ANNUAL SERMON BEFORE THE American Board of Commissioners FOR Foreign Missions DELIVERED AT PROVIDENCE, R. I., OCTOBER 3, 1899 BY THE REV. GEORGE C. ^DAMS, D.D. Pastor of the First Congregational Church SAN FRANCISCO, CAL. ^ OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT ANNUAL SERMON BEFORE THE American Board of Commissioners FOR Foreign Missions DELIVERED AT PROVIDENCE, R. I., OCTOBER 3, 1899 BY THE REV. GEORGE C. ADAMS, D.D. Pastor of the First Congregational Church SAN FRANCISCO, CAL. PUBLISHED BY THE BOARD CONGREGATIONAL HOUSE, BOSTON 1899 Beacon Press : Thomas Todd, Printer, 14 Beacon Street, Boston. (Il'PllllTHNm' FUR THE IIOLV SPIRIT. “I CAMK THAI’ IMKY MAY II.AYK I.IIK, AND MAY HAVE IT ABl'N- DA.N n.Y.’’ — Joh)! X : to. The Holy Spirit works through human means. He comes, not at our agonized call alone, but when we have fulfilled the conditions in which it is possible for Him to reach us. Elijah was never more in earnest in prayer in his life than when he asked for translation because he was not fit to live. But even the Spirit of God could do nothing with him in that mood ; it was only when the wind and the earthquake and the fire had passed over him, and his rest- less spirit was humbled by the mighty unrest of nature, that he was fit to hear the “still small voice.” The Spirit of God had a special commission to give him, but was power- less until the prophet had risen from his hopeless pessimism, and in the awful stillness that follows the tornado his voice could be heard. The outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost was not a sudden nor an unexpected occurrence to the disci- ples. Not a word of surprise is expressed by them. The astonished were the unprepared ; the disciples had received a training in the fifty days preceding that made them ready ; they met for prayer, and with one accord continued stead- fastly in prayer. They at last understood the Saviour’s pre- diction about the coming of the Comforter, and their lives were dedicated to his service. It was not until the day of Pentecost was fully come that He appeared; and the “fully” here spoken of refers as much to the preparation of heart as to the date on the calendar. As the development of the young church went on. He still came only to those whose hearts were ready, and whose lives were fulfilling the conditions under which He could work successfully. Unpalatable as 4 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. the idea is to many, He could not come to the twelve wait- ing disciples at Ephesus whom Paul found, because of the incompleteness of their creed. They believed in a Saviour yet to be revealed. There was no place in that confession for the coming of the Holy Spirit. When Paul preached the gospel to them and they met the conditions, the Spirit came to them, and the usual manifestations of his presence followed. There is no variation from this law ; there is a divine order in revelation to the individual soul, as much as in creation or revelation through Scripture, and no amount of prayer without preparation will cause it to vary. The Saviour recognized this fact, and emphasized it. The disciples could not understand how it was expedient that He should go away from them, but He insisted on it. They clung to the earthly Jesus ; He led them to the divine Christ. They were as lost without his bodily presence as a child without its mother, but he prepared them as a mother is compelled to for the time when they must walk without Him, relying on themselves ; for that purpose they were to be better guided by the Spirit than they could be by the Master himself. So we may understand the evidences of the resurrection and the occurrences of the forty days. The appearances of the risen Christ are mysterious even now until we have the key. Two purposes were before him; first, to give sufficient evidence of the fact of the resurrec- tion for all future use the Spirit would have to make of it ; and second, to so train the wondering disciples that they would be ready to walk without His presence. That the first was thoroughly accomplished is shown by the fact that Paul, who was not born into the kingdom until long after these occurrences, is the one to gather into one statement the evidences of the resurrection, and show their cumulative force. In our discussions we are prone to give too little weight to the second purpose ; a careful study of the appear- ance of Christ after His resurrection, with this question in mind, “ What was He trying to accomplish ? ” reveals a pro- OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. s gres.sive influence on the minds of the disciples, that pre- pared them for the wonderful change that came with the outpouring of the Spirit. He was leading them from the visible to the invisible. His words to Mary Magdalene, the walk to Kmmaus, and the revealing through the break- ing of bread ; his two appearances to the disciples when the same body that bore the print of the nails and the wound of the spear had suddenly appeared in their midst, though the doors were shut for fear of the Jews; the days so spent among them that even the untutored fishermen realized that they were on the borderland between two worlds ; all these things were a part of the education of the believers into the thought of a spiritual Christ, unseen, but more real to them than ever, who should be truly present to them, and whose work should go on more grandly than ever under the con- stant impulse of the Holy Ghost. How well this purpose was accomplished ! The same disciples who fled at the arrest, crept fearfully at a distance at the crucifixion, could not believe the resurrection was a fact, and were affrighted at sight of Him, supposing it was a spirit, while they could hardly withdraw their eyes from the heavens into which He had disappeared, yet went submissively into Jerusalem, their lesson learned, and tarried there as the Master had com- manded, meeting constantly for prayer and conference, until Pentecost was fully come. In such manner Jesus fulfilled his own words : “I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.” The religion of form must give way to that of the heart. The letter that killeth must break down before the Spirit that giveth life. The loved form of the Master must be so com- pletely forgotten that Paul should be able to say, “ Even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know Him so no more.” The men and women who had been affrighted at every new manifestation of the power and glory of Christ, and had fled for their lives, were to become as bold as lions. The same Peter who had sworn that he had 6 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. never seen Jesus, was to stand in the most august presence in Judea and accuse the Sanhedrim of murder in the first degree, and men were to explain the transition by taking knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus. So the expressed purpose of his coming was fulfilled upon the little band who gathered about Him in His earthly pilgrimage, and in like manner it was and is to be fulfilled through all time. Without His coming there would be no significance in the coming of the Holy Ghost, for He was to use the work that the Saviour had done, and without that work there was no means of action whatever for the Spirit. So on the human side, there is no opportunity for the Spirit until He can bring home to the soul this fact that Jesus came. Here is at once the inspiration and the method of all successful missions — the fact that Jesus came, the purpose for which He came, the abundance of that purpose. The Holy Spirit is to use these facts to inspire a like willingness for sacrifice in those to whom Christ has come. He is to carry these thoughts as basal facts to men who are lost in sin, and who can never rise above their inheritance until the Holy Spirit brings through human lips the same old story that has made this earth increasingly beautiful through nineteen centuries. I. “/ came." A simple enough statement of fact, but pregnant with mighty truth. Here is a startling use of tense: “the thief cometh,” “ I came.” The thief is always coming ; the struggle is always on ; but the Saviour came once. The thief comes this night, and tomorrow, and every night ; but that one coming of Christ long ago has set in motion agencies that will be powerful under the impulse of the Spirit, and will make it possible to conquer the thief. The purpose is not that He shall come whenever the thief appears, but that He shall furnish the Holy Spirit the means whereby He may strengthen every man for his own great battle, and enable him to win the victory. Why repeat this truth now i' Is not the historical fact OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 7 that Jesus came admitted well-nigh universally among intel- ligent people } There was never a time when so large a part of humanity believed that Jesus came as just now ; that name was never upon so many tongues, and never com- manded so great respect. Infidelity has never had so weak a hold on the reading public. Ten years ago the writings of agnosticism were thrust before you at every turn ; the train boy handed you that class of literature at the start ; if that was not wanted he had something else in reserve, light literature, possibly some religious book, but not religious enough to offend any one. Now it is quite probable that the first book laid on the lap in any train will be “ In His Steps.” A news agent testified not long ago that it was his best selling book. Let them criticise it if they must ; it is being read, and is having a mighty influence to turn the thought of humanity to the fact that Jesus came ; no one can read it carefully witliout being impressed with the fact that His coming was of more than ordinary importance, since it has led to a story of such consecration at this distance in time. What a large proportion of the literature of the present is founded upon that coming ! A few years ago we were mourning because the taste of the young turned so generally to a trashy kind of writings. It is fashionable now to read the books that are founded on the fact that Jesus came ; turn whichever way we will, there is cheering evidence of the truth that every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess. We are in the midst of a great tide that is sweeping all human thought before it. Shall we not be content, and remember that the Spirit who has made such successful use of the coming thus far will carry it on to its great consum- mation ? But the historical fact is the smallest part of it. A large proportion of those who admit that Jesus came, see no great significance in it unless it touches their self-interest. The name of Jesus has never been on the lips of laboring men so generally as now ; gatherings of workingmen have actually 8 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. cheered when that name was mentioned, and many of them have gone home to find out about Him more than they knew before. This is well, but it has been largely because He was a carpenter, and they are carpenters. Not Jesus as a Sav- iour, but Jesus as a carpenter, to help them to higher wages and an easier life. Now how much soever we may desire that every man may get the highest wages he can earn, and every true Christian has that desire, it was not the prime object of the advent of Jesus, When one came to Him to plead for some change in his social condition he received the caution to take heed and beware of covetousness. Strong words were spoken against the sin of acquiring for the sake of having, or of spending for selfish pleasure, words that apply to every class in the community. More than that, when Jesus touched a man he left his trade and lived by faith. Ours is an age of unrest and ambition, much of it worthy, and we believe we are on the eve of great changes, where more even justice can be done to all, but that does not warrant us in using the name of Jesus to conjure with. All this ambition, and the great uprising of humanity in every way, are due to the fact that Jesus could say “ I came.” But they are incidental. The truth of His coming cannot be successfully proclaimed in any place without an appreciable rising in the scale of being; but there is no promise that the Spirit will use His coming first of all to promote selfishness. Not to possess more, but to use more for blessing others, is the fruit of the Spirit. Jesus came that we may learn to forget self, and love our neighbor as ourselves. While a great multitude are learning to have a sort of love for the name of Jesus, not many are finding what is the real heart of Christ. Though it is true that we have more books and better teaching now on the inner life of Christ, it is also true that a great multitude are satisfied with the historical fact that Jesus came. The friendship of some is one of the hardest tests of the divine force in the world. Just now there is a tendency among thoughtful Jews to admit OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 9 the excellent character and blameless life of Jesus. One public address at least, by a Jewish business man, tells how he was taught that all the sufferings of the Jews were due to the teachings of Jesus; how he was led to read and think for himself, with the result that he found that Jesus was a Jew, faithful to His people, who spiritualized the Old Testament teachings; then he thinks that Paul, without the aid or sym- pathy of Jesus, spread his teachings among the Gentiles. He expresses the greatest admiration for Jesus of Nazareth ; and leading rabbis state that this man’s view is that of many intelligent and thoughtful Jews. The chief rabbi of Eng- land lately expressed sentiments that might easily have been suggested by Him whom we Christians adore. We are glad for so much ; it marks a tendency in the right direction, but as yet only a tendency ; and with the intimate relations of Jew and Gentile it is a dangerous tendency to some. When intelligent Jews see that the wonderful prophecy, that “the tribe shall not depart from Judah nor a lawgiver from be- tween his feet till Shiloh come,” was wonderfully fulfilled in the preservation of the integrity of the tribe of Judah, and the continuance of the Sanhedrim till Jesus came, and that then they were lost forever ; when they see that the power of Jesus was not that He was a Jew, but that the Divine Spirit dwelt in Him, and that He was Immanuel, then the reign of the Spirit shall begin for them. In the meantime many need to study as never before the heart of Christ, and make way for the Spirit in their own hearts, lest they be drawn away by the very plausibility of the recognition of the truth that Jesus came. There are subtle forces at work; the multitude are compelled to accept Jesus’ state- ment, “ I came,” but are industriously trying to admit only so much as they have to. Even the spirits are called in to help ; many people who like to be called intelligent are visit- ing spiritualist mediums, and with wonderful unanimity their communications state that Jesus was the highest created being, or that He was the greatest man that ever lived. lO OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. Either the auto-suggestion of the medium is very strong, or there are lying spirits about. A Volimtary Coining. However we may teach that He was sent, there is a quiet statement of fact in His words, “ I came.” Our own spirit of self-sacrifice will be greatly enhanced when we realize how thoroughly voluntary all His acts were. We have suffered the cross, which is the well chosen symbol of his coming, to overshadow all else. It was not the fact that He hung on the cross that gave it its significance; it was that He hung there of his own free will, in order that others might not have to hang there. “I have power to lay down my life, and I have power to take it again.” He had power to call for the legions of angels who were anxiously waiting for the command to rush to His help ; and He had, what no one else ever had, the power to refrain from calling for divine help in that supreme hour. Every step of the way He trod was of His own choice ; the first humble coming to earth and each stage of His journey through it were purely voluntary. He foretold all his suffer- ings and triumph as something premeditated ; three times he informed them that it was predetermined. This thought grew upon Paul until he was absorbed in it; “have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus ; who, being in the form of God, counted it not a prize to be on an equality with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a ser- vant.” And again, “He humbled himself, becoming obedi- ent unto death, yea, even the death of the cross.” Here is the process from the time He left His throne, till the last great act of obedience was complete. Jesus, not only at the cross, but from the manger cm, was an all-atoning sacrifice ; and He was that all-atoning sacrifice because He chose to be. There is a wonderful quality about the peace of Jesus which He promised to will to His disciples. Not only His .calmness in view of disaster and death, but His evident looking to these experiences as a part of His own plan for OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. H His life, in consonance with the plan of the Father, mark this peace as of a different quality from any other on earth. He is peaceful because He is filled with the enthusiasm of the greatest mission ever known. He is not startled at arrest, or trial, or execution, because He has come to them all of His own free will. The consciousness of a great duty done, a grand privilege met, makes