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MY NOTE-BOOK 
 
 FRAGMENTARY STUDIES IN THEOLOGY 
 
 AND SUBJECTS ADJACENT THERETO 
 
 BY 
 
 AUSTIN PHELPS, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 WITH A PORTRAIT 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHAELES SCRIBNEE'S SONS 
 
TyviL.^^, u-u<_^^^*-' /Cu^i-v-v^-<^ 
 
 ;<- tj^*/o 
 
 ^53.3 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1890, 
 BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 
 
PEEFACE. 
 
 By far the major portion of every man's thinking 
 is fragmentary. The best thinking of some men is 
 so. They are seers of transient and disconnected 
 vision. An educated man who practises literary fru- 
 gality in preserving the ideas suggested by his read- 
 ing, will find, after years of professional service, an 
 accumulation of them, in which he will recognize 
 some of the most robust products of his brain. Some 
 of them will affect him with a sense of loss, because 
 he has not been able to amplify them in monograph 
 or volume. 
 
 Some men find an outlet for such thinking in bril- 
 liant colloquy. Their friendship is a literary treasure 
 to other men. Hence have come such volumes as 
 Eckermann's " Conversations with Goethe," and Cole- 
 ridge's "Table-Talk." Others improve their moods 
 of facile expression by recording their most sugges- 
 tive fragmentary studies for their own gratification, 
 or for future use. Hence we have such books as 
 Pascal's "Thoughts" and Southey's "Commonplace- 
 Book" and Hawthorne's "Notes." Occasionally such 
 materials find their way into a literary mosaic of 
 
vi Preface. 
 
 mingled philosophy and fiction, of which a master- 
 piece is " The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table/' by 
 Dr. Holmes. President Edwards once lamented an 
 interruption of his morning studies, because it had 
 expelled from his memory a single thought which he 
 might never think again. 
 
 These remarks are suggested by the origin and 
 resources of the present volume. It is literally what 
 its title indicates. Its contents are a selection from 
 the accumulated memoranda of forty years. A por- 
 tion of them have been partially developed and pub- 
 lished in essays which are now out of print. A larger 
 portion is made up of unpublished material. They 
 make no claim to originality in any other sense than 
 that in which every educated man's best thinking is 
 original to Mm. It will be seen that in the selection 
 I have often had in mind the necessities of young 
 preachers in the early years of their ministry. With- 
 out conscious plagiarism on the part of the author, 
 these thoughts are offered to readers for just what 
 they are, — "Fragments from my Note-Book." 
 
 A. P. 
 
 Bar Harbor, October 1, 1890. 
 
isroTE 
 
 The peculiar interest which attaches to last things 
 belongs to these pages. 
 
 A letter from his publishers, acknowledging the 
 receipt of the manuscript of "My Note-Book/' was 
 the last which was read to my Father. Death, the 
 great enhancer of values, had already touched him; 
 and his work doth follow him. 
 
 The duty of superintending the passage of this vol- 
 ume through the press has fallen upon myself; but 
 the service has been chiefly that of a proof-reader. 
 His clearness of purpose, exactness of method, even 
 the well-known beauty of that chirography which was 
 always the delight of his printers, have made these 
 labors as light as the anxiety to have everything as 
 he would wish it may permit. The book was finished 
 in every sense of the word by its author; and but 
 few changes have been required of the text by the 
 practical necessities of publication. 
 
 To those who knew anything of his long illness, 
 it is almost incredible that he should have labored as 
 he did, to the utter end. Like any well man, he 
 dropped at his post. 
 
 vii 
 
viii Note. 
 
 It is impossible that any word of mine can add to 
 the tenderness or to the loyalty with which his old 
 pupils and friends will use their final opportunity to 
 study a new expression of his ripened thought and 
 spiritual refinement. "If I can only live tiU this 
 book is done, I shall be content to go,'' he wrote to a 
 friend. When he could say this, — he who did not 
 speak of his own work, and seldom of his own death, 
 — it was time for God to grant him his wish. So it 
 was given him. 
 
 ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS WARD. 
 
 Newton Highlands, Mass., 
 November, 1890. 
 
COI^TENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. Fkagmentary Studies in Theology (I.) ... 1 
 
 II. Fragmextary Studies in Theology (II.) ... 27 
 
 III. Fragmentary Studies in Theology (III.) ... 51 
 
 IV. The Personality of a Preacher 79 
 
 V. The Materials of Sermons 101 
 
 VI. Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit . . . 132 
 
 VII. Conscience and its Allies 157 
 
 VIII. Our Sacred Books 188 
 
 IX. Theistic and Christian Types of Religious Life, 222 
 
 X. The Future of Christianity 240 
 
 XI. Methodism — its Work and its Ways .... 275 
 
 XII. Miscellaneous Topics 296 
 
 iz 
 
MY Is^OTE-BOOK, 
 
 FRAGMENTARY STUDIES IN THEOLOGY. I. 
 
 1. All good governments work largely on the 
 principle of non-intervention. Other things being 
 equal, that is the best government which most 
 liberally lets subject or citizen alone. International 
 law achieves its chief end if it compels nation to let 
 nation alone. Federal republics forbid encroach- 
 ment of State upon State, of county upon county, 
 of city upon city. Municij^al police prohibits 
 intrusion of family upon family, of man upon man. 
 The old Englisli law Avhich said, "Every man's 
 house is his castle," delivered one of the first prin- 
 ciples of civilization. Without it, civilization would 
 not be. Parental government restrains trespass of 
 child upon child, of servant upon servant. Through \ 
 the whole range of authority, he governs best who 
 governs least. 
 
 2. It is marvellous, when we put our minds to 
 it, how little government has to do with any of us. 
 In the main drift of life we help ourselves, we 
 
 1 
 
2 My JVote-Book. 
 
 attend to our own business, come and go as we 
 please, fall by a law of elective affinities into soci- 
 eties of kindred, of trade, of literature, of politics, 
 and the thing which gives its solid cubic strength 
 to civilized order is that no man says, Why do ye 
 so ? When these things cease to be, we go to the 
 almshouse or the penitentiary. There government 
 pure and simple holds us in the clutch of power. 
 
 The ultimate idea on which society at its best 
 forms itself seems to be to insulate the individual, 
 so far as may be needful, to enable him to live his 
 own life, to build up his own fortune, to do his 
 own thinking, to form his own opinions, to create 
 his own character ; in a word, to be himself, come 
 what may of it. Around this idea, all good gov- 
 ernment revolves in concentric circles. The chief 
 good which government achieves is to contrive how 
 not to govern. 
 
 3. Does not the same principle find more majes- 
 tic evolution in the government of God? One of 
 the first impressions, and the most durable, which 
 we receive from the phenomena of nature is that 
 of the non-intervention of the creative Mind. Hav- 
 ing set the wheels of the universe in rotation, God 
 seems to leave them to revolve by their own secret 
 springs and with their own momentum. Whatever 
 may be the occult fact at the centre of things, 
 this is the look of them to our vision of the cir- 
 cumference. The planets, so far as we know, are 
 islands in an ethereal ocean, which no keel navi- 
 gates. No electric cable has flashed a syllable of 
 
Studies in Theology. 3 
 
 salutation from one to its nearest neighbor. And 
 this is an emblem of the insular policy which 
 appears to rule the relations of man to the laws of 
 nature. He is left alone to adjust himself to their 
 stupendous forces as he can. 
 
 4. This policy of insulation is often tragic in its 
 working. That does not induce its abandonment 
 or suspension. Evil of appalling magnitude falls 
 on men under the merciless operation of nature's 
 laws, and God seems to look on in as merciless 
 repose. Cities are devastated by conflagrations, and 
 nations are decimated by pestilence, as if sentient 
 beings were of no more worth than mushrooms. 
 The earthquake at Ischia, a few years ago, buried 
 two thousand people in a night, as if they were so 
 many animalcules. Cyclones plough a furrow of 
 death through a crowded population as if a city 
 of human homes were of no more account in the 
 universe than a beehive. A waterspout in mid- 
 ocean sinks a ship in twenty minutes as if its 
 immortal freight had no more dignity than an out- 
 heap. A spark of fire which one raindi^op could 
 extinguish sets ablaze a railroad bridge at midnight, 
 and in the morning the city of Peoria sends up a 
 cry to Heaven, like that which went up from the 
 banks of the Nile, when in all the land not a house 
 stood in which there was not one dead. A father 
 caught in a Western blizzard buries his little son 
 in the snow, and lays himself down to die with 
 apparently no friend in the universe more helpful 
 than his Newfoundland dpg. 
 
4 My Note-Book, 
 
 5. So it looks to our blinking vision. Fire here, 
 and snow there, the very elements which make the 
 comfort and beauty of our winter homes, go forth 
 at some voiceless bidding like angels of retribution. 
 Some of these fatal phenomena ajDpear to come to 
 pass with no compensating good in the end. Of 
 the reptilian species, some have been created for 
 whose existence no reason can be given, it should 
 seem, but a malign purpose. Among our fellow- 
 creatures we discover cobras and rattlesnakes. 
 God has concocted venom. He has contrived a 
 marvellous animal machinery for its ejection. In 
 consequence, twenty-two thousand human beings 
 lost their lives in India in the year 1886. 
 
 6. These symbols of evil accumulate, and catas- 
 trophes pile themselves up in human history, and 
 He who holds the universe in the hollow of His 
 hand appears to hide Himself in some cavern of 
 reserve. He sends out no countermands. He 
 provides no reversals or suspensions of natural 
 laws. So absolute is His concealment and so still 
 is His footfall, that men plausibly ask, '^Who is 
 God? What is God? Where is God? 7s there any 
 God ? How can He look on such colossal tragedies 
 and be still?" 
 
 7. Atheism finds its capital argument in the 
 concealments and silences of God. The argument 
 is by no means insignificant. We all find that 
 within us which gave birth to the Egyptian Sphynx. 
 We cannot deny that there is an abysmal depth of 
 mystery in this Divine seclusion. Some inscruta- 
 
Studies in Theology. 6 
 
 ble necessity exists for giving to the system of 
 things as we look at it, on the under side of the 
 universe, the aspect of a government of chance. 
 
 8. Yet Christian believers are no more responsi- 
 ble than other men for a solution of the mystery. 
 Our sacred books do not create the facts. There 
 they lie patent, not even between the lines of 
 natural laws and their intersection with human his- 
 tory. History and law make no secret of them. 
 One system of religious thought is as much bound 
 to respond to atheistic corollaries as another. If 
 we have no response to give, we are all balked by 
 the dread dilemma, " A malign God or no God ! " 
 
 9. But suppose that we discover a laiv of non- 
 intervention, operating by Divine decree, thread- 
 ing the sinuosities of all government alike, and 
 founded in the nature of the things concerned. 
 Suppose that without it man cannot be a man in 
 the fulness of Divine ideal. Do we not discover 
 at least one glint of light playing over the abyss of 
 mystery, which but just now was the very black- 
 ness of darkness? Especially does it illumine many 
 of the dark things occurring under natural law, by 
 disclosing for them a moral reason. It is a step 
 in a triumphal march into the reasons of things 
 when for a natural evil we can discern a moral 
 cause, or declare a moral fact as the reason why. 
 
 10. It should not surprise us then if we find the 
 principle of non-intervention in God's moral gov- 
 ernment. In the probationary administration of 
 this world He certainly appears, within a limited 
 
6 My Note-Book. 
 
 range of working, to have chosen an insular policy. 
 The isolated locality of the globe which we inhabit 
 necessitates, as it respects the rest of the popu- 
 lated universe, a moral seclusion. Who knows 
 what auxiliary alliances might be available for 
 our moral security if no imj)assable gulf held this 
 world aloof from our brethren of the stars ? In 
 size and astronomical conditions the earth seems 
 to be vastly inferior to Jupiter. That planet may 
 be as magnificently its superior in the rank of 
 quality and moral force of its population. What 
 protective battalions of spiritual power might we 
 not summon to our aid in crises of the conflict 
 with evil, if the insulation of the planets could be 
 suspended ! 
 
 Every human mind too is a walled city. Its 
 gates are closed at will to every fellow-mind. 
 Silence barricades its history against the world. 
 An autocracy of moral government administered 
 by a Divine vice-regency is going on within its 
 insulated realm. Who knoweth the spirit of a 
 man ? One criminal at the bar of human justice 
 can defy the judicial inquisition of an Empire. 
 
 11. Pursuing into details man's discipline by 
 seclusion, we discover evidences of an intricate 
 yet well-defined plan of God, in many things to let 
 him alone. He accumulates and interweaves, lim- 
 its and extends his own habits. No other than he 
 is permitted to fashion the mould of his own char- 
 acter. He it is who holds supreme command of 
 ante-natal tendencies and inherited conditions. 
 
Studies in Theology. 7 
 
 No power from outside puts constraint upon his 
 birthright of moral freedom. His is the strategy 
 which brings to pass its conquests and its failures. 
 His very opinions are largely the creations of his 
 own will. He sees what he chooses to see. No 
 amount of evidence for truth or falsehood is irre- 
 sistible. Fichte says : " We do not will as we rea- 
 son ; we reason as we w^ill." For weal or for woe, 
 man must work out his own destiny. It is fixed 
 as the order of the stars. He must he himself 
 whatever may come of it. This appears to be the 
 law of probationary conditions. 
 
 12. The severity and constancy of temptation, 
 so far as we can see, make no break in the Divine 
 law of non-intervention. Every human life, in 
 one aspect of it, is one prolonged temptation. 
 Probationary government would be a nullity but ] 
 for this constitutional element of temptation. The/ 
 thing which makes it what it is, is temptation. 
 Without this, it might be existence ; it might be ' 
 education; it might be growth; but it could not j 
 be probation. This sinister factor in man's des- 
 tiny often coils itself secretly in his pathway, and 
 in some forms it springs upon him with the sud- 
 deimess and the venom of a rattlesnake. 
 
 13. A sinofular resemblance exists in the devel- 
 opment of evil, between the natural and the pro- 
 bationary governments. So striking is the likeness 
 that natural phenomena are the most truthful 
 emblems of probationary catastroplies. God often 
 suffers evil to grow to its malign maturity in the 
 
8 Ml/ Note-Booh, 
 
 two departments of matter and of mind alike, 
 with no counteractive force from Him in either. 
 The argument therefore is one of exact analogy. 
 The brunt of it is this : why should not the same 
 principle which we find so abundantly and often 
 so disastrously working in the kingdom of nature 
 be looked for in the moral kingdom ? 
 
 14. A historic example will emphasize the argu- 
 ment. Many years ago a tidal wave on the coast 
 of Norway buried a score or more of human 
 homes. It sent cradles with their sleeping freight 
 out to sea at midnight. Infinite benevolence did 
 not " scotch " the wheels of planets and their satel- 
 lites to forestall the tragedy. Why may not the 
 same benevolence see reasons for refraining from 
 placing let or hindrance in the way which a human 
 being on trial for eternity has chosen to his own 
 hurt? Who knows enough of God's realm of 
 reserve, wherein are stored infinite things and 
 infinite reasons of things, to affirm that it may not ? 
 
 Who knows that man's moral personality may 
 not depend upon such non-action on the part of 
 God? Who knows that he can he a man, full- 
 grown, of finished character, of crystallized virtue, 
 consolidated and secure throuofh all the coming 
 cycles in his loyalty to God without some such 
 experience of moral isolation? Who has ever 
 penetrated the concealments and silences of God 
 far enough to discover that non-intervention on 
 His part is not as just, as wide, as good, in the one 
 phenomenon as in the other? 
 
Studies in Theology. 9 
 
 15. An incident in natural history is strikingly 
 emblematic of certain facts of probationary gov- 
 ernment. 
 
 The geographical text-book of our schools fifty 
 years ago contained a rude woodcut, representing 
 an anaconda coiled around the body of a passing 
 traveller, whose life-blood it was crushing out. It 
 was a picture of peril in the wilds of South 
 America. When the scene there pictured took 
 place, infinite wisdom did not interpose to stifle 
 the murderous appetite of the reptile. Infinite 
 benevolence did not send a shaft of lightning to 
 paralyze its contractile muscles. Reptile and man 
 were left to fight their own duel. The chances 
 were hideously in favor of the reptile. 
 
 Why may not the same wisdom and benevolence 
 have reasons inscrutable, perhaps inconceivable, to 
 us, for standing aloof while temptation springs 
 upon a man in liis youth and coils itself in evil 
 habits around his manhood, and crushes out all 
 good from his nature in the end? Why may not 
 the purposes of probation require that, within a 
 certain range of destiny, tempter and tempted shall 
 be left to fight their own duel? Why should it 
 stagger our faith if fearful chances are on the side 
 of the tempter? Who is learned enough in the 
 secret ways of God to say that this cannot be ? 
 
 16. Observe the analogy on a broader scale, of 
 more terrific significance and moral suggestion. 
 Between a.d. 250 and a.d. 262 a pestilence raged 
 over the whole Roman Empire. From Egypt to 
 
10 My Note-Booh. 
 
 the Hebrides and from the Hebrides to Egypt, 
 forth and back and forth again, under laws of 
 nature which were then more mysterious than 
 eclipses, epidemic death trampled the nations in 
 its fury. Believing men saw in it the avenging 
 angel of the Apocalypse. Unbelievers beheld in 
 it a maniacal Fate. Both took it as a sign that 
 the world was drawing near its end. Medical 
 science was paralyzed. Men died like flies. Gib- 
 bon says that statisticians of the succeeding age 
 estimated that half the human race perished in 
 , those twelve years. In some of the Italian cities 
 \ from three-f oui^ths to four-fifths of the population 
 ' disappeared. Neither wisdom nor benevolence from 
 ' on high interposed to roll back the tide of death. 
 Then occurred one of the awful concealments of 
 God. Men sought Him the world over and He 
 was not found. Men were struck down in the 
 very act of fasting and prayer for His discovery. 
 
 17. Why then may not the same benevolence 
 
 and wisdom retire into more fearful hiding when 
 
 nations rage in the fury of their passions and rot 
 
 in the ulceration of their vices? Why may not 
 
 I non-intervention on the part of God be as wise, as 
 
 just, as good in the one case as in the other? 
 
 j Are moral causes and effects ruled by laws so 
 
 I widely diverse from those of nature ? Who knows 
 
 that? Where is the proof? Who has ex^Dlored 
 
 the realm of Divine reserve far enough to discover 
 
 the fact? Let philosophy explain, in its relation 
 
 to moral laws, the destruction of half the world 
 
Studies in Theology. 11 
 
 under the Roman sway, and we can explain as 
 philosophically the antediluvian corruption for 
 which God repented that He had made man upon 
 the earth. 
 
 18. The analogy between the two kingdoms is 
 impressive in another feature of Divine proced- 
 ures. Non-intervention in the administration of 
 probationary discipline is intermittent in its devel- 
 opment. We discover it here and not there, now 
 and not then. An element of sovereignty is visi- 
 ble. He hath mercy on whom He will have 
 mercy. But neither is the principle in question 
 uniform in God's metliods of procedure under the 
 laws of nature. There, too, it is intermittent. 
 In her treatment of man Nature is very kindly in 
 some things ; in others she is very cruel. In some 
 phenomena we call her "Mother Nature." In 
 others she exhibits her fangs and the spring of a 
 tiger. Our own poet sings of the " stern mother- 
 hood of the sea." The picture as a whole is one 
 of mingled light and shade. It is a work of chiaro- 
 oscuro. 
 
 19. In like manner, in probationary discipline,! 
 God interposes the suasions of truth and grace to 
 balance and often to overbalance the forces of 
 temptation. Yet again He retires apparently into 
 close-barred seclusion, and the tempter has his Avay j 
 with the tempted in ruin and desolation. Even in 
 the supreme disclosures of Divine love an occult 
 necessity seems to exist, that redemptive decrees 
 shall be so executed as to put on the look of a 
 
12 My Note-Book. 
 
 government of chance. One is taken and another 
 left. If, then, the one system expresses wisdom 
 and benevolence, why not the other? Who is the 
 expert so accomplished in knowledge of the Most 
 High that he can venture to affirm that it does 
 not ? 
 
 20. We call the Divine silences mysteries, and 
 they are such. Yet this principle of non-interven- 
 tion is not entirely inexplicable even to our pur- 
 blind vision. A certain cognate principle gives us 
 a hint of the j^ossible — may we not say probable ? 
 — explanation of it in part. It is that in all the 
 departments of God's government Ave detect signs 
 of asjnration. His Avisdom is not content with a 
 creation of Ioav grade. His beneficence is not sat- 
 isfied Avith products of inferior quality. Always, 
 in the fuial outcome He aims at best things. 
 
 21. This element of Divine aspiration may 
 underlie, Ave knoAV not hoAv broadly or profoundly, 
 the mystery of non-intervention in moral govern- 
 ment. Here as elsewhere it is to be presumed, 
 and we discern it in evidence, that God aims at a 
 creation of superlatiA^e excellence. He deals in 
 suj)reme things. He is not content with a universe 
 of imbeciles. His ideal aa^ouUI not be realized in a 
 race of moral dAvarfs and cripples. Infantile being 
 is not His ultimate thought. Innocence is not His 
 supreme model. A uniA^erse of lambs and hum- 
 ming-birds and ring-doA^es might be that. He aims 
 at the production of a race of beings aa4io shall be 
 susceptible of character, of diversified character, of 
 
Studies in Theology. 13 
 
 robust character, of self-contained, self-reliant, crys- j 
 tallized character, — character at once consolidated ' 
 and pure. What else can be the object of proba-| 
 tionary discipline ? 
 
 22. Who then knows enough of the occult and 
 complicated and hereditary processes by which 
 God devolops to its maturity the character of a 
 moral universe to say that it can realize the ideal 
 of Divine aspirations, without a discipline con- 
 ducted to a greater or less extent in moral insula- 
 tion? Who can affirm, and give infinite reasons 
 for it, that insular planets, and untraversed oceans, 
 and undiscovered continents, and races segregated 
 by contrasts of color, and nations walled apart by 
 confusion of tongues, and tribes alienated by in- 
 vincible antagonisms, and minds shut into bodies 
 which tell no secrets, and reserves of speechless 
 thought, and powers of silence which do not yield 
 to rack and thumb-screw, even capabilities of 
 concealed virtue and latent guilt, are not in the 
 nature of things essential conditions of a moral 
 system which shall realize its Divine ideal, and 
 bring to pass its ultimate possibilities of being and 
 endeavor ? 
 
 Ao-ain, who knows that man can he a man, de- 
 serving to bear the image of his Creator, if he is 
 not, in some of the conditions of his moral trial, 
 let alone to exercise his moral sovereignty, and 
 develop his godlike personality by himself? One 
 must be very knowing in the reserves of God's 
 thoughts, in which the infinite reasons of things 
 
14 My Note-Book. 
 
 interplay before one can say yes or no to such a 
 stupendous inquiry. 
 
 23. Critics of Bishop Butler's "Analogy of Re- 
 ligion to the Constitution and Course of Nature " 
 have objected to its masterly argument, that it 
 proves nothing but the crass ignorance of man. 
 The same criticism may lie against all our reason- 
 ings upon the partial non-intervention of God in 
 human destiny. It is true, they begin and end 
 with an interrogative. The chief thing we know 
 is that we do not know. In researches into the far- 
 away interior of the Divine economy, the discovery 
 of our ignorance is the discovery of a great deal. 
 To know that we do not know is to know much to 
 the purpose. 
 
 24. From such a discovery practical corollaries 
 follow. It follows that we must not condemn a 
 system of things of which we knoiv nothing. This 
 stands to reason. It follows that we must not 
 distrust a Being in procedures of which we know 
 nothing. This stands to justice. A truism covers 
 all such investigations into the ways of God. It 
 is that a realm of the unknown, fathomless, and 
 boundless lies athwart our track of inquiry. Its 
 phenomena and its laws may be inconceivable by 
 human faculties, and therefore unknown. They 
 may be inexpressible in human dialects, and there- 
 fore unrevealed. 
 
 In that impenetrable realm, God revolves the 
 infinite possibilities of creation. There is His king- 
 dom of reserve. There is the place of His hiding. 
 
Studies in Theology. 15 
 
 There is the cause of Ilis silences. Our province 
 is to stand on its border, ourselves also in believing 
 silence. We believe what we do know ; we are 
 silent upon what we do not know. Our knowledge 
 is infinitesimal as compared with our ignorance. 
 We reproduce in our researches the experience of 
 Newton gathering his few pebbles on the shore of 
 an untraversed ocean. 
 
 25. In our treatment of the principle of non- 
 intervention in the Divine government, the fact 
 should be emphasized that the phenomena on 
 which the principle is founded cannot be denied. 
 They exist whether we can solve their mystery or 
 not. They need no proof. Silence and history 
 are surcharged with them. 
 
 Moreover, they are among the elementary teach- 
 ings of our experience of the world we live in, and 
 of the system of things which encloses us. We 
 very soon discover the fact that the Divine gov- 
 ernment, in both the natural and the moral king- 
 doms, is threaded by an element of tragedy. Its 
 lurid lines cross and recross the map of every 
 human life. An infant on whose mundane exist- 
 ence the sun rises and sets but once does not 
 escape the sinister decree. It comes into the 
 world, the unconscious herald of suffering. It 
 goes out of the world under a law of pain and 
 dissolution which is itself a stupendous war upon 
 nature before which all generations of men have 
 stood aghast. 
 
 We must concede these facts to he facts indis- 
 
16 My Note-Book. 
 
 putable. We must admit also, that, considered 
 by themselves alone, they give a malign aspect to 
 the system of things in which we live and of which 
 we form a part. So much, be the consequence 
 what it may, must be conceded by an honest be- 
 liever to an honest Atheist. No moral intuitions 
 are of any avail to set aside the facts in question 
 as non-existent. The line of denial is the line of 
 absurdity. To say, as one objector has done, 
 " Proof or no proof, it is not true," is insane. 
 
 26. Moreover, it is unwise policy to ignore 
 these phenomena by burying them in a bottomless 
 abyss of mystery, and leaving them there. This 
 is the disposal made of them by many devout 
 believers. The facts are stolidly let alone. 
 
 A Professor of theology in the city of New 
 York, on an occasion which brought before his 
 theological class for discussion one of the recondite 
 problems now in question, said in substance : " I 
 have a bag of incomprehensibles in which I de- 
 posit all such inquiries unanswered. I store them 
 there; affirming nothing, denying nothing, believ- 
 ing nothing." He might consistently have capped 
 the climax, as a free-thinking President of a col- 
 lege in South Carolina once did, by adding, " and 
 caring nothing." 
 
 27. The dictum of the theological seer expressed 
 the mental habit, perhaps of the majority of believ- 
 ers when confronted with the " dark things " in 
 which God seems to have retired into a kingdom 
 of oblivion. To many, that which they call their 
 
Studies in Theology. 17 
 
 " faith " appears to be reverently expressed by this 
 unreasonincr trast. But this is not faith. It is 
 
 o 
 
 intellectual lethargy. It presupposes shallow think- 
 ing and flabby moral fibre. In every highly organ- 
 ized character there are certain robust graces to 
 which it is a laxative and a destructive. 
 
 28. The working- of such inert and stolid faith 
 in the conflict of Christianity with Atheism is still 
 more disastrous. It is treacherous. It permits 
 atheistic bravado to beg the whole question of the 
 Divine existence. Atheism revels in these unsolved 
 enigmas. The alternative with which it plausibly 
 blocks the way of the Christian argument is : "A 
 malignant Creator or no Creator." The human 
 mind, if pressed by this dilemma, will never hes- 
 itate long in its election. None but a frenzied 
 conscience ever made obeisance to a malign Deity. 
 As intelligent Theists then we must say something 
 of these repellent anomalies which no sane man 
 can deny. What shall we say for the faith that 
 is in us ? 
 
 29. A few thoughtful minds find relief from the 
 sinister look which the " dark things " of Nature 
 and of Providence give to the government of God, 
 in the doctrine of a " Pre-existent State " of which 
 the phenomena in question are a disciplinary 
 sequence. 
 
 Of this hypothesis, several things may be briefly 
 noted. One is that the fact of an ante-mundane 
 life in the history of man is at best, in the formula 
 of Scotch jurisprudence, " not proven." A second 
 
/ 
 
 18 My Note-Book. 
 
 is that till the memory of somebody renders it a 
 practical fact if it is proven, we can afford to wait. 
 A third is that as a possible hypothesis it is no 
 solution of the mystery. It only shows the problem 
 one stage farther back in the history of the moral 
 universe. It leaves our obstinate questionings 
 unanswered, and in darkness as compact as ever. 
 
 A fourth is a fact which one whispers under 
 breath. It is that, with profound deference to the 
 retrospective and far-seeing thinkers who find repose 
 in this anomalous theory, one cannot rid oneself of 
 the sense of a certain comical incongruity involved 
 in it. A truthful theory in religious thought con- 
 firms its truth by the dignity of its associations of 
 theory with fact. Tried by this test the hypoth- 
 esis of an ante-mundane period in the history of 
 man must be accepted, if at all, under an sesthetic 
 protest. 
 
 30. Here, for example, is a new-born infant who 
 by the conditions of the hypothesis may as probably 
 be ten thousand j^ears old as ten minutes. The 
 memory of man runneth not to the contrary. Now 
 is it credible that this pitiable puny creature — 
 this homoeo^^athic attenuation of moral being — 
 this microscopic iota of thinking power — express- 
 ing less intelligence than a semicolon, and in 
 action immeasurably less than a honey-bee — is 
 it conceivable that this yet nameless thing which 
 we call "It" — has come into this world bending 
 under the colossal burden and the unrivalled 
 honor of such a venerable antiquity? Which 
 
Studies in Theology. 19 
 
 element preponderates in sucli a discovery in 
 anthropology — the improbable or the risible ? 
 Shall one controvert it or smile at it? 
 
 31. Passing from hypothesis to facts, we find 
 much to the purpose of relieving the dark things 
 of nature and of providence in the discovery that 
 they are diminutively exceptional in their occur- 
 rence. They are not the prevailing expression 
 of the Divine Mind. They are but a fragment of 
 the warp and woof of the plan of the universe. 
 Neither do they present the look of eager design. 
 They do not appear as if God delighted in them 
 for their own sake. Where do we find in them 
 the profusion which we discover in the beauty of 
 this world's adornments, and the sublimity of its 
 nocturnal skies? The terrific shock which they 
 give to our sensibilities is largel}^ the shock of 
 contrast with their magnificent and beneficent 
 surroundings. 
 
 32. Artists tell us that paintings in mezzotint 
 should be set in golden frames. In the material 
 world something like this is Avitnessed in the ac- 
 companiments of the shocking phenomena evolved 
 by the forces of nature. Those mysterious aliens \ 
 to the work of a benign Creator are set in the » 
 framework of a world of exceeding beauty. The I 
 first impression and the last that is made upon the 
 mind of a philosophic observer, is that in its orig- 
 inal and Divine ideal this world was meant to be a ) 
 happy world. So far as should be in keeping with 
 its moral design as the arena of a probationary 
 
20 My Note-Book. 
 
 government and of the recovery of a fallen race, it 
 was designed to be the abode of beings dwelling 
 in communion with God. 
 
 He who out of His own serene consciousness 
 evolved a world of such exceeding loveliness, and 
 then planted in the soul of the being to whom He 
 gave dominion over it the G-reeh idea of Beauty, 
 must be a benign Creator. So have men reasoned 
 from the beginning, and so will they reason till the 
 end. 
 
 33. It is in the lap of such a world that we dis- 
 cover the few anomalies, thrown in as if at random, 
 which put our faith on trial. So infinitesimally 
 exceptional do they appear, that on the broad and 
 long scale of observation, a devout looker-on can- 
 not help exclaiming, " He hath made everything 
 beautiful in His time." True, the exceptions are 
 dark — very dark. To one who will have it so 
 they make their author look evil-minded. Yet a 
 moss rosebud is a triumphant respondent to them 
 all. Is an African desert a blotch on the face of a 
 world of beauty ? Aye, but how much more re- 
 splendent is the moral idea conveyed by the daisy 
 which was foreordained to bloom there for the 
 glazing eye of Mungo Park ! 
 
 34. The supreme argument in the Christian 
 theory of the mysteries in question is discovered 
 when we lift them up into the plane of their moral 
 uses. God's ultimate designs are moral designs. 
 His ultimate reasons are moral reasons. There- 
 fore, we always let in some glint of light on a por- 
 
Studies in Theology. 21 
 
 tentous development of evil when we can find a 
 moral aim in the use of it by Divine adjustments 
 and counteractions. 
 
 For example, of all the phenomena in liuman 
 destiny, no other is of such abysmal blackness as 
 the phenomenon of death. Does it not then give 
 dignity to our sacred books that they discover a 
 moral significance in this primal curse? They 
 record a credible narrative of its origin. They 
 tell us of its symbolic meaning — why it has been 
 and must be, and by whose benignant conquest it 
 will be blotted out. They make it a memento of 
 a great moral catastrophe. As an incident to the 
 discipline and the symbolism of a fallen world, it 
 is dense with moral design. As an incident to the 
 recovery of a redeemed world, it is luminous with 
 Divine benignity. Thus it is that by interpreting 
 shocking and mysterious phenomena as devices of 
 moral government, and symbols of a history of sin, 
 Ave discover somewhat of God's mind in them. 
 We find that they have moral uses which make 
 them worthy of God — even Godlike. 
 
 35. To appreciate the full significance of the 
 principle of moral usefulness in stupendous evils, 
 we must revise the popular notions of the purpose 
 of God in man's creation. Those notions often 
 assume that the goodness of God is facile good- 
 nature and nothing more. The supreme design of 
 man's creation is to make him happy, and nothing 
 else. To open a new magazine of outflowing joy 
 in the universe is the aim by which Divine good- 
 
22 Mij Note-Book. 
 
 ness gratifies and satisfies its creative wisdom. 
 The act is rather an impulse than a purpose. But 
 we engulf ourselves in intractable confusions if we 
 conceive of no more exalted aim than this in an 
 act so sublime as that of giving existence to an 
 intelligent and deathless spirit. 
 
 36. In the Divine ideal of him, man is not only 
 j a sentient being. He is not an intelligent and 
 
 immortal being only. He is a moral being. And 
 in a moral being there is an object more worthy of 
 God than happiness. It is character. The grand 
 design of man's creation is the development of 
 grand character. And grand character is by its 
 very nature the product of probationary disci- 
 pline. The man must grow into it and up to 
 the level of the loftiest possibilities which his 
 nature can carry. This he must do by thinking 
 grand ideas and believing grand principles and 
 lifting his will-power into grand endeavors. He 
 must encounter and master trials which in the 
 Divine decree are grand opportunities. He must 
 "lift himself above himself" into the grandeur 
 of godlikeness by self-conflicts which bring the 
 strain of infinite and eternal verities close home 
 to him. 
 
 Such in the nature of things is the law of buoy- 
 ant ascent into moral sympathy with God. One 
 auxiliary to that ascension is the strain put upon 
 faith by encounter with mysteries of evil and 
 shocks of suffering. 
 
 37. A fragment of Biblical story will illustrate 
 
SfioJi'rx in Tb>oIo</i/. 23 
 
 the principle here developed. When the Arabian 
 patriarch lay between the anvil and the hammer 
 of God's discipline, he cried out hi a paroxysm of 
 choleric despair, "Am I a crocodile?" Such is 
 the amended reading of the word which our 
 English Bible translates by the word "whale." 
 Whales were not known on the banks of the 
 Nile ; crocodiles were. The mind of the suffer- 
 ing patriarch seized upon the monster of the 
 river — the only thing he knew of that seemed 
 to him in keeping with the merciless treatment 
 which he appeared to himself to be receiving 
 at the hand of God. No ; he was not a croco- 
 dile ; he was a ma7i. And God was true to the 
 eternal purpose of his creation — to make a man 
 of him. 
 
 38. A spirit of aspiration has been observed as 
 a characteristic of God's wisdom in His moral 
 designs. In that spirit God did not fashion the 
 patriarchal model on a life of ease and affluence 
 and social dignity as its background. " The 
 greatest of all the men of the East " in tlie Divine 
 ideal of him was not realized by the ownership of 
 " seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, 
 and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred 
 she-asses, and three daughters and seven sons, and 
 a very great household." The least in the king- 
 dom of Heaven was greater than all that. Divine 
 methods of discipline were aimed only at best 
 things, — the noblest, the most Godlike, and the 
 littest for an endless life. 
 
24 My Note-Book. 
 
 To this end God summoned auxiliaries. A 
 cyclone, a shaft of lightning, a horde of guerillas, 
 a termagant wife, and diabolical ingenuities of tor- 
 ture were His instruments. These He commis- 
 sioned under that law of which this is the first 
 mention in history, by which calamities come in a 
 crowd. Not otherwise than by such diverse 
 severities of discii:)line, rushing in fleet-footed 
 succession, could the finished and consolidated 
 character be fashioned which should realize the 
 Divine conception of what an Arabian patriarch of 
 the olden time ought to be. 
 
 39. Whatever else this ancient epic was designed 
 to teach, it illustrates incidentally the principle 
 that runs through all the heroic methods of moral 
 government, in which God aims at a revolutionary, 
 often a convulsive, uplifting of a human character 
 by the discipline of suffering. A finished charac- 
 ter of lofty type, and specially a character rich in 
 the wile elements which make great men, pre- 
 supposes conflicts with mystery and tln-oes of 
 anguish. Heroic believers become such by the 
 ministry of heroic j^ains. 
 
 40. To appreciate in its complete emphasis the 
 principle of moral value in things evil, we need 
 furthermore to revise popular notions of the dignity 
 of faith. Faith — what is it as an element in 
 highly organized character ? Many conceive of it 
 as a neutral grace, the dignity of which is pro- 
 portioned to its inertia. It has only the lunar 
 beauty of a passive virtue. 
 
Studies in TheoJogij. 25 
 
 But its superlative type in finished character can 
 be no such imbecile thing. Rather is it an athletic 
 virtue. It is panoplied with elemental principles 
 of truth. It is rooted in the deep things of God. 
 It has robust, oaken (qualities. A man never attains 
 to the jubilant working of a believing spirit until 
 a certain element of heroism is wrought into the 
 springs of his being. This must be the fruit of 
 heroic, disciplinary training. 
 
 41. By any and every means an immortal spirit 
 must be set to thinking. It must think responsi- 
 bility with profound and eager moral conscious- 
 ness. A great faith must feed on great mysteries. ' 
 The sinews of its strength must grow tense and] 
 wiry by the strain of great conflicts. Many need 
 the discipline of great searchings after God in 
 which they do not find Him. Some must agonize 
 in prayers which in the seeming are dead failures. ; 
 Not otherwise can some natures grow into that 
 massive and consolidated virtue and that masterful 
 solution of religious problems which shall fit them 
 for their predestined place as powers of control in 
 God's plan. 
 
 42. Just here it is that the appalling catas- 
 trophes in which Divine non-intervention appears 
 to leave men so frigidly to themselves, develop 
 singularly benignant uses. Welcomed by a docile 
 spirit, and used by an alert one, they brace up the 
 tone of a believing soul. They inject a firmer 
 tension into holy will-power. They plant courage 
 at the roots of fears. In all things that go \k 
 
26 Ml/ Xote-Book. 
 
 develop in a man God's image, they work in the 
 Avake of God's beginnings. In all minds which 
 are thoughtful enough to grapple with such 
 mysteries, they tend to develop the force and 
 grandeur of a great liberty. 
 
TI. 
 
 FRAGMENTARY STUDIES IN THEOLOGY. II. 
 
 1. Reasonings like those contained in the pre- 
 ceding pages need to be enforced by the fact that 
 we are set upon an intense strain of life here, antic- 
 ipatory of a more intense sequel in an endless 
 future. This allotment is not restricted to men of 
 regnal endowments who are created for G^reat des- 
 tinies. It is the common law of common life. 
 Said an illiterate Catholic woman, speaking of a 
 bereavement which had set her mind to thinking 
 into the underground of her dim creed, '' Such 
 things make us see what we are here for." 
 
 That one hint ifom. the Holy Spirit thrust 
 underneath the forms of her Church touched the 
 whole secret of the endless life. Science and phi- 
 losophy in their most far-reaching adventures into 
 the mysteries of providence make no more pro- 
 found discovery. We are here, not only " to he, 
 but to heeojne.'^ Everything made or done here 
 is organized for migration. It is like the anatomi- 
 cal structure of birds of passage. Everything has 
 wings. 
 
 2. We discover also a moral significance in that 
 feature of suddenness, by which many dark phe- 
 
 27 
 
28 My Note-Booh. 
 
 nomena in nature and in providence shock men 
 into affrighted silence. Abruptness is an awful 
 factor in probationary training. Men hear invisi- 
 ble monitors saying, *' Be still and know that I 
 am God." It is the only monition they can hear 
 or heed. How fearfully is this illustrated in the 
 annals of certain families ! Some homes are 
 shadowed by tragic histories. Without herald, 
 cold, cadaverous fingers have written on their 
 walls. 
 
 3. In our modern civilization there is an unwrit- 
 ten discipline by the telegram. Do not afflicted 
 men and women often forebode evil at the sight 
 of one? Do not some who have been elected 
 to a tragic experience, often say in the night- 
 watches, " After this, anything may happen ; 
 nothing can be reserved in God's silence which is 
 so shocking or so improbable as to take us by sur- 
 prise"? 
 
 4. Family history sometimes undergoes a revo- 
 lutionary change, like that which occurs in crises 
 of a nation's life, in the displacement of civil law 
 by martial law. After a long period of serene 
 prosperity there comes suddenly an interval of 
 rigor and desolation. The angel of the scourge 
 alights at the door. Affliction follows hard upon 
 affliction. The prattle of children is hushed at 
 noonday. The beauty of young maidenhood is 
 laid low. For years the habiliments of mourning 
 are not laid aside. Yet sudden calamities, even a 
 fleet-footed succession of them, may give to a 
 
Studies in Theology. 29 
 
 human life its most central depth of meaning, as i 
 preliminary to an endless career of moral enter- / 
 prise in other worlds. 
 
 5. One of the perils against which an undisci- 
 plined being whose destiny looks out upon un- 
 known cycles, may need a protective discipline, is 
 that of surprisal into apostasy from God. In this 
 world sin often springs upon unconsolidated virtue 
 from ambuscades of evil. Men are overborne by 
 the spur of the moment. Who can tell what mul- 
 tiplied encounters of that kind ma}^ lie in the end- 
 less pathway of one whose loyalty is not compacted 
 by a solidifying and protective discipline here ? 
 There as here God works by means. He begins 
 far back in the infancy of being. Then as now 
 the perseverance of the saints may be vitalized 
 by moral forces accumulated in this life. That 
 may be the thing which many of us "are here 
 for." 
 
 6. Is it not obvious that future crises of moral 
 peril will be met and mastered with most secure 
 and concentrated virtue, by those who have been 
 schooled into moral repose by events which have 
 given a shock to their whole moral being? Said 
 an English colonel in India, " In tlie first charge 
 of my cavalry in battle, I always tremble into 
 courage and self-collection." So, a godly charac- 
 ter, in some of those immortal types which men 
 need to carry into Eternity, grows to its destiny 
 there by means of such disciplinary shocks to moral 
 inertia here. Their suddenness is the chief element 
 
30 My Note-Book. 
 
 in the discipline. Courage to give grows undei 
 the blows it takes. 
 
 What other probationary devices, then, Can give 
 to character this reduplication of conscious strength 
 more effectively than those which inject into life 
 the catastrophic element of its training? This is 
 a thing of which no man can know anything worth 
 knowing but his own experience. It cannot make 
 a transit from one man's life to another. CharaC' 
 ter can carry no trace of it into Eternity but thai 
 which the man himself has lived through. 
 
 7. Real life discloses another fact from which 
 reappears from another phase of rigor and necessity 
 the moral value of the phenomena now under con- 
 sideration, as probationary expedients. It is that 
 some men do not work their wa}^ to any overmaster- 
 ing sense of God's existence till they have known 
 what it is to be God-forsaken. In this, as in many 
 other phases of moral growth, a sense of necessity 
 generates a sense of reality. We have what we 
 must have ; no more, and no other. 
 
 8. There is a supreme faith, Avhich some have 
 inaccurately defined as "the consciousness of God." 
 More correctly stated, it is a conscious union with 
 God, in sympathy with His thoughts and sensi- 
 Ijilities and eternal purposes. It is an experience 
 which often works by reactions. In one swing of 
 the pendulum the occult force is generated which 
 starts its opposite. Faith springs by a rebound 
 from unbelief or from despair. It may grow% 
 therefore, out of that moral solitude in wliich 
 
St2idies in Thpology. 31 
 
 prayer creates only a sense of orphanage. God 
 appears to have retired beyond the reach of sup- 
 pliant yoices. 
 
 9. Probationary schooling by that awful seclu- 
 sion Avorks directly into line with the necessities 
 of certain minds. Its moral uses are sometimes 
 disclosed in the training of elect spirits for elect 
 services. In some cases it is the training which 
 discovers the election. Men are put upon the 
 track of their life's mission by the strain laid upon 
 them in the discipline preparatory to its achieve- 
 ment. Pre-eminent saints and elect forerunners 
 have often commenced their careers under a crush- 
 ing sense of personal abandonment by God. They 
 were orphans in a desolate universe before the 
 Fatherhood of God illumined their pathway. 
 
 10. The two great departments of theological 
 thought, — those of natural and of revealed relig- 
 ion, — in the general trend of many of their teach- 
 ings, lie on substantially parallel lines. At certain 
 points of proximity, the one crosses over into the 
 domain of the other. Especially is it true, that 
 the grandest and toughest inquiries of natural 
 theology find their most luminous responses in the 
 disclosures of Revelation. 
 
 11. Such is the fact in the case here brought 
 under review. The consciousness of the loss of 
 God is created by some of the most common va- 
 rieties of affliction. The discipline suggests an 
 opportunity for a solemn and tender fellowship 
 with Christ. This may be the prerogative of all 
 
32 My Note-Book. 
 
 believing souls who are called to an exceptional 
 intensity of trial. Our crucified Lord endured the 
 discipline in question in an extreme unequalled in 
 any other human sufferer. He could not otherwise 
 compass the culmination of His atoning pains. He 
 could not find it in His heart to say, in the dawn- 
 ing consciousness of the reward set before Him, 
 " It is finished I " till He had first passed through 
 that blackness of darkness in which all that He 
 could say of filial trust in His Father and ours was 
 that climax of all human anguish, "My God! 
 My God ! Why hast Thou forsaken Me ! " 
 
 12. Probably no other problem suggested by 
 the mysteries of evil in the Divine government 
 presses with such cold, leaden weight upon the 
 popular thought as that of the inquiry, " Where, 
 under the law of non-intervention, is the place for 
 prayer ? " 
 
 Everywhere. The law of non-intervention 
 does not abrogate the law of prayer. The conceal- 
 ments and silences of God do not restrict the 
 range of its operation. Whatever will explain any 
 instance of unanswered prayer will explain every 
 instance which to human vision appears to occur 
 in consequence of Divine seclusion. Like every 
 other law, that of non-intervention is but one of the 
 expressions of Divine decree. It covers only those 
 probationary experiences which are foreordained 
 by the will of God. Moral solitude is one of His 
 chosen conditions of moral trial. He is no more 
 oblivious of its working- than of that of the law of 
 
Studies in Theology. 33 
 
 gravitation by which the sparrow falls. Nor is 
 there any more mystery in its phenomena than in 
 those of the laws which iLx the orbits of the stars. 
 
 13. To the popular mind the most transparent 
 conception of the relations of prayer to Divine 
 decrees may be founded on the image of the Divine 
 government as a iietwork of laws. To human vis- 
 ion laws run parallel with laws. Laws cross and 
 recross the grooves of laws. There is a Law of 
 Light, which regulates its undulations to the fron- 
 tiers of the stellar universe. So is there a Law of 
 Prayer, by which as grandly and as benignantly 
 and as far away in the stretch of human thought, 
 God adjusts His responses and I lis silences, His 
 self-disclosures and His concealments. Each and 
 every one is His eternal purpose. The innumera- 
 ble reticulations of their interplay are but the rhyth- 
 mical utterances of His will. Not one controverts 
 another. Not one tangles or suspends another, 
 even in appearance, but at His bidding, and for 
 reasons infinite which make it seem good in His 
 sight. 
 
 14. There is an illusion in practical astronomy 
 which may serve to illustrate the complication of 
 laws with la\\'s in the administration of the Divine 
 government. To the naked eye the orbits of the 
 stars seem to cross and recross each other at angles 
 and right angles, which bring them into perilous 
 convergence. To an inexpert observer it would 
 appear that contradictory attractions must bring on 
 abrasions and jostlings and collisions. The heav- 
 
34 My Note-Book. 
 
 ens, as they look on an astronomical map, appear 
 as if they must some clay be crowded with the 
 wrecks of dislocated worlds. A cyclone in the sky, 
 in which Orion and Cassiopeia and the Pleiades 
 should be hurled crashing and ablaze into chaotic 
 space, is not an impossible catastrophe. One touch 
 of retributive decree upon the law of gravitation 
 might bring it to pass. Yet the sidereal universe 
 moves in such exactest order, that no sign of minut- 
 est friction even has appeared from the beginning 
 until now. 
 
 15. The explanation is that the stars are not 
 located on one extended plain as they appear on a 
 celestial map. Some are at such unmeasured dis- 
 tances in the rear of others, that immense spaces 
 intervene between them, when to our vision they 
 are less than one inch asunder. There is and 
 can be no foreclosure of orbit upon orbit, and no 
 ejection of planets from their spheres till the heav- 
 ens shall be rolled together. 
 
 16. Every Autumn witnesses a beautiful illus- 
 tration of this astronomical fiction. To the naked 
 eye the planets Jupiter and Venus appear to be 
 approaching each other. Evening after evening 
 the intervening space is abridged by instalments 
 till it dwindles to a cipher. Yet at the hours of 
 their nearest approximations the actual astronomi- 
 cal distance between them varies from four hun- 
 dred and thirteen millions to five hundred and 
 
 i forty-seven millions of English miles. Ample 
 space this, it should seem, for morning and even- 
 
Studies in Theolofiy. 35 
 
 ing stars to come and go without perilous inter- 
 volution of their orbits or dislocation from their 
 places. 
 
 17. This is a sufficiently accurate emblem of the 
 complication, which is not contradiction of laws 
 with laws, and of decrees with decrees, in the 
 administration of the moral world. The look of 
 contradiction is an illusion. It is caused by a fore- 
 shortening of perspective by our contracted range 
 of vision. Ultimately it grows out of the contrast 
 of the magnitude of God with the littleness of 
 man. 
 
 18. We flee therefore when no man pursueth if 
 we are intimidated by discoveries of science which 
 the wise men tell us leave no room for prayer. 
 Just as unreasonably do we quake at the shocks 
 and heavings of natural forces against the moral 
 decrees of God. It is yet to be proved that a 
 cyclone cannot be forestalled by believing prayer. 
 
 19. When the question confronts us, of conflict 
 between spiritual and material powers, both acting 
 by laws which are the very breath of God, we 
 need to be very intelligent in our wisdom or very 
 modest in our assertions. The wise men are 
 neither, when they assure us that the}^ have risen 
 in their might, and have driven prayer beyond the 
 confines of a respectable universe. We ourselves 
 are neither, when we are scared out of the birth- 
 right of Christian believers, by mysteries of evil, 
 and shocks of suffering which we do not com- 
 prehend. 
 
36 My Note-Booh. 
 
 20. Suggestions of an overruling Mind in 
 human history are found in the concealme?its of 
 Nature and of Providence. 
 
 The hiding of the American continent till a new 
 world was needed for the further development of 
 the race ; the concealment of certain metallic 
 mines till the financial resources of commerce 
 required their discovery; the burying of anthra- 
 cite and petroleum till other means of artificial 
 heat and light were approaching the point of 
 exhaustion ; the silence of the clouds respect- 
 ing the occult forces of electricity, till near the 
 time when mechanical invention rose to a level 
 with the discovery; England's ignorance of the 
 value of her coal and iron mines, till they became 
 indispensable to her advancement to imperial rank 
 as the bulwark of Protestantism and of civil liberty ; 
 the delay of the manufacture of paper from the 
 pulp of vegetable fibre, till the time when the 
 practical value of the art of printing depended 
 upon it, — these are signs of a comprehensive and 
 far-reaching ^^/aw of history. It antedates and 
 outlives the forecast of any human mind. 
 
 21. Wise men have often observed the singular 
 marriage of invention to discovery, and of dis- 
 covery to invention ; sometimes the one and some- 
 times the other being the senior in the order of 
 time — but without which in union, human prog- 
 ress would have suffered a deadlock. Discovery 
 stimulates invention with prophetic forecast. Every 
 great epochal event in history is brought out of 
 
Studies in TheoJo<iy. 37 
 
 the arsenal of the ages by a law of predestination. 
 It comes when it must come. It is as if " He who 
 made the lock knew where to find the key." 
 
 22. To conceive and to execute such a plan of 
 critically significant events and agencies and com- 
 binations must have been the work of some other 
 intelligence than that of man. William Pitt, when 
 he heard of the victory of General Wolfe on the 
 " Heights of Abraham," said, " The more a man 
 is versed in the history of nations, the more he 
 sees of the hand of an overruling Providence 
 everyAvhere." A devout student must observe the 
 same in the discoveries of science and the history 
 of invention. Man has executed them, but some 
 other Mind than that of man has timed them. 
 
 23. Supernatural agency in human affairs is 
 forcibly suggested by the mysterious supremacy of 
 right over wrong. We often reason as if this were 
 an intrinsic necessity in the nature of things. 
 Where is the evidence of that? Who has ever 
 proved it ? In a world which has lapsed into sin, 
 the very contrary is the " nature of things." By 
 the innate law of character, by which it perpet- 
 uates itself, and reduplicates its forces, in such a 
 world as this, the wrong should rise and the right 
 go down. Such is the drift of moral gravitation. 
 Character once set on a downward plane has in 
 itself no recuperative force for a return. What 
 it is, it will be, till remedial power controls it from 
 without. 
 
 24. Yet, on the grand scale of trial, right is 
 
38 Mil Xotc-Book. 
 
 never defeated, but bv a colossal inequality of 
 numbers and resources. In the wrestlings of races, 
 if it has anythino" like an equal cliance, right 
 never goes under. Moderate majorities never 
 crush it. Reverses never put it out of average. 
 It has become one of the axioms of refiM-m, that 
 God works with minorities. In the conflicts for 
 human liberty, and the rise of despised races, right 
 has always trium[)hcd with a minority behind it. 
 When majorities come to its support, they consist 
 largely of reluctant multitudes, who are drawn 
 over to it by the suction of events. They come to 
 its defence when it needs no defence. They do not 
 support it — it supports them. 
 
 The most philosophical solution of the paradox 
 is the Christian disclosure of a remedial system 
 which brings supernatural powers into secret alli- 
 ance Avith men in the execution of the purposes of 
 (nnl. (^ur mundane atmosphere is thronged by 
 them. But our eyes are holden that we may not 
 see them. 
 
 25. The same truth is more signally suggested 
 by what are called " the fortunes of war." 
 
 Why is it that of all the great operations of 
 men in masses of physical potency war is the most 
 uncertain? Why do victories occur in defiance of 
 all visible probabilities ? Why is it that Provi- 
 dence, so often, is not on the side of the strongest 
 battalions? Why do revci-ses often contradict all 
 calctdable chances ? AVhy do panics make cowards 
 of veteran brigades ? 
 
Sfudie.^ in Theology. 39 
 
 The science of war gives no satisfactory solu- 
 tion of such problems. Tlie great Captains of all 
 ages have confessed the insoluble mystery, unless 
 Napoleon, wlio exalted the "strongest battalions," is 
 an exception. Yet no hero in military history was 
 a more conspicuous illustration of the truth than 
 he. He declared at St. Helena that the most 
 astounding surprise in his career was the failure of 
 the campaign in Russia. At Dresden, on his march 
 to Moscow, when a lialf-niillion of soldiers, tlie 
 majority of them veterans, were at his command, 
 he said that every military forecast of events gave 
 him assurance of success. l>y the laws of war, 
 which had been the study of liis life, it was im- 
 possible that lie should fail. Why iUd lie fail ? 
 
 26. No other liy[)otliesis ex[)lains the class of 
 events to which the contradictions of the "fortunes 
 of war" belong, so philosophically as the biblical 
 theory of the intcrver.tion of supra-mundane auxil- 
 iaries, who march under orders unheard by us. 
 Our atmosphere is a non-conductor to the sound 
 of their movement. 
 
