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SONS OF GOD

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BY THE
Rev. S. D. McCONNELL, D.D.
» * »
RECTOR OF ST. STEPHEN'S CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA
AUTHOR OF "HISTORY Of 'HE AMERICAN EPISCOPAL CHURCH," ETC.

NEW YORK
THOMAS WHITTAKER
2 and 3 Bible House
1891

Copyright, 1891,
By Thomas whittaker.
Mww3 Y\\15 1291

TO
THE MEMORY OF MY DEAR FRIEND,
A HIGH MINDED, HONORABLE MAN,
Wilis ILittle Uolume
IS
AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.

CONTENTS.

SERMON PAGE
I. The Family Record  1
II. The All-Father  13
III. The Church the Body op Christ  25
IV. Jesus' Working Theory op Lipe  39
V. Personal Religion  53
VI. God's Love for Men  67
VII. The Permanent Element in Christianity . 79
VIII. Jesus' Estimate op Human Value .... 93
IX. God's Love the Motive in Redemption . . 107
X. Pilgrims and Strangers  119
XI. The Immanent God  133
XII. The Earth Helped the Woman  147
XIII. The Spirit Which Was in Christ  159
XIV. The Law op Progress in Religion .... 171
XV. Religion and Knowledge  185
XVI. Bread or God  201
XVII. Old and New  217
XVIII. The First Adam  239

I.
THE FAMILY RECORD.

SONS OF GOD.

THE FAMILY KECOKD.
ILnfteJUUE. 23-38.
" Sesus teas about tfttrtg gears of age, firing (as toas supposes)
tfie son of Sosepfj . . . fofjtrfj foas tfje son of Babto . . . fofrtdj
ferns the son of Sttoalj . . . rufjicft foas the son of Jlacofi . . .
tofjtctj bias tfie son of . . . Isaac . . . infjicrt Sobs tfjc son of 3lfira»
ftam . . . ferfotdj fcras tfje son of Noafj . . . fofjtrfj ferns tije son oE
&oam, fajfttcft feias tfje son of ffioo."
The third chapter of St. Luke contains the
strangest family-tree ever erected. Its root is God ;
its stem Adam, Noah, Abraham and his descend
ants, and the fruit is Jesus. There is no break in
the descent anywhere. There is no intimation in the
record anywhere that at some point a new kind of
being has come in. The author seems to assume
with the strangest simplicity that all the persons
named are of the same species. That "like begets
like " is one of the truisms of human science and
human experience. When father, son, and grand
son are spoken of, it is assumed without question
that they all belong to the same kind of being.
Now, here stands Adam in the direct line of de
scent between God and Jesus. The stirps is the

4 SONS OF GOD.
same. Humanity is Divine. Which is but another
way of saying that " we are God's offspring." This
fundamental assumption that men literally share in
the nature of God, as a child shares in the nature of
its father, I believe to be the starting-point of all
religion, and the rescuing this truth from oblivion to
be the distinctive work of Jesus Christ. It is the
fact which makes revelation possible. Only beings
of the same kind can hold intercourse. A man can
have no commerce with a stone. A fish cannot
speak with a bird. Only a god can hold converse
with God.
There is a strange notion current in Western the
ology that human nature was transformed by the
"Fall." It was indeed, but not in the way com
monly imagined. When Adam came in sight of the
" Tree of knowledge of good and evil," God said if
they eat of it " they shall become as gods." What
He said was true. When they attained the point
where they could comprehend moral distinctions,
they passed beyond the brute, and took their places
as sovereign citizens in the republic of spirits.
" And so I live, you see,
Go through the world, try, prove, reject,
Prefer, still struggling to effect
My warfare; happy that I can
Be crossed and thwarted as a man ;
Not left in God's contempt apart,
With ghastly, smooth life, dead at heart,
Tame in earth's paddock as her prize."
This Christian genealogical table answers the
question which has been for a generation the most

THE FAMILY RECORD. 5
imperious one in science, "What is man's place in
Nature?" This settles it. He is not in Nature.
He belongs to a different category. He is in the
supernatural. This underlying assumption of the Fatherhood of
God and the sonship of men is Jesus' starting-point.
It comes out with startling distinctness in the two
titles by which he described himself, the " Son of
man," and the " Son of God." We miss the point
when we think of this being true only of Him. On
the contrary, the burden of His life was that men
would not see that it was true of all men. It was
because He realized in Himself exhaustively both
natures that He felt their identity. It was when He
was most intensely conscious of His humanity that He
said, " I and my Father are one."
" The man most man works best for man,
Like God at Nazareth,"
In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the place where
one sees the gospel in action, the son remains a son
in all the windings of his tortuous course. He lives
among swine, but is not turned into a pig like
Ulysses' companions. If the strange women among
whom he lived should have borne him children, even
those sons of shame would have been the lineal
descendants of the father who sat at home, but fol
lowed with his eyes the errant son who bore his own
flesh and blood. When he returned, it was because.
he " came to himself." A son he was in his father's
house, a son he was in the far country, only a son he

6 SONS OF GOD.
was when he came home again. The double revelation
of Jesus is, if one may use the phrases without being
misapprehended, the humanness of God, and the
divineness of man.
In the two primary formularies of Christianity this
fact stands in the front, and is the ground of entrance
to what follows.
In the Lord's Prayer men are taught to make their
intrinsic relationship to God the ground of their
approach to him. They come to him, not as mani
kins to their cunning artificer, but as children to their
father; —
" Our Father who art in Heaven."
In the Creed, the essential paternity of God is the
first article. The imperious instinct of propagation
is characteristic of God as of men. It is not good
for God to be alone ! From this, creation comes ; —
" I believe in God, the Father."
And now I beg you to notice a few practical issues
from this fundamental truth thus briefly stated and
defended. (1.) The interplay of affection between God and
men rests upon this fact. I have already called your
attention to the fact that only beings of the same
nature can hold intellectual commerce. This is more
profoundly true of love than it is of knowledge. A
man may be fond of his dog or his horse, and the
brute may follow him with eyes of mute worship, but
intelligent exchange of love between them there is
none possible. They are not commensurate. Their
natures are not in the same plane. It is as true that

THE FAMILY RECORD. 7
like loves like as it is that " like begets like." This
is the significance of that pregnant article in the
Creed, " Begotten before all worlds." That is, it is
of the essential nature of God to love. But love
will only go out to a person. Hence, the Son of
man, the " first-born among many brethren," is as old
as God. This affection of God for his children is
the result of their essential nature, and not of their
conduct. Human love is not contingent for its exist
ence upon its being either valued, understood, or
returned by its object. The father will love the
wayward son, the wife the unworthy husband, unde
terred by either indifference, stupidity, or absence.
It has its root in their community of nature. The
father's or wife's very identity has passed into the
son or the husband, and cannot be recalled. But
there is a strange notion current that God's good-will
for a man is latent until set in motion by some delib
erate action on the man's part ; that it is only a pos
sibility instead of an actuality wrapping the man
always round about; that it is arrested by misbe
havior, and may be killed by rejection. This notion
seems to me to be in the face of the revelation of
Jesus Christ. Its deadly error may be seen by stat
ing it another way. Suppose God to speak thus : —
" I once knew and loved such or such a man. He
was My child. I loved him. But he offended Me.
He was fractious, coarse, obstinate, stupid. I gave
him his warning several times, but he would not heed.
I have now cast him off. I have thrown him out of
My life. My love for him is dead. He is now, like

8 SONS OF GOD.
many others of My children, ' dreeing his weird,' but it
does not disturb Me. He made his bed himself, and
he must lie in it. He can never again be son of Mine."
This is Paganism pure and simple.
Christianity, on the other hand, thinks of God as
saying : —
" This, My son, is silly, stubborn, selfish. He was
impatient of My way of life. He went away, think
ing, foolish child, to be out of My sight. I cannot
send out My servants to bring him back by violence ;
for it is his love I want, and that cannot be forced.
But I have kept him always in My sight. I wait. His
rags, his pains, his hunger, are My burden, but he is
My son. When he has exhausted himself he will
return, and My sorrow shall be turned into joy."
But at this point let me pause to say, in parenthe
sis, that candor compels the recognition of the fact
that there seems to be in the Gospel itself an intima
tion of the possibility of a strange and mysterious
kind of human action which results in dehumaniz
ing its subject. Just what it is is not very clear.
" Offending one of these little ones," Jesus calls
it. It seems to be the action of a man who, being
consciously aware of God's affection, turns upon it
with hate, breaks himself against it, and loses the
semblance of a son. The action arouses the wrath
of the Lamb Himself ! We will not delay now to
speculate upon its issue. Whether it transforms its
author into a being of another kind which retains
his immortality, or whether it fixes in him a process
of degradation which slowly carries him out of his

THE FAMILY RECORD. 9
unhappy being, have been variously held. This
much is clear: it is an action which no soul can com
mit without the deliberate wish and intent to do so.
(2.) Notice in the next place the relation of Jesus
Christ to this fact of Divine Humanity. What was
He? What did He conceive Himself to be? He
thought it necessary to insist that He was a man.
Whence did the necessity arise ? Could any sane
person ever doubt the fact ? Would not any compe
tent observer have described Him to be " An adult
male specimen of Homo Sapiens?" Did He not
show flesh, blood, nerves, tissues, hair, beard? Did
He not wear clothes, eat food, and warm Himself at
the fire ?
" Had He not eyes, hands, organs, dimensions,
senses, affections, passions ? Fed with the same food,
hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same
diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and
cooled by the same winter and summer as another
man ? If one prick Him would He not bleed ? If one
tickle Him would He not laugh ? If one poison Him
would He not die ? "
Being so palpably man as He was, why should He
insist upon the fact ? Why call Himself the " Son of
man?" The reason is not far to seek. Being in Himself
the ideal man, He found Himself identifying His con
sciousness with that of God ! Not enough, I think,
has been made of the psychological proof of Christ's
Divinity. He seems to show the double conscious
ness which belongs of necessity to such a Person.

10 SONS OF GOD.
He says, " I and my Father are one," and again " My
Father is greater than I ; " and both were alike true.
Their harmony is to be sought, not in the unity of
any theological system, but in the unique personality
of the Divine Man. He carried to their ultimate
power the dual spiritual consciousness which belongs
to all the sons of men.
" What is man that thou art mindful of him," and
" Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels,"
was the complex feeling of David, and of all men
who closely question themselves. In Jesus the com
plexity was resolved. When man comes to himself
he becomes aware of God. In St. Paul it wrought a
confusion of his own identity. " It is I, yet not I,
but Christ that dwelleth in me."
(3.) But over against all this seem to stand the
stubborn facts of human life. Look at men; let
attention rest upon them until you become deeply
impressed with what they are as they actually exist.
Stand upon a street corner, and watch the myriad
men and women as they hurry past. You see how
commonplace they are. There is no divinity appar
ent in them. At best they are but respectable.
But most fall short of the best. They are intent
upon money or enjoyment. See the hard, empty,
vacant, brutalized faces. They fall below the stand
ard of humanity ; why put in the claim of divinity
for them?
Then call to mind the teeming myriads of narrow-
skulled savages who dwell in the dark places of the
earth. Call you these gods? Can you fairly call

THE FAMILY RECORD. 11
them men? So low are they, so little above the
beast of the field, some of them only yet struggling
up out of their original clay into the semblance of man !
Why claim for all these to share the nature of God ?
I reply : Christianity does claim for them just that
descent, and in this claim is the secret of her triumph.
But it must be borne in mind that they are children
in all stages of development. If the womb of time
be torn rudely open, its embryotic children will seem
monstrosities of course. Even when they are brought
to the birth some are deformed and misshapen. But
can deformity beat off a mother's love from the off
spring in which runs her blood ? Will she not nour
ish it, rear it to symmetry within the limitations which
its nature sets, taking for the task all the time and
all the means available ?
Will moral deformity or mere helplessness beat off
the love of God ? And who will say through what
stretches of time and upon what successive stages
God will develop his children " into the measure and
the stature of a perfect man "?
One thing Christianity has already made practi
cally evident, that is, that belief in man and belief
in God are bound up together. They stand or fall
together. The revelation of Jesus Christ the Son of
man concerning the intrinsic nature of His brethren
has not been forgotten or ineffective. Even a false
and unworthy "theology," though it has obscured,
has not been able to hide it. It is the motive force
which is slowly shaping the fortunes of the race.
" Beloved, now are we the sons of God ! "

II.
THE ALL-FATHER.

II.
THE ALL-FATHEK.
Sofjn WE. 9.
" l§e tTjat fjatf) seen me fjatfj seen tfje JFatfter,"
When the gloomy Teuton, our ancestor, walked
or sat under the shadows of the German forest, saw
its giant branches torn and whirled by the winds,
heard the cruel gray North Sea roaring against the
shore, heard the ice cracking in the silent nights of
winter, he personified all these agencies and called
them Thor the "Thunderer." God, to him, was
hard, resistless, bowelless Might !
The Hindoo, dwelling for ages in the midst of
tropical luxuriance, where the fecund earth riots in
growth, where life is prodigal, where tree and plant,
and bird and beast, bring forth so abundantly that their
children choke and smother one another, personifies
the vital force everywhere at work, and with obscene
symbols worships Venus Genetrix.
The Egyptians, after centuries of nature worship
and nature study, abandon the problem, and perpet
uate their despair in the Sphinx.
And so one may call the roll of all the peoples.
There have been none of them who did not "seek
after God if haply they might find Him." They all
15

16 SONS OF GOD.
did find something. Each saw God in the greatest
thing he knew. Men's eyes had slowly to be trained
before they could see. God revealed himself to them
as fast as they were able to comprehend. But their
advance in Divine knowledge was never at a uni
form rate of progress. From time to time great
strides were made, at each of which men paused,
sometimes for ages.
In the Holy Scriptures is contained the record of
God's successive manifestations, and of the effect
of these manifestations upon the lives and conduct
of those to whom they came. " God, who, at sundry
times and in divers manners, spake by the prophets,
hath, in these last days, spoken unto us by His Son."
I wish you to examine with some care the thought
of God, as that thought lay in the minds of three typ
ical men. They are representatives of three great
stages of religious progress. One is from the Patri
archal, one from the Hebrew, and one from the Chris
tian world. They are Job, Solomon, and Paul. It
will be seen Uhat each is truer than the one which
went before, and also that each hands on his ideas to
his own successor who incorporates them into the
substance of his own faith. The deep truth of Jesus'
declaration is vindicated, that He " came not to de
stroy, but to fulfil the Law and the Prophets." It is
probable that every Christian runs through in his
own experience the antecedent religious history of
his race; just as every man, in embryo, passes
through the types of the lower forms of animal life.
Even when mature, there are still to be found fea-

THE ALL-FATHER. 17
tures in his body, and habits in his mind, whose func
tion is obscure, but whose history is plain : they are
survivals from a forgotten past.
So in the Christianity of to-day, there are still ex
tant the great features impressed upon the race ages
and ages ago. Indeed, men often fancy they are
living " according to Christ," when, in point of fact,
they are dominated by the thought of God which
belonged to the patriarchs or to the Hebrew Com
monwealth. (1.) Job, the man of Uz. The drama is an un
folding of the thesis that G-od is Justice. It is the
religion of the unfortunate. It is true to the facts of
human life. It is not the man who has been stripped
bare and lies in ashes who curses God and defies
Him. On the contrary, this is the one who cannot
afford to lose his faith in equal dealing of the
Almighty. If the man who has not yet received his
good things abandons his faith in an ultimate fair dis
tribution, he abandons everything. This life he has
already lost ; by so much the more does he hold fast
to the hope that he will receive them in some other.
Job is a great, rich, benign, courteous, Eastern
Sheikh. His noble sons and gracious daughters are
worthy children of a worthy sire. In the gate of
the city he is known as the leading nobleman of the
Empire. His wealth is past count. He lives gener
ously, cares for the poor, fears God, and loves right
eousness. No nobler or more attractive character is
drawn in any literature.
But out of a clear sky the lightning of misfortune