that peace so wonderful. “I came” means the coming for one definite purpose, and all the events of the life are a part of the carrying out of that purpose. “For this cause came I unto this hour” is the key to all His words and acts. Unless there is life in Him who comes there will be nothing to impart to those He plans to save. He must have life enough to conquer death, but there must be more than that. We can be brave in view of death when it is inevitable ; but Jesus was brave and calm as He planned to die. It has been recently proved that an agnostic can approach death with a great degree of calmness ; but none but a God could ever come to earth for the purpose of dying, and be calm. The peace of Jesus was not the peace of enduring, but the peace of deliberate sacri- fice. He went to the cross, not as many of his disciples did shortly after, who sought the crown of martyrdom with songs and shouts of joy, but with a calmness and majesty that compelled the hardened centurion who executed him to cry, “Truly this was the Son of God.” The death on the cross was the culmination of the sacrifice, and his peace there was the same as it had been all along the way. Jesus was consistent from the beginning to the end of his remark- able work. The life that He came to impart is as clearly seen in each day’s work and endurance as in the last. He could give life because He had life. He came to bring divine life to earth. It is customary to dwell on the miracles in order to show His power ; yet the miracles, great though they were, are only incidents of His coming. We may give them too much weight because they are miracles ; in performing them Jesus 12 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. was simply himself. In discussing His power we have un- wittingly allowed our enemies to draw attention from the heart of the gospel to a symptom of it. Instead of center- ing our attention on the fact that He came to bring life, we have been discussing the possibility of miracles. Much good may have resulted from that discussion, and incidental proof of Jesus’ mission may have been drawn from it, but it is high time for all believers to learn that the real question is not whether miracles were performed, but whether He who did these things is life in himself. John’s powerful statement needs careful study : “ In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.” If there was life in Him there would cer- tainly be manifestations of the life out of the common expe- rience of men, and that in this case makes them miracles. So our study of the possibility and the fact of miracles is only that we may learn if there was divine life in Him who performed them. When that is proved they have little fur- ther significance for us. They are only what we would expect of the Son of God. They are the acts of a loved friend, the greatest of all friends, and as such are dear to us; but they have real value only as evidence of His life. The quality of the miracles is their real power; Jesus vol- untarily scattered such blessing by means of the great life He was, that wherever He went men were raised up from their weak, lost condition, and Jesus’ life became literally the light of men. We say that He came voluntarily, and we have stated a great truth ; but when we are able to say that He came voluntarily to bring light into darkened and sin-blinded lives, we have said a thousand times more. Just as the fact of His coming means more as we study it, so the voluntary coming grows in significance as we reflect on those to whom He came, and what was the effect on them of His coming. The Manner of His Coming. There is no more in- structive place in His life than that where we at the last find Him praying, “And now, O Father, glorify thou me OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. >3 with thine own self with the glory that I had with thee before the world was.” We at once ask why He has not now that glory, and the only answer is because He had voluntarily laid it aside for the sake of lost humanity. It is the grandest purpose ever revealed. Peter the Great might leave his royalty for a time in order that he might be a better king, but Jesus emptied himself of His glory in order that His subjects might become kings. He had made him- self poor, that we through His poverty might become rich. And when we say poor, we do not mean poor as one of us would be; His manger cradle. His homeless life. His bor- rowed tomb, are incidents of His poverty, but they are not that poverty itself. As the physical suffering was the least of the agony on the cross, so the poverty in which He lived those three and thirty years as regarded home and earthly fortune is the smallest part of the real poverty He knew. There was a time in Christian development when the thought of the earthly poverty of the Master would have great weight, but we are far enough advanced in spiritual life now to know that it is only the husk of His poverty. He could not have come in voluntary poverty and not been poor in this world’s goods : but His real poverty was in what He had surren- dered for our sakes. And first we must learn, if possible, how deep the poverty of which He was capable. The one who has most can lose most. The poverty of one who has been rich is far greater than that of one who has never known abundance. Possibility of suffering grows with de- velopment. That wonderful beatitude, “ Blessed are they that mourn,” means nothing at all to the savage. Its mean- ing grows with the refining of the sensibilities. As the spiritual takes precedence, and the physical is overcome, that promise rises until we are able to heartily thank God for the ability to mourn. Carry the thought forward, and what was the capacity for mourning in Jesus Christ ? There were never such tears as those He shed over Jerusalem. No sentence in the English or any other language contains 14 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. SO much in so small compass as those two words, “Jesus wept.” There was never such love as His, as He looked on the young man and loved him. Human thought is powerless to comprehend the capacity of Jesus for love, for sorrow, and for sacrifice. Then human thought is powerless to com- prehend the poverty of Christ. No foreign missionary among a degraded and savage race ever approached the condition of Jesus in this world. Sin was on every side of Him ; wherever he turned the taint was in the air ; every friend he had was a sufferer from sin, and a sinner. We may picture to ourselves the Black Hole in Calcutta, where into a space some eighteen feet square a hundred and forty-six British soldiers were driven at the point of the sword; we may think of the one little opening where air could come in ; of the tainted air without, full of the smell of burning; we may picture to ourselves the mis- erable wretches crowding and struggling in their agonized fight to get where they could breathe ; but we cannot for one moment by any such picturing get a conception of the absolute poverty and loneliness of the Son of God in this world of sin. If one can remember when, a pure-hearted lad, he first heard the conversation of those who could not speak without oaths and loathsome talk, if he can recall the shuddering and fear that took hold upon him, he may be able to get some slight idea of what Jesus had to endure. But we mortals become used to such things; we reach a time when we can hear an oath and not shudder. Jesus never could; His spotless character revolted at sin as much at the end of his life as at its beginning. The temptations of the forty days were only the concentrated poverty of His whole life. There is exquisite pathos in the statement after it was over that angels came and ministered unto Him ; one breath of pure air in the Black Hole; one moment’s respite in the poverty He had assumed. And this poverty grew deeper and deeper. He must tread the wine press alone ; He must know the complete absence of all the purity that OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 15 belongs to heaven, until from His parched lips there is. wrung the cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? ” One of the principal aggravations of this poverty was that as a result of sin men could not understand the mission of Christ, nor can they yet. It grows upon us with passing generations, but it may safely be said that we do not yet grasp more than the smallest fraction of what He came to do. Even His divine patience was so intensely tried that now and then His face was turned heavenward, with excla- mations on the absolute lack of faith of those about Him. His mission was misunderstood from the start. Men were looking for freedom from their most galling yoke, and that just then was Roman bondage ; in their eagerness to escape from that they were ready to crucify any Saviour