 27. The first thing which shook the confidence 
 of Napoleon in his " strongest battalions," after 
 crossing the Russian frontier, was the devout tone 
 of the intercepted despatches of the enemy, and 
 of the api)eals to the Russian soldiery. The rec- 
 ognition of other than human allies was a factor 
 in the })robleni foi- which the Napoleonic theory of 
 war had made no provision. Tlu; destruction of 
 the hosts of Sennacherib between the evening and 
 
40 My Note-Book, 
 
 the morning twilight — a hundred and eighty-five 
 thousand strong — was of a piece with countless 
 phenomena in military history, which no other 
 force accounts for but that of the " Angel of the 
 Lord." 
 
 28. The triteness of the beauty of the material 
 universe renders us insensible to the symbolic tes- 
 timony which it gives to the moral perfections of 
 God. The blunt antagonism between right and 
 wrong might have been symbolized by things re- 
 pulsive and uncanny. The rectoral and retributive 
 goodness of God is symbolized by volcanic fires and 
 the tragic severity of the laws of nature. But the 
 holiness of God has a serene beauty which demands 
 more tasteful emblems. It could not have been 
 inscribed on a world destitute of colors. Heavens 
 void of stars could not have expressed it. Benig- 
 nant virtues require for their emblematic painting 
 things of exceeding loveliness in earth and sky. 
 The wondrous exuberance of God's benignity de- 
 mands a corresponding profusion, even an apparent 
 waste, of things fascinating to eye and ear. 
 
 29. We find that in this mood God has created 
 the heavens and the earth. Tropic flora, cascades, 
 and rippling brooks, sunsets, and the dawn of 
 morning, humming-birds and orioles, and a con- 
 stellated firmament are the natural concomitants 
 of a world which is the handiwork of One whose 
 name is Love. The fitness of things is specially 
 witnessed in the fact that the most significant 
 symbols of His character are the most common. 
 
Studies in Theoloffij. 41 
 
 We do not have to search for them in the arcana 
 of science. They are not stored in cabinets of 
 natural history. The very clouds over our heads 
 on a summer day can scarcely take on other con- 
 iigurations than those which artists love to paint. 
 The smoke from the chimne3"s of our winter 
 homes assumes the form of spiral wreaths, the 
 beauty of which poets sing. The winning attri- 
 butes of God re(|uire and receive for their sym- 
 bolic utterance a magnificent and ornamented 
 globe wliich the sun gilds and the moon silvers, 
 and the stars greet. One such vision of His glory 
 as that of Jungfrau at sunset, as seen from Inter- 
 laken, gives one an emblem of His benevolence, 
 which lives in memory forever. 
 
 30. Agnostic educators do not appreciate the 
 loss they inflict on the culture of the young by elim- 
 inating from its moral elements the idea of a per- 
 sonal God. As a power developing and uplifting 
 the human intellect, what other conception within 
 the range of human thought is its equal? What 
 other idea puts significance, as this does, into the 
 phenomena of natural science ? Without it, moral 
 science does not exist. Nothing else philosophi- 
 cally interprets human history. Nothing else so 
 magnifies and ennobles literature. The great i 
 bulk of human libraries, so far as their educating j 
 power over the human intellect is concerned, is ^ 
 nullified w^hen the idea of a personal God is ex- 1 
 punged. No act of vandalism is so frightfully ; 
 destructive to the interests of culture as that of 
 
42 My Note-Book. 
 
 uprooting the natural faith of childhood in the 
 Divine existence. The conflagration of the Alex- 
 andria Library was but a spark in the comparison. 
 
 31. Our age deifies its material prosperity. We 
 stand in awe, almost up to the level of worship, 
 before the marvels of invention and discovery. 
 Wise men put them in a nut-shell by saying that 
 all that civilization had achieved for the welfare 
 of mankind before the last fifty years, does not 
 equal its triumphs during this half-century. 
 Measured on the scale of material advancement, 
 it may be true. But the real civilizing forces which 
 have made the world what it is to-day are not such 
 things as steam and electricity. We are not civil- 
 ized by our command over the law of gravitation. 
 Nations are not made great by Atlantic cables and 
 Pacific railroads. The civilizing powers in all 
 history are Ideas, not things. Of these the reg- 
 nant forces are religious ideas; and of these the 
 one supreme power is the idea of a personal Crea- 
 
 \ tor. A soldier in Cromwell's army struck the ke}'- 
 note of everything in history which lives and wears, 
 when he said, " The best courages are but beams 
 of the Almighty." 
 
 32. A large literary assembly happened to be 
 convened at a semi-centennial amiiversary on the 
 day on which the tidings reached this country that 
 the first Atlantic cable had brought an intelligible 
 message from the eastern to the western shore of 
 the ocean. 
 
 Mind had at last traversed three thousand miles 
 
Studies in Theology. 43 
 
 of the under-world of the sea without sail, or 
 steam, or keel to navigate it. At the word, the 
 entire audience sprang to their feet. At first, 
 cheers rent the air. But the sober second thought 
 of the whole assembly was the request that a ven- 
 erable clergyman who was present should lead 
 them to the throne of grace in prayer. The idea 
 which lies back of every great causal fact or event 
 in the history of civilization is the idea of God. 
 Well is it for human culture that the Theistic 
 instinct of the race is so obstinate in its demand 
 for a personal God. Literature and philosophy are 
 beneath the average of civilized thinking when 
 they blink the idea of personality in their notions 
 of a Supreme Being. In such repudiation of spir- 
 itual cognitions wise men take a long stride 
 toward barbarism. The popular mind of any civil- 
 ized people is wiser than \\\Qy. 
 
 33. To a working theology in the pulpit, certain 
 elements are indispensable. They are freedom 
 from self-contradictions ; consonance with the in- 
 tuitions of the human mind ; a comprehensiveness 
 which shall forbid omissions of essential truth ; a 
 perspective of doctrine which shall give pre-emi- 
 nence to Christian ideas as related to those of 
 natural religion or those of the Old Testament; 
 harmony with the Scriptures as a whole, and as 
 the intelligent popular mind reads them ; and 
 statement in such forms as shall carry intense con- 
 victions corresponding to the necessities of a mind 
 awakened to the exigency of sin. 
 
44 My Note-Booh. 
 
 34. The initial fact in all theology, as it is in 
 all religious thinking wliich is truthful in its adap- 
 tations to human life, is the fact of sin. The con- 
 sciousness of sin is an intense experience. In the 
 order of time it is probably the first development 
 of conscious moral being. Man first knows him- 
 self as a subject of moral government in the intui- 
 tion of his moral sense that he is a sinner. In the 
 order of nature, that intuition is intensified by 
 time. The process of deliverance from it involves 
 immeasurable cost in suffering and death. Praise 
 for recovery from it is ecstatic. Therefore the 
 forms of faith which shall meet the conditions of 
 the Christian pulpit must carry the most profound 
 and exalted ideas which the human mind can con- 
 ceive. Such the redemptive ideas are, in their full 
 significance. 
 
 / 35. Theology adjusted to the uses of the pulpit 
 emphasizes a quadrilateral of doctrines which in- 
 tensify each other, and give character to all the 
 rest which enter into the system of Christian be- 
 liefs. These are the depravity of man as the Gos- 
 pel finds him; his exposure to retributive suffering 
 in a future life ; the necessity of his regeneration 
 by influences of the Holy Spirit ; and the depend- 
 ence of pardon as a judicial act of the Divine gov- 
 ernment, upon the sufferings and death of Jesus 
 Christ. A preacher's personal faith in any one of 
 these will measure his working faith in the rest. 
 The intensity of his faith in them all will measure 
 the force of his ministrations as a whole. In the 
 
Studies in Theology. 45 
 
 popular thinking they need to be held in an equi- 
 librium which shall make each an auxiliary to the 
 others. Essential error can scarcely find a lodge- 
 ment in the popular theology if this equilibrium 
 is kept intact. 
 
 36. Errors, like truths, grow and decay in the 
 religious convictions of a people, in clusters. A 
 single error is never long insulated. Its cognate 
 group is soon developed. That the germ of a sys- 
 tem of beliefs is an error, sometimes is not proved 
 except by its reproductive affinities with kindred 
 errors. A belief, like a man, is known by the com- 
 pany to which it gravitates. New ideas in theology 
 may be tested by the reception given to them by 
 the enemies of the old. When alleged improve- 
 ments of an ancient faith are greeted with loud 
 applause by its hereditary opponents, and gratula- 
 tions on deliverance from bigotry fill the air, those 
 improvements are probably illusive. Prove all 
 things ; hold fast that which is good. 
 
 37. When an ancient faith is caving in, the most 
 sagacious judges of the drift of opinion are often 
 found among those who have long watched the old 
 faith with an evil eye. They know by heart the 
 process of transition from the old to the new. The 
 snapping of ancient ties is familiar to them. The 
 pioneers in a revolution of opinion are apt to be 
 very honestly insensible of the tendencies they 
 have evoked. The ultimate developments surprise 
 and grieve them. 
 
 38. This was affectingly illustrated, if report be 
 
46 My Note-Book, 
 
 true, in the mental history of the Chief of the 
 Unitarian defection from the popular theology of 
 New England. Dr. Channing was a man of trans- 
 parent mental integrity. His theology was not 
 of speculative origin. Professor Stuart, his chief 
 opponent in the controversy of the times, revered 
 him as a devout believer to whom the faith he 
 held was a life. It was not possible for such a 
 man to wander from the faith of his fathers in a 
 somnambulistic dream. Every step of the way 
 was doubtless trodden in tears. He lived long 
 enough to discover the ultimate extremes to which 
 the revolution he had evoked w^as rapidly hasten- 
 ing. And if common fame spoke truth, his closing 
 years were clouded by the vision. 
 
 39. When a great truth is dislocated from its 
 socket in the popular theology, the danger of its 
 absolute and final overthrow is proportioned to 
 its intrinsic dignity. It is as if one should pry up 
 a boulder on the summit of a mountain and send it 
 bounding to the valley. The velocity of its de- 
 scent is proportioned to its weight. So of an 
 imperilled doctrine in the faith of a people ; the 
 more massive it is, the more potent are the forces 
 which must be set to the work of lifting it from 
 its place. Therefore the more sure is its fall, and 
 the more disastrous is the ruin which its fall evokes. 
 
 40. It is remarkable with what unerring aim 
 a false departure in theology, starting anywhere, 
 reaches the central doctrine of the atonement in 
 the sweep of its forces. Error acliieves no fatal ruin 
 
Studies in Theology. 47 
 
 till it gets possession of that citadel of the faith. 
 Consequently, begin where it may, its march 
 thither is prompt and swift. The chief object for 
 which men need a faith is to determine the prob- 
 lems which the experience of sin creates, and the 
 atonement of Christ solves. A tangent in theology, 
 to reach its resultant, must pursue that line in its 
 divergence. 
 
 41. The principle above stated was emphatically 
 illustrated in the case of Dr. Channing. There is 
 reason to believe that his departure began with 
 the doctrine of endless retribution. His original 
 belief of that doctrine is indicated by a discourse 
 reprinted in 1885. If it were reproduced now in 
 a Calvinistic pulpit, it would shock the sensibilities 
 of our times as his own were shocked by what 
 seemed to him a ferocious discourse upon that 
 truth in his childhood, probably preached by the 
 Rev. Dr. Hopkins. 
 
 It is not unnatural that the animus of such a 
 discourse should have concentrated on that doc- 
 trine his first secession from the stern faith of his 
 fathers. Yet that did not occur till a short time 
 before the delivery of the celebrated discourse at 
 the ordination of the Kev. Jared Sparks in Balti- 
 more. In that brief period he had learned to con- 
 ceive of the scene of the atoning sacrifice of Christ 
 as the central scaffold of the universe, without 
 which the wrath of God could not be appeased. 
 
 42. This sympathetic decadence of faith in the 
 atonement, when any other one of the great f unda- 
 
48 My Note-Book. 
 
 mental truths of evangelical theology falls, is en- 
 tirely germane to the laws of theological belief. 
 From such premises it is a foregone conclusion. 
 The irresistible drift of error at the circumference 
 is to advance by the nearest radius to the centre. 
 A mind of such resolute integrity as that of the 
 \ Unitarian Chief could not long retain its youthful 
 ' trust in a vicarious sacrifice for sin by the Son of 
 God, when its faith in the endlessness of retribu- 
 tive inflictions for sin had been abandoned. The 
 same underestimate of the evil of sin, and miscon- 
 ception of its nature, was at the root of both sur- 
 \ renders. Such is the welding of doctrine with 
 doctrine in the Christian system of beliefs. 
 
 43. The evil of single errors in religious think- 
 ing is commonly underrated. Few popular maxims 
 are so mischievous as that which affirms that it is 
 of little moment what a man believes, if he acts 
 his belief honestly in real life. A man is saved, 
 1 not by his belief, but by his life. But to live an 
 I error is to live a falsehood. The Father of lies 
 does nothing worse. It is as true in the construc- 
 tion of a religious creed as in the ethics of private 
 life, that one lie necessitates another. To act one 
 error consistently must ultimately reduce every- 
 thing in moral beliefs to error. An honest con- 
 science does not essentially better it in the end. 
 Character thrives on nothing but truth. " The 
 true and the good are one thing. Mind has no 
 natural affinities with falsehood. A false idea, 
 honestly held and lived, is to the moral nature 
 
Studies in Theolofiy. 49 
 
 what a cancer is to the human body. It is an abso- 
 lutely foreign and malignant growth. Pure blood 
 never creates it. Like a cancerous humor, its ten- 
 tacles strike inward from the surface to the vitals. 
 
 44. That was a capital remark made by the 
 Rev. AVilliam Jay of Bath : " The doctrine of 
 election is true, but it is not of equal importance 
 with that of the perseverance of the saints. We 
 must distinguish not only between truth and error, 
 but between truth and truth." 
 
 45. In one aspect of it, theology is cathedral 
 architecture. It is a structure in which truthful- 
 ness depends on perspective and proportion. The 
 most sinister errors are distortions of truth — often 
 only extremes of truth. Some such have grown 
 out of the hyperbole of Christian song. Ancient 
 hymns transmuted into didactic form became 
 prayers for the dead and to the dead. That 
 element of personal character which men call 
 "level headed" is essential to truth in the popular 
 thinking. 
 
 46. Therefore, error which is plausible as a 
 preacher delivers it, is often reduced to caricature 
 as the people think it. That which to him is only 
 a moderate foreshortening of perspective becomes 
 in the popular conception a monstrosity. This is 
 illustrated in the probable origin of the worship of 
 saints in the clerical eulogies of the dead in the 
 early centuries of the Church. 
 
 47. It may be an open question, therefore, of 
 homiletic policy, whether at a given time an 
 
50 My Note-Booh, 
 
 im^^rovement in the popular thinking is worth its 
 cost in the peril of distortion which it must 
 encounter in the process. Advances in popular 
 beliefs come more naturally by imperceptible and 
 unconscious growth than by a dead lift from 
 
 I inherited beliefs. Growth in character is always 
 growth of thinking power. Belief thrives on faith. 
 
III. 
 
 FRAGMENTARY STUDIES IN THEOLOGY. III. 
 
 1. The laws of heredity have significant theo- 
 logical relations to the Fall of Adam, which 
 students of those laws lose much by ignoring. In 
 real life, all things which express and forecast 
 human destiny run in grooves of inheritance. 
 Everything that creates history runs in the blood. 
 Ante-natal prepossessions are at the roots of things. 
 Disease is not more obviously or radically affected 
 by physical heredity than moral character and its 
 sequences are by the same principle in moral 
 destiny. Many of the most mysterious phenomena 
 of life are in exact keeping with the fact of a 
 moral catastrophe in the infancy of the race. They 
 are more philosophically explained by the history 
 of Eden than by anything else. How otherwise, 
 for instance, can the universal sinfulness of the 
 race be accounted for ? 
 
 2. Animal suffering has melancholy complica- 
 tions with the question of Divine benevolence. Dr. 
 Arnold of Rugby said that it was so fearful in its 
 apparent implications that he dared not discuss it. 
 Many animals themselves protest, at the sight of 
 the blood of their species, by a sound which nothing 
 
 61 
 
52 My Note-Book. 
 
 else evokes from their dumb natures. No hy- 
 pothesis explains the phenomenon of animal suffer- 
 ing and death but the Biblical histoiy of the lapse 
 of the ruling race of this world from moral recti- 
 tude. The law of moral correspondence between 
 matter and mind requires that the abode of a 
 fallen being and the fellow-creatures who serve 
 him shall sympathize with and symbolically repre- 
 sent his moral character. What he is as a moral 
 being must be declared by sympathetic suffering. 
 The whole mundane system must be set in accord 
 morally with its fallen lord by the symbols of 
 pain. The very rocks and mountains must bear 
 traces of buried histories of pain. Fallen man 
 must see himself reflected in the woes of subaltern 
 species, and in the shock which his fall has given 
 to the solid globe itself. 
 
 3. Every central doctrine of the Gospel has 
 collateral uses. We could not afford to part with 
 the truth of the Deity of Christ, were it valuable 
 for nothing else than the vividness which it has 
 imparted to our conception of the personality of 
 God. The whole structure of our faith rests upon 
 certain grand demonstrations of personal identity. 
 Man, a person — accountable to God, a Person — 
 redeemed by Christ, a Person co-equal with the 
 Father — regenerated by the Holy Spirit, a Person 
 of equal dignity in the Godhead, — these are its 
 corner-stones. The tendency of all the ethnic 
 religions has been to confound and obliterate these 
 representations of personality. The tendency of 
 
Studies in Theolojiy. 53 
 
 Biblical thought is to exalt and intensify them. 
 The prime illustration of this in its impression on 
 our minds is found in the Deity of Christ. 
 
 4. It is impressive to observe the ingenuity 
 with which the human mind has expressed its 
 interest in the atoning sacrifice of Christ. No 
 other single thought, unless it be the thought of 
 death, has taken equal possession of the Christian 
 world. It abounds even in the literature of Chris- 
 tian fable. A mediseval legend represents that at 
 the festival of Easter, all the lambs on the globe 
 are thrilled with thanksgiving to the Saviour of 
 mankind for having put an end to their suffering 
 as the type of His. The conception may have 
 been a puerile fancy in its original setting. The 
 mediaeval mind had a rare knack in loading with 
 puerilities sacred things and persons. Yet the 
 legend never could have had form except in an 
 age and in countries in which the Christian idea 
 of an atonement had taken supreme rank in the 
 common mind. Men must think it intensely 
 before they will put it into the mind of animals. 
 It marks the climax of devotional inspiration, that 
 men invoke the dumb world to aid them in its 
 expression. 
 
 5. Do not the words of our Lord in St. Matthew 
 18:7 give us a hint of all which it is given us to 
 know of the problem of the Divine permission of 
 sin ? " It must needs be that offences come ; but 
 woe to that man by whom they come." Two prin- 
 ciples are involved here which appear to cover 
 
54 My Note-Book. 
 
 the a^vful mystery. One is that, as related to the 
 power of God, there is in the nature of the things 
 concerned some mysterious necessity from which 
 moral evil springs. That is to say, the preven- 
 tive power of God cannot exclude sin from the 
 best system of the universe administered in the 
 best manner. To the Divine Mind, its existence 
 belongs not to the kingdom of design, but to the 
 kingdom of the inevitable. The other is that 
 the responsibility for moral evil rests upon finite 
 moral being. 
 
 These facts interpreted, each as correlative to 
 the other, point to the nature of the best possible 
 moral system as the cloudland in which the mys- 
 tery of sin lurks. Its prevention in any creation 
 of moral beings which should be worthy of God, 
 and therefore morally right as the object of His 
 creative wisdom, was in the nature of things im- 
 possible to Him. Like change in the immutable 
 relations of numbers, it was one of those blank 
 impossibilities to which infinite power sustains no 
 relation. The phenomenon of sin, therefore, argues 
 no more disparagement to the character of God 
 than the phenomenon of pain in an ulcerated tooth. 
 Things inevitable in nature prove no wrong in 
 character. 
 
 6. The contingencies involved in moral freedom 
 are appalling to contemplate if not balanced by 
 Divine promise in the form of immutable decree. 
 In one who has been redeemed from the catastrophe 
 of sin this correlation of opposite truths forms the 
 
Studies in Theology. 55 
 
 only ground of moral stability. The wavering 
 debility of conscience, the consequent weakness of 
 virtuous habit, the paralytic tremulousness of will, 
 and the intermittent integrity of intellectual judg- 
 ments tend to create trepidations and alarms. 
 These, again, threaten apostasy. Such a being, 
 though regenerate, if left to himself at the starting- 
 point to which regeneration introduces him, must 
 live on the defensive till the end. His life is a 
 state of siege in a granite castle. Aggressive enter- 
 prise is impracticable without the panoply of a 
 Divine alliance. In a fallen world if in no other, the 
 stability of virtue in the long process of recovery 
 requires the protective force of changeless decrees. 
 Freedom and election form one of those dual 
 weldings of balanced forces by which the redemptive 
 system is adjusted to the exigency of a fallen mind. 
 
 7. It would be difficult to number the controlling 
 minds in history who have been predestinarians. 
 Men who have scouted the truth as dogma have 
 been constrained by the stress of events in real life 
 to recognize it as fact in their own persons. So 
 extensive is this faith amouof the srreat executives 
 who have created history, that it argues some inborn 
 infirmity or some acquired obliquity in the growing 
 of such a mind, if the man does not discover the 
 truth dawning upon his consciousness before he 
 passes the ridge of middle life. 
 
 8. The discovery of personal foreordination is 
 not restricted to any one class of those who have 
 been organizing forces in human affairs. Reformero 
 
56 My Note-Book. 
 
 and founders of sects like Luther and Mahomet, 
 statesmen like Sir Matthew Hale and the Duke de 
 Choiseul, generals like Cromwell and Napoleon, 
 philosophers like Socrates and Spinoza, painters 
 like Fra Angelico, and sculptors like Danneker, 
 heroes of adventure like Havelock and Gordon, — 
 all come upon common ground in this consciousness 
 of having been chosen by a Power above the plane 
 of their own being to a destiny of achievement 
 planned by no wisdom of theirs in its origin, but of 
 which they have been the executives. Men who 
 have believed this with no religious consciousness 
 have, if possible, been more obstinate in the con- 
 viction than their Christian peers. The doctrine 
 of Election which is so transparently taught in the 
 Scriptures is as clearly the teaching of grand 
 biographies. 
 
 9. This faith in personal predestination is a 
 necessity to the normal working of the very first 
 order of public men. Without it, born leaders and 
 forerunners do not climb to the summit of their 
 faculties. They do not otherwise grow into the 
 inspiration and the conscious ownership of their 
 supreme prerogatives. By no other means do they 
 command that repose in great endeavor which 
 elect men need. In other words, to accomplish 
 their mission on any masterly scale of enterprise, 
 men must find out on an equal scale of discovery 
 that they have a mission. They must have a sense 
 of eternal allotment to it which in its inspiring and 
 propelling force is equivalent to prevision. 
 
Studies in Theology. bl 
 
 10. Seldom does a man perform a work of signal 
 value to the world without the existence of pre- 
 monitory hints of it in his personal training. The 
 man is made for his work, and the work is pre- 
 ordained for tlie man. The man and the work 
 come together by irresistible affinities. The whole 
 process is threaded by Divine foreknowledge and 
 decree. Tlie youth and early manhood of one who 
 is elected to the performance of even a single great 
 thing in the advancement of mankind are never 
 devoid of tokens of Divine prescience and antici- 
 patory discipline. The strategic providence of 
 God inserts into the early development of such 
 men hints which symbolize the great history to 
 come. What such a man does is foreshadowed in 
 the training which makes him what he is. The 
 being and the doing are an equation. It is not in 
 the power of any man to lift his life's work above 
 his character. If he seems to do it, it is but a 
 seeming. It is a mirage. Always and everywhere 
 the saying of Goethe holds good, " If you would 
 create something, you must be something." 
 
 11. More even than this is true. A man's ante- 
 natal history often gives intimation of f<ome elect 
 service for which he is to be created. To this law I 
 belongs the fact so well known that remarkable I 
 men commonly have remarkable mothers. At 
 birth rivulets of vitality come to a junction 
 from fountains unsealed by a Divine hand for a 
 Divine purpose. The best work which a man ever , 
 achieves in this world lies in the grain. The hand 
 
58 ■ Mtj Note-Book. 
 
 which made him lays down the grooves of his use- 
 fulness. 
 
 12. When God has in His kingdom of reserve 
 a great thing for one of His chosen to achieve, He 
 does not often disclose the fact of the consciousness 
 of the man himself, till the time comes for the 
 execution, or afterwards. The " Paradise Lost " 
 was a rare exception. The best work of this world 
 is, as a rule, done by unconscious instruments. 
 To them and to lookers-on, the fact that they are 
 elect instruments is an afterthought. The most 
 frequent sayings of wisest men are unconsciously 
 said. Immortal proverbs which tell the wisdom 
 of the ages are fortunate hits. We seldom know 
 their origin. 
 
 13. Poetry is the most profound theology. The 
 Psalms of the Old Testament disclose a more pen- 
 etrative insight into the Mind of God than the 
 Epistles of the New Testament. The hymnology 
 of the Church has expressed more of the immeasur- 
 able de^Dths of truth than her creeds. Our great 
 historic confessions are religious life in the work 
 of inquiry, of debate, of action. But when we 
 mount to the heights of inspired devotion, or seek 
 God on death-beds, we turn to the treasury of 
 Christian song. 
 
 14. A test of new departures in theology is 
 found in the inquiry, " What is their bearing upon 
 the practical work of the Church for the world's 
 conversion ? " Tried by this test, the recent theo- 
 logical adventures in New England present very 
 
Studies ill Theology. 59 
 
 grave problems to Christian thinkers. Tliose ad- 
 ventures go to the root of Christian missions, 
 as we have known them for nearly a century. In 
 two respects they involve disastrous changes in 
 our well-known theory of missionary enterprise. 
 
 15. One of tliese is a denial of the necessity 
 of a knowledge of Christianity in the present 
 life to the salvation of unevangelized nations 
 in the mass. The conviction of that neces- 
 sity has taken a profound hold upon the faith of 
 the Church. Upon it the magnificent structure 
 of Christian missions has been erected. We have 
 accepted without abatement the Scriptural teach- 
 ing that mankind, as the Gospel finds them, are 
 '' dead in trespasses and sins." It has been to us 
 a stupendous and appalling fact. We have not 
 theologized about it so profoundly as we have 
 believed it. We have taken it soberly to heart. 
 We have found in it an imperative reinforcement 
 of our Lord's command to preach the Gospel to 
 every creature. 
 
 16. We have sent the Gospel therefore to the 
 benighted nations as their forlorn hope. What- 
 ever may be true of the minority of exceptional 
 enlightenment, we have acted in the belief that, 
 without a knowledge of Christ the majority of the 
 heathen go into eternity unsaved. It may be j 
 reasonably doubted whether without this convic- 
 tion a Christian mission to the heathen would ever 
 have existed to this day. We cannot know that it 
 would ever have been commanded. At any rate, 
 
60 My Note-Book. 
 
 this is the appalling theory on which it has been 
 commanded and executed. 
 
 17. Recent discussions in theology are threaten- 
 ing to overturn all this. Revolutionary change is 
 in the air. It is claimed that the ancient notions 
 respecting the destiny of the heathen are unworthy 
 of broad and noble conceptions of the character of 
 God. By some it is more than hinted that the 
 ethnic religious, antedating Christianity in their 
 origin, are, in their providential design, preparatory 
 to its coming. They have been its forerunners 
 and pioneers. So far they have been its auxil- 
 iaries in their working. Some do not hesitate to 
 affirm that they contain truth enough to constitute 
 a saving power to the nations which have inherited 
 nothing better. Not exceptionally only, but on 
 the general scale, the heathen may be saved with- 
 out a knowledge of Christ. Not possibly only^ 
 which few would deny, but practically they have 
 been saved in the ages past. By the grace of God, 
 acting through imperfect beliefs and overruling 
 destructive errors, or by the working of occult 
 and mysterious decrees, the natural drift of error 
 to a retributive destiny has been reversed. 
 
 Not that all these vagaries of opinion have come 
 to pass anew from recent theological speculations. 
 But when an intense awakening of missionary 
 ardor, founded on intense convictions of the lost 
 state of mankind, has been rudely rebuked, the 
 door is thrown wide open to the influx of any and 
 every error tending to its extinction. Apostolic 
 
Studies in Theolouy. 61 
 
 zeal is checked when apostolic beliefs are shaken. 
 Even doubt is sufficient to paralyze the nerve of 
 missionary enterprise. A question of their neces- 
 sity strikes at the root of the motives which un- 
 derlie them. 
 
 18. The questions here raised are not merely 
 questions of Biblical interpretation. They are 
 also questions of historic fact. They are answer- 
 able by the phenomena of real life. The actual 
 condition of the unevangelized nations and races, 
 as the Gospel finds them, may be appealed to for 
 independent evidence. 
 
 19. If the un-Christianized peoples, by the condi- 
 tions of their birth and probationary discipline, 
 or by virtue of some occult decree of God, are 
 already in the time of redemption^ that fact, it may 
 be assumed, will disclose itself in certain very sig- 
 nificant phenomena. Individual character should 
 often speak it. Not exceptionally but with suffi- 
 cient frequency to prove the presence of regener- 
 ating forces widespread and rooted deep. Private 
 virtues should give signs of thrift. Public morals 
 should be healthy in their tone and robust in their 
 grip upon social institutions. Such institutions as 
 those of marriage and the family and the judiciary 
 should give evidences of moral soundness; Popu- 
 lar forms of worship should be such as to make 
 for the interests of spiritual religion. Religion 
 and morality should go hand in hand. 
 
 20. In a word, the civilizations existing in 
 heathen lands should indicate that society is 
 
62 My Noie-Booh. 
 
 morally on an as^cending grade. Indeed, religions 
 which are preparative to Christianity should approx- 
 imate its teachings in their regnant ideas. To a 
 philosophic observer they should appear to be 
 prophetic of its coming. They should be anticipa- 
 tory of its ruling spirit, full of sublime and myste- 
 rious hints of its revelations. They should breathe 
 an atmosphere of Messianic promise. The civili- 
 zations efflorescing from them should display the 
 moral buoyancy of nascent and crescent, not the 
 stagnation of effete and decadent races. 
 
 21. Now the critical inquiry is, are these condi- 
 tions true of heathen and Mohammedan races, as 
 the Gospel finds them ? Do heathen and Moham- 
 medan civilizations, before they are renovated by 
 Christian ideas, give any such tokens that they are 
 the work of nations and races which are rising in 
 the scale of moral dignity? Do the facts of 
 Oriental life prove that any uninspired religion, 
 or secret redemptive working of the Holy Spirit is 
 a preparative of Christianity in any such sense 
 that it does or can imitate among the masses of 
 mankind the work which Christianity promises to 
 complete in the salvation of individuals and the 
 regeneration of society? For example, are the 
 conditions which seem to have existed in the men- 
 tal history of Socrates and Plato and Marcus 
 Aurelius reproduced on any large scale among 
 heathen and Mohammedan thinkers ? How many 
 such examples of mental and moral forecast of a 
 revelation from Heaven does a vigilant missionary 
 
Studies in Theoloijij. 63 
 
 discover in a lifetime ? To make these inquiries 
 is to answer them. 
 
 22. Our time-tried theory of missions is also 
 imperilled by a denial of the finality of a proba- 
 tionary discipline limited to the present life and 
 administered under tlie light of nature alone. We 
 have sent the Gospel to the heathen, believing that 
 without it they can know the living and true God. 
 We have accepted the teachings of St. Paul, that 
 " eternal power and Godhead " are revealed in the 
 phenomena of the material universe and the intui- 
 tions of the human conscience. These sources of 
 religious knowledge constitute the groundwork of 
 a just and benevolent probation. If in the working 
 of it men are not saved, they " are without excuse." 
 Such a probation is a '' fair trial." It is sufficient 
 to sustain in eternal justice a system of rewards 
 and punishments. A knowledge of Christ, therefore^ 
 is no man's moral right. It is a gift of God to the 
 undeserving. It is of grace, and of grace only. 
 The perdition of men who leave this world in 
 ignorance of a Redeemer and unforgiven, is not 
 their misfortune ; it is the penalty of their sins. 
 They came into the world subjects of an equitable 
 probation; they leave the world subjects of an 
 equitable condemnation. 
 
 23. Christian missions, therefore, are designed to 
 save men not from a grim, implacable decree of 
 God, but from the maturing of their own depravity. 
 Our missionaries go to their rescue, not from their 
 fate, but from their guilt. The emergency from 
 
64 My Note-Book. 
 
 which we seek their deliverance is a voluntar}^ ruin 
 from which deliverance is impracticable only in one 
 world. We claim that probationary discipline under 
 such conditions meets all the demands of the 
 heathen conscience. It satisfies our profoundest 
 reverence for the honor of God. On this theory 
 of probation has been founded every Christian 
 mission in the world. On this theory the Acts of the 
 Apostles were executed and the Epistle of St. Paul 
 to the Romans was written. We reasonably doubt 
 whether, on any other hypothesis, such an enter- 
 prise as a mission to unevangelized nations would 
 ever have existed to the end of time. Again, 
 we cannot know that it would ever have been 
 commanded. 
 
 24. This claim of the equity and the sufficiency 
 of moral trial under the light of nature is now 
 questioned. By some it is uncompromisingly de- 
 nied. An improved " ethical instinct " is set up as 
 a test by which that which seems to be the plain 
 declaration of the Scriptures is to be tried and 
 condemned. By the same standard of ethical taste 
 the early propagation of Christianity is brought to 
 trial. The verdict pronounced upon it is that it 
 was the work of a darker age than ours. Apostles 
 saw through a glass darkly. Saints had a less 
 truthful insight than ours into the Mind of God. 
 
 We are told that the restriction of any man's 
 probation to one lifetime, and that illumined by the 
 light of nature only, is unworthy of God. It is the 
 outcome of an ascetic theology. It is a relic of a 
 
Studies in Theology. Q^ 
 
 reign of terror over theological iiiquir3\ An eter- 
 nal destiny cannot be fairly determined by the issues 
 of a moral trial thus impoverished in its conditions 
 and limited in time. Men have a right to some- 
 thing better. A just God will provide something 
 more luminously expressive of His benevolence. 
 If not in this world, then in another, men must be 
 lifted to the level of a Christian probation. Other- 
 wise they are hardly dealt with, and God is 
 dishonored. Such is the belief of some, and the 
 petted hypothesis of others. 
 
 25. Some who do not claim this enrichment of 
 probationary conditions on the ground of justice, 
 claim it as the fruit of Divine benevolence. They 
 declare that whatever may be theoretical equity in 
 the allotments of probation, infinite benevolence 
 imposes a law of its own. A natural as distinct 
 from a Christian trial does not meet its demand. 
 A probation worthy 'of God as He is represented in 
 the " ethical judgments " of our advanced culture, 
 must somehow and somewhere bestow on all men 
 a knowledge of redemption. That conception of 
 God which the work of redemption has created 
 must be permitted to exert retroactive sway over 
 the range of its operation. Every man, tlierefore, 
 past, living, or to come, nuist have or have had in his 
 own consciousness a Christian chance of heaven. 
 
 26. Just here the new theology interpolates an 
 error which carries with it immense and sinister 
 consequences in the argument. Yet it is often so 
 plausibly put that the fallacy passes without detec- 
 
66 My Note-Booh, 
 
 tion. A probation under the light of nature only 
 is subjected to a pessimistic depreciation of its 
 value. Its conditions are grossly underrated. 
 Man's moral freedom is reduced to its minimum, 
 by some to zero. Its sublime and awful preroga- 
 tives are ignored. The sovereignty of conscience 
 as God's vice-regent in the soul is overruled by 
 laws of heredity. Inherited beliefs are exalted 
 as supreme factors of destiny which lord it over 
 the omnipotence of the human will. The result 
 is that to the popular mind probation under the 
 light of nature appears Avell-nigh hopeless. It is a 
 trial the result of which is a foregone conclusion. 
 Its magnificent opportunities are but chances. The 
 chances are determined by loaded dice. The cer- 
 tainty of moral catastrophe lapses into necessity. 
 Man becomes in the end, not Avhat he will, but 
 what he must. His probation in this world is 
 rather detective than restorative. He has been 
 thrust without his consent into the arena of a lost 
 conflict. Mankind in the mass are a foredoomed 
 race. Their moral history may have strategic uses 
 in the plans of God for the benefit of other races 
 in the universe, but none whatever for their own. 
 Practically, therefore, to every man's sense of jus- 
 tice, the Christian chance of heaven ceases to be a 
 favor; it is a right. Grace is no more grace. God 
 cannot refuse it without dishonor. 
 
 27. We cannot deny that this interfusion of 
 benevolence with justice in the Divine purposes of 
 redemption is plausible. More, it is fascinating. 
 
Studies in Theology. 67 
 
 It appeals to some of the most seductive sensibili- 
 ties of our nature. We confess the attractiveness 
 of the novel word which has been coined to ex- 
 press it. When men tell us of the discovery of a 
 Ohrisfocentric law of salvation, we bow in acknowl- 
 edgment of the adroitness of the epithet. But if 
 it he expressive of an advanced insight into the 
 nature of the Divine government, its bearing on 
 the theory of missions to the heathen is inevitable 
 and revolutionary. If prosecuted at all, they must 
 shift their ground of necessity and of motive. 
 They must be supplemented also by the promise of 
 a future probation for all whom they fail to reach 
 in the present world. 
 
 28. This is a convulsive change in the mission- 
 ary policy of the Church. We should take no 
 such leap in the dark. We do well to test it by 
 a plain, practical appeal to the facts of heathen 
 experience. In other words, we should ask for the 
 verdict of the common sense of the heathen mind. 
 Especially is there one line of unwritten history 
 which we may study with no doubtful success. 
 That is, the testimony of tlie human conscience 
 and common sense when these emerge from 
 heathen or Mohammedan beliefs into Christian 
 discoveries and convictions. What is that testi- 
 mony ? 
 
 29. What, for example, do heathen converts to 
 Cliristianity affirm of the character of their ante- 
 Christian history ? Do they, or do they not, hold 
 themselves guilty for their rejection of the true 
 
68 Mij Note-Book. 
 
 God? Do they, or do tliey not, repent of idolatry 
 as a sin ? What of their licentious and inhuman 
 rites of pagan worship? Do they acknowledge 
 these to have been outrages w^ow right reason and 
 good conscience ? Do they confess infanticide as 
 a crime ? Do they hold themselves justly punish- 
 able for these things under the righteous govern- 
 ment of God ? Does the heathen conscience, when 
 brought to face the facts under the illumination 
 of Christian ideas, act the part of a detective, 
 a remonstrant, and a punitive authority in the 
 heathen soul ? 
 
 30. What, again, have Mohammedan converts to 
 say of the falsehood, the im^Durity, and the cruelty 
 which are said to be almost universal in the habits 
 of their race ? We are told that, in some parts of 
 the East, the courts of English law can scarcely be 
 conducted, because of the obtuseness of the natives 
 to the sanctity of an oath. Warren Hastings, 
 when impeached for high treason in his adminis- 
 tration of the government of India, was acquitted 
 chiefly on the ground that, as Lord Macaulay 
 observes, "the oath of a Hindoo could not be 
 trusted." Elsewhere he says : " What the horns 
 are to the buffalo, what the paw is to the tiger, 
 what the sting is to the bee . . . deceit is to the 
 Bengalee. Elaborate tissues of circumstantial 
 falsehood, chicanery, perjury, forgery, are the 
 weapons offensive and defensive of the people of 
 the lower Ganges." Mohammedanism is little 
 better in its standards of morality. Islam has 
 
Studies m Th'ohxijf. 69 
 
 become the synonym of brutality in the service 
 of religion. 
 
 31. Repeat the crucial inquiry : hoAv do converts 
 to Christianity from these races judge of their old 
 religions and moralities? Do they call themselves 
 unlucky or guilty ? Do they turn to Christ as sin- 
 ners or as victims of the laws of heredity? Are 
 their \dces " kismet " or are they crimes ? Do they 
 ask for pardon, or do they claim in justice the 
 " Christian chance " ? In a word, does the ante- 
 Christian history of Oriental converts, as it lies in 
 their startled memory, appear to themselves to have 
 been a moral trial for the abuse of which they are 
 responsible, and justly exposed to the wrath of God ? 
 That self-jud(jment^ whatever it may be, is the ver- 
 dict of the silent and invisible government of God 
 which every man carries with him in the vice-re- 
 gency of conscience. What is the verdict ? Again, 
 to ask the question is to answer it. 
 
 32. In defence of an exotic theology it is often 
 urged that the novel theory is held in theory only. 
 It will not be obtruded in the pulpit at home. 
 The missionary who has been captured by it will 
 carry it in his pocket. He will not attempt to 
 indoctrinate with it infant churches on heathen 
 ground. He will hold it only in philosophical 
 reserve. 
 
 It is to be regretted that this plea has been urged 
 for the novel theology or for any theology. If it 
 means anything, it means that theological beliefs 
 shall be held in secret. But a secret theology sug- 
 
70 My Note-Book. 
 
 gests by the very epithet an offensive odor. We 
 do not know what corruption it may grow to in 
 the lapse of time. It has a Jesuitical look. The 
 world's experience of such a policy in matters of 
 religion is uncanny. If anything can bear light, it 
 is a religious thought. That does not naturally 
 take to hiding. The very consciousness of con- 
 cealed beliefs imperils the mental integrity of a 
 godly man. It tempts to a tortuous diplomacy a 
 wily man. Christianity finds no place for the dis- 
 tinction between exoteric and esoteric doctrines. 
 
 33. But beyond this, a latent theology is impos- 
 sible for any great length of time to an earnest 
 man. This is emphatically true of a secret belief 
 on such subjects as those reconstructed by the new 
 theolog3^ They are among the most transcend- 
 ingly solemn themes of human thought. Men who 
 believe anything respecting them believe intensely. 
 No man given" to earnest thinking can keep long 
 in reserve opinions so profoundly related to human 
 destiny. They wdll out, more surely than murder 
 will. They incessantly struggle to the birth. 
 Bold men will not long submit to keep them 
 under diplomatic cover. Will honest men ? Diplo- 
 matic preachers will disclose them unconsciously. 
 Through crevices of the most adroit discourse they 
 will find their way. The discussion of cognate 
 themes will let them loose in hints and implica- 
 tions and refractions. 
 
 34. A preacher may be ever so reticent about 
 occult beliefs in his sermons, yet his prayers, if he 
 
St}(dies i}i Theolofiy. 71 
 
 is an earnest believer, will scatter them broadcast. 
 The more devout the man, the more vividly will 
 his prayers tell the story of his secret faith. Never 
 yet did a latent belief long remain in hiding in the 
 mind of an intensely praying man. That which is 
 really in him must fly out, as through wide-open 
 windows, on the wings of his devotions. Sooner 
 or later, though whispered in the closet, it will ho, 
 shouted on the house-top. Some men, in indig- 
 nant revolt from their self-imposed taciturnity, 
 will break open their padlocked lips, and blurt out 
 all the}^ think and a good deal more than they 
 know. 
 
 No, no, this will never do. We betray a shallow 
 knowledge of men when we consecrate as a pastor 
 or a missionary a candidate who believes error, or 
 who does not know what he does believe, founding 
 our action on the hope that he will never tell of it. 
 He cannot help telling of it. 
 
 35. There is something phenomenal in the recep- 
 tion which its opponents have given to the Calvin- 
 istic type of theology. Not in its extremes and 
 its eccentricities alone, but in its moderate and 
 balanced forms, men have heaped upon it abuse 
 and obloquy. No other modern confession of faith 
 has been debated with such virulent and venomous 
 dissent. It is one of the rarest achievements of 
 theological candor, if its opponent gives a state- 
 ment of it which its believer can accept as his own. 
 Philosophic thinkers lose their balance in assault- 
 ing it. Good men fall from grace in disproving 
 
72 Mil Note-Book. 
 
 it. The more " liberal " unbelievers are, the more 
 intolerant is their reasoning and the more vitriolic 
 is their animosity. This is emphatically true of 
 that class of men of letters in whose culture liter- 
 ature takes precedence of religion. 
 
 36. One of the pet ideas of Mr. Emerson is 
 "the malignant mythology of Calvinism." Such 
 is his modest caricature of a system of beliefs 
 which has for centuries commanded the faith of a 
 larger proportion of the cultivated mind of Chris- 
 tendom than any rival. It has been the favorite 
 belief of the more thoughtful confessors of Chris- 
 tianity from the beginning. Men of independent 
 inquiry, of well poised minds, and of profound 
 religious nature, have inclined to one or another 
 form of it in larger numbers than those commanded 
 by any other theological structure. The literature 
 of the last three hundred years contains more of 
 elaborate discussions in its defence than is to be 
 found in that of all other compends of Christian 
 doctrine combined. In substance it is the spinal 
 cord of the most illustrious of historic creeds. It 
 is the soul of many of the most precious products 
 of Christian hymnology. Men have argued it and 
 sung it with equal force of conviction. Sangui- 
 nary battles have been fought for it, as the most 
 potent ally of civil and religious liberty. Histo- 
 rians of the latest and most brilliant type of civil- 
 ization laud it as a tributary to all that is most 
 valuable in civilized society. Yet in the face of 
 all this, we are called upon to believe that Calvin- 
 
Studies in Theology. 73 
 
 ism, in any form of it, is a mythology I The old 
 Greek cultm is treated by many literary men with 
 more decent respect. 
 
 37. The Calvinistic way of thinking in theology 
 lias commanded the loyalty of Christian woman- 
 hood, in its most refined and cnltivated represent- 
 atives, and these in larger numbers than can be 
 claimed for any other symbol of religious faith 
 now extant. Devout woman has trusted it, loved 
 it, sung it, suffered and died for it, in multitudes 
 incalculable. Yet despite all this, grave and 
 learned and reverend critics would have us believe 
 that it is a " malignant mythology " I 
 
 38. There is a theology of the rainbow. As a 
 pledge of the veracity of God in the promise to the 
 patriarch on his egress from the Ark on Ararat, the 
 bolt of lightning which had a little while before 
 reddened the heavens in anger, might have been 
 selected and consecrated instead of the boAv of many 
 colors in the clouds. Either must have receiA ed 
 its significance in part from the potency of a Divine 
 decree. But what else than the variegated coloring 
 and the protective arch — the symbol of strength 
 and safety to all ages — and the sublime reach 
 from horizon to liorizon, as pictured by the rain- 
 bow, could have symbolized the moral beauty of an 
 immortal covenant of God with the awestruck and 
 trembling remnant of a depopulated world ? 
 
 39. Creeds, designed to be denominational stand- 
 ards of faith, must from the nature of the case be 
 compromises. It is not singular if, to Ijelievers of 
 
74 My Note-Book, 
 
 an after-age, they appear inconsistent and illogical. 
 The conflicting parties who framed them were each 
 intent on the statement of their own belief, not 
 caring much for the welding of it to that of 
 dissenters. So long as each found its own there, 
 both and all were content. That is often true of 
 confessions thus framed, which Lord Macaulay 
 affirms of political constitutions — that ''some of 
 the most useful political instruments in the world 
 are among the most illogical ever penned." The 
 phenomenon, in religious and civil histor}^ alike, is 
 one of the inevitable necessities of compromise 
 among independent thinkers. Such representative 
 documents need to be interpreted in the light of 
 their origin. They signify what they were meant 
 to signify. Rankest heresy in the letter may be 
 strictest orthodoxy in historical intent. 
 
 40. Subscription to ancient creeds, or indeed to 
 any creeds which are emphasized by the conditions 
 of their origin, involves a point of law and a point 
 of honor. In law the silence of a creed may limit 
 the responsibility of a subscriber. He may believe 
 anything or nothing on a theme on which the 
 instrument affirms and implies nothing. Not so in 
 the point of honor. The history of a creed may 
 carry declarations more explicit and more authorita- 
 tive than words. Its originators may have expressed 
 by silence a faith too positive to need utterance in 
 syllables. Their reticence may have been evidence 
 that a truth is self-evident. They saw no need of 
 speech. Must a creed framed for an evangelical 
 
Studies in Theology. 75 
 
 church on Cape Cod contain an article denying 
 the Divine origin of the Mormon Bible ? 
 
 41. Many who do not hold extreme or extensive 
 religious errors, often give aid and comfort to those 
 who do. Error in some things pays tribute to 
 error in all. An ancient faith consolidated in 
 the popular thinking cannot be shattered at one 
 point without opening breaches for assault at every 
 point. The premises which lead to one false doctrine 
 support cognate doctrines underground. Scarcely a 
 contradiction of revealed theology exists to which 
 a false theory of Biblical inspiration may not logi- 
 cally lead. 
 
 42. New departures in theology are always fas- 
 cinating. Opposition is attended with more or less 
 of obloquy. " Orthodoxy," as the world goes, is 
 commonly a term of reproach. Novelties in relig- 
 ious thinking have the look of emancipation 
 from ancient bondages. It is easy to talk on the 
 side of liberty in anything. It is sure to bring 
 down applause from the galleries. 
 
 43. The most inexplicable feature of the Divine 
 plan for the redemption of this world is that its 
 execution seems to involve an appalling ictute of 
 being. Of all the antediluvian generations, only 
 one group of eight souls was deemed fit to lift the 
 Divine decree, and project it across the awful 
 chasm of the Noachian deluge. All the rest of 
 that unknown population was apparently wasted 
 mind. Our sacred books make the impression 
 that, so far as the redemptive history is concerned, 
 
76 My Note-Book. 
 
 they were flung aside as unfit material for a work 
 so august and so hol}^ God repented that He had 
 created them. The deluge bears every sign of a 
 retributive infliction. 
 
 44. From the deluge to the call of Abraham 
 the scroll of the centuries is rolled up in silence. 
 The " selection of the fittest " is narrowed down 
 to one stock of mind. The other teeming multi- 
 tudes of being are left out of the executive line 
 of God's purpose in redemption. From Abraham 
 to Christ thousands of years are given to the moral 
 training of one diminutive and obscure people 
 for the welcome of the Redeemer and His late 
 coming. 
 
 Again, the great nations are left out of the suc- 
 cession of redemptive decrees. Their magnificent 
 civilizations are a moral desert. Whatever may 
 have been their mission laterally to the plan of 
 redemption, to its direct evolution they pay no 
 tribute. They give birth to neither prophets nor 
 apostles nor Messiahs. The idea of a church is 
 not found in their splendid literatures. Their 
 vocabularies — the supreme creations of human 
 speech — contain no words adequate to express 
 certain thoughts of the Divine Mind in the recov- 
 ery of mankind. The inventive eloquence of St. 
 Paul at Mars Hill could discover nothing in the 
 masterpieces of Grecian sculpture which as such 
 he could make auxiliary to his aims as a Christian 
 preacher. He saw no occasion to do homage to 
 Phidias and Praxiteles as in any sense his own 
 
Studies m Theology. 77 
 
 forerunners. Even the colloquies of Plato have 
 lam undisturbed in the silence of centuries. No 
 apostolic inspiration recovered them from the obliv- 
 ion of ages. As related to the work of redemp- 
 tion, in the grand history of its evolution, the 
 great nations and races of antiquity lie like drift- 
 wood in the troughs of the sea. 
 
 45. Theological science can never outlive its 
 obligations to the English Puritans. As a body, 
 at the time of their supremacy in English politics, 
 they contained a larger proportion of learned and 
 godly men than any other of equal numbers in 
 Europe. They made the taste of the age theolog- 
 ical. Divinity became a study in which men and 
 women of culture were ambitious to excel. Men 
 lost prestige if they were ignorant of the great 
 schools of theological opinion. At the Bar it was 
 a collateral branch of Law. Judges and chancel- 
 lors wrote theological monographs. Never before 
 nor since the age of the Puritan ascendency in 
 England has the popular mind, even any consider- 
 able fragment of it, been so ponderously weighed 
 with theological ideas. 
 
 46. In Cromwell's armies, sergeants debated the 
 doctrine of decrees. A painting is extant in Edin- 
 borough, commemorating the exposition of a 
 chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, by a cor- 
 poral in his tent before the battle of Naseby. 
 The chief reason, probably, of the good order of 
 Cromwell's soldiery, when they were disbanded, 
 was that their minds were laden with great relig- 
 
78 My Note-Booh. 
 
 ious thoughts. They had no taste for the frivol- 
 ities of this world while their life was absorbed in 
 visions of another. Theologic beliefs conceived 
 amidst the throes of revolution received also an 
 intensity which in the line of Puritan descent 
 they have never lost. 
 
IV. 
 
 THE PERSONALITY OF A PREACHER. 
 
 1. One element exists in all powerful preaching, 
 to which criticism lias given no name. Hearers 
 describe it, but do not defme it. They say : '' We do 
 not know what it is, but it is something individual 
 and peculiar to the man.'' Jeffrey, the editor of 
 the Eclinhurgh Review^ said thus, on his first hear- 
 ing of Dr. Chalmers: ''I do not know what it 
 is, but there is something altogether remarkable 
 about that man." Singularl}", this subtle quality 
 has found expression in other languages in corre- 
 sponding words. French audiences have so often 
 thus described it that French critics have appro- 
 priated their description as a lame attempt at 
 definition. They call it the "je ne sais quoi." 
 
 2. Preaching may have every other quality of 
 powerful discourse, and yet fall short of su2:>erla- 
 tive energy, for the want of this indefinable '' je ne 
 sais quoi." Without this occult inspiration, a ser- 
 mon which is thoughtful, logical, ornate, practical, 
 and not perceptibly deficient in spirituality, may 
 achieve no more than to elicit some one of the 
 commonplace criticisms by which hearers express 
 the fact that they are pleased, but not swayed. 
 
 79 
 
80 My Note-Booh, 
 
 They say : " A good sermon that for a fine morn- 
 ing ! What is the news ? " 
 
 3. Men who are profoundly impressed by preach- 
 ing do not ask for the news, nor comment on the 
 weather. The most significant token of the spirit- 
 ual power of a sermon in the mood of a retiring 
 audience is — silence. Radical change of char- 
 acter or conduct is rarely produced by the fault- 
 less discourse here described, unless the hearer, by 
 the spring of his own receptive and responsive 
 sensibility, puts into it an electric force of his 
 own, which thrills him again by a rebound. Such 
 preaching is heard from cultivated pulpits in times 
 when society prattles of itself and about itself, and 
 does not touch bottom in its convictions about any- 
 thing. At such times, like people, like priest ! 
 
 4. Other things being equal, a pastor's success 
 will be proportioned to the incisive tact with which 
 he probes the secret life of his hearers. So far as 
 they become to him what they are to their own 
 live consciences, his voice will have the authority 
 of a live conscience. 
 
 Sir James Mackintosh once said of William 
 Wilberforce : " I never knew another man who 
 touched real life at so many points. This is the 
 more remarkable in a man who. is supposed to live 
 in the contemplation of a future state." It was 
 this blending of insight with foresight Avhich made 
 Wilberforce in his prime the authoritative con- 
 science of the House of Commons. In questions 
 affecting public morals, he was recognized as a 
 
The Personalitij of a Preacher. 81 
 
 public censor whose judgment it was not safe to 
 dissent from or to ignore. He represented the 
 ideal of a successful preacher — a man who has 
 such an insight into life here, and such a foresight 
 of the life beyond, that he can use both as allied 
 forces in the ministrations of the pulpit. 
 
 5. The Divine blessing upon a pastor's work is 
 bestowed under a law of benign and magnanimous 
 condescension. It elects and consecrates the lines 
 of usefulness intimated by his mental structure. 
 The liand which made him lays down the grooves 
 of his life's work. Often it adjusts circumstances 
 and events to his infirmities. Even sins of which 
 he is not remorsefully conscious do not thwart its 
 benignant decrees. If through innate deficit or 
 acquired disabilities, or even unconquerable dis- 
 tastes, he cannot achieve one thing, he is consider- 
 ately permitted to achieve another thing. 
 
 6. To some men some clerical duties are signifi- 
 cantly unconstitutional. The faculty for them is 
 wanting. Or it exists in such infirm degree that 
 the effort to master them is wasteful of time and 
 mental force. Such duties are not required of 
 such a man. Other things being equal, a man's 
 best work in life is that which he can do best — 
 that is, by the use of the best faculty that is in 
 him. 
 