18 SONS OF GOD.
strikes him, blow upon blow. His flocks and herds
are swept away. His sons and daughters are dead.
His wealth follows. He becomes suspected of secret
crime which has called upon him the vengeance of
the Almighty. His friends abandon him. He falls
sick of a loathsome ailment ; Last, and worst of all,
the woman's love upon which he had leaned fails him
at his need. His wife turns upon him in disgust, and
calls him a fool. He has drained the cup of misery
to its last drop. No dramatist has ever left a more
vivid impression of a man's utter desolation than in
this divine poem. But literary form is not the
author's object. He proposes the question which so
many have tried to answer Why does God mete
out misery to any man ?
His three friends sit down by him, and weary him
with the shallow religionism not yet dead. Misfor
tunes are " judgments," they say. "It is true," they
confess, " that in this case the offence has been well
concealed. You have figured as an upright man ;
but God can«see through all that. Your attempt to
still hide the fault only makes the matter worse.
Come, make a clean breast of it. Undo the evil,
whatever it may be, and then God will take his
corrective hand off you."
They made the common mistake that God pays
moral awards in material coin.
But Job holds fast to his own honesty. " I cannot
tell why God has done this thing to me. That it is
for any grievous sin I deny. Of course I know that
I have, like every other man, failed to do the perfect

THE ALL-FATHER. 19
right ; but I have no crime to charge myself with, as
you suppose. God does what is right. Even though
he slay me I will still hold to that. To let that slip
would make existence meaningless, and would leave
me, to all practical purposes, mad ! I will wait.
Some day my vindicator will appear. I have faith
that the right will be shown before I die. But I will
not be false to myself, even to please God ! "
Here the argument ends. The dramatist becomes
historian, and records that Job's judgment concern
ing God was vindicated by the result. For he re
covered from his sickness. His wife came back to
him with double love. Other sons as noble, and other
daughters more fair than, the lost were given to him.
Larger wealth and more exalted honor than before
became his fortune. And so the drama ends. It
exploits that conception of God which is the comfort
of all wretched folk. They cling to the belief that
the happiness which they have so far missed is guar
anteed to them ultimately by the very nature of God,
for " Cod is Justice."
(2.) Solomon the Magnificent.
The Hebrew king is the type of the fortunate man.
His is probably the most conspicuous example of
absolute good fortune on record. Try to reproduce
him and his times before your imagination. Imagine
a man in the vigor of mature manhood. His manly
beauty is the wonder of his time. His health is abso
lute. He is endowed with understanding beyond
any other. He is a poet, a man of science, a soldier, a
statesman, a philosopher, a king, and in every charac-

20 SONS OF GOD.
ter is pre-eminent. He sets before himself the task to
test the possibilities of human life. If it be possible
for any man to suck happiness out of it Solomon can.
He deliberately makes the experiment with his eyes
open, noting the observed facts as he goes. First he
tries Philosophy. He has all the sciences at his
fingers' ends. The " Systems " are as familiar to him
as is his nurse's speech. He learns all there is to
know, and declares there is nothing in it. He flings
it all away, and tries what can be found of pleasure
through the senses. Not the gross gratifications
which, everybody knows, defeat themselves, but the
well considered pleasures of a philosophic voluptuary.
He denied himself nothing, — gorgeous residence,
dress, service, music, art, entertainment, the fair mis
tress whom he adored, and the thousand wives and
concubines who adored him; the enthusiastic affec
tion of his people and the admiration of his contem
porary kings. Again he declares that there is noth
ing in it. And he says why. It is because God has
ordained certain laws of living which a man can no
more escape from than he can from his own shadow.
Every attempt to violate or ignore any one of them
is quietly but relentlessly met and punished. The
wise thing to do is to find out as completely as one
can what these laws are, and mind them. If he
transgress, either through ignorance or foolhardiness,
it is but a word and a blow, — and more often the
blow without a word.
"This is the substance of the whole matter: fear
God and keep his commandments." The final word
of Solomon is that " God is Law."

THE ALL-FATHER. 21
(3.) Paul, " the slave of Jesus Christ."
All will allow that this was an extraordinary man.
But, unlike Job and Solomon, the things which made
him remarkable are to be looked for not in his sur
roundings but in himself. There was nothing excep
tional in his outward life. He was like ten thousand
other men. He was a scholar, a gentleman, a man
of comfortable fortune, of position and character, but
had nothing about him to attract the attention of
even his fellow-townsmen.
But his inner life was most tumultuous. His soul
was the arena in which was fought out that struggle
between the god and the beast of which every man
is compounded. His " Confessions" in the seventh
chapter of his epistle to the Romans has held the
glass up to millions. From this intolerable conflict
he found relief through the aid of the Divine Man in
whom he saw the significance of life and the nature
of God. Then he emerged into the serene content
of a son of God. He found the solution of the
problem of existence in the truth that " Cod is
Love." You must see how the domination of one or other
of these three notions about God must affect a man's
living. In point of fact they are all three actively
working to-day.
All about us whole classes of men are in rebellion
against the existing conditions of life, and appealing
clamorously for a "justice" which they think has
been wrongfully denied them. They are poor, and
they think their poverty a punishment for an offence

22 SONS OF GOD.
which they have never committed. Why should they
live meagrely and stinted while their neighbor, no
better man than they, lives in luxury. Lazarus in
his rags and sores, like Job on his garbage-heap with
his boils, asks God " Why ? " They misread, or but
partially read, the facts of life, as Job did. They
fancy that God makes up his balances yearly. If a
practical equity of distribution fails to reach them in
a lifetime, they conclude that either God or man is
at fault. God, they think it cannot be ; and so they
clamor for a human adjustment which will, by laws
and governments, bring in the equity which God's
justice warrants, and man's injustice thwarts. I wish
it might be done ! Surely it is not pleasant to think
of pain and poverty as being perennial. Who would
not vote for any act of legislature or any economic
system which would cure them, — if only it could
be ? But the whole thought of God and life out of
which such dreams come is shallow, mechanical,
of the world's childhood. It would settle the per
plexities of»life by changing conditions instead of
by changing characters. If men were automata, if
they were beasts, this way would be practicable.
But the disturbing element in this mechanical equa
tion is the incalculable quantity of men's wills.
These can never be reached, changed, controlled,
moved, or restrained by justice. Only to love will
they respond.
But not more true, and much less noble, is the
cold-hearted acquiescence in " law " which marks
the smug, comfortable man of fortune, or man of

THE ALL-FATHER. 23
science. The one sees in God an infinite policeman,
to preserve the established order of things. The sin
fulness of crime seems to him to rest in its tendency
to disorder. The student finds himself in the pres
ence of a formless, impassive force, which does not
hesitate to break up and throw upon the ground a
thousand generations of unnoted men that they may
form the soil out of which a future generation of
better things may grow. I doubt if any more horri
ble conception of existence will ever be reached than
that of the " Reign of Law." In the presence of an
infinite justice one may plead and hope. In the
presence of law, one will " eat, and drink, and die,"
— if possible, childless !
The infinite relief which Jesus brings to the situa
tion is this, — one sees in Him the eternally true
relation which exists between God and men. They
are father and sons. They show the same nature and
the same destiny. What derangements exist are in
the estranged affections. What is possible is to be
sought here. The Christian is the only man who is
true to the facts. He only is " scientific." He does
" fear God ; " but he knows that he cannot " keep
His commandments." In sober truth, he is not much
concerned about commandments. He asks, not
"What am I to do?" but "What am I?" He
knows that if he can settle truthfully his eternal
relationships his conduct will take care of itself.
Keenly and painfully alive as he is to the fact of his
" brute inheritance," he is as deeply conscious that
he has also descended through another line. This

24 SONS OF GOD.
is the one he tries to re-establish. Slowly, as he does
so, he comes into the secret of God. The perplexi
ties of life clear up, and the burdens of it become
light. As he comes more and more to know his
Father, he comes more and more to recognize and care
for his brethren. He would reform the world by lead
ing his brothers, one by one, back to their Father.
He comes to see that the most imperious force in the
universe is the same one which laughs at all obstacles
when it shows itself in the lives of men and women,
— that is love. He opens his heart to his Father,
and walks serenely.
" Strong Son of God, immortal love,
Whom we that have not seen thy face,
By faith and faith alone embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove,
Thou wilt not leave us in the dust."

III.
THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST.

III.

THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST.
lEpft. i. 23.
" 5Efte Cfjurcfj is his fioog, the fulness of him that filleth all
in all." No one doubts that Jesus intended to be a perma
nent force in the world. It was clearly no tempo
rary ascendency which He had in mind. His was not
the temper of what the Scotch call the " maisterful
man." That sort of men are always in the world.
" Born leaders " men call them. They dominate
those with whom they come in contact. They seem
to have more dynamic potency than their fellows.
These go down before the glance of the eye or the
tone of voice of such a man. ]
But these masterful souls are not those whose in
fluence upon the race is permanent. Their effect is
intense rather than extensive. Their influence usu
ally ends with their lives. For a little while their
names are remembered as prodigies, and then they
fade out of memory. Jesus cannot be classed among
great leaders. That He was not : He was something
more. The work which He proposed to Himself was
to be a constant work. It was to be least at its
beginning, but to grow through the ages. It was a
27

28 SONS OF GOD.
"kingdom" to be built up slowly, out of discordant
materials, brought from many places at many times,
by many hands ; but its design was clear in His mind,
and shows no trace of misgiving about the issue.
He warns His friends in whose hands He placed His
working-plans, against impatience and against despair ;
but He looks for triumph so confidently that He con
fuses His tenses, and says, "I have overcome the
world." He deems Himself to be more secure and
abiding than the most stable things, and declares that
"heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word
shall not pass away." In a word, none can read the
Gospels without being struck with the serene confi
dence of perpetuity which filled His mind.
Again : no reader of human history will care to
deny that this confidence of His has been in some
sense vindicated by the subsequent facts. Who is as
well known in the world, at this moment, as Jesus
Christ ? About whom do men think and speak and
read as much as they do about him ? Whose life has
been so exhaustively studied? Whose words have
engaged and held the attention of men in a way at
all approaching His? The dominant races of the
earth count the years from His coming. They deem
that the most important event in history. The one
word which groups and unifies the progressive races
is " Christendom." In some mysterious way He has
constrained history, and bent the current of move
ment. It is true that other men have done the same,
in a measure. But His influence has been so incom
parably greater in degree than that of any other, that

THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST. 29
a strong presumption is established that it must be
different in kind. It differs from that of any man in
this, that it constantly increases in potency, while
that of theirs constantly diminishes. The influence
of a great man upon his race is like a projectile fired
from a gun. Its initial velocity is its greatest. The
farther it travels the less its energy becomes, until it
is spent and falls. The influence of Jesus has moved
through the centuries like a missile whose energy is
in itself. Its speed and potency have steadily in
creased. Compare His course with that of John the
Baptist. " I must decrease, but He must increase,"
said the greatest of all the men born of women. He
was indeed great, " but the least in the kingdom of
heaven is greater than He," because in that kingdom
inheres a new and greater kind of energy, which
every member of it shares.
The effect which He has produced is usually spoken
of as done by the " spirit of Christianity." This is
in harmony with the language He Himself held. But
He spoke of His " Spirit " not as that diffused ten
dency which we call by such a name, but as a self-
conscious, though protean, person. How does the
spirit of Christianity operate ?
I reply, it follows the analogy of all spirit, and
operates through and by a body. One cannot con
ceive of spirit operating any other way. The spirit
precedes the body, forms it, and expresses itself by
it. Let us draw out this idea more in detail, so as to
get it fairly before our minds.
What is a man but a soul which is constantly

30 SONS OF GOD.
clothing itself and expressing itself in matter ? Its
garment is ever disintegrating and being renewed.
Particle after particle falls away, and is replaced by
other like particles. The "form" lies under the
stream of atoms which flow over it, as the form of
the river's bed gives shape to the water above it.
The spirit speaks through the body. If the vehicle
be sane and vigorous, the message is clear and whole :
if it be faulty or marred, the message is incomplete
or broken. If the body be broken, the spirit remains
silent and flits away.
Examine also such a phrase as, for example, the
"spirit of political freedom." There is such a thing.
No word so well describes the thing as the word
" spirit." It is like the wind ; one cannot tell from
where it emerges, or to where it vanishes, but it can
be clearly seen, sometimes in fitful zephyrs fanning
the hot cheek of the slave, and again sweeping like
a cyclone amidst the dSbris of empires. But it can
not subsist disembodied. The political history of the
last thousand years is simply the record of the at
tempts of this spirit to clothe itself in form. It
emerges from its secret home in the forest, and finds
expression in the clumsy folk-laws of the Saxons. It
gathers about it slowly the body of the English Con
stitution. It finds its thus-far fittest expression in
American institutions. But the thing to be noticed
is, that it has always wrought through and by some
organized body. At every stage it has dropped some
thing, and taken on something new. It has con
stantly re-incarnated itself. Thus the spirit has

THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST. 31
always found a body, and the body has always pro
tected the spirit. The spirit of political liberty will
not remain for long alive as an inspiration, a memory,
or a hope: there must be some place among men
where it dwells bodily.
But there is a strange notion current that the spirit
of Jesus Christ may subsist indefinitely as a blessed
Ghost; indeed, not only that it may do so, but that
it must. The idea of organization as being necessary
to the life of Christianity is deeply resented by many.
The strange paradox exists of great religious organi
zations whose organizing principle is that organization
is of no consequence. Probably the popular notion
of Christianity diffused in Protestant communities is
this : It thinks of Christianity as a spirit, — a spirit
working sensibly in individual souls, a spirit moving
in the mass of society. It is jealous of every offer to
claim for this spirit an organized body. Such people
seriously believe that the less body of organization a
spirit can have, the better ; that the ideal would be
a state of humanity wherein every individual soul
would be touched independently by the spirit of
Christ. This is not to be wondered at. The notion
arose at a time when " Christ's body " was so con
stricted and paralyzed that it could not speak as the
Holy Ghost moved it, but mumbled incoherent or
blasphemous words. But then, because the spirit of
a man speaks but poorly through a diseased body,
shall we say that the spirit of man will manifest
itself without a body at all? Or shall we think the
same way about the spirit of Christ ?

32 SONS OF GOD.
Suppose the first generation of Christians had thus
conceived of the Church, what peril and pain they
would have been saved ! For, remember, martyrdom
came to them in cruel form, not for following Christ's
precepts, or for being filled with His spirit, but for
membership in an illicit organization. Had the early
Christians at Antioch or Lyons, or even at Jerusalem,
thought of Christianity as many people now do, they
would certainly not have acted as they did. Suppose
some modern " Evangelist " had been their adviser,
what practical form would his advice have taken?
Would he not have been constrained to say then as
now, that " Church-membership is not essential to
salvation ; the sacraments are not necessary in the
sense that he who misses them shall miss of heaven ;
the chief and only essential thing is that a man
should consciously receive the spirit of Christ into
his own spirit, and allow that spirit to bring forth its
legitimate fruit of righteousness of life." But sup
pose the disciples had accepted that to be an adequate
statement oi the case, their action would certainly
have been different from what it was. Why should
they have jeopardized their lives and estates to do
things which, on the theory of the " Evangelist,"
were not necessary, and not even of any great con
sequence ? For, notice, persecution seized upon them,
not because they became conspicuous for purity,
honesty, charity, gentleness, meekness, goodness.
There has never been a society which would have
become exasperated at the exhibition of these quali
ties in individuals as the Roman world did at the

THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST. 33
Christians. That anger was aroused by the deliberate
attempt to introduce a new and antagonistic kingdom.
It was the projection three centuries forward of the
same offence which brought Jesus to the cross. The
renunciation of His plan of a kingdom would have
saved Him at Jerusalem. Abandonment of church-
membership would have saved His followers at Rome.
They were burned and crucified because "they
assembled themselves together." If they had be
lieved it to be lawful, how easy it would have been
to pass on from mouth to ear the gracious words of
Christ ; for individuals to keep His gracious spirit in
loving memory, to conform themselves quietly to His
precepts without attracting dangerous attention to
themselves by organization. And why should they
have banded themselves together into a body if
membership in a body be not of imperious necessity ?
And if they had followed that theory, every sane
man can see, that Christianity would have been dead
and forgotten fifteen hundred years ago !
Here we come to see the ground and reason of
Christ's stern exaction that every follower of his
must declare himself. "Him that will confess me
before men I also will confess ; him that will deny
me before men, before men I also will deny." This
clearly demands a voluntary and positive declaration ;
not simply the negative and inevitable declaration
which a Christian makes of himself by his conduct.
But why ? Why should public confession be de
manded of me when it is, in the nature of the case,
not essential to my salvation ? I reply : the obliga-

34 SONS OF GOD.
tion does not arise out of the need of the confessor,
but out of the needs of Christ. If it concerned
only myself, I might forego at once the advantages
and the duty. But it concerns Christ. This is the
means by which he intends to be kept alive in the
world. The body to be formed thus out of His
individual followers is the place where His spirit is to
dwell. Refusal on the part of an individual to take
his place in it is treason ; and treason in any king
dom is a capital offence.
I think the real difficulty in the minds of many is
a different one. They find it difficult to believe that
the spirit of Christ either needs a specific body, or
that it will, in fact, confine its operations to the
members of such a body. They ask, " Is the Church
identical with the body of Christ ? " The facts of life,
which every one can see, make it difficult to assert this.
If there were a sharp distinction between the " Church "
and the " world," the perplexity would be solved.
But there is not. Any definition of the Church which
would satisfy even the strongest Churchman, would
still leave outside of it a broad margin of individuals
who are clearly more or less under the domination of
the spirit of Christ. It is urged even, " Why try to
maintain the Church idea when the exigencies of life
do not require it ? Here are a thousand institutions
now existent among men which have established
their necessity, — law, government, commerce, science,
art, learning, — why not try to infuse all these with
the spirit of Christ ? When that shall be done the
problem will be solved. The world will be redeemed.

THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST. 35
The spirit will no longer be compelled to brood over
chaos, but will sing in an harmonious universe ? "
To this I answer: The notion arises out of a
confusion in thought. Take, for example, the insti
tution of civil government. It is perfectly true that
if every individual citizen were filled and moved by
the spirit of Christ, the State would be Christian.
But government, law, would be neither more nor
less Christian than they were before ; for these are
things of which not even moral qualities can be
predicated. Laws are simply lifeless tools by which
living creatures express and execute their wills. No
spirit, either good or bad, can dwell in them, any
more than the spirit of man can dwell in a manikin
of springs and steel. The same is true of every one
of the " institutions " named. They are lifeless
things. But the " Spirit is life," and can only abide
in a body suitable for it. The actual experience of
the attempt to bring in the spirit of God by reform
ing institutions, has not been encouraging. It is
amazing that wise and good men and women should
look to it as they do. The Church of Jesus Christ
has always been the reforming agency of the world.
It was meant to be. It was established primarily for
that end. It has preserved in the holy place of its
temple the standard of moral measurement which the
world has always accepted. The things which it has
banned, the world has banned ; the things which it
has loosed, the world has received.
But this fact, that the Church is the body of which
Christ is the soul, forces some very serious considera-

36 SONS OF GOD.
tions upon its members. I will ask you to weigh
only two of them.
The first is, that law of growth by which a principle
of life attracts to itself, and uses only such matter as
can be assimilated. God giveth to every seed his
own body ; that is, the body which is able to con
serve and express the life of the seed. Every life
selects unerringly from the earth's mass such atoms
as are fit ; the rest it rejects. If by chance a strange
one find itself entangled in the organism, it irritates ;
and if the life be strong enough, it is cast off. So
the spirit of Christ moves among the mass of men.
It tests them. It selects and rejects. It moves with
a fan in its hand. It winnows the human atoms, and
builds its heap finally of those who can endure.
The second is the awful disaster of schism in the
body. Church unity is dismissed by many sober-
minded men as an impracticable dream. It may, con
ceivably, be so ; but do they perceive the alternative ?
It is true that each body hath many members, — eyes,
hands, feet,* — and that no one can say to another, "I
have no need of thee." But do they see that all the
members may still remain attached to the body, and
yet the body be smitten with an awful disease ?
There is a dreadful affection of the brain, which
produces what the physicians call " loss of co-ordina
tion." It is a pitiable sight. There is no visible
lesion ; but the owner's two hands or two feet, or
hands and feet, refuse to act in concert. Each moves
independently of the other. The man is as good as
dead. Does this not express the helpless condition

THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST. 37
of a divided Christendom? Co-ordination has been
lost. The Church can neither run nor speak. She
can yet think and pray. Let her pray for unity that
she may be kept alive.
The amazing vitality of the spirit which animates
it is manifest in the faults and weaknesses of the
Church, as in her strength and triumphs. The hope
and pledge of her abiding life and vigor are in the
changeless soul which dwells within her. For " the
Church is His Body ; the fulness of Him that filleth
all in all."

IV.
JESUS' WORKING THEORY OF LIFE.

IV.

JESUS' WORKING THEORY OE LITE.
Phil. KB. 5-0.
" iLet this mini fie in gou, feihich bias also in Christ Sesus :
JKHbo. fifing in the form of ©oS, thought it not robfierg to fie equal
iuith ffioo : But rnabe himself of no reputation, anS tooft upon hint
the form of a serfeant, ano bias matfe in tfje likeness of men : <EnS
being tnunb in fashion as a man, he humfileb himself, ano became
ofiebient unto lieath, eben the Beath of tfje cross, therefore ffioB
also hath bighlg exalteo him, ano giben him a name fejhich is abobe
eberg name."
The student of " Comparative Religion " can
make very little out of Christianity. It will not
yield up its contents to his tests. He tries to place
it side by side with the other 'isms, but its personality
is so unique that his comparisons are of very little
value. The truth is, it is not a " religion " at all.
The things which are prominent in other cults are
conspicuously absent from it. It concerns itself
hardly at all with the origin of man, for example, or
with the origin of the universe, or with the mode and
manner of future existence. It has little to say of
the internal economy of the Godhead. To be sure,
the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is clearly dedu-
cible from it, but it is not formally stated (save in
one spurious passage), and does not occupy much
space anywhere. 41

42 SONS OF GOD.
What it essentially is, is a Working Theory of Life.
It takes the facts of existence as they involve and
concern men, sets them in their true relationships,
uncovers their significance, and brings the man who
comes to see them truly into a new and hopeful tem
per. Jesus seems to say to those who heed him some
thing like this : —
" Brothers, listen to me ; every human life is,
whether he knows it or not, under the management
of a father. It is to be passed among brothers.
These are the facts ; and while you may ignore them
or mistake them, they are still the facts. Now, if
you will recognize these facts, and act accordingly,
you will be blessed and you will bless ; if you do not
see them, or do not believe them, you will be miser
able, of course. In Me you see the Father. Many
who look at Me do not see the Father, but you who
do see it are let into the secret of existence. You
must treat your brothers brotherly. They will not
understand you, and will not thank you. So be it.
Trust to the# facts, and all will come right. Your
brother may over-reach you, may curse you, may slay
you. Let it be so. You are still the winner. Do
not retaliate. If you want to bind him into help
lessness, throw around him the meshes of your love.
True, he may break out of them and smite you, but
even so, not a hair of your head shall be wasted. In
the end you will win. One, with God, is a majority."
He calls attention to Himself as the supreme ex
ample of this method. He had renounced the rights
and immunities which belonged to Him as God, and

JESUS' WORKING THEORY OF LIFE. 43
deliberately embraced the career of a man. He fol
lowed the career to the end. He claimed no exemp
tions, not even from temptation, from death, or from
hell. He passed through every experience possible
to a man, and the whole career was just the parts of
the One Great Renunciation !
St. Paul seizes upon this, the central feature of
Jesus, and challenges every man to become " of the
same mind which was also in Christ." He urges this
upon the ground that in the case of Jesus it was
magnificently successful. The central spirit of Chris
tianity is then the renunciation of rights. That is,
one finds success by renouncing ambition. He finds
safety by declining to fight for it. He finds wealth
by spending, peace by going about unarmed, life by
losing it.
Now, to practical men, all this seems the very
extremity of wrong-headedness. It is a set of para
doxes which do well enough for a sermon, but which
are really not to be considered in practical conduct.
It is an ideal which will do to dream about, but in a
world constituted as this one is, it simply " will not
work." " Suppose," they say, " a man should really
undertake to conduct his life upon this theory, to
resist not evil, to sit down patiently under contempt
uous usage, to empty out of his life all those laud
able ambitions which he has set before himself as
aims, what a pusillanimous wretch he would become !
He would be thrust to the wall and trampled upon,
and would deserve to be, and more than all, he would
do harm and not good in the world."

44 SONS OF GOD.
Or, to see its absurdity more clearly, imagine a
corporation, say a railway company, to adopt this
policy. It must not seek its own ; it must forget
itself, and work for the interest of its rivals ; if rates
are cut, or a parallel road is built, it must not return
evil for evil. What would become of the share
holders of such a road ? Would not the courts of a
Christian government step in to remove and probably
to imprison the managers who should adopt such a
policy ?
Or, try it on a still more palpable scale, in the case
of a Nation. Let such a country disband its armies,
lay up its arms, beat its spears into ploughshares and
its swords into pruning-hooks, and learn the art of
war no more. If an enemy seize her territory, let
him have it. If she is insulted abroad in the person
of a citizen, do not avenge it. Let her burn her
bonds and remit her taxes, — and all the rest of it.
You see how grotesque it seems to fancy the same
mind which was in Christ in a man, a corporation, or
a nation, it seems to be not only impracticable, but
dangerous. It would seem to imperil some of those
virtues which men hold in high honor. For, in point
of fact, many of our highest ideals emerge from the
idea of Rights. The Magna Charta, the Petition of
Rights, the Declaration of Independence, — what are
all these but the solemn asseveration that men know
their rights, and knowing, dare maintain; that they
not only will not, but ought not to, renounce them.
Out of this springs the high, chivalric ideas which
belong to military life, the pomp and circumstance

JESUS' WORKING THEORY OF LIFE. 45
of glorious war, the instances of bravery and self-
devotion which shine out of the stained pages of
history. Is it not indeed true that such considera
tions as these have restrained the mass of men from
taking up the cross ? It is not so much shrinking
from the pain of the cross which deters. That could
be borne. But it is the stubborn belief that it would
be useless, and a lurking suspicion that it would in
the end be hurtful. One could lose his right eye
or right hand to win eternal blessedness ; but to lose
the dear member, and then find that the sacrifice had
been thrown away ! To maim one's self, and then
fail of entrance into life ; there's the rub.
Now, I have tried to state the practical and theo
retical difficulties in the way of a Christian life with
out reserve, and as they do actually lie in the minds
of many honest men with whom I have talked about
these things. I do not think it worth while to say
to such men, " Here is a manner of life laid down by
Jesus : you must take it on faith ; that is, you must
shut your eyes to all its probable consequences, and
obey like a little child." The fallacy of this exhorta
tion becomes evident as soon as one examines it. Of
course this challenge to obedience does not become
of obligation upon any individual until such a
person is satisfied that it comes from One who has
the right to command. But the nature of Him who
issues the order is largely to be determined by the
nature of the order itself. Some men have satisfied
themselves upon this point, and so are the " followers
of Christ." Others are trying to satisfy themselves

46 SONS OF GOD.
upon the same point : and they also are followers of
Christ, only less far along. I fancy this to be the
attitude of thousands. They are strangely attracted
by the person and spirit of Jesus ; but they hesitate
to commit themselves unreservedly to his principle of
living on account of its seeming impracticability.
Before such, — and are we not all such ? — I want to
lay a few considerations.
(1.) I ask your candid attention to the overwhelming
successfulness of Jesus' own career. Who thinks of
His life as a failure ? as wasted or thrown away ? or
as lived in such a way as to miss of the best conceiv
able ? Dismissing for the moment all thought of His
divinity, was there ever a more successful life than
that of Jesus the Nazarene ? In its main outlines
it is perfectly familiar to more than half the world.
They know the poverty, the humiliation, the death,
which overtook Him. But they know also that He
possessed a serene self-content which made Him
invulnerable. They see the strange moral domina
tion which *He exercised over all who came at all to
understand Him. When we see Him and Pilate
standing face to face, — Pilate the self-seeker, who
subordinated everything else to his own aggrandize
ment, and Jesus, who would not so much as open His
lips to save His life, — which of the two does one
instinctively prefer ? Here the two theories of life
are violently contrasted. Pilate looks to himself, is
alert, adroit, his trained senses and understanding
keen to detect danger, and unhesitating either to
parry or to strike, as occasion may advise. Jesus

JESUS' WORKING THEORY OF LIFE. 47
has no thought of Himself at all, but without the
smallest tremor commits His destiny to His Father.
Look at them closely. Which of them will you
point to and say, " Behold a man " ? The judg
ment of the world has been given upon both the
man and the principle.
Is it not a strange fact, that in the face of " the
practical common sense " of humanity, Jesus, and His
faint shadow the Buddha, divide the homage of three-
fourths the human race ? The great renunciation of
Him who " thought it not robbery to be equal with
God," and the little renunciation of the Indian prince
under the bo-tree have touched the heart of Chris
tendom, and the imagination of Heathendom. Can
it be that a principle so practically potent does not
rest upon eternal verity, or can be unsafe to follow ?
(2.) Weigh the experience of men, — that the
things most to be desired in life are not attainable
when striven for as rights. The great joys of living,
the real blessings of existence, come not that way.
Any one can test it for himself, or observe it in a hun
dred examples. A man says : " I will act with open
eyes and calm judgment. I will not be guided by
sentiment. I will look fairly at the situation in
which I live, and will care for myself.
* As I walked by myself
I talked to myself,
And thus myself did say to me:
" Look to thyself, and take care of thyself,
For nobody cares for thee." '
" I will do justice as far as is in my power ; but I
will also exact justice from my fellows. I will follow

48 SONS OF GOD.
Polonius' counsel and beware of entrance to a quarrel,
but being in, will so bear myself that my enemy
shall beware of me. I will owe no man anything,
and I will see to it that no man shall owe me anything
uncollected." Now, what will such a man be able to secure for
himself? At the very most, he shall dwell in a
palace, dress luxuriously, fare sumptuously, and buy
such toys as he fancies will amuse him. But the code
which he adopts, with what he fancies so much sa
gacity, will be impotent to secure him the devotion
of a woman, the friendship of a man, or the love of a
child ! No doubt he will actually possess all of these
to a degree ; but if he look closely he will see that
they have all come to him, not because he has adhered
to the plan of living which he has announced, but
because he has at times broken away from it, and
allowed himself to be led by the " mind " of Christ.
He may possess some of these, and the like blessings,
I say. But again he may not; for it is the pecu
liarity of this kind of man to think that love may be
bought or compelled. Who has not watched the
wretchedness of a man, for example, living year after
year unloved in the presence of a wife whose heart is
filled to bursting with an affection which he cannot
touch. He thinks it ought to be his by right. He
owns it. He has bought, or he has contracted for, it
in an open and fair bargain. But he cannot possess
it. He gnaws his own heart in impotent disappoint
ment, because he cannot bring himself to ask as a
gift that which he thinks ought to be his as a right.

JESUS' WORKING THEORY OF LIFE. 49
A tender word of solicitation would open upon him
self the very flood-gates of a woman's love ; — but he
has learned to live by the rule of rights, and cannot
understand the "mind of Christ" which alone can
compel the benedictions of life for lack of which he
is starving. Indeed, there can be no more patent
illustration of the potency of Jesus' rule of living,
than the strange place which woman holds in Chris
tendom. They were the first to comprehend Him
and to make His spirit theirs. They have always been
drawn to Him, as men have not. They have found
the strange strength of weakness, the rich life which
comes by losing one's life. Pity it is that they
should ever be misled to exchange the power of
Love, which has the promise of the future, for Right,
whose sway is doomed !
(3.) Institutions which rest upon force are short
lived. This is true, though the quality of force may
be disguised, even though it masquerade as neces
sity or even beneficence. Men of violence have tried
again and again to seize and control the world's life.
They have always failed. They always must, even
though the tyranny be that of " the people " instead
of the ruler. Governments of might have chased
each other like the breakers chasing one another up
the beach. Their violence ruins their stability.
Who can think that the armed truce of Europe's
mighty empires is stable? "They that take the
sword shall perish by the sword " is an eternal law.
Each one must, of necessity, add force to force in the
titanic rivalry, until the burden of the armor be-

50 SONS OF GOD.
comes crushing. Then it must fight for the oppor
tunity to disarm. When, finally, one stands supreme,
overlooking its fallen rivals, its very attitude evokes
new enemies, and again begins the horrible cycle.
All see that no stable equilibrium of nations can come
until force is eliminated, and " sentiment " takes its
place. And what is true of nations is true of men.
" They must overturn, and overturn, and overturn,
till He comes whose right it is to reign." His name
is Love.
Just here I fancy some one saying : " Is Tolstoi
right, then ? or the Quakers ? Is non-resistance the
way ? Shall men and society lay down their arms,
and abandon the machinery of government, — for is
not government itself but consecrated force?" I
answer: They are only half right. Half a truth
may be practically, and for a time, worse than a con
sistent lie. Passivity is not the law of Christ, for it
is contrary to the nature of life. Life is active, not
passive. This is its distinguishing quality. Safety
in life is net to be found by standing still. That
attitude loses the promises both of this life and the
life that is to come. Jesus promised His followers
safety and blessedness while they should be actively
seeking their fellows, — not otherwise. It is not the
Quaker, but the Good Samaritan, who is safe from
robbers. The one invites attack ; the other disarms
it. It is not the cloistered nun, but the Sister of
Mercy, who is spared by the plague. It is not he who
allows his life to be taken, but he who deliberately
loses it, who finds it again.