who did not make that his chief concern. The very disciples whom He gathered never understood Him until He was gone. Judas, in disgust that Jesus did not take the sword and the scepter, let his own cupidity have full reign, and betrayed his Master ; Peter in abject hopelessness became a coward and denied Him. And even after the resurrection, when His presence was more sacred than ever, the great question that arose in their minds was, “Wilt thou at this time re- store the kingdom to Israel ? ” After the reign of the Spirit had begun, and till the present moment, men have always been ready to make the earthly kingdom their chief thought in relation to Christ. From that hour when the sons of thunder wanted to call down fire from heaven on the city that would not receive Him, to the latest diatribe in the name of Jesus against existing social conditions, men have been ready at any moment to sacrifice the heart of Christ for a little momentary gain in worldly advantage over those from whom they differed. II. “ T/iat They May Have Life." We in our short- sightedness allow our sympathy to become sentimental, and hasten to carry to others the results of life, its conven- i6 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. iences ; we long to teach others the value of a Christian civilization ; we would like to give them our methods, and the means whereby we have achieved success, but the teach- ing of Jesus is not like that. There is the same divine order in this gift as in that of inspiration. Jesus did not bring one result of the life He gives into this world with Him ; they will all develop themselves in time. It is self-developing power that He bestows ; all the rest will follow. No long- ing that others may be as we are should ever for one mo- ment turn our attention from the one great purpose Jesus states, “That they may have life.” Not method, but life; not what life has developed in others, but life in order to develop for themselves. The World's Need. The more we study history the more we are impressed with its uncompleted beginnings. That tower of Babel, standing unfinished under the eastern sky, is a type of more things than the confusion of tongues. It has its antitype in the ruins along the Euphrates and Tigris, in the meager remains of the primitive races of Palestine, in the monuments of Egypt. History is a record of continual risings and falls ; race has succeeded race, civilization has crowded civilization, and the center of light and influence has ever moved on. The Hebrew gave the knowledge of one God, and was exiled. The Greek gave one language to commerce that Paul might speak of Christ in any city in the world, and became an ancient art gallery, without life, and with no power of self-continuance. Rome gave one government, until the teachings of Jesus had taken root, and then broke up into fragments that had no resem- blance to an empire. The history of the races of the earth has been a continual crescendo, ending in diminuendo. A nation has come to the front, acted its part for a little, lost its hold, and gone into desuetude, only to give opportunity for another to do the same. And all through this wearisome progress there has been an ever-increasing wail, a moaning for something that is not. Men have risen who have had a OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 17 greater grasp of truth than others, and have swayed the multitude for a time, but with their death the refle.x wave has swept away their power. Pericles, who never began any important matter without prayer, was able to give Greece a golden age ; while he lived Athens was great ; so long as his noble purpose and strong hand were able to make themselves felt Athens was a power, but when he died the forces he had controlled broke loose, and Athens became the home of babblers and sneering philosophers that Paul found. All history is full of the thought that there are possibilities for humanity which have never been realized. Many times a race has been like Paldasarre, the old man in Romola, who pored over the Greek te.xt with tears running down his cheeks, and knew he had read it once, and thought he could almost make it out, but the paralysis of power was final. There is great unrest in this world today. In every civilized race a revolution seems imminent. Questions that will not down are making the future uncertain. That beau- tiful simplicity and trust in the relation of capital and labor that appear in the Book of Ruth have long been gone ; we see two great factors in the world’s work arrayed against each other, and sometimes it looks like a death grapple. The leading nations of the civilized world have accepted democ- racy in whole or in part, and with it has come the rising of the degraded classes, the education of those who will accept it, deeper thought, the desire for self-improvement, ambitions that have never been able to find such general expression before. All the pent-up forces of humanity have been let loose, and Icarus is flying perilously near the sun. On the other hand, the races that we call uncivilized are coming in such close touch with the rest of the world, that they are really a part of us. The theater of the world’s action has shifted, and the far-away islands to which we used to send missionaries, with the thought that we would probably never see them again, are now at our doors. We have been pulling i8 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. out our atlases, and locating the Philippines, and Carolines, and Ladrones. China can no longer be a recluse ; Corea will not again be a hermit nation ; Japan is suddenly a young giant, springing up full armed, and bright with the promise of the sunrise. But through all this wonderful change there runs the discord of human selfishness. We are reminded that civilization that is not founded on eternal principles can- not stand, and ever there rises a cry for more than armies and governors can give. Unless these ambitions and long- ings in nations civilized and savage can be met by something more than diplomacy and force they will only end in self- destruction. Why has the religious instinct been given, except that like all other appetites there should be an answer from God possible ? He who said “ Blessed are they that mourn,” said also,j“ Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after right- eousness.” From Plutarch’s day to the present observing minds have seen the power and the beauty of the faculty of praise to God. But this appetite has been given in order that Jesus might have the opportunity to bestow that which He brought to earth. The world’s need is not government, not armies, not diplomacy, but life. We live in the dream that a race shall arise that can not only achieve victories, but can endure success ; that shall not be intoxicated with its own power, but shall see in strength a grand opportunity, and in the millions of human beings that come under its influence the greatest missionary call of the ages. Wherever we look we see a world that has made some progress and stopped, that has achieved some little success, and then lost its inspiration, and suffered stagnation. If the Anglo-Saxon race, and its mother, the Teutonic, cannot raise themselves with God’s help to this height of privilege, the scepter will depart from them, and among the effete races of the East will come a stirring of the dry bones ; the breath of God will blow upon them, and the true missionary spirit will assert its privilege. The world is waiting yet as it waited in Jesus’ OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 19 day ; and while the church disputes over forms and ceremo- nies and methods, and its heart grows cold, the wail of Mary at the sepulcher goes ever up to God: “They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him.” The world waits, as it has ever waited, for the living Christ. The World's Lost Opportunities. In the story of the man who was an householder there is a principle of wider interpretation than the Jewish race has suggested; humanity has always been treating God’s gifts as if they were their own, and has slain the Son when He came to claim His right. The lord of the vineyard has always been destroying the husbandmen and letting out his vineyard to others. To state it differently, the world has many times had light enough by which to find the life God had in store for it, and each time it has been placeJ under a measure, and its power has been lost. The study of philology has shown that at least a large part of the human race once dwelt under one roof and spoke one language, and the strongest proof of it is in the words that sprung from the religious life. God has singled out particular races and given them special knowl- edge, but it has been lost. Paul’s visit to Athens was in her decay; Sparta had long before gained