 Divine providence is often condescendingly vig- 
 ilant in its supervision of a pastor's search for his 
 natural mission. It lifts him to his supreme possi- 
 bilities of achievement. It inspires him with ideals 
 
82 - My Note-Book. 
 
 which are natural to his individuality. He is 
 assisted to work in his own way. Grapes are 
 not demanded of a fig-tree, nor figs of a juniper. 
 Ante-natal prepossessions are often developed and 
 used ingeniously for his advantage. Ancestral 
 virtues reappear in him at critical junctures of his 
 ministry. Ancestral prayers, venerable for their 
 ages of repose in the Divine silence, are answered 
 
 I in his successes, or in failures which are successes 
 
 , in disguise. 
 
 7. In a word, if a man is a docile child of God, 
 the Divine economy takes him as he is, with his 
 reserves of undeveloped faculty, and, by secret 
 impulsions and opportune surroundings, and con- 
 genial auxiliaries, makes the most of him and them. 
 An eternal plan of benedictions ripens in his his- 
 tory. To a large extent it is not his plan. Ample 
 sections of it are made up of disappointments and 
 incompletions and retrogressions. 
 
 Emerson has somewhere said : " The way into 
 life often opens backward." A wiser seer has 
 said : " Thou shall hear a word behind thee saying, 
 ' This is the way.' " A profoundly consecrated min- 
 istry is packed full of these Divine condescensions. 
 God never crowds a man to ascetic self-discipline 
 in a work which he was never made for, and which, 
 in God's system of strategic decrees, his life was 
 never planned for. Conscience is awry in its judg- 
 ments if, from a remorseful sense of duty, a man 
 crowds himself into such a discij)line. 
 
 8. This law of Divine adjustments often gives to 
 
The Personality of a Preacher. 83 
 
 a disappointed preacher his unexpected reward in 
 the successes of other men. In every age the pul- 
 pit has contained some men who have achieved 
 brilliant usefulness by proxy. 
 
 This was signally illustrated in the ministry of 
 John Foster, the illustrious thinker, and not illus- 
 trious preacher, of Bristol. Late in life he lamented 
 that he did not know of one man, one woman, one 
 child, who had been visibly led to a Christian life 
 by the elaborate persuasions of his pulpit. Ap- 
 parently he was not created for the pulpit. Had 
 his stock of self-knowledge been more abundant, or 
 more discriminate, he would never have entered it. 
 He had neither the temperament, nor the beliefs, 
 nor the ideals, of a suasive preacher. His tempera- 
 ment was atrabilious ; his ideal of Christian living 
 was ascetic ; his theology was fatalistic ; his deliv- 
 ery was statuesque ; and his person, not magnetic. 
 His congregation dwindled patiently to a fraction. 
 His ministry was conspicuously an industrious and 
 conscientious failure. He was one of the few sons 
 of clergymen who misjudge and misuse themselves 
 in choosing the profession of their fathers. I am 
 unable to recall another really great and good man 
 who has closed a life of ministerial service with 
 such a disconsolate wail of disappointment. 
 
 9. Yet John Foster was by no means God-for- 
 saken. He was well known as one of the most 
 suggestive thinkers of the century. His writings, 
 though not voluminous, are a treasury of germinal 
 ideas, which have been more prolific in their repro- 
 
 / 
 
84 My Note-Book. 
 
 ductive fertility in other minds than in his own. 
 His power of microscopic thinking was unrivalled. 
 The ministry of nearly two generations have been 
 indebted to him for materials of more stimulant 
 thinking than the majority of them could originate, 
 vet which they have adapted to popular assimila- 
 tion more deftly than he could. The secluded 
 thinker of Bristol, who could not hold his ow^n 
 congregation, has preached in metropolitan pulpits 
 to charmed audiences through the lips of men of 
 the magnetic order and of suasive faculty. Like 
 Aaron the Levite, they '* could speak well " ; but 
 it was John Foster who roused and fructified their 
 thinking power. 
 
 10. Young preachers, on the threshold of their 
 life's work, when oppressed by a sense of their 
 intellectual insufficiency for it, may take heart, in a 
 merely professional outlook on the future, from 
 the fact that the world receives the early efforts 
 of young men with marvellous leniency. The 
 popular patience with juvenile crudities in the 
 pulpit amazes an old campaigner who has become 
 sublimely oblivious of his ow^n. The pulpit, in 
 this respect, is an anomaly. Young men are the 
 favorites there, as they are not at the bar or in the 
 medical profession. A beardless face offsets an 
 immensity of platitude. If a youthful preacher 
 does not overrate himself, he may safely depend on 
 a certain telescopic vision in his congregation to 
 commit that folly for him. Seldom does it hap- 
 pen that they cease to magnify his stature till it 
 
The Personality of a Preacher. 85 
 
 has ceased to be important to him professionally 
 whether they do so or not. Speaking in mundane 
 phrase, he stands a fairer chance of being appreci- 
 ated at his full worth than a young attorney or a 
 young physician. They must prove their claim 
 
 Laim \ 
 his/ 
 
 before they can assert it; he must disprove 
 before he can lose it. 
 
 11. No man accomplishes work of superlative 
 excellence in the ministry who does not revere 
 his office as one of unparalleled personal dignity. 
 " Sometime minister of the Gospel " was the unpre- 
 tending suffix which our clerical fathers used to 
 append to their names in the title-pages of their 
 publications. They knew no nobler insignia of 
 rank. There w^as a worthy pride in their humility. 
 They were dignitaries of a kingdom to which this 
 world contained no equal. Princes of the blood f 
 royal, as a class, were their inferiors. Their self- j 
 respect bordered on reverence. The world of 
 to-day smiles at their lofty mien, but the world 
 which knew them best bowed its uncovered head 
 when they walked the streets, and reverently stood 
 up when they came down the pulpit stairs. There 
 was no sham beneath the old band and surplice. 
 This profound consciousness of their life's work as 
 a calling^ a high calling, a calling of God, a calling 
 which lifted them into sacred alliance with Jesus 
 Christ, was one of the elements of that power of 
 control which made them leaders of great men and 
 builders of sovereign states. 
 
 12. One peerage in Great Britain is said to give 
 
86 My Note-Book. 
 
 to its incumbent the prerogative of standing with 
 covered head in the presence of his sovereign. 
 That earldom is an emblem of a preacher's office. 
 A preacher must believe this, or his life will be 
 spent beneath his calling. As a man he must be 
 such a man that he can revere himself for being 
 elected of God to the preaching of Christ. 
 
 13. An uplifting of a preacher from a lower to 
 a higher plane of religious life is sure to declare 
 itself in a re-enforcement of spiritual power. The 
 vital force in the preacher becomes a vitalizing 
 force to the hearer. In great awakenings the 
 Holy Spirit makes use of the character of a pastor 
 very much as He does of the character of the 
 psalmist and the prophet and the apostle in the 
 construction of the Scriptures. In both the per- 
 sonality of the man is a factor in the weight, and 
 especially in the ahi^ of his message. The truth 
 that is in him is the word which comes from him. 
 His own experience of it as a living thing gives 
 to it a momentum which carries it straight to the 
 mark. Witness Mr. Chalmers in the rural homes 
 and byways of Kilmany, and Dr. Chalmers in the 
 '' closes " of Edinburgh. Robert Hall tell us that, 
 in the early years of his ministry, he " preached 
 Johnson." When he became a new man, he 
 preached Christ. Then the Christian world found 
 him out. 
 
 14. When personal holiness in a preacher rises 
 to pre-eminence, it is apt to declare itself in an 
 expectant faith. He is apt to look for grand and 
 
The Personality of a Preacher. 87 
 
 speedy advances of Christ's kingdom. In great 
 revivals and reformations it is no uncommon thinor 
 
 o 
 
 for those who have felt in their own souls spiritual 
 premonitions of their coming, and who have wel- 
 comed them with unintermittent sympathy, to 
 expect a rapid conversion of the world. In some 
 minds ihi^ foreseei7ig faith takes the form of an 
 anticipation of the speedy coming of our Lord in 
 person. Read prophecy as we may, we cannot but 
 own how tenacious is the hold of this idea upon 
 the faith of the Church in the periods of her intens- j 
 est life and her most rapid growth. 
 
 15. Often the expectation of the near advent of 
 Christ is not so much an opinion as a development 
 of character. It does not spring from a reckoning 
 of prophetic symbols, and the collocation of events 
 in historic crises, but from an identitu of the be- 
 liever's personal aspirations with Divine methods 
 of achievement. Nearness to God awakens pro- 
 founder sympathy with God. Thence come antici- 
 patory visions of advances which shall be like God 
 in the majestic sweep of their movement. 
 
 16. It is as if the man were lifted up into 
 supramundane regions of space, where supernatu- 
 ral forces are in free play around him. His faith 
 in the future takes on a recognition of those forces 
 as being in the common way of God's working. 
 To men like-minded they afford a prevision of con- 
 quests vast and swift. Changes which have the 
 moral impressiveness of miracles seem to him to 
 be in keeping with Divine procedures. They are 
 
88 My Note-Book. 
 
 no longer exceptional. They are a revelation of 
 occult decrees. Convulsions of nature are their 
 most significant emblems. That the mountains 
 and the seas should change places, appears, to 
 such an expectant trust, a very natural phenom- 
 enon, as symbolizing the advancement of a spiritual 
 kingdom. 
 
 17. Early failure in the ministry is not neces- 
 sarily, not even probably, prophetic of a life's work. 
 In the pulpit, as in the secular professions, there 
 are some late men. They develop slowly, and 
 reach their maturity after middle life. The growth 
 of the clerical tastes is sometimes like the opening 
 of a dilatory spring. 
 
 18. I have observed among students of theology 
 a conspicuous difference between those born of 
 clerical or diaconal stock, and those who had more 
 secular antecedents. In the former, clerical apti- 
 tudes often seemed to run in the blood. Ante-natal 
 tendencies brought them early into a restful sym- 
 pathy with their life's work. In others, these aux- 
 iliary aptitudes and s}Tnpathies were often the 
 result of prolonged and tough self-discipline. 
 Some young preachers have themselves to make^ 
 as laboriously as they construct their sermons. 
 One of the most eminent pastors of the Presby- 
 terian Church once lamented at the age of sixty 
 years that he was not yet enfranchised from the 
 bondage of sceptical ideas which had oppressed his 
 youth. Yet some of the most useful preachers in 
 the end belong to this class of late-maturing minds. 
 
The Personality of a Preacher. 89 
 
 They do not know themselves, and the world does 
 not find them out, till they have passed their life's 
 meridian. 
 
 19. A prime virtue in the pulpit is mental integ- / 
 rity. The absence of it is a subtle source of moral 
 impotence. It concerns other things than the 
 blunt antipodes represented by a truth and a lie. 
 Argument which does not satisfy a preacher's log- 
 ical instinct ; illustration which does not commend 
 itself to his sesthetic taste ; a perspective of doc- 
 trine which is not true to the eye of his deepest 
 insight; the use of borrowed materials which 
 offend his sense of literary equity ; an emotive 
 intensity which exaggerates his conscious sensi- 
 bility ; an impetuosity of delivery which overworks 
 his thought ; gestures and looks put on for scenic 
 effect; an eccentric elocution, which no human 
 nature ever fashioned ; even a shrug of the shoul- 
 der, thought of and planned for beforehand, — these 
 are causes of enervation in sermons which may be 
 otherwise well framed and sound in stock. They 
 sap a preacher's personality and neutralize his 
 magnetism. Tliey are not true, and he knows it. 
 Hearers may know nothing of them theoretically, 
 yet may feel the full brunt of their negative force, 
 practically. 
 
 20. Dr. Philip Doddridge was an example of a 
 preacher who owed his power in the pulpit cliiefly 
 to the impression which his sermons made of the 
 personal integrity of tlie man. He had neither j 
 graces nor forces of elocution. His voice was 
 
90 My Note-Book. 
 
 unmelodious. A nervous affection destroyed the 
 significance of such delivery as he had. His dis- 
 courses were neither elegant nor profound. He 
 often discoursed on a dead level. Not an undula- 
 tion of genius broke up the wooden mechanism of 
 his style. But these grave defects were so over- 
 balanced by the evidences of uncompromising in- 
 tegrity of intellect and heart, that his preaching 
 "attracted and enchained all classes of hearers, 
 from those who could not read the alphabet, up to 
 the poet Akenside." Men went from his public 
 services saying : " He speaks what is true to his 
 own soul." 
 
 21. The influence of the religion of a country 
 upon its public men should be a subject of anxious 
 vigilance to an educated ministry. Only an edu- 
 cated clergy can largely represent that influence. 
 So far as the pulpit expresses it, it is preponder- 
 antly a moral rather than an intellectual force. 
 The personality of the clergy is at the root of it. 
 Their intellectual culture should be such as to 
 command the respect of other cultivated men. But 
 their personal character should be such as to com- 
 mand reverence. The ministry should justify the 
 title by which, for centuries, the world has honored 
 them as an order in society. Men of culture in the 
 secular professions may not believe that the clergy, 
 as a class, are more able men than themselves. 
 But it is possible to convince them that, as a class, 
 the clergy are more reverend men. If they are not, 
 the religion which they preach will not long hold 
 
The Personality of a Preacher. 91 
 
 the faith of the educated classes to whom they 
 minister. 
 
 22. That quality of impressive discourse which, 
 by importation from the French vocabulary, we 
 call " unction " is not identical with the " je ne 
 sais quoi '' to which allusion has been made. It is 
 not necessarily peculiar to the individual. It is 
 rather a spiritual grace than an intellectual gift. 
 It is thought so vivified by emotion as to reproduce 
 emotion. In its finest developments it is a devo- 
 tional impulse. Old truths impregnated by it take 
 on the force and fire of original thinking by being 
 lifted into the atmosphere of prayer. Hence has 
 arisen in European pulpits the usage of interposing 
 ejaculatory pra3^ers into the delivery of sermons. 
 French and German preachers often do this with- 
 out aAvakening in hearers the sense of incongruity. 
 
 23. Spiritual unction is often extinguished by a 
 preacher's solicitude for the safety of his reputa- 
 tion. Few things are more fatally suffocative to 
 the breathing life of a sermon than this form of 
 egotism. Reputation itself suffers as fatally as the 
 sermon. The Scotch have a proverb: ''Nurse 
 your reputation and lose your reputation," — an- 
 other form of the Biblical admonition: "Whoso- 
 ever will save his life shall lose it." An invariable 
 element in tlie supreme flights of eloquent speech 
 which have thrilled great assemblies and changed 
 tlie destiny of nations has been that which the! 
 French call abandon. No other arena invites a\ 
 speaker to exercise it so powerfully as the pulpit. ; 
 
92 My Note-Booh. 
 
 The chief objection to a professional dress for the 
 clergy is the hint which it gives that the clergy- 
 man has, on the sly, been thinking of his person. 
 
 24. A secret requisite to a pastor's success is 
 to know what he can do ^^ith the best use of his 
 faculty, and where is its constitutional limit. It 
 is a capital gift, to be able to work within that 
 limit contentedly, and without waste of mental 
 force, in straining after that which to him is uncon- 
 stitutional. It is a habit of mind and body which 
 few men acquire without severe self-discipline and 
 some disheartening failures. Contentment in the 
 
 [ place and with the work which a man is made for, 
 \ belongs to the first class of spiritual graces. Short 
 pastorates are due as much to the mistaken self- 
 judgments and the consequent discontent of pas- 
 tors as to the fastidious tastes of churches. 
 
 25. Ministerial faculty when it is not all a waste 
 is often wasteful. It is extravagantly expended 
 on the results wliich it achieves. The cost of 
 religious achievement should be counted like that 
 of all other human enterprises. The sensibilities 
 of both preacher and hearer are often taxed inor- 
 dinately. A physician, who is at the head of his 
 profession as an expert in the treatment of nervous 
 disease, once expressed the opinion that clergymen 
 rarely break down in health from excessive labor. 
 
 ' " Intellectual labor," said he, '' never kills. It is 
 overtax on the sensibilities that does the mischief. 
 Who ever heard of a Professor of Mathematics 
 dying of overwork? The Differential Calculus 
 
The Personality of a Preacher. 93 
 
 never caused a worse evil than a headache." Re- 
 sources would be doubled by accumulation, if 
 economically husbanded by self-collection. 
 
 26. The Divine estimate of the w^ork of a con- 
 secrated man in the pulpit is more lenient than 
 his own. The law of unconscious graces governs 
 God's judgment in this thing. He is a magnani- 
 mous Judge. He discovers excellences not visible 
 to their possessor. He is especially considerate 
 of that inevitable conflict between the strain of 
 intellect and the aspiration after spiritual cul- 
 ture which often oppresses and tangles the early 
 struggles of a preacher. He remembers the dust 
 from which His hand has fashioned us. 
 
 27. One of the marvels of God's condescension 
 is that He accepts imperfect service so cordially. 
 He has no mental reservations of contempt. He 
 deigns to be pleased with any work that represents 
 the best of a man's aspirations. In His scale of 
 judgment, desire rather than achievement is the 
 measure of success. Ano^els catch their idea of 
 the Christian pulpit from the mirror of His gener- 
 ous opinions. A grand surprise is in store for pas- 
 tors whom the world never hears of. They will be 
 gladdened at the last tribunal by the discovery that 
 they are no longer cast down by the remembrance 
 of their mundane service. Their works do follow 
 them, and they are not ashamed. 
 
 28. The spiritual experiences of pastors in the 
 act of preaching are often suggestive of supernatu- 
 ral guidance. Tlie phenomenon of spontaneous 
 
94 My Note-Book. 
 
 generation of thought in extemporaneous discourse 
 is well known. In the pulpit it is often accom- 
 panied with such an overpowering consciousness of 
 mental illumination, that the preacher cannot rea- 
 sonably accept it as due only to the ordinary laws 
 of the oratorical instinct. A more philosophical 
 account of it attributes it to suj)erhuman sug- 
 gestion. 
 
 29. In periods of widespread religious awaken- 
 ing the atmosphere is laden with sympathies and 
 auxiliary tributes. Then the phenomenon above 
 named sometimes becomes conspicuous. An inci- 
 dent in the early ministry of President Finney 
 illustrates this. On one occasion he had brought 
 to the pulpit a thoroughly elaborated sermon. He 
 knew of no reason why he should not deliver it. 
 But for same occult reason he could not deliver it. 
 An invisible hand seemed to thrust it away from 
 him. Another discourse on a different text and 
 theme came to his mind unbidden. It was as if 
 a secret voice commanded him, saying : " Not that, 
 but this." At the last moment he yielded to the 
 unseen monitor, and preached as he believed the 
 Lord bade him. To the end of his ministry he be- 
 lieved that on that occasion he preached under 
 supernatural direction. 
 
 30. Another biographical incident illustrates the 
 same principle of Divine suggestion, in the expe- 
 rience of a preacher whose predispositions and high 
 culture and conservative temperament forbade the 
 hypothesis of self-delusion. He was a man of thor- 
 
The Personality of a Preacher. 95 
 
 ough intellectual discipline and extreme conserv- 
 atism. In elocution he was one of the most 
 phlegmatic preachers of his time. Emotional va- 
 garies were alien to his temperament and his train- 
 ing. He preached as if in private colloquy. His 
 mental excitement was rarely such as to require a 
 gesture. 
 
 Yet on one occasion this calm man, and almost 
 apathetic j)i'eacher, in the midst of a Aviitten dis- 
 course, paused, grew pale, and, with tremulous 
 voice, said in substance : " I do not know what it 
 means, but I seem to be in the presence of an 
 unseen and holy Power. Is it possible that Christ 
 is here, in this house, and would speak to us ? Let 
 us pray ! " The sermon, I think, had no other 
 ending. The audience retired in awestricken si- 
 lence. No spoken discourse could have added to 
 the electric impression. 
 
 31. Such experiences as the foregoing are of 
 course possible delusions. A preacher who should 
 often profess to be thus moved in the pulpit could 
 not trust himself or be trusted by his hearers. It 
 is not the law of the pulpit that the occult teach- 
 ings of the Holy Spirit should make themselves 
 thus consciously felt by the preacher. But to 
 assume that they never do so would justify incre- 
 dulity respecting everytliing that is idiosyncratic in 
 the mental history of genius. Tlie human mind 
 is made for correspondence with the Mind of God. 
 In the service of the pulpit, it is under the promise 
 of Divine illumination. That such illumination 
 
96 My Note-Booh. 
 
 should occasionally disclose itself in the conscious- 
 ness of the preacher is in keeping with all that we 
 know of the laws of mind and the teachings of the 
 Scriptures. No other interpretation of well-known 
 phenomena in the history of the pulpit is either 
 philosophical or probable. 
 
 32. An educated minister is perilously exposed 
 to conflict between his convictions and his tastes. 
 Frederick Robertson once said of certain agitations 
 in the Church of England : " My tastes are all one 
 way ; my convictions are all the other way." Dr. 
 Thomas Arnold said in substance the same thing. 
 The dilemma is one which a cultured clergyman 
 must often encounter between the agreeable and 
 the true. Sometimes clerical sympathy with revi- 
 vals of religion is balked by antipathy of taste 
 to the excitement and methods of revivals. Cul- 
 ture in the pulpit as elsewhere leans to conserv- 
 ative quiet. It dreads the discomfort of radical 
 upheavals. 
 
 33. One source of spiritual effeminacy in the pul- 
 pit is often found in a preacher's consciousness of 
 secret antagonism to the divinely ordained drift 
 of the age in which he lives. The pulpit is a place 
 of torment to a mediaeval mind in a modern civil- 
 ization. A preacher carrying the load of such a 
 contradiction in the very elements of his person- 
 ality, is like an ancient " man at arms " on the field 
 of Gettysburg. If any work on earth demands 
 integrity of soul, — that is, wholeness of mental and 
 moral being, — it is that of a Christian preacher. 
 
The Personality of a Preacher. 97 
 
 Of him above all other men it is true, that a house 
 divided against itself cannot stand. 
 
 34. Pastors encounter extreme difficulty in the 
 cultivation of the meditative graces in a life of 
 distracting toils. Those graces are a necessity to 
 the best successes, yet professional toil appears to 
 be prohibitory to their growth. There is but one 'j 
 remedy : to adopt as one's ideal of Christian liv- ^ 
 ing, a state of communion with God. Toils and 
 graces interlock if they are sought in conscious 
 alliance with Christ. Toil becomes repose and 
 graces a spontaneous growth in that grand fellow- 
 ship of kindred. 
 
 35. The absorption of a minister's time and 
 mental force in other avocations than those of his 
 own profession is an immense drawback to clerical 
 usefulness. There is a subtle distinction between 
 a vocation and an avocation. Avocations are often 
 a fatal draught upon the vitality of a vocation. The 
 late Rev. President Nott of Union College did a 
 valuable service doubtless to the economics of his 
 time by the invention of an improved pattern of 
 stoves. Tlie Rev. Dr. Morse of Charles town did 
 a service more valuable to popular intelligence by 
 the construction of a Geography for use in public 
 schools. But to one looking back from this date, 
 it appears that both these eminent preachers would 
 have performed a superior life's work, if they had 
 left such forms of service to their secular contem- 
 poraries, and had concentrated their own exertions 
 upon their spiritual vocation. 
 
98 My Note-Booh, 
 
 36. A man called of God to the preaching of 
 the Gospel is rarely called to anything else. When 
 our Lord summoned two of his disciples from their 
 fishing-boats, they left their nets straightway and 
 followed Him. They moved with eager prompt- 
 ness. This was a symbol of the exclusiveness of a 
 preacher's Avork. Nothing outside of it can aug- 
 ment its dignity. Any expansion of its bulk by 
 secular labors is a contraction of its weight. Rela- 
 tively such labor is mental waste. 
 
 37. It has been remarked elsewhere that clerical 
 influence with the cultivated classes of society is 
 largely reflexive. It rolls back over the heights 
 of social culture by the force of its accumulations 
 below. This is especially true of that class of 
 cultivated minds whose culture is the product of 
 wealth and of the leisure which wealth creates. 
 This is a distinct class in our times, in their rela- 
 tion to the influence of the pulpit. Mental quie- 
 tude, often degenerating into mental indolence, 
 shields them from direct religious appeals. They 
 are more effectually reached by indirection. Often 
 they are profoundly moved in sympathy with relig- 
 ious awakenings among their inferiors. Indeed, 
 seldom does a powerful reformation agitate the 
 social deeps without reaching the social heights. 
 Other things being equal, sheltered and anchored 
 ease is most solidly impenetrable by the expostula- 
 tions of the pulpit, except when it is thus broken 
 up and dislocated by the heavings of awakened 
 mind below. The power to reach protected classes 
 
The Personality of a Preacher. 99 
 
 by indirection, therefore, is a factor in clerical use- 
 fulness of large range in the society of our age. 
 
 38. A young preacher may fail to measure 
 appreciatively his own resources by not recognizing 
 the existence in his mind of latent ideas. Much 
 of a man's reading which he believes to have 
 passed out of his memory is not in fact beyond his 
 recall. It will come to him in fragments, when 
 memory is quickened by sympathy with other facul- 
 ties roused by the intense thinking of composition. 
 The success of extemporaneous discourse is often 
 due to re-collections of forgotten thought produced 
 by the stimulus of a large assembly. A thousand 
 eyes before him will often magnetize the Avhole 
 being of a man. They will send his memory for- 
 aging for material with the speed of telegrams. 
 
 39. More than this is true. A well-educated 
 mind holds within its reach ideas which have never 
 shaped themselves in liis consciousness. They are 
 thinking germs lying near the surface and ready 
 at the summons of necessity to spring into lan- 
 guage. On their first appearance there, they seem 
 to him to be discoveries. Yet somehow he recog- 
 nizes them as old acquaintances. They are latent 
 ideas, waiting for expression. Their utterance by 
 another mind may be the thing which first lifts 
 them up into the light of his consciousness. Then 
 his wonder is that such old truths should be sound. 
 
 Blaise Pascal was at one time forbidden to study 
 Geometry. When the prohibition was removed he 
 found that nearly all the elementary theorems of 
 
100 My Note-Book. 
 
 the science were familiar to him. He had elab- 
 orated them for himself in his own untaught 
 thinking. The same phenomenon is more signally 
 developed in our acquisition of religious truth. 
 We have latent conceptions and fixed beliefs, and 
 a world of tributary thought in the form of intima- 
 tions, w^hich take a long time in coming to their ma- 
 turity. But a well-trained mind is accumulating 
 this occult material all the while. Let such a man 
 keep a note-book in which he stores his unused 
 ideas which are worth using, and he will soon dis- 
 cover that they are more in number than he can 
 use. He will learn that his intellectual possession 
 and his conscious discovery seldom synchronize. 
 
THE MATERIALS OF SERMONS. 
 
 1. Masterly preaching requires the habitual 
 selection of great subjects. Other things being 
 equal, great subjects insure solid thinking. Solid 
 thinking prompts a sensible style, an athletic style, 
 on some themes a magnificent style, and on all 
 themes a natural style. The best class of topics 
 inspire a preacher to put forth the most tonic think- 
 ing that is in him. He cannot deliver an insipid 
 discourse upon them unless he has rare talents for 
 pettifogging. Even commonplace subjects will 
 not be developed in commonplace discussions by 
 a preacher who in the general strain of his dis- 
 courses breathes that atmosphere of electric think- 
 ing which is created by the habitual handling of 
 solid themes. As a man thinks^ so is he, in every 
 sermon that comes from his lips. 
 
 2. The pulpit often suffers loss of vital force by 
 a disproportionate amount of preaching on infidelity 
 and its adjunct subjects. This danger besets es- 
 pecially preachers who have lived through a period 
 of sceptical thinking in their own experience. 
 The preaching of the Rev. Albert Barnes of Phil- 
 adelphia was impaired in its perspective from this 
 
 101 
 
102 My Note-Book. 
 
 cause. No other class of his hearers than those of 
 sceptical bias were so faithfully instructed by his 
 pulpit, yet no other class were so few in numbers 
 « 3. Scepticism obtruded in sermons, though in 
 I the way of masterly discussion, creates a cold 
 ' wave in the atmosphere. Popular unbelief need 
 not concern the ministry very much in the pulpit. 
 We need not preach with tempestuous fidelity 
 either to it or at it or about it. A live pulpit, 
 aglow with positive beliefs, may for the most part 
 safely leave it to take care of itself. Under the 
 adjustments of probation in a Christian age and 
 country, infidelity cannot come to maturity — it 
 can scarcely germinate vigorously without a pre- 
 monitory refraction of conscience. That is an 
 experience in which men drift away from the 
 House of God. Men cease to be worshippers 
 before they become infidels. An invasion of that 
 form of error, therefore, must be repelled by other 
 means than the ministrations of the pulpit. 
 
 4. The ministry of some men is a comparative 
 failure by reason of excessive preaching on com- 
 minatory and remonstrant topics. Among the 
 causes of this we find an ascetic theology, pessi- 
 mistic views of the future, a saturnine tempera- 
 ment, and a disconsolate conscience. The effect 
 of it is to make the Gospel a message of intem- 
 perate intimidation. There is a great deal of 
 faithful j)r caching which is not helpful preaching. 
 Men do not go from the hearing of it with a more 
 enlightened conscience or a more resolute will- 
 
The Mafrriah of Srrmons. 103 
 
 power. One of the most faithful pastors now 
 living has preached his congregation out of doors 
 by his fatalistic theology and his despondent views 
 of this world's future. This is not a Christian 
 life's work. No other system of human thought 
 equals Christianity in buoyancy. From our sacred 
 books the first and the last that we know of it is a 
 song of congratulatory angels. A man wrongs the 
 only redemptive system of beliefs whose preaching 
 weighs it down preponderantly with intimidations 
 and maledictions. 
 
 5. Is the philosophy of the atonement expedient 
 material for discussion in the pulpit ? Certain 
 facts weigh heavily in the negative. (1) The 
 Scriptures do not discuss it. (2) Any theory of 
 the atonement must from the nature of the case be 
 fragmentary. (3) No one theory has ever com- 
 manded the co7ise7isus of the Church. (4) In 
 religious awakenings such discussions are not 
 craved by inquirers after the way of salvation. 
 (5) The moral power of the doctrine is greater in j 
 the form of unfathomed mystery than in that of 
 philosophical solution. Divested of its mystery, it 
 is shorn of its dignity. 
 
 6. Popular science in our day lays upon the 
 pulpit the necessity of emphasizing the supernat- 
 ural in its general average of impression. This is 
 essential to a certain equilibrium in the popular 
 thinking. Science throws supernatural phenomena 
 into disrepute. Not only by atheistic and agnostic 
 negations, but by familiarizing the popular mind 
 
104 My Note-Book. 
 
 with marvellous results and immeasurable forces, 
 in which no hint of the supernatural projects itself 
 into the thinking of the people. Science often 
 treats the universe as phenomena which need no 
 cause. The true balance of cause and effect must 
 be preserved by the pulpit. This must be achieved 
 mainly by proportion in the choice of themes. 
 The patriarchal idea of a personal creative and 
 directive force in all phenomena should be made 
 vivid. That which Plato conjectured and which 
 pantheism dreams, Christianity uncompromisingly 
 affirms. The pulpit should keep it fresh and 
 operative in the popular theology. 
 
 7. The pre-eminence of the supernatural ele- 
 ments in Christian preaching is enforced also by 
 the drift of the popular mind to absurd and malign 
 forms of it if a rational and benevolent faith in it 
 is not fostered. The human mind will have faith 
 in the supernatural in some form. If not in that 
 benign form which Christianity represents, then 
 in wildest vagaries of belief, ending in religions of 
 cruelty and lust. Men everywhere crave converse 
 with invisible powers. Supernatural histories they 
 must have, if in no better form than that of the 
 Arabian Nights. Childhood craves them in fairy 
 stories. When the sterner demands of manhood 
 express themselves, they cling to absurd myths 
 and malign necromancies, if the beneficent narra- 
 tives of the Gospel are rejected and its miracles 
 expurgated. 
 
 8. The ancient belief in witchciuft illustrates 
 
The Materials of Sermons. 105 
 
 the tendency of mankind to a malignant faith 
 in the unseen. Dr. Sprenger, in his " Life of 
 Mahomet," estimates that nine millions of the hu- 
 man race have suffered death for that delusion. 
 Women chiefly, and even children of tender years, 
 have been its victims. The longing of human 
 nature for converse with supramundane intelli- 
 gences is too intense to be content with sportive 
 or conjectural faith in them. They put on demo- 
 niacal shapes if the Christian revelation is rejected 
 or its authority suspended. All history teaches 
 that the world will have a demonology of some 
 sort. Demons regnant and triumphant will throng { 
 the air if the Biblical doctrine of their subjection \ 
 to the sovereignty of God is ignored. An agnos- 
 tic apathy on the whole subject does not meet the 
 case as it lies in the history of human beliefs. 
 The human mind cannot rid itself of the matter 
 in that way. It leaves a vacuum which must be 
 filled ; if not by the Christian ideas, then by some- 
 thing contrary and infinitely degrading. 
 
 9. The spiritualistic delusion illustrates another 
 form of the same craving for the supernatural, 
 perverted through a suspense of faith in the teach- 
 ings of the Bible. It is claimed that the spirit- 
 ualistic mythology now boasts the adherence of 
 twelve millions of believers. Many of these are 
 apostate members of Christian churches. Would 
 such an appalling outbreak of anti-Christian faith 
 have been possible in Christianized nations, if the 
 popular craving for the supernatural had been met 
 
106 My Note-Booh. 
 
 by forceful preaching of a rational, well-balanced 
 faith in the historic supernaturalism of the Scrip- 
 tures ? In determining the question how to preach 
 a supernatural religion, we should study well the 
 related question, What will the popular mind have 
 in its place ? Something, it must and will have. 
 
 10. Ought the existence of God to be a subject 
 of argumentative discussion in the pulpit? The 
 answer is suggested by a glance at the condition 
 of the public mind when trained under a Christian 
 civilization. Atheism never has been, is not, and 
 never can be, a popular dogma. Robespierre said 
 a profound truth in affirming that it was an aris- 
 tocratic belief. The mass of men are born Theists. 
 This proclivity is enforced by responsive affinities 
 of conscience which give to theistic faith the in- 
 sight of vision. This cast of mind is almost uni- 
 versal among the common people of Christianized 
 races. A disbelief in God is to the immense 
 majority of such races an absurdity. Theistic be- 
 lief runs in their blood. It carries the weight of 
 the common sense. Atheistic revolutions appear 
 to them either maniacal or demoniacal. Preach- 
 ing, therefore, which treats Atheism as a respecta- 
 ble form of error is to such minds supremely dull. 
 
 11. It is marvellous what power that preaching 
 which by the dignity of its subjects and the solid- 
 ity of its discussions, manifests respect for its 
 hearers, has to make them worthy of respect. A 
 respectable pulpit creates for itself a respectable 
 audience. Laing in his " Notes of a Traveller " 
 
The 3fafenals of /Sermons. 107 
 
 observes the wide difference in thinking power on 
 religious topics between the common people of 
 Enoiand and those of Scotland. Those of Scot- 
 
 o 
 
 land owe their superiority to the strength of their 
 jnilpits. There, as everywhere else, Calvinism in 
 its stoutest emphasis has taken possession of the 
 thinking commonalty. It has either found such 
 material or created it. 
 
 12. Sermons which derive their subjects from 
 local and temporary exigencies are of^en under- 
 rated. Elemental truths have usually found their 
 way into human thought through such exigencies. 
 Truths thus ejected into light, it may be through 
 volcanic craters, are the most effective means of 
 meeting the exigencies which discover them. Rev= 
 elation itself has come to us very largely through 
 the crisis of national and tribal and individual his- 
 tories. 
 
 13. Eloquence, in preaching as in all other 
 forms of it, consists largely in the art of using 
 occasions and events. Other things being equal, 
 he who lives in his own times and has faith in their 
 precedence of better times is the most powerful 
 preacher. He is the soul of the occasion, the 
 prophet of the event. He lives in them, and they 
 in him. The thing he speaks seems to be the only 
 thing he could have spoken. He is the oracle of 
 the hour. Self-surrender to the truth which the 
 times ask for is the pivot on which his discourse 
 turns. Hence the French critics call an orator's 
 mood abandon. Some one has said that all our arts 
 
108 My Note-Booh. 
 
 are happy hits. They are born out of a felicitous 
 use of events and occasions, and crises and things 
 and men all found ready to be used to a purpose. 
 So is it with the triumphs of public discourse. 
 
 14. Some of Edmund Burke's most original and 
 profound philosophical reflections were scintilla- 
 tions struck out from the collision of his mind, at 
 white heat, with those of his opponents on the 
 hustings. The most forceful and helpful preach- 
 ing has commonly a similar origin. 
 
 This is one element in the superior force of 
 extemporaneous preaching often observed. The 
 preacher's mind, free from the restrictions of man- 
 uscript, and pricked by the extemporaneous neces- 
 sity, — by the spur of the moment, as we say, — 
 springs to the exigency. Real life, in this as in 
 other things, creates its own supplies by the outcry 
 of its own demands. 
 
 15. The most successful preachers have been 
 those who, in adjusting the materials of the pulpit, 
 have cherished the most appreciative estimate of 
 small and uncultivated audiences. A far-sighted 
 preacher will not grudge his best sermons to his 
 least numerous and least intelligent hearers. He 
 will revere the truth he speaks more than those to 
 whom he speaks it. This reverence for his work 
 is a distinct source of powder. 
 
 16. The "Astronomical Discourses" of Dr. 
 Chalmers, on which chiefly his fame as a preacher 
 rests, were first prepared for his rural congregation 
 at Kilmany. His hearers commonly numbered less 
 
The Materials of Sermons. 109 
 
 than a hundred. He had no thought then of deliv- 
 ering those sermons elsewhere. The success of 
 such a preacher was foreordained. He was pre- 
 destined to be the oracle of unseen thousands. It 
 is a law of that Providence which directs the work 
 of the pulpit, that hearers shall be found for the 
 man who has the j^ower and the aspiration to say 
 to them that which is worth hearing. He shall not 
 seek them ; they shall seek him. Such a man the 
 world always finds. He cannot be hidden. 
 
 17. Another incident illustrates the reverence 
 for his work and for his hearers which Dr. Chal- 
 mers retained to his life's end. When he became 
 Professor of Philosophy at St. Andrews, he gath- 
 ered and taught in his own dwelling a Bible class 
 of the poor and neglected children of the neighbor- 
 hood in which he lived. For that little handful 
 of juvenile paupers he prepared himself with pen 
 and paper as conscientiously as for his class of 
 collegians in the University. After his decease 
 manuscripts were found on file in his study, con- 
 taining memoranda of questions and answers and 
 illustrations used in those gatherings of his Bible 
 class. Behold the lowliness and the greatness of 
 a Christian preacher ! 
 
 18. Are funeral sermons worth their cost ? It is 
 an open question, with ponderous argument in the 
 negative. A biographical discourse is a painting. 
 Was ever a good painting executed of a live man, 
 from that which we so significantly call his " re- 
 mains " ? Artists tell us that a truthful likeness 
 
110 My Note-Booh. 
 
 after death is obtainable only of children. Death 
 creates much of the same difficulty in painting 
 character in words and in painting features Avhich 
 express character in colors. In listening to such a 
 sermon, if it gratifies our feeling of respect or affec- 
 tion for the departed, does it not also offend our 
 sense of truthfulness by an impression of its unre- 
 ality? Massillon's descriptive powers placed him 
 at the head of the French pulpit as a preacher 
 of obituary sermons. But French critics pronounce 
 that class of his discourses the least valuable of 
 his productions. 
 
 19. A pastor may learn wisdom from a review 
 of the texts and themes of his sermons during any 
 preceding ten years of his ministry. Such a review 
 will disclose the proportions of his preaching. If 
 he has a favoritism for one class of topics, it will 
 appear. One pastor in Connecticut discovered 
 thus the fact that he had not in nearly twice ten 
 years preached on tlie atoning sacrifice of Christ. 
 A recent critic of the pulpit of London affirms that 
 if one should go the round of the metropolitan 
 churches through a single year, one would learn 
 that much more than half of the texts and subjects 
 of discourse are taken from the Old Testament. 
 A single fact like that indicates defect in one or 
 more of the most vital characteristics of Christian 
 preaching. The ablest ministry are liable to 
 unconscious distortions for the Avant of vigilant 
 reviews of past labors. 
 
 20. Who has ever listened to a sermon on the 
 
The Materials of Sermons. Ill 
 
 
 despotism of an unenlightened conscience? Yet 
 few inflictions of ignorance and infirmity are more 
 disastrous to Christian character. 
 
 The Rev. John Newton, the author of some of 
 the most valuable hymns in the English language, 
 was once, as is well known, a slave trader on the 
 coast of Africa. After his conscience was awak- 
 ened to a discovery of his exceptional depravity, he 
 could, for a time, scarcely be persuaded to converse 
 on other than religious subjects, lest he should 
 incur the guilt of " idle words." From the extreme 
 of moral stupor he vaulted over to the extreme of 
 moral hysteria. From the conviction that nothing 
 was sin his moral sense came to the conviction/ 
 that everything was sin. 
 
 21. Preaching in religious revivals should have 
 a care to exalt in the minds of recent converts the 
 dignity of Christian living. Youthful believers, 
 under the stress of sympathetic excitement, easily 
 fall into bondage to an ascetic conscience. Enthu- 
 siasm misguided easily runs into fanaticism. From 
 that a reaction is sure to come. After such ex- 
 tremes the natural and healthy equipoise of moral 
 sense is not easily regained. The sin of "back- 
 slichng" is the normal sequence of temporary sub- 
 jection to an astringent conscience. 
 
 22. Young converts, in their first tremulous 
 awakening to the solemnity of life, have sometimes 
 resolved that they would never indulge in a laugh 
 again. One such youthful devotee did not recover 
 from that self-imposed servitude, till the study of 
 
112 My Note-Booh 
 
 anatomy disclosed to him tlie fact that man has 
 facial muscles ^yhich have no other use which 
 he could discover than to facilitate smiles and 
 laughter. His moral sense received a vast expan- 
 sion when he once admitted the idea that, in the 
 creation of man, God must have descended to the 
 sense of humor. An infantile piety, and especially 
 that which succeeds repentance of exceptional 
 guilt, needs to be instructed in the dignity of our 
 moral intuitions, and of the faculty which creates 
 them. A good conscience never drivels. 
 
 23. Revivals of religion do not always concern 
 directly the conversion of men and the subsequent 
 increase of the Church. Other subjects than those 
 which are commonly the burden of '' revival preach- 
 ing" are often more needful. A resuscitation of 
 a decadent doctrinal faith is sometimes the most 
 urgent necessity of the Church. An increase of 
 its numbers is not then desirable till the needed 
 reform is achieved. The quality of the Church is 
 a more essential factor in her final triumphs than 
 her numbers. At another time a revival of fidel- 
 ity to the Lord's Day may be the critical want of 
 the period. An awakening to the sacredness of 
 the religion of the family may be the pressing 
 demand of the hour. For the want of it the chil- 
 dren of Christian households may be abandoning 
 the faith of their fathers. A reformation in the 
 practice of the mercantile vices may be the ex- 
 treme need of another period. Numerical growth 
 of the Church may be held in reserve in the Divine 
 
The Materlah of Sermons. 113 
 
 plan awaiting an elevation of the Church in char- 
 acter. The quantity of moral force in the body 
 of believers depends less on numbers than on god- 
 liness of spirit. " What ? " is a more vital query 
 than " How many ? " 
 
 24. " Revival preaching " therefore is sometimes 
 a failure because it is an anachronism. Untimely 
 subjects are discussed through negligence of these 
 correlative awakenings for the want of which the 
 cause of Christ is suffering and the future of the 
 Church is imperilled. But is not the conversion 
 of souls always in order? Yes: in order, but not 
 always in time. It may be no more timely than 
 the reaping of a wheat-field in midwinter. In 
 spiritual as in material husbandry there is a suc- 
 cession of seasons. The wisdom of the springtime 
 is the folly of the autumn. 
 
 25. The choice of materials for the pulpit 
 should be regulated in part by the principle that 
 the preaching of experiences should preponderate 
 heavily over the preaching of beliefs. Fidelity to 
 the preacher's own mental history should be the 
 forerunner and the model of his fidelity to hearers. 
 We know very little beyond that which we know 
 by heart. 
 
 26. The preaching of Wesley and Whitefield is 
 monumental in history for the grandeur of its 
 successes. Yet it was remarkable for the paucity 
 of its ideas. A few central truths of the New 
 Testament were the staple of Wesley's forty thou- 
 sand sermons. But these were impregnated with 
 
114 My Note-Booh. 
 
 the Christian personality of the man. They were 
 full of what Whitefield called "soul-life." For 
 that element of soul-life, the early Methodist pul- 
 pit has had no superior since the apostolic age. 
 Hence came its romantic conquests. 
 
 27. Over against the foregoing principle, how- 
 ever, stands another, — that topics above and 
 beyond the personal life of the preacher are a 
 necessity to a symmetrical ministry. They should 
 not be underprized. The fact often attracts atten- 
 tion in religious awakenings, that some men are 
 grandly used by the Spirit of God in the pulpit, 
 Avhose personal " soul-life " is sadly below the level 
 of their exhortations. Revivalists often have a 
 powerful magnetism which is not wholly the mag- 
 netism of grace. The principle involved is the 
 same with that which underlies the enrichment of 
 Christian Hymnology by the lyric genius of men 
 who do not profess to have a j)ersonal experience 
 of the truths they sing. 
 
 28. It is often remarked that one of the most 
 useful resources of Biblical wisdom is the inspired 
 record of the follies and sins of good men. A 
 large portion of the value of the Old Testament 
 to the uses of the pulpit is found in its fidelity to 
 the experience of sin in the lives of j)enitent be- 
 lievers. The most natural histories of recovered 
 loyalty to God are found there. 
 
 On the same principle an uninspired preacher 
 may find revelations of the elemental principles of 
 religious life in his own unwritten experiences of 
 
The Materials of Sermons. 115 
 
 sin. His conscious failures in the interior life 
 furnish an illuminated record of truth, often more 
 valuable than his self-conquests, because more 
 incisive in their forms. That which a preacher 
 knows of disaster in self-conflict, he knows by 
 heart. He can speak it with assurance of heav- 
 enly prompting. 
 
 29. A certain manual of devotion, which has 
 found its way into many languages, has been criti- 
 cised for its austere fidelity to the record of the 
 infirmities of Christians in their habits of prayer. 
 One unlettered but shrewd reader once said of it 
 in substance : " The author of that book must 
 have been at some time a very wicked man. How 
 otherwise could he have known so much of the 
 failures of praying men and women in their secret 
 life ? " The judgment probably had a foundation 
 in facts. The writer had drawn from his own 
 remembered history. Such fidelity to oneself, if 
 disclosed with compassion for others of like bur- 
 dened memory, may give to a preacher some of his 
 most effective sermons. He speaks what he knows 
 by heart. 
 
 30. Some ministers preach disproportionately 
 and unseasonably on the decline of spiritual re- 
 ligion. The fact is often affirmed on insufficient 
 evidence. It is a theme of very easy discourse. 
 The subjects of religious philippics are always such. 
 Yet if the fact be true, it is so appalling that it 
 should never be assumed unproved. A decadent 
 church is a fearful spectacle to angels. But the 
 
116 My Note-Book. 
 
 phenomenon is never true universally. A " rem- 
 nant " of the faithful always survives. And they 
 are the hearers who will take home to their 
 afflicted consciences the diatribes of the pulpit 
 against backsliders. No other class of subjects 
 needs to be handled with such delicate considera- 
 tion for the " smoking flax " and the '' bruised 
 reeds." 
 
 31. The proportion of remonstrant and trench- 
 ant sermons should be restricted by their ten- 
 dency to degenerate into cynical and vituperative 
 discourse. The secret mental history of the origin 
 of many such sermons, if it were known, would 
 disclose the fact that the preacher is laying upon 
 the consciences of other men, an ideal of Christian 
 living to which his own does not even aspire. An 
 awakening of the moral sense in a religious teacher 
 often spends its force in objurgatory discourse to 
 others. A religious diatribe is one of the con- 
 tortions of a pricked conscience. An honest dis- 
 covery of his own deficiencies will make a preacher 
 wary in proportioning his remonstrant sermons. 
 We should walk humbly before God in the mission 
 of rebuke. 
 
 32. The objections often urged against the dis- 
 cussion of difficult topics and obscure texts are 
 offset in part by one very striking fact in the 
 mental diagnosis of the condition of an audience. 
 It is that hearers who are not intelligent enough 
 to comprehend the most intellectual preaching 
 still receive benefit from it through the trans- 
 
The Materials of Sermons. 117 
 
 fusion of ideas from the few who do compre- 
 hend it. 
 
 Mind, like the body, has imperceptible pores ' 
 through which thought is absorbed from the think- 
 ing of its superiors. The stolid two-thirds of an 
 audience breathe the intellectual and moral atmos- 
 phere created and heated by the alert one-third. 
 They are specially receptive of the most necessary 
 and intense ideas. An emotive response of the 
 few to the force of such ideas strikes chords of 
 vibrating sympathy in the souls of the many. A 
 profound mental experience of such ideas — that 
 which introduces them into " soul-life " — cannot be 
 concealed by anybody from anybody. It struggles 
 to the birth in silent expression, though it finds no 
 words. 
 
 33. Therefore, preaching above the average of 
 existing culture is a less evil than preaching 
 below it. Tlie chief hindrance to the salvation 
 of many is their indolent, intermittent, somnolent 
 interest in the eternal verities. Mental lethargy 
 is a vice. In matters of religion it is an insult 
 and a repulse to the Holy Spirit. It swells the 
 accumulation of guilt. It is part of a preacher's 
 province to rebuke it by discoursing on some things 
 *' hard to be understood." 
 
 34. Yet it must be conceded that to the popular 
 mind a frequent cause of dulness in the pulpit 
 is an excess of philosophical discussion. We are 
 not wise in assuming that every truth needs to be 
 proved, or accounted for, or elaborately adjusted 
 
118 My Note- Booh 
 
 to other truths. Truth assumed is often more 
 potent for moral uses than truth adroitl}^ manip- 
 ulated. Some things cannot be accounted for ; 
 they are not proper subjects of philosophical 
 adjustment. Some are not ^Yorth accounting for ; 
 they do not expand in the process. Some are 
 minimized in dignity by being subjected to philo- 
 sophical debate. 
 
 35. Sir Isaac Newton believed that he could 
 account for the omniscience and omnipresence of 
 God. He regarded them as necessities of the 
 Divine nature made so by the hypothesis that 
 " space is the Divine sensorium." Does that con- 
 jecture add anything to our conception of these 
 attributes? Who knows definitely what it signi- 
 fies ? To the average of popular intelligence does 
 it signify anything which can be comprehended 
 from oral address ? Grant it, and what follows ? 
 It is dangerous to the force of the pulpit, to reason 
 in a style which prompts blunt hearers to say: 
 '' Well, what of it?" 
 
 36. A Congregational or Presbyterian pastor 
 must make his pulpit a powder by the vitality of its 
 subjects and the density of its thinking, or he has 
 no power. He has no auxiliary support from 
 ritual observanceSo He has less than none from 
 ecclesiastical authority. No other body of public 
 speakers have so little prestige from adventitious 
 sources as the Calvinistic clergy. The theology 
 they preach is pre-eminently a thoughtful theology. 
 It is packed with the themes of thoughtful ser- 
 
The Materials of Sermons. 119 
 
 moiis. It needs such sermons to express its ele- 
 mentary strength. In the very natural course of 
 things we make much of jjreaching in public wor- 
 ship. That we mui<t make worthy of respect by 
 the best thinking power of a community. This 
 the Calvinistic pulpit has done through all its 
 history. 
 
 37. The aim of the pulpit should be to provide 
 for the moral necessities as distinct from the intel- 
 lectual luxuries and even the religious refresh- 
 ments of hearers. The literature of the pulpit 
 contains a large cabinet of curiosities. Subjects, 
 arguments, illustrations, applications, appeals, are 
 found in it which are not now, if they ever were, 
 relevant to the spiritual exigencies which preach- 
 ing is designed to meet. Our Lord would sweep 
 them all aside with a word : '' What is that to 
 thee ? " If a preacher's work does not rouse in 
 men and provide for a sense of ezujency which 
 nothing but the Gospel can provide for, it runs to 
 waste. Such a pulpit may be one of the orna- 
 mental institutions of society ; but a moral power 
 with men, in the sense of a power of control, it 
 cannot be. 
 
 38. No audience has patience with a condescend- 
 ing pulpit, if they detect the condescension. The 
 greater their need of it, the more vigorously do 
 they repel it, and the more promptly do they sus- 
 pect the imposition. Even children do not like to 
 be addressed in a style of thinking which is on a 
 level with their years. In this, as in other things, 
 
120 My Note-Book. 
 
 they aspire to be thought to be above their years. 
 Walter Scott, speaking of juvenile literature, says : 
 "It is a fatal blunder to write down to children." 
 Churchly audiences possess in large degree the 
 spirit of youthful aspiration. 
 
 39. The pulpit suffers no hardship in the intel- 
 lectual demands of the age upon it. This is an 
 awakened world. Life creates life. Thought runs 
 to thought. Originality springs to greet origi- 
 nality. Alert readers clamor for quickened authors. 
 Live hearers throng upon live speakers. The pul- 
 pit in this respect comes under the common law of 
 all thinking power in this age of thought. The 
 Holy Ghost does not work miracles to give success 
 to dulness. 
 
 40. The popular laudations of simplicity in 
 preaching should be accepted with large allow- 
 ance for a change of time. The story of Tillotson 
 and his servant-maid may pass as containing a half- 
 truth. But from the present generation the arch- 
 bishop could not obtain a second hearing. Espe- 
 cially should the pulpit take cognizance of, and 
 make much of, the advance which time has brought 
 about in the general intensity of thinking and liv- 
 ing. The still, unimpassioned thinking and inor- 
 nate style of Addison, which we have been trained 
 to admire as a model, will never do for many of 
 the themes of the pulpit now. Indeed, for some 
 of them, the solemn, the comminatory, the over- 
 powering, and the magnificent themes, it never 
 was a good model. 
 
The Materiah of Sermons. 121 
 
 41. A protracted ministry may derive from the 
 congruity of its messages a certain force distinct 
 from that of isohited truths. Belief gains strength 
 from concinnity. So does the utterance of truth 
 gain suasive force from the consent of one truth 
 to another and of all to each. Ramohun Roy, the ) 
 Hindoo philosopher, said that the most decisive j 
 evidence to his mind of the truth of Christianity j 
 was the proof of a congruous and compact design I 
 in the structure of the Bible. A long-continued 
 ministry has a similar resource of convincing and 
 suasive power. In a long pastorate alliances of 
 truth with truth have time to consolidate them- 
 selves. Silent accumulations of force have time to 
 grow and to interlock. The implications of truth 
 in such a ministry may in moral effect equal its 
 assertions. The most profound and enduring of 
 our convictions rest on such implications and alli- 
 ances and correspondences. 
 
 42. The Trinitarian pulpit is often criticised for 
 its neglect of the moral virtues and their opposites 
 in the selection of the subjects of sermons. The 
 criticism has too much foundation. It is one of 
 the disproportions by Avhich the symmetry of our 
 ministrations is impaired, that the duties and the 
 sins of real life are often overgrown by that system 
 of truth which Ave call the '' Plan of Salvation." 
 The title itself is unfortunate. There is a want 
 of personality in it. Tlie discussion of it needs to 
 be intermingled with more frequent and specific 
 preaching on the morals of common life. 
 
122 My Note-Book. 
 
 It is notorious that the conversational usages of 
 society are infected with a want of reverence for 
 truth. Yet would not a plain, direct sermon on 
 veracity be to many congregations a novelty ? It 
 is well known that in the morals of trade, a dis- 
 tinction has grown up between the oath of the 
 Court-room and the oath of the Custom-house. 
 Yet how many pastors in commercial cities often 
 preach on honesty to the civil government ? Cole- 
 ridge once gave a fine hint to the English clergy 
 of his day. Said he, in substance : " If I were a 
 preacher in the city of London, I would not preach 
 on the sin of wreckage. But if I were a preacher 
 in a coast-village where wreckers plied their vil- 
 lanous calling, see if I would preach on anything 
 else." 
 
 43. It is a truism — we ought not to need it; 
 but do we not need it? — that the province of the 
 pulpit is to take men as they are, and to call them 
 what they are ; if wreckers, then be it wreckers. 
 George Fox thought that he had made a great dis- 
 covery when he found a preacher who " spoke to 
 his condition." Spiritual awakenings always start 
 with that discovery. 
 