JESUS' WORKING THEORY OF LIFE. 51
"But, after all, is it anything more than a religious
fancy, which will, of necessity, break down under the
test of experiment? Can any man live that way ? "
I answer: "Thousands have lived that way. Many
of them have come to disaster, as we would say ; but
when we offer them pity or counsel, we are met by a
strange smile as of one who knows better than we.
Those who have been broken, have not repined, but
sung songs. We can see that their pain has made it
easier for all who follow.
The difficulty of Jesus' theory of life may be
frankly acknowledged. He himself declared it. The
way is narrow, and the gate strait. The apostle,
with that broad-minded reasonableness which marks
the true- Christian, only exhorts his friends "as much
as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men." But it
seems clear to me, at any rate, that the world has
now travelled far enough to see the goal toward
which the path points. The ideal of life which Jesus
brought in has been tacitly accepted as the ideal. No
man in Christendom is altogether untouched by it.
Says Mr. John Fiske : " To many the Sermon on
the Mount has been as foolishness and a stumbling-
block, and its ethics derided as too good for this
world. But through misery that has seemed unen
durable, and turmoil that has seemed endless, men
have thought on that gracious life and its sublime
ideal, and have taken comfort in the sweetly solemn
message of Peace on Earth to men of good will."

V.
PERSONAL RELIGION.

PERSONAL RELIGION.
Col. I. — 26-27.
" Che mgsterg bihich hath been hib from ages ano from genera*
tions nofet is mabe manifest to his saints ; to fohom ffiob fejoulb make
fcnobm fohat is the riches of the glorg of this mgsterg . . . fohtch is
Christ in gou the hope of glorg ! "
The word "saint" is used in the New Testament
as synonymous with " Christian." Our popular use
of the term is unknown there. We think of a saint
as . a Christian who has reached such a superlative
pitch of holiness that he has become conspicuous. In
a large section of the Church there are regular methods
of canonizing such a person; that is, of formally
admitting him into the roll of the "saints." St.
Paul is always careful to speak of all Christians as
saints. He begins by addressing a letter to " the
saints which are " in such or such a place ; and then
passes at once to rebuke them sharply for the very
gravest moral faults which, he says, are common
among them ; and ends by a loving greeting to the
same " saints." Our common antithesis of saint and
sinner was unknown to him. To his mind many of
the saints were grievous sinners ; but they did not, on
this account cease to be saints. When he wrote saint
55

56 SONS OF GOD.
he meant Christian ; and when he said Christian he
meant saint.
But then, to his way of thinking, a Christian was
a very remarkable sort of person. In the text he
states briefly what such a person essentially is. He
is one to whom the mysteries of God lie open. All
ages and generations had stood perplexed in the pres
ence of great mysteries. They are such as the
being and nature of God ; the significance of exist
ence; the question of a possible immortality; the
moral value of actions; the destiny of individuals;
the future of the race. The apostle claimed that
Jesus Christ was the answer to all these hoary prob
lems ; and that there was no other answer. His own
relation to Jesus was very peculiar. He had never
seen Him except in a vision. Just what the nature
of this vision was is not very clear ; but it is clear
that he did not suppose his knowledge of Him to be
due to the vision, for he insists that precisely the
same certain knowledge is possible to any man.
Now, I wisji to press this, though I know that such
insistence may be distasteful.
St. Paul asserts that Christianity is the conscious
personal relation of an individual soul to Jesus
Christ. It is much beside this. It is a manner of
living ; membership in a society ; the acceptance of a
creed ; but before these, and after them, and along
with them, it is an experience. It is a conscious,
overwhelming, personal love for God as God is seen
and known • in the person of Jesus Christ. Let me
recall to your mind a few typical passages of Scrip-

PERSONAL RELIGION. 57
ture which will put this beyond dispute. We will
begin with the words of Jesus himself : —
" Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love
me he will keep my words ; and my Father will love
him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode
with him."
" O righteous Father, the world hath not known
thee ; but I have known thee, and these have known
that thou hast sent me, and I have declared unto
them thy name, and will declare it, that the love
wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them and I
in them."
Then hear the words of the apostle : —
" Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and
that the spirit of God dwelleth in you?"
" Who shall separate us from the love of Christ ?
Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or fam
ine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword ? As it is writ
ten, For thy sake we are killed all the day long ; we
are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all
these things we are more than conquerors through
him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither
death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor
powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor
height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be
able to separate us from the love of God which is in
Christ Jesus our Lord."
Again : During the whole course of Christendom
individuals have borne their testimony to this same
religious experience. They have believed in Christ,
not so much because such conviction was reasonable,

58 SONS OF GOD.
because it was constrained by the strength of the
evidences laid before them, as because they found a
witness within their own consciousness which ren
dered external argument and evidence superfluous.
They have had the " witness of the Spirit bearing
witness with their spirits that they have passed from
death unto life." They have been aware of God
directly, just as they have been aware directly of
their own lives. This religious experience has not
been confined to any one type of man or woman. It
does not show itself solely in those who are predis
posed to hysterics. Philosophers, mathematicians,
students of physical science, soldiers, statesmen, men
of affairs, all alike have borne their testimony to it.
Take, for example, three men, as unlike one another
as it is possible to imagine, unlike in mental habit
and training, in manner of education, in situation and
character, — Augustine of Hippo, Francis of Sales,
and John Wesley of London and Oxford. They
lived at different periods with centuries between, in
widely removed countries, and in the midst of speech
and manners not intelligible to one another, yet
the religious experience of the one might stand for
that of any of the others, or for that of millions
beside. They believed that they " had really come to
know the Lord Jesus Christ; that in an interview
between their souls and their Lord they entered into
a relation with Him as real, and as vivid in conscious
ness, as is any other experience of the affections or
the cognition faculties."
Augustine in a shady nook of his mother's garden ;

PERSONAL RELIGION. 59
Francis in his lonely walk along the deserted streets
of a plague-stricken city ; Wesley sitting in his study
in London and reading a dry commentary, — all passed
through a like experience. A Presence encompassed
them about, and a voice spoke within their souls
which they could not but confess was the same which
arrested Saul on his way to Damascus. These men,
being accustomed to clear thinking, were able to dis
criminate in this experience between what was their
own, and what affected them from without, as the
mass of Christians do not and cannot ; but they ex
pressly repudiated any endowment not equally possi
ble for all men.
This same personal consciousness of Christ finds
constant expression in the hymns of Christian devo
tion. Indeed, it is probably the most distinctive
mark of Christian poetry. It is subjective. It does
not deal, as does Pagan or Hebrew poetry, with the
affairs of man, or the glories of God, but with the
emotions which the soul undergoes in the presence of
Jesus Christ. In some favorite hymns, with large
classes of Christians, this language of love borrows
phrases and modes of expression from the most ardent
hymns of erotic passion. Indeed, there have been
not a few who found the most satisfactory expression
for their religious affections in the unbridled sensual
ity of Solomon's Song ! But however it be expressed,
it is probably the common thought about religion, in
America at least, that its starting-point and first
necessity, in every individual, is a conscious succes
sion of emotions which are stirred by the contact of

60 SONS OF GOD.
the spirit of the man for the first time with the spirit
of Jesus Christ.
Now, what shall we, sober-minded Church people,
say to all this? We have a deep distrust of emo
tional religion. An "Experience Meeting" would
be the most dreadful place in which we could find
ourselves. Few among us are aware of what a large
place "experimental religion" holds in the religious
world about us ; that applicants for admission to the
Church are carefully examined upon it. That in
public and social meetings the detailing of "expe
riences" is the staple exercise. That the question of
how one feels is esteemed of supreme importance
above that of how he does or how he thinks. All
this is offensive to us. Its phraseology sounds un
real, and is associated in our minds with unctuous
hyprocrisy. We are reticent. We could no more
bring ourselves to expose to public gaze our religious
experience than we could our love experiences. Very
rarely, in the confidence of intimate friendship, dur
ing a quiet walk in the woods, or sitting of a summer
evening by the seashore, we may draw aside a corner
of the curtain which hides the soul from vulgar gaze,
and allow a friend to see what has passed there.
But to insist that the soul should be constantly on
exhibition, as is the body or the mind, seems to us
monstrous. We would have the sense of being in
decently exposed. But then what shall we say to the
undeniable fact that religion is an experience ? The
reply is not as easy for us as it is for many.
The non-religious world has an answer ready.

PERSONAL RELIGION. 61
" Oh, yes ; " they say, " these emotions which you
call religious are common to all men. They always
have been. They are but the projection of one's self
into the infinite, so far that one's identity becomes
confused, and he fancies his own voice to be the voice
of God. This faculty, which you call religious, is
but the feeling of wonder in the presence of sur
rounding mystery, which has always spoken this
way. It produces the medicine-man among the sav
ages, the yogi and the fakir among Orientals, the
pythoness among the Greeks, the " seer " among the
Hebrews, and the " saint " in Christian times. It is,
after all, nothing but a man talking to himself, and
imagining his own voice to come from the heavens.
It is an experience, to be sure, but all its ingre
dients are provided by the man himself."
The Romanist has a reply equally ready. " True,"
he says, "these deep soul tragedies are real and
always possible. But they are not common. They
do not have place in the life of the ordinary Chris
tian. He lives by the simple rule prescribed for him
by Holy Church. In his life is little or no self-
consciousness. Indeed, the less of it he has the
better. But there are always a few to whom God
vouchsafes personal speech. These are the saints.
They are called to special honor in the Church, and
at death go past purgatory immediately into heaven.
They are not set before us as examples, because in
the very nature of the case, the thing which distin
guishes them from others, and produces their peculiar
sanctity, is a special and arbitrary revelation of God

62 SONS OF GOD.
himself to them. We may pray to them ; we cannot
follow them."
The popular notion about the matter is vague, but
in substance it thinks of a conscious " Conversion "
as the beginning of a Christian life. It has no very
clear idea of what it means by the term; but it
accepts it all the same, and is inclined to doubt the
" vital piety " of any Protestant who offers to ques
tion or qualify it. It does not object to a Roman
Catholic doing so, for it is vaguely aware that in his
case he offers a substitute for personal spiritual
guidance in the shape of the authority of the
Church. Now, what really is at the bottom of it all? How
shall we harmonize the language of Scripture, the
phraseology of hymns and biographies, the common
speech of the Christian world, with our own reti
cence and absence of religious self-consciousness?
To speak with all candor, we lament our cold hearted-
ness and incapacity to enter into the deep religious
feeling whieh has left itself on record ; but at the
same time, we are honestly distrustful of emotional
religion, because we have seen so often its tendency
to relax the moral fibre, and weaken the mental vigor,
of those in whom it shows itself most markedly.
In this dilemma, I venture to offer two or three
considerations which have brought a measure of re
lief to myself, and may to some of you.
The first is the impossibility of accuracy in lan
guage about the affections. When we read the con
fessions of a lover, we can never be quite sure what

PERSONAL RELIGION. 63
he means. One person will habitually apply the
names of love, hate, disgust, devotion, to the most
languid and shallow movements of feeling. Another
will only use such terms about the most fiery, tur
bulent, overwhelming cataclysms of emotion. From
the mere reading of the record we can never be at
all sure which kind, or rather which intensity of
experience, is meant. If you try any affection which
you are sure you have felt by the language of the
poets or novelists, you will be almost sure to think
their expressions exaggerated. Let it be conjugal
love, and Alkestis seems impossible ; filial love, and
Antigone is overstrained ; erotic love, and the poets
are phrase-spinners, and seem to exaggerate the thing,
after the manner of their kind.
Now, the same thing is probably true as to the
language of apostles, saints, and psalmists concern
ing human love for God. "My soul is athirst for
God ; yea, when shall I come to appear before God ; "
— "It is I, yet not I, but Christ that dwelleth in
me," — " Jesus, the very thought of thee
With sweetness fills the breast."
Who among us can honestly adopt any of these
phrases as his own? And yet may we not fairly
believe that our own love for God is as deep and as
real as that of apostle, psalmist, or poet ?
Here are two persons who live in the bonds of a
deep and strong friendship. One of them is reticent,
not self-conscious, never examines or thinks of his
affection for his friend, would be disturbed and dis-

64 SONS OF GOD.
tressed at any demonstration of affection, but will
stand by him through good report and ill, will share
his last dollar with him as a matter of course, will
postpone his own advantage to serve his friend.
The other is ardent, demonstrative, self-conscious,
outspoken. Now, of the two, it is always the latter
who writes the record. Is it to be wondered at if
the expressions he uses seem too high to describe the
friendship which was in the other's heart?
The crystal vessels in which the saints and apos
tles stored the record of their love for God are too
capacious for our smaller store ; but ours, though
smaller, may be just as true and genuine.
But, after every allowance has been made, it still
remains true that this conscious interplay of affection
between one's self and God must be present. It is
true, or at least it appears to be true, that without it
an upright, and in a sense a religious, life may be
conducted. But in its absence such a life is wanting
both in enthusiasm and in security. An examina
tion of evidences may entirely satisfy the under
standing ; pictures of the place and manner of reward
or penalty may fill the imagination; the struggle
after duty may content the conscience ; but still
something is wanting. There is present " the voice
of them who conquer, and the cry of them that are
overcome, — but the sound as the sound of singing "
is not heard !
But then " How shall I come to appear before
God? " If God were to call to any one of us, as to
Samuel, we would gladly answer, " Speak, Lord, for

PERSONAL RELIGION. 65
thy servant heareth." But which way shall we turn,
where shall we go in the daylight or the night, what
attitude shall we observe, to catch a divine voice in a
world where all is silent to our ears ? This, it seems
to me, is the very mystery which St. Paul declares
that Jesus has laid open. He that hath seen Him
hath seen the Father ! The very core of Christianity
is the belief that Jesus is God. Now, what personality
is anything like so well known, as clearly imaged
in the intelligence, as easily presentable before the
thought, as Jesus ? In point of fact, we know Him
better than we do any other person, living or dead.
It is the strange power which belongs to Him that He
becomes real and living to every one who steadfastly
regards Him. This is the ultimate and always avail
able proof of His Divinitjr. He realizes Himself in
any human soul who learns of him and turns toward
him with admiration. As the admiration deepens,
the sense of his very reality increases, until in the
Christian it takes the form, not of a governing prin
ciple, but of an abiding personal friendship. In a
few choice natures so happily constituted, it sweeps
away their very being, and substitutes for it the very
nature of Christ. Their identity becomes confused,
and they exclaim, "It is I, yet not I, but Christ
that dwelleth in me ! "
I know there are some who are unable to hear in
all this anything but "words, words, words." It is
to them, — " Like a tale told by an idiot, sound and
fury, signifying nothing." It is unreasonable.
I would, in all candor, remind such that all human

66 SONS OF GOD.
affections are unreasonable. But they are none the
less real. Ask yourself why you love your wife,
your child, your friend, and you will wait in vain for
an answer. There is no reason why. An affection
which is able to take an inventory of its contents
proves by the very act that it is a sham affection.
" Love is blind." This is true of all sorts of love. It
does not follow sight ; it finds its affinity by instinct.
So it is of those in whom Christ has been, or is being,
formed, the hope of glory. They are slowly finding
God, and establishing abiding relations with him.
Sometimes the discovery comes as a spiritual shock,
an experience easily isolated from all the rest of
one's emotional life. More frequently the Spirit
worketh with one's own spirit so insensibly that the
presence of a strange visitant is all unsuspected.
More frequently still, the process moves by frequent
alternations of both methods. But in any and in all
ways, the phenomenon is the same splendid and
wonderful one.
It is the solution of the mystery of living by the
formation within the soul of the Christ which links
its possessor to immortality.

VI.
GOD'S LOVE FOR MEN.

VI.