the ascendency; forti- fications, religion, philosophy, were wrecked at Athens. The consecrated visitor was keen to select the most touching relic of a great past, and make it the text for the grandest address ever delivered. The altar to the unknown god was not an incident of their worship, but the poor and lonely remains of what had been the origin of their greatness. It had come to them from their ancestors, the Pelasgi, who wor- shiped the supreme God without temples or images, and whose altars flamed from the highest mountain tops. They even worshiped Him without a name, suggesting the unpro- nounceable name among the Hebrews. Zeus means the heavens. When they wished to imply a nearer relation they called Him Zeus Pater, almost identically the Saviour’s expression, “Our Father which art in heaven.” Here is the 20 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. beginning of Greek history, before the Doric and Ionic invasions had made confusion of thought, and the develop- ment of the commercial spirit had made men selfish. Our first vision of the race that was to give the world its best philosophy and finest art is of a simple people, kneeling under the open sky and worshiping the unseen author of their world. They kept their reverence for the unseen, but so mingled it with superstition and polytheism that all that was left when Paul came was that one altar. Instead of worship of God under the open sky there was Delphi, the mother of superstition and craven fear. No race can be studied until we have some knowledge of its religious life. God has ordained that in the starting of a new world force there shall be the impulse of a purer wor- ship than has been. But it is not alone at the beginning ; nations have become and remained great according to the religious impulse they have received and preserved, and when that has been lost, their decline and fall have begun. English history begins at Carnac and Stonehenge. Call Druidism heathen if you will, it had much to do with the formation of Anglo-Saxon character. The civilizations of the Saxon and the Teuton are what they are today because the moral impulse with which they started was not lost in doubt and scoffing, but followed by a purer and diviner impulse that carried forward what had been fairly well begun. Too much credit cannot be given to those first missionaries who carried the religion of Jesus Christ among the races that had become hardy by exposure, and whose first faith in Christi- anity was as simple as that of a little child. Gibbon tells us that the civilizations of today came out of the forests of England and Germany, but they did not emerge until Christian missionaries had gone in, and Boniface had not only dared to chop down the sacred oak, but had it cut into timbers, with which to build a chapel for the worship of Jesus Christ. The history of races that have kept their inspira- tion shows in startling contrast those that did not. The OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT, 2 1 Pelasgi were not the only people of the olden time who had a pure worship ; that of the early Persians is almost as clear as that of the nations of modern times. In fact, the more we study the races of antiquity the more clearly this point appears, that Paul was right when he said God had not left Himself without a witness. The difficulty has always been to lead the people to keep the witness after its divine impartation. The most startling instance in all history is that which confronted Jesus at every step. The law as revealed in the Old Testament has in it all the teaching that is necessary to make men godlike. Whenever Jesus was appealed to for the heart of his teachings He went right to the Law. A modern Jew finds all the Sermon on the Mount in the Old Testament, and is astonished at the beauty and force it possesses when Jesus has spiritualized it. One thing only is lacking, and that is the life that the Saviour brought. Because of this lack men had allowed the Law to degener- ate into a heavy weight, a matter of casuistry that made the people moral cowards. As a result of moral disintegration a large part of the nation had been deported, and had never come back. The rest had suffered deportation, and only through the general policy pursued by Cyrus of reinhabit- ing desolated lands with their own people did it come to pass that the poorest part of Judah returned and rebuilt the wall and the temple. The then modern students of the Law had added interpretation to interpretation, until a plain man had difficulty in worshiping God in spirit and in truth. Hence the surprise with which men said, “Never man spake like this man.” In all human history no greater contrast could be found than that between the scribes and the Saviour. The Jewish race had lost the inspiration given them through Moses, and like other races had degenerated into a supersti- tious formalism. Now we know what the Saviour meant when He said, “Ye are the salt of the earth. But if the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted ? ” Other 22 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. peoples have had opportunity ; you have life ; but if you lose that life there is no further hope either for you or those to whom you are sent to impart this life. The fatherhood of God has been revealed before, but men have not appre- hended it ; you are sent out to carry it as the Son has re- vealed it ; you carry the means of salvation ; be careful not to lose it. The Life Jesus Imparted is a Moral and Spiritual Power. Life is more than existence. The sheep are alive ; the thief comes to kill ; the Saviour came to keep alive, but more than that, to lead them in green pastures and beside still waters, that their life may be abundant. Life means progress, growth, development. If the eternal life Jesus came to give were nothing more than the privilege of eter- nal existence we would not crave it. But “This is life eternal, that they may know thee, the only living and true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.” So of life here ; under the impulse of the love of Christ life becomes worth living. He is the moral and spiritual force that moves the world. There is deep significance in the words of the late Lord Beaconsfield, when he called the attention of think- ing people to the fact that the nations that are leading the world in art and science and everything that is worth the having, are the nations where Jesus Christ is most earnestly preached and most faithfully worshiped. That great Jew had his eyes open, and did not hesitate to tell what he saw. There has been remarkable preserving and developing power where Jesus has been preached until the heart yielded. Something has been at work on these races ; others have had equal op- portunities ; China discovered several of our most valuable improvements long before we did ; with gunpowder she made nothing more destructive than fire-crackers ; with the begin- ning of the mariner’s compass she has the record of sending only one small squadron a few miles from sight of land. With the secret of movable type she printed no book. The difference between China and Germany is the difference OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 23 between a race that has no personality because it has no conception of the real fatherhood of God, and one that has a moral purpose, great and abiding. The people who gath- ered on the housetops at Worms as Luther went by to his great trial, and besought him to be firm, and cjuoted passages of the Word of God to cheer and strengthen him, had life. No uncertainty there, no wavering, no clinging to ancestral traditions simply because they are old. They were own cous- ins to Cromwell’s Ironsides, of the same stock and with the same spirit. This national or racial life is entirely dependent on indi- vidual life. Sociological studies have of late somewhat ob- scured this ; we are at our old trick of inverting the divine order. We forget that when the Saviour had the opportu- nity of His life, as the world sees it. He deliberately turned away from the multitudes, telling them they were after the loaves and fishes, and devoted himself to training the few who were willing to give up all for Him. Cromwell had caught his method when he declared that he believed that a few honest men were better than numbers, and formed his army of a thousand who were never defeated, and who in many battles saved the day for those who in Cromwell’s phrase were not so honest. We are in danger of doing in religion what we have long done in public charities, of train- ing up a great army in the church who are there for the loaves and fishes. The part of the church that does the work, bears the burden, gives to missions, sends the gospel round the world, may all be comprehended in that not very large number proportionately