 44. The preponderance of so-called " spiritual " 
 subjects over so-called '^practical" subjects is a 
 very natural error in the preaching of educated 
 pastors. They are men of libraries. They are as 
 they ought to be, — speculative theologians. They 
 enter their professions at the end of ten years of 
 studious seclusion. To many of them, the " prac- 
 
The Materiah of Sermon.^. 123 
 
 tical " side of life is a sealed volume. Their themes 
 of discourse are very naturally chosen from their 
 themes of silent thought. The evil of the dispro- 
 portion is more serious than is often supposed. 
 They may preaeli nothing but purest truth, yet as 
 a whole their ministry may make tlie impression of 
 falsehood. Their silences are false while their ) 
 speech is true. 
 
 45. I once inquired of an intelligent layman 
 in middle life what impression the preaching to 
 which he had listened had made upon his practical 
 life. He replied in substance : " None at all. I 
 have heard good sermons for twenty-five years. 
 The sum of all that I have got from them is that 
 salvation is not a matter of conduct, but of faith. 
 
 My principles of practical living I have had to | / 
 discover for myself. The pulpit has not helped] 
 me." The verdict was valuable as that of the 
 common sense, because the man was not a cynical 
 censor of the ministry. His inherited and acquired 
 prepossessions were all favorable to Christian ideas 
 of life. He made a public profession of religion a 
 short time afterwards. The preaching to which 
 he had listened had been rather above than below 
 the average standard of ability and of earnest pur- 
 pose. But it had been, as a whole, a defence of 
 the Christian theory of doctrine. The Christian 
 theory of life had been, not suppressed, but (/ex- 
 pressed by the dead weight of speculative beliefs. 
 
 46. In adjusting the materials of sermons, it 
 should be remembered that the pulpit is a product 
 
124 My JSTote-Booh. 
 
 of the New Testament. It had no existence in 
 the patriarchal, the Mosaic, and the prophetic 
 ages. It should live mainly on the soil and in the 
 atmosphere which gave it birth. An antique mind 
 is out of place in its service. A preacher should 
 be a Christian as distinct from a Hebraist in his 
 tastes. 
 
 This suggests the chief error in proportion 
 which has impaired the symmetry of the pulpit. 
 It is that of subjecting the New to the Old Testa- 
 ment in its ministrations. But for this distortion, 
 what a magnificent expansion of power would have 
 been imparted to the Puritan pulpit ! Grand as 
 it was in its Mosaic intensity, it would have had 
 the majesty of apostolic insight if it had accepted 
 its mission as one of the creations of apostolic 
 inspiration. As the world grows older, the pulpit 
 draws nearer to the closing ages of time. It 
 should be administered in sympathy with the 
 intensity of ultimate ideas, and the rapidity of ulti- 
 mate progress, and the grandeur of ultimate con- 
 quests. A preacher should be a forward-looking 
 and a far-seeing man. He should be more at home 
 with St. Paul than with Moses. 
 
 47. The longer a man serves in the pastoral 
 office, the more exalted will be his estimate of the 
 Scriptures as a treasury of materials for sermons. 
 One of the early discoveries of a young preacher 
 is the affluence of our sacred books in the subjects 
 of pulpit discourse. The early dearth of topics 
 soon gives place to a throng, if a man is a cordial 
 
The Materials of Sermons. 125 
 
 student of the Word of God. Not texts only, but 
 examples of character, principles of truth, illustra- 
 tions from life, lines of argument, models of ap- 
 peal, the roots of which lie deep in human nature, 
 abound in it beyond all possibility of enumeration. 
 No sacred books of other religions exhibit this 
 overflowing abundance of materials for popular 
 impression. Therefore other religions have not 
 depended largely on suasive discourse for their 
 propagation. 
 
 48. The intellectuality of sermons is subject 
 to a principle which regulates all persuasive elo- 
 quence in popular address. It is that the speaker 
 should stand upon an intellectual level above that 
 of the hearers. Yet not so far above as to destroy 
 the sense of sympathy and reciprocity between 
 them. Anytliing in subject or argument or style 
 which creates a sense of distance is fatal. Dis- 
 tance easily grows to alienation. 
 
 Daniel Webster said that if an attorney were 
 perched as high up in the air and as far off from 
 the jury as a preacher was in the pulpit of the 
 last generation, he would not gain a case in a 
 lifetime. The architecture of sermons may repro- 
 duce the effect of the ancient architecture of pul- 
 pits. An eminent scholar has remarked, with the 
 same idea in mind : " I am always anxious when I 
 see a very learned man mounting the pulpit stairs." 
 The ultimate object of preaching is not instruction, 
 but suasion. That requires proximity of preacher; 
 to hearer in intellectual affinities. 
 
126 My Note-Book. 
 
 49. The most intelligent hearers enjoy most 
 heartily the simplest preaching. Those who 
 clamor for stimulant discourse are they who 
 really know least about good j^reaching when 
 they hear it. The more ignorant hearers are, the 
 more fuss they make respecting the want of intel- 
 lectual gifts and acquisitions in their pastors. It 
 is the commonplace mind which complains most 
 unreasonably of commonplace preaching. An emi- 
 nent Southern preacher once remarked that he 
 never seemed so successful in impressing the mas- 
 ters as Avhen he addi^essed their slaves. 
 
 50. The obligations of preacher and hearer re- 
 specting the quality of sermons are reciprocal. 
 If the hearer has a right to good preaching, the 
 preacher has an equal right to good hearing. An 
 audience should bring to the service brains, if 
 they assert the right to receive brains. There is 
 an appreciative and appropriating faculty in hear- 
 ers which is the preacher's right if he has anything 
 to give which deserves appropriation. The facult}^ 
 is one by which they meet his thought half-way. 
 They welcome it. They take it in with preposses- 
 sion. Nothing short of eager hearing is good 
 hearing. Without it, a discourse may be inspired, 
 and yet pass for humdrum. With it, hearers will 
 find ^'sermons in stones." The ablest preacher 
 living has a fruitless labor if he must provide an 
 audience with thinking power, or what is often 
 the same thing, with the thinking mood. They 
 deserve the well-known rebuke of Dr. Johnson to 
 
Tlie 3fate rials of Sermons. 127 
 
 an opponent whom lie failed to convince. The 
 fatal defect of hearers Avho are indifferent to 
 eternal things is that they have no favorable pre- 
 possessions, no eager cravings, and therefore no 
 appropriating affinities. A preacher, if he moves 
 them at all, must lift and carry them. 
 
 51. Christianity in its periods of decadence 
 is never more void of vital power than when its 
 ministry struggles to sustain its prestige by preach- 
 ing chiefly those truths which it contains in com- 
 mon with the religion of nature. An advanced I 
 system of faith cannot live on those elements J 
 which historically are far in its rear. As well 
 might adult thews and sinews thrive on the organs 
 and nutriment of infancy. Pure Theism alone is 
 more potent than with the adjuncts of the forms 
 and symbols of Christianity from which the life 
 has died out. Under such conditions men had 
 better be philosophers than Christians. 
 
 52. One of the Siamese twins died before the 
 other. It has been reported that the survivor died 
 of horror at his terrific brotherhood with corrup- 
 tion. In such a fearful conjunction of the living 
 with the dead is natural religion where bound by 
 an abnormal vinculum to a defunct faith in Christ- 
 ianity. Both are doomed to a process of dissolution 
 which has already begun. Such was the state of 
 things in the Church of England in the age pre- 
 ceding the advent of Methodism. Such is the 
 condition of the Unit arian faith to-day, because of 
 its forlorn struggle to build a popular religion out 
 
128 My Note-Book. 
 
 of the religion of nature, but in Christian forms 
 from which the most intense of the Christian ideas 
 have been expurgated. 
 
 53. The denial of man's moral freedom inevi- 
 tably contracts the range of the pulpit in its choice 
 of materials. A large group of central and most 
 vital subjects are involved in human liberty. 
 Without that solvent they cannot long be held 
 subject to practical use in the popular theology. 
 Logical minds will not continue long to preach 
 on topics which force the servitude of the human 
 will to the front. Masterly preachers will not 
 preach under such conditions. They will not sow 
 seed on a marble quarry. 
 
 54. At the decease of an eminent preacher of 
 the eighteenth century in the city of New York, 
 an examination of his manuscript sermons revealed 
 the fact that he had seldom preached to uncon- 
 verted men. To the communicants in the Church 
 he had preached well. On his fidelity to them 
 his fame as a preacher rested. The unregenerate 
 portion of his hearers were virtually without the 
 Gospel. He had not warned them to repent, for 
 he did not believe that they could repent. He had 
 not urged them to accept the Christian offer of 
 salvation, for he did not believe that Christ died 
 for them. What a fearful hiatus existed in respect 
 to the symmetry of that metropolitan ministry ! 
 
 55. Ages of great indifference to the ministra- 
 tions of the pulpit have commonly been ages of 
 equal indifference in the pulpit to the sacredness 
 
The Materials of Sermons. 129 
 
 of its mission. Either by intellectual puerility or 
 ])y moral corruption, and sometimes by both, the 
 pulpit at such periods has invited the contempt it [ 
 has received. In the time of Charles 11. of Eng- 
 hind, a preacher at the University of Oxford 
 attempted to prove that the law of nations was 
 revealed to Noah in the Ark. He whiled away the 
 time of his seclusion there in adjusting that law 
 to the necessities of the coming world. Another 
 University preacher defended the use of instru- 
 mental music in public worship, on the ground 
 that certain notes of an organ were an antidote to 
 the power of Satan over the spinal marrow of the 
 worshipper. Such were the puerilities of the 
 pulpit which it was the mission of tlie Puritans to 
 displace. 
 
 56. The obligations of the pulpit to the Puri- 
 tans are not less than those of theology. Queen 
 Elizabeth was a Papist in her antipathy to free 
 preaching. She had the instinctive hostility of 
 a despotic monarch to any power which could 
 share with the throne its sway of the popular 
 thinking. 
 
 At one period during her reign, all preaching 
 was forbidden throughout the realm. Afterwards 
 she admitted it in driblets. She said that one or 
 two preachers in a diocese were sufficient. In 
 London many churches were closed by the dearth 
 of priests who could preach respectably. In many 
 rural parishes it was difficult to find priests who 
 knew enough to read intelligibly the baptismal 
 
130 My Note-Book. 
 
 and the burial services. Infants were unbaptized. 
 The dead were *' buried with less respect than 
 heathens." '' Many there are," says Bishop Sandys, 
 '* who hear not a sermon once in seven years." 
 " In Cornwall," Neal says, " there was not one man 
 capable of delivering a sermon." In 1563 the 
 University of Oxford had but three preachers, and 
 they were Puritans. 
 
 Tlie Puritans changed all that semi-heathenism. 
 Their rir^t conflict with the Queen was in defence 
 of their liberty to preach when and where they 
 pleased. It was to remedy the dearth of preaching 
 that they instituted their famous '• prophesyings." 
 
 57. A good general test of the themes of sermons 
 is the degree of their congruity with the average of 
 the popular thinking in times of religious awaken- 
 ing. Make the eternal verities a reality to one 
 mind, and you produce an effect which all preach- 
 ing is designed to create in the individual. Ex- 
 tend that sense of eternal realities to the general 
 mind, and you have all that is essential to a re- 
 vival of religion. The " Great Awakening" under 
 President Edwards and his associates was no 
 more than such a response of society to visions of 
 Eternity. Materials of discourse in the pulpit 
 which fit in congruously with such a popular 
 aAvakening cannot as a general rule be out of 
 place. If in exceptional cases they are untimely, 
 something in the drift of the popular thought is 
 abnormal. A prolonged strain of such preaching 
 has the indubitable sign which all eccentric and 
 
Tht' Materials of Sermons. 181 
 
 untimely things have of unfitness to the supreme 
 objects of the pulpit. The normal condition of I 
 fallen mind is moral stupor. The normal effect 1 
 of Christian discourse is a state of quickened / 
 sensihility to eternal things. 
 
VI. 
 
 METHODS AND ADJUNCTS OF THE PULPIT. 
 
 1. The Christian pulpit is a power allied with 
 powerful auxiliaries. That is never its normal 
 working in which it quiescently holds its own. It 
 deals with truth so stupendous, in exigencies so 
 perilous, that its failure to rouse and agitate the 
 world is against nature. When the Apostles 
 " turned the world upside down," they were in the 
 exact line of success which their mission contem- 
 plated. Less or other than that would have been 
 failure against all reasonable probabilities. Noth- 
 ing short of apostasy is so ominous of spiritual 
 decay as a state of moral quiescence under the 
 preaching of a live man. To achieve nothing 
 is to achieve everything that the confederated 
 powers of evil can desire. Absence of progress 
 is retrogression. Absence of life is death. Dr. 
 Chalmers sounded the note of warning for all 
 time in saying : " Christianity is naught when it 
 has become only a force of respectability." 
 
 2. Subjects which hearers do not understand, 
 they are abundantly able to misunderstand. They 
 can grasp and appropriate recondite errors with 
 which they have secret moral affinities. Moral 
 
 132 
 
Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 133 
 
 affinity is more than the equivalent of intellectual 
 force. Hearers need, therefore, in the pulpit, 
 methods and auxiliaries to pure truth which create 
 an intense way of putting things. Light must 
 often put on the glare of lightning. Logic must 
 be set aflame. Our Lord's way of putting things 
 was eminently pictorial. That which men heard 
 from His lips they saw. The eye reduplicated the 
 ear. His words w^ere the utterance of an intense 
 mind. He never spoke a dull thing. 
 
 3. Young preachers need self-discipline in the 
 selection of the books they read in the early years 
 of their ministry. Reading should be such as to 
 stimulate healthy growth. Two things then put 
 their culture in peril. One is the fact that those 
 are the plastic years in the building of character. 
 A preacher in that initial decade of his life's work 
 absorbs the elements of manhood as from an atmos- 
 phere, not conscious of its sources. The other is 
 that those are peculiarly independent years in the 
 building of opinions. If a preacher is ever scep- 
 tical or tangential in his convictions, he is so then. 
 Those are the years in which chiefly he comes 
 under the sway of the subtle oppugnation which 
 the new generation feels towards the old because 
 it is old. He is apt to be jealous for his inde- 
 pendence. Consequently, at that period a young 
 preacher is exposed to the tyranny of school in 
 opinion and in taste. 
 
 4. A certain preacher is now living who, thirty 
 years ago, became fascinated by the writings of 
 
134 My Note-Book. 
 
 Frederick Maurice. He read Maurice ; he theolo- 
 gized in the grooves of the opinions of Maurice ; 
 he preached Maurice. An educated hearer famil- 
 iar with Maurice could detect tlie thoughts' and 
 style of Maurice in a series of sermons by his 
 disciple through an entire winter. The vocabulary 
 of Maurice was perceptible even in his prayers. 
 To this day, after a score and a half of years, he 
 has not outgrown Maurice. Twists of opinion and 
 a certain indecisive tone in his style remain to bear 
 witness to the tyranny of one mind over the sen- 
 sitive years of his earl}- growth. Any author w^ho 
 charms a youthful preacher so powerfully should 
 be held at arm's length for a while. The mind 
 should take time to grow around him, not under 
 him. 
 
 5. The reading of religious diaries by preachers 
 as a means of spiritual culture needs to be con- 
 ducted with precaution. Some of them should be 
 read in a defensive mood. Many of them have 
 been written by men of whom it has been said that 
 " they were born with knives in their brains." 
 They had an overgrown taste for self-dissection. 
 Sometimes this produced a barbarous type of 
 vivisection. A robust religious temperament is 
 requisite to write or to read an intense Christian 
 diary with profit. Ecstatic piety disheartens by 
 contrasts. Hypochondriac convictions debilitate 
 by example. Religious experiences which are self- 
 condemnatory and lugubrious are always open to 
 suspicion. The best Biblical examples of piety are 
 
Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 135 
 
 jubilant. A pastor who must bear the burdens of 
 other men should have no needless burdens of his 
 own. 
 
 6. One diary, written by a clergyman of the last 
 generation, and devoted chiefly to his own mental 
 history, was revised by his own hand, not long 
 before his decease, Avith a view to its posthumous 
 publication. That fact alone should have for- 
 bidden its publication. The revision must have 
 caused the interpolation of unconscious quackery. 
 As literature the volume belongs to the depart- 
 ment of religious fiction. 
 
 7. A capital hint for preachers is found in the 
 reminiscences of a friend of Arago respecting his 
 tact in lecturing to a new audience on Astronomy. 
 It was his hal)it to look around and find the hearer 
 of dullest look, of lowest forehead, of most inani- 
 mate attitude, and to lecture to that man as if he 
 were the only auditor. The lecturer framed defi- 
 nitions for him^ selected illustrations for him, drew 
 diagrams for him. He was confident that if he was 
 successful in awakening that dullard's interest, he 
 was sure of the rest. Daniel Webster and Rufus 
 Choate used in their own way to practise a similar 
 elective policy in the Court-room. Mr. Choate 
 once said that there Avas always one man on the 
 jury, to secure w^hom was to secure all. In w^ays 
 practicable to the pulpit, preachers may com- 
 monly command the majority of an audience, by 
 interesting profoundly the less cultivated or the 
 more indifferent minority. In any case, to indi- 
 
136 My Note-Book, 
 
 vidualize the aim of a discourse will sharpen its 
 point. 
 
 8. Modern civilization gives to the ministry 
 facilities for knowing men superior to any that 
 existed in ancient times. We can know our audi- 
 ences, what they are, what their temptations, what 
 the popular currents of opinion and of taste, if we 
 exercise reasonable vigilance and the tact of com- 
 mon sense. A daily newspaper lays open real life 
 to our study with a degree of accuracy and com- 
 prehensiveness which was not attainable even a 
 century ago. Probably the issue of the New York 
 Tribune for six months presents a panorama of 
 metropolitan life to-day which the sum total of 
 Greek literature now extant does not contain of 
 real life in ancient Athens. 
 
 9. Our colloquial vocabulary contains a word 
 not often used in dignified discourse, yet a good 
 old English word which has never become obsolete. 
 It expresses a faculty which the ministry greatly 
 need to cultivate in their study of men. It is 
 "gumption." For the acquisition and the tactful 
 use of knowledge of human nature, give us above 
 all other men the man of gumption. That incan- 
 descent vision which sees through men with a 
 clearness that burns is needful to give a public 
 teacher command of men. It resembles that qual- 
 ity in our Lord's mental character which led His 
 biographer to say of Him that He knew what was 
 in men. There are men whose eye makes the eye 
 of other men drop. The mental eye of one who 
 
Methods awl Adjuncts of the Pnlpit. 137 
 
 would move men by discourse needs such piercing 
 vision that he shall not onl}^ know men, but shall 
 make them know that he knows them. 
 
 10. In our Lord's instructions to the hrst corps 
 of preachers, the personal human element predom- 
 inates heavily over the official and the authoritative. 
 He commissions them as practical working men to 
 a world of working men. They are not to be 
 chiefly expounders of creeds, interpreters of tradi- 
 tions, men of schools and libraries. No sign of 
 superiority to other men is given to them, except 
 the fact of their commission to teach ; and that is 
 to be done in suffering and at the cost of life. The 
 title by which He distinguishes them is drawn from 
 their manual occupation. " Fishers of men " rep- 
 resents their exalted yet humble calling. Honorary 
 titles they have none. His summary of doctrine 
 is brief. His directory of practical instructions is 
 much more extended. His commission reads : '^ Go 
 ye into all the world; say this, do that." He 
 gives them no orders for the government of a 
 council or the compilation of a litany. But He 
 tells them how to cross the threshold of a private 
 house, what to say to its inmates, and how to leave 
 it. Their office is much more emphatically instruc- 
 tive than cathedral. He does not forbid the 
 Church to make them prelates or to call them 
 saints ; but not a word does He say to initiate such 
 distinctions. 
 
 11. The most noble discourse requires in a 
 preacher a conscious redundance of perception be- 
 
138 My Note-Book. 
 
 yond expression. No man is competent to speak on 
 a great theme, till his insight discloses a vast deal 
 more than he can say of it. He cannot speak his 
 mind upon it till he finds in his mind more than 
 he can speak to his own satisfaction. A masterly 
 discourse is always the overflow and outflow of a 
 full mind. It is ebullient rather than elaborate. 
 
 In this respect preaching resembles what artists 
 tell us of the art of painting. Sir Joshua Rey- 
 nolds said that " a painter cannot produce a great 
 work till he is conscious of a depth and breadth 
 and intensity of truth in his subject which he never 
 can express in colors." 
 
 12. Perhaps musical composers illustrate the 
 principle above stated still more forcibly. Handel, 
 in narrating his mental history in composing the 
 " Hallelujah Chorus," says : '' I did think I did 
 see all Heaven before me, and the Great God Him- 
 self." In the same sense preaching is a fragment- 
 ary utterance. If a man can speak all that he 
 knows, he does not knoAV enough to speak. In 
 nothing is the proverb more significantly true than 
 in a sermon, that " a fool utters all his mind." 
 
 13. Prayer as an immediate preliminary to preach- 
 ing has profound disciplinary power. One of the 
 most valuable apothegms of Mr. Emerson is : 
 " No man can pray heartily without learning some- 
 thing." More than this is true. No man can pray 
 heartily without a penetration of mental insight 
 into spiritual things and an expansion of mental 
 force in their expression. Baxter's habit at Kid- 
 
Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 139 
 
 derminster of spending in secret prayer the hour 
 preceding- public worship was in keeping with a 
 law of intellectual discipline. Sermons on intract- 
 able subjects have often developed themselves 
 to the minds of preachers in the few moments of 
 preparatory prayer. " In that same hour it shall 
 be given you what ye shall say." Probably Cole- 
 ridge's opinion, that perfect prayer exercises the 
 supreme energy of a finite intellect, is often not 
 extravagant. 
 
 14. Preachers suffer a misfortune Avho have little 
 or no opportunity for communion with God in the 
 open air. The mental exhilaration which poets 
 conceive of in communion with Nature is more 
 profoundly real to a Christian believer in converse 
 with the God of Nature. In the thought of the 
 suppliant a creative Person puts a soul into crea- 
 tive Power. When the mind is in tune for it, it 
 is difhcult to listen to the carols of birds before 
 sunrise without spontaneously joining in the song 
 as a religious service. Wilberforce in one of his 
 letters speaks of his indebtedness to the singing 
 birds, in the forests of Yorkshire, for the quicken- 
 ing of his devotional fervor. 
 
 15. Probably the majority of pastors makes too 
 little of ejaculatory prayer, as a means of asso- 
 ciating intellectual with spiritual culture. The 
 upspringing of a thought to the INIind of God 
 makes a day eventful in one's hidden life. A suc- 
 cession of such aspirations makes a day historic. 
 Dr. Arnold speaks with great earnestness of the 
 
140 My Note-Book. 
 
 occult power of such prayer in consecrating life. 
 His friends discerned in his colloquial intercourse 
 a remarkable interblending of the two worlds of 
 sense and spirit. He probably owed it in part to 
 his appreciative practice of ejaculatory prayer. 
 
 16. One mind united with God in faith has the 
 resources of the universe at its command. '' Few," 
 not " many," is the emphatic word in Spiritual 
 devotion. Where '^ two or three " are, there is spir- 
 itual power. Solitude with God often characterizes 
 ministerial service. Then the axiom has redoubled 
 significance : " So much solitude, so much char- 
 acter." 
 
 17. Dr. Doddridge was one of the most faithful 
 of preachers to the duty of prayer preparatory to 
 preaching. Dr. Chalmers observes as a marked 
 feature of the prayers of Doddridge, many of 
 which have been published, the ''business-like 
 style of his intercourse with God." His whole 
 mind seems to have been absorbed in them. They 
 have the look of a definite means for a definite 
 end. A living American preacher has remarked 
 that "prayer is a business to be conducted in a 
 business-like way." Mental revery is not prayer. 
 Discursive thinking is not prayer. Esthetic admi- 
 ration of the works of God is not prayer. Nothing 
 is prayer but the conscious appeal of the soul to 
 God with a conscious purpose to gain an object. 
 Prayer thus conducted, in continuity however brief, 
 subjects the intellect to the same tension which is 
 requisite in earnest discourse to men. A preacher 
 
Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 141 
 
 may naturally pass from one to the other, on one 
 plane of intellectual energy. 
 
 18, It is remarked b}' Isaac Taylor that minds 
 which are most conversant with sublime truths as 
 subjects of devout meditation derive from them 
 resources of power in argument. He observes in 
 illustration that we find lofty xloxologies em- 
 bedded in the Epistles of St. Paul, in the midst 
 of remonstrant and expostulatory passages. The 
 Apostle's mind seems to seek vigor for the one from 
 refreshment by the other. It is one of the count- 
 less illustrations of the alliance of devout sensibil- 
 ity with intellectual force. 
 
 19. The rapidity with which pastors in active 
 service must construct sermons forbids the major- 
 ity of them to indulge a fastidious taste. But some 
 are pestered by this infirmity. They never know 
 when to cease correcting and improving a dis- 
 course. Beyond a limited criticism, improvement 
 does not improve. An eminent preacher of the 
 last generation preached one sermon ninety times, 
 amending and embellishing it after each delivery. 
 A reputation created by a few highly organized dis- 
 courses is an infirm one. Its possessor must con- 
 stantly nurse it to keep it alive. Sermons are like 
 certain jewels which shrink in weight under exces- 
 sive polish. The first fresh delivery of a discourse / 
 is likely to breathe its truest inspiration. 
 
 A fine art like painting may tempt some artists 
 like Leonardo da Vincd and Washington Allston 
 to leave the work of their lives unfinished through 
 
142 Mi^ Note-Book. 
 
 inability to satisfy their overgrown ideals. But 
 preaching is not in any such sense a fine art. It 
 is the work of an emergency. When taste over- 
 reaches the sense of exigency, a sermon collapses. 
 
 20. The effectiveness of sermons is sometimes 
 diluted by excessive quotation, especially quota- 
 tion of hymns. A certain discourse taken at 
 random from the literature of the recent English 
 pulpit contains eleven scraps of lyric quotation. 
 Few things give to a sermon so much of conven- 
 tional commonplace as the citation of hymns, 
 unless they are of prime quality, of recent origin, 
 and few. "When the hymn commencing " Nearer 
 my God to Thee " was fresh in our Hymnology, the 
 pulpit persecuted it with quotation. By far-fetched 
 connections with subject, it was interpolated by 
 preachers till, beautiful as it was, it was worn out 
 before its time. 
 
 21. The usage of Congregational and Presby- 
 terian Assemblies which rejjresses audible responses 
 to the sentiments of a preacher is one of doubtful 
 wisdom. It sacrifices sympathy to dignity. On 
 the preacher its influence is restrictive as well as 
 on the hearer. In supreme efforts of eloquence a 
 speaker craves some token of appreciative hearing. 
 The instinct of appreciative hearing is to volunteer 
 that token. Magnetism in public discourse is like 
 a shuttle; it moves to -^.nd fro. One of the chief 
 sources of the proverbial dulness of sermons is not 
 in the sermon, but in the absence of its natural 
 adjuncts. One of these is participation by the 
 
Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 148 
 
 hearer in the work of the hour. An audience suf- 
 fers ennui often for the want of something to do. 
 Admit them by the libert}' of responsive utterance 
 to that which is going on. Their interest in it 
 Will grow by expression. 
 
 Listeners to secular discourse commonly exercise 
 that liberty. If not forbidden, they take it as a 
 thing of course. Secular orators often depend 
 upon its exercise by hearers. Edward Everett 
 used to plan for the responses of his audiences in 
 his own movements on the platform. The " Hear I 
 Hear I " of tlie English House of Commons has 
 been reduced to a science by the diversity of its 
 signification corresponding to variety of intona- 
 tions. The freedom of Methodist congregations 
 in responsive hearing has been an invaluable 
 stimulus to Methodist preaching. Real eloquence 
 gives and takes 
 
 22. The large majority of preachers are not men 
 of genius. The most useful of them are not such. 
 The best work in the pulpit, as elsewhere, is per- 
 formed by men of average abilities. The most 
 effective preaching in tlie long run is the sensible 
 preaching. This is that in which good sense 
 appeals to the common sense. It wears well. Cor- 
 ruscating discourse burns itself out. Of all vari- 
 eties of preaching, that of the pyrotechnic school 
 i.s the most impotent. 
 
 23. Sensible preachers find an encouragement 
 in the response which the human mind makes to 
 truth pure and simple. This is illustrated in the 
 
144 My Note-Book. 
 
 circulation of certain books. The history of *' The 
 Imitation of Christ " is monumental evidence to 
 the purpose. Four nations claim the honor of its 
 production. T\yo thousand editions of it have 
 been published in the Latin language alone. One 
 thousand editions have appeared in sixty different 
 translations into the French language. Thirty 
 translations exist in the Italian tongue. And 
 innumerable manuscript editions were extant in 
 European libraries before printing became an es- 
 tablished art. 
 
 24. Yet from beginning to end the volume does 
 not contain a sentiment, or an illustration, or an 
 epigram, or a paragraph of artistic style which can 
 fascinate a reader by any other attraction than 
 that of spiritual truth appealing to spiritual neces- 
 sities. It claims no inspired authority. It was 
 never a representative of a political or moral re- 
 form as some works of fiction of world-wide fame 
 have been. It is not cast in lyric form to be sung 
 by the people, as the ballads have been which 
 nations love and sing forever. 
 
 In a word, it is not popular literature in any 
 acceptation of the phrase. To a man of the world 
 it is a supremely dull book. 
 
 25. Yet it lives. Why? Because it is full of 
 truth which must live. The world cannot do with- 
 out it. Christian faith finds in the book an expres- 
 sion of the profoundest aspirations of our moral 
 nature. It finds that which meets the great exi- 
 gency of sin. Age after age, therefore, minds 
 
Methods and Adjuncts of the Pidjnt. 145 
 
 awakened to the reality of sin liave demanded this 
 work of one who had made the same discovery and 
 had found the remedy. Christian culture has 
 thriven upon it. It is full of Christ. It tells the 
 story of one to whom Christ had become the most 
 profound reality in the universe. The believing 
 world, therefore, will have it so long as the world 
 stands. Such a literary phenomenon is a prophecy 
 of the coming reign of Christ over all nations to 
 the end of time. Any pulpit which should be as 
 faithful a representative of Christ in a believer's 
 experience of His personal friendship would share 
 in the same success. 
 
 26. In popular religious awakenings the most 
 essential requisite to the power of the pulpit is a 
 healthy balancing of opposite truths. A prolonged 
 pressure of any one class of ideas which appeal to 
 but one side of human nature tends either to stag- 
 nation or to fanaticism. Extreme begets extreme. 
 The more intense the awakening, the greater is the 
 peril. Our moral sensibilities are never very pro- 
 foundly moved by great and holy ideas except 
 when they act serenely. And this is the natural 
 resultant of such ideas touching them at many 
 points and qualifying each other. It resembles 
 the attraction of gravitation by which planets hold 
 each other in their orbits. No more sure sign of ! 
 moral health in the excitements of a revival exists 
 than that equilibrium of great forces, which, by 
 the stillness of their action, suggest the serenity of 
 the Mind of God. 
 
146 My Note-Book. 
 
 27. Tlie same balancing of great motives is the 
 most effective defence against the eccentric ten- 
 dency of one-sided religious excitement to run into 
 animal passion. Real life often discloses the fact 
 
 I that the most exalted sensibilities of our nature lie 
 \ very near to the most debased. Under favoring 
 conditions the transition from the one to the other 
 is very facile. Hence in great religious reforma- 
 tions, the excitation of certain temperaments passes 
 over from spiritual convictions to animal impulses. 
 It vaults over even from spiritual ecstasy to animal 
 passion. The history of the Anabaptists of the 
 sixteenth century was polluted from this cause. 
 
 28. Other things being equal, the most infirm 
 pulpit is that which is sustained chiefly by polemic 
 discussions. The most potent truths, the most con- 
 clusive arguments in their defence, and the most 
 pungent applications of them to the conduct of life, 
 their opponents rarely discuss. Discreetly they let 
 the strong points of our faith alone. Polemic dis- 
 course, therefore, is apt to be beguiled into inferior 
 lines of thought. The surest method of accumu- 
 lating unimpressive and lukewarm materials for 
 the pulpit is to follow in the wake of the current 
 
 . unbelief of the day. 
 
 29. That is a perilous liberty which we take 
 with the Scriptures in which we claim that our 
 own interpretation and infidelity constitute the 
 sole alternative. Before the emancipation of our 
 colored people, this wa^ the argument on both 
 sides of the great debate. Said the advocate of 
 
Methoth and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 147 
 
 slavery : " The Bible surely justifies human servi- 
 tude : if not, it does not deserve our trust in it as 
 the Word of God." The abolitionist responded: 
 " The Scriptures cannot befriend the institution of 
 slavery: if they do, they cannot be a revelation 
 from Heaven." Such is often the spirit of over- 
 confident exegesis. We have no right to put a 
 Divine revelation in power to any such hazards. 
 The Scriptures mean what they do mean, not what 
 they must. We come to them as inquirers under 
 pledge of extreme modesty. It is not our province 
 to construct exegetical dilemmas from which they 
 must extricate themselves or go into obsolescence. 
 Our business as interpreters is not to create, but to 
 receive, 
 
 30. The pulpit derives great strength from its 
 alliance with secret auxiliaries in the make of the 
 human mind. Not conscience alone, but the nat- 
 ural and acquired allies of conscience are on the 
 side of Christian ideas. The sense of honor, the 
 instinct of truth, the feeling of reverence, the per- 
 ception of beauty, the social affections, the love of 
 home, the logical faculty, are all tributaries under 
 the lead of conscience to the force of the Christian 
 sermon. Every man carries within him an invis- 
 ible and silent government, viceroyal in its relation 
 to God, and supreme in its relation to the man. 
 Every utterance of truth from the pulpit appeals 
 to that confederation of moral powers for re-en- 
 forcement. Christian birth brings a man into a 
 complicated system of tendencies and usages and 
 
148 My Note-Booh. 
 
 beliefs which give to these secret alliances the 
 authority of a second nature. Hence arises the 
 phenomenon of sudden conversion so often wit- 
 nessed in seasons of revival. It is because the 
 moral being of the man is already captured in its 
 stronghold and waits only for the moment of overt 
 decision. Hence also comes another very common 
 occurrence in such seasons that men are apparently 
 led to a revolutionary change of character by the 
 force of truth, pure and simple, with no appurte- 
 nances of eloquence or of genius on the part of the 
 preacher. 
 
 31. The best defence of short sermons is that 
 given by Lamont : " If a sermon is a good one, it 
 need not be long ; if it is a bad one, it ought not to be 
 lone." But the criticism is rather smart than true. 
 It is not a fact that all good sermons need not be 
 long. On some of the most weighty themes of the 
 pulpit a good sermon cannot be brief. The mod- 
 ern taste in this respect lowers the tone of the 
 pulpit and contracts its range. On some of the 
 most suggestive texts of the Scriptures it would 
 enforce silence. Boyle has an essay on patience 
 in listening to long sermons. But if a live man is 
 in the pulpit, and live hearers in the pew, patience 
 is not necessary to support a sermon of an hour's 
 length on a subject of which a finished discussion 
 demands that length. 
 
 32. That is an unwise policy in preaching which 
 may be termed the policy of hyperbole. It crowds 
 upon the sensibilities of the hearer possible events 
 
Methofh avrl AfJJunrf.^ of the Pulpit. 149 
 
 as if they were probable, or probable events as if 
 they were certain. Sensational preaching abounds 
 with it. Men tacitly repel it as an imposition on 
 their good sense. The possibility of speedy and 
 sudden death, the possibility tliat the present is a 
 man's last hearing of the Gospel, the possibility 
 that a present rejection of the offer of salvation 
 will grieve away finally and hopelessly the Spirit 
 of God, — are all true, but to press them on the con- 
 science in exhortations to repentance as if they 
 were more than possibilities is false motive. The 
 momentary impression is more than cancelled by 
 the reaction. In real life men act upon such 
 future contingencies by applying the law of 
 chances. And the chances are by a thousand to 
 one adverse to the preacher's intimidation. 
 
 33. Any plea of the j)ulpit, to be effective, must 
 commend itself to the common sense of men. The 
 common sense, silently appljdng to the policy of 
 hyperbole the law of chances, rejects them without 
 pausing to argue the case. So far as they move 
 men at all, they have the effect of a scare. A 
 scare nullified is an invitation to apathy. A nim- 
 ble spring of good sense lifts men above its reach. 
 John Foster says of such appeals that they resem- 
 1)le a false alarm of a thunderbolt. " A sensible 
 man looks out to see if it is not the rumbling of a 
 cart." 
 
 34. Christianity never stands upon its dignity. 
 One of its first principles is to take men as it finds 
 them. It descends wherever man descends. To 
 
150 My Note-Book. 
 
 save, it finds. To find, it seeks. To seek, it goes 
 where men are. It does not wait to be sought and 
 found. A Christian pulpit, therefore, must not 
 wait for men to rise to its own level where they 
 can receive its message gracefully, tastefully, in a 
 scholarly way, contemplatively, or even candidly. 
 It will never do to apply to the work of preaching 
 the punctilios of a very sensitive self-respect. 
 
 35. The most effective method of proving any 
 truth which is implied in human duty is to use it. 
 
 / Assume it, preach it by implication, persuade men 
 ' to act it by doing the duty. Make it thus prove 
 
 itself as fact, and time will take care of it as 
 
 dogma. 
 
 36. The rite of confirmation as practised by the 
 Episcopal Church, or some equivalent, would be a 
 valuable addition to the ceremonial of other than 
 prelatical churches. It expresses a truth which all 
 evangelical churches believe and their puljjits 
 teach. It is a natural recognition of the laws of 
 heredity in their Christian working. It declares 
 that by the gracious action of those laws the 
 children of the Church are in the natural course of 
 things brought within her fold. At the fitting 
 time this should be expressed in their character, 
 and should receive the sanction of the Church by 
 her outward symbol. Liable as such a rite is to 
 abuse, the absence of it is a greater evil. Con- 
 trolled by a spiritual theory of regeneration and of 
 Christian living, it may be a powerful auxiliary to 
 the Christian family as a tributary to the Church. 
 
Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. lol 
 
 37. In discourses on the Deity of Christ, it is 
 not wise to philosophize on the mystery of the 
 Divine existence. Where all is said that can be 
 said, it remains mystery still. Assumption on 
 Biblical authority is the wider method of treat- 
 ment. Treat it as the Mosaic vision of the creation 
 treats the origin of liglit. God said : Let Light 
 be, and Light was. Mystery thus aflirmed carries 
 in its sublimity the force of proof. Inexplicable 
 truth demands imperial thinking. Authority has I 
 more weiglit than logic. 
 
 38. A valuable auxiliary to the pulpit is found 
 in a vigilant study of Christian families. Allusion 
 has been made elsewhere to the theory of revolu- 
 tionary conversion, as not natural to the training 
 of Christian youth. Neglect of this principle has 
 often resulted in consigning youth of Christian 
 parentage to a period of religious despair. Not 
 the despair of consciously extreme guilt, but the 
 despair of Christian fatalism has sometimes been 
 the fruit of ill-balanced preaching on the necessity 
 of a change of heart. Despair in any form intensi- 
 fies guilt. Said one son of believing parents : " I 
 had reached my thirtieth year before the duty of 
 repentance became a practicable reality to me. 
 My youth was spent in fatalistic bondage to the 
 theory of convulsive regeneration." 
 
 39. One sign of the active presence of the Holy ' 
 Spirit in a community is that stale truths from the 
 pulpit put on the fascination of novelty to the ; 
 hearers. To their electrified sensibilities it seems 
 
152 My Note-Book. 
 
 as if they were hearing truth for the first time. 
 They are discoverers in a strange world. Awaken- 
 ing from a spiritual coma is equivalent to discov- 
 ery. Another form which the same phenomenon 
 assumes is that of resentment of imagined insults 
 in sermons. Hearers listen with the conviction that 
 the preacher " means them." Old sermons heard 
 before, on repetition are found to be full of per- 
 sonal allusions to the hearers. The same truth is 
 a song or an outrage, according to the state of 
 moral stupor or moral quickening in which the 
 hearer receives it. More than once hearers of 
 Whitefield's pungent discourses followed him with 
 stones in their pockets to punish his insolence. In 
 one instance the preparation for assault was the 
 preliminary to conversion. 
 
 40. Preachers, Avhen moved most profoundly 
 by the Spirit of God, preach under the sway of 
 spiritual joy. They are conscious of a newborn 
 freedom. In clerical diaries of a former generation 
 may be often found an entry recording the labors 
 of the Lord's Day like this : " Had great liberty 
 to-day." Preachers thus inspired speak like men 
 freeborn. Their discourse has a ring of gladness. 
 
 41. A wise man in entering the pulpit will leave 
 pet theories behind him. In other professions the 
 most inveterate theorizers ignore their favorite 
 speculations when the brunt of practical life is upon 
 them. Men do not consciously carry theories into 
 battle. If they do, they are beaten, as General 
 Braddock was on the march to Fort Du Quesne. 
 
MetJiods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 153 
 
 So it should be with the favorite speculations of 
 preachers. The philosophy of the pulpit should 
 he the common sense of common life. It should 
 be spoken, if at all, unconsciously. Masterly 
 preachers speak the things which most obviously 
 ought to be spoken. They say Avhat hearers detect 
 as necessities to their condition. They speak to 
 exigencies. Men in exigencies consciously cannot 
 help responding. The want welcomes the supply. 
 Hunger greets the offered food. " The common 
 people heard him gladly." 
 
 42. Few men adequately appreciate the value 
 of the reading of the Scriptures as an ally of the 
 sermon. The Rev. Albert Barnes of Philadelphia 
 once delivered a sermon Avith great effect wdiich 
 was constructed entirely with Biblical selections. 
 They were carefully interAvoven so as to make a 
 consistent and continuous structure. He said that 
 it cost him more labor than an ordinary discourse. 
 An English preacher once read as Dr. Johnson 
 did, the entire book of Ruth. Some of his charmed 
 auditors did not recognize its inspired origin. The 
 Rev. Dr. Hawks of New York used to attract 
 intelligent men of other professions, not by his 
 sermons, but by his inimitable delivery of the Bible. 
 The Rev. Dr. McAll of England once said in pub- 
 lic: "If the Lord had ordained two orders in the 
 ministry, one to preach and the other to read the 
 Scriptures, if I could have had my choice between 
 them, I would have chosen to be a reader of the 
 Word." It was no uncommon occurrence in the 
 
154 My Note-Book. 
 
 services of Wliitefield that hearers were converted 
 by his marvellously realistic rehearsal of the Bible. 
 
 43. The usefulness of this adjunct of the sermon 
 is confirmed by the policy to which managers of 
 City Missions have been led by a long experience 
 of the conditions of their work in the employment 
 of Bible-readers. The most remarkable revival of 
 spiritual religion known in the modern history of 
 Sweden was, under the blessing of God, initiated 
 and conducted by " Bible-readers " alone. The 
 cathedrals were emptied, and the people flocked in 
 thousands, some of them walking fifty miles to 
 listen to the Lascari, in barns and storehouses. 
 Such is the testimony of history. It j^roves that 
 an earnest reader who is not a great preacher may 
 so deliver the words of the Scriptures that their 
 Divine inspiration shall electrify his intonations. 
 
 44. Golden seasons occur in the history of every 
 earnest ministr3^ They are seasons of coincident 
 opportunities. Churches, like nations, have their 
 conjunctions of circumstance and tendency and 
 resource which promise huge advances. The prime 
 quality of sermons then is timeliness. The chief 
 virtue of the ministry then is vigilance. Grand 
 successes then depend on discovering where men 
 are and aiming the message at them as they are. 
 The work calls for Divine intuitions. Results 
 depend on working in an expectant faith. Preach- 
 ers at such crises of spiritual advancement should 
 resume the old prophetic title of " Watchmen." 
 
 45. The administration of the pulpit should 
 
Methods and Adjuncts of the Pulpit. 155 
 
 be conducted in part with the aim at educating 
 the Church. Its education in the essentials of 
 doctrinal faitli, its education in the reasons for 
 Christian beliefs, its education in the symmetry 
 of Christian graces, its education in methods of 
 Christian work, its education in the construction 
 and history of the Bible, represent the aims of 
 an educated ministry. The blending of balanced 
 graces in character is the grand conquest of Chris- 
 tianity over human nature. The passive virtues 
 alone make an effeminate believer; the forceful 
 virtues alone create tough and repellent believers. 
 The Christianity of the future will command not 
 alone men of silk nor men of steel. A church 
 well developed in character and well equipped in 
 resources must grow to its maturity and find out 
 its mission under wise pastoral training. The chief 
 peril of evangelism is its narrowness. By its con- 
 centration on one and but one object of the pul- 
 pit, it leaves the great bulk of ministerial labors 
 undone. 
 
 46. Our Puritan inheritance has led us to un- 
 derestimate conversions in early life. The crys- 
 tallizing process in the formation of character 
 sets at a much earlier period than is commonly 
 supposed. Probationary discipline usually be- 
 comes decisive of results long T)efore the arrival 
 of adult years. The intellect grows more rapidly 
 and accumulation of moral ideas goes on with 
 more prolific force in the first ten years of life 
 than in any other decade. The ideal of the pulpit. 
 
156 My Note-Booh. 
 
 therefore, should include an early engrafting upon 
 the minds of the youth of the Church, of the 
 duty of consecration to Christ. Beza, in con- 
 structing his Will, wrote : " Lord, I thank Thee, 
 that, at the age of sixteen years, I Avas enabled to 
 dedicate myself to Thee." As a rule, the ripest 
 characters in Christian history are those of the 
 , early blossom. 
 
VII. 
 
 CONSCIENCE AND ITS ALLIES. 
 
 1. The moral sense in man is not designed to 
 stand alone in the conduct of life and the building 
 of character. Alone, it may by its imperativeness 
 create an austere character. By its intensity it 
 may create a narrow one. Its action is rather 
 penetrative than expansive. Hence it comes to 
 pass that some of the most conscientious men are 
 not the most amiable men. They fall into bond- 
 age to ascetic scruples and tyrannical prohibitions. 
 Their religion at its best has a ponderous monotony. 
 It reminds one of a treadmill. In some men con- ] 
 science develops a singular incongruity. It runs 
 in veins. Men are often very scru})ulous in some . 
 things who are very lax in otlier things. The 
 brigands in the Apennines go to the confessional 
 most obediently befoi'e starting on an adventure of 
 robbery and murder. In more civilized life a more 
 frequent phenomenon is that men of keen moral 
 sense expend its force chiefly in censorious judg- 
 ment and remonstrant appeals addressed to other 
 men. To such men the times are always out of 
 joint, and they are born to set them right. Hence 
 comes the malign element m fanatical reforms. 
 
 157 
 
158 My Note-Book. 
 
 2. Conscience has certain natural allies whose 
 working is both regulative and intensive. As con- 
 ditions may require, they tend to consolidate the 
 impulses of conscience, or to literalize its judg- 
 ments, or to fortify its authority. 
 
 3. One of the natural auxiliaries of the moral 
 sense is fidelity to early ideals of duty. For the 
 want of this principle, character at its maturity 
 often suffers in moral thrift and symmetry. The 
 grand ideals dawn upon a man when his days are 
 young. The soul is young then ; the spiritual 
 sensibilities are receptive. Morally as well as 
 physically he is at the top of his condition. Lofty 
 aims have a luminous reality which they are apt 
 to lose in after years. Life is a pedestrian tour ; 
 over portions of it we plod ; we grow tired and 
 hot when the noonday comes. Thought falls into 
 commonplaces. Aspiration flags. We Avalk with 
 eyes downcast. Then we • learn to compromise 
 principles, to doubt inherited faiths, to act in sus- 
 pense of conscience, to dip the flag of achievement, 
 perhaps to draggle it in the mire. 
 
 4. Tliat was a far-reaching admonition of Schil- 
 ler's : " Reverence the dreams of thy youth." 
 Something better than romance is in that instinct 
 of our nature which throws a golden halo over the 
 young days. The young ideas, the young hopes, 
 the young projects, the young confidences, the 
 young loves, the j^oung reverence for great men. 
 the young enthusiasms over favorite books, — all 
 have a pure and tonic influence in the memory. 
 
Conscience and its Allies. 159 
 
 A young man gives a costly pledge to Satan when 
 he pawns his youthful reverence for woman. That 
 is a pledge which is never redeemed. Emerson 
 said to the students of Dartmouth College: "When 
 you shall say, ' I renounce — I am sorry for it — 
 my early visions,' then dies the man in you." 
 
 5. Swedenborg saw in his thirteen years of 
 dream-life, that time in Heaven rejuvenates men. 
 The oldest there have the most youthful persons. 
 There are no decrepit angels. No blind eyes, no 
 deaf-mutes, no cripples are there. This was the 
 old Greek wisdom fermenting in the Swede's abnor- 
 mal brain. "The immortals are always young. 
 In like manner the Christian ideal of life perpetu- 
 ates juvenescence in its lofty aspirations. Chris- 
 tianity has something yet to do for a man, if it has 
 not fortified his moral sensibilities by mastering 
 the tendency to decadence which years create in 
 his thinking and achievement. 
 
 6. Conscience finds a capital auxiliary also in 
 an appreciation of the gift of speech, as one which 
 is susceptible of Cliristian uses. If many are con- 
 scientious in word who are not so in act, some are 
 conscientious in action who are not so in speech. 
 A great deal of moral stamina leaks away in dril> 
 lets of insignificant and irreligious talk. " Idle 
 words" monopolize not a little of the colloquial 
 pleasures of cultivated society. Many have tlie 
 gift of prayer who have not the gift of reticence. 
 The theory of the origin of language which makes 
 it the direct gift of God is at least as probable as 
 
160 My Note-Book. 
 
 any other. It should be revered as a Divine endow- 
 ment. It is akin to the moral sense in its dignity 
 and more noble than the sense of beauty. The 
 speech of an idle mind is sin. Even the North 
 American savage has it among his reverend tradi- 
 tions that a deaf-mute is stricken of God. 
 
 7. The majority of men impair their moral force 
 by talking too much. A profound insight into 
 one side of human nature was involved in the 
 Pythagorean device of education, which consigned 
 a young man to silence for five years. An im- 
 mense amount of falsehood is uttered in uncon- 
 scious gabbling. We reasonably distrust a man's 
 absolute veracity when we discover that he loves 
 to hear himself talk. A portrait of heroic size 
 was suggested of Baron Von Moltke, by the criti- 
 cism : " He knows how to be silent in seven lan- 
 guages." What wisdom, what strength of intellect, 
 what weight of character, what latent force, what 
 unknown resources, we involuntarily attribute to 
 reticent men I We think that the less they say, 
 the more they can say which would be worth hear- 
 ing. This is our spontaneous tribute to a great 
 virtue. 
 
 8. Our admiration of the gift of silence is some- 
 times misplaced. Coleridge's experience with the 
 silent man and the apple dumplings is well known. 
 A remarkable illustration of the same misjudgment 
 has occurred in American history. For a hundred 
 years, under the lead of Thomas Jefferson, our 
 national conception of the North American Indian 
 
Conscience and its Allies. 161 
 
 was that of a marvel of dignity and self-control 
 for his power of taciturnity. Jefferson taught us 
 to consider a ]\Iohawk Council-fire a model for 
 Senates. But the Rev. Dr. Palfrey has pricked 
 that bubble. He claims that aboriginal taciturnity 
 was sheer stolidity. In his best condition the 
 Nipmuck chief said nothing because he had nothing 
 to say ; and he fell asleep at that. The savage 
 mind was void of ideas. He had therefore the 
 cunning to hold his tongue. 
 
 9. Of all men most infirm in the virtues col- 
 lateral to the moral sense are the buffoons in speech. 
 They are apt to be dwarfs and cripples in enter- 
 prise. In an emergency they seldom know what 
 to do till graver men teach them. They are bank- 
 rupt in resources when men of resources are most 
 needful. Events outwit them. Such men are out 
 of place in an awakened world. Two classes of 
 men are never buffoons, very great men and very 
 good men. Great thoughts in the one class and 
 great virtues in the other give solidity to character 
 and intensity to thinking-power. Life centred in 
 anything either great or good, men do not fool 
 away. 
 
 10. The moral sense is broadened and deepened 
 as an element of character, by reverence for one's 
 occupation in life as a part of one's religion. We 
 are often admonished to make a business of our 
 religion. It is quite as essential to right living 
 that a man should make a religion of his business. 
 This means vastly more than that he should not be 
 
162 Ml/ Note-Book, 
 
 a liar and a cheat. It means that he should be 
 unselfish in his business. He should conduct it 
 on principles of benevolence. A Christian pur- 
 chase or sale implies reciprocity of profit. That 
 fine sense of right and wrong which makes a man 
 seek opportunities for generous giving should make 
 him generous in a trade. 
 
 The whole theory of commercial life which 
 makes it a conflict between competitors, in which 
 each must grapple with the other as a foe, is un- 
 christian. Like everything else which is unchris- 
 tian, it is unmanly. Character suffers an immense 
 degradation from the ascendency of such a prin- 
 ciple in that which occupies the larger portion of 
 a man's waking hours and absorbs the best ener- 
 gies of his manhood. Money-making conducted on 
 that principle makes hard men. In no other form 
 does selfishness crystallize into a type of evil so 
 fixed and unimpressible. Character thus indu- 
 rated in wrong is harder than the metals of which 
 money is made. These can be made fluid by fire ; 
 the other by nothing but the breath of God. 
 
 11. One who has the means of knowing declares 
 that a growing atrophy of benevolent instincts is 
 perceptible in the recent history of civilized com- 
 merce. He aflirms that there is less of sponta- 
 neous giving than there was fifty years ago. There 
 is less of gratuitous service between man and man. 
 Everybody must be paid for everything. Com- 
 petition is more relentless and pugnacious. The 
 1 morals of trade have become the morals of war. 
 
Co7iscience and its Allies. 163 
 
 Why should it not be so if '' competition is the life 
 of business." Says another keen observer : " The 
 ways of trade have become selfish to the borders of 
 theft, and supple to the borders of fraud." Allud- 
 ing to the oaths of the Custom-house, the same 
 censor of public morals adds : " We eat and drink , 
 and wear perjury in a hundred commodities." 
 
 12. It is by no means certain that the increase 
 of organized beneficence is a fair substitute for the 
 ancient ways in keeping the elements of character 
 in fine accord and in concerted tribute to a noble 
 life. Indeed, glaring instances occur in which or- 
 ganized giving makes not a whit of difference in 
 the grip of selfish grabbing. It is reported that a 
 merchant of New York, whose name appeared in 
 subscription lists for twenty years, prided himself 
 on the fact that he had not in all that time per- 
 mitted a youthful tradesman to succeed in that 
 city who had learned his business in the princely 
 merchant's complicated and colossal commerce. 
 He crushed such beginners by underselling them 
 at his own cost. He claimed the rifi^ht to do it 
 because he had the power — and is not competition 
 the life of commerce ? His principle of life was 
 that of England's freebooter, — 
 
 " That they should take who have the power, 
 And they should keep who can." 
 
 Would even fabulous wealth and the prestige cre- 
 ated by amassing it have glossed the reputation 
 of a man lifty years ago who conducted his busi- 
 
164 My Note-Book. 
 
 ness in that Satanic style ? Defaulting cashiers 
 and treasurers ought not to surprise us ; the}* are 
 germane to the soil ; they breed in the atmosphere 
 of commercial life, if conducted on the principle 
 of selfish competition. 
 
 13. The moral faculty, enlightened by Christian 
 training, is expansive almost without limit in its 
 affinities with the professions and trades by which 
 men earn their livelihood. Labor is a factor in 
 man's destiny by Divine decree. Natural religion 
 adopts it in the name of God. Revealed religion 
 baptizes it in the name of Christ. Both dignify 
 and sanctify it Avhen performed under the suprem- 
 acy of a good conscience before God and man. 
 Professor Agassiz used to say that, " on the large 
 scale of things a physical fact is as sacred as 
 a moral principle.'' So the Christian law of con- 
 science takes into its embrace all secular occupa- 
 tions and blesses them. They are all religious if 
 conducted on Christian principles. As it respects 
 the time they consume, and the mental and moral 
 forces they expend, they constitute the chief relig- 
 ion of the majority of good men. 
 