GOD'S LOVE FOR MEN.
3Eph. EH. 14-19.
" JFor this cause E bota mg fences unto the father of our ILorb
3esus Christ, ®f inborn the tohole familg in heaben arth earth is
names, Chat he fooulb grant gou, accoroing to the riches of his
glorg, to be strengthened ferith might bg his Sgirit in the inner
man ; Chat Christ mag Sfoell in gour hearts bg faith : that gc, being
rootcb anb grounbeb in lobe, JHag be able to comprehenb forth all
saints ferhat is the breabth, anb length, anb bepth anb height; 3nb
to fmofo the lobe of Christ, b>hich passeth ftnoialebge, that ge might
be Blleb bnth all the fulness of Cob."
When the apostle once got fairly before his mind
the fact that God feels a deep love for men, he was
filled with amazement. It is a fact hard to believe
and still harder to realize. Yet it is the starting-
point of Christianity. It is the very core of the
revelation of Jesus. His declaration that God is
Love has changed the temper and life of every man
and every community which has come to believe that
what He said was true. It has been a thousand times
more potent to produce right living than had been
the previous belief that God is Power. That is to
say, Love is more potent than Law ; and this is the
essence of the Gospel. It is hard to believe it, for
the facts seem to be against it. A ruler or a law can
compel a certain course of action in those who come
69

70 SONS OF GOD.
under them, and can compel it at once, whereas
the affection of the ruler may be thrown away upon
unworthy subjects, producing no results. Love seems
weak unless force will clear the way for it, and hold
its object down while love works its will upon him.
Nevertheless, Jesus insists that God Himself is so
constituted that He can never rest content until He
shall have won for Himself the affection of all His
creatures. He cannot compel this by force of any
sort or in any sphere. Jesus uncovers the love of
God for men, and allows it to work. He has serene
confidence that in the end it will win an answer
ing affection in every human soul. It may work by
very sharp methods ; for Love can be cruel to be
kind. But, according to Jesus, the object which God
sets before Himself is not to break a recalcitrant will,
or compel an obedience to his orders, but to draw all
men to Himself. This theme is constantly played
upon in the New Testament. It is the fact which is
constantly appealed to as a motive Whenever in
any case it is accomplished, God's purpose is thought
of as having been in that case secured. There may
be much still to be desired in the life of a man who
"has fallen in love with God," but there is no anxiety
about the issue of such a life. A force is at work
in it which will ultimately bring all the outlying
discords of it into harmony.
" As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you :
continue ye in my love. If ye keep my command
ments, ye shall abide in my love ; even as I have kept
my Father's commandments, and abide in his love."

GOD'S LOVE FOR MEN. 71
" For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life,
nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things
present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth,
nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us
from the love of God."
" Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that
he loved us. If we love one another, God dwelleth
in us, and his love is perfected in us."
Now, I have dwelt at some length upon this truth,
not because I have been anxious to convince you that
it is true, for I have no doubt you all assent to it in
the abstract, but because I want it to sink into your
minds until it awakens the doubt which always
springs up concerning it whenever it becomes fairly
grasped. That God loves men is likely to be believed
just until one sees what the statement involves, and
then it is seriously questioned. I think it well to
start these questionings into life in order that we
may dispose of them.
(1.) The first cause of difficulty is one's sense of
his own insignificance as an individual atom in the
universe of existence ! That God should have some
feeling, on a grand scale, toward humanity as a whole,
does not sound unreasonable. But then think how
many men there are, and have been, and will be !
They are numbered by myriads. When one tries to
bring the multitude before his imagination he be
comes bewildered. Now, can we seriously think of
God having a distinct and separate affection for
each? But if this be not the fact, then His "love
for men " becomes a mere phrase not worth contend-

72 SONS OF GOD.
ing about. I hesitate to think that God cares for me
as an individual, one way or another, — that I am
anything more to him than an unnoticed unit
in the great whole of things which he rules by fixed
laws. (2.) A still greater difficulty arises out of the fact
of human unloveliness. We think of things being
loved which are lovable. But men, taking them by
and large, are not very lovely. Even among one's
own acquaintances, there are only a few who are even
interesting, and very few indeed who inspire affec
tion. Then think of the great mass who seem to
exist for no special purpose. Stop for a little while
on a corner of Chestnut Street of a fair and busy
afternoon, and look at the crowds hurrying by. If
you watch them steadfastly, they will, after a little,
come to seem as automata, creatures driven by a pur
poseless restlessness. Look at their faces. Most
are empty of expression, or else have an eager look
which is still more forbidding. You can see that
many are vicious, most are stolid. Their lives are
narrow, their interests are petty, they awake no
interest and provoke no love. This is the invariable
impression produced upon one whose duty or office
leads him to deal with multitudes. The public official,
the clerk in a public office, the salesman in a great
store, any one, in short, who comes personally in
contact with multitudes of people for a considerable
period of time, comes to have a sort of contempt
for humanity. He has seen too much of it. Its
foibles and petty faults have been before such a per-

GOD'S LOVE FOR MEN. 73
son so long that he has ceased to feel kindly. He
has discovered the unloveliness of men.
Then call to mind that the humanity with which
we are familiar, and which fails to touch our affec
tion, is the best in existence. If you take in as well
the millions of narrow-browed, dull, brutal, who toil
in mines or hide in cities' slums ; the worn-out, but
still vicious millions of the Orient; the millions of
semi-bestial savages in the Dark Continent and the
isles of the sea, — the average of the race falls so
unspeakably low that it becomes of the utmost diffi
culty to conceive of God as even keeping it in mind,
much less keeping in his love the individuals who
compose it !
(3.) But there is a third difficulty far more formid
able still. That is, the fact of human pain. If it be
true that God loves his children, why does he leave
them to suffer so ? This has been the dark mystery
of the ages. It has led men to atheism. It has led
them to attribute to God the qualities of the Devil.
It has driven them in frantic despair to curse God
and die. It has led men to grovel before God in the
abject attitude of slaves before an Oriental despot.
It has led them to throw their children into the
flames for Moloch, to propitiate an angry deity by
the costliest gifts. It leads many among us to think
of a " Law," instead of a Person, at the centre of
things, so impassible is it, so indifferent to the cries
of human agony.
Now, all these facts of human life St. Paul looks
squarely in the face, and yet bursts out in praise of

74 SONS OF GOD.
the goodness and loving kindness of God. Why does
he do so ? What new light has he upon the " painful
riddle of life " ? Why is his opinion concerning the
disposition of God of any more value than that of
another man ? I ask you, then, to notice that he
does not give his dictum as an opinion at all It is
not anything which he has thought out, or discov
ered, or reached by any method common among men.
Jesus had said not long before that any one who
" saw " Him would see the Father. There were some
who did see Him. Not all who looked at Him, for
many looked at Him without seeing or recognizing
Him for what He was, but some did. Among these
was St. Paul. This sight of God in the face of Jesus
Christ had the same effect upon him that it always
has upon those who " see Jesus." It changed his
estimate of his fellow-men by changing his notion
about God. It set all the facts of life with which he
was familiar in a new light. They remained the
same, but they no longer meant the same. As he
learned from his Master what is the real disposition
of God toward men, they ceased to be insignificant,
contemptible, or hateful. They became pathetic, in
spiring, dreadful. As an educated and exclusive
Jew, he had thought of the mass as "a people
who know not the Law, and are accursed." As
a Christian, the same people became so valuable
that he was ready to pluck out his eyes for them,
and even intimated that he would be ready to
lose his own soul for them. This discovery that
all men are sons of God is the copious spring out

GOD'S LOVE FOR MEN. 75
of which has flowed that unfailing " Enthusiasm of
Humanity " which is the mark of Christianity. It
is only within Christendom that a man is held to be
intrinsically valuable. This valuation is based, not
upon what he shows at the moment, but of what he
is in his very nature. The thing which strikes most
painfully a traveller in a heathen land is the low esti
mate of human life. The natives may be gentle and
kindly as in Japan, wise as in China, acute, subtle,
and graceful as in India, but in no case are they
shocked as we are by unnecessary waste or loss of
human life. Philanthropy is in its origin Christian.
It started from the revelation of Jesus Christ, the
truth which He was the first to get men really to
believe, that God has a personal interest in men ; an
interest which does not depend upon their character
or their accomplishments, but upon their relationship
to Himself. It is only so long as Philanthropy is able
to maintain connection with this, its base of supplies,
that it remains effective. As has been shown a thou
sand times, whenever a man or a society which at
tempts charitable work, and which has begun with a
distinctly religious motive, but declines from its faith
and comes to work upon a humanitarian basis, it loses
both its enthusiasm and its effectiveness. This must
be so in the nature of the case. Love for men is
only possible in the presence of God.
So absolute is the Christian's conviction of God's
loving kindness that he ventures to seek for the
explanation of human pain in it ! This would seem
to be the extremity of wrong-headedness. But he
does it clearly, —

76 SONS OF GOD.
" My son, despise not thou the chastening of the
Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him : For
whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth
every son whom he receiveth. If ye endure chasten
ing, God dealeth with you as with sons ; for what
son is he whom the father chasteneth not? But if
ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partak
ers, then are ye bastards, and not sons. Further
more, we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected
us, and we gave them reverence : shall we not much
rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and
live ? For they verily for a few days chastened us
after their own pleasure ; but he for our profit, that
we might be partakers of his holiness."
Now, no theory of the origin or meaning of pain is
altogether satisfactory. But is there any more rea
sonable one than this ? It asserts in effect that the
ills which assault men and torture them, or at best,
take the zest out of living, are neither meaningless
accidents which come from nowhere and for no
reason, no* are they the purposeless agonies caused
by the crampings of a soulless " Law," but that they
are the smartings from the stripes of a rod laid on
reluctantly, but intentionally, by a father. It is
quite true that we all see and feel many an ill which
we cannot honestly account for on this theory.
There are sufferings which do not educate. They
teach no lesson to the victim, because they do not
leave the victim, alive to learn the lesson. Or the
lesson is so obscure that its purpose cannot be read.
A cyclone sweeps away a man's fortune and maims

GOD'S LOVE FOR MEN. 77
his child, and what fault is it meant to punish, or
what lesson to teach ? Was it a fault to build upon
a fair and inviting prairie ? Is the bare fact that
there are cyclones in that region a truth worth learn
ing at such a cost? This is all true, and there are a
thousand ills which we are not able to place under
this " Educational " theory of suffering. But, then,
what other theory is there ? Of course one can dis
miss the problem as insoluble. He may clench his
fist like Ajax, and defy the brandished darts of Jove.
He may picture existence as a sphinx with expres
sionless face, with the soft, inviting breast of a
woman, and the claws of a wild beast. He may
think of a universe compelled by a Law which has
no self-consciousness, and which grinds without hate
and without ruth. But I say without hesitation that
none of these theories of life bring, to me at any rate,
the same intellectual relief, to say nothing of moral
uplift, as does the Christian doctrine that God is
Love, and that He is slowly school-mastering his chil
dren into a recognition of their relationship to Him.
St. Paul calls the love of God a mystery. It is so.
All the primal, fundamental forces are mysteries.
That is to say, they are entities of whose existence no
one, to whom they have been revealed, can ever again
doubt; but what they are in themselves, and how
they work to fulfil their results, no man has ever seen.
This is the case, for example, with regard to gravita
tion. It is a mystery. In fact, it is nothing but a
name. But in the sphere of physical things it ope
rates so generally, and its formulas bring so much

78 SONS OF GOD.
intellectual rest, that wherever it is announced it is
received by all who are capable of apprehending it
at all. In the higher sphere of moral things, Jesus'
declaration, that Love rules de facto as well as de jure
solves so many difficulties, and opens so many other
wise closed lines of motion, that the number who
accept it as true has steadily increased for centuries.
Longfellow set the deep Christian truth to verse : —
"Love is the root of creation; God's essence; worlds without
number
Lie in His bosom like children; He made them for this purpose
only.
Only to love and to be loved again, He breathed forth His spirit
Into the slumbering dust, and upright standing, it laid its
Hand on its heart, and felt it was warm with a flame out of
heaven."

VII.
THE PERMANENT ELEMENT IN
CHRISTIANITY.

VII.
THE PERMANENT ELEMENT IN
CHRISTIANITY.
t Cor. 3OT. 8.
" Charitg neber faileth ; but fohethcr there fie prophecies, theg shall
fail ; whether there fie tongues, theg shall cease ; fohether there fie
hnofolebge, it shall banish afoag."
Heaven and earth were, in a certain way, nearer
to each other during the thirty years of the life of
Jesus than they have ever been before or since. In
theory it has never been absurd, and is not now, to
expect a "sign," a "miracle," a "mighty work."
There is no assignable reason why such a thing
should not be. All that the most bigoted materialist
can say is that " miracles do not happen." He does
not venture to say that they cannot, or will not, or
have not. He only asserts that the universe, in so
far as he knows it, does not show any such thing.
Christians believe in miracles, to some extent, but
they beheve in something else still more. They are
not so credulous as to accept blindly the literal
reality of everything in profane or sacred literature
which claims to be a supernatural portent. But they
find no difficulty in believing that at certain times,
and for certain well-defined purposes, there have oc
curred what the materialist calls " divine incursions."
81

82 SONS OF GOD.
That is to say, things have happened to men, and in
the presence of men, whose rationale is not to be
sought for in the natural forces and processes with
which either physical or psychological science deals.
Such events have not occurred with any regularity,
or with anything like even distribution throughout
the period of human history. They have occurred
when they were needed, or when they served a pur
pose. An extraordinary cycle of them clustered about
the time and place of Jesus Christ. There seemed
to have been, if one may put it so, a sort of spiritual
excitement throughout the universe which was set
up by the Incarnation. The interplay between the
seen and the unseen was then most vivid and fre
quent. It began with the angelic vision to Zacharias
in the Temple. The Annunciation, the song of the
heavenly choirs, the communication to the Magi, the
vocal heavens and the resonant earth at the Birth,
the unnumbered signs and wonders which attended
upon the words and steps of Jesus, the rocking of the
earth, and dynming of the sun's light, and the flitting
about of ghostly phantoms at the Crucifixion, all
these were in the entourage of the Divine Man.
Gradually the spiritual disturbance subsided. It
had swept through the universe as an electric storm
illuminates the northern sky, deflects the normal
currents of earth, and sinks again into wonted equi
librium. But the first generation of Christians, who had
lived in a time when, if one may say so, the super
natural was natural, were most reluctant to believe

PERMANENT ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY. 83
that it should cease, and that men and things should
resume again their life under the natural order of
things. They had had, for a time, that fine spiritual
exaltation which enables one to pierce the future, and
become a seer. They had prophesied. The limita
tions of past and future had fallen away from them
for a little, and they had seen things to come as
already present. Their defects in learning and lan
guage had been, for a little, supplemented by a
strange " gift of tongues." When they found these
to be less and less frequently to be depended upon,
they were sorely disturbed. It seemed then as
though the old work-a-day world was sucking them
in again, that the reign of spiritual things was dying
away. St. Paul pointed out to them that this was
inevitable. " Whether there be prophecies, they shall
fail ; whether there be tongues, they shall cease." The
Church was slow to believe him. In point of fact, it
never has believed him. In the record, " ecclesiastical
miracles " follow hard upon apostolic times. They
sprung from the deep craving for immediate spiritual
vision. Just in proportion as the Church fell away
from its spiritual fervor and early moral insight, these
grotesque and frequently repulsive signs came to be
more and more readily accepted. The belief still
survives. The blood of St. Januarius still liquefies ;
the withered mummy of San Spiro is still carried
about the streets of Corfu, while the faithful re
count to one another the story of his miracles upon
the mules ; the stigmata of St. Francis are still de
fended by appeals to apocryphal science ; pilgrims

84 SONS OF GOD.
still flock to Lourdes and Knock, and the sick are
carried by hundreds for cure by a Swiss monk at
Pittsburg. The misapprehension is deep-rooted and
widespread. Even so sagacious a thinker as Dr.
Bushnell felt bound, in the interest of an indefensible
theory, to vindicate nineteenth century miracles.
It need not be asserted that such things have
passed away for always. Humanity, moving in its
orbit, may again cut into the orbit of supernatural
verities at a point where they may become visible and
frequent. Just as at regularly irregular intervals of
years the earth passes through the orbit of the
meteoric bodies at a point where they are abundant,
and at such times there are showers of " falling
stars " in the earth's atmosphere, so the path of
Humanity's moral movement has led through places
where heavenly phenomena were abundant. Con
ceivably it may do so again. But the Church has
been slow to learn that her Master has committed her
fortunes to the forces which are regular and constant.
No sign will be shown to a wicked and adulterous
generation, no fire from heaven can be called down
upon a recalcitrant village, and no mighty work may
be forthcoming to convince the unbeliever, or to
make the way easy for the discouraged saint. This
method had its place, and filled it, whereupon it
ceased, vanished, passed away, according to the
apostle's word.
But when it passed away another unrealizable hope
took its place, and has survived even until now,
when it also shows signs of ceasing. That is