who are in the church simply and solely for the life it gives. For when the life of Jesus takes hold upon a man it quickens all his faculties, clarifies his distinctions between right and wrong, stirs him up to do for others as he would have others do for him, makes him in every sense a new man in Christ Jesus. Christian philos- ophers in coming days may have occasion to associate in thought the increasing sluggishness in general Christian 24 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. benevolence in our clay with the tendency to try to human- ize the church, thereby attracting attention to the outward and visible, and losing sight of the value Jesus puts on an immortal soul. In attempting to put greater stress on the command to love our neighbor as ourself we may forget, as some so-called Christians have been glad to do, that it is founded wholly on the other and greater, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.” The second commandment never can last permanently when it is robbed of its power by belittling the first. The disciples whom Jesus trained to love God first through Himself went to the ends of the earth for His sake, not for the sake of humanity ; there was ever before them the fact that the Master was with them and knew their work. Paul was a debtor to all the earth because his sins had been forgiven through Jesus. When the life forces are low, and death seems inevita- ble, the skill of the physician and the care of the nurse, no matter how well they are given, lose all their power ; they are only valuable as aids to the life. The patient lies for weeks at the point of death ; the doctors give him up ; the pulse is only a slight flutter that will go out in a moment. There comes a morning when the family gather about the bed, and watch the slow, heavy breathing that does not pen- etrate the lungs ; it becomes slower and slower ; it stops ; there is no pulse ; the nurse says it is over. A few minutes later it is noticed that a faint breathing has commenced again ; it seems a miracle, but it is a fact. The doctor says frankly that medicine has not done it. The breathing grad- ually gains in strength ; after a day or two the patient opens his eyes and looks faintly upward ; there comes a day when the nurse points out a slight appearance of returning flesh where the bones have been absolutely bare ; it becomes more and more noticeable, then a slight use of the hands and arms, then of the lower limbs. It is a great day when he first sits up, a greater when he takes his first step. He continues to gain until every sense has returned in all its power, and the lad is OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 25 Stronger and brighter than he was before. Scientific men say it is one of those constitutions that endure in spite of death itself. But the secret of it all is life ; the life had never left the body; it conquered disease and death itself, and under its power the boy becomes a man. Now is there any point in this recovery where we dare to say that we will depend no longer on life forces, but on externals.^ Jesus tells us that in Him is life, and He intends us to understand that this life is to have its work even to the end. There will never be a day when we can help that convalescent by treat- ing a class, and so expecting to build him up. The conser- vation of life in the one who has been sick demands all our thought. So with the soul that has life through the Saviour; the only possibility for it is the love of Christ for him, and the inspiration that Jesus has for him, that he may be the channel through which the Holy Spirit carries the glad tidings to another. Christ treated souls as individuals ; the result was the grandest missionary impulse the world has ever seen. III. And May Have Abundance. The verb here is closely associated with the fullness of the promise; “may continue to have” would be its full meaning; it is in the present subjunctive. It is a continual having, not getting nor giving, but having, and because of this having it means growing abundance. Not having abundantly, but having abundance ; the word that is timidly placed in the margin of the Revised Version is the real meaning. The Saviour is promising not only abundance of life, but the abundance that goes with abundant life. It is a large promise, worthy of the Son of God. It is limitless. It is a standing rebuke to our willingness to take only salvation at His hands. Lt/e for Self-Purificatioti. This differentiates Christi- anity from other religions. It has the power of self-develop- ment and self-purification. It is always better farther on. It places an ideal before the eyes today, and when that has been achieved or almost reached it has another a step beyond. 26 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. A Christian man becomes dissatisfied with his own short- comings, and reforms within himself. A monk, trained in an Augustinian convent, started the reformation in Germany. The beginners in that mighty movement were in the heart of the Roman Catholic church, and obtained their education there. The Bible had found them in the course of their studies, and the Holy Spirit had made use of the same weapons He always does, with the result that their eyes were opened, and they longed for the purifying of the church. However selfish the motives of Henry VHI may have been, his reformation was a step in advance, beginning within the church, and made the way possible for the Puritan and the Pilgrim who followed. The Reformation, that was stayed in some parts of the Continent of Europe, has had its way among the Anglo-Saxons, working until now, and the end is not yet. There is iron in the blood of the Anglo-Saxon, and it comes from his belief in God and His providence. No one but an Anglo-Saxon would have thought to make the reply of Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga, when the British captain demanded his authority: “In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.” The English and American race has been moving onward in the name of the Great Jehovah for centuries, and has only just begun. The Gaul and the Briton were one in belief and oppor- tunity in the days of the Druids. Their difference has been the difference in their writers and preachers. Carlyle men- tions as three typical names in English literature, Knox, Milton, and Shakespeare. You can almost hear Knox’s voice yet in old St. Giles, and the unpretentious little piece of stone under the wheels of the vehicles in Parliament Square, with its quaint “ J. K.” upon it, brings up a flood of memories of him who feared neither man nor devil, but who made a queen to tremble, and who voiced and intensified all that is strong and strength-giving in Scotch belief and life. Milton, whose faith only stood out more clearly as the day- light was shut out from his eyes, our own Independent, who OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 27 saw much in God's providence that others did not, who loved the liberty with which Christ has set us free, and even averred that “ new Presbyter is only old Priest writ large,” who longed for the greatest growth of the Kingdom of God ; Shakespeare, whose real greatness is accounted for by the fact that his writings are saturated with Scripture allusions and quotations, — these, according to an authority than which there is none better, are typical names in English literature. They dealt with the first part of the two great command- ments, and the people who with them have learned to love the Lord their God with all their hearts are the missionary people of today. Voltaire took only the second half of the commandment, and, with a heart burning at the thought of human oppression, tried to teach that men ought to love one another. Paris, that applauded all he wrote, was bathed in blood as she tried to make his idea practical. He never led her one step nearer God, and so not one step nearer a real love for humanity ; her mad cry of Liberty, Equality, and P'raternity had no ring of the divine in it. She sang the “ Marsellaise ” and danced the carmagnole, but sent no missionary to an oppressed brother. The great thought of human brotherhood with God left out, that Voltaire preached, is even now showing its hollowness in the festering mass of race hatred and official corruption that stains the fair name of the republic that we dare to hope may even yet stand beside us in the effort to lead the world to Christ. Zola’s great and bitter cry has gone forth, but it is a cry of despair ; he sees only fate and nemesis at work on France, no divine Providence, no “ God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.” His reference to Jesus seems to us impious, as he says by comparison that “Jesus was condemned but once.” Was Carlyle right when he called St. Pierre’s “ Paul and Virginia” the swan song of French literature.’ . No other race has ever trained such men as Carlyle named. After all allowance has been made for the ruccged climate and un- toward surroundings of the British Isles, it still remains true 28 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. that the religion of Jesus Christ has made them what they are. That religion will never allow them to stop in their great onward sweep toward the civilization that shall per- meate the world, until He shall come whose right it is to reign. We have been illustrating the self-purifying power of the love of Christ under the most favorable circumstances. How is it where the spark of faith is small, and may easily go out ? We shudder at the cruelties of Cortez and Pizarro, who called themselves Christian, and yet in many respects were not so civilized as the people they conquered. They brought a rough gospel to the gentle races of Mexico and Peru ; and the conversions of which thev boasted were not much more than an exchange of idols. Yet in both these countries there has been for a number of decades a strug- gling toward the light, an anxious looking for something better, that presages a true Christian civilization yet to come. And the islands of the sea ; how have they been brought to our very doors by the fortune of war ! Some one besides the authorities at Washington had to do with the selection of the quiet man whose guns that May morning changed the map of the world. To the Roman Catholic church in the United States God is sending a challenge, and all the world waits to see her accept it ; here is her opportunity ; her best men are as much ashamed of the condition of things in the Philip- pines as we are ; she has priests as pure and as consecrated as the first missionaries she sent over to this continent, and it is in her power to illustrate as she never has yet the self- purifying power of Christianity. She is being watched, to learn if she sees her opportunity, and if she does not, other missionaries will do it for her. She herself is an illustration of the fact we are discussing ; her popes are a different race from those of a few hundred years ago, and in the last few weeks some hot-headed opponents of Romanism have learned to their surprise that priests may stand for law and order. So the life Jesus gives solves old problems by raising new OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOI.Y SPIRIT. 29 ones, and the life becomes ever more complex. The prayers of our fathers that the doors of China and Japan might be opened to the missionaries of Christ have been so answered that we tremble at the weight of responsibility they have laid upon us. Now we are praying that the people of God may see their most magnificent opportunity, and give the money, for there is no lack of men, and send this old world forward with an impulse she has never had before toward the millennium promised by the Master. The burden grows heavier as we go forward, as did that of the Saviour, but the same power persists to the end, with ever-increasing effect- iveness. Abundance in All True Progress. A religious motive has been under material as well as spiritual gain. This was true before Christ came ; it has been doubly true since. Phidias made his best reputation in religious sculpture, and strange as it may seem to us, he worked under an inspiration that moved all Hellas. His Athene Parthenos was something more than a work of art ; it meant a religious revival ; it was part of a great forward movement, which was helped by /Eschylus, the firm believer in the religion of his fathers, and by the pious Sophocles. Their sentiments were shared by Pericles, who, in spite of his philosophy, and of immorality tolerated by the religion of those days, publicly and in his own house zealously offered sacrifices to the gods, and was constant in prayer. If men could be so moved by high and holy motives when as yet there was no great personal revela- tion of God, what should we expect when the opinion of Socrates was verified that if sin was to be eradicated, one of the gods must come to earth to attend to it ? The coming of Jesus Christ marks the beginning of the world’s best growth in everything worth having. That wonderful speech of Paul on Mars Hill was epoch-making. The sneering audience of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers was doomed as the speaker crept down from above the cave of the furies, with a man following him who should become the bishop of the Christian 3° OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. church in Athens, and seal his devotion with his life. Epicurus and Zeno must give way to Plato and Aristotle, whose philosophy the religion of Jesus Christ could take and irradiate until it should become the basis for the grandest thought in modern times. Christianity conquered Greek culture ; the conquered, as has so often been the case, in turn became the victor, and the thought of personal allegiance to Jesus was overshadowed for centuries by the effort for intel- lectual grasp of divine truth. The age of creed-making has not been as Christian in its spirit as it might have been, but the fact is apparent that when the truth as it is in Jesus began to take hold on human thought it brought out the greatest strength the intellect has ever shown. The world’s intellectual giants have been developed in the effort to wres- tle with the unrevealed. Literature has shown the impulse, and that which lives has the coming of Christ behind it. Such themes as were sung by Dante and Milton would make any writer great. Canova said of Pauline Bonaparte that with such models journeymen could make statues ; with the thought of human sin and misery, and divine love shown in salvation, any writer must become eloquent. How thoroughly this has been felt is shown in the strength of English literature. One of its best illustrations is Ruskin, whose beauties are those of that grandest of all Saxon books, the English Bible. His mother taught it to him until it became his very life. Read any of his writings with this in mind, and one soon learns the strength of the writer and the reason for it. If you want contrast, try the lectures of the great agnostic who recently dropped out of this life, and see how absolutely barren human speech can be made by eliminating the gospel. The taste of the people is being rapidly cultivated for reading that has this foundation. A large part of the fiction of the present is founded on the fact that Jesus came, and on the incidents of that coming. The Holy Spirit is making even the enemies of Jesus to praise Him. When the leading OPFORTUNITV FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 31 dailies of a city begin to publish the Sunday school lessons with comments for teachers each week, and many of the Sunday editions are printing more each year that tells of Christ, we see that every force may be made subservient to Him, and we learn the abundance of His power. That which is true in literature is still more apparent in art. Art before He came made beautiful faces and perfect figures. After His coming artists began to try to paint and chisel the godlike into the human visage. The paintings in all the great galleries that challenge attention of the multitude, those that command the highest prices, are those in which are the forms of Jesus and His disciples. Artists have wrought till human strength gave way in their effort to paint the face of Jesus ; none have ever succeeded, and none ever will in this life ; He can only be reproduced faintly in the countenances of those who love Him, but the artist has been glorified in his attempt at the impossible, and the yearning of the heart to know and recognize that countenance has given the world the richest and best it has had. When we come to sociology we at once run into the pessimism of men who have not read comparative history, or have read it with strong prejudice. The laboring man never stood so high in the scale of being as he does now : never had so many privileges, never lived so well, never re- ceived so good wages ; this is not saying that he receives all he ought to have, but that he is nearer to getting it than ever before ; and with all this he has never had so great and worthy ambition. The Spirit of the Master is at work on human minds and hearts. The world has never before seen so large a class of manly and able workingmen as the loco- motive engineers that brought us to this meeting, and the motormen and conductors that take us about the streets. Even the bootblack is an artist now, and no ordinary boy can take his place. Humanity has been rising from the foundation up. With it there has been a notable improve- ment in the condition of the poor. At the beginning of the 32 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. Christian era the population