 14. In comparison with the religion of secu- 
 lar duties, certain more demonstratively religious 
 habits may be overrated. The moral sense of 
 some men is — we will not 'say ^:>er verted, but — 
 fZi verted from their best vocation. Christian work 
 directly for the conversion of men to an actively 
 religious life is not the highest vocation of every 
 man. Not every man is an expert in it. It is 
 
Conscience and its Allies. 165 
 
 sometimes laid upon the conscience unwisely and 
 with excess of pressure. A keen observer of men 
 has published an essay on the futility of training 
 a man to do that which is not i^i him. We may 
 judiciously apply the principle to self-training. It 
 is not m some men to talk usefully on personal 
 religion. They make a burlesque of it in the 
 attempt. They can make shovels or navigate a 
 ship more deftly. 
 
 15. It is never wise to fling duty into the face 
 of Nature. Conscience is sure to suffer in the re- 
 bound. When the sense of duty is adverse to a 
 man's natural gifts and tastes and training, the 
 presumption is that the moral sense has been mis- 
 informed. A Divine decree is lodged in the make 
 of a man's mind, which takes precedence of all 
 subsequent convictions. Where conscience collides 
 with natural infirmity. Nature is an " iron moun- 
 tain." 
 
 16. The principle above named is often illus- 
 trated in the convictions of zealous men respecting 
 the duty of personal effort for the salvation of 
 men to which allusion has been made. Those in 
 whom Nature has not laid the foundation of suc- 
 cess in that kind of service rarely do succeed in it. 
 Yet they often feel impelled to it by the type of 
 Christian character which is current in our days. 
 In such cases Nature often has her way, and con- 
 science is angered. A sense of guilt is the con- 
 sequence, which a wiser reading of natural laws 
 would have forestalled. 
 
166 My Note-Book. 
 
 17. " IMany are the friends of the golden tongue," 
 saj's a Welsh proverb. But in the service of 
 religion the golden tongues are not a majority. 
 Only one preacher in the history of the pulpit has 
 come down to us as the "golden-mouthed." Ease 
 in private religious colloquy is more rare than in 
 the pulpit. Like kindred gifts, it is not born, it is 
 acquired. Often Xature is so set against it, that 
 it demands study and prayer, and dubious exper- 
 iment, and perilous ventures, and disciplinary 
 failures, and infinitesimal successes, and a stout 
 persistence, and watchfulness of opportunity, and 
 the foil of judicious silences, and a cultivated 
 sense of the proprieties, and back of all a far 
 insight into human nature, to bring it to au}^ high 
 degree of excellence. It is an accomplishment. 
 In its best development it takes on the look of 
 a fine art. To do it superlatively well, a man must 
 serve his time at it. Such men as the evangelist 
 Moody are not fashioned in a day. In some men 
 the drawbacks of infirmity respecting it amount 
 to positive disability. There are some tongue-tied 
 Christians. A great misfortune befalls them if 
 their religious training has been such that their 
 moral sense attaches exclusive or supreme sacred- 
 ness to the duty which is out of their power. 
 
 18. Conscience sometimes needs to be liberalized 
 in its judgments of men whose chief end in living 
 is the accumulation of wealth. We call such men 
 misers, worldlings, grovellers ; and some of them 
 are such. But other some find the design of God 
 
Conscience and its Allies. 167 
 
 ill tlieir creation in money-making. As there are 
 working-bees in a hive, so are there natural money- 
 makers in every civilized society. They are made 
 for that service to the Avorld in their intuitions. 
 They are born to it in their surroundings and 
 opportunities. Often it is an endowment which 
 has come down to them through generations of an 
 accumulative ancestry. All men have iron in their | 
 blood. Some men have gold. It is their duty to ' 
 be rich. As it is the dut}^ and the honor of some 
 men to be poor, so is it the duty and the peril of 
 other men to be rich. They sin if they are not so. i 
 It was a virtue in John Calvin that when he died 
 he did not leave money enough to pay the expenses 
 of his funeral. That would have been no virtue 
 in George Peabody. 
 
 19. An East India merchant of Newburyport in 
 its prime once remarked : '^ I do not understand 
 it ; it is due to no merit of mine ; but my ventures 
 never fail. I never lost a ship or a cargo. If I 
 put a dollar on a shingle and send it to sea, it 
 comes back to me doubled." It was that man's 
 duty to be rich. Onl}^ a contracted conscience 
 would have forbidden it. Every man should find \ 
 his religion in the thing he Avas made for. The ' 
 end of God in Ids creation should be his end in 
 living. Christian heroism can aim no higher : 
 Christian martyrdom can achieve no more. Once 
 admit as a working principle of conscience that 
 secular vocations are intiinsically as sacred as 
 that of missionary services, and Christian living 
 
168 My Note-Book. 
 
 becomes as broad in its range of possibilities as 
 it is loft}- in the reach of its aim. 
 
 20. Real life illustrates this in grand example. 
 The elder Frelinghnysen of New Jersey, in his 
 early manhood, desired to choose the ministry in- 
 stead of the law as his profession. But probably 
 he served God more usefully in the United States 
 Senate, where he was for many years what Wilber- 
 force was to the British Parliament, — the con- 
 science of the whole body, — than if he had given 
 his life to a mission to the Zulus. General Have- 
 lock believed that he was living for Christ in 
 leading his cavalry to the victories of English 
 civilization in India, more efficiently than if he 
 had spent his days in a curacy in the heathendom 
 of London. Who shall say that he was not? 
 The order of his superior in an emergency was : 
 " Turn out Havelock's regiment for that service ; 
 they are never drunk, and they never run." That 
 told a grand story of Havelock's moral consecra- 
 tion of his w^ork in India. 
 
 21. The moral sense, enlightened by Christian 
 training, is so elastic in its versatility that it 
 appears paradoxical in its embrace of things dis- 
 similar. In the majority of men it does not send 
 out the antennce of its affinities to the fine arts. 
 These have been defined as " the arts of pleasure." 
 They are often degraded to serve '' the lust of the 
 eyes and the pride of life." Yet they are the 
 " end of God in the creation " of some men. Some 
 of the masterpieces of mediaeval art were the 
 
Conscience and ifii Allies. 169 
 
 work of days and iiiglits of prayer. The temple 
 of Solomon ^Yas not more religiously designed and 
 built than were some of the cathedrals of Cen- 
 tral Europe. Madonnas which are the wonder of 
 the world were painted by men who worshipped 
 them. Conscience claims regency in everything 
 that a man should aim to do or to be. The word 
 " ought " is the sovereign of all vocabularies. 
 
 22. God is interested in the humblest of the 
 mechanic arts. Who inspired Bezaleel to " devise 
 cunning works, to work in gold and silver and 
 brass " ? One of the most commonplace of trades 
 has been hallowed for all time by the fact that our 
 Lord was probably a carpenter for fifteen years. 
 If a man can make shovels better than he can do^ 
 anything else, then his " calling of God in Clnist 
 Jesus " is to make shovels. It is a high calling. 
 His work may be uplifted into the realm of " the 
 sublime and beautiful " by the motive force which 
 he puts into it. That may uplift him as well. 
 One of the most eminently useful men in Massa- 
 chusetts spent liis life in the manufacture of pins. 
 A life of working sympathy with Christ, though 
 passed in the forecastle or in a coal mine, will make 
 a 7na7i of anybody. Angels will respect him. 
 
 23. Our moral nature is many-sided. Its full 
 development involves principles of which one quali- 
 fies another. The views foregoing are modified by 
 the fact that conscience finds one of its natural 
 allies in reverence for mind as the superior of 
 matter. Dr. Johnson observed that wliatever 
 
170 My Note-Book. 
 
 makes a man more thoughtful of the future than 
 of the present elevates him in the scale of thinking 
 beings. The same is true of anything which gives 
 him an adequate appreciation of mind as the sov- 
 ereign of matter. In the conduct of life and the 
 buikUng of character on Christian principles, we 
 find occasion to apply this, among other things, to 
 benevolent activities. Without it we fall into a 
 low grade of benefactions. 
 
 24. A man once held office in a church in Bos- 
 ton, who was severely conscientious in self-disci- 
 pline, but Avho could not see the necessity of 
 colleges and institutes of science. The " Boston 
 Shoe and Stocking Society," which watched over 
 the necessities of neglected children, w^as his pet 
 above all other benevolent organizations. He once 
 spoke contemptuously of an audience assembled to 
 hear a lecture from Professor Agassiz on Ichthy- 
 ology. "Fifteen hundred full-grown men and 
 women," said he, " spending an hour to hear a man 
 talk about the construction of a Connecticut River 
 shad I " Yes, they were " full-grown," and he was 
 not. His generous contributions to objects of 
 charity never rose in spirit above the level of his 
 shoestrings. 
 
 25. Ours is a materialistic age. It exalts wealth 
 immoderately in its measurements of men. The 
 consecration of wealth is esteemed the most effec- 
 tive way of doing good. We call it " substantial " 
 
 I benevolence ; as if a thought had less substance 
 ■ than a dollar, and character had less weight than 
 
Conscience and its Allies. 171 
 
 gold. How many of the thousands who have 
 heard and read it have appreciated the reply of 
 Agassiz to an offer of a lucrative office : '' I have 
 no time to spend in making money." 
 
 26. Reverence for mind as the superior of 
 matter in conscientious ways of living changes all 
 this. It lifts character to a loftier grade of being. 
 We learn from it that to make men is a nobler 
 achievement than to make things. '' A man's life 
 consisteth not in the things which he possesseth." 
 A " McCormick Reaper " is a marvellous inven- 
 tion, but to have trained the boy, McCormick, and 
 steered his life clear of the perils of youth into the 
 solidity of manhood, was a greater thing. . Ruskin 
 says: "It is better to build a beautiful human 
 creature than to build a beautiful dome." Sir 
 Humphry Davy's remark, "My best discovery 
 was Michael Faraday," contained a principle of 
 all the nobler uses of life in beneficent activity. 
 Every man has it in him to " discover " another 
 man. Insular living is obsolete. It belonged to 
 the age of the cloister and the hermitage. Yet 
 character as contracted and monotonous as that 
 of the monastery may grow from the concentration 
 of moral sensibilities on things, to the neglect of 
 men. 
 
 27. Every young man, therefore, before he falls 
 into ruts of materialistic living, should ask him- 
 self : " Where is the brother man whom I can help 
 to be or to do the thing he was made for?" Find 
 a lodgement for your thought in something whicli 
 
172 My Note-Book. 
 
 can think. When you have found it, make a bee- 
 line for it. Do not dally with preliminaries. Some 
 men spend their lives in getting ready. Let not 
 the evening sun leave you where the morning sun 
 found you. Set something to working, on the 
 spur of the moment, though it be but an ejacula- 
 tory prayer, towards the end of transfusing your 
 life into another life. You thus put yourself en 
 rapport with the whole illimitable network of spir- 
 itual agencies which fills the universe. You 
 become one of the powers of the air and the land 
 and the sea and the untraversed spaces. 
 
 28. Another auxiliary of conscience in the con- 
 duct of life is a certain blending of emotive force 
 with self-mastery. It creates that balance of inten- 
 sity and solidity which is essential to the best type 
 of working power. Held under tribute to a good 
 conscience, it reduplicates the force of that as a 
 power of control. It transforms the advices of 
 conscience into decrees. 
 
 29. Do w^e not find among the emphatic men of 
 the world a class whose first impression upon us is 
 that of their intensity ? They are not merely men 
 of impetus ; they are that and more. They have 
 resources which seem as if moved from under- 
 ground. The intensity which they put into their 
 life's work resembles the still, red heat of kindled 
 anthracite. Often they are silent men. But their 
 thinking goes out to other men in action, which 
 makes them involuntary leaders. From men of 
 this class come seers of distant truths an 1 pioneers 
 
Conscience and its Allies. 173 
 
 of coming revolutions. Whatever their life's work 
 is, they take it up as if they were made for it only. 
 They do it with a grand self-abandonment. 
 
 30. On further acquaintance with them, the 
 men now referred to disclose to us, in alliance 
 with their intensity, a self-collection which gives 
 them weight and poise. Their will-power is put 
 to service primarily in self-control. Many are 
 great in will-power towards other men. They are 
 full of will ; that is, wil-ful. But the class now 
 under review are great in will-power, in the form of 
 self-mastery. By sheer weight of character and 
 singleness of aim, they hold well in hand their 
 impetus. They do not lose their balance in the 
 rapids of affairs. They live a solid central life. 
 Centrifugal and centripetal forces offset each 
 other and keep them clear of tangents. Their or- 
 bits are planetary, not cometary. Men call them 
 level-headed, and say of them : " We always know 
 where to find them." 
 
 31. It is marvellous how promptly other men 
 call men of this balanced character to leadership 
 in emergencies. They are always in demand in 
 the making of history. They always have the 
 right of way. We call them to represent us in 
 Church and State. We never give them instruc- 
 tions. AVe should as soon think of giving instruc- 
 tions to sun-dials. Their thought is our vote. 
 
 32. In the published account of the catastrophe 
 on the Eastern Railroad at Revere, some years ago, 
 it was said that there was one man who sprang 
 
174 My Note-Book. 
 
 unbidden to the post of control. In the horrors 
 and agonies of the scene, he was the only man who 
 was master of circumstances and of himself. He 
 alone " knew Avhat to do next." Nobody knew 
 who he w^as, or whence he came. He had no offi- 
 cial authority. But he took authority, as by right 
 of the strongest. He said to this man, '-'- Go," and 
 he went ; and he said to that man, " Do this," and 
 he did it. By common consent, the awestricken 
 crowd turned to him as the born leader of them 
 all. He possessed that rare proportion of emotive 
 force and self-government which gives control of 
 other men in crises. 
 
 On a limited scale this illustrates the style of 
 manhood always demanded in the making of his- 
 tory. The success of such men is foreordained. 
 It was written in the decree of their creation. 
 
 33. This kind of intense yet consolidated char- 
 acter becomes imperial in its command of men and 
 its subjection of events, when in consecrated alli- 
 ance with a good conscience. It gives to Christian 
 character depth and breadth and a huge momen- 
 tum. It redoubles in appearance the amount of 
 conscience : lifts it above pettifogging scruples ; 
 holds it clear of popular superstitions ; and gives 
 it a propelling force in the government of men, 
 which has the steadiness and stillness of the 
 planets. In great religious awakenings, such men 
 know how to be progressive without running wild. 
 They know how to be conservative without block- 
 ing the way. 
 
Conscience and its Allies. 175 
 
 34. Other things being equal, ch-aracter made 
 up of bahmced opposites is the style of manhood 
 which in varying degrees Christianity tends to 
 develop. Christianity has a wonderful command 
 of proportion in the making of a man. According 
 to the amount of character which each man's na- 
 ture can carry, it puts the two elements of force 
 and weight in even poise into men of average abil- 
 ities. Under its inspiration, the best work of the 
 world is done by men of sense rather than by men 
 of genius. 
 
 35. The moral sense finds a capital ally in the 
 sense of personal honor. So high has this virtue 
 ranked among civilized graces that it has sometimes 
 usurped the place of conscience. Men of noble 
 birth have made it a substitute for religious faith. 
 When Lord Chesterfield was inquired of what was 
 his religious faith, he replied: '-I am an English 
 gentleman." The germinating of this virtue is 
 one of the first premonitions which boyhood feels 
 of coming manhood. Often it takes precedence of 
 conscientious principle. The dialect of the play- 
 ground has coined awoi'd for it, — "honor-bright." 
 Even thieves proverbially cling to it when all other 
 virtues have taken flight. 
 
 The design of God in interweaving this prin- 
 ciple with the fibres of our moral being in such 
 close affinity with conscience appears to be to 
 furnish an auxiliary inspiration to its judgments 
 where they are obscure, and an auxiliary force 
 where their autlioritv is weak. The resultant 
 
176 My Note-Book. 
 
 working of the two allies often is to tone up the 
 whole man to a loftier ideal of character and of 
 conduct. 
 
 36. Debility in the sense of honor is the moral 
 disease most frequently charged upon the charac- 
 ter of otherwise conscientious men. In nothing 
 else is the popular criticism of Christian profes- 
 sions so severe. Men say of a certain Christian 
 believer, representative of a class : " He is a pious 
 man ; but he will do mean things. His religion is 
 of coarse grain. He has the gift of prayer, but a 
 tongue as glib in coloring the facts in a trade. He 
 will not tell lies, but he tells very corpulent truths. 
 He is not a thief, but men like to have things in 
 writing when they have dealings with him." 
 
 37. Cynical criticism is never just. But it is 
 often sprinkled with iotas of truth which a man 
 who is scrupulous in the point of honor will not 
 ignore. In real life, up to the limit of his culture 
 a thorough-bred Christian is a thorough-bred gen- 
 tleman. He cannot do a mean thing. He will not 
 equivocate. He will not hang his veracity on the 
 difference between the singular and the plural of a 
 word. His moral sense knows no distinction be- 
 tween his word and his oath. His oath at the 
 Custom-house is as sacred as in the witness-box. 
 In either, he is not afflicted with an intermittent 
 memory. Conscience regulates his silences as 
 honorably as his speech. In secret before God, 
 the meanness of sin augments the burden of his 
 sorrow. 
 
Conscience and its Allies. 177 
 
 38. It is in the fine j)oii^ts of character chiefly 
 that real life calls for the alliance of conscience 
 with the sense of honor. This is a rough woi'ld. 
 Sin is innately coaree-grained and full of gnarls. 
 The usages which it popularizes are degrading. 
 The civilization which it creates, if left to itself, 
 rots. Treacherous and obscure and malign powers 
 are in the air of a fallen world. In such a world 
 life tempts the moral sense to a perilous stretch of 
 fibre. If a Christian is true to his conscientious 
 convictions, he must do many odd and some unre- 
 spectable things, as the world goes. Jesus Christ 
 did such things. The toughest trial of a young 
 man's faith often is the loss of social caste to which 
 obedience to his sense of right subjects him. 
 
 39. Moreover, the morals of the world are a vari- 
 able quantity. A sea-captain once sought pastoral 
 advice upon an adventure which had been more 
 satisfactory to his purse than to his Methodist con- 
 science. The contents of his purse burned in his 
 pocket. When he had told liis story, the pastor 
 inquired : " Do men of your profession commonly 
 approve of such transactions ? " " Oh yes ; " he 
 replied, " the morals of the sea are not the morals 
 of the shore." Again came the inquiry : " Did you 
 ever tell your wife and children the story you have 
 told me ? " He was dumb. A few months after- 
 wards he wrote that he had made restitution. He 
 could look now his children in the eye. 
 
 In such a bewildering labyrinth of right and 
 wrong as that which commerce has built on a chaos 
 
178 My Note-Booh. 
 
 of truths and half-truths and falsehoods and false 
 silences, a man needs every refining and ennobling 
 principle which he can command, to save his con- 
 science from degeneracy and his whole character 
 from caving in. 
 
 40. In this point of honor often appears the 
 auxiliary force of a liberal education to a good con- 
 science. It was observed in our Civil War that 
 recent graduates and undergraduates of Yale and 
 Harvard colleges, men of gentle birth and delicate 
 build, though never under fire before, would stand 
 a hotter fire without flinching than robust men of 
 heavier weight and tougher brawn. Certain sen- 
 sibilities inherited from scholarly fathers, and 
 develoj)ed in the still alcoves of libraries, made 
 their sense of honor indomitable in its fidelity to 
 the right. Such men died by the score, to whom 
 it never occurred that they could skulk. 
 
 41. The Duke of ^Yellington observed the same 
 thing at Waterloo, in the sons of the English 
 nobility. When ruder men sneered at their deli- 
 cate complexion and feminine fingers, he answered : 
 '• Yes ; but the puppies fight well." A cultivated 
 sense of honor has a fineness of vision and wiry 
 tenacity which are often the very things that con- 
 science needs to enlighten its judgments and make 
 its authority supreme. The blunt thrust of the 
 moral sense needs, on occasions, to be re-enforced 
 by the suave impulsions of self-respect. Exigencies 
 and surprises occur in which it is well if a man is 
 too proud to smirch his soul. 
 
ConscieMce and its Allies. 179 
 
 42. That was a thing to be remembered and 
 revered through all time, which Algernon Sydney 
 wrote to his father from his dungeon, a few days 
 before he left it for the scaffold : " I have ever had 
 it in my mind, that when God should cast me into 
 such condition that I cannot save my life but by 
 doing an indecent thing. He shows me that the 
 time has come when I should resign it." The 
 world will never take the name of such a man in 
 vain. Yet ever}^ man of rovuided and finished 
 Christian character is such a rounded and linished 
 gentleman. 
 
 43. The principle of the education of the moral 
 sense, to which allusion is elsewhere made, is often 
 illustrated in modern experience. The Rev. John 
 Newton, to whom also reference has been made, 
 was converted to spiritual Christianity before he 
 had abandoned the slave-trade. He says that on 
 his last voyage to the African coast for a cargo, he 
 " experienced sweeter and more frequent hours of 
 Divine communion than he had ever before known." 
 Again he writes of his infamous occupation : " No 
 other employment affords greater advantages for 
 promoting the life of God in the soul, especially 
 to one who has command of a ship " I This is the 
 testimony of a slave-trader. Yet the piety of John 
 Newton in the record is scarcely more questionable 
 than that of St. Paul. 
 
 44. The appalling contradiction is to be recon- 
 ciled by the same principle which interprets the 
 ethical mysteries of the Old Testament. The 
 
180 My Note-Booh. 
 
 moral sense of England under which John New- 
 ton was born and bred took no cognizance of 
 the slave-trade as a sin. It was legitimate com- 
 merce. English law authorized it. The English 
 navy furnished consorts for its protection. Eng- 
 lish statesmen participated in the profits of it. 
 English bishops blessed it as a missionary enter- 
 prise for the Christianizing of Africa. The national 
 conscience made no protest against its barbarity. 
 Only an individual, here and there, had discovered 
 its hideous depravity ; and at him the people 
 wagged their heads, saying : " He is a madman." 
 Ships engaged in the slave-trade often were chris- 
 tened with Biblical names. The vessel in which 
 Sir John Hawkins brought a cargo of slaves from 
 Africa to the West Indies in 1564 bore the name 
 '' Jesus." Its commander attributed his mercan- 
 tile success to " Almighty God . . . who never 
 suffers His elect to perish" I 
 
 In that morally putrescent atmosphere John 
 Newton had lived from his birth. His moral sense 
 was drugged. It gave out delirious judgments ; 
 with slow and stertorous respiration it came into 
 spiritual life. He wrote hymns for Christian wor- 
 ship which the Church sings to-day, before he found 
 out the depth of the moral abyss in which his 
 moral nature was rotting. 
 
 45. The same principle explains some of the 
 phenomena of conscientious persecution. An un- 
 enlightened but an honest conscience founded the 
 Inquisition. Torquemada looked unflinchingly on 
 
Conscience and ifi< Allies. 181 
 
 the agonies of his victims on the rack ; but all the 
 while he wore beneath his under vest a chain-shirt 
 filled with metallic prongs turned inward upon his 
 living flesh. To save his own soul he endured tor- 
 ture equal perhaps to that Avhich he inflicted to 
 save the soul of a heretic. Philip the Second, 
 after capping the climax of judicial tortures in the 
 extermination of heresy, endured for months equal 
 agonj^, in which he died like a saint. 
 
 46. Fearful are the contortions of the human 
 conscience, and infinite is the condescension of God 
 in its disciplinary training. The enormities which 
 it perpetrates, when left to the alternate stupor and 
 exasperation of a fallen stake, give us some hint of 
 what it might have been and might have done if the 
 way of salvation had been thrust upon mankind 
 im[)ulsively, without a preliminary process of 
 moral discipline. 
 
 47. The first thing requisite to the recovery of 
 a fallen race was to create a conscience which could 
 take in and appropriate a redemptive economy, 
 without perverting it to a more appalling and hope- 
 less downfall. This was the work of time. In 
 this, as in all other works of God, there is a con- 
 spicuous absence of high pressure. God seems 
 never to be in haste. No magnitude of evil crowds 
 His plans to their completion before their time. 
 '' Rapidity of movement," observes Mr. Gladstone, 
 " was no part of the providential design." Ages 
 must come and go. Generation must hand over 
 to generation the fruits of di.scipline through a 
 
182 My Note-Book. 
 
 long line of moral inheritance before the fulness 
 of time could appear. That educational history 
 the Old Testament records. 
 
 48. A good conscience is good sense. It is 
 level-headed in its judgments. Tt limits a man's 
 responsibility to practicable things. Not only 
 that, but to things practicable to him. St. Paul 
 in his casuistry to the Corinthians puts under the 
 sovereignty of conscience the broad principle of 
 common sense. When Hortensius invites Marcus 
 to meet Aurelius at a banquet, if Marcus happens 
 to be a Christian, the Apostle would not counsel 
 him to provoke the contempt of the pagan gentle- 
 man whose guest he is, by asking where the escu- 
 lents on the table came from. He virtually advises : 
 " Behave like the gentleman that you are ; act 
 like a man of good sense and ask no questions for 
 conscience' sake. Where your meat and figs and 
 wine came from is not your business ; it is the 
 business of your host. It belongs to his conscience, 
 not to yours." 
 
 49. The apostolic principle of the limitations 
 of conscience covers an immense variety of ques- 
 tions of Christian casuistry in all ages. It settles 
 all those cases of scruple respecting food and 
 drink and purchase and sale which are involved 
 inextricably in organic sin. To go beyond or 
 under that principle in the application of scruples 
 would plunge us into an interminable jungle of in- 
 quiries in which conscience would become a Jesuit. 
 We should soon find ourselves questioning whether 
 
Conscience and its Allies. 183 
 
 we may eat or drink or wear or buy or sell or 
 give or barter anything respecting which anybody 
 has committed sin. We should be in the plight 
 of the Hindoo devotee to wliom animal life was so 
 sacred that he chose starvation rather than to drink 
 a drop of water in which the microscope had dis- 
 covered to him the gambols of a thousand animal- 
 cules invisible to the naked eye. 
 
 50. A caution which inexperienced piety often 
 needs is that we should avoid so putting things 
 that conscientious scruples shall have the look, to 
 others, of religious pettifogging. Frederick Rob- 
 ertson has emphasized the fact that " scrupulosity 
 about laws positive generally slides into laxity 
 about the eternal laws of right and wrong." This 
 is tliat infirmity of a weak conscience which sub- 
 jects good men to the charge of cant. No other 
 sign of a canting piety is so common or so sure as 
 a queasy conscience in little things balanced by a 
 lax conscience in great things. But in a great 
 right mind, the moral sense is the faculty of 
 supreme dignity. 
 
 Under Christian enlightenment it supports the 
 dignity of Christian conduct in a multitude of 
 things otherwise liable to the world's contempt. 
 
 51. Sin in a good man's consciousness may never 
 be all that his severe self-judgment declares it to 
 be. It has offsets and alleviations. Even its tem- 
 porary conquests of the protesting will are not 
 what they seem to be to suspended faith. The 
 moral sense, enlightened and balanced by good 
 
184 My Note-Book. 
 
 sense, never plunges a good man into despair and 
 leaves him there. 
 
 Washington Allston was once afflicted with a 
 distressing nervous malad}^ In that condition he 
 was on one occasion tempted b}^ an incontroUable 
 impulse to profane speech. The reaction of course 
 overwhelmed him with remorse. Probably God 
 did not judge the artist's moral defeat as he him- 
 self did. Coleridge, bringing his philosophy to 
 bear on the incident, very aptly said : " Allston 
 should have said, ' Nothing is I but my will.' " If 
 he did not deliberately will the wrong, it was no 
 more sin than the profaneness of a sailor's parrot. 
 Good sense should not permit conscience to degen- 
 erate into a detective, eager to ferret out the secret 
 vagaries of a sick man's brain. 
 
 52. The foregoing incident suggests also that 
 there may be strata of virtuous character which a 
 man's own mental introspection does not turn up 
 to the light of his own consciousness. He may be 
 a better man than he seems to himself to be. Bun- 
 yan's Pilgrim would have been a better man if he 
 had discovered sooner than he did the grace which 
 was germinant within him. Bunyan himself would 
 have been saved from great suffering and from 
 some sin, if his conscience had been more health- 
 fully instructed and mollified b}" good sense. His 
 "bell-ringing," of which he accused himself as a 
 sin with such savage fidelity, was not to the com- 
 mon sense of men a damnable crime. Yet he 
 damned himself for it without mercy. There is a 
 
Conscience and its Allies. 185 
 
 law of unconscious virtue which a delicately trained 
 conscience needs to apply to its lurid flashes of 
 self-conviction. Character, in both extremes, seems 
 to hide itself from self-inspection. In the long 
 run, charity is more truthful than severity. Cen- 
 soriousness even to oneself is sure to be false in 
 some of its judgments. 
 
 Oberlin, it is reported, once fell u^^on his knees 
 in a remorseful prayer, because he had despatched 
 a letter in which he had neglected to cross the 
 ^'s and dot the z's accurately. Ought he not to 
 have known better than to picture God to his 
 imagination as an irascible writing-master on the 
 watch for blunders of chirography ? 
 
 54. The best development of the Christian 
 graces, next to that of our Lord, is that which may 
 be distinguished as the Pauline development. With 
 profound sensibility it unites a sylvan strength 
 which bears without despondency honest convic- 
 tions of sin. 
 
 In their private portraitures of sin, our fathers 
 were sometimes morbid and extravagant. They 
 dealt excessively with superlatives. Not that they 
 exaggerated guilt in itself considered. No lan- 
 guage can do that. But guilt never exists to be 
 in itself considered. It exists in the concrete, and 
 in the concrete it is never in this world absolute 
 and unmitigated. Is a bad man ever as bad as he 
 can be ? Guilt in its finished and supreme malig- 
 nity exists nowhere but in the world of despair. 
 
 55. The self-convictions of a conscientious man 
 
186 My Note-Book. 
 
 should be balanced by the principle that his religion 
 has something yet to do for him if his mental habit 
 is not one of gladness. A good conscience is a 
 conscience at rest. Mental suffering has no place 
 in the Christian theory of holy living. Purgatorial 
 suffering has no more right to be in this world 
 than in the next. Joy, in varying degree from 
 peace to ecstasy, is the Christian life. Song is its 
 natural language. There was a natural ground- 
 Avork for that provision which an Italian nobleman 
 made for an unintermittent and unending anthem 
 of praise in the cha^Dcl of his palace. This is a 
 symbol of St. John's dramatic representations of 
 Heaven, in which the redeemed are occupied chiefly 
 in holy song. Their moral nature, even when 
 exercised upon tlie stupendous mystery of God's 
 retributive decrees, is exalted and kept in even 
 balance of its sensibilities, by the service of thanks- 
 giving. 
 
 b^. Among the balanced virtues which an edu- 
 cated conscience fosters are those of a profound 
 reverence for the supernatural, and freedom from 
 popular superstitions. A Christian believer thor- 
 oughly trained in the good sense of the Scriptures 
 is not given to Biblical sortilege in his devotional 
 habits. He does not hold conference with the dead 
 at light-footed tables with light-headed sitters 
 around them. He never sees ghosts, or, like Tal- 
 fourd, he sees too many to be overawed by them. 
 He does not fear to set sail on a Friday, nor to 
 dine with thirteen at the table. He does not fore- 
 
Conscience and its Allies. 187 
 
 bode a death in the family if a dog howls at mid- 
 night, nor think that ill luck is in the air if he sees 
 the new moon over the left shoulder. He does not, 
 as a Boston merchant did, kick every tree on the 
 way to his store to insure good luck for the day. 
 He does not go back and start anew on his morning 
 walk, as Dr. j4)hnson did, if he began it with his 
 left foot foremost. He does not nail horse-shoes 
 over the door of his dwelling to keep Avitches at 
 bay. Believers of the '' level-headed " conscience, 
 by keeping their faith clear of such vagaries, make 
 religion respected by making it respectable. 
 
VIII. 
 
 OUR SACRED BOOKS. 
 
 1. Every great religion which has created epochs 
 in history has been the religion of a Book. Of 
 such historic religions, Christianity is the oldest, 
 the purest, the most prolific of best things, and the 
 most enduring. To-day it is the only one which 
 has a future. Its Sacred Books contain the oldest 
 cohesive literature extant. They contain the only 
 credible narrative of the origin of man, of the 
 infancy of the race, of the septenary division of 
 time, of the introduction of sin, of the cause and 
 the moral significance of death, and of the prom- 
 ise of redemption. No other sacred records pre- 
 sent a respectable outline of the destiny of the 
 race from the birth of the first man to the death 
 of the last man. 
 
 2. Our holy books are signalized by the evidences 
 they contain that their teachings are to be dissem- 
 inated chiefly by oral discourse. The religions of 
 the world may be classified as the religions which 
 can and the religions which cannot be preached. 
 The religion of the Bible is pre-eminently one of 
 
 j the former class. Christianity has created the pul- 
 pit. It addresses the reason and the conscience 
 188 
 
Ou7' Sacred Books. 189 
 
 of man. It asks no credence without proof, asserts 
 no claim which does not commend itself to the 
 common sense and the moral sense of mankind. 
 By these instrumentalities and auxiliaries it i)rom- 
 ises to make conquest of the world. 
 
 3. Four features of the Bible adapt it so forcibly 
 to the purpose as to give intimations of the fact 
 that its system of thought is to be propagated by 
 the pulpit. One consists of the correspondences 
 which it reveals to the necessities of the human 
 soul and the intuitions of the human conscience. 
 The second is a remarkable balancing of related 
 truths and welding of half-truths, by which the 
 most intense conceptions which the mind of man 
 can grasp may be enforced without self-contra- 
 dictions. The third is the frequency and the force 
 with which it expresses truth in laconic forms. 
 The fourth is the fact that it is pervaded by an 
 intense personality from beginning to end. Every 
 practised preacher has discovered that sucli ma- 
 terials have a superlative fitness to be proclaimed 
 by the magnetism of the human voice. An illus- 
 trious churchman of England has remarked upon 
 the adaptations of the Bil)le to pul)lic speech, that 
 it is the only Book extant from which quotatio7i is 
 always pertinent. If it had been constructed solely j 
 for the purpose of furnishing to th6 pulpit a the- j 
 saurus of texts and themes and other materials of 
 sermons, it could scarcely have been conceived 
 more wisely and put together more skilfully. 
 
 4. One of the collateral evidences of the Divine 
 
190 My Note-Book. 
 
 authority of the Scriptures is their political wis- 
 dom. For writings not designed to teach political 
 economy, they are wondrously prolific of ideas 
 fundamental to the building of States. In this 
 respect they are unequalled by any other sacred 
 books known in history. 
 
 Liberty as a right of the individual is a corollary 
 from the Christian idea of personal responsibility. 
 Heathen theories of civil government have never 
 made human servitude a wrong in itself considered. 
 The principle of federation as a bond of union 
 among States and of alliance among nations is a 
 Biblical idea. Jonathan MayheAv of Boston in our 
 colonial revolution suggested it as a derivative 
 from the fellowship of churches enjoined by 
 Christ. The principle of a graded judiciary was 
 first announced incidentally to the government 
 of nomadic tribes under the leadership of Moses. 
 The substitution of peaceful expedients in place of 
 war in the abolition of organic wrongs is of Script- 
 ural origin. The Hebrew lawgiver initiated it in 
 legislation upon slavery and polygamy. Bloodless 
 revolutions and tranquil reforms are silent trophies 
 of Christianity. Serfdom in England has never to 
 this day been abolished by act of Parliament. The 
 still force of Biblical ideas has stifled it so gently 
 that English legislation forgot to iiay that it should 
 exist no longer. A finer example does not appear 
 in history of the modus operandi by which the 
 ; Christian Scriptm^es work out revolution in human 
 ofovernments. 
 
Our Sacred Books. 191 
 
 Above all, that fundamental principle on which 
 all durable States are built — that national virtue 
 is the groundwork of national perpetuity — has 
 never been wrought into the building of great 
 nations, except among Christianized races. Politi- 
 cal economy has never projected it into national 
 life. Civilization unevangelized has never lifted a 
 people to its level. Experience of the rise and fall 
 of nations has never taught the wisdom of it as a 
 practical principle of government. Plato thought 
 it, but he did not persuade a Grecian State of the 
 size of a Swiss canton to build on it as a founda- 
 tion of national renown. Only where and when 
 and so far as the holy books of Christianity have 
 made their way into popular thinking has so pro- 
 found yet so plain a principle either created a 
 great nation or saved it from decay. 
 
 5. It is a fact of most solemn import to mod- 
 ern Republics, that the Bible nowhere recognizes 
 democracy as a legitimate form of government, 
 except as it is the superstructure of a Theocracy. 
 The theory of self-government by a people in their 
 own natural right finds no authority in the Script- 
 ures. Advocates of monarchical forms have the 
 Biblical argument in their favor. So far as this, — 
 that the noblest ideal of government must be cen- 
 tred in the sentiment of loi/alt//. And loyalty finds 
 its natural centre in a person. Despotism finds its 
 centre in the person of tlie autocrat. The moie 
 nearly an autocrat approaches the dignity of deity 
 in the reverence of his subjects, the more consonant 
 
192 My Note-Book. 
 
 with Biblical ideas is his right to reign. Constitu- 
 tional monarchy finds an object of loyally, in a 
 lame way, in the person of the constitutional sov- 
 ereign. The rectitude and the stability of all 
 human governments depend on the allegiance of 
 the people to some personal representative of Law. 
 Loyalty of personal beings to impersonal Law is 
 an absurdity. It is reverence of the superior for 
 the inferior. It is obedience of a living person to 
 a lifeless thing. A Republic must find its centre 
 of the loyal sentiment in the Person of the living 
 God. Neither the history of the Old Testament 
 nor the preachings of the New recognize popular 
 governments without the theocratic element under- 
 neath. Such is the political wisdom of our sacred 
 oracles. 
 
 6. A similar evidence of the Divine origin of 
 the Scriptures appears in a feature to which refer- 
 ence has been already made — the fidelity with 
 which they disclose the secret qualities and uncon- 
 scious tendencies of human nature. The amaze- 
 ment of the woman of Samaria at our Lord's knowl- 
 edge of her unwritten biography is an example of 
 the incisive force of the Bible as detective of human 
 character in all times. The storied personages of 
 the Old Testament are antitypes of men as real 
 life discovers them in all ages. No other volume 
 in all literature is so human in its disclosures of 
 man, and at the same time so Godlike in its revela- 
 tion of God. The junction of the two is a pre- 
 monition of the Day of Judgment. Man does not 
 
Our Sacred Books. 193 
 
 know himself, except through some sort of contact 
 with the Mind of God. The indignation often 
 expressed by hearers of the Gospel, at what they 
 suppose to be intentional personalities of the 
 pulpit, springs naturally from the preaching of a 
 revealed religion. A revelation of the thoughts 
 of God starts the retributive machinery of the 
 human conscience. 
 
 7. Many of the objections to the ethics of the 
 Old Testament spring from ignoring the necessity 
 of an education of the human conscience in the 
 early ages. The Old Testament is mainly a record 
 of a nation's birth and of its training in moral 
 sense. There are degrees and varieties of con- 
 science. The age, the race, the nation, the tribe, 
 has its conscience. Men who appreciate well the 
 education of a national intellect are ofteii slow to 
 recognize the development of a national conscience. 
 Yet the ethics of the Old Testament depend on 
 that stage of the national history which it records. 
 It is unphilosophical to judge the moral sense of 
 one who represents the beginning of that process 
 of moral discipline, by that of one who represents 
 its end. A Hebrew conscience and a Christian 
 conscience may be separated by two thousand 
 years of spiritual training. St. Paul may have 
 taught as elementary principles ideas wdiich w^ere 
 not intellectually conceivable by the mind of 
 Abraham. 
 
 8. The ethics of the Old Testament find their 
 toughest knot in the command of God to Abraham 
 
194 Mij Note-Book. 
 
 to immolate his son. That command probably 
 met with no recoil wliatever in the moral sense of 
 the patriarch. His parental affection was shocked. 
 His patriarchal hopes and ambitions were shattered. 
 But the story bears no trace of moral reprobation 
 of the deed. Parental sacrifice of children was 
 one of the established customs of the age. It was 
 done in the discharge of a sacerdotal function. 
 In the ethics of the time it was a parental preroga- 
 tive. It was founded on the same principle as 
 that of the sacrifices of the first brothers of the 
 race — that of consecrating to God the best and 
 the best beloved. We do not know that the act of 
 God forbidding it had an}^ precedent in the patri- 
 arch's experience. The Avhole bearing of the vic- 
 tim also gives no evidence of any sense of the right 
 of resistance to it as an act of barbarism. That 
 was a barbarous age. The conscience of the age 
 was in twilight. Men saw spiritual things only 
 as by the light of a solitary morning star. 
 
 9. It is absurd, therefore, to hold the moral 
 sense of the Chaldean patriarch to the same vision 
 of right and wrong which four thousand years of 
 moral training have revealed to us. Under his 
 moral conditions and with his moral precedents he 
 would have been guiltless in the commission of a 
 deed for v.diich the Commonwealth of Massachu- 
 setts has incarcerated a man for life as a maniac. 
 So vast are the diversities contingent on the edu- 
 cation of conscience by the inherited discipline of 
 ages. 
 
Our Sacred Books. 195 
 
 10. It is startling, yet refreshing, to note in 
 the Biblical treatment of suffering, the boldness 
 with which it is attributed to the agency of God. 
 We find no adroit concealment or disguise of the 
 Divine Hand. We discover no obtrusion of second 
 causes to relieve the appalling facts of history. 
 The way of science is to evade the name of God ; 
 the way of revelation is to proclaim and exult in 
 it. Even when tragic story '^ makes both the ears 
 of men to tingle," the more fearful it is, the more 
 emphatically does inspiration attribute it to the 
 plan of God. A strain of theocratic sovereignty 1 
 runs through all the teachings of the Bible respect- / 
 ing the origin of suffering. It never happens ; 
 it is inflicted. It never springs up in a night ; it 
 is foreordained. God thought of it ages before 
 it came. He cared enough for the sufferer to 
 think of him, to single him out and individualize 
 him from uncounted millions ; to call him by 
 name, to measure his necessities, to plan the out- 
 line of his destiny, and to select and arrange his 
 appointed discipline ; and this long before he was 
 born. Every sufferer in this " hurt world " is \ 
 enclosed in a golden network of eternal and benig- ) 
 nant decrees. 
 
 11. The treatment of the sorrowing by our holy 
 books presents, in one respect, a striking contrast 
 to that suggested by the noblest poetry in unin- 
 spired literature. Our great poets, except when 
 they write under the inspiration of Biblical ideas, 
 direct us for comfort to the works of Nature. 
 
196 My Note-Book. 
 
 They celebrate in lofty song the forests and the 
 rivers and the silent skies, for their tranquillizing 
 influence upon us, in the agitations of a great sor- 
 row. They tell us that " Nature never did betray 
 the heart that loved her." But coming down to 
 the hard facts of life, who of us ever found it so ? 
 Are there not deeps, and "lower deep," beneath 
 the billows of a great affliction into which Nature 
 cannot follow us ? At her best, she is passionless 
 and unresponsive. We feel the absence of reci- 
 procity. She hears no prayer. We interrogate her 
 wisdom, and she tells us, " It is law." We throw 
 ourselves upon her mercy, and she responds, " It 
 is law." She knovfs no deity but Law. When we 
 are rocking on the surges of intolerable suffering, 
 what do we care for Law ? Law is timely and at 
 home in our laboratories and observatories ; but in 
 our darkened homes, and in the awful solitude 
 which makes the packed streets a Avilderness to us, 
 we need some other friend than Nature. Yet 
 Poetry has no other for us, except when she re- 
 hearses the simple Biblical hymns which we teach 
 to our children, and sing at our morning and even- 
 ing prayers. 
 
 12. Suffering is elevated in dignity by the 
 Biblical representations of it as one of the Divine 
 instruments consecrated to man's redemption. It 
 is not an isolated anomaly. It is not a mystery, 
 the solution of which we must find, or seek and 
 not find, in its own impenetrable darkness. It has 
 part in a grand alliance of beneficent agencies. 
 
Our Sacred Books. 197 
 
 Not merely is it that siiif ering is so ruled and over- 
 ruled by a strategic Providence that glimpses of 
 benevolent design can be extorted from its history. 
 This mystery of pain is a r/ift which takes rank in < 
 dignity with the gift of prayer. It proclaims eter- 
 nal purposes of which a risen and ascended Saviour 
 is the culmination. 
 
 13. The Scriptural view of the discipline of pain 
 reaches its climax of dignity in the fact that it was 
 one of the factors, perhaps the chief, in the personal 
 discipline of Christ for his redemptive mission. 
 The Bible brings afflicted men and women into a 
 very sacred alliance, in its revelation of Him as a 
 Man of Sorrows. What they suffer He suffers. 
 " In all their affliction He was afflicted." Occult 
 emanations of sympathy from the heart of our Lord 
 are going into all the homes where believing men 
 and women mourn. That sympathy is vibrating 
 on the air the world over. 
 
 14. When Isaiah's mysterious visions of a suf- 
 fering Messiah were uttered, there was not a blind 
 asylum, nor a retreat for the insane, nor a school 
 for deaf-mutes, nor a hospital for incurable invalids, 
 nor a home for orphans, nor a refuge for the fallen, 
 in the world. Sufferers were deemed the objects of 
 Divine desertion. The wisest of men placed their 
 dead in the tomb, or on the funeral pyre, doubting, 
 as Cicero did when his only daughter Althea died, 
 whether the doctrine of the immortality of the soul 
 Avere a truth or a myth. It was on the ear of such a 
 world that the words of Messianic promise first fell. 
 
198 My Note-Booh. 
 
 15. We shall the better realize the dignity they 
 give to our sacred records by reproducing a single 
 scene in our Saviour's life. It concentrates into 
 one picture the whole spirit of the Bible in its 
 treatment of human sorrow. 
 
 When his friend Lazarus sickened and died, He 
 was five and twenty miles away, beyond the Jor- 
 dan. He was busj^ preparing the minds of His 
 obtuse disciples for their approaching separation 
 from Him. Yet in the distance He felt^ as a 
 burden on the quivering air, the scene which was 
 going on at Bethan}^ He needed no telephone to 
 tell Him of its progress and its fatal ending. His 
 own great heart was conscious of its undulations, 
 as it thrilled along the electric chords of His sym- 
 pathy with the suffering. He drew the sorrows of 
 the weeping sisters silently into the recesses of 
 His own soul. He brooded over them there as a 
 guarded treasure till the hour came when all was 
 over. Then, as strong souls in affliction will when 
 they have something to do for others, He laid 
 aside his own heartache and said to His mystified 
 disciples : " Our friend sleeps ; I go to wake him." 
 
 16. The Christian Scriptures disclose as no other 
 holy books have ever done, the only credible expla- 
 nation of the phenomenon of death in human his- 
 tory. We experience a relief from the mystery of a 
 natural evil when we discover for it a moral cause. 
 Such a cause the Scriptures reveal for the most 
 appalling of all natural evils. They tell us of its 
 historic origin. They represent it as the fore- 
 
Oiw Sacred Books. 199 
 
 ordained sequence, and the threatened penalty of 
 transgression. It is the symbol of a great catas- 
 trophe. It has a right to be. Something within 
 us responds to it, as just and good in a system of 
 things devised by a holy God for a moral expres- 
 sion of His Mind. So would we have it. In our 
 loftiest moixls of responsive sympathy with the 
 thoughts of God, we see in it a phenomenon of 
 most profound and trutliful meaning. An evil so 
 stupendous as the revolt of a moral world from its 
 loyalty to such a Being ought to be branded by 
 some sign of its exceeding guiltiness. Wisdom 
 and benevolence of staminal force appear in this 
 decree b}^ whicli a world populated by a rebellious 
 race becomes a world of death-beds and graves. 
 
 17. Yet, on the other hand, it is one of the para- ^'^^^^ 
 doxes of Christianit}^ that its sacred books elimi- 
 nate death as a terror from the system of things, 
 as no other religion has ever done. In the natural 
 aspect of it, death is a hideous monstrosity. In 
 the Christian aspect of it, it is an illusion. On 
 the plane of nature only, it is an appalling catas- 
 trophe. On the plane of Christian thought, it is a 
 dream. Approaching it from the side of natural 
 law, we recoil with liorror. Approaching it from 
 the side of Christian promise, behold it is not 
 there ! Where /.v th}^ victory, O Death ? It is one 
 of the common] )laces which still are immense in 
 meaning, tliat death never touches the real man. 
 With tliat which thinks and feels and enjoys and 
 hopes, death has no more to do than it has with 
 
200 My Note-Book. 
 
 God. Look at an Egyptian mummy — is that a 
 man ? Yet it is the only reprisal that death has to 
 boast of. 
 ./ 18. A service of very peculiar nature and not 
 
 y generally known connects the books of our faith 
 
 / with the researches of astronomical science. It is 
 
 well understood by experts in astronomy that a 
 
 '^'^' certain complicated cycle., which should harmonize 
 certain intricate revolutions of the solar system, has 
 been sought for, for centuries. At last it was, till 
 recently, given up as being beyond the reach of 
 human discovery. 
 
 But within a few years an eminent Swiss astron- 
 omer professes to have found the long-sought mar- 
 vel of astronomical science. His researches have 
 been submitted to three distinguished astronomers 
 of the " Royal Academy of Sciences " in Paris. 
 By them it has been pronounced accurate and of 
 practical value. 
 
 19. The interesting fact about this astronomical 
 discovery is that the discoverer was first led to 
 suspect the existence of the cycle, by a study of 
 the symbolic prophecies of Daniel. It is well 
 known that the majority of interpreters have found 
 in those prophecies a period of twenty -three hun- 
 dred years, as the measurement in the prophetic 
 visions, of the time which should elapse between 
 the age of Daniel and the end of the so-called 
 " times of the gentiles " ; in other words, the end 
 of this world. The Swiss astronomer — M. de 
 
 S'^- Cheseaux, by name — is a devout believer in the 
 
Our Sacred Books. 201 
 
 Scriptures. In reading the sym]")olic predictions of 
 Daniel, it occurred to him as a hypothesis that this 
 period of twenty-three centuries might be the cycle 
 so long despaired of by experts in astronomical 
 wisdom. On further investigation by astronomical 
 methods, he found that it was even so. The 
 discovery led to that of several other cycles, all 
 involved in the prophetic computations, and by 
 means of which he was able to solve between 
 thirty and forty astronomical and geographical 
 problems. 
 
 20. He suggests, plausibly, to say the least, 
 the inquiry : " How happened it that a Hebrew 
 prophet, twenty-three centuries in advance of scien- 
 tific discovery, ni<ed that occult cycle in his timing 
 of coming events in the far-distant future ? " If he 
 had conversed with the most eminent astronomers 
 of the age, he could not have learned it from them. 
 They knew nothing of its existence. If he had 
 been himself the most accomplished scientist of 
 the century, he could not have discovered it. 
 There were no astronomical instruments in exist- 
 ence by which the requisite observation could be 
 made. The famed astrology of Chaldea, in which 
 he mai/ have been an expert, knew nothing of it. 
 For twenty-three centuries that ignorance of the 
 learned world has continued, notwithstanding the 
 immense advances in astronomical knowledge and 
 in the improvement of the instruments of the ob- 
 servatory. Yet all the while the mysterious and 
 unknown cycle lay embedded in the symbolic 
 
202 My Note-Book. 
 
 prophecies in actual use by the Hebrew seer. How 
 happened that? Not one only but a system of 
 co-ordinate cycles was made the groundwork of 
 prophetic computations. How came that about ? 
 
 21. The theory of the discoverer is, that a fore- 
 ordained synchronism exists between the move- 
 ments of the solar system and the developments 
 of human history. The chronologies of the two 
 are one. The mind which contrived the one fore- 
 ordained the other. The clock-work of the mate- 
 rial heavens and the clock-work of the history- of 
 Man have been created and wound up by the 
 same Being. So reasons the devout astronomer. 
 Of course, none but proficients in astronomical 
 researches who are also proficients in the interpre- 
 tation of symbolic prophecy can pronounce inde- 
 pendently upon the value of the alleged discoveries. 
 But the conditions attending their announcement 
 entitle them to the consideration of Biblical schol- 
 ars. They place the hallowed books of our religion 
 in very interesting relations to human science. 
 
 22. A question concerning our Divine revela- 
 tion which has been asked through all Christian 
 ages is, Why, in revealing to us so much, has it 
 revealed so little ? Why is its impenetrable silence 
 on many things of which the human mind has 
 intense cravings after knowledge ? 
 
 23. If the earth had no atmosphere, sound could 
 not be audible anywhere on its surface. Beings 
 adjusted to organic life under such conditions 
 might exist here, but speech would be a lost art. 
 
Our Sacred Books. 203 
 
 The whole globe would be engulfed in a silence as 
 profound as if the ocean of air at the bottom of 
 which we live were an ocean of water. This 
 would be a world of deaf-mutes. 
 
 Like such a world often appears the state we 
 live in, of comparative ignorance of another life, 
 and under an absolute embargo upon intercourse 
 with our brethren of the stars. Who of us has 
 not asked of the heavens on a starry night : '' Why 
 is this universe so silent?" Who has not longed 
 to hear the legendary " music of the spheres " ? 
 Why, even in our sacred books, has God revealed 
 so little ? An invisible God w^e can see the neces- 
 sity of, in the nature of things ; but a speechless 
 Deity, with lips close shut to the majority of our 
 questionings — who can solve this mystery ? 
 
 24. Yet some reasons we can see for God's 
 silence, especially in a revelation by a book. For 
 instance, it hardly needs saying that the Bible is 
 silent upon many things because they are not 
 essential to its religious purposes. We are content 
 with other literature if it is true to its object. 
 That a poem is no more than a poem, a history 
 nothing else than a history, a drama no other than 
 a drama, we do not reckon as defects in their 
 construction. By the same test we estimate the 
 Scriptures. It is no fault in a revelation that 
 it does not disclose undiscovered sciences, or the 
 histories of other worlds. That Moses knew noth- 
 ing of the telephone is no blemish in the Book 
 of Genesis. That St. John did not discover from 
 
204 My Note-Book. 
 
 Patmos the belts of Saturn is no defect in the 
 Apocalypse. 
 
 25. This principle of fitness to its aim rules out 
 of the Bible the greater part of the sum of human 
 knowledge. That it is a Bible, and not an ency- 
 clopedia, is its first excellence. One of the 
 renowned encyclopedias of Europe contains two 
 hundred and twenty quarto volumes. A single 
 Chinese work extends to five hundred volumes. 
 For a revelation from God we need not an alcove 
 of volumes like these, but a book which will give 
 us the maxhnum of substance in the minimum of 
 bulk. We need a portable book. We need a book 
 which a child can read and revere as a mother's 
 keepsake. We need a volume which will not 
 weary by its immensity the eye of the aged or the 
 ear of the dying. 
 
 26. The Scriptures are silent upon many things, 
 also, because they are only matters of curiosity 
 or of marvel. We reasonably expect a revelation 
 from God to commend- itself to our respect by the 
 dignity of its themes. Even its treatment of 
 necessities would suffer in our esteem if it came to 
 us fringed with frivolities and kickshaws. Our 
 libraries contain volumes of the " Curiosities of 
 Literature." A revelation from God ought not to 
 be of those. Would the way to Heaven be more 
 clear or alluring if its discovery came to us bound 
 up with Dr. Kane's researches in the Arctic Sea ? 
 The Scriptures have not disclosed to us the locality 
 of Heaven ; but they do what is infinitely more to 
 
Our Sacred Books. 205 
 
 the purpose. They disclose that there is a Heaven, 
 and the spiritual highway to it. Philosophers 
 have racked their wisdom over the origin of sin, 
 the possibility of a fall from holiness, and the 
 probable fortune of the race if it had not fallen. 
 The Bible by its reticence discourages such in- 
 quiries, but it does more than to answer them, in 
 assuring us that the race has fallen, and how it 
 can be uplifted from its ruins. 
 
 27. A youthful Bible class once debated the ques- 
 tion : " What is the rank in the Heavenly life of 
 the world's great men ? Alexander, Csesar, Shake- 
 speare, Washington — where are they now, and 
 what?" The Book wisely refrains from touching 
 distinctions which have no reference to its one 
 great intent, — to teach what all men must do to be 
 saved. A man of scientific tastes once said that 
 the first question he would ask on entering Heaven 
 would be : '' Where is Sir Isaac Newton? " A boy 
 in a Sunday-school at the " Five Points " in New 
 York said that the man whom he wanted to see 
 first there was '^ Goliath I " Each one to his taste ! 
 But why should the Bible satisfy the curiosity of 
 one of these explorers of the hidden life rather 
 than that of the other ? 
 