PERMANENT ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY. 85
"knowledge." Immediately after apostolic times
the Church set about the necessary task of formulat
ing its doctrine. It made the deliberate attempt to
state the Gospel of Jesus Christ in formal propo
sitions. It constructed its Creeds. It did not invent
the substance of the Creeds, of course. But at Nice,
and Ctesarea, and Constantinople, it determined upon
the formal statements of the truths of the Gospel.
The purpose was to state the truth of Christianity in
clearly intelligible and logically defensible terms.
It was not meant that there should be any further
room for ignorance. It was believed that an ex
haustive knowledge of divine things was possible,
and ought to be attained as soon as might be. This
knowledge was added to from time to time. It
descended more and more into detail. The Church
passed through the scholastic ages, during which
every bundle of Christian grain was threshed and
winnowed. The "Fathers " stated and defended the
truth in countless volumes. The Schoolmen raised
and laid every conceivable and inconceivable objec
tion. The Councils of the Reformation period drew
out the intellectual contents of Christianity in the
minutest detail. They set them forth in the Thirty-
nine Articles, in the Westminster Confession, the
Decrees of Trent and Dort and Augsburg. They
were unmindful of St. Paul's explicit declaration, that
" whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away ; "
literally, it shall be "transitory." In our own gen
eration the apostle's declaration is evidently becom
ing vindicated, and to the great disturbance and

86 SONS OF GOD.
apprehension of many devout men. That this is
true is evident, I think, to any one who will open his
eyes and look. The exact " knowledge," that is, the
logical statements and arguments from Christ's Gos
pel, in which men have rested as a finality, are
dropping out of sight on every hand. Doctrines,
confessions, formularies, which were once, and not
so long ago either, deemed to be so true that they
were worth going to the stake for, are dropping out
of sight on every hand. How many of you have
ever carefully read the Articles of Religion in the
Prayer Book ? How many of you would be willing
to have the Athanasian Creed restored to our Prayer
Book, from which it was dropped a century ago ?
The revision of its Confession of Faith has been
deliberately pronounced to be necessary by one of the
greatest and clearest-minded of American churches.
Doctrines which once passed for knowledge have
come to be seen for ignorance. The literal inspira
tion of the Scriptures, the creation of the world in
six natural <days, the Miltonic conception of the
" Fall," the expiatory theory of the Atonement, and
such as these, are items in the knowledge which St.
Paul warned the Church were to be transitory.
But what then? What abides? And can it be
secure of abiding if these things and the like pass
away? These are the questions which many ask
with earnestness, and some with terror.
I answer in the apostle's words, " Charity never
faileth." And I know very well the sense of unsatis-
fiedness which the answer leaves in many minds.

PERMANENT ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY. 87
They say, " Your words would seem to imply that
miracles and doctrines are of no account ; that the
Church has always been mistaken about these things.
You abandon all effort to defend them, and resolve
Christianity into a sentiment. So long as you give
us good and wonderful miracles to satisfy our faith,
and clearly stated doctrines to satisfy our under
standings, we have something to go upon. We know
then where we are. We can meet and wage war
with the adversaries. We know where we stand.
But you take these things away, and our religion is
gone." I reply, that I do not take these things away at all.
I have tried to state what I believe to be the facts of
the past and the present. I do not create either the
past facts or the present situation. I simply say that
it is best for us to look the facts in the face, and I
assert that when we do so we find that they have
happened as Jesus and his apostles said they would
happen. What has happened to the Church is what
always happens to a living creature. Its life does
not depend upon its body ; its body depends upon its
life. As an individual, your body was and is shaped
by your living soul. That it was which determined
originally that the atoms of matter which form your
body should take the shape of a man, and not of
some other animal. A beast's life gathers to itself
the thews and claws, and fur or feathers, of a beast.
The plant life gathers to itself matter, and moulds it
into the shape of a tree or flower. God giveth to every
seed a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed

o» SONS OF GOD.
his own body. The Christ life gathers about it and
gives shape to the body of Christ on earth, even the
Church. But I ask you to notice well, it is not
the Church which keeps Christianity alive ; it is the
spirit of Christ which keeps the Church alive. This
spirit gathers to itself individual atoms, it reshapes
and transforms them as individuals, it builds them
together into a society, it develops in the society the
faculty of speech, it speaks by a thousand tongues,
to every man "in the tongue wherein he was born."
The theology, the organization, of the Church is then
but the body which is created by its essential spirit.
Her customs and methods are but the clothes which
that body wears, and which change with the fashion
of the times. Or, to leave metaphor and speak
explicitly, the Church is not built up around a set of
miraculous facts, nor around a set of theological
doctrines : it is built up around the spirit which was
in Jesus, which spirit was Love. Its central, vital
principle is " Charity." This is immortal. It pre
ceded the Church in point of time, and will survive
it ; but it has in this dispensation a close and neces
sary relation to it.
The burden of Jesus' message is, that God loves men,
and therefore they ought also to love one another.
They ought to do so. But, as he clearly recognizes,
such affection is neither common nor easy. He set
about to produce it. In his first public address, he
asserted in the most uncompromising way that men
must come into this temper. They must love, not
their friends only, — anybody, even the Publicans,

PERMANENT ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY. 89
could do that, — but their enemies also. They must
be alert, not only to return courtesy for courtesy, —
anybody could do that, — but return good for evil.
They must not be put out if asked to go a mile to
show a stranger the way, but must volunteer another
mile for Love's sake. He declares that the future and
final classification of men will hinge upon the pos
session or absence of this temper. He who possesses
it to the smallest degree, even enough to induce him
to give a cup of cold water for human love's sake,
shows that he has the spark of Divine Life in him ;
he who fails utterly here is dead, and condemned
already. Before his departure he ordains his Holy
Sacrament to be for all time both a perpetual pledge
and reminder, and also a constant producer of charity.
The Holy Communion is the sacrament of love.
It takes the act of brotherly communion which is
the expression of affection, and labels it Holy. No
better exemplification of my thesis can be found
than this sacrament. Many have been in the way of
thinking that the true nature of the Holy Eucharist
is to be safeguarded by calling attention to the super
natural quality which inheres in it because of
Christ's presence there. Or that it is only safe and
permanent when the Church holds and teaches with
authority correct notions as to its nature. Both these
seem to me to strangely miss the mark. The stress
which has been laid upon these has only availed to
produce the monstrous result, that the sacrament
which was meant to be the very bond of peace, the
sign and pledge of Christian love, has been the bone

90 SONS OF GOD.
of contention around which has been carried on the
theological wranglings of centuries. Christendom is
broken in two over the Mass ! Men have persisted
in seeing in it a sign, when they had the apostle's
word that signs shall fail; they have sought to
identify it with a knowledge, when he had declared
that knowledge vanisheth away, and have missed in
it the charity which never faileth.
The Christian Church is organized around an
emotion ; to speak more accurately, it is organized
around a principle of life. This principle is Love.
As men come to realize what their true relation is to
God and their fellows, they come to realize their
kinship with God, for God is Love. It is out of
these new created souls that the Church springs. It
is Charity, which is the constant force, that keeps
the organized body together. It keeps the doctrine
sound and the practice reasonable. The formula,
" the faith delivered to the saints," is far more pro
foundly true than most of those who have it so
frequently ©n their lips ever dream. It is always
true. It is only to the saints that the faith can be
delivered. For " faith " is a moral and not an intel
lectual thing. It is only the " saints " — that, is those
who possess the charity of Christ — who can receive it.
The truth of Christ has been obscured for ages by
the pre-eminence which has been given to miracle and
dogma. But let us be candid, and confess that it is
hard to see how it could have been otherwise. The
cluster of miracles which attended upon its foundation
were so striking that they strongly arrested the atten-

PERMANENT ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY. 91
tion of the ages. The systematic theology has been
but the inevitable attempt to manifest the life of the
innermost soul in terms of the understanding. These
have been the hard, strong, and sometimes repellent,
husk and shell which conserved for the time the life
of the kernel. But now, on every hand, these are
yielding to the gentle solicitations of the recurring
seasons, they are opening and falling away, to allow
the priceless seed of Christian charity to sink into
the soil of human society, that it may bud and
bloom, and bear fruit. The promise of the harvest is
on every side. The growing gentleness of manners,
the decadence of doctrinal hardness, the multiplica
tion of agencies of charity, both within the Church
and without, the eager attention given to the bitter
cry of the outcast, the feverish anxiety to provide a
place for the weak and helpless at the banquet of
life, — all these are the first fruits of the abundant
harvest already ripening, which springs from that
seed of charity which never faileth.

VIII.
JESUS' ESTIMATE OF HUMAN VALUE.

VIII.
JESUS' ESTIMATE OF HUMAN VALUE.
Matt. III. — 12.
" l^ofer much is a man better than a sheep '/ "
One Sabbath day a man with a withered hand came
to our Lord and asked to be healed. The Pharisaic
precisians, who were standing by, interposed an objec
tion. They said the man ought to wait till the next
day. To cure him then and there would be a viola
tion of the regulations concerning the Sabbath day.
It is not necessary to suppose that their objection was
either captious or dishonest. It would not lay any
special hardship upon the man to wait, and it was of
importance that the sanctity of the Sabbath should be
maintained. It was an institution whose practical
use had been vindicated by centuries of experience.
But it was an institution which could only be sus
tained by ceaseless vigilance. There was always
somebody ready to encroach upon it in the interest
of his own personal advantage. But if exception
was allowed in one case, not clearly of overwhelming
necessity, then another would ask the same favor, and
another, and another, and the Sabbath rest, which was
such a social and national blessing, would be lost. For
this reason surgery, and most of medicine, were un-
95

96 SONS OF GOD.
lawful on that day. It is not very easy for us to
realize that to their way of thinking the cure which
it was proposed that Jesus should perform had in it
no element of religion. It was quite a matter of
course that a great Hakim should perform such a
cure, but then the Hakim was no more exempt from
Sabbath-day restrictions than was another man. And
Jesus did not question the soundness of their prem
ises, but He showed them in three sentences that
their conclusion was wrong.
" What man shall there be among you that shall
have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the Sab
bath day will he not lay hold on it and lift it out?"
That would be a breach of regulations also ; but
then it was clearly justifiable by an appeal to that con
viction which has always been powerful in the Jew,
the sacredness of property. They would unhesitat
ingly rescue a sheep on the Sabbath, not because the
sheep was suffering, but because it was worth money.
They would not have understood Him if He had
appealed to thdir pity, either for a sheep or a man,
but He appealed to their commercial instinct, " How
much is a man better than a sheep?" If the law of
the Sabbath can be set aside to save a sheep because
it is too valuable to be lost, what may not be done in
the interest of a man by one who is alive to his
intrinsic value ? In this case His argument was tri
fling because He was dealing with trifling people, and
may it not have had something of pleasantry in it ?
But it is of a piece with His whole way of thinking of
humanity.

JESUS' ESTIMATE OF HUMAN VALUE. 97
According to Him, this is God's way of feeling
about men. They are too valuable to be lost. He
came "to seek, and to save" them, because to His
judgment they were intrinsically worth saving. The
price which He paid shows how He, at any rate, esti
mated them. There is a homely old proverb to the
effect that " the worst use you can put a man to is to
hang him." It sometimes must be done, but it is a
waste which is incurred reluctantly. To damn him
would be a still worse use. This also may be neces
sary ; but we may be sure that it will be done still
more reluctantly.
Now, I wish you seriously to consider the ques
tion, whether this exalted estimate of the value of
humanity which Jesus entertained is a correct one ?
That He really did hold it I shall try to show after a
little, but at present I only ask you to consider the
valuation itself.
Whether it be correct or not, it is contrary to the
opinion unhesitatingly expressed by very many whom
men have accounted wise. Mr. Carlyle once took
occasion to speak of the population of England as
" thirty millions, mostly fools." There is no reason
to doubt that this contemptuous estimate expressed
his real thought. Horace had said the same thing
centuries before him, and Csesar had endorsed it.
The Pharisees held the same view, and the philoso
phers agreed with them to a man. But, what is most
significant to us, the religious world has, in large
measure, taken the same view. Even David, who
discerned that man was set in a place not far below

98 SONS OF GOD.
the angels, failed to comprehend the real force of the
fact, and asks in impatience, " What is man that thou
art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou visit-
est him ? Man is like to vanity ; his days are as a
shadow that passeth away." This estimate of the
poet king, and that of his splendid son, passed into
the thought of the Jews, and probably remains there
until this day. Jesus was utterly free from it,
though there are traces of their hereditary notions
upon this subject in the words of some of the New
Testament writers. But in the Western Christen
dom in which we live, the great Augustine's mean
and false estimate of man holds almost universal
sway. He was the great theological system-builder
of the Western Church. His theology has been
dominant for more than fourteen hundred years.
He had been reared a pagan. He was a philosopher,
a scholar, a man of affairs, and lived in debauchery
until nearly middle life. When he became a Chris
tian he pursued his new profession with the same
fierce eagerness»that had marked his old studies and
his old dissipations. But he brought with him into
Christianity the same low estimate of man's worth
which marked the shallow, cruel, despairing pagan
ism of decadent Rome. This dark view of human
character was intensified by the unflinching examina
tion which he made of himself. When he looked
within, he saw a personality beneath contempt. He
mistakenly assumed that that represented the aver
age man. But his genius and his sanctity availed to
carry his doctrine of " total depravity " throughout

JESUS' ESTIMATE OF HUMAN VALUE. 99
the Western Church, and bound it upon the minds
of men for centuries to come. In the Middle Ages
he was the master, and the Roman Church still
accepts his theology. Luther, an Augustinian
monk, brought it into the theology of the Germanic
Reformation. Calvin, in his Institutes, expounded
the same theology, and fastened it upon the French,
and Scotch, and American world. There are traces
of it in our Prayer Book, and our Articles adopted
it, without question, as a part of the common thought
of the time when they were formulated. It is now
the thought about man which is popularly accepted
as " orthodox." It speaks of man in terms of con
tempt. It fancies that by exaggerating his degrada
tion and unworthiness it so far exalts the goodness,
and mercy, and compassion of God. The more con
temptible the thing saved can be made out to be, the
more glorious will be the Saviour and the salvation.
It has come about also in our time that physical
science has joined forces with orthodox theology
to vilify human nature. If David thought meanly
of man, whom he saw to be, on his spiritual side,
"little lower than the angels," what must a genera
tion think which has found him to be, on his physi
cal side, little higher than the ape ? We have all
come to believe that this is substantially true. We
have traced the history of the race away beyond that
portion of its course with which Scripture is con
cerned. We trace the path back to Eden, cross the
Garden, and pass out at the other side, following the
trail to the primeval caves in which prehuman brutes

100 SONS OF GOD.
snarled, and gnawed their bones. We have watched
through the ages the heavings of the sea of humanity.
We have seen individuals, now and again, thrown
high up on the shore of some new achievement in
morals or knowledge, and have seen their descendants
hold the vantage gained. But the temper of our
science is to think meanly of the great, uncounted,
unthinking, unfeeling mass. It expects and hopes of
them little more than that they shall be the soil out
of which better things shall grow " with the passing
of the suns." The last word of physical science,
and the last word of Calvinistic theology concern
ing man, is the same : he is " vile earth " !
Now, set over against this Jesus' estimate of human
nature. As a starting-point, consider the title by
which He commonly described Himself, — the " Son of
man." He seemed always solicitous that there should
be no mistake about what He was. He was a man.
Whatever humanity might be, that, He wanted it
understood, He was. He asked no exemptions. He
identified Himself with men absolutely. He was not
God masquerading. He was a man, and therefore a
son of God. All His thought of His work for men
is colored by this belief in the intrinsic value of man.
In that great trilogy of parables from which Chris
tianity shines out, this is conspicuous, — the lost coin,
the lost sheep, the lost man. A woman loses a coin.
It rolls away into obscurity and darkness ; it be
comes overlaid with dust and rubbish ; it is lost to
circulation and to its owner's use : but the Divine
mistress never conceives of it as being anything but

JESUS' ESTIMATE OF HUMAN VALUE. 101
precious metal, wherever it may be. Being lost, it is
not transmuted to sordid iron or worthless clay.
She searches diligently until she finds it, because
she does believe it to be always valuable. When
she finds it, dimmed with dust and covered with
rust, it needs only to be cleansed, not recast. The
image and superscription of the great King is upon
it, and always has been.
A man loses a silly sheep, who strays from the
flock into the desert. It runs hither and yon, and
loses all sense of direction. It keeps itself alive on
brackish water and desert scrub ; it is torn by bram
bles, and hunted by wolves ; but it remains a sheep.
It is not transformed into a goat, much less into a
jackal. The Divine Shepherd seeks it, because he
knows it is of value. His motive is double : He
pities its pain, and he cannot afford to lose it or
its fleece. He leaves the ninety and nine, and
traverses the desert till he finds it, and brings it
home rejoicing.
A man loses his son. The lad, from wantonness
and a boy's unbridled thought of liberty, wanders
into a far country. He squanders his life among
harlots and swine. But no Circe transforms him
into a pig. His Divine Father's blood is in his
veins all the while, and his Father's love follows
him through all his wanderings. Wanting him, the
Father's content cannot be complete. When he
"comes to himself," not when he is transformed
into something else, he turns his face toward his
Father's house.