of Rome is estimated to have been 2,000,000; of these 10,000 constituted the nobility; 1,000,000 were slaves, not all of them degraded ; 50,000 were foreigners; the remainder constituted the plebs urbana, who were absolutely destitute. Come down to the days of Queen Elizabeth, and historians say that one-fifth of the population of all England were paupers. At the present time General Booth, after the most careful research, going through London where crime and poverty are massed, when he had placed matters at their very worst, can only talk about the submerged tenth. If these figures stand for any- thing they mean that the Holy Spirit is lifting humanity in the name of Christ faster than we realize. Nineteen-twen- tieths slaves and paupers in the best city of its time, reduced in sixteen Christian centuries to one-fifth of the best nation of its time, and that in three centuries more reduced to one- tenth in the worst place in that nation. Now we can see what Jesus meant when He said that He came that they may have abundance. This Abundance is to Come by Inspiration. Those who work in the name of Jesus have just one power that others do not possess ; they have but one ; it is important that they recognize the fact. If the church gives herself to acts of charity as a business, she wakes suddenly to find that the newspapers have taken it up, and can raise more in a day than the church can in a year, and gloat over it. If she grapples with questions that have to do with human condi- tions, she finds herself only a small part of the great num- ber that are wrestling witji the same, and soon, in their des- peration at want of success, they are blaming her for not immediately solving the whole vast problem. And so on with the great round of practical applications of the spirit of love to modern problems. The late Dr. Dale was right when he said that the mission of the church ends with being inspirational ; but we must not forget that his was an inspi- ration that inspired, even to parliament. The church has OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 33 not yet successfully devoted herself to both inspiration and method. One or the other always suffers, and it is usually the inspiration. The power Jesus has given His church is that of going to the human heart, and so filling it with the longing for His presence that it will turn to Him whose it is by right, and give Him the opportunity for which He waits to make that soul Godlike in power over self, and in love for all humanity because of love for Him who died for humanity. When a soul is thus illumined and inspired it will find its own method. Nothing ever moves a man so completely as to learn that you are trying to give him spiritual power. He will be grateful if you feed him in his hunger and clothe him in his poverty; but soon he will blame you if you do not continue to do it. But when you lift his soul out of the mire and let the love of Christ fill it, he never ceases to be grateful. Only one mortal had any power for good over Alcibiades. That gifted and dissolute young man thought the whole world came only to flatter and cajole him in order to get something from him. He learned after a time that Socrates wanted of him only one thing, and that was his immortal soul. He listened, became interested, tried to grasp his thought, and the time came when with hot tears he admitted that a life that Socrates did not approve .was not worth liv- ing. Men sneered as the handsome young courtier and the ugly old philosopher went by, and attributed their friend- ship to vile motives, but the confession of the young man was deep and sincere. Socrates lacked only one motive to have made Alcibiades one of the world’s greatest characters. That was the one Paul and Silas hurled at their jailer when the prison at Philippi was shaken : “ Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” That motive brought Dionysius the Areopagite down from INIars Hill, while his brother philosophers sneered ; it transformed the brutal jailer into a man all love and sympathy. That motive turned the world upside down, by the confession of their 34 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. enemies, wherever the disciples went. That motive has been the lever by which humanity has been lifted thus far. We live in treacherous times ; the results of Christianity are before us ; we see their value ; we are surrounded by the seen as never before ; this means that the unseen is not so real in our thought as it was once. Mr. Gladstone has well pointed out the fact that the meaning of the modern word “altruism ” is really a perhaps unconscious borrowing of the results of Christianity, without realizing the power that has produced them. We are in the same danger in our thought of missions for the whole world. Oh ! for one hour of that terrible reality in the conception of a world lost in sin that sent the first modern missionaries on their long voyage to their life work, that filled the treasuries and girdled the earth with prayer. Our fathers had enough power to pray open the long-shut doors of China and Japan. Have we enough of the same kind of power to make their people glad their doors are open ? We as missionaries are not to enter these doors merely in order that the people may have the blessings of civilization that we have, but that they may have the in- spiration that gave us those blessings, and that then they may go to work in the power of Christ’s love, and develop beyond what has yet been seen. Not the result, but the power, is what the. world needs ; it asks bread ; we must be careful, or we shall give it a stone. The blessings of civil- ization without the love of Jesus will prove only a means to greater sin and misery. Without the spiritual impulse we shall give only our most harmful vices. When Raphael died there was an unfinished picture on his easel. It represented the Transfiguration ; the Saviour and His three disciples on the top of the mountain, at the base the dumb demoniac child whom the scribes had brought that they might win a triumph over the followers of Jesus. The picture was incomplete, but it was Raphael’s, and one of his best. It was placed beside his body and carried in the funeral procession. It was too precious to be allowed OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 35 to go from Rome, and was never placed beside its companion picture, the Resurrection of Lazarus, by Sebastiano. It was significant ; the great painter had caught the thought of the story ; his untimely death had emphasized it. The won- dering disciples on the mount had not apprehended the purpose of the transfiguration ; they only wanted it to last always ; but down in the valley was the demoniac boy. The question for them and for us is, can we get enough inspira- tion on that mount to cast the devil out of the boy at its base, or shall we get only suflficient to make us appear ridiculous in the eyes of the enemies of Christ.^ How often the disciples have been able to receive only sufficient to make them want to stay always on the height ? But that is not the divine plan. We have misunderstood the inspira- tion ; we have belittled it ; we thought the divine intent was that we should be at peace above this world of woe, when it really is that we shall plunge into the life below with the story of a life unknown before, with a power that shall put to flight the devils that haunt human hearts. Under the name of Christian we have given currency to the idea that the physical healing of that boy is the great thing to be desired ; we spend millions on societies to care for him after he has been plucked out of the fire ; we start rescue stations to pull him out of the water ; we fail to realize that our mission is to cast the devil out of him. There he writhes, and there comes to us the patient voice of the Master : “This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.” We had thought there was some other way ; we had wondered that we could not do it. Our transfiguration, like Raphael’s, is unfinished, and the boy waits, and the devil tears him, ,and casts him into the fire and into the water ; and the enemies of the Master sneer at our incapacity. And we are intent on staying with Christ on the mountain, so intent that none of His wonderful inspiration becomes ours. He sighs as He heals him Himself, and we wonderingly ask, “Why could not we cast him. out.'*” All we can do is to bring 36 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. Him to the boy, or the boy to Him. Shall we ever learn the conditions under which that Spirit that dwelt in Him will take up his abode with us? Until we do, our efforts will be lame and our longings unsatisfied. We have to learn that the power of the Spirit can be ours only when we are willing to meet God’s conditions. V X c ■ 1 • • • v‘ ' ,.J-V L