 28. The Word of God is silent upon many 
 things because they are not timely to this initial 
 and preparatory stage of human development. 
 The advances of human knowledo-e in this world 
 
 o 
 
 show the forecast of an overruling Mind in the 
 fact that knowledges come to the front whuu they 
 
206 My Note-Book. 
 
 are needed. Timeliness is a grand factor in the 
 history of inventions and discoveries. Historians 
 see a foreordained coincidence between the discov- 
 ery of America and the state of the nations when 
 the discovery was made. One-third of the globe 
 was hidden from the eye of civilized man till it 
 was needed for the progress of arts and sciences 
 and civil freedom. 
 
 So it was with various other inventions and dis- 
 coveries of which mention has been made else- 
 where. The statesman of our Civil War remarked 
 the o^ood fortune of the Union in the discoverv of 
 the oil wells of Pennsylvania when we needed a 
 new product for exchange with Europe to take the 
 place of blockaded cotton. 
 
 On the minutest, as well as the grandest, scale 
 of affairs, wise men observe the recurrence of the 
 proverbial " nick of time " in the progressions of 
 human knowledge. Two angels of observation 
 hover over this world on poised wings. The angel 
 of demand and the angel of supply keep watch, 
 the one over the world's necessities, and the other 
 over the resources of genius and the junctures of 
 auxiliary circumstance. Each keeps time witli the 
 other with the fidelity of clock-work. 
 
 29. We venture to believe, therefore, that a sim- 
 ilar law of timeliness governs the higher advances 
 of knowledge which arch over the two Avorlds of 
 sense and spirit. Some knowledges are timely to 
 this world, and others to that. Some discoveries 
 fit a state of pr()])ation, others a state of moral 
 
Our Sacred Boohs. 207 
 
 repose. Some are congenial with a world of sense, 
 others not even intelligible except to disembodied 
 mind. Some are pertinent to the infancy and some 
 to the maturity of an endless life. 
 
 All analogies suggest that in that upper stratum 
 of interests, as in this of numdane affaiis, this fac- 
 tor of timeliness could not be ignoi-ed without 
 damage. The neglect of it might involve eternal 
 loss. The conditions of this world and those of 
 the next it may not be safe to interchange. That 
 might be like transposing the conditions of this 
 globe, which has water and an atmosphere, with 
 those of its satellite, which has neither. Reserve 
 of knowledge till the ripening of conditions is one 
 of the signal features of God's wisdom. The 
 future ages of our immortality may have great 
 epochs of discovery. Then we may learn the 
 secret blessing of our profoundest ignorance here 
 of things for which the time has not yet come. 
 
 30. God's realm of reserve is large, and dense 
 with mysteries. Who can say that He does not 
 hold in wise concealment there, for the reason here 
 given, the mystery of the origin of sin, and of the 
 necessity of endless retributive penalties in the gov- 
 ernment of the universe ? The world is no nearer 
 to-day to a solution of these problems than it was 
 when the patriarch, perhaps four thousand years 
 ago, inquired of the silent heavens of Arabia : 
 " Wherefore do the wicked live ? " But the time 
 may come in the progress of the future life when 
 responses to incpiiry on these and kindred subjects 
 
208 My Note-Book. 
 
 will be the natural and inevitable discoveries of 
 the age. We ma}" then seem to ourselves to solve 
 these mysteries intuitively. We may discover 
 that previous lines of history and of research have 
 all been converging to that fulness of times. It 
 may then appear that to have antedated those re- 
 sponses by throwing them back into a life of com- 
 parative infancy w^ould have wrought irreparable 
 damage. 
 
 31. The first life in a series of endless progres- 
 sions must be like no other in its inexperieyice. 
 Inexperience, even aside from probationary contin- 
 gencies, is itself peril. In such a life, reserve of 
 knowledge in some things is as much a protection 
 as a revelation of it in other things. We read of 
 a traveller who once crossed a bridge over a raging 
 torrent in darkness so absolute that his eyes, shut 
 or open, made no difference. The morning revealed 
 that the bridge had been entirely swept away except 
 the single timber on which he had crossed the 
 rapids. If he had known the danger, his trepida- 
 tion of nerve would have cost him his life. Similar 
 to this may be our ignorance as a factor in the pro- 
 tection of our inexperience. Knowledge of all that 
 we crave to know might lay a burden of astound- 
 ing truths greater than they could bear upon minds 
 unbalanced and sensibilities distempered by sin. 
 To fire the world with controversy over such reve- 
 lations might result in moral convulsions. " Are 
 ye able to be baptized with the baptism that I am 
 baptized with ? Ye know not what ye ask." 
 
Ou7' Sacnul Books. 209 
 
 32. We know, for ^example, that beings whose 
 moral nature is re-enforced by the tonic disclosures 
 of a redeemed life do bear, without a quiver of an 
 eyelid, the sight of the symbol of endless pains 
 from a world of incorrigible guilt. Rut who dares 
 to say that he could now bear the same vision with 
 the same equipoise of faith ? To us it miglit be 
 as if we were caught up in the twinkling of an 
 eye into the upper layers of the atmosphere in 
 which aeronauts soar with laboring breath and 
 bursting blood-vessels on the verge of asphyxia. 
 
 The analogies of this world lead us to believe 
 that through the unending succession of discov- 
 eries of God which lie before us we shall find, as 
 we do here, the constant recurrence of the critical 
 " nick of time." We shall be told what, and when, 
 and where, it will be safe for us to know. 
 
 33. A profound hint of the Divine policy in reve- 
 lation is given in a fragment of Old Testament 
 biography. The disclosures made to Moses in the 
 mount seem to have stimulated his desire to know 
 more. He craved to look with unveiled eye upon 
 the glory of Jehovah. Mark the answer to his 
 prayer : " I will put thee in the cleft in the rock ; 
 I will cover thee with My hand while I pass by." 
 It appears, then, that converse of the finite with 
 the infinite mind involves peril to finite faculties. 
 There are truths which no man in this world ca7i 
 know and live. 
 
 34. A protective element, therefore, runs through 
 the Divine economy of revelation. Our ignorance 
 
210 My Note-Booh 
 
 here is the '' cleft in the rock/' The thoughtful 
 kindness of God hides us from revelations which 
 would be untimely to our conditions. But for 
 this, our growth in character might be convulsive 
 and catastrophic in its working. We exult in the 
 dignity of knowledge. We make it the synonym 
 of power. But in moral surroundings which make 
 knowledge unseasonable, the blessing of ignorance 
 is incalculably greater. 
 
 35. Scientists believe that they see evidences of 
 a typical relationship between this material world 
 and the moral world of whose redemption it is the 
 theatre. The elemental forces of the one are 
 symbols of corresponding elements in the other. 
 What, then, are the moral developments of which 
 earthquakes and volcanoes are symbolic ? To dis- 
 close them to us before the fulness of time might 
 make the whole head sick and the whole heart 
 faint. It might work out a ruin of human facul- 
 ties more irreparable than the fall of Eden. A 
 ruin it might be of which insanity is but a feeble 
 premonition. That moral repose which is requisite 
 to healthy growth in likeness to God is of more 
 worth than intellectual visions. 
 
 36. The Book is silent also upon some things 
 because reason either certifies them, or makes them 
 immensely probable. When our Lord was about to 
 part with His disciples, He was thoughtful of their 
 infantine faith. He saw that they were struggling 
 with destiny as the rest of us do in times of be- 
 reavement. They were brooding over the mys- 
 
Our Sacred Books. • 211 
 
 teries which death suggests but never solves. 
 Where was He gomg? Would He be beyond 
 their hearing? Should they see His face again? 
 Would He come back to them a conqueror and a 
 prince ? Or would His voice die in impenetrable 
 silence, like those other men of mystery ? What, 
 where, how far away, under what conditions, was 
 that unseen world of which their inspired books 
 spoke as the " land of darkness " ? 
 
 To ease their minds, He says to them : " Do not 
 trouble about such things. My Father's dwelling- 
 place is large and hospitable. I go to prepare a 
 home for you. My home shall be yours. If it 
 ivere not so., I would have told you'' May not many 
 of our unanswered questions be determined in the 
 same way? Some things which we wish to believe, 
 and dare not, are as certain as such things can be. 
 Why should we ask for more ? 
 
 37. For instance, are we morally free, or are we 
 bondmen in sin, doomed helplessly to suffer for a 
 heritage of guilt ? The Scriptures do not affirm 
 or deny. But surely something within us settles 
 that. Dr. Johnson gave the argument in a nut- 
 shell : " A man knows it, sir, and that is the whole 
 of it." And can we not hear the Master say : " If 
 it were not so, I would have told you " ? Shall we 
 recognize friends in heaven? Nature unhesitat- 
 ingly responds : Why not ? And does not our 
 Lord seem to add : " If it were not so, I would 
 have told you " ? Are infants saved who die 
 before infantile character is set in changeless 
 
212 My Note-Book. 
 
 groove ? Undoubtedly. The common sense of 
 men determines that. And from God's Word do 
 we not hear the echo ; " If it were not so, I would 
 have told you " ? 
 
 A volume might be compiled of inquiries like 
 these which carry their answers in the asking. In 
 the material world, God never does needless things. 
 Not a leaf opens in the springtime which is not 
 worth a life. Much more in a supernatural rev- 
 elation should there be no wasted wisdom. That 
 which the skies, and the seas, and the forests, and 
 the prairies are forever chanting in our ears in 
 majestic cadence, we should not ask prophets to 
 teach us, or martyrs to witness to us. 
 
 38. Our holy books do not once prove to us the 
 Being of God. Yet faith knows no more necessary 
 truth. Why were not the archives of the universe 
 ransacked for indubitable evidences ? Atheism 
 would so easily have been struck dumb forever. 
 We might fancy that angels would have come 
 trooping to earth to assure us- But when they do 
 come and look over the shoulder of him who is 
 elected to record for us a revelation from God, 
 His Being is never once named as a subject of dia- 
 lectic discourse. Why ? Because no man can in 
 reason doubt it. Nature settles it to every honest 
 and balanced mind. A man who doubts or denies 
 it is usually credulous to the verge of dotage 
 respecting things immensely less probable. He is 
 a moral Nyctalops who is blind at midday, and has 
 the eye of an eagle at midnight. 
 
Our Sacred Books. 213 
 
 God trusts the evidences of His own existence 
 to the necessities of men. Lord Bacon spoke the 
 voice of the ages when he said : " I would rather 
 believe all the fables in the Koran, than that this 
 world has no God." The learned world goes on 
 [)iling up libraries of proof and disproof, and reply 
 and rejoinder, respecting the First Cause. Mean- 
 while the Spirit of the Book is looking calmly on, 
 and saying never a Avord. His silence means more 
 than speech. It means : " If doubt of God's Being 
 were in reason, think you that I would not have 
 told you how to solve it ? " 
 
 39. Our Divine books are taciturn about some 
 things because ignorance of them is a more valu- 
 able factor than knowledge would be in probation- 
 ary discipline. Trial of character is largely by 
 trial of faith. To lessen the discipline makes less 
 of the man in its result. Therefore inspiration 
 often does not follow the lead of our inquiries. 
 Inspiration looks up and looks off when we look 
 down. Then, again, the seer looks down to some- 
 thing of practical use or of pressing urgency, while 
 we are looking away to the nebulse. It says : "Why 
 stand ye gazing up into Heaven?" Even revela- 
 tions which would add something to our stock of 
 thought are witheld, because fidelity without them 
 would add more to our stock of character. All 
 the answer we get is : " Blessed are those who 
 have not seen, and yet have believed." 
 
 40. This principle explains, in part, the awful 
 stillness of our Sacred Scriptures respecting the 
 
214 My Note-Book. 
 
 dead. Suppose that all the questionings of our 
 grief were answered. What would be the se- 
 quence? Our fancy would gather our lost ones 
 around us in loving groups. We should live in a 
 Christian fairyland. We should set plates for them 
 on our dining-tables as some of the disciples of the 
 Swedish Seer are said to do. Such a life could 
 not be much more valuable for spiritual discipline, 
 than the Hall of Valhalla. The fictitious element 
 would lord it over the true. Our bereaved life 
 would be the old life reproduced and idealized, 
 but without mundane realities to steady it in good 
 sense. Where would room be found for Christ ? 
 Romish history teaches us how perilous it would 
 be for us to know much about departed saints. 
 
 41. One loss especially should we suffer if our 
 Bible satisfied all the cravings of affliction. We 
 should lose the tonic reaction of the finality which 
 death gives to probationary experience. It is a 
 grand thing for us, that in so many ways death 
 fixes a limit to earthly interests and ambitions. 
 Never a death occurs which does not cut short some 
 lines of earthly allurement to survivors. Some one 
 of the three Sisters of Destiny severs a strand 
 which binds us too closely to this world. This is 
 well. It helps to concentrate our thought on 
 things more vital to the felicitous settlement of 
 our destiny. We are kept from a great deal 
 of spiritual gossip by the silence of the Bible con- 
 cerning departed souls. The vacuity of our igno- 
 rance throws us back in more docile mood upon 
 
Our Sacred Books. 215 
 
 the lessons which God has had in mind in their 
 removaL 
 
 42. The silence of our sacred books about the 
 interior of the spiritual world is in keeping with 
 the methods in which the most profound teachings 
 of the Spirit are imparted to us. These are com- 
 monly given in still ways. The}' come in still 
 hours, in whispers, in hints, in queries, to which 
 our own souls give answer. They are not heralded 
 by blare of trumpet and beat of drum. It would 
 not take much out of the common way to deafen 
 our ears to their gentle tones. The staring marvel 
 with which we should pore over a volume full of 
 revelations about the dead would not be helpful 
 to that calm, steady vigilance which is requisite to 
 our discovery of the deep things of God. 
 
 43. Such a volume would not be much better 
 than a world in which visible apparitions should 
 flit to and fro, here and there and everywhere, 
 interrupting us by da}' and scaring us by night. 
 History abounds with these, of one sort and an- 
 other. They come with just evidence enough of 
 the fact to keep us all agog witli expectations 
 which they never realize. We have libraries, too, 
 made up of messages from oracular spirits, who 
 know less than they knew here. They make the 
 world they live in insufferably repulsive by their 
 want of dignity and good sense. Stuff more bar- 
 ren of useful discovery never found its way into 
 j^rint than that which makes up the literature of 
 magic. 
 
216 My Note-Book. 
 
 Suppose, then, that our supernatural books con- 
 tained records enough of correspondence between 
 the living and the dead to create a plausible 
 groundwork for necromantic oracles. What reason 
 have we to believe that we should make anything 
 better out of them than we have made out of nec- 
 romantic revelations which have kept the world 
 agape through all past times? What a mass 
 of addled theology would have accumulated by 
 this time I Good Lord deliver us ! Yet how 
 fascinating it would be to people in affliction ! 
 Have not the best of us been sometimes tempted 
 to seek out '' the woman that had a familiar 
 spirit"? 
 
 44. The silence of the Bible, it should be borne 
 in mind, disturbs us chiefly under the discipline of 
 bereavement. It should go far to quiet us, that 
 it is a part of that discipline. The thing which 
 afflicts us most severely is that our "loved and 
 lost " have gone into a land of silence. Oblivion 
 shuts them out from ns, and us from them. The 
 pressure of a finger on the medulla oblongata of 
 the human brain produces instant loss of mem- 
 ory. We sometimes tremble at the thought that 
 perhaps the removal of souls from the physical 
 organ of thought produces the same effect on their 
 memory. The land of silence is to them literally 
 the land of forgetfulness. We call to them, and 
 they do not answer. At times we cannot realize 
 to our thought that they are not under the sod 
 with which we have covered them, or in the tomb 
 
Our Sacred Books. 217 
 
 where we have with our own hand shut the iron 
 door upon them. 
 
 Yet it is better for us that we are as we are. It 
 drives us back into the clouds and darkness where 
 God is. It helps us to make real to our faith the 
 resurrection of our Lord. Heaven becomes a 
 reality to us, as it could not in any other way. 
 We are wiser for it, if, with faces buried in a 
 prophet's mantle, we listen only for the whispers 
 of His love. Often, probably, our friends are 
 removed for the very purpose of creating a void 
 which only God can fill. Their voices are rever- 
 ently silent, — perhaps consciously and intention- 
 ally silent, — that we may the better hear God 
 speak. It is timely to such a life as this that it 
 should be so. The renewal of earthly friendships 
 may be most wisely reserved for a world where 
 God so fills all thought that it can inflict no dan- 
 ger of moral damage. 
 
 45. Our Testaments, Old and New, are silent 
 about some things, because their spiritual nature 
 renders them inconceivable in our present envelop- 
 ment of bodily sense. Certain spiritual disclosures 
 would be of no more use to us than the painting 
 of a sea-storm to the blind. We have no faculties 
 competent to take in such revelations. We could 
 not interpret the language in which they must be 
 expressed if expressed at all. Doubtless many 
 things are untold because they can be told only by 
 symbols ; and symbolic representations of them 
 would do us more harm than good. We are 
 
218 My Note-Book. 
 
 bunglers in the reading of emblematic dialects. 
 We stumble upon bogs, and flounder into quag- 
 mires of literalism. We are apt to end with get- 
 ting ourselves swamped in atheistic doubts by our 
 struggles to make something out of them which 
 the senses can take hold of. Nothing else is so 
 prolific of false and imbecile beliefs, as the wilful 
 resolve of the human mind to crowd spirit into 
 sense. We make an "infinite deal of nothing" of 
 it when we strive to make matter hold mind. Yet 
 this is what we must do if we insist on the dis- 
 closure of certain spiritual truths to minds enclosed 
 in a framework of physical faculties. Densest 
 ignorance is better than that. Therefore igno- 
 rance it is. 
 
 46. Incidentally to the cravings of the human 
 mind for converse with the dead, its equal craving 
 for knowledge of the conditions of life in Heaven, 
 renders the silence of the Bible a trial to faith. 
 Of few things are mankind so impatient as of 
 their enforced ignorance of another life. A living 
 publisher has been heard to say, that almost any 
 book with the word " Heaven " on its title-page is 
 sure of a successful sale. vSo intense is human 
 desire to explore the world beyond. 
 
 47. On the subject of the heavenly life our 
 Scriptures are reticent, not silent. They make 
 some things certain and others as probable as the 
 majority of the facts on which we act in daily life. 
 They assure us that Heaven is a place. Socrates 
 was right in speaking of the " future habitation of 
 
Our Sacred Books. 219 
 
 the soul." We cannot err essentially in conceiv- 
 ing of it as existing somewhere. Heaven has a 
 theocratic government. Gradation exists in its 
 social order. Its occupations, so far at least as 
 men conduct them, are performed by the faculties 
 of a celestial body. The ills of terrestrial condi- 
 tions are not there. In their place is a felicitous 
 activity which nothing else can symbolize so 
 accurately as exultant song. The redeemed hold 
 some sort of regal and sacerdotal rank. Christ 
 is their imperial Chief. Christ in glorified man- 
 liood so diffuses His own presence through all 
 the ramifications of heavenly society that He 
 is to that world what the sun is to our solar 
 system. 
 
 Moreover, our '' place " there is to be one w^hich 
 has required the personal presence and ingenuity 
 of our Lord in its preparation for our coming. He 
 who created and adorned this world with such 
 marvellous invention is creating and adorning 
 another for our final abode. It will be adapted to 
 our necessities, our character, our tastes, even to 
 our innocent idiosyncrasies. All that is peculiar 
 to our natural individuality will be provided for. 
 It will be a natural continuation, in its regnant 
 spirit, to all that is pure in our life here. The 
 transition from this life to that will not be revolu- 
 tionary. The process of the change is like a 
 natural slumber. We shall fall asleep here and 
 awake there. 
 
 48. These are specific and intelligible ideas. 
 
220 My Note-Booh. 
 
 They certainly add something to the far-off dreamy 
 notion which some have of Heaven as only a state of 
 happiness and holiness, that being all that Ave know 
 about it. It is not all. Though expressed with 
 the gorgeousness of Oriental imagery, these are 
 solid facts. The resplendent painting of St. John's 
 vision, or the calm, didactic assurances of our Lord, 
 ought not to go for nothing, through fear that they 
 may mean something. They do mean something. 
 We abuse a revelation from Heaven if we conjure 
 all significance out of its symbolic teachings be- 
 cause they are symbols. Human speech chooses 
 the symbolic form because it means so much ; not 
 to throw back into a blank words that mean noth- 
 ing. So far as our Occidental fancy can reproduce 
 the Biblical painting soberly in literal concep- 
 tion, we are quite within the liberty of inspired 
 thought in doing so. 
 
 49. But beyond the purpose here indicated, con- 
 jecture of the heavenly life is useless and may be 
 worse. Reverence is apt to fare hardl}^ at the 
 hands of guess-work. Minds of healthy faith and 
 Biblical training Avill get a loftier inspiration from 
 the few but striking hints which the Bible gives. 
 Specially does the Biblical assurance that the life 
 there transcends all sensuous conceptions founded 
 on the life here open to us an illimitable field of 
 anticipation. It is a world of God's contriving. 
 Therefore it is like Him in the magnitude of its 
 resources. Its life is a hidden life with Christ in 
 God. We wait for its disclosure till the dawn 
 
Our Sacred Books. 221 
 
 of spiritual faculty shall enable us to take in spirit- 
 ual glory. 
 
 50. Our reticent Bible gives us one grand hint 
 of the unseen world by a pregnant necjatlve decla- 
 ration, "Eye hath not seen and ear hath not heard." 
 Although these words were not aimed primarily 
 at the heavenly life, yet they include that. The 
 hint they give, therefore, is that the reality is so 
 much beyond and above all sensuous discovery, 
 that it is useless to attempt description or painting. 
 Negative definitions and descriptions are often 
 most dense with meaning. We are helped in the 
 discovery of what truth is by a discovery of what 
 it is not. That the coming life cannot be described 
 by human tongue, nor painted by human fancy, 
 gives us by its bare negation a thought surpassing 
 thought. God's silence means more than most 
 eloquent speech. It opens to us an illimitable 
 field of anticipation. Our taciturn Scriptures in- 
 vite us to wait for its disclosures till the dawn of 
 spiritual faculty shall enable us to take in spiritual 
 glory. We rest assured that God will speak when 
 and where He can speak to the purpose. 
 
IX. 
 
 THE THEISTIC AND THE CHRISTIAN TYPES OF 
 RELIGIOUS LIFE. 
 
 1. Two varieties of religious experience are one 
 in spirit, yet diverse in the habits of mind by which 
 they disclose themselves to the consciousness of 
 the believer. One is marked by the emphasis 
 which it gives to the personality of God. This is 
 the central idea around which all other ideas re- 
 volve. The fact that there is a God, a personal 
 God, a God everywhere present, efficient in the 
 great forces of Nature, and revealing His govern- 
 ment in the still voices of conscience, gives charac- 
 ter to the whole moral being of the man. He is 
 emphatically a believer in God. He is a friend of 
 God, a child of God. Those peculiarities of the 
 hidden life which encircle the person of Christ are 
 less strongly marked, if they exist at all, in the 
 distinct consciousness of the believing spirit. 
 
 2. This theistic type of religious life gives large 
 place to the exercise of adoration. The grace of 
 reverence is thrifty in its growth. Prayer dwells 
 much upon the attributes of God. Devotional 
 feeling commonly takes the form of fear of God, 
 trust in God, joy in God, desire after God, thank- 
 
 222 
 
Theistic and Christian Types. 223 
 
 fulness to God, and in its ecstatic phase of con- 
 scious union with God. There is a variety of this 
 type of piety in which the personal blessedness 
 of God becomes a source of blessedness to the be- 
 liever. A reverent sympathy with the inconceiv- 
 able felicity of the Divine Being takes possession 
 of His child. His filial heart is glad because God 
 is full of gladness. A lowly sense of ownership 
 springs up in relation to God. The phrase " My 
 God" has a singular and intense significance. 
 With no lapse into cant, he says in self-communion : 
 "I belong to God, and God to me. I am His 
 friend, and He is mine, by the ties of an immortal 
 trust." This variety of godly life abounds in the 
 saintly characters of the Old Testament. It is re- 
 produced in later times in those godly men and 
 women whose meditations dwell chiefly upon the 
 examples of the more ancient Scriptures. 
 
 3. Some of our hymns of adoration addressed 
 to the First Person of the Godhead have been 
 hallowed by the voice and the heart of ages. To 
 us they often appear too intense for honest wor- 
 ship. We resign them to professional choirs and 
 quartets. We admire them as works of art. We 
 are apt to think of them as the honest offerings of 
 saints and the dying words of martyrs only. 
 
 There is a hymn which in its Latin original is 
 probably nearly a thousand years old, beginning, 
 " Thee we adore. Eternal God " ; and another of 
 Roman Catholic origin, " My God, how wonderful 
 Thou art I " and a dozen versions of the twenty- 
 
224 My Note-Book. 
 
 third Psalm, one of which, an ancient version by 
 Ainsworth, was a favorite with the New England 
 Pilgrims, and is more likely than any other to have 
 been sung by them on that Lord's Day which they 
 spent on Clark's Island before landing from Ply- 
 mouth harbor, beginning wdth, "Jehovah feedeth 
 me ; I shall not lack " ; and Luther's hymn, sung 
 at his fourth centennial by forty thousand voices 
 at Eisleben and echoed around the world, " God 
 is my Refuge, ever near " ; and the old battle-song 
 of Gustavus Adolphus, sung by his army at Liitzen, 
 and again by the army of Oliver Cromwell at 
 Naseby, '' Fear not, O little flock, the foe ! " 
 
 These exultant hymns of praise and trust and 
 love and courage, we, in these luxurious times, 
 may well hesitate to sing, lest we take God's name 
 in vain by melodramatic worship. Yet this por- 
 tion of our Hymnology is none too exalted to ex- 
 press the aspirations of a believer in whose culture 
 this type of experience has ripened. The existence 
 
 I of such hymns is evidence that it has been lived 
 
 j by holy men in all ages. 
 
 4. This species of faith often gives a peculiar 
 phase to the consciousness of sin. Sin, as reflected 
 from this mirror, towers up into a flagrant and 
 defiant wrong inflicted on God. Probably in noth- 
 ing else does the human mind realize to its thought 
 the personality of God so vividly as in suffering 
 the mordant stings of conscience. Remorse is the 
 
 j revenge which angered Law takes when sin is felt 
 
 \ to be an outrage upon a personal Deity. Law im- 
 
Theistic and Christian Types. 225 
 
 personal is scarcely more to us than any other dead 
 thing. It is God, the infinite and infinitely holy 
 Person, against whom sin is flung in insult. That 
 which was but error at the first deepens into crime 
 ao-ainst the rio-hts of God. Not Law, but the Law- 
 giver, is the only Being in the universe with wliom 
 a guilty conscience has to do. The unanswered 
 question of the ages, " How shall man be just with 
 God ? " looms up as the only question in the uni- 
 verse which needs an answer. The world's peace 
 hangs upon it. 
 
 5. To one in whom this variety of religious cul- 
 ture has become a life the Avorks of nature are 
 profoundly significant as religious symbols. Sir 
 Fowell Buxton says : " A man must preach very 
 w^ell indeed before he conveys such a lesson of the 
 greatness of God and the unworthiness of man, 
 as a view of the heavens discloses." Richter de- 
 scribes a dream in which the sleeper sees an angel 
 " bearing a mortal man through the endless choirs 
 and galaxies of immensity till he trembles and cries 
 out at the overpowering spectacle of God's infini- 
 tude." 
 
 Such is the involuntary response of all thoughtful 
 and believing minds to the resources of awakened 
 worship which the material universe discloses. 
 They are vocal with revelations of God. From a 
 leaflet of a geranium to the fixed stars, and the 
 awful possibilities of spaces which no star illu- 
 mines, everything that is., to a vigilant soul is articu- 
 late of God. To such believing spirits there is no 
 
226 My Note-Book. 
 
 cant in the " worship of Nature's Temple." It is 
 as real as St. John's vision of the New Jerusalem. 
 
 6. The type of religious life now under review 
 spurns as an absurdity the solicitude of a certain 
 class of literary men and scientists to evade the 
 recognition of a personal Creator. The effort to 
 expurgate the very name of God from literary and 
 scientific vocabularies is often offensive. Only 
 one phenomenon of modern literature is more illog- 
 ical. That is the sober and labored attempt of 
 Matthew Arnold to expunge the idea of a personal 
 Deity from the religion of the Hebrews. 
 
 Even if science must, in some connections, be 
 reticent in its nomenclature, what has literature 
 to do with such diplomatic evasions? Why, for 
 instance, should Emerson, with his Platonic tastes 
 and spiritual aspirations, find it so difficult to say 
 outright the Holy Name ? The facts in his thought 
 are sometimes too urgent for his reserve. He 
 must say something to indicate the unseen Power 
 which no earnest seeker after truth can do with- 
 out. Why, then, must he beat about the bush, and 
 say '' Nature,'^ " Law," "Fate," "the Gods," "the 
 Stars," "the Absolute," "the All," "the Over- 
 soul," "Jupiter," "Thor," " Woden " — anything 
 but GOD? Why should that stick in his throat? 
 When the personal Name does force its way 
 through the philosophic dead-lock into plain 
 speech, why does it come as if he blushed for it ? 
 
 7. It is refreshing to turn from baptized heathen- 
 ism to the athletic faith of such a mind as Nie- 
 
TJieistic and Christian Types. 227 
 
 buhr's, to whom Nature and Nature's God were 
 one ; or to the faith, more profound than science, 
 expressed in Coleridge's " Hymn before Sunrise in 
 the Vale of Chamouni " ; or to that beautiful trib- 
 ute to the unity of science and religion which 
 Louis Agassiz paid in opening the sessions of 
 his class in Biology on the Island of Penikese: 
 " Young gentlemen, before we commence to look 
 into the secrets of Nature, let us seek Avisdom from 
 the God of Nature I Let us pray ! " 
 
 8. The theistic type of religious culture, in its 
 best development, may not inaptly be denominated 
 the religion of literature. When a religious spirit 
 breathes at all in secular literature, why does it so 
 commonly assume this theistic form? Is it that 
 modern letters owe so much to those of Greece 
 and Rome in which Christ was unknown? Ac- 
 count for it as we may, the fact is indisputable 
 that the vital piety expressed or implied in the 
 major part of our secular libraries is that which 
 we term natural, as distinct from revealed, religion. 
 The theolog}^ of poets, of essayists, of dramatists, 
 of philosophers, of historians, is for the most part 
 natural as distinguished from Christian theology. 
 
 9. Wordsworth's " Excursion,'' for example, is 
 one of the most religious poems in the language. 
 But its religious thought is derived chiefly from 
 the Book of Nature, not from the Christian Script- 
 ures. Emerson once said that Wordsworth's " Ode 
 to Immortality " is the most decisive argument for 
 the truth of that doctrine extant in our literature. 
 
90( 
 
 My Note-Booh. 
 
 Yet not a line of it is necessarily and directly attrib- 
 utable to the Bible. Bryant's " Thanatopsis " has 
 been characterized as being rather a heathen than 
 a Christian poem. The theology of Shakespeare, 
 though expressed as he could not have expressed 
 it but for the atmosphere of Christian culture in 
 which his mind was formed, yet is inspired by the 
 material world and the intuitions of conscience 
 more distinctly than by the Christian revelation. 
 Spenser's " Fairy Queen " and Milton's '' Paradise 
 Lost " are the only two poems of equal eminence 
 in our language, which are constructed, warp and 
 woof, on Christian ideas, and with direct use of 
 Biblical materials. 
 
 Although it is true that English Literature, as a 
 whole, is more thoroughly imbued with the spirit 
 of the Bible than any other now existing, yet the 
 facts above named indicate the limited extent to 
 which our religion as a spiritual life in the soul of 
 the individual has taken possession of the leading 
 minds of those who have made our literature what 
 it is. Their faith in Christianity has been largely 
 nominal. It has been belief as distinct from faith. 
 
 10. More generally than we should be glad to 
 find it, this religion of Nature is the variety of 
 religious life expressed by American statesmen. 
 AVhat has their confession of faith often given to 
 the world more positive than that of the best 
 heathen philosophers ? Thomas Jefferson pro- 
 fessed in private his sympathy with the liturgic 
 service of the Church of England. But so far as 
 
Thehtic and Christian Types, 229 
 
 an observer of his life could -have discovered, his 
 personal faith, that which represented his men- 
 tal history, was scarcely more than that of Cic- 
 ero. The same is true of many of his associates in 
 the first American Congress. Benjamin Franklin, 
 though trained in the ancient faith of New Eng- 
 land, when he came at the last to declare his 
 mature opinions, had not so much to declare 
 which was indicative of a spiritual life as Plato 
 had. 
 
 American statesmen sometimes betray a timid- 
 ity, unworthy of their ancestry, in their straining 
 to avoid religious cant. This infirmity has ren- 
 dered their religious utterances on the approach of 
 death jejune and commonplace. Their guarded 
 words in some cases have been as bare of distinc- 
 tively Christian aspirations as the symbolic inscrip- 
 tions on the pyramids. The dying words of one 
 of the most illustrious of them amount to scarcely 
 more than this — that, all things considered, 
 Christianity is a credible system of belief, and on 
 the whole the Bible is a good book. There is one 
 thing more discreditable to a man of Christian 
 birth than the cant of Christianity ; it is the cant 
 of heathenism. 
 
 11. A striking illustration of the tendency of 
 a theistic religion to lapse into a nominal belief 
 is found in the life of one of the statesman of 
 England in the last generation. He was contem- 
 porary with the Rev. William Jay of Bath. Mr. 
 Jay was one of the most intelligible preachers of 
 
230 My Note-Book. 
 
 his times. Unlettered hearers listened to him in 
 silent crowds. Children easily took in his mean- 
 ing. He possessed that first and best sign of a 
 great preacher, that men were moved by his dis- 
 courses without distinction of intellectual or of 
 social class. 
 
 Yet when " the great commoner " heard one of Mr. 
 Jay's plain sermons addressed to spiritual believers, 
 he said at the close of the services, that he had not 
 received one definite idea of the preacher's mean- 
 ing. Such a result might be due to defects in 
 the discourse of many another preacher, but not 
 to defects in that of Mr. Jay. \yhat, then, was 
 the root of the difficulty ? It was simply that the 
 mental habits of the statesman were so void of the 
 ideas peculiar to a spiritual Christianity that he 
 could not interpret the dialect in which they were 
 uttered. It was a strange tongue to him, because 
 the ideas which it carried were strange to his 
 experience. He had never lived anything which 
 lifted his mind to their level. 
 
 12. The theistic variety of religious experience 
 when it is a real life in a believing soul may as 
 honestly express a regenerate state as the more 
 characteristic life of a Christian believer. It may 
 have been " saving faith " to many a heathen 
 inquirer after truth. To Marcus Aurelius it may 
 have been such. The practicability of salvation 
 through this imperfect knowledge of the true God 
 is distinctly recognized by St. Paul. '' Eternal 
 Power and Godhead " are the things which may be 
 
Theistic and Christian Tifpes. 231 
 
 " clearly seen, being understood by the things that 
 are made." God may have disclosed Himself thus, 
 to how many we cannot know. They saw more, 
 and saw more clearly it may be, than we have been 
 wont to give credit for to the system of things 
 under which they lived. What they saw was 
 golden truth, so far as it went. It may have been 
 the motor to a penitent and believing life. 
 
 We may therefore find Socrates in rank with 
 Christian martyrs. The " Meditations " of Aure- 
 lius are a phenomenon most significant and hope- 
 ful respecting the probable range of the human 
 mind and the efficiency of the human conscience 
 in the discovery of the most necessary ideas with- 
 out the aid of a revelation. It should not astonish 
 us if we see many from the West and from the 
 East in the kingdom from which its children have 
 been cast out. 
 
 13. In modern Christian communities are found 
 many good men who are not churchmen. One 
 who is predisposed to judge men generously would 
 fain discover in many such men the unconscious 
 disciples of Christ. They live in a Christian 
 twilight. Prejudices often curtail the volume of 
 their faith. Their sacred books are abridged. 
 They may see as cross-eyed men see, not in perfect 
 perspective. As they see, so they believe often in 
 fragments. But cross-eyed men do see something. 
 An abridged Bible may contain much saving truth. 
 Isaac Taylor has observed that if the entire Script- 
 ures were blotted out from the literatures of the 
 
232 My Note-Book, 
 
 world except the briefest of St. Paul's Epistles, the 
 residuum of Christian truth would be sufficient to 
 save the world. One truth, living as a faith, in 
 the character of one believer carries with it a 
 thousand corollaries. 
 
 So in the case of infirm believers, the Spirit of 
 God may use their contracted and tangled faith in 
 a fragmentary revelation to their eternal life. In 
 His magnanimous vision of their character they 
 may be devout men, worshippers in secret of One 
 who sees in secret. Their feeble consciousness of 
 a living God may one day grow into an over- 
 powering consciousness of a living Christ. The 
 kingdom of Heaven is as a grain of mustard 
 seed. 
 
 14. Unconscious conversion is probably a more 
 common occurrence in the economy of grace than 
 we think. The Holy Spirit achieves many secret 
 conquests. He employs all varieties of method 
 and all proportions and some disproportions of 
 truth to meet all diversities of condition. As men 
 judge. He saves at great risks. The ways to 
 Heaven are many, not identical, but convergent. 
 
 15. Opposite, yet not contrary to the variety of 
 religious life described in the foregoing pages, is 
 another which is illustrated in the large majority 
 of believers. It differs from the theistic tj'pe of 
 piety in the fact that the central and regnant idea 
 around which it circles is Christ. Not the idea of 
 God in the undivided unity of His being, but the 
 idea of God incarnate in the person of His Son, 
 
Theisfic and Christian Types. 233 
 
 gives character to the whole round of the believer s 
 faith. This is made familiar to us by the large 
 majority of Christian biographies. The inner life 
 which they portray is Christian as distinct from 
 theistic. It is the Christian religion of the New 
 Testament, not the natural religion of the Old. 
 
 16. This emphatically Christian type of piety is 
 marked in its most mature examples by an inten- 
 sity all its own. Christian memoirs abound with 
 narratives in which the person and the atoning 
 work of Christ appear to have been absolutely reg- 
 nant in the believer's religious life. Often on the 
 approach of death the very name of Jesus has had 
 power to call back the dying memory from the 
 land of shadows. An example of this was wit- 
 nessed in the extreme old age of one of our fathers 
 in the ministry, recently deceased. When his 
 memory had become infirm, he used at times to 
 imagine in social prayer that he was conversing 
 with friends long ago departed, and whom he was 
 soon to follow. 
 
 On one such occasion, he talked with a ministe- 
 rial brother whose death had greatly afflicted him. 
 When his mind righted itself, he prayed : " O Lord, 
 my memory is gone, but Thou knowest that I have 
 not forgotten Jesus Christ." 
 
 17. The soul's immortality has no more impres- 
 sive proof than such a phenomenon as this. What 
 is that something on which a name can be so nide- 
 structibly engraved that it cannot die ? Agnostic 
 science is very wise, but what cerebral convo- 
 
234 My Note-Book, 
 
 lutions can explain this? What impersonal psy- 
 chic force achieves the mystery? 
 
 18. In countries in which religious expression 
 is more demonstrative than in ours, this type of 
 piety is found beautifully wrought into social 
 usages. " The Lord is risen" was the morning sal- 
 utation of the early Christians. The Waldenses 
 used to accompany their good wishes of the morn- 
 ing and evening with a formula which recognized 
 the intercession of our Lord. '' In His Name," 
 they said. That was also their password by which 
 they distinguished friend from foe when they held 
 their faith at the risk of their life. In some dis- 
 tricts of the Tyrolese Alps, friends meeting in the 
 mountain highways used to salute each other thus : 
 " Praised be the Lord Christ," says the elder, and 
 '' Forever more. Amen ! " the younger responded. 
 The national faith must have had somewhere in 
 the past a most intense vitality to have given birth 
 to such social customs. 
 
 19. Another feature of this variety of Christian 
 living is its intense individuality. No other vari- 
 ety equals it in singleness of experience. That is 
 a great revolution which comes into a believer's 
 consciousness when his faith realizes to him the 
 personal love of Christ to him as an individual. 
 Christ as a world's redeemer, and Christ as the 
 redeemer of the individual, are very distinct. Sal- 
 vation as a corporate gift, or an organic arrange- 
 ment for the race, and salvation as a blessing to 
 the individual believer, are widely different things. 
 
Theistlc and Chriatian Types. 235 
 
 The one may live in his belief many years before 
 the other becomes a reality to his faith. 
 
 Yet it is a very simple tiling when we put our 
 minds to the root of the matter. The entire work 
 of Christ for man is an individual concern. We 
 sin as individuals. We are regenerated as indi- 
 viduals. We appropriate his atoning sacrifice as 
 individuals. We shall stand one day at His tribu- 
 nal of judgment as individuals. In this singleness 
 of relationship between the individual spirit and 
 our Lord is laid the foundation of the entire work. 
 On this rests every hope. The whole wealth of 
 our Redeemer's love flows out to each and every 
 one, as if he were the only sacred being in the uni- .' 
 verse. He does not come into His full heirship 
 with Christ, as a redeemed being, until those 
 words of St. Paul become an overwhelming reality 
 to Him: ''Who loved me and gave Himself for, 
 mer 
 
 20. In the individual life this experience is apt 
 to disclose itself first as a sequence to an impas- 
 sioned sense of sin. Ignoring sin, all religion 
 is a by-play to real life. To the purpose of such a 
 life as man lives here, it means nothing, does noth- 
 ing, promises nothing, is nothing. But when the 
 consciousness of sin takes such possession of a 
 man's inner being that he feels it to be the one 
 central fact of his moral history, then he begins to 
 feel as profoundly his need of Christ. From this 
 discovery the step is short and quick to that of 
 the reality of Christ. It is human nature to be- 
 
236 My Note-Book. 
 
 lieve vehemently in the thing we need. We sel- 
 dom believe in Christ as a reality till we first find 
 Him as a necessity. Other and finer relations to 
 Him disclose themselves at a later stage of spirit- 
 ual growth, but the initial discovery is that of a 
 desperate necessity. We find Christ in the deep 
 religious sense of faith, because we must find Him. 
 
 John Foster uttered the experience of the vast 
 majority of believers : " The Gospel to me is not a 
 matter of speculation, but of necessity. I come to 
 Jesus because I need pardon." So say we all in 
 those hours of spiritual discovery in which our 
 vision is most keen and our assimilation of truth 
 is most active. Some can find rest from the tem- 
 pestuous agitations of an angered conscience, and 
 others from the dull dead ache of remorse, in no 
 other way. The dull, the is tic type of religious 
 faith is not enough for such quickened believers. 
 They must find God in Christ. 
 
 21. Real life sometimes discloses a fearful pecu- 
 liarity in that experience in which the conscious- 
 ness of sin is not relieved by a spiritual discovery 
 of Christ. It is that the consciously guilty one 
 cannot pray. He appears to himself so remote 
 from God in moral sympathy that prayer is 
 mockery. Cowper once described this in his own 
 diseased vagaries, as " a remoteness compared with 
 which the distance from East to West is vicinity, 
 is cohesion." Thrust out like Cain from the pres- 
 ence of the Lord, a sinner feels that like the first 
 murderer he is an accursed and branded being. 
 
Theistic and Christian Types. 237 
 
 The universe must undergo some catastrophic 
 revolution before prayer from his lips can traverse 
 the infinite spaces which separate him from the 
 place hallowed by God's dwelling. " Do not 
 name prayer to me," said Voltaire in his last 
 hours, as he is reported by his Christian nurse. 
 
 22. Poets, with no intent to illustrate a Biblical 
 truth, have illustrated this truth of the contradic- 
 tion between prayer and the consciousness of sin 
 unrelieved by the discovery of Christ. Thus 
 Shakespeare pictures the remorse of Macbeth 
 wlien the blood-stains on his hands bring his 
 guilt home to him. He cannot pray. He over- 
 hears the young sons of the murdered prince 
 waking from their troubled sleep to say their 
 prayers, and he says : — 
 
 " Listening ... I could not say ' Amen ' 
 When they did say ' God bless us ! ' 
 Wherefore could I not pronounce ' Amen '? 
 I had most need of blessing, yet ' Amen ' 
 Stuck in my throat." 
 
 This is human nature when buffeting the infu- 
 riated billows of remorse without Christ. The 
 most genuine literature of tlie world places a 
 guilty man in the same dread extremity in which 
 the Bible places him. Dramatic genius paints it 
 as the pulpit paints it. To a guilty being aroused 
 to an honest disclosure of himself, the thought 
 of God is freighted with secret revenges, which 
 nothing silences but a corresponding disclosure 
 of Christ. Sometimes that discovery comes as a 
 
238 My Note-Booh. 
 
 surprise : it did so to David Brain erd. In other 
 cases it is the fruit of prolonged discipline : it was 
 such to Richard Baxter. But in both it is one 
 thing — a sense of the reality of Christ as God — 
 working out a redemption from sin which is pos- 
 sible in no other way. 
 
 23. Another peculiarity of this phase of relig- 
 ious life is that when we grasp th^fact of Christ 
 as a reality in our moral destiny, we have no 
 desire to philosophize about it. That is to say, 
 a philosophy of the atonement is not a necessity 
 to our mental repose. The contradiction of trinity 
 in unity in the ontology of Divine Being does not 
 disturb us. Nor does the ulterior mystery of 
 atonement, as related to the moral government 
 of God, clamor for a clearance. Under the intoler- 
 able weight of guilt we have no heart for such 
 researches. They may come to us at a later stage 
 of moral quietude, but for the time being we do 
 not care for them. Men struggling for a necessity 
 do not think beyond the necessity. A swimmer 
 striking out for dear life does not care for more 
 than life. So in that exigency of an awakened 
 spirit in which we appropriate Christ by faith, 
 philosophical speculations find no purpose. We 
 hang on the edge of suspended fate. We want 
 a Redeemer who is God-Man ; but to know what 
 is the mysterious bond between them would be 
 rather a hindrance than a help. That wisdom 
 is not timely, though from the lips of angels. 
 
 24. It deserves note also that the conscious pos- 
 
Theistic and Christian Types. 239 
 
 session of Christ as a personal Saviour brings the 
 believing spirit into closer proximity to a personal 
 God than it seems reverent to approach when all 
 that we know of Him is His unveiled Deity. 
 
 The confessions of a pastor's note-book often 
 give illustrations of this. A pastor in Boston 
 once mentioned to me an inquirer in his own par- 
 ish whose awe at the ineffable majesty of God was 
 so profound that he had no consciousness of the 
 filial relationship between God and himself. The 
 possibility of it was a discovery. He might fear 
 God, revere God, repent towards God, trust God, 
 adore God, obey God ; but he said : '* Do you mean 
 to say that I am free to love God as I do a personal 
 friend?" 
 
 25. Overpowering awe at the majesty and holi- 
 ness of God is not limited to minds of exceptional 
 structure. This is evident from the fact that it 
 finds so frequent and intense expression in our 
 Hymnology. One recalls at random such lines as 
 the following ; viz. : — 
 
 " Great God, and wilt thou condescend 
 
 To cast a look below? " 
 " And can this mighty King 
 
 Of glory condescend ? " 
 " My God ! O could T make the claim, 
 
 My Father and my Friend! " 
 " Father ! if I may call Thee so." 
 
 In such strains of trembling reverence the 
 Church has for ages been wont to sing that mood 
 of devotional feeling in which the remoteness of 
 
240 My Note-Book. 
 
 a holy God from a guilty man burdens the spirit. 
 But that mood gives way to a sense of proximity 
 and of friendship when God is discovered as a 
 reality in the person of our Lord. Christian 
 Hymnology in every language overflows with 
 hymns of loving adoration of Christ. 
 
 26. An affecting illustration of the unsatisfied 
 craving of a believing heart for union with God is 
 on record in the Memoirs of Dr. Chalmers. The 
 strength of his character gives it a place among 
 the few records of Christian experience which the 
 Church will not " willingly let die." 
 
 Under one date he writes in a diary kept for his 
 own eye alone : '' March 4. Cannot say much of 
 my walk with God." Again he says, '' March 5. 
 Cannot yet record a close walk with God." Then, 
 "March 7. Cannot yet speak of any walk with 
 God." And again, " March 8. Not yet ! Not yet! 
 O God, help me ! " And once more, " March 9. 
 Not yet ! O my God, keep me humble ! " At last 
 he records in one of those silent communings with 
 himself and God, these words : " Will not a quiet 
 confidence in Christ bring it about ? " The words 
 of this confession of a good, great man are few, and 
 of the more worth for being few. A volume of 
 unwritten biography lies behind them. Here is a 
 godly man who, after years of Christian discipline, 
 labors day after day under the same sense of the 
 infinite recoil of the sensibilities of God from human 
 guilt which is felt by the humblest believer. At the 
 very time when Europe and America were ringing 
 
Theistic and Christian Tyj^es. 241 
 
 with admiration of his genius, and when vast 
 assemblies crowded the largest church in Scotland, 
 and extended from the windows and doors across 
 the street, to catcli the words that fell from his 
 lips, this struggle of his inner life was going on 
 in secret. None but himself and God knew it. 
 He could find God in the walk of friend with 
 Friend, only as the rest of us do, by " a quiet con- 
 fidence in^ Christ." 
 
 27. A remarkable difference exists betw^een the' 
 Protestant and the Romish faith in their impression 
 upon religious life, of the person of the Redeemer. ' 
 Protestant faith realizes to the believer's thought a ' 
 living Christ ; Romish faith, a dead Christ. The 
 living link between power and helplessness to 
 which a man clings in the emergency of sin is 
 intercession. That the Romish theolog}^ relegates 
 to created beings. Our Protestant theology brings 
 the penitent soul to the very God in the person of 
 our Lord. 
 
 With a great sense of need have we obtained our 
 Protestant freedom in this thino\ Modern thought 
 has made it in theory so trite that we do not appre- 
 ciate the magnitude of it till some emergency dis- 
 covers to us what our plight would be without it. 
 What would our practical sense of deliverance from 
 sin be, if we had none greater or better than saints, 
 living or dead, to indorse our prayers for it ? Re- 
 verse the grooves of our supplications, so that they 
 shall ascend not to the living and recreant Christ, 
 but to St. Dominic or St. Bernard, and how much 
 
242 My Note-Booh. 
 
 of the peace of God could we ever get from them ? 
 Materialize our mental image of our Lord to the 
 drooping form in Rubens's " Descent from the 
 Cross " or to the agonized visage of Guido's " Ecce 
 Homo " ; how could we bear the revulsion which 
 would come upon our present conception of Him ? 
 Shall we not need something other than these 
 before our dying eyes ? 
 
 28. The Christian type of religious life fur- 
 nishes an antidote to another stupendous error 
 in human conceptions of God. Left to its own 
 imaginings the human mind conceives of the life 
 of God as an eternal repose. In the far, the long 
 withdrawing recesses of primeval distance, some- 
 where in the universe, immeasurably remote from 
 human wants and sympathies — God is. That is 
 all that we know of Him. So dreams our thought 
 of God without the help of an incarnation. Buddha 
 has done for us the best that man can do to formu- 
 late to human thought the life of God, without a 
 knowledge of Christ. 
 
 Our Lord, on the other hand, has revealed God as 
 the most intensely and benevolently active Being 
 in the universe. We do not know that Christ 
 ever spent an idle hour. Who believes that He 
 ever felt the necessity of " killing time " ? Enter- 
 prise and self-sacrifice follow as inevitable corol- 
 laries from the consciousness of a living Christ in 
 the believer's thought. We should have reason to 
 distrust the history of Christianity if it had not 
 produced such men as St. Paul, Francis Xavier, 
 
Theistic and Christian Types. 243 
 
 Count Zinzendorf, and Henry ^lartyn. Such men 
 are the direct product of the idea of Christ as a 
 revelation of the life of God. 
 
 29. The fact deserves emphatic mention that 
 this variety of experience which we term Christian 
 as distinct from Theistic has impressed itself on 
 real life more vividly than an}^ other which has 
 wrought itself, on any larger scale, into human 
 history. 
 
 For proof of this we must turn again to the 
 hymns of the Church. That which the Church 
 loves most profoundly she sings most cordially. 
 Of all her hymns, the choicest and dearest to 
 Christian hearts in all ages have been those conse- 
 crated to the worship of the living Christ. Some 
 of them are older than any living language. The 
 earliest known Greek poem on a sacred theme is a 
 song of " Praise to Christ the Redeemer." 
 
 This class of Christian hymns were the favorite 
 songs of the early Christian homes. They have 
 been sung at marriage-feasts, over the cradles of 
 new-born children, at morning and evening and 
 noontide prayers. They have been the most 
 precious burial-h3'mns chanted beside the graves 
 of saints. They have been the most inspiring bat- 
 tle-songs of Christian armies. In hours of victory 
 they have been the thanksgiving alike of the liv- 
 ing and the dying. In civil wars, dying Christians 
 of both armies, the victors and the vanquished, 
 have joined their feeble voices in them on the field. 
 This occurred on the field of Shiloh. 
 
244 My Note-Book. 
 
 Hymns of this class have been the summons of 
 great awakenings and reformations. Luther made 
 Europe ring with new hymns in praise of God in 
 Christ. The Moravian Brethren of Germany, and 
 the Methodists of England, called back in the 
 same way a decadent Church. 
 
 Above all others, these have been the chosen 
 hymns of martyrs. They have been sung in low 
 tones, by hunted worshippers in dens and caves, 
 and in the intervals of torture on the rack. The 
 Albigensian Christians sang them while casting 
 themselves into the flames kindled by Simon de 
 Montfort. The Waldenses sung them in the fast- 
 ness of the Maritime Alps, when they were com- 
 pelled to smother their voices lest they should be 
 heard by armed men in ambush. Margaret Wil- 
 son sung fragments of them when tied by the min- 
 ions of Claverhouse to the stake in Solway Frith. 
 Women of gentle culture in the Netherlands who 
 were buried alive sung snatches of them while the 
 guards of "Alva the Butcher" were shovelling 
 the earth in upon their living faces. 
 
 30. Such is the volume of holy song which has 
 borne down through the ages the very life of souls 
 in adoration of Christ as God. Yet Matthew 
 Arnold would have us believe that our faith in 
 any personal God at all " cannot be verified ! " 
 Our own Scriptures even do not teach it ! What 
 living thing under the whole heavens, then, can 
 "be verified"? That men and women and chil- 
 dren have lived this faith, singing it through cen- 
 
Theistic and Clirhtiaii Types. 245 
 
 turies of suffering for it unto death, is an argument 
 in proof of it, the same in kind and tenfold in 
 force, with that which Emerson ascribes to Words- 
 worth's " Ode on Immortality " in proof of that 
 doctrine. 
 
 31. An interesting incident to the history of 
 the two varieties of religious life illustrated in the 
 foregoing pages is the fact that they have impressed 
 themselves upon the two grandest and most he^u- 
 i\i\jl festival days which the world has known, — 
 the Thanksgiving Day of New England and the 
 English Christmas. Our fathers of the exodus 
 from England likened themselves to the people 
 of the more ancient exodus of Egypt. Though 
 by no means indifferent to the institutions of the 
 New Testament, yet they were in many things men 
 of the older dispensation. The Mosaic Sabbath 
 was their ideal of holy time. The Decalogue was 
 their code of private morals. The abhorrence with 
 which they recoiled from Romish festivals swept 
 away with them the English Christmas. It was 
 quite in the course of Nature that the only festival 
 which they originated which has become national, 
 should be in adoration of the Creator, the Protector, 
 the Father, the God of the seed-time and the har- 
 vest, rather than of Christ the Redeemer. It was 
 in keeping with their departure from the traditions 
 of the Mother Church in other things. 
 
 The Church of England, on the other hand, hon- 
 ored some of those traditions to her own hurt. But 
 as an incident to her conservatism, she saved 
 
246 Mij Note-Book. 
 
 to the whole English-speaking world the festival 
 commemorative of the risen and ascended Christ. 
 Thus the two great types of individual religious 
 life which are natural to Christian believers, we 
 find expressed in the two festivals which bid fair 
 to become national in our country's history. 
 