102 SONS OF GOD.
Could Augustine or Calvin have written these
parables ? No : they spring from Jesus' profound
estimate of the value of man.
His practice was like His theory. He associated
habitually with the " common people." This phrase
is persistently misapprehended. A sharp distinction
is drawn in our minds between the rich, cultivated,
educated class on the one hand, and the poor, squalid,
and vicious class on the other ; and we think of these
last as being the common people. This misses the
meaning. Common people are average people. Those
contemporaries of Jesus who were for any reason
withdrawn from the common mass of humanity were
withdrawn from Him. There always are such people.
The possession of exceptional wealth will isolate a
man. A certain kind of advanced education will do
it. A feeling of religious exclusiveness will do it.
So also will exceptional immorality, or confirmed,
deliberate wrong-doing. Jesus associated with none
of these. He could not do so without separating
Himself from tbe mass of average humanity, — the
" common people." Neither riches nor poverty shut
Him out, so long as their possessors remained in
touch with their kind. It was only when Dives shut
his gate, and sat down, flower-garlanded, to a banquet
with a few boon companions, that Jesus could not
enter. But He dined again and again at rich men's
houses, He had the entrSe of a rich man's garden, and
a rich girl who could afford to break a costly chate
laine of alabaster above his head, was his chosen
friend. Only those who withdrew themselves from

JESUS' ESTIMATE OF HUMAN VALUE. 103
their kind, shut themselves off from Him. He was
concerned with men, and wherever humanity was
left He was interested. He fraternized with the poor,
for in them He saw humanity stripped to its lowest
terms. He ate and drank with sinners, for in them
He found humanity stripped still more bare, un
clothed with either goods or character. The common
people heard Him gladly, because they recognized
Him as one of themselves.
" The man most man works best for man,
Like God at Nazareth."
I am quite alive to the objection which some urge
to this whole way of thinking and speaking. They
allege that it leaves out of sight, and indeed tends
to obscure, the distinction between the " saved " and
the " lost," between the regenerate and the unregen-
erate, between the natural man and the spiritual
man. They will allow what I have said, with some
qualifications, to apply to the saints ; but they assert
that other men absolutely, and even the saints
naturally, are " as nothing, and worse than nothing,
in the sight of God."
This objection may, as it seems to me, be fairly
answered in two ways. In the first place, it would
be sufficient to say that what I have tried to set forth
is clearly the teaching of Jesus ; and then leave to
them to harmonize it with other truth in whatever
way they see fit.
But, beside that, it seems to me that the objection
arises from a misconception of the facts of the situa-

104 SONS OF GOD.
tion, and a misapprehension of the Holy Scriptures.
The distinction of natural and spiritual man is in
deed present in the Scriptures. But it is a classifica
tion which does not run between men, but through
them ; that is to say, the same persons are at the
same time both natural and spiritual. It is not the
truth that some men are gods, and some are beasts ;
but it is true that every man is compounded of God
and brute. Salvation is the process of eradicating
the brute, and extending the dominion of the divine
part over the whole nature.
The supreme work of Jesus has been, and is, to
bring men into a hopeful temper. He does this by
showing them what they are. This is what is needed
practically. Men are deterred from entering upon
the task of personal redemption from the bonds of
sin by an antecedent despair. Their brute inherit
ance is so clamorous that they have forgotten that
they are also gods. The great value of the Incarnation
is the proof which it affords that God can in very
deed dwell in. human form. Wherever the great fact
of the Incarnation has been received, man's conscious
ness of his own dignity has revived. His sense of
kinship with God has asserted itself. The creature
discovers that he was not made subject to vanity
willingly, but by reason of Him who hath been under
that subjection in hope. He begins, in this hope, to
strive for deliverance from the bondage of corrup
tion into the glorious liberty of the sons of God !
In the presence of Jesus, men slowly discover that
they are not worthless, and that they are not hopeless.

JESUS' ESTIMATE OF HUMAN VALUE. 105
If my hope of salvation lay only in my con
temptible craving for God's pity, I should despair
in advance. But since I learn that God needs me
as well as I him, I rest serenely in the certainty
that God will, unless I hinder him, accomplish his
own purpose.
Jesus appeals with confidence to that instinct of
men which has always responded whenever they have
been induced to heed Him. He, and He alone, has
found the long-closed door to men's innermost soul ;
and such have found Him to be the very door through
which they pass to God.
" He that entereth in by the door is the shep
herd of the sheep. To him the porter openeth ; and
the sheep hear his voice : and he calleth his own sheep
by name, and leadeth them out. And when he put-
teth forth his own sheep, he goeth before them, and
the sheep follow him : for they know his voice. And
a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from
him ; for they know not the voice of strangers.
Verily, verily, I say unto you, I am the door of the
sheep. All that ever came before me are thieves and
robbers : but the sheep did not hear them. I am the
door : by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved,
and shall go in and out, and find pasture. The thief
cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to de
stroy : I am come that they might have life, and that
they might have- it more abundantly. I am the good
shepherd : the good shepherd giveth his life for the
sheep. But he that is a hireling, and not the shepherd,
whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming,

106 SONS OF GOD.
and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth ; and the wolf catch-
eth them, and scattereth the sheep. The hireling
fleeth, because he is a hireling, and careth not for the
sheep. I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep,
and am known of mine."

IX.
GOD'S LOVE THE MOTIVE IN
REDEMPTION.

IX.

GOD'S LOYE THE MOTIVE IN REDEMPTION.
Watt. se. u-
" Chen the Pharisees foent out, anb helb a council against htm,
hofo theg might bestrog him."
3ohn IIF. 9.
" ge that hath seen me hath seen the JFather ; anb hofer sagest thou
then, Shefo us the JFather '/ "
The Incarnation is often thought of as an abstract
theological dogma. All words which end in " tion "
produce this effect upon the average mind. It is the
termination wliich in English denotes abstraction, as
" ness " does concreteness. Abstract propositions are
most valuable ; but they belong in a region where
practical minds do not habitually move, or feel at
home. People generally are not fond of doctrine.
They regard it as the perquisite of specialists. They
usually hold in high honor those men who are at
home in it, but they wait themselves until the doctors
have done with abstractions and bring out the prac
tical results. The doctrine of the Incarnation has
been specially unfortunate in this regard. It involves
of necessity the most transcendental of all possible
ideas. It has to do with the essential nature of God,
with the constitution of the human soul, with meta
physics, logic, and philosophy. On this account it
has been the theme of endless discussion and contro
versy. The every-day man is repelled by the very
109

110 SONS OF GOD.
term, and is not very clear in his mind just what is
meant by it.
But, nevertheless, it is the central truth of Chris
tianity. The question, What is a Christian ? cannot
be answered without taking account of it. The reli
gious motives and hopes of Christendom flow from
it. And although it is true that hardly any can be
altogether clear as to what the term denotes, even
for himself, still nearly every one has a general notion
of what it means. It is with this general idea alone
that I intend to deal now. The simplest form of
statement that I can think of is something like this :
We believe that God has manifested Himself in the
person of the man Jesus Christ. This is Jesus' own
way of putting it. He asserts that any one who has
seen Him has seen God. He asserts in various ways
that He Himself is God, in the world upon an errand
of mercy. By watching Him closely, therefore, we
come to see what God's disposition, temper, way of
thinking about men and dealing with them, really is.
When one, then, thinks of Jesus as being really an
incarnation of God, He becomes at once of the most
absorbing interest ; for, when all is said, people would
rather know about God than about any other thing
in the universe. It is quite true that they very often
show great lack of interest in religious questions and
teachers, as compared with secular things and living
men. But this is not because they are really not in
terested in the questions, but because they either do
not believe that any answer to them is possible, or
do not believe that the particular teacher who asks a

GOD'S LOVE THE MOTIVE IN REDEMPTION. Ill
hearing knows what the answer is. I think it is
within the truth to say that ninety-nine men out of
every hundred have a religion. There is a religious
side to every man's life and nature. The religious
faculty is as universal as is the faculty of reason or
taste. It satisfies, or tries to satisfy, itself in a thou
sand ways. The savages' superstitions, the pagans'
strange ceremonials of sacrifice and lustration, are
but expressions of it. St. Paul declares that in every
nation there have been those who have "felt after
God, if haply they might find him." Among us it
shows itself in many and strange ways. In one it is
only a vague, formless apprehension; in another it
is a constant, or a frequently recurring, self-disgust.
In another the faculty seems to be extinct, but is
found to be only quiescent until it is momentarily
startled into consciousness by a sudden terror or blow
in the presence of which a man involuntarily calls
out: " Oh, my God ! " In yet another it takes the
form of an arbitrary and eclectic code of personal
morals, which he has slowly formulated for himself.
There is something which he will not allow himself
to do, even though he might gain by it. Every man
keeps a virtue by him. In some little corner of his
life there is a little place fenced off from himself;
that is his forbidden fruit, and he is generally stead
fast in his determination not to eat of it. Another
great company, containing many whom we love to
call our personal friends, show their religion by their
high morality. They accept the code of ethics which
obtains in the time and place where they have chanced

112 SONS OF GOD.
to be born, and steadfastly regulate their lives thereby.
This is their religion.
Now, we are in the habit of assuming that the
Christian is in some way better off than the best of
these. We assume that he has been, to some extent,
let into the secret of God's will and purpose ; that
while others know about God, he knows Him directly ;
that while others are feeling after God, he has found
Him. Is this true ?
It is perfectly clear, that if it be true, it is a most
astounding truth. Its practical importance cannot
be over-estimated. If we could only see God, it
would be an unspeakable relief, both to our moral
and our intellectual natures. In the matter of right
living, what would it not do for us ? I think the
most pathetic sight in the world is the spectacle of
men and women struggling on year after year after
righteousness, without knowing why they do so, or
whether their struggle will bring them to any real
goal. I have known hundreds of such. They have
struggled against the current of temptation within
and without, from a dumb instinct. In some cases
they are swept away despite their sturdy strokes.
In some cases they seem after a time to become mor
ally exhausted, and sink. Others, again, go out of
sight still swimming. But the pitiful thing is, that
in no such case do they see the significance of their
moral struggle or what is involved in it. What a
stay and stimulus to them it would be to see God !
The Incarnation is the truth which they miss. It is
the answer, and the only answer thus far, to some of

GOD'S LOVE THE MOTIVE IN REDEMPTION. 113
the most constant and imperious needs of men. The
practical need is for a mediator between men and
God — a tertium quid which will bring them into
union. The truth is, that, apart from the Incarna
tion, the very word God is only an abstraction. It is
doubtful whether any but the Christian is intellectu
ally justifiable in ascribing to God the qualities which
men do so glibly. Is He good? Setting Jesus aside,
the answer is at least doubtful ! One can only hope
so. But under the pressure of pain, and in the
presence of "Nature's immoralities," one must doubt
of it. Judging existence by what we can see of it,
and without any revelation of whence it proceeds
and whither it tends, one must remain doubtful of
whether it is presided over by a good genius or a
malevolent sprite, or whether it has any plan or pur
pose whatever. Nor do the observable facts of life
yield up any clear answer to the question of the
endurance of a human soul. There are some things
wliich intimate immortality, but then there are just
as many and as cogent considerations which point
the opposite way. Indeed, the " God " who is con
structed by human reason out of the only material
available, is a being powerless to engage a human
affection, or, indeed, to awaken anything but the most
languid interest. In point of fact, He does not do
anything more than this. Did you ever know a man
who cared nothing for the person of Jesus who had
any real, vivid, personal interest in God ? I never
did. The truth is, that if one will take the trouble to

114 SONS OF GOD.
trace up the various complex notions, which, in their
combination, compose the accepted idea of God, he
will find that they have proceeded from Jesus Christ.
Men have looked at Him and seen the Father.
They have seen a father. This is the characteris
tic of the conception of God which comes from Jesus.
It forms itself not around the idea of greatness, or
majesty, or mystery, but love. It thinks of God as
a parent who has transmitted part of his own life to
his numerous offspring. These children are scattered
far and wide. Some are silly babes, and some are
wayward sons. They have wandered far from their
father's house, and for the most part have forgotten
all about him. Myriads of them are living in pov
erty and pain. They have used up long ago the
little portion of goods which fell to each one's share
when they left their father's house, and to make it
good they have been for many a century plundering
and over-reaching one another. The weak and help
less ones are robbed, while the lusty and smart pile
up heaps of treasure. From the whole mass a con
fused cry comes up to heaven.
It is to this situation that the idea of " Salvation "
addresses itself. But look closely at just what is
this thing we call salvation. It is a movement, not
of men toward God, but of God toward men. He
comes to seek and to save. This is the element
which has given such a tenacious vitality to Jesus'
plan. He roots the process of salvation in the nature
of God. We might do without God, but He cannot
do without us. This is the fact which gave Jesus

GOD'S LOVE THE MOTIVE IN REDEMPTION. 115
such assured confidence of ultimate success. He
was working with God.
Let us open this thought a little. Why do men
exist at all ? What did God make them for ? What
is the final cause of creation ? The answer is stated
in the central formula of Christianity, " I believe in
God the Father ; and in Jesus Christ His Son."
That is to say, God's essential nature is such that
He has not remained lonely. That instinct of propa
gation, the most imperious of all impulses in man, is
also the dominant impulse in God ! He was beget
ting, and the Son was begotten from all eternity.
But the Son is also " the first-born among many
creatures." God will not sit solitary at the centre of
an empty universe. If he were Power this might be,
for the sense of power does not need to be either
shared or admired in order to give satisfaction to
its possessor. If He were Benevolence, Goodness,
Truth, other sentient beings would not be a necessity
to Him, for all these find complete gratification in
merely existing. Jesus' description of God is, that
He is Love. But Love, by its very nature, cannot
exist without an object. So, from God's necessity for
companionship springs Adam, " who was the son of
God," and all his race. The rationale of Redemption
is the same as that of Creation. It is rooted in the
eternal fact that God's purpose must remain unful
filled until He brings back His children to His love.
As Jesus phrases it : " It is not the will of your
Father which is in heaven that one of these little
ones should perish." Let me call to your mind again

116 SONS OF GOD.
that wonderful parable of the Prodigal Son. There
are four scenes in the drama of a human soul. The
first is a splendid and happy home, where an old man
and his children live in peace and free interchange of
affection. The second is a young man in torn and
ragged silks and faded garlands, standing wistfully
in a confused scene where pipers and swine, harlots
and prodigals, jostle one another. The third is a ven
erable and sad father sitting, waiting wearily the
home-coming of his child. The last is a great house,
illuminated, from whose open doors and windows
pours out the sound of music, feasting, and the sweet
cries of love.
The father keeps himself advised of his child's
whereabouts through all his wanderings, and his love
pursues him always. It cannot be but that the Eter
nal Father will follow every child through every turn
and labyrinth of earth and hell. The Psalmist long
ago had a fleeting glimpse of the truth, and left it
upon record: "Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or
whither shall I flee from thy presence ? If I ascend
up into heaven, thou art there : If I make my bed
in hell, thou art there. If I take the wings of the
morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea ;
even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right
hand shall hold me." He who thinks of this sub
lime burst as proclaiming only God's greatness,
misses the meaning. It is that the relation of the
Father and the child is such that, in the very nature
of things, it never can be sundered.
But this pursuit by God of an errant child is com-

GOD'S LOVE THE MOTIVE IN REDEMPTION. 117
patible with sharp methods. Love can be cruel to be
kind. God's love can brandish lightnings as scourges,
and open before the prodigal sights of such abysses
as shake the soul. It is a fearful thing to fall into
the hands of the living God. The stem, but bracing,
discipline of living is the means by which He brings
His children home. But I cannot conceive of any
mode, or place, or term of punishment which is not
meant to be remedial. A place and mode of torment
for human souls must be a necessary, but not a per
manent, institution in God's universe. Eternity can
not be predicated of evil without bringing hopeless
confusion into all thinking. The last enemy which
shall be destroyed is death. Ay ; it is only at long
and weary last ; but destroyed it shall be. For it is
not the will of God that even one of these little ones
shall perish. And God fulfils His will in many ways.
Salvation, then, is God's process of bringing his
children back to Himself. It must be borne in mind
that we are dealing here with things which cannot
be forced, not even by God Himself. The old
legend which tells of Julian the apostate lying
wounded and dying in the desert, flinging up a
handful of sand like a vanquished gladiator in
the arena, and crying, " Oh, Nazarene, Thou hast
conquered ! " misconceives the very spirit of Christi
anity. God does not win, and will not have, victories
thus. God is a Christian. He overcomes evil with
good. His formula is, " My son, give Me thine heart."
Anything less than this He will not have. He would
win His children as the maiden is won to blissful

118 SONS OF GOD.
surrender to her lover, or as the strong man is bound
in the cords of love.
Why do we so confidently assert all this about
God? Because we see Him in the Nazarene. By
walking with the Son we come to see the Father.
We find God present and rejoicing in human loves at
Cana ; present, grieving with human woe, at Nain ;
present, and pitying human weakness and sin, before
the women taken in adultery ; present, and denoun
cing human selfishness in the Scribes and Pharisees ;
present, and gathering little children in his arms ;
weeping over human folly, as he looks from the
mountain shoulder upon Jerusalem ; eagerly grasping
at the faintest proffer of divine love by the thief
upon the cross ; pleading in extenuation of mortal
sin, that, " they know not what they do ; " passing out
of sight to the Father with divine benediction on His
lips ; disappearing into the heavens wherein the
Eternal Heart of the universe throbs in sympathy
with human need.