 32. Of the two varieties of Christian experience 
 here developed, it may seem superfluous to inquire 
 which is the superior. Each is the superior under 
 its own conditions. Each is natural to the condi- 
 tions which produce it. Neither is exclusive of 
 the other. The possible and the actual range of 
 Christian living are very expansive. Like the 
 love of Christ, they have height and depth and 
 length and breadth. The Divine toleration of 
 diversities is very generous. God looks magnani- 
 mously upon varieties of temperament and early 
 training and inherited bias and outward circum- 
 stance. If a man of meditative temperament 
 inclines to one type, and a man of more demonstra- 
 tive nature to another, God is not hypercritical 
 in judging the one by the other's tastes. Dwell- 
 ers in the mountains or on the sea may find in 
 their surroundings food for one kind of religious 
 growth, and inhabitants of cities who never see a 
 horizon may experience more facile development 
 in another kind. They whose education has made 
 much of the Old Testament may expand in one 
 way ; they whose training has had closer affinity 
 with the New Testament may develop in another. 
 Divine grace studies the history of the individual* 
 
Theintlc and Christian Types, 247 
 
 33. Nature often is made tributary to grace 
 through the laws of heredity in ways which are 
 intricate and wonderful. Here is a child born 
 with a healthy physical inheritance, and especially 
 with a dense and evenly balanced brain. He is 
 therefore saved by ante-natal protection from the 
 temptations and moral defeats which come from 
 distempered nerves and tainted blood. Such a 
 child, trained in the seclusion of a Christian home, 
 is preserved by his very ignorance from many 
 varieties of sin. He may, therefore, grow into 
 " a state of grace " without knowing it. God the 
 Creator, the Father, the Friend, may tacitly take 
 the place of earthly father and mother in his lov- 
 ing reverence, and he may never know the time of 
 the substitution. He may honestly say : " It was 
 always thus with me." The moral horologe, in 
 such a case, has no dial-plate. Christ may not 
 become more than a historic fact to him till riper 
 years and severer trials and the craft of Satan 
 make siyi more potentially real to him, and drive 
 him to the great discovery. He finds out the 
 reality of Christ, not till he feels his own need 
 of Christ. 
 
 34. Yet the whole inner spirit of these varieties 
 of Christian living is one. They are varieties, not 
 contraries. Each is the complement of the other. 
 In a rounded and finished character both will 
 appear in living beauty. 
 
 A resident of the city of Bath, England, a contem- 
 porary witli the Kev. William Jay, once compared 
 
248 My Note-Booh. 
 
 his preaching with that of a Unitarian preacher 
 of the same city. He said that the one preached 
 Christ as if there were no God, and the other 
 preached God as if there were no Christ. No such 
 contradiction appears in the characters of those 
 formed by a full, balanced faith. In such charac- 
 ters both these ideas are living forces. They work 
 in harmony. 
 
 35. In personal Christian growth we often 
 observe a progress from the one to the other of 
 these types of piety corresponding to that from 
 the Old Testament to the New. Such progress 
 indicates the tendency of character to grow by 
 evolution rather than by revolution. Gradual 
 increments are Nature's choice. Individuals may 
 have their " fulness of time " as the world's his- 
 tory has had. It may in both be marked by an 
 "advent of Christ." God builds characters or 
 stars in ways manifold. 
 
THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 1. The conversion of the world to Christ is a 
 prophecy and an enterprise. We are prone to rest 
 in the prophecy and to lag in the enterprise. At 
 present it languishes, not for the want of resources, 
 not for the want of faith in the issue, but for the i 
 want of character^ consecrated and concentrated in | 
 its achievement. It needs to be prosecuted with 
 an intensity of desire and will which shall have 
 the force of a passion. The object is a con- 
 quest, the grandest that is known to either his- 
 tory or prophecy. It must be achieved, if at all, 
 by the passion of conquest. It requires a force 
 of human will, like that which created Moham- 
 medanism. 
 
 2. Is the passion of conquest impossible in the 
 execution of a spiritual enterprise? For answer, 
 be it observed that the love of science has some- 
 times assumed this form and degree of heroism. 
 De Quincey mentions a French physician who, 
 in devotion to medical science, inoculated himself 
 with the virus of a malignant cancer. Another 
 did the same with the venom of hydrophobia before 
 Pasteur was known. A third committed suicide 
 
 249 
 
250 My Note-Book. 
 
 with the fumes of burning charcoal, that he might 
 record, for the benefit of his profession, the pulse 
 of slowly approaching death by that means. A 
 fourth lowered himself into the crater of Vesu- 
 vius, to the depth never before touched by human 
 foot, that he might give to science memoranda 
 of dying sensations which could be obtained in 
 no other way. There is but one object which 
 deserves self-sacrifice so heroic. It is that, or 
 something akin to that, for which our Lord laid 
 down His life. Is not the passion of Christian 
 sacrifice equal to that of scientific research? 
 
 3. A hopeful outlook upon the future of Christ- 
 ianity is suggested by the fact that the principle 
 of sympathy is more potent for good than for evil. 
 Right is auxiliary to every other right. Wrong 
 eventually wars with every other wrong. Good 
 tends to union; evil to segregation. Selfishness, 
 full-grown, is absolute isolation. The selfishness of 
 evil, therefore, defeats itself. A world in which 
 sin is regnant has only to be let alone to insure its 
 ruin by internal convulsions. On the contrary, a 
 body like the Church of Christ carries in its con- 
 stitution the elements of conquest, through sym- 
 pathy in feeling and concert in action. 
 
 4. The radical conditions of the problem disclose 
 another ground of hope in the fact that evil in this 
 world exists under a destiny of reaction, which is 
 fatal to its perpetuity. In many forms even its 
 longevity yields to reactions, by which it destroys 
 itself. In the form of bad governments evil tends 
 
The Future of Christianity. 251 
 
 to extremes, which wear out the patience even of 
 a bad workl. Revolutions follow, which tear up 
 society by the roots. Men who initiate the corrupt 
 and the false in government, and build institutions 
 of falsehood and corruption in their pride of suc- 
 cess, grow weary of their own work. They pull 
 down in rage what they built up in hope. Evil 
 thus reacts at maturity upon the promise of its 
 infancy. The major part of political history is 
 made up of these retributive reactions, in which 
 wrong dies by its own hand. 
 
 In the destiny of false religions the same law 
 holds good. Superstitions die suicidally. Even 
 a bad conscience revolts from its own excesses. 
 Heathen religions are not destroyed by the philos- 
 ophies which grow up by their side. They die of 
 their own corruptions. Christianity achieves its 
 most brilliant successes by taking possession of the 
 vacancies which such destructions leave behind 
 them. 
 
 5. Through its whole history the Christian 
 religion has developed supreme affinities for best 
 things. For the noblest culture, for purest morals, 
 for magnificent literatures, for most finished civil- 
 izations, for most energetic national temperaments, 
 for most enterprising races, for the most virile 
 and progressive stock of mind, it has manifested 
 irresistible sympathies. It goes wherever it can 
 find these superlative growths of human nature. 
 Where it cannot find them, it creates them. Judg- 
 ing its future by its past, no other system of human 
 
252 My Note-Book. 
 
 thought has so splendid a destiny. It is the only 
 system which possesses undying youth. 
 
 6. The successes of Christianity are not to be 
 measured by the increase of the Church alone. It 
 has secondary purposes which yet enter into its 
 predestined conquests. One of these is to act as a 
 detective and remonstrant force in human society. 
 " I bear zcitness to the truth." It has come into 
 the world as a test of character. Its mission in 
 part is to disclose evil which it does not rectify, 
 and to protest against corruptions w^hich it does 
 not purify. For the vindication of the govern- 
 ment of God, evil is not to go to its own place till 
 it is found out. It must know itself, and be known 
 to an observant universe, by the force of contrasts. 
 This world is a spectacle to other worlds. 
 
 T. Illustrations of this detective principle are 
 witnessed when and where Christian character is 
 most positive. Wicked men become eminently 
 wicked when and Avhere good men are eminently 
 good. Degree matches degree. The secret depths 
 of depravity are unveiled. Sin acts itself out in 
 preparation for judgment upon its malign matu- 
 rity. In the natural course of events, we should 
 expect the final triumphs of Christianity to suc- 
 ceed conflicts with the matured and concentrated 
 forces of depravity. The Gog and the Magog of 
 prophecy have a foundation in the nature of the 
 things concerned. 
 
 8. A fact often overlooked in our prognostica- 
 tions of the conversion of the world is the im- 
 
The Future of Christianity. 253 
 
 mensely augmented vitality of modern nations, 
 and of races of modern birth, as compared with 
 those of earlier ages. From antediluvian times 
 downward, the tendency of things has been to 
 pack human life more and more densely with 
 eventful history. Human character has been broad- 
 ened and deepened. The resources of race have 
 multiplied. Man is another being now than he 
 was in Syria or Arabia when the race was young. 
 There is more of him in the aggregate ; not in 
 numbers only, but in virility of character. He 
 leaves behind him when he dies a more magnificent 
 past than he inherited at his birth. 
 
 9. National destinies also develop more rapidly, 
 and mature with more weight of history. The 
 same underlying causes which have made armies 
 colossal in size, and almost resistless in the enginery 
 of war, tend also to make the development of moral 
 forces more rapid, and to hasten on ultimate events. 
 A year now is equivalent to a decade in the time 
 of Charlemagne. The face of the world and of 
 the Church to-day has the look of being in the 
 final ages of time. Men now living have the 
 promise of witnessing an advance toward the end 
 of the present economy unequalled by the progress 
 of any human lifetime of the past. 
 
 10. It is misleading, therefore, to conceive of 
 the conversion of the world as a remote event. 
 Prophecy declares what history hints at, that the 
 closing stages of that work will be developed with 
 unprecedented rapidity. History will grow and 
 
254 My Note-Booh. 
 
 mass itself in great events with reduplicated 
 momentum. 
 
 11. It appears probable that in the future prog- 
 ress of the Christian faith large expansion is to 
 take place in the breadth of Christian mind. A 
 profound principle of proportion in character was 
 announced in the declaration of our Lord: "There 
 hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist ; 
 nevertheless, he that is least in the kingdom of 
 Heaven is greater than he." The tendency of 
 Christian ideas is to mental growth. The mind 
 must expand which takes them in with cordial 
 sympathy. The conversion of Saul of Tarsus 
 wrought in him an intellectual revolution. 
 
 12. The working of this principle seems likely 
 to be redoubled in creative force, by the multiply- 
 ing of nationalities and races under the sway of 
 Christian thought. The Church of the future 
 cannot be provincial in character any more than 
 in locality. That enrichment of life-blood Avhich 
 springs from the intermingling of races must 
 become tributary to the ultimate types of Christ- 
 ianity. This is one of the ways in which is to be 
 developed the tendency of Christianity to take 
 possession of best things. 
 
 13. The work of the world's conversion suffers 
 for the want of that prestige which in any great 
 enterprise of a spiritual nature comes only from 
 rapidity of progress. When such an enterprise 
 lags, something more than time is lost. Imper- 
 ativeness of moral impression is lost. The respect 
 
The Future of Chriatianity. 255 
 
 which is felt for congruity of the work with the 
 spirit of its executives is lost. The reduplication 
 of force which springs from momentum is lost. 
 Natural laws are not suspended in the working of 
 Divine power. 
 
 14. Lord Collingwood of the English navy used 
 to teach his gunners that if they could deliver 
 three broadsides in five minutes, no enemy could 
 stand before them. The impression on the enemy's 
 morale would double the force of the assault. His 
 gunners learned to do it in three minutes and a 
 half. A similar principle holds good in moral 
 warfare. Motion itself is force; speed is force 
 reduplicated. One brief period of rapid conquest 
 in the progress of Christianity would concentrate 
 the mind of the world upon it as the work of God. 
 For moral impression, it would be worth tAvice 
 that of the same amount of gain extended over 
 twice the length of time. And in such an enter- 
 prise, moral impression is the germ of ultimate 
 success. 
 
 15. The composite structure of the Anglo- 
 American stock of mind marks it as that from 
 which the most prolific resources of power are to 
 come for the work of the world's salvation. Great 
 Britain and America are peopled by races more 
 diverse, and in some respects more antagonistic, 
 than are found in any other portion of the world. 
 Such opposites blended into one usually crystallize 
 into elect nations. From such nations spring elect 
 families and individuals. These develop into 
 
256 My Note-Booh. 
 
 chosen leaders and foreseeing pioneers. It is not 
 without significance to the future of the Christian 
 Church that the English language already sways 
 one-quarter of the world, and much more than that 
 proportion of the thinking power of the world. 
 Back of that fact lie immense forces of 7'ace which 
 are committed to the ultimate ascendency of Christ- 
 ianity. 
 
 16. The Church will not attain to her millen- 
 nial expansion till we give freer play, in our plans 
 and expectations, to the laws of hereditary grace. 
 There is an extreme of individualism in the theory 
 of conversion entertained by many, which virtually 
 ignores those laws. Yet nothing is more obvious 
 in the Scriptural theory of Church extension as 
 displayed in Scriptural history. Our faith in them 
 should lead us to work in line with them. We 
 should work expectantly. We should look to find 
 a feeder to the growth of the Church in the natu- 
 ral outflow of ancestral piety in the persons of 
 Christian children to the remotest generation. Our 
 colonial fathers and mothers of New England were 
 accustomed to pray for the conversion of their 
 posterity to the end of time. Theirs was a philo- 
 sophical as well as a far-sighted faith. 
 
 17. The law of hereditary grace is a magnifi- 
 cent example of the " conservation of forces." No 
 other is so sublime or so beneficent. Under its 
 operation every new-born child of Christian parents 
 enters on existence under protective conditions. 
 In the natural order of things, his salvation should 
 
The Future of Christianity. 257 
 
 be treated as a thing of course. A fearful revul- 
 sion and contradiction of Divine law takes place 
 if he is not saved. In God's plan of procedure, 
 the growth of the Church is ordained mainly by 
 natural increase under Christian parentage. Here, 
 as elsewhere, grace works in the groove of Nature. 
 It is not that holiness is inherited ; no form of 
 character is so. But the elements are inherited in 
 which, as in its natural soil, holiness germinates. 
 A momentum towards right is thus created, which 
 it requires an incalculable force of evil to over- 
 power. Plant an acorn anywhere and anyhow in 
 good soil, and it will grow upward, not downward. 
 By a law of its being, its tiny sprout will seek the 
 sun. So a child set in the groundwork of a Christ- 
 ian family, and nurtured in its bland and pure 
 atmosphere, should, by the very conditions of his 
 existence, grow up towards God and Heaven. His 
 failure to do so is a moral catastrophe. It is against 
 Nature. 
 
 18. To specify but one of the instrumentalities 
 by which the grace of God reaches the heart of a 
 Christian child through the channel of his parent- 
 age, look at the moral power of the family altar. 
 Nothing else in a Christian home lives in memory 
 with such regenerating force as that which inheres 
 in a father's or a mother's prayers. One such child 
 of prayer, when an old man near the time of his 
 translation, recorded his own experience in a com- 
 munication to a friend, as follows : — 
 
 " I remember our family prayers in my cliildhood 
 
258 My Note-Book. 
 
 as if they were voices from Heaven. I owe my 
 salvation to them. The scene can never fade from 
 my mind. The room in which we knelt, the light 
 of the setting snn, which often streamed in through 
 the western window, the sweet voice of my mother 
 in the hymns we sang, the low and loving tones in 
 which my father used to plead with God for us, 
 are as fresh in my recollection to-day as they were 
 sixty years ago. No other scene this side of Heaven 
 is so hallowed in my thoughts. It all came back 
 to me at the only time in my life at which I strayed 
 into a theatre. It made the hour one of misery to 
 me. As a power of restraint to keep a young man 
 from evil ways, give me first and above all others 
 of human origin the memory of family prayers." 
 
 19. If the natural law of increase in the line of 
 Christian families should come under the power 
 of the grace of God, Avithout exceptions or inter- 
 missions, how long would it be before the present 
 relative proportionB of the Church and the Avorld 
 would be reversed? The problem is susceptible 
 of a mathematical solution. The tendency of 
 religion in a family is to prolong its line ; that of 
 irreligion, to shorten the line« Depraved families 
 have brief histories. Ancestral virtue has a long 
 life. A hint of this contrast in the destiny of 
 families is expressed in the third commandment 
 of the Decalogue. Let it be as definitely wrought 
 into the expectant faith of believers in the conver- 
 sion of the world, and that event would soon be 
 more than prophecy. 
 
The Future of Christianity. 259 
 
 20. The law of hereditary grace should affect 
 the methods of Christian usefulness in labors for 
 the conversion of children and youth. Those of | 
 godly parentage should not be taught the necessity j 
 of a convulsive change in regeneration Such a 1 
 change in a Christian child is unnatural. It is not 
 the common law of Christian life. The ideal of 
 that which was to them an impossible change of 
 character has doomed many such children to a 
 period of unspoken despair. Despair aggravates 
 sin by developing the consciousness of sin. Re- 
 morse without hope develops guilt as nothing else 
 can. Such children often become unconscious 
 fatalists in all that concerns their own salvation. 
 
 21. The law of hereditary grace suffers an occa- 
 sional intermission. Real life sometimes discloses 
 a suspension of this law in the descent of moral 
 tendency fro^n parent to child. One, even two 
 generations may be omitted in the inheritance of 
 the blessing, and it will reappear in the generations 
 following. King Hezekiah, of the line of Jewish 
 monarchs, was a devout man. Manasseh, his 
 son, and Anion, his grandson, were exceptionally 
 depraved. Men must be so who resist innate 
 tendencies to virtue. But in Josiah, the great- 
 grandson of Hezekiah, the line of godly graces reap- 
 peared. The unwritten history of Christian families 
 often discovers the same phenomena of intermission 
 and resumption of the law of gracious inheritance. 
 Through the long run of generations, the law de- 
 velops a wonderful tenacity of life. 
 
260 'My Note-Book, 
 
 22. The disastrous consequences of a neglect 
 of the laws of heredity in our estimate of the 
 moral conditions of Christian children had a strik- 
 ing illustration many years ago, in the case of a 
 youth who afterwards became the Governor of one 
 of the Middle States of this country. He had 
 been born and nurtured in a family of Scotch- 
 Presbyterian descent. At about the age of fifteen 
 years he sought the advice of his pastor respecting 
 a profession of religion by communion with the 
 Church. His yet infantile faith was tested by the 
 standard given in "Edwards on the Religious 
 Affections." He was asked if he had felt this and 
 felt that revolutionary change in his mental exer- 
 cises. Had he made new discoveries of God ? 
 Was he overwhelmed by his conciousness of guilt ? 
 Did he feel that he deserved to be damned for his 
 sins ? Did he so submit his destiny to the will of 
 God that he was willing to be damned if God had 
 so decreed ? He knew nothing of all that in his 
 own experience. Its very dialect was a strange 
 tongue. He only knew that he loved Christ, and 
 it seemed to him that he had always done so. 
 
 It was probably a case of unconscious regenera- 
 tion, perhaps in infancy. But he was told to wait 
 till he was old enough to experience a change of 
 heart, and to know it. When it came, it would be 
 indicated by signs which could not be mistaken. 
 The consequence was humiliating to the religious 
 enlightenment of the age. With what was to liim 
 an impossible ideal of conversion before him, he 
 
The Future of Christiayiity. 261 
 
 entered on active life with no faith in himself as a 
 child of God. Years followed years of prayerless 
 life. Conscience suffered from a religion of de- 
 spair. It was not till fifty years had rolled by that 
 he again summoned courage to seek admission to 
 the Church. Half a century of Christian peace 
 and usefulness was sacrificed by the want of faith 
 in God's working under the laws of Christian 
 parentage. 
 
 23. It should stimulate our confidence in the 
 future of the Christian religion to contemplate the 
 appalling results which must follow the failure of 
 such a faith to realize the promise of its triumph. 
 The downfall of such a system of beliefs would 
 plunge the thinking portion of mankind into an 
 abyss below the lowest ever conceived of by Roman 
 pessimism when the old mythologies expired. The 
 gloom of universal incertitude would be inevitable. 
 " Deeper than ever plummet sounded " is the ocean 
 of despair which Avould then roll over the nations. 
 The corollary would be indisputable that, if such 
 a faith cannot commend itself to human reason as 
 true, then nothing is true but the theorems of 
 Euclid. Annihilation would be the only possibility 
 in human destiny which could balance the fact of 
 death. Immortality, if credited, would become a 
 doom. Insanity and suicide would grow with the 
 growth of liberal culture. Such is the forecast of 
 the world's destiny which men of agnostic nega- 
 tions offer as a substitute for the Christian promise 
 of redemption. 
 
262 My Note-Booh. 
 
 24. It is well known that many of the most 
 thoiiQfhtful minds in Christendom believe that the 
 final conflict between good and evil in this world 
 will be raged between Christianity in its maturest 
 type and the extreme of unbelief represented by 
 avowed and cultivated Atheism. It is to be a war 
 of giants. It will not be provincial in its range. 
 Nor will it be limited, as the moral conflicts of the 
 past have been, to a few representative leaders of 
 Christian sects, and a few champions of the ex- 
 treme and erratic ideas of unbelief. It will be like 
 the War of the Rebellion in America — a conflict 
 of opposing civilizations. Nations will be its 
 armies. The world will be the battle-ground, and 
 there will be no lookers-on. 
 
 Such is the conception of the closing age of this 
 world's history, of which man}- Christian minds find 
 symbolic hints in Biblical prophecy. Philosophic 
 thinkers discern signs of colossal preparations for 
 it in the present state of the world and the drift 
 of history. 
 
 25. One of the tokens of the spirit of progress 
 with which Christianity has leavened human soci- 
 ety is witnessed in the alleviation of the rancor 
 which once infected religious controversy. 
 
 One cannot but contrast hopefully the genial 
 temper of modern religious debate with that which 
 history pictures to our fancy of the controversies 
 among the early Protestant reformers. Luther 
 called a brother monk a "beast," and another a 
 "hog." Even if it was true, it was not exactly 
 
The Future of Christianity. 263 
 
 fraternal. Calvin denounces a brother Protestant 
 as a " dog," and Servetus he branded as a " viper." 
 As to the honorary titles of '' devil," " fiend," " Anti- 
 christ," they were like household words. They 
 were bandied about like shuttlecocks. There was 
 a great deal of latent profaneness in the contro- 
 versial anathemas of the olden times. 
 
 Churchly disruptions within the memory of 
 men now living have given vent to fraternal bit- 
 terness scarcely less revolting. American slavery 
 tended to demonize everything that it touched. 
 How many ecclesiastical assemblies have been 
 infuriated by it ! In one such, a reverend brother 
 from Alabama affectionately invited his brother 
 from Ohio, who had just acknowledged his invest- 
 ments in the " underground railroad," to visit him 
 in his Southern home, and assured him that he 
 would be welcomed to tar and feathers and a 
 lamp-post ! 
 
 T am reminded also of one of the critical assem- 
 blies of the Presbyterian Church, which occurred 
 in my later boyhood. One of the several Drs. 
 Breckinridge, brothers, was pre-eminent in his 
 power of invective. He had an equal gift of the 
 dialect of sympathy and of compliment. In public 
 salutations he was a prince, so courtly was his 
 manner and so elegant his style. His sermons 
 were models of smooth and flowing rhetoric. On 
 the occasion referred to, a brother presbyter of the 
 New School rose to reply to the doctor's rasping 
 criticism of him on the day before. To this hour 
 
264 Mij Note-Book. 
 
 his introductory remark clings to my memory. 
 Said he : " My brother from Kentucky well knows 
 how to speak in elegant and oily phrase, but on 
 this occasion he has misplaced his gift, and has 
 poured out on my devoted head the oil of vitriol." 
 Half a century has improved the civilization of our 
 public bodies. We seldom hear in our religious 
 convocations a specimen of the vitriolic comity. 
 
 26. Suspending the argument from prophecy, a 
 forecast of the issue of the conflict of Christianity 
 with the forces of evil in this world may be 
 founded upon the history of Christianity hitherto. 
 That which it has already done for mankind gives 
 no doubtful promise of what it will do in the last 
 times, be they distant or near. 
 
 To estimate such a history free from mental 
 bias, we should imagine the effects which it 
 records to have been wrought by other causes. 
 Suppose them to have been the fruit of other 
 sacred books than ours. Imagine that the Hindoo 
 Vedas had acliieved for the world all that the 
 Hebrew and Christian Scriptures have achieved, in 
 creating nations, literatures, civilizations ; could a 
 doubt exist of their final conquest of all other 
 powers which create human destiny? Confucius 
 died about twenty-four hundred years ago. Imag- 
 ine that his writings had made the Chinese Empire 
 what the British Empire is to-day. Would philo- 
 sophic minds look farther to discover the system 
 of morals or religion which is destined to over- 
 spread the world? 
 
The Future of Christianity. 265 
 
 27. In estimating the adaptations of Christian- 
 ity to be a world-wide faith in the ages to come, 
 one fact should have decisive weight, — that it is 
 the only system of faith of which the world has 
 made trial which combines dogmatic religious 
 beliefs with corresponding principles of morality. 
 It builds ethics on religion. The ancient religions,") 
 excepting that of the Hebrews, which was Christ- ' 
 ianity in embryo, had no systems of ethics. They 
 did not profess to have any. Ante-Christian 
 ethics, so far as they existed outside of Hebrew 
 literature, were independent of religion. Neither 
 had any radical relation to the other. A Greek 
 or Roman devotee might be guilty of all the crimes 
 and vices known to the criminal code of ancient 
 jurisprudence, and it made no difference to his 
 character as a religionist. He might be the most 
 execrable of mankind in the courts of law, yet he 
 could cross the street into a temple of religion, and 
 there be a saint. In the temple of Bacchus or of 
 Venus his very vices were virtues. The identity i 
 of morals and religion is a Christian discovery. 
 
 28. There are religions of the soil. They abide 
 where they were born. They develop no power 
 of self-expansion and no facility of migration. 
 Rooted in the tastes of one race, they do not grow 
 into affinity with other races. They are intrinsi- 
 cally provincial and stationary. Of this immobile 
 type Christianity is not. It has restless migratory 
 impulses — tastes we may almost call them — which 
 forecast its destiny of dominion. It is emphatically 
 
266 My Note-Book. 
 
 the religion of colonization and of commerce. 
 Always and everywhere it is the pioneer of benefi- 
 cent change and of undying youth. It transplants 
 itself into nascent languages and cements antago- 
 nistic races from which elect nations spring, 
 
 29. The predicted triumphs of Christianity 
 suggest the very probable hypothesis that in forms 
 of oral address it is to command a hearing from 
 immense assemblies. Certain features of Christian 
 life require for their best development the inter- 
 play of sympathy and the stimulus of members in 
 such assemblies. There are graces of the closet 
 and graces of the crowd. The self-diffusive force 
 of our religion also cannot have full sway with- 
 out the incidental aid of multitudes to work with 
 as w^ell as to work upon. 
 
 30. The concentration of populations in great 
 cities, in this view, offers one of its best aspects. 
 It gives to the future of Christian enterprise the 
 opportunities which it needs for the assembling 
 of large congregations. A clerical traveller visit- 
 ing the market places and amphitheatres of South- 
 ern Europe can scarcely escape the thought of the 
 conveniences they furnish for discourse to immense 
 numbers in the open air. Imagine an Italian 
 Whitefield preaching in the Colosseum at Rome! 
 The golden age of street-preaching is yet to be. 
 
 31. The preaching of the Gospel will not 
 achieve results which \vill much exceed its present 
 average of success till the spirit of aristocratic 
 caste is extirpated from our churches. Metro- 
 
The Future of Christianity. 267 
 
 politan clusters of churcli-edifices in fashionable 
 localities and from which the poor are practically 
 excluded are a flat contradiction to the spirit of 
 our Lord. Alienation of classes in the Christian 
 brotherhood is a blank wall in the path of progress 
 which no human power can overleap. 
 
 32. The relig-ion of Christ contains an element 
 of power over the future in its teaching of the pos- 
 sibility of amiable relations between God and men. 
 Paganism knew nothing of such relations between 
 the worshipper and the objects of worship. The 
 mythologies, speaking in the general, had no lov- 
 able gods. The incentive to worship was fear. The 
 gods were deified men. If not purely malign, they 
 were selfishness personified. As such they leaned 
 to malign qualities in character. Hindoo mothers 
 flung their children to the crocodiles of the Ganges 
 as a propitiatory offering to deities whose nature 
 was like the crocodile. Love from man to God 
 and love from God to man are Christian discov- 
 eries. Human worship, just in proportion as it has 
 differed from Christian worship, has developed a 
 frightful approximation to devil worship. Pagan 
 art discloses this in the manufacture of deities. 
 Idols are frequently hideous representatives of the 
 malign passions. 
 
 33. It is impossible to understand some passages 
 of the Scriptures otherwise than as teaching that 
 the moral power of Christian believers is compe- 
 tent to effect results in the moral world which 
 shall have the impressiveness of miracles in the 
 
268 My Note-Book. 
 
 natural world. Until such phenomena appear in 
 the progress of the world's conversion, we must 
 believe that immense energies lie occult and unused 
 in the bosom of the Church. 
 
 34. Christian evang^izing of the nations has 
 now a history which has made the theory of mis- 
 sions a science. One of its axioms is that civiliza- 
 tion is a sequence, not an antecedent of the evan- 
 gelizing of a heathen people. The most facile and 
 1 expeditious way to uplift men to the level of civil 
 jj freedom is first to Christianize them. The initial 
 step in fitting men for self-government is to teach 
 them obedience to the government of God. Noth- 
 ing else dignifies man in his own consciousness 
 like a spiritual religion. The first sign of success 
 in the early missions to the Hawaiian Islands was 
 that the natives began to wear clothes. From that 
 germ of the sense of personal dignity the gifts and 
 graces of an advanced civilization have grown. 
 
 85. In estimating the probabilities of the future 
 progress of mankind, the fact is a significant one, 
 that no nation has ever voluntarily receded into 
 darker ages than the best in its history. Conserva- 
 tive tastes have never driven or enticed a civilized 
 people backward by their own choice. Romantic 
 sentiment may look backward, but the common 
 sense never walks backward of its own will. A 
 complex civilization never gives way to one of 
 primeval simplicity. Philosophers of erratic no- 
 tions have sported with the idea that savage life is 
 happier or purer than that of high culture, but no 
 
The Future of Christianity. 269 
 
 nation or race has ever been so fascinated by it as 
 to attempt its reduction to practice in real life. 
 Eager pedestrians lean forward. So. does the 
 human race bend with all its will power into the 
 future. 
 
 36. Especially is it true that those forces which 
 Christianity has put into the civilization of the 
 great races are growing forces. They have been 
 born with a destiny of thrift. Catastrophes which 
 threaten their perpetuity are never long-lived. The 
 tendencies to national decline which they set in 
 motion are tidal movements — not the oceanic 
 currents of the deep seas. We do not yearn for 
 mediaeval life any more than we do for the tastes 
 of our cannibal ancestors. A voluntary retrograde 
 from a Christian civilization by a nation once pos- 
 sessed of it would be equivalent to national suicide 
 — a doom which no people ever sought in fact or 
 tolerated in idea. 
 
 37. The advancement of religion in the world 
 often seems to be threatened with suspension by 
 its perversions and corruptions. Superstitious 
 beliefs, spurious revivals, and fanatical reforms 
 often have the look of a decline and fall of best 
 things. Best things corrupted become the worst. 
 Such is sometimes the look of affairs on the sur- 
 face of social agitations. Not so is it written in 
 the book of destiny. Things evil, when stirred up 
 by a quickened moral sense, have a chance of 
 regeneration. Spurious revivals set men to ponder- 
 ing the eternal verities. The very judgment that 
 
270 Mtj Note-Book. 
 
 they are spurious is founded on a superior ideal. 
 Imbecile suj^erstitions are built on a certain re- 
 siduum of truth, without which men could not 
 recognize their imbecility. Fanatical convulsions 
 awaken a great deal of sober and health}^ think- 
 ing. The existence of the extreme proves the 
 reality of the mean. So it is that evil works out 
 good through Divine reactions. Light gleams out 
 of darkness. Even lightning from thunder-clouds 
 is light. Salvation armies and Christian crusades 
 are not the inspired models of religious activity, 
 but it requires a profounder religious life to create 
 the intuition that they are not. Christianity is a 
 system of beliefs and practices which has immense 
 powers of deglutition and assimilation. It can 
 carry a dense mass of evil in its history without 
 lapsing into a state of moral convulsion. 
 
 38. It is a striking fact, bearing upon this 
 world's future, that civilization gives no sign of 
 perpetuity in history, till it is transplanted into 
 Christianity. Independently, like all other social 
 forces of human origin, it rots and dies. Only 
 Avhen it is rooted in Christian ideas does it give 
 promise of a future. The most corrupt nations 
 have been the most accomplished in civilized graces. 
 The most appalling downfalls of great races have 
 been the ending of the most illustrious careers of 
 national renown. The ante-Christian civilizations 
 have betrayed a frightful tendency to the develop- 
 ment of cruelty and lust in national entertain- 
 ments and the rites of national religions. They 
 
Tin' Future of Christ ianiti/. 271 
 
 taught men to luxuriate in the sufferings of their 
 fellows, and to adore their deities by acts of besti- 
 ality. 
 
 39. A fact not often estimated at its full worth 
 in our forecast of this world's future is that in its 
 Biblical representations the law of prayer has a 
 certain supremacy over other laws concerned in 
 human destiny. AVithin certain limits sovereignty 
 is assigned to mind over matter. The moral king- 
 dom takes precedence of the realm of nature. 
 Our earth gives abundant evidence of its sub- 
 ordination to moral uses and redemptive purposes. 
 And in keeping with this adjustment of things, 
 an imperial authority is ajvarded in the Bible to 
 prayer over material forces. 
 
 Fixed laws of Nature certainly have been sus- 
 pended at the bidding of believing prayer. More 
 than once the grave has given up the dead at its 
 imperial command. We assume more than we 
 know, therefore, when we affirm that never, under 
 any possible contingencies, can such an obeisance 
 of natural to moral law take place again. There 
 is a startling freedom from qualification in the 
 language of Biblical assurance to a Christian 
 suppliant. It is not uttered stealthily in a whisper. 
 Xor is it expressed in dubious intimations, as if the 
 speaker feared that he might say too much. 
 
 40. It is impossible, Avithin hearing of this 
 regal echo of inspired promise, to resist the con- 
 viction that, in the main, prayer is yet one of the 
 occult forces of the universe. Immense reserves 
 
272 My Note-Book, 
 
 of its po\Yer are yet latent and unused by Christ- 
 ian faith. It has never yet been put to the full 
 proof of its possibilities. Of all the forces known 
 to us, it is the last that can be imperilled by 
 future discoveries of the works and ways of God. 
 Who can dare to limit the resources of such a power 
 over the ultimate destinies of mankind? Espe- 
 cially when a spiritual power like this is com- 
 mitted to a spiritual work like that of the world's 
 con-conversion, with the sympathies and corre- 
 spondencies of myriads of Christian minds inter- 
 playing between, where is room for doubt of the 
 result? 
 
 41. The outlook of conquest which Biblical 
 prophecy gives to the closing periods of mundane 
 history suggests the possible return of miracle to 
 the resources of the Church. Who knows enough 
 of the marvels of those last times, to affirm that 
 the exigencies which they will create will not also 
 create such a demand for miracle as to make it 
 reasonable to the mind of God? Who knows 
 enough of the possibilities of expansion in spiritual 
 forces, to declare that prayer cannot achieve ascend- 
 ency over natural laws in those coming ages, as 
 it did in the saintly history of ancient times ? 
 
 42. It is cheering to observe, even in the pres- 
 ent conditions of Christendom, tokens of a much 
 broader subjection of civilized mind to the spirit- 
 ual reign of truth than is commonly recognized in 
 the statistics of Christian sects. The number of 
 regenerate souls is probably much larger than the 
 
The Future of ChrUtianity. 273 
 
 Church reckons among her converts. Circles upon 
 circles of illumined minds revolve around the 
 solar centre Avhich the Church represents. They 
 resemble the rings of Saturn. How many of them 
 are elect spirits we cannot estimate. But that 
 multitudes of them are such cannot well be ques- 
 tioned. A Christian civilization is a grand prod- 
 uct of Christian redemption. Lines of spiritual 
 sympathy run to and fro between them. If we 
 could express in numbers the spiritual conquests 
 of the Cross, Ave should doubtless find millions ' 
 upon millions of true believers in these outside 
 realms of civilized thought. 
 
 Christianity is thus putting forth its feelers to 
 gather in uncounted and unknown fruits. Many • 
 such saved ones are in the twilight of corrupt 
 churches in which truth is not yet extinct. Com- 
 merce has carried germs of Christian thought into 
 the shadow of heathen temples. Christianized 
 languages are crowding hard upon those of pagan 
 origin. Christian ideas of liberty and of political 
 economy are pushing their way underneath an- 
 cient despotisms. It is impossible that such tribu- 
 taries to the Gospel should not scatter broadcast 
 the seeds which shall spring up in the regeneration 
 of souls. The disclosures of the great Day will 
 surprise us by the magnitude of its spiritual 
 triumphs. Despised races Avill be seen to con- 
 tribute to immense majorities of the redeemed. 
 God counts nothing lost Avhich can be saved. 
 These secondary workings of redemptive purpose 
 
274 My Note-Booh. 
 
 are preparatory to the marvellous rapidity of its 
 acliievements in this world's closing scenes. They 
 give more than hints of the fact that the last sun 
 which will dawn on its spiritual history will go 
 down in unclouded glory. 
 
XI. 
 
 METHODISM -ITS WORK AND ITS WAYS. 
 
 1. The Methodist Episcopal Church is a strik- 
 ing illustration of the principle that every great 
 Christian sect is built on a necessity. It comes 
 into being because it must come. 
 
 The rise of Methodism was the birth of a spirit- 
 ual reform of which all the Christian denomi- 
 nations in Great Britain and America were in 
 desperate need. The Established Churches of 
 England and Scotland were dying of spiritual 
 ancemia. Dr. Blair at Edinburgh and Bishop Por-^ 
 teous at London'were droning moral platitudes in 
 the pulpit, while the masses of the people, espe- 
 cially in England, never heard of them or of the 
 Gospel they professed to preach. Never before, 
 nor since, has the phenomenon been so signally 
 developed, of Christianity gasping in the struggle 
 to live on the religion of Nature. The religion of' 
 the realm was Christianity without Christ. All 
 that was peculiar to it as a way of salvation was 
 practically ignored. Among the ruling classes 
 religious convictions had no intensity, and relig- 
 ious life no reality. 
 
 2. Bishop Butler gave it as a reason for publish- 
 
 275 
 
276 My Note-Book. 
 
 ing the " Analogy,'' that " it has come to be taken 
 for granted that Christianity is no longer a subject 
 of inquiry, but is now discovered to be fictitious." 
 As for the English court, Bishoj) Stevens has told 
 I tlie whole story in saying : " It was a royal brothel." 
 Dr. Samuel Johnson was contemporary with John 
 Wesley. He told his friend Boswell : " I can 
 remember the time when it was common for Eng- 
 lish gentlemen to go to bed drunk every night in 
 the week, and they were thought none the worse 
 of for it." Such was England when Methodism 
 came as an angel of rebuke. 
 
 The chief power in saving to the future the old 
 Church of Cranmer and Ridley was the Methodist 
 revival. It broke upon the kingdom in tongues 
 of flame. Then was the golden age of field-preach- 
 ing. In the venerable cathedrals of England the 
 magnates of the Church on the Lord's Day preached 
 to a dozen hearers ; sometimes to less ; occasionally 
 to nobody but the sexton and the choir. An 
 audience of two hundred was a crowd. The Dean 
 of St. Patrick's in Dublin once preached to the 
 sexton alone. His sermon, all told, as my mem- 
 ory recalls the story, was : " Be a good man, John, 
 and a Tory." At the same time Wesley and 
 Whitefield were haranguing ten and twenty thou- 
 sands at a time in the open air. The wisdom of 
 the city fathers of Boston had not then illu- 
 mined the world. 
 
 3. The movement began, as religious awaken- 
 ings usually do, among the lower orders. But its 
 
Metliodism — its Work and its Ways. 277 
 
 refluent waves soon rolled up over the heights of 
 cultivated society. The infidel lords, Bolingbroke 
 and Chesterfield, rode out in their crested car- 
 riages to see " what these Methodist loons were 
 making such an ado about." David Hume and 
 Benjamin Franklin studied the phenomenon with 
 knitted brows as a psychological enigma. Every 
 Protestant sect in England, Wales, Scotland, Ire- 
 land, and America felt the reviving thrill. 
 
 4. Methodism in those days had its baptism of 
 fire. It met the usual fate of religious reforma- 
 tions in being detested and maligned. The name, 
 as is well known, became the synonym of social 
 vulgarity. To become a " Methody " was to drop 
 out of sight of respectability. Men lost caste by 
 it, even in humble life. Chimney-sweeps and boot- 
 blacks grinned at the discovery that there was a 
 rung of the social ladder below theirs. Cowardly 
 inquirers denounced " the humbug " roundly in 
 the daytime, and crept into the chapels on the sly 
 in the twilight. Families were disrupted by it, as 
 by the " Wars of the Roses." Sons and daughters 
 were disinherited for leaving the parish church for 
 the conventicle. " I came not to send peace on 
 earth, but a sword." But none the less for that, 
 the mother church, and every church, felt the new 
 spirit in the air. 
 
 5. The Church of England could no more with- 
 stand it than she could have withstood the day of 
 judgment. To her it luas the day of judgment, 
 but for the " remnant which was left " within her 
 
278 My Note-Book. 
 
 pale which recognized the voice of a prophet. 
 English Christianity has never lost the elements 
 of spiritual life which Methodism, by direct reproof 
 and by the power of contrast, then put into it. 
 For her noble missions of a later day, for her fidel- 
 ity to the faith as expressed in her incomparable 
 Litany, and for her faithfulness to the masses of 
 the poor at home, in the ways practicable to her 
 stately polity, the Church of England to-day is 
 largely indebted to the stimulant and remonstrant 
 action of Methodism upon her vital powers. It 
 regenerated them. It brought back into living use 
 the resources which had been buried in her ancient 
 standards, and her Book of Prayer, and her mar- 
 tyrology. Methodism saved the Anglican Church 
 1 from extinction. It was a re-enforcement of apos- 
 I tolic Christianity, also, in every other Christian 
 * denomination in the English-speaking nations and 
 colonies. We have all felt the throb of its pulsa- 
 tions. It has been what new blood is to falling 
 dynasties and decadent races. 
 
 6. Methodism has done for the Christian world 
 another service. She has contributed improve- 
 ments of inestimable value to the popular theol- 
 ogy. In theological science, strictly so called, 
 Methodism has not been illustrious. Her great 
 theologians are yet to be. Wesley seems not to 
 have cared much about truth in dogmatic forms. 
 His mind was of the executive order. His convic- 
 tions were facts articulate. He seized upon a few 
 fundamental ideas of Christianity as facts rather 
 
MethoiVism — its Work and its Ways. 279 
 
 than as doctrines. Beyond affirming these, he 
 built a church on the principle, as he put it, " of 
 liberty to think and let think." The leaders of 
 the reform, with perhaps one exception, were 
 preachers rather than theologians. Its throne was 
 the pulpit, not the school. Yet to the theology of 
 the people its pulpit has done good, knightly ser- 
 vice. It has been a stout ally of those who have 
 labored to eliminate from the popular notion of 
 Christianity the fictions of limited atonement and 
 the servitude of the human will. 
 
 7. Before the advent of Methodism, these dog- 
 mas, to the majority of minds which came under 
 their influence, had made salvation an impracticable 
 business. Theoretically, the popular mind could 
 make nothing else of it. The speculations in 
 which adroit minds essayed to untie the knot in 
 which these dogmas had bound popular inquiry 
 had little weight in the pulpit. They were not 
 useful there, because they could not be used. In 
 many pulpits the preaching of repentance to un- 
 regenerate men had absolutely ceased. Logical 
 minds holding those dogmas could not preach it. 
 In private they said so, and in *the pulpit they 
 were dumb. To preach repentance as a duty to 
 men who could not repent, and who until they did 
 could have no assurance that the sacrifice of Christ 
 had any concern with them, was an insult to the 
 hearer and stultification to the preacher. Sensible 
 men felt this and revolted. They would not sow 
 seed on a marVjle quarry. Rowland Hill once, on 
 
280 My Note-Book. 
 
 entering a certain churcli, was admonished : " We 
 preach only to the elect here." " So will I," he 
 replied, " if you will put a label on them." 
 
 8. Methodism cut the knot. Wesley and his 
 associates denied the limitation of the atoning 
 sacrifice by Divine decree. They did it in no 
 obscure or silken speech. They denounced the 
 dogma with vehemence and scorn. They defied it 
 as an invention of the devil. Indeed, throughout 
 the controversy with Calvinism, Wesley was a 
 savage. He sj)ared neither foe nor friend, not 
 even Whitefield. He gave us the iron hand bare 
 of the velvet glove. But his unkempt ferocity of 
 method achieved its object. It said what he 
 meant, and hewed the way clean to the liberty of 
 proclaiming a free salvation. That he and his 
 successors flung broadcast. They preached it 
 exultingly. They preached it like men freeborn. 
 It gave a ring of gladness to their ministrations. 
 The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills 
 like lambs, at the sound of their voices. 
 
 9. There was an electric spring to conquest in 
 the Gospel as they projected it upon the quivering 
 sensibilities of men, which made it seem to them 
 a novelty. The immense assemblies in the fields, 
 when they listened to the impassioned harangues 
 of Whitefield and Wesley, seemed to themselves 
 to hear the word of God for the first time. Then, 
 first, the offer of salvation meant something to 
 them. Men and women who, all their lives, had 
 been droning the confession that they were " mis- 
 
Methodism — ?V.s- Work and its Wa>/s. 281 
 
 erable sinners," not believing a word of it, sud- 
 denly found out that it was a fact. Sermons, as 
 they heard them, were full of personal allusions. 
 Then Christ became to them a necessity; and 
 because a necessit}^ a reality. The sympathy of 
 numbers redoubled the force of the convictions 
 which sprung up in the soul of every one. Light 
 shone reflected from a thousand mirrors. The 
 Day of Pentecost dawned again. 
 
 10. Human freedom in matters of religion came 
 to the faith of the Methodist commonalty more 
 circuitously. Yet it came with scarcely less power 
 of persuasion as a corollary from the ministra- 
 tions of the Methodist pulpit. Not as clear-cut 
 dogma in theological science, such as it appears 
 — and nowhere else so luminously — in the lat- 
 ter Calvinism of New England, but as fact, the 
 freedom of the human will has been built into 
 Methodist theology as the people have conceived 
 it from the beginning. Men who have denied 
 it as dogma have used it as fact. The Wesleys 
 denied it, but John Wesley preached it in his 
 forty thousand sermons, and Charles Wesley sung 
 it in hymns which have been heard around the 
 globe. 
 
 This contradiction, which was fto contradiction, 
 grew out of the intensity of the faith of the early 
 ^lethodists in individual responsibility. " The 
 living soul in moral solitude with God" was the 
 key-note of their preaching. Wesley used to say 
 to his lay preachers: "Remember you have but 
 
282 My Note-Book. 
 
 one thing to do — to bring the individual soul to 
 Christ." 
 
 11. Now, no man can have his own soul set aflame 
 I with a sense of the responsibility of the individual 
 I man to a personal God, of a guilty man to a holy 
 
 God, of a redeemed man to a self-sacrificing God, 
 and not preach the ability of man to obey God. 
 No matter whether he believes it as dogma or not, 
 \ he will preach it as fact. He will preach it with a 
 1 force of implication which amounts to certainty. 
 He may give to it one name or another, or none. 
 He may call it "natural ability," as the later Cal- 
 vinism of New England does; or "gracious abil- 
 ity," as Wesley did ; or no ability at all, as the 
 elder Calvinism did ; he will so preach it that 
 awakened hearers will take it in and trust it and 
 use it as ability pure and simple. In a great spir- 
 itual reform it will become a power of spiritual 
 life in the popular thinking. And this is what 
 Methodism made of it. As the groundwork of 
 individual responsibility, it has been set home 
 to the conscience by the Methodist pulpit with 
 an intensity of conviction which has often swept 
 everything before it. 
 
 12. Robert Southey says that, of all the hymns 
 in the English language, " none are more devoutly 
 committed to memory and more frequently repeated 
 on death-beds, than certain hymns by Charles 
 Wesley." But Methodist Hymnology has done a 
 broader service than that. When the Methodist 
 pulpit has proved the power of men to repent bv 
 
Methodism — its Work and its Ways. 283 
 
 constraining them to act it with tears of godly sor- 
 row, then the great congregation has caught it up, 
 and, as if moved by the baton of an angel in the 
 sky, has echoed and re-echoed it in hymns which 
 have borne up the faith of souls in it as on the 
 wings of the wind. Where in the comparison are 
 our thundering organs and our surpliced boys pos- 
 ing in dim cathedrals ; and where our puny quar- 
 tettes performing before dumb assemblies ? 
 
 13. For the planting of great Christian truths 
 deep in the heart of an awakened people, let us 
 have John Wesley's tongue of fire, seconded by 
 Charles Wesley's hymns floating heavenward on 
 the twilight air from ten thousand Methodist voices. 
 Under such conditions Methodism is inspired. To 
 know what Methodist voices are under that inspi- 
 ration, one must hear them. Mobs, bellowing with\ 
 infuriated blood-thirst, which neither John Wesley's \ 
 coal-black eye, nor Whitefield's imperial voice, 
 could quell, have been known to turn and slink 
 away when the truth was sung at them in Charles 
 Wesley's hymns. Their ringleaders more than 
 once broke down in tears and groans of remorse. 
 They took the preacher by the hand, and went his 
 way with him, arm in arm, swearing by all that is 
 holy that not a hair of his head should be touched. , 
 Thus was Luther's saying verified anew : " The 
 devil can stand anything but good music, and that 
 makes him roar." 
 
 In this method of transfusion from the faith in 
 individual responsibility, faith in man's power to 
 
284 My Note-Book. 
 
 repent has been in part the soul of every great 
 Methodist revival, from the gathering of sixty 
 thousand souls at Moorfields down to the last 
 autumnal camp-meeting in the forests of Maine. 
 Partly by the force of this Methodist intensity in 
 the use of it, and partly by its own good sense, it 
 has made its way as a living fact into the heart of 
 churches whose standards to this day disown it as 
 a dogma of speculative belief. 
 
 14. This is a magnificent service, however imper- 
 fect and illogical, to the Church universal. No 
 other truth so vital to spiritual religion has had so 
 painful a birth as this of human freedom in the act 
 of repentance. Augustine and his predecessors 
 paganized Christianity in this respect for a thou- 
 sand years. The reformers left the truth substan- 
 tially as they found it. Calvinism, as defined in 
 the Genevan and Scotch theologies, and in the 
 Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church as 
 well, was dead fatalism. The popular mind could 
 not logically get anything better from it. The 
 offer of salvation, loaded with the doctrine of ina- 
 bility, meant no more to multitudes of hearers than 
 " Selah " did in the old editions of the Psalms. 
 The struggles of the Calvinistic mind to rid itself 
 of the incubus have not been a brilliant success. 
 Ability to obey God has been sometimes denied 
 and affirmed in the same creed. Scores of sermons 
 have been made a shuttlecock of it. Forth and back 
 and forth again it has been knocked about, till it 
 has fallen to the ground through sheer exhaustion 
 
Methodism — its Work and its Wai/s. 285 
 
 in the hand which has held the battledoor. Never 
 a man has been the wiser. 
 
 15. We have reason to be grateful to any em- 
 bodiment of Christian thought, or enterprise, which 
 has helped us ever so infirmly to rescue such a truth 
 from its tribulations, and restore it to its place as a 
 power of spiritual life. The most triumphant way 
 of proving any doctrine involved in human duty is 
 to use it. Persuade men to act it out by doinr/ 
 their duty. Make it thus prove itself as fact, and 
 time will take care of it as dogma. This Method- 
 ism has done for the doctrine of human freedom, 
 through the whole of her splendid history. 
 
 16. The history of the first generation of Meth- 
 odism reads hke a romance. It reminds one of the 
 uprisings in the crusades at the call of Peter the 
 Hermit! Wesley inherited from his indomitable 
 mother the courage of mediseval chivalry. Mili- 
 tary men recognized in him a born leader. Mobs 
 were cowed by the look of his eye. On one occa- 
 sion a company of men who had sworn to take his 
 life approached a group of his friends, inquiring, 
 " Which is he ? " He calmly stepped to the front 
 and replied, " I am he." They were awed into 
 dead silence. How like to a certain other group, 
 who, on a memorable occasion, "went back and 
 fell to the ground." That spirit he breathed into 
 the whole movement of which his mind was the 
 interior spring. He illustrated the saying of a wise 
 man, that "God wdll not have His work made 
 manifest by cowards." 
 
286 My Note-Booh. 
 
 17. Methodist enterprise has been adventurous 
 in the choice of localities for evangelistic labor. It 
 is a notable phenomenon of religious awakenings 
 that the leaders develop migratory tastes in the 
 extreme. There are no fixed stars among them. 
 They seldom have the desire or the faculty for 
 stationary labors. Successful evangelists are sel- 
 dom successful pastors. Migration has character- 
 ized the whole development of Methodism. The 
 missions of Wesley and Whitefield to this coun- 
 try, when six weeks on the Atlantic made a short 
 'passage, were examples. Whitefield was on his 
 seventh tour in America when he died. Wesley 
 
 'travelled in Great Britain, chiefly in the saddle, 
 \ nearly the equivalent of twelve times round the 
 '. globe. In the main, he sought the localities which 
 
 others did not seek, and which commonly did not 
 
 seek him. 
 
 18. From the beginning the aspiration of Meth- 
 odism has been to take possession of the ends of 
 the earth. Wherever man has gone Methodism 
 has gone. It has been emphatically the religion of 
 the frontier and the backwoods. In its infancy, cer- 
 tainly, whatever may be true now, it did not han- 
 ker after metropolitan luxury, nor recoil from the 
 privations of colonial exile. Wesley was once 
 admonished by the assessors that he had omitted 
 to report the amount of his silver-plate for taxa- 
 tion. He replied: "My silver-plate consists of two 
 spoons and a porridge-boAvl, and I shall not pur- 
 chase more while my countrymen are suffering for 
 
Method Um — Us Work and its Wai/s. 287 
 
 the want of bread." We may safely affirm that 
 such a man never prayed that the lines might fall 
 to him in pleasant places. 
 
 i\Ir. Hilliard, in his work entitled " Six Months 
 in Italy," remarks it as a sign of England's care 
 for her honor, and the protection of her subjects, 
 that she keeps a man-of-war anchored "within 
 twenty-four hours of everywhere." Similar has 
 been the spirit of Methodist evangelistic enter- 
 prise. Wherever an Phiglish or American colony 
 migrates, it is very apt to fmd a Methodist preacher 
 within a day's ride of its location, who makes a 
 bee-line for it the next morning. The first emi- 
 grant wagon-train of considerable size crossing the 
 Plains to the Pacilic Coast carried a Methodist 
 itinerant. This at least has been the genius of 
 Methodism. One hears, now and then, lamenta- 
 tions in whisper from its despondent fathers that 
 the former times were better than these. Of that 
 they may speak who know. But historic Method- 
 ism is of this adventurous type. This is its idea 
 of Christianity. 
 
 19. More signally still has the spirit of conse- 
 crated adventure been developed in the choice of 
 the classes of society among whom chiefly Method- 
 ism has elected to labor. 
 
 One thing we must confess with downcast eye. 
 It is the tendency of the great Christian sects to 
 lean upon worldly greatness for their prestige. In 
 apostolic times Christian assemblies needed the 
 admonition respecting the man with " a gold ring 
 
288 My Note-Book. 
 
 and in goodly apparel/' Their successors to-day 
 have not outlived the need. They seek prestige 
 inordinately from wealth and culture. The philo- 
 sophic historian of modern Europe contends that 
 " a certain portion of worldly splendor is requisite 
 to maintain even the cause of truth." One of the 
 four things for which De Quincey gave thanks in a 
 review of his life was that he was " the child of a 
 magyiificent church." Witnesses have borne tes- 
 timony before the English Parliament that they 
 had " never seen a poor man in soiled or tattered 
 garments in a church of the Establishment." State 
 churches have taken the lead in this corruption, 
 but others have not been ashamed to follow, at 
 varying distances in their rear. 
 
 20. This drift of denominational affinities is not 
 without its palliations. Christianity has a natural 
 affiliation with culture, with refinement, with 
 learning, with industrial thrift and its rewards. If 
 it does not find these, it creates them. It plants 
 great cities. It develops expensive tastes. It 
 aspires to the noblest and the best in all things. 
 It builds "after the similitude of a palace." Its 
 ultimate trophies are superlatives. Therefore, to 
 desire those things which are the signs of Christ- 
 ian civilization at its best is not necessarily a sin. 
 To preach the Gospel to those who possess them is 
 not a crime. Somebody must do it; why not John 
 Wesley, if he can bear the perils of the service ? 
 Why not your sect or mine, if power and oppor- 
 tunity be given ? Said Lord Shaftesbury at a 
 
Methodism — ?V.s' Work and its Wa>/s. 289 
 
 foreign missionary meeting in England: '^ I beg 
 you not to forget the rich and noble heathen of ; 
 London, whose souls are starving." 
 
 21. But here is the rub: Christian sects as a 
 whole have not borne the temptations of worldly 
 aggrandizement with impunity. With many and 
 noble individual exceptions, they have succumbed 
 to the perils of building Christianity on the very 
 highlands which it has itself uplifted. They have ( 
 sought prestige often from souls civilized rather / 
 than from souls saved. There has sometimes been 
 more joy at the parsonage and the vestry over one 
 rich man who repented than over the opportunity 
 to save the ninety-and-nine who did not repent. 
 Has any sect, clergy, age, country, escaped wholly I 
 this miserable effeminacy? Have we not all suf- 
 fered from the taint which it has injected into our 
 spiritual life-blood? 
 
 State churches commonly die of this moral 
 pycemia. History has not yet proved that, with- 
 out reformatory awakenings from outside, and dis- 
 ciplinary dislodgements witliin, a church of Christ 
 welded to the State can be saved from sinkinp- into 
 
 o 
 
 a Sybaritic civilization in which the crumpled rose- 
 leaf takes all spirit out of her for evangelistic 
 enterprise. 
 
 22. Such was in the main the condition of the 
 Church of England when Wesley entered her 
 priesthood. She was emphatically the church of 
 the noble and the gentleman. The masses of the 
 poor had forgotten her and been forgotten by her. 
 
290 Mil Note-Book. 
 
 At no period of her history had she been more 
 fatally entangled in her Avorldly alliances. Her 
 high places were in the gift of immoral statesman, 
 and her low places were the rewards of their 
 dependents. Churchly livings were sometimes 
 given at the solicitation of mistresses. The ma- 
 jority of the clergy looked on blinking, and pro- 
 fessing to believe that God was well pleased. 
 
 23. Methodism — whatever it may be now — 
 was at its birth an intrepid and exasperated revolt 
 from that secularized corruption of Christianity. 
 Wesley had no prolonged self-conflict about it as 
 Luther had respecting the degeneracy of Rome. 
 He had no more doubts than he had of the hour 
 and the minute of his own conversion. That event 
 occurred, as he tells us with artless assurance, " at 
 a quarter before nine o'clock on the evening of 
 Wednesday, May 24, 1738." The positiveness of 
 undoubting conviction was in the make of the man. 
 What he saw he believed, and what he believed 
 he knew. He expended no mental force on mis- 
 givings. 
 
 It was with a whole soul, therefore, that he flung 
 himself impetuously against that theory of Christ- 
 ianity which made it the sycophant of the great, 
 and dependent on them for its place in history. 
 He fell back on first principles, and declared that 
 it was pre-eminently the religion of the poor. As 
 preached by him and his associates, its great suc- 
 cesses were among colliers and peasants. Tears 
 made gutters down the grimy faces of thousands 
 
Methodism — its Work and its Waj/s. 291 
 
 who listened to them in the fields of Cornwall. 
 To his theological pupils he said : " Remember 
 that you are to give account of God's poor. You 
 have no business to be gentlemen " — using the 
 word in its technical English sense ; " you have 
 no more business to be gentlemen, than you have 
 to be dancing-masters." That was the inspiration 
 of the Methodist Awakening. 
 
 24. To appreciate the chivalry of this action, we 
 should remember that Wesley was himself a gentle- 
 man and the son of a gentleman. None but gentle 
 blood was in his veins. Through his mother he 
 was related to an English earldom. He was a 
 priest of the Church of England, and to the day 
 of his death he loved her. He was a graduate 
 of the most aristocratic of her universities. He 
 could not but be proud of his country's history ; 
 and, like all Englishmen of his day, proud also of 
 her nobility. It was a heroic thing for such a man 
 to do to fling the gauntlet over the battlements of 
 English caste, and declare to the church of his 
 father : " You have been false to your mission as a 
 church of Christ." That was a living echo of 
 our Lord's words to John the Baptist : " Go and 
 tell him that sent you, that the poor have the 
 Gospel preached unto them." So nearly identical 
 with primitive Christianity was primitive Method- 
 ism. 
 
 25. The adventurous spirit of the Methodist 
 reformation appears further, in its methods of ap- 
 proach to the lowly classes. 
 
292 My Note-Booh. 
 
 Some other sects have offered to the humbler 
 orders of society a gospel of condescension; Meth- 
 odism has offered them a gospel of equality. Oth- 
 ers have treated them with distant and dignified 
 beneficence ; Methodism has made friends of them. 
 Some others have courteously called to them from 
 over the way to repent and be saved — and — and 
 — stay where they are I Methodism has gone 
 over to them and taken them by the hand, saying : 
 " Come with us ; we have found Christ." Others 
 have gathered them into mission churches ; Meth- 
 odism has welcomed them to the best she had. 
 " Mine are thine," she said. 
 
 26. At the first, Methodist churches were built of 
 plain materials and homely architecture, that they 
 might seem h-OTdQlike to the multitudes to whom 
 sesthetic tastes were in cloud-land. The temple 
 outside was in keeping with the worshippers 
 inside. For this and other like things in their 
 policy, Dr. Johnson — stout aristocrat as he was — 
 said that the "Methodists should be commended 
 by all men of sense." Why not? As a tempo- 
 rary policy, what could have better suited the 
 emergency ? What could the colliers of Cornwall 
 have made of the refined, philosophic sentiment of 
 Coleridge that "a Gothic church is a petrified re- 
 ligion " ? Colliers do not want a petrified religion. 
 The early Methodists had the good sense to know 
 it, and the courage to act upon their knowledge. 
 
 27. We have all of us, according to the knack 
 given to us, been " fishers of men." But man}^ of us 
 
Methodism — iU Work and its Wa)/s. 293 
 
 have fished with a pole, and some with a long pole, 
 and a few with a very long pole, daintily tapering 
 to the end, and qnivering with one little fish at 
 the bait, while ]Methodism has fished with the net. 
 Methodist faith has seen in the individual soul 
 anywhere a possible temple of the Holy Ghost. 
 In it He miglit speak with authority to the wisest. 
 She has therefore barkened for His teachings from 
 the lips of the ignorant. She has inquired of men 
 in coal mines : " What has the Lord done for your 
 souls ? " Then she has listened for their answer 
 in reverent silence. When it has come, fresh and 
 clear from quickened hearts, she has been tolerant 
 of ungrammatical speech, and grotesque illustra- 
 tion, and awkward gesture, and vociferous decla- 
 mation, and stentorian prayer, and unconscious 
 vanity. She has risked her good name for this 
 mission to the lowly. In this, who will venture 
 to say that she has not acted with wisdom from on 
 high ? 
 
 28. True, Methodism has not b}^ any means 
 been alone in this exhibition of primitive Christ- 
 ianity. No sect has had a monopoly of it. But 
 she has been so far eminent in it as to be justly 
 called pre-eminent. The gospel of equality, as 
 distinct from the gospel of condescension, has 
 found in her its elect apostle. And she has had 
 her reward. She has Christianized immense multi- 
 tudes who, so far as we can judge, would not have 
 been saved by any other agency. 
 
 29. A shrewd observer of human faces has said 
 
294 My Note-Booh. 
 
 that every Christian sect has its own physiognomy. 
 There is a certain combination of tendencies and 
 tastes and qualities, bodily and mental, which for 
 the want of a better name we ma}' call a tempera- 
 ment^ which has responded to the Methodist pulpit 
 more genially than to any other. It is a tempera- 
 ment largely developed in the English and Ameri- 
 can stock of mind. Methodism has saved men of 
 its own temperament to Christianity by millions. 
 Whole strata of society have thus been ]3enetrated 
 by Christian truth. Solid blocks of ignorance and 
 depravity have been broken up and turned over to 
 the light of Heaven. 
 
 The immaculate Church is yet to be. But w4th 
 all the deficiencies, theological and ecclesiastical 
 and liturgical, of the Methodist Church, the Church 
 Universal has reason to thank God for her mag- 
 nificent history. It has expedited by untold years 
 the conversion of the world to Christ. 
 
 30. One other fact should not be forgotten. 
 Methodism approximates Romanism, though in 
 the far distance, in her obligations to the charac- 
 ter of one woman. Of the Avell-known principle 
 that it is the mothers who make great men, the 
 humble mistress of the rectory at Epworth is 
 perhaps the most illustrious example on record. 
 Susanna Wesley, down to the last year of her life, 
 — and she lived into the tenth decade, — did much 
 to shape the ministry of her sons. The element 
 of lay preaching in the Methodist economy is due 
 to the adventurous cast of her mind. Her son 
 
MethotUsm — its Work and its Wai/s. 295 
 
 John was jealous of the innovation. He hastened 
 back from Bristol to London to put a stop to it 
 in the person of one of his recent converts. On 
 his arrival he said, with much discomposure : " I 
 hear that Thomas Maxwell has taken to the pul- 
 pit." His mother replied : " John, wait ; do noth- 
 ing rashly. At first I thought as you do. But I 
 have heard Thomas Maxwell preach, and I tell 
 you that he has as much right to preach as you 
 have." John did wait ; he heard for himself, and 
 said : *' It is the Lord ; let Him do what seemeth 
 Him good ! " Well does Robert Southey say that i 
 "the mother of the Wesleys was the mother oij 
 Methodism." 
 
XII. 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS TOPICS. 
 
 1. The Theatre is older by centuries than the 
 Christian pulpit. Both claim to be moral instruc- 
 tors of the people. Both have experimented side 
 by side, in the same communities, upon the same 
 races, surrounded by the same civilizations, and 
 both often with the prestige of subsidies by the 
 State. The Theatre has had a monopoly of dra- 
 matic literature in its most brilliant accumulations 
 for aofes. What in the result has the Theatre to 
 show in the comparison with its junior rival ? 
 What institutions has it founded which are essen- 
 tial to human welfare ? A single sermon preached 
 by a Welsh divine was the means of founding 
 an orphan asylum which still exists. What one 
 trophy of its moral power can be found like that 
 in the history of the Stage ? The pulpit originated 
 the fundamental idea of federal union which was 
 wrought into the structure of American liberty 
 at the birth of our Republic. For what one such 
 idea is the world indebted to the Theatre? By 
 their fruits ye shall know them. 
 
 2. Of the conservative and the progressive prin- 
 ciples there can be no question which should be 
 
 296 
 
Miscellaneonsi Topics. 297 
 
 ascendant in the policy and tastes of a preacher. 
 The pulpit is built on a prophecy. Tlie prime 
 reason for its existence is the promise that this 
 world is to be converted to Jesus Christ. Its chief 
 outlook therefore should be upon the future. Yet 
 an educated clergy almost inevitably acquire tastes 
 which, if not balanced by their opposites, incline 
 to conservatism in the extreme. Culture tends 
 to passive virtues in character and therefore to 
 conservative repression in enterprise. 
 
 3. Intimations abound in the New Testament, 
 which indicate a foresight on the part of the 
 Apostles, that the religion they brought would be 
 a secret germ of revolution in all departments of 
 human thought. In the nature of things it could 
 not be otherwise. Nothing else penetrates so pro- 
 foundly the springs of social action and reaction 
 as the moral regeneration of a fallen world. Rev- 
 olution is its primal law. Progress is its sign of 
 life. 
 
 4. When conservative tastes set themselves 
 against the progressive convictions which are the 
 natural product of Christian ideas, they produce the 
 very evils which conservative minds dread. Con- 
 servative repression is the prelude to volcanic 
 upheavals. It tends to make progressive opinion 
 rabid and reform malign. Reform will always be 
 fanatical when relig^ion is stao^nant. It was con- 
 servatism which crucified Christ. Such is conser- 
 vative taste always when it becomes crystallized. 
 
298 Mjj Note-Book. 
 
 5. One phase of the philosophical argument in 
 defence of revivals of religion is seldom appre- 
 ciated by their opponents. It is that vast sympa- 
 thetic awakenings of men in masses are more 
 natural in matters of religion than in any other. 
 
 [ On no other subject are the interests of men so 
 
 I compactly one. The religious nature is the same 
 the world over. Its awakenings on the grand 
 scale are not dependent on diversities of culture 
 or varieties in the scale of civilization. They may 
 be of great power and purity in a very dilatory 
 state of social progress. 
 
 6. Some errors and abuses will die if we give them 
 time to die. We have only* to let them alone. 
 They will fall to pieces through their own want of 
 that adhesive vitality which cements and consoli- 
 dates institutions. It is as old as Tacitus, that 
 " truth is established by investigation and delay'' 
 A truism from Goethe is to the same effect that 
 
 I I " it is not by assaulting the false, but by affirming 
 ' the true, that good is done." A double service to 
 
 truth is rendered, when it is advanced without 
 belligerent excitements. Assume that no enemies 
 are in sight, and commonly there are none in 
 ambush. But they will spring at the sound of 
 blows. 
 
 7. It is difficult to say which is productive of 
 I greater evil, to be a fanatic or to live in morbid 
 
 fear of becoming one. Dr. Chalmers, speaking of 
 
Miscellaneous Topics. 299 
 
 the charge of morbid agitations against the Meth- 
 odists of Scotland, remarks : " I have uniformly 
 found that the charge of fanaticism has been most 
 vehemently preferred against those men whose 
 spirit and whose language came nearest to the 
 spirit and phraseology of the New Testament." 
 To the same effect he observes respecting attempts 
 to satisfy those wlio make the charge : " You can- 
 not get the matter accommodated to their tastes, 
 until you have made every heart as cold as lead 
 and as motionless as a stone." Commonly the real 
 state of the case with those who object to religious 
 enthusiasm is '' not that they would have this done 
 rather than that, or that instead of another thing, 
 but that they would have nothing done. '' We are 
 a quiet church " often means, " We are a somno- 
 lent church." Large masses of nen, not excited / 
 about eternal realities, are at war with nature. J 
 
 8. The hostility of men to unusual develop- 
 ments of religious awakening is commonly a sign 
 of their secret faith in such awakenings as the 
 work of God. In the act of denouncing, men 
 believe. They denounce because they believe. 
 Men have no more profound faith than that which 
 they hold, or rather which holds them, in a thing 
 which rouses their malign passions. 
 
 9. The inherent debility of infidel thinking is 
 seen in the paucity of its original ideas. At pres- 
 ent, indeed, Christianity supplies its most effective 
 
300 My Note-Book. 
 
 resources. The superiority of modern warfare upon 
 Christian institutions is derived from ideas which 
 they have themselves originated. The scepticism 
 of our age is in one sense a Christianized system 
 of thought. Its root is nourished by a Christian 
 soil, and its branches by a Christian atmosphere. 
 Such plausible assaults on the Christian faith could 
 not have been constructed without appropriating 
 some of the practical Christian ideas, yet not 
 acknowledging their theoretic origin. That type 
 of infidelity, for instance, wliich builds up a 
 system of morality without recognition of a per- 
 sonal God, builds up the system which nothing 
 else than Christianity could ever have given to 
 the world. 
 
 10. Unbelievers in Christianity, above all other 
 men, often betray illogical prejudices in giving a 
 history of their opinions. Bolingbroke says that 
 he was made an infidel by Dr. Manton's commen- 
 tary on the 119th Psalm, which his mother com- 
 pelled him to read in his boyhood, as a punishment 
 for a childish folly. There may have been wiser 
 women in her day than Lord Bolingbroke's mother. 
 There may have been more exhilarating reading 
 for a child than Dr. Manton's commentary. But 
 what a confession is this for a bearded man to make 
 of the inability of his manhood to outlive a preju- 
 dice of his boyhood I Any opinions held b}^ such a 
 man on the subject of religion must have been 
 superhcially rooted in his moral iiature. 
 
Miscellaneous Topics. 301 
 
 11. How slioukl the Pulpit treat the tendency 
 of reform to alliance with Infidelity ? The antag- 
 onism between Christianity and infidel reform 
 cannot be evaded. The ministry should offer no 
 compromise and accept none. History teaches that 
 little if any good can be achieved by any work- 
 ing alliance between Christian preachers and anti- 
 Christian reformers. A preacher is always first a 
 Christian, and then a reformer. That order of 
 succession should never be reversed. But the 
 pulpit should initiate its own reforms, and do it 
 seasonably. We should assume that every social 
 question which ought to be agitated will be agi- 
 tated. The great peril of the ministry is that of 
 delay. Preachers are often followers when they 
 should have been pioneers. An infidel leadership 
 supplants them in their national birthright. Be- 
 cause we cannot sacrifice religion to reform we 
 should be all the more careful not to sacrifice reform 
 to religion. 
 
 12. Christianity, in all its theories and enter- 
 prises for the regeneration of society, starts with 
 the unit, not with the mass. It does not propose 
 to reach the individual through the State, but the 
 State through the individual. The profoundest 
 depths of our nature do not appear in social rela- 
 tions and combinations; they are in the individual, 
 secluded in their working, and incommunicable in 
 their results. Reform, technically so called, is 
 never the prime object of Christian enterprise. 
 
302 My Note-Booh 
 
 From the individual to the family, thence to the 
 Church, and ending in the world at large, is the 
 line of Christian endeavor for the uplifting of 
 ^ the race. 
 
 13. The popular idea of the Puritans as men 
 of ascetic and disconsolate conscience has grown 
 largely out of the fact that they represented the 
 religious reforms of their day. They lived in a 
 historic crisis in which extreme conservatism in 
 the Church of England developed itself in intense 
 worldliness outside. They were the awakened mind 
 of the age. They sought to reform the national 
 amusements, because those amusements had de- 
 generated into immoralities. They were forced 
 upon quickened consciences by the laws of the 
 realm. Human nature is very apt to discover rea- 
 sons for not doing a thing which men are told that 
 they must do. When such laws strike athwart con- 
 scientious convictions, the reaction becomes reform 
 of a very intense and solemn kind. Men make a 
 religion out of conscientious resistance to anything 
 which is inflicted on conscience by civil law. 
 
 14. It is often observed that great men are sel- 
 dom reproduced in their children. A parallel fact 
 is that the originators of great popular awakenings 
 which mark crises in human pi'ogress, seldom trans- 
 mit their own enthusiasm and Avorking force to 
 the leaders who succeed them. What Richard 
 Cromwell was to Oliver, the second generation of 
 
Miscellaneous Topics. 303 
 
 reformers often is to the first. The period of one 
 man's working years commonly measures the 
 length of time for which such an awakening en- 
 dures. Everywhere in the laws of succession 
 the sovereignty of decree appears. Great reforms 
 (;reate great men for leadership. Grand leadersliip 
 of men is almost never inherited. 
 
 15. It is not becoming in this generation to 
 denounce the legislation of our fathers against 
 witchcraft, till we are able to affirm some positive 
 and reasonable opinions of the phenomena of spirit- 
 ualism. The two classes of phenomena belong to 
 an unexplored kingdom of either the natural or 
 the supernatural. Whatever will explain the one 
 will explain the other. We are as ignorant of 
 both as our fathers were. We opine that they are 
 natural phenomena, but we cannot claim that we 
 have proved it till we have discovered the natural 
 Cause. They opined that the phenomena Avere 
 supernatural, and apparently they did prove that. 
 To the best intelligence of the age tliey seemed to 
 have in the Old Testament explicit authority for 
 their convictions and their jurisprudence. The 
 witchcraft of the Mosaic age seemed to tally well 
 with the abnormal events of their own. They 
 were positive men. They were stout believers. 
 It would have been too much to expect of such 
 men to sit down in the midst of such scenes with the 
 quietude of agnostic indifference. Their convic- 
 tions were less discreditable to them than our want 
 
304 My Note-Book. 
 
 of convictions is to us. Neither witchcraft nor spir- 
 itualism is wholly explicable by natural laws then 
 or now known to science. It is not yet proved 
 that there is not a supernatural residuum of truth 
 in both. So long as we are at our wit's end about 
 the one, it behooves us to be modest in our judg- 
 ments of the theory which the fathers held of the 
 other. Whatever else was true or not true of 
 them, they were 7iot at their wit's end. To rest in 
 \ an error, on the apparent authority of a revelation 
 I from Heaven, is a posture of greater dignity than 
 to rest in nothing on the authority of either God 
 \ or man. 
 
 16. Probably all men who pray at all, some- 
 times pray for a painless death. It is not certain 
 that we are wise in this. The moral uses of bodily 
 suffering are a mystery, yet not all a mystery. 
 What its province may be in "last hours," wlio 
 can tell? Its power to penetrate and fuse hard- 
 ened natures may then come to the rescue of 
 some who without its benignant discipline could 
 not be prepared for spiritual discoveries. It 
 should seem that the first disclosures of eternity 
 cannot be welcome to one who has no moral tastes 
 for their reception. Even the foundation of such 
 tastes may not be laid in some natures except by 
 the discipline of paiii. Nor do we know what 
 delicate operations the ministry of pain may set 
 going in giving the finishing touches to a saintly 
 character. The depth of a mystery is the measure of 
 
MisceUaneoufi Topics. 305 
 
 the wisdom which it encloses. Two such enigmas 
 as the way in which we come into this world and 
 the way in which we leave it, are fitted to make 
 us dumb with awe. Wisdom unsearchable must 
 be in them ; they are so strange and so painful. 
 
 17. The benevolence which Christianity inspires 
 is characterized by five elements. It is intense in 
 degree ; it is inventive of expedients ; it is vigilant 
 of opportunities ; it is appreciative of remote and 
 invisible objects ; and it is capable of studious 
 and protracted exertions. The biographer of Sir 
 Fowell Buxton says of him : " He walked through 
 the world as through the wards of a hospital. He 
 had a singular power of realizing to his own mind 
 distant and unseen suffering, and on the compas- 
 sion which it inspired founding a course of delib- 
 erate and sustained action." 
 
 18. Our age is characterized by a degree of 
 irreverence which in former times would have 
 shocked the same class of minds which now in- 
 dulge it, apparently without remorse. Unbelief 
 of Christianity was not formerly deemed a sufficient 
 reason for ridiculing it in the faith of its humble 
 believers. Within the memory of men now liv- 
 ing, reticence respecting one's own disbelief of the 
 Scriptures was regarded as the sign of a gentleman. 
 Is it so now ? One of our most popular essayists 
 says that he " can conceive of Rabelais as going 
 into convulsions of laughter at the folly of Satan 
 
306 My Note-Book. 
 
 waging war with God." Something less deserving 
 of respect than either wit or humor prompted the 
 remark. Cicero displayed a finer taste and more 
 healthy conscience in observing that " enormous 
 wickedness is never esteemed ridiculous." 
 
 19. The evangelizing of the negro race in Amer- 
 ica is one of the exigent enterprises which will not 
 bear to be left to the ordinary average of Christian 
 progress. They cannot wait for its accomplish- 
 ment. The white race cannot afford to make 
 them wait. The work, if done at all, must in the 
 interest of both races be done with speed. Several 
 facts emphasize this view. 
 
 20. One is that the present religious condition of 
 the freedmen, if not speedily improved, threatens 
 a relapse towards barbarism. They have a religion 
 which is called Christian, but among large numbers 
 of them it is infected with that virus which dooms 
 all corruptions of Christianity to decay, — the alien- 
 ation of religion from morality. Many church 
 members among them are equally glib of tongue in 
 praying and in lying. They bless the Lord in the 
 very act of larceny. They make much of baptism 
 and little of the marriage vow. Said one to a mis- 
 sionary teacher, who reproved him for adultery: 
 " I've been dipped, sir." Poor sufferers for the 
 sins of others ! Slavery, that providential " mis- 
 sionary institution " of which we used to hear so 
 
 jlmuch, has confounded in their minds the first prin- 
 ciples of Christian living. 
 
Miscellaneous Topics. 307 
 
 Exceptions to this picture are of course numer- 
 ous. In some localities the picture itself may be 
 exceptional, and a purer type of piety the rule. 
 But, from the somewhat conflicting testimony of 
 eye-witnesses, one is compelled to infer that, taking 
 the religion of the field-negroes into account, the 
 barbaric elements are altogether too potent for the 
 perpetuity of the Christian faith. 
 
 21. Moreover, the most disheartening feature 
 of the case is that the type of Christianity which 
 prevails among the " poor whites " around and 
 above them is no better. The immoralities of 
 Christian negroes they have copied from the supe- 
 rior race. They are an imitative people. They 
 have inherited the habit of looking upon every- 
 thing white as superior to anything black. One 
 poor negress of queenly head and figure, when 
 told that a sculptor would carve a bust of her as a 
 representative of her race, was overjoyed to tears 
 by the assurance that it would be in w^/fe marble. 
 Not the distinction of the bust, but the color of 
 the material, Avas the thing which overwhelmed 
 her. The very vices of white men look respectable 
 by the side of black virtues. A poor quadroon 
 girl esteems it an honor to be the mistress of a white 
 man. And the marvel of horrors is that in some 
 instances her mother trains her so. 
 
 Such is the material from which our religion 
 must select its representatives among the freed- 
 men. Slavery has poisoned the whole religious \ | 
 atmosphere of the South. The classes low down 
 
308 My Note-Book. 
 
 in the social scale have breathed the miasma in its 
 most virulent precipitate. 
 
 22. Such a religion in either white or black 
 cannot fairly be called the religion of a civilized 
 race. It cannot long remain as it is ; it must give 
 place to something better or worse in no long time. 
 Christianity is indignantly intolerant of its own 
 corruptions. It is nauseated by them and spews 
 them out, or its life-blood is poisoned by them and 
 its own fevered and infuriated energy goes into 
 them and dies with them. That nominally Christ- 
 ian people is in a woful plight whose religion is 
 their ruin. Yet this is the doom which threatens 
 the colored race at the South, if left to themselves, 
 with no other regenerative influences than those 
 which they have inherited and which are germane 
 to the soil. 
 
 23. The exigency of the enterprise appears fur- 
 ther in the prospect of extensive changes in the 
 character of Southern labor. Hitherto . the freed- 
 men have been chiefly agricultura.l laborers. They 
 have lived in the open air, under the bland and 
 morally healthful influences of green fields, and 
 blue skies, and forests, and the songs of birds. 
 Agricultural labor everywhere is humanizing. So 
 far it is auxiliary to Christianity in its unconscious 
 sway over the character of a docile people. It is 
 congenial especially with the refined and passive 
 graces which it is so diflicult to engraft upon 
 uncultured mind. 
 
 But what is to be the future of Southern labor? 
 
Mi^eeUaneoni< Topics^. 309 
 
 Those who have the best means of judging tell us 
 that it is to be largely revolutionized. The subter- 
 ranean resources of the South are to be developed. 
 Her magnificent water-power is to be put to the 
 service of human industries. In some States the 
 cotton-field is to yield precedence to the factory, 
 and the forge, and the mine. Georgia already 
 takes rank among the great manufacturing States 
 of the Republic. It is reported that some of her 
 fabrics compete successfully with the same from 
 the looms of Massachusetts. The amount of cap- 
 ital invested in manufacturing and mining enter- 
 prises of the South was augmented in a single year 
 by fifty-two millions of dollars. This indicates no 
 fragmentary or transient development of new 
 industries. 
 
 24. It is not difficult to forecast the effect of 
 this change in the conditions of Southern labor on 
 the character of the laborer. He must pass out 
 from the humanizing sway of agriculture, and 
 come under the indurating influences of toil in 
 heated workshops, and furnaces, and coal pits, and 
 iron mines. All history declares that when labor 
 retires from the open air and is shut in within four 
 walls, or buried underground, it becomes more ' 
 gross and barbarizing in its influence on the laborer. 
 His mind becomes less receptive of religious ideas. 
 His sensibilities are less responsive to their disci- 
 pline. He is more prone to infidel thinking, and 
 more easily dominated by atheistic leaders. In 
 social crises he is more readily swept away by 
 
310 My Note-Booh. 
 
 malign excitements. In New England, the hot- 
 beds of infidelity among the artisan classes are the 
 shoeshops. In Old England Atheism is nowhere 
 else so deeply rooted as in the factories of Bir- 
 mingham and Manchester. 
 
 25. The changes referred to in Southern indus- 
 tries tend, therefore, the wrong way in their prob- 
 able influence on negro character. They must 
 render his spiritual regeneration more difficult. 
 They must complicate it with political and social 
 problems, the agitation of which by an injured race 
 cannot be friendly to the best type of Christian 
 manhood. Fifty years hence Christian enterprise 
 may find in the laboring elements of Southern 
 society the most unmanageable extremes of com- 
 munistic infidelity. The savagery of Africa may 
 be found to have run through the life-blood of ser- 
 vile generations, to reappear at last in a more fero- 
 cious, because a more knowing, hostility to the 
 religion of the superior race. The evil may be 
 redoubled by the animal fecundity of the negro, 
 which he has in common with all ser^dle races, 
 and which may treble and quadruple the numbers 
 of his class. 
 
 26. Mr. Cable, in one of his admirable essays on 
 the Silent South, speaks of the new industries of 
 Birmingham," Alabama. He writes: "It was fine 
 to see the crude ore . . . turned into one of the 
 prime factors of the world's wealth. But another 
 thought came with this, at the sight of dark, 
 brawny men moving here and there, with the wild 
 
3L'iicenaneous Topics. 811 
 
 glare of molten cinder and liquid metal falling 
 upon their black faces and reeking forms. They 
 were no longer simple husbandmen, companions 
 of unfretted Nature." This is a hint of the change 
 which every philosophic observer foresees coming 
 upon the laboring claSs of the South in thousands 
 upon thousands. 
 
 27. What we do, therefore, for their uplifting 
 into a purer Christian life should be done now. 
 The work should be crowded with all possible 
 speed. We should prosecute it as men gather in 
 their ripe harvests when a thunder-storm lowers in 
 the horizon. Humanly speaking, the chances of 
 its success will never be greater ; the obstacles to 
 it will never be less. 
 
 28. Another critical feature in the exigency 
 arises from the fact that, in the person of the 
 freedman. Republican government in many of the 
 Southern States is practically suspended. 
 
 We have given suffrage to the negro ; but the 
 ballot in his hands is too often waste-paper. AVher- 
 ever his vote would affect the issue of an election, 
 he understands that he deposits it at the risk of his 
 life. Minorities have silenced majorities. Most 
 significantly does Mr. Cable speak of " the Silent 
 South." Silence is it, like that of a man whose 
 eye looks into the barrel of a burglar's revolver. 
 
 29. In such a condition of things, two questions 
 come unljidden to every tlioughtf ul observer. One 
 is. How long can the Republic stand such a 
 glaring outrage upon its first principles of consti- 
 
312 My Note-Book. 
 
 tutional la^Y ? The other is, How long will six 
 millions of an injured race bear the humiliation of 
 such enormous wrong ? 
 
 30. The problem is complicated by the fact 
 that the Southern whites are obeying irrepressible 
 instincts. What is it that has kept us of the 
 North in a state of acquiescent silence in the face 
 of political revolution ? Why do we look through 
 our fingers on this violence which has thrust down 
 majorities and sent minorities to the top ? The 
 reason is the silent conviction that the Southern 
 whites are acting naturally. Immeasurable as the 
 wrong is, it is not an unnatural wrong. It would 
 be an anomaly, unknown in civil history, if they 
 acted otherwise. 
 
 Let us face this thing as it is, and commit no 
 pharisaic impertinence by arrogating to ourselves 
 superior virtue. It is very easy to thresh the mis- 
 deeds of other men. But the fact is, in this case, 
 that Massachusetts or Connecticut would do the 
 same thing under the same conditions. Not in the 
 same way, but in ways constitutional and decorous, 
 the end would be made sure, that the servile race 
 should not lord it over the master race. It is 
 expecting too much of human nature to turn the 
 whole framework of society upside down and com- 
 mand it to remain so. Man is not made to walk 
 on his head. Neither is civilized society so consti- 
 tuted that ignorance and vulgarity and thriftless 
 poverty can assume dominion over intelligence and 
 culture and wealth and historic pride and — 'kee'p 
 
MisceUaneoKs Topics. 313 
 
 it. Only standing armies from outside can long 
 hold the government of great States, with a proud 
 history behind them, in the hand of the servile 
 race over the master race. To administer govern- 
 ment in such a houleversement^ you must station a 
 soldier with fixed bayonet at every man's door. 
 Even then, government would be law against 
 nature. In such an antagonism, law would stand 
 no chance. Law or no law, the reactionary somer- 
 sault must come. The body politic must spring 
 again into its natural posture, and stand on its feet 
 Avith head erect and eyes looking straight on. 
 
 31. The anomaly here indicated has been the re- 
 sult of our policy of reconstruction. I do not say that 
 it was the fault of either race, but it surely was the 
 misfortune of both races, that the liberty of the 
 slave did not grotv. It came leaping from the can- 
 non's mouth. Citizenship did not come to him by 
 his own act ; it was imposed from outside. He 
 did not take it with his own right hand ; it was 
 put into his left hand from behind. Everybody 
 knew that he was not fit for it, but nobody knew 
 what else to do. It was the forlorn necessity of 
 the crisis. The gift, therefore, carried with it none 
 of the dignity and the consciousness of power to 
 use and to defend it which belong to a liberty and 
 a citizenship which are the groAvth of time, and of 
 political training by great events, and of deter- 
 mined self-assertion. In the nature of things, it 
 could not be that five millions of a servile people 
 should come into the right of free citizenship in 
 
314 Mij Note-Book. 
 
 such a left-lianded way, without loading the politi- 
 cal system growing out of the revolution, with 
 anomalies in law and contradictions in practice. 
 We never strike Nature a blow without feeling a 
 return blow. So we find it. 
 
 32. But what has all this to do with the evangel- 
 izing of the negro ? Just this — that the evangel- 
 izing of the negro opens the only way out of the 
 perilous imhroglio of Southern government. We 
 have but one thing to do, to save the Republic to 
 either race. It is to take the freedman as he is, 
 and make him a citizen in character as he is in law. 
 He must be educated up to the level of his politi- 
 cal rights by an intelligent discharge of his politi- 
 cal duties. Thus, and not otherwise, can he acquire 
 the power to appreciate those rights and to defend 
 them. Let him share in the intelligence and the 
 culture and the industrial thrift of the white race, 
 in proportion to his capacity, and in the same pro- 
 portion he will share with them in the government 
 of States. His rights will be his when he takes 
 them by force of character ; never till then. Char- 
 acter will then take the place of color as the badge 
 of distinction, and honor will crown worth. We 
 need not be greatly disturbed by the vows of South- 
 ern whites, that they will not permit the freedman 
 to have the right of suffrage. Thinking men will 
 do what they must do. 
 
 33. But to achieve this we must work at the 
 religious end of the enterprise. The theory of 
 missions has become a science. One of its axioms 
 
Miscellaneous Topics. 315 
 
 is that civilization is a sequence, not an antecedent, 
 of evangelization. The most facile way to uplift 
 men to the level of civil freedom is first to Christ-; 
 ianize them. A robust tj-pe of Christianity must 
 supplant the diseased and crippled nondescript 
 which they have now. Then the gifts and graces 
 of an advanced civilization will follow. 
 
 This Avork has been magnificently begun. Few 
 enterprises of the American Church have so much 
 to show in results for twenty years of labor. But 
 it has now reached a point of complication with 
 Southern politics and industries at which it needs 
 to be expedited with all possible speed. Republi- 
 can freedom degenerates rapidly with disuse of 
 republican principles. Half-civilized natures rap- 
 idly grow sullen and revengeful under the burning 
 sense of injustice. The safety of both races from 
 internecine conflict depends on the quick working 
 of spiritual remedies. We have no time to lose. 
 It will not do to prosecute the work conveniently. 
 We cannot afford to prosecute it with conservative 
 dignity. Mr. Cable strikes the keynote of Christ- 
 ian as well as of political endeavor when he reads 
 the exhortation of conservative wisdom ys'\\\\ a new 
 emphasis. He writes : " Make haste slowly." 
 
 34. In ancient Egypt, the chief concern of a 
 man's life was preparation for his burial. The 
 chief ambition of a sovereign was to build his tomb. 
 Of mechanic arts, masonry and embalming were 
 the most honorable — the one to build a resting- 
 
316 My Note-Book. 
 
 place for a corpse, and the other to delay its disso- 
 lution. Usages of society, the names of streets, 
 anniversary customs, were suggestive first of the 
 death-scene and the grave. Diodorus Siculus says : 
 '' The Egyptians call the dwellings of the living 
 'lodgings,' because they are only occupied for a 
 short time. The tombs they call ' eternal houses,' 
 because the occupants never left them." 
 
 Egyptian life is an emblem of the whole w^orld's 
 thinking upon death. Less demonstratively, and 
 for the most part secretly, men are all embalmers 
 and undertakers. Arts now lost were employed in 
 the construction of the pyramids, but the world has 
 not lost the thought which built them. No other 
 thought has ever gained such absolutely universal 
 sway over the human mind. 
 
 35. Critics of Shakespeare have observed the 
 fact that there is not to be found in his dramas a 
 solitary line expressive of even so. much as a philo- 
 sophical toleration of the prospect of death. The 
 only feeling respecting it which he has put into the 
 mouths of men is that of passionate abhorrence. 
 In " Measure for Measure," Claudio, appealing to 
 his sister, is made to say : — 
 
 " The weariest and most loathed worldly life 
 That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment 
 Can lay on nature, is a paradise 
 To what we fear of death ! " 
 
 This is the conception of the " myriad-minded " 
 poet, who is thought to have conceived more pro- 
 foundly and variously than any other man the 
 
Miscellaneous Topics. 317 
 
 inner life of the liunuin soul. In this respect 
 Shakespeare was not a Christian. He seems to 
 have known nothino- of the lio-lit with which Christ- 
 ianity has ilhunined the grave. 
 
 36. The unnaturalness of death in the system 
 of things is symbolized by the sympathy of the 
 brute creation with man's antipathy to it and 
 dread of its coming. An ox will low mournfully 
 over the pool of blood from the veins of its kin. 
 The poor dumb being finds in the phenomenon 
 the same tragic mystery that we do. He protests 
 against it as a thing which is at war with Nature. 
 
 37. " That man lies," said the Duke of Welling- 
 ton, "who says that he never feared to die." 
 Marshall Montluc of the French army acknowl- 
 edo-ed that he was often overcome with fear in 
 battle, and could not get possession of himself till 
 he had said a prayer. I once asked a soldier of 
 the Army of the Potomac if he supposed that the 
 men of the rank and file ever prayed ? " I believe," 
 said he, "that every man of us did when we went 
 into action." 
 
 In presence of such testimony, when Sweden- 
 borg tells us that Charles the Twelfth of Sweden 
 did not know what that is which we call fear, we 
 must be permitted to shrug our shoulders. Proba- 
 bly the certainty of coming dissolution causes 
 more of suppressed dejection than any and all 
 other facts in the experience of men. It raises 
 with more oppressive doubt the question, " Is a life 
 worth living which must have such an ending?" 
 
318 Mij Note-Booh. 
 
 38. We need a certain military element in our 
 mental conquest of death. No other fear balances 
 it among all human forebochngs. Faith in a risen 
 and ascended Christ should be such as to enable 
 us to fling off our natural horror, as we do a tangled 
 and terrific dream on awaking. Such was one of 
 the martial virtues of St. Paul. Probably few 
 men have ever lived, though trained at the can- 
 non's mouth, who really cared so little about dying 
 as he did. Yet he does not seem to have raised 
 himself to meet it by the dead lift of will or in 
 shame at secret fears. He lived in the military 
 state of victory over its terrors. All that he has 
 to say of it has the ring of sovereignty. It was 
 the natural sequence of his faith in our Lord's 
 resurrection. 
 
 39. In the popular notions of death, it is doubt- 
 ful whether the Christian or the pagan element 
 predominates. The dying words of Rabelais were ; 
 " I am going to meet the great Perhaps." What 
 is this but the " If" inscribed on the portals of the 
 temple of Delphi ? Have two thousand years of 
 Christian culture done nothing for us, that we 
 must now go back to pagan oracles ? Yet is there 
 not much in oui' funeral usages and accompani- 
 ments which Socrates would have deemed un- 
 worthy of an ancient Spartan ? 
 
 40. In some respects the first Christian ages 
 were not superior to ours ; but in their concep- 
 tions of death they were so. Our belief in immor- 
 tality is more philosophical than theirs ; theirs 
 
Miscellaneous Topics. 819 
 
 was more Christian than ours. The resurrection 
 of Christ was to them the one stupendous fact of 
 all time. It gave to death a new meaning and 
 clothed it with new associations in human thought. 
 The original significance of it as the exponent of 
 sin and of God's displeasure was blotted out. A 
 new conception of it was introduced into Christian 
 Hymnology. The catacombs to-day bear witness 
 that that event wrought a revolution in Christian 
 thought which illumined the whole heavens. No 
 other revolution in history can bear comparison 
 with this in the metamorphosis wrought by it in 
 the popular ideas of the end of this life and the 
 promise of another. When did ever any other 
 religion create a literature in which death-songs 
 were so jubilant and triumphant? 
 
 41. The analogies of Nature are in league with 
 revelation in its contradiction of our pagan notions 
 of dying. They teaeli that the passage to another 
 life must in the natural order of things be a tran- 
 sition to a higher and a nobler life. Things super- 
 annuated and effete are forerunners of things 
 nascent and young. One thing passes away that 
 a better thing may be. Species give place to 
 superior species. Evolution is upAvard. Such is 
 the latest and grandest faith of science. 
 
 This law of an ascending grade in the evolution 
 of Nature is but the type of the law of resurrection 
 and ascension in spiritual destiu}-. Terrestrial 
 bodies are the precursors of bodies celestial. The 
 new being is a nobler being. New faculties open 
 
320 My Note-Book. 
 
 upon new researches. Discovery springs to new 
 opportunities. The spirit of the man goeth up- 
 ward. The comparative reticence of revelation 
 on the subject is the most suggestive thing we 
 know of it. It hints at unutterable possibilities. 
 It encloses inconceivable certainties. Eye hath 
 not seen nor ear heard them. 
 
 42. The dread of death must in the nature of 
 things be most oppressive in a materialistic age. 
 This is a magnificent world. A man must have 
 had a very sad life in it, who would not be con- 
 tent, under existing conditions, to abide here for- 
 ever. Add to its material resources the attach- 
 ment which habit creates, and you have bonds 
 almost invincible, to bind us all to its exceeding 
 loveliness. This world is home. A materialistic 
 faith has nothing to give us which can balance 
 the grim fact that we must leave it, and go — 
 whither ? 
 
 The well-known remark of Dr. Johnson to 
 Garrick who was showing off his splendid house 
 and grounds : '' Ah I David, these are the things 
 that make death terrible I " has probably found its 
 way in substance to the mind of every man whose 
 life has been successful, as the world counts suc- 
 cess. 
 
 Christianity is worth believing, were it for noth- 
 ing else than its revelation of an antidote to the 
 fact of death. And its glory is that it discloses a 
 world of spiritual resources of which this world, 
 with all its resplendent beauty and home-likeness, 
 
Miscellaneous Topics. 321 
 
 is but a remote and inadequate emblem. In tlie 
 Christian theory of life the chief use of this world 
 is to be a sj^mbol of the world to come. 
 
 43. In those phenomena of Nature which confirm 
 the teacliings of revelation respecting another life, 
 the condescension of God has been marvellously 
 considerate of human weakness. The most im- 
 pressive of the natural emblems of resurrection 
 from the grave are not locked up in recondite 
 realms of science. They are not a treasure of 
 learning only. He has written them in the com- 
 monest phenomena which a child may interpret. 
 Wh}^ is the sunrise a diurnal spectacle ? Is it not 
 in part to give us every morning a resplendent 
 symbol of the resurrection of the dead? Why is 
 sleep made a daily necessity to the recuperation of 
 life ? Is it not partly that we may realize to our 
 imagination the waking from the grave? Why 
 are the alternations of summer and winter so 
 faithful ? Is it not that the springtime may give 
 us proclamation, as from other worlds, of the 
 reality of another life ? The moral uses of these 
 natural phenomena poetry has interpreted more 
 appreciatively often than religious faith. 
 
 44. Does real life discover any basis for that 
 negation of a Divine providence which affirms the 
 existence of " lucky " and " unlucky " men in their 
 vocations ? Jolm Jacob Astor is reported to have 
 said : '' I never have anything to do with unlucky 
 men. I have known clever men, very clever men. 
 
322 3Iii Note-Booh. 
 
 who have no shoes to their feet. I fight shy of 
 them." 
 
 One thing is patent on the face of this theory. 
 \ The moral argument is against it. It is the theory 
 i of concentrated, Satanic selfishness. The maxims 
 of commerce contain nothing more malevolent 
 within the circle of ideas which respectable men 
 dare to profess. We are safe in spewing it out of 
 a Christian civilization, as offensive to God and 
 man. 
 
 45. The facts of life, when thoroughly investi- 
 gated, falsify the theory. The very large majority 
 of the " unlucky men " are such by reason of some 
 maladjustment of faculty to vocation. They are 
 the victims of unwise choices. Men enter a pro- 
 fession who ought to learn a trade. Men engage 
 in commerce who ought to be tillers of the soil. 
 For sanitary reasons, some can succeed in nothing 
 Avithout life in the open air. ^Multitudes of men 
 are born with aspirations above their abilities. 
 They have the tastes of leadership without the 
 power to lead. Sons follow the employments of 
 their fathers, without the pluck and self-discipline 
 of the fathers. They insist on beginning where 
 their fathers left off. Innumerable are these malad- 
 aptations of men to things. Multitudes of men 
 therefore belong to Sydney Smith's classification 
 of round men in square holes, and square men in 
 round holes. 
 
 46. Further, men are often "unlucky" through 
 neglect of their ante-natal history. They do not 
 
MIsrrllani'OKfi Topics 323 
 
 inquire what is the vocation which the blood rnns 
 to. No man can tit himself for conspicuous suc- 
 cess in an employment to which he has no pro- 
 clivities inherited. A man must be born to some- 
 thing, to make a great success of anything. 
 
 47. Many of the defeated men represent their 
 family stock at the period when it is caving in. 
 This is the destiny, sooner or later, of all families. 
 Rarely does eminent ability descend beyond the 
 third generation. The remote descendants of an 
 illustrious ancestry are apt to be as illustrious for 
 their incompetence. They should have descended 
 with the family stock gracefully. They should 
 have chosen humbler callings. Often the son of a 
 Senator should have been a clerk in the Post 
 Office. The grandson of a Chief Justice should 
 make shoes. The son of a millionnaire must often 
 be a book-keeper in the palatial store in which his 
 father made the fortune that the son has lost. 
 The ancestral line always, sooner or later, runs on 
 an inclined plane. He that is wise will discover 
 this seasonably, and make the best of it gracefully. 
 
 48. Multiform are these failures of faculty to 
 interlock with birth and circumstance and time 
 and opportunity. It is as unphilosophical as it is 
 irreverent to charge the failures of unsuccessful men 
 upon the disabilities or the ill-will of Providence. 
 Yet this is the f oll}^ and the crime which are covered 
 under a flippant name in the theory of " ill-luck." 
 It is not necessary that all men should achieve 
 what the world calls success. A descent in life 
 
324 My Notc-Booh. 
 
 from the higher to a lower plane is often a 
 nobler fortune than the reverse. The material 
 decline is a spiritual ascent. Alas I how often is 
 it better to enter another world halt and maimed 
 by the defeated wrestlings of this world ! He is 
 the wise man who, under life's failures, enters into 
 God's silence and waits there. 
 
 Typography by J. S. Gushing & Co., Boston. 
 Presswork by Berwick & Smith, Boston. 
 
PROFESSOR AUSTIN PHELPS' 
 
 ESSAYS AND STUDIES. 
 
 MY NOTE-BOOK : Fragmentary Studies in 
 Theology and Subjects Adjacent Thereto. 
 
 I vol., i2mo, with a Portrait, $1.50. 
 Contents: Fragmentary Studies in Theology. — The Personality 
 of a Preacher. — The Materials of Sermons. — Methods and Adjuncts of 
 the Pulpit. — Conscience and Its Allies. — Our Sacred Books. — Theistic 
 and Christian Types of Religious Life. — The Future of Christianity. — 
 Methodism : Its Work and Ways. — Miscellaneous Topics. 
 
 A peculiar interest attaches to these studies in the fact 
 that almost the last act of Dr. Phelps' life was in connection 
 with his preparations for their publication. In the Preface 
 to the volume he -says : " By far the major part of every 
 man's thinking is fragmentary. The best thinking of some 
 men is so. They are seers of transient and disconnected 
 vision. An educated man who practices literary frugality 
 in preserving the ideas suggested by his reading, will find 
 after years of professional service an accumulation of them, 
 in which he will recognize some of the most robust products 
 
 of his brain These remarks are suggested by 
 
 the origin and resources of the present volume. It is 
 literally what its title indicates." 
 
 MY STUDY AND OTHER ESSAYS, i vol., 
 i2mo, $1.50. 
 Contents : My Study. — Vibratory Progress in Religious Beliefs. — 
 Oscillations of Faith in Future Retribution. — Retribution in Its Biblical 
 Atmosphere. — St. Paul on Retribution. — Correctives of Popular Faith in 
 Retribution. — Retribution in the Light of Reason. — Endless Sin Under 
 
Professor Phelps' Books. 
 
 the Government of God. — The Hypothesis of a Second Probation. — 
 Scholastic Theories of Inspiration. — The New England Clergy and the 
 Anti-Slavery Reform. — Massachusetts and the Quakers. — Does the 
 World Move ? — Is the Christian Life Worth Living ? — A Study of the 
 Episcopal Church.— Prayer as a State of Christian Living. — Why Do I 
 Believe Christianity To Be a Revelation from God ? 
 
 " Whatever Phelps writes is worth reading and preserving. Each of the essays of 
 this volume bears the unmistakable mark of his thought and style. Nearly every 
 paragraph betrays the touch of a master. In vigor, in richness of thought, as well as 
 in neatness and clearness of style, these essays are almost incomparable.*' 
 
 — The Ltitheran Observer. 
 
 MY PORTFOLIO: A Collection of Essays. 
 
 I vol., i2mo, $1.50. 
 
 Contents : A Pastor of the Last Generation. — The Rights of 
 Believers in Ancient Creeds. — The Biblical Doctrine of Retribution.-:— 
 The Puritan Theory of Amusements. — The Christian Theory of Amuse- 
 ments. — Is Card-Playing a Christian Amusement ? — The Question of 
 Sunday Cars. — Woman -Suffrage as Judged by the Working of Negro- 
 Suffrage. — Reform in the Political Status of Women. — The Length of 
 Sermons. — The Calvinistic Theory of Preaching. — The Theology of "The 
 Marble Faun." — The Debt of the Nation to New England. — Ought the 
 Pulpit to Ignore Spiritualism ? — How Shall the Pulpit Treat Spiritual- 
 ism ? — Foreign and Home Missions as Seen by Candidates for the 
 Ministry. — Foreign Missions, Their Range of Appeal for Missionaries 
 Limited. — Congregationalists and Presbyterians : A Plea for Union. — 
 Methods of Union. — The Preaching of Albert Barnes. — A Vacation with 
 Dr. Bushnell. — Prayer Viewed in the Light of the Christian Conscious- 
 ness. — Intercessory Prayer. — Hints Auxiliary to Faith in Prayer. — The 
 Vision of Christ. — The Cross in the Door. — The Premature Closing of a 
 Life's Work. — What Do We Know of the Heavenly Life ? 
 
 " To say that sound wisdom, broad and exact learning, profound sjjirituality and 
 practical adaptation to current needs are all blended in these essays, and are rendered 
 the more impressive by a literary style of such purity and force as seldom are illustrated 
 by any one author, is to say only what is familiar already to everybody who has read 
 anything from Prof. Phelps' pen. Such a volume is a substantial addition to that lit- 
 erature which, by broadening and strengthening the true foundation of belief and 
 character, is 'preparing the way of the Lord' upon earth." — Congregationalisi . 
 
Professor Phelps' Books. 
 
 MEN AND BOOKS : or Studies in Homiletics. 
 
 Lectures introductory to "The Theory of Preach- 
 ing." One vol., crown, 8vo, $2.00. 
 
 Professor Phelps' second volume of lectures is more popular and 
 general in its application than "The Theory of Preaching." It is de- 
 voted to a discussion of the sources of culture and power in the profes- 
 sion of the pulpit, its power to absorb and appropriate to its own uses 
 the world of real life in the present, and the world of the past, as it 
 lives in books. 
 
 "It is a book obviously free from all padding. It is a live book, animated as well 
 as sound and instructive, in which conventionalities are brushed aside, and the author 
 goes straight to the marrow of the subject. No minister can read it without being 
 waked up to a higher conception of the possibilities of his calling." 
 
 — Professor George P. Fisher . 
 
 " It is one of the most helpful books in the interest of self-cultiire that has ever 
 been written. While specially intended for young clergymen, it is almost equally 
 well adapted for students in all the liberal professions." — Standard of the Cross. 
 
 " We are sure that no minister or candidate for the ministry can read it without 
 profit. It is a tonic for one's mind to read a book so laden with thought and sugges- 
 tion, and written in a style so fresh, strong and bracing." — Boston IVatchinan. 
 
 ENGLISH STYLE IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE. 
 
 With Special Relation to the Usages of the Pulpit. 
 
 i2mo, $2.00. 
 
 English Style is broad and comprehensive, and is particularly fasci- 
 nating from its stores of happy illustrations and its frequent discussions 
 of matters that everyone is interested in, but which few are competent 
 to decide for themselves. By far the greater part of the volume relates 
 to English style in its widest acceptation, and the entire work is a most 
 valuable contribution to the subject. 
 
 " It would be difficult to match this book for practical v due and literary merit in 
 the English language." — The Evangelist. 
 
 "This volume may be read, and not only read, but studied, with much profit by 
 everyone who has occasion to speak in public or to write for the public. . . . We 
 have here a treatise on pulpit style broad enough to be that and something more — a 
 satisfactory treatise on all English style. It will be a great help to any who are 
 striving to learn how to write and speak their mother-tongue with precision, force and 
 grace." — The Examiner. 
 
Professor Phelps' Books. 
 
 THE THEORY OF PREACHING: Lectures 
 on Homiletics. By Professor Austin Phelps, D.D. 
 One volume, 8vo, 600 pages, $2.50. 
 
 This work is the growth of more than thirty years' practical ex- 
 perience in teaching, reinforced by suggestions arising from inquiries of 
 students, which feature is especially to be noted as giving an intensely 
 practical and living character to the discussion. It is probably the most 
 thorough and masterly treatment of the preacher's art that exists, cer- 
 tainly as adapted for the American pulpit it is unequalled. While pri- 
 marily designed for professional readers, it will be found to contain 
 much that will be of interest to thoughtful laymen. The writings of a 
 master of style and of broad and catholic mind are always fascinating ; in 
 the present case the wealth of appropriate and pointed illustration ren- 
 ders this doubly the case. 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICES. 
 
 " In the range of Protestant homiletical literature, we venture to affirm that its 
 equal cannot be found for a conscientious, scholarly, and exhaustive treatment of the 
 theory and practice of preaching. . . . To the treatment of his subject Dr. 
 Phelps brings such qualifications as very few men now living possess. His is one of 
 those delicate and sensitive natures which are instinctively critical, and yet full of 
 what Matthew Arnold happily calls sweet reasonableness. . . . To this character- 
 istic graciousness of nature Dr. Phelps adds a style which is preeminently adapted to 
 his special work. It is nervous, epigrammatic, and racy." 
 
 — The Exautiner and Chronicle. 
 
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 consequence to pastors and people alike, and to the salvation of mankind. It is 
 elaborate, but not redundant, rich in the fruits of experience, yet thoroughly timely 
 and current, and it easily takes the verj' first rank among volumes of its class." 
 
 — The Congregationalist. 
 
 " The volume is to be commended to young men as a superb example of the art in 
 which it aims to instruct them." — The Independent. 
 
 " The reading of it is a mental tonic. The preacher cannot but feel often his heart 
 burning within him under its influence. We could wish it might be in the hands of 
 every theological student and of every pastor." — The Watchman. 
 
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