X.
PILGRIMS AND STRANGERS.

PILGRIMS AND STRANGERS.
I $et. M. tt.
" Bearlg fielobeb, I beseech gou as strangers anb pilgrims, afistain
from fieshlg lasts, fohieh foar against the soul."
The fundamental question in Ethics is, Why should
I do right? But the pressing practical question is,
How shall I do so ? St. Peter approaches this second
question from a strange point of view. He appeals
to a very unusual motive to produce right living. I
will ask you, after a little, to look at it steadfastly.
But first, I want to place before you some of the
common arguments for purity of life.
Everybody acknowledges that the problem is more
important than anything else, more important than
right thinking or right believing. " His creed cannot
be wrong whose life is in the right," is the way the
secular world states it. Where and how to find a
sound basis for morals is the thing which engages the
attention of preacher, priest, social reformer, states
man, philosopher, and man of science. An essay
published some years ago under the title, " A Scien
tific Basis of Morals," attracted the attention of two
continents. How shall men be enabled to live
rightly ? This is the question of the age. We will
121

122 SONS OF GOD.
withhold for the present the answer which Religion
gives. The secular answer is, " Righteousness comes
by knowledge." That is to say, sin and crime are
folly. The universe is so constituted that sin brings
suffering in its train. If men were only wise enough
they would be righteous. In point of fact, they are
ignorant, short-sighted, and therefore unjust and
incontinent. It is out of this feeling grows the high
estimate which is generally placed upon education.
Think of the way in which that idea is exploited.
In the United States the machinery for education is
probably more costly, more efficient, and certainly
is more highly valued, than the institutions provided
for any other purpose. The State may be remiss in
laying, collecting, and expending many a tax, but not
the school tax. People differ politically about every
thing else, but not about that. They all hold educa
tion in the highest value. The schoolhouse is
everywhere, and the college follows hard after it.
Those who have been fortunate enough to secure for
themselves a university education are enthusiastic
just now to extend it to the masses. It is seriously
proposed to make attendance at school compulsory
upon all children, under penalty of fine and imprison
ment of the parent who is at fault. I ask you to
notice carefully the reason invariably urged for all
this. It is not that education makes men happy. No
one would think of defending it upon the ground
that knowledge is pleasure. The reason alleged is,
that knowledge produces goodness. "Education
makes men good citizens ; " that is, it leads men to

PILGRIMS AND STRANGERS. 123
discharge rightly the duties which belong to them
as individuals, and the obligations which bind them
to their fellows. This theory has been deliberately
acted upon now for nearly a century ? Is it true ?
Many seriously question it. I doubt whether the
practical result has been such as to satisfy anybody.
I think people are slowly beginning to see the truth,
that knowledge has no moral quality at all. It
neither advances nor retards virtue. Upon the whole,
it probably makes the conditions of virtue more
favorable, but it has in it no quality which can pro
duce righteousness. A generation which depends
upon it to produce morality will come to fatal grief.
And this is just as true of social, or political, or
economical knowledge, as it is of purely physical
science. The Church herself has not been free from the
prevailing delusion. She also has gone largely into
the business of " education," and with the same
purpose in view. If a thoughtful man steps into a
Sunday-school supply-store, for instance, he will find
much food for thought. He will be bewildered by
the machinery for instruction which he finds about
him. He will find that all the stores of sacred learn
ing have been ransacked, and their contents arranged
and packed for easy distribution among all people.
Lives of Christ, written from every conceivable point
of view ; illustrated books of the fauna and flora of
the Holy Land ; libraries by the ton, and newspapers
by the mile, for Sunday schools ; charts, pictures,
handbooks, maps, class-books, text-books, cards, toys,

124 SONS OF GOD.
puzzles, in a word, every imaginable and unimagin
able device for the easy, quick, and sure distribution
of knowledge about religion. Of course, the rationale
of it all is evident. It is believed that by imparting
knowledge, goodness will be secured. In this belief
myriads are toiling painfully and patiently week by
week to educate old men and maidens, young men
and children, into the love and service of God. Now,
I would not speak slightingly of this. I am not
worthy to loose the shoe-latchet of any one of thou
sands who labor thus. So far as all this activity is
the result of pure religion, it is worthy of all honor ;
but so far as it is looked to as a cause of that same,
it will largely fail. The reason is evident. There
is a gap between knowledge and conduct which only
something else can bridge. Our Lord forestalled it
all. " Men will run to and fro, and knowledge will be
increased : but when He comes, will He find faith
upon the earth? " You will observe that this knowl
edge of which I have been speaking is one, all of
the ingredients of which are gathered from this world.
Now, the contention of Christianity is, that the
materials are not present here from which to con
struct right conduct. Or, to put it differently, so
long as one confines himself to considerations drawn
from this world, there is no sufficient reason to be
found why he should do right, and no sufficient
motive to induce him to do so. It is for this rea
son that the apostle exhorts men " as pilgrims and
strangers," that they should refrain from fleshly
lusts. What he did say has been often misunder-

PILGRIMS AND STRANGERS. 125
stood. Bunyan's " Pilgrim " has misled thousands.
It is often thought that the Christian notion is, that
one becomes a " pilgrim and a stranger " by adopting
the service of Christ; that his profession estranges
him from his fellows and the world in which he has
heretofore felt himself at home. The Church is
thought of as a little band who have voluntarily
bound packs upon their backs, took staves in their
hands, and gone away into a strange country. This
is but a travesty of the profound truth. The
apostle asserts that all men are in the same case.
They do not become strangers to life by entering the
service of God ; but they are so always, and in the
nature of the case. Shakspeare saw it clearly, as
was his fashion. " Man is a being of large discourse,
looking before and after." He is larger than the
world in which he lives. If he shrink to its dimen
sions, he does so at the expense of his essential
nature. Christianity has often been jeered at by
practical men as being " other-worldly." It is so.
This is its distinction. It looks outside this world
for some of its most potent motives and most valued
consolations. It remembers that here a man " hath
no continuing city ; " that " he cometh up and is cut
down like the grass;" that "he continueth not in
one stay ; " that he is a pilgrim passing through a
country in which he is closely concerned for the
time, but which is only one stage of a far longer
journey. This is not the place to show why we
believe this to be a scientifically accurate view of the
facts of life. But it is the place to say that this

126 SONS OF GOD.
" pilgrim view " is not any unwholesome sentimental
izing of a melancholy Jacques, but a broader, more
worthy, and far more moral view of life than its
opposite. The late Professor Clifford ventured to do,
and evidently with sincerity of purpose, what very
few have : he accused Christianity of being distinctly
immoral in its effect. He asserted that its habit of
withdrawing men's attention from the things which
may be seen and known, and directing them with
such persistence to the things which are unseen and
cannot be known, tended to weaken the only motives
out of which practical morality can flow. He argued
that this world will be best administered when men's
whole attention and energy are given to it, un dis
tracted by considerations drawn from any other. I
think many others have vaguely the same thought,
as is shown by their readiness to bend to the authority
of human conventions, and their slowness in per
mitting their conduct to be regulated by any thought
of future or divine things. Against this I assert my
belief that right living is neither safe nor reasonable,
unless it be inspired and fortified by belief in unseen
realities. The facts bear this out. Ask any one to
point to the most shining example of human good
ness of which there is any record. All votes will be
cast for the same person who found no one to take
up his challenge, "Which of you convinceth me of
sin ? " But then He was the one who was domi
nated most absolutely by the over-world.' " I came
out from God ; and I go to the Father." And who
will lay any thing to the charge of His first elect, the

PHGRIMS AND STRANGERS. 127
earliest generation of disciples ? Can any group of
men and women be found of more brilliant and
striking goodness ? Where will the observer go to
find displayed better virtue, charity, peace, gentle
ness, kindness, love, fortitude, patience, heroism,
than to them? But this was while and because
the spell of the Divine Pilgrim was fresh upon them.
They looked for a better country, even an heavenly.
Their citizenship was elsewhere. They believed in
God, and loved him ; hoped for heaven ; feared the
damnation of hell ; were ware of their adversary
the Devil ; prayed and fasted and gave alms ; and
has the world ever seen, not better Christians, but
better men or women ? The Christian looks outside
for the approval of his conduct, and, therefore, is not
misled by sophistical courts such as exist in this
world. But let us try this truth by a more direct, immedi
ate test. Let us watch a soul in the actual process
of moral struggle. The question is of sufficient
importance to warrant us in using a case laid bare to
me in the confessional. Here is a man who has
sinned, not once, but again and again. But his moral
nature has cried out every time it has been out
raged. The offence is not one which, like envy,
wrath, malice, shows a diseased conscience. The sin
is physical. He declares that it does not involve his
better self. It is a rebellion of the members against
the law of the mind. He has gone over the whole
matter with himself a hundred times. He has said to
himself, in extenuation, that " the offence is personal,

128 SONS OF GOD.
and tends in no way to injure society ; it harms no
one ; it may be but a physical idiosyncrasy ; he is no
more responsible for it than he would be for the
unequal gait resulting from a deformed leg ; his case
is exceptional ; God, knowing all the circumstances,
will judge him by other laws than those established
for others ; the other compartments of his moral
nature are sound, and will keep him afloat, though
this one be broken up." Now, I ask in all candor,
why are not any or all of these pleas sufficient?
Why does his soul still cry out for deliverance ? He
has violated no human law. He has not disturbed
any social order. From the secularist point of view
his moral agony is sheer folly. What shall I say
to him ? What can I say that is more nearly true to
the absolute reality of things than this : " I beseech
you, as a pilgrim and a stranger, abstain from fleshly
lusts ! " As a pilgrim and a stranger. He is
sojourning temporarily in a material existence which
will subdue him to itself if he will allow. It is as
relentless as the law of gravitation. There is no
force in the whole material or psychical universe
which will avail to counteract it. What he needs is
to realize that he is encompassed about with a great
cloud of witnesses ; that the outcry of his moral
nature, under the stress of physical defilement, is for
him the voice of God : that " God hath set eternity in
the heart of every man ; " that moral actions involve
consequences which stretch away beyond the stage
across which he is just now walking. It is only
when one sets conduct in the light of eternity that it

PILGRIMS AND STRANGERS. 129
can be seen in its true proportions. He who refuses
to set the life that now is side by side with the life
which is to come, will fail disastrously to order it
aright. It is hard to see how common sanity can miss this
truth. Who would fancy that a mode of existence
which is fitting during a week's voyage across the
ocean would be fitting for a stable community ashore ?
Who can imagine that, taking all things together,
men will really adopt the same code of conduct
whether they believe the span of their existence to
be fourscore years, or whether they believe them
selves destined to a continuous immortality ? From
here emerges the potent force which produces Chris
tian righteousness. Christianity believes the soul to
have a long and noble history. It comes from God,
and goes to " the heavenlies." It dwells here, like
Israel did in the wilderness. There is enough in the
life to fill the years full. It is of the deepest inter
est and significance. There is enough to be learned
and to be done to engage all energies. But it is not
final, and cannot be treated as final without becoming
meaningless. The Christian society has often been charged with
an evil indifference to human welfare as such. Social
and political reformers have often blamed the Church
for holding aloof and leaving them to carry out their
projects unaided. Christians, they say, are so busy
"saving their souls," or "keeping the Church
pure " in doctrine or order, that they have no
time for, and no interest in, humanitarian labors. The

130 SONS OF GOD.
reproach has not been altogether undeserved. One
who loves the Church is compelled at times to hang
his head in shame at her supineness and her selfish
ness. But these have been the times at which she
has been faithless to the spirit of her Master. Besides
that, it is to be remembered that there are a thousand
projects for the good of humanity in which the mem
bers of Christ's flock must work as individuals, where
the Church in her organized capacity is not fitted to
act. Her machinery is not adjusted primarily to
carry forward reforms, but to produce and conserve
in individuals the spirit which leads to work for hu
manity. In this spirit Christians have never been
lacking. Indeed, it would not be extravagant to say
that they have furnished the membership and the
leaders for every movement for human weal which
has justified itself by its results. In proportion as
they have realized the shortness and uncertainty of
human life, they have become the more solicitous to
remove stumbling-blocks out of the path of those
who will follow them. It would not be too much to
say, that it is this sense of brotherhood in a common
destiny which has caused in Christendom the innu
merable alleviations in the pain of living. Pagans do
nothing of the kind. Professor Drummond, in his
delightful book on Tropical Africa, points out that
all Africa is criss-crossed by countless footpaths.
They lead in every direction, and they are all crooked.
A stone is in the way, or a limb falls across the
path, and the first savage who comes along goes
around it. It never occurs to him to remove it in the

PILGRIMS AND STRANGERS. 131
interest of the next traveller. The next comer steps
around it also, and a permanent bend is made in the
path. They have no sense of human solidarity.
Where the spirit of Christ has gained a lodgement
men have come to think of those who come after
themselves. He " makes the paths straight." Jesus
pours maledictions upon them who place stumbling-
blocks in the path of human life. He passed through
it Himself, and found it perplexing, painful. He
rolled away the great stone which blocked up its exit,
and shut out the view of what might lie beyond.
Through the triumphant gateway out of which He
passed to glory streams back along the path an illu
mination to light the feet and guide the way of pil
grims following ; and they are sustained and inspired
by the song which they hear of " Peace on earth to
men of good will."

XI.
THE IMMANENT GOD.

XI.

THE IMMANENT GOD.
ILufte -EOT. 20, 21.
"Slnb when he ferns bemanbeb of the Pharisees, fohen the ftingbom
of Cob shoulb come, he ansfoereb them anb saib, Che ftingbom of
Cob cometh not toith obserbation: ^either shall theg sag, Ho hire!
or, lo there ! for, beholb, the ftingbom of ffiob is foithin gou."
The time when a child " finds out Santa Claus "
is a moment of considerable peril to that child's
moral nature. He is apt to resent having been
duped, and to remain for a time thereafter in a scep
tical frame of mind. He is all the more resentful
because he has been duped through his affections,
and by those whom he loves and trusts. If their
testimony is not trustworthy, he reasons in his child
ish way, whose is ? Later on he finds out that he
had not really been deceived. The love from whence
came his cherished toys and presents was a real thing.
In accommodation to his childish mind, it was person
ified, and named Santa Claus. While he understood
as a child, the great fact of human love could only
reach him in the concrete way in which children
apprehend. When he became a man, and put away
childish things, he put away his childish ideal of the
rubicund gift-bringer, and put in place of him the
affection which he found diffused among his fellows.
135

136 SONS OF GOD.
This is a parable, and, like all parables, must not be
pressed with too much detail. But I think it fairly
represents the change through which men's minds
are just now passing as to the way in which they
conceive of God. A general way of thinking about
God, which has obtained ever since there has been
any record of human thought, shows signs, in our
time, of being abandoned, or, to speak more accu
rately, outgrown. The change is attended with grave
peril to both faith and morals ; but it is inevitable, and
when it shall have been completed will be found to
be good. Let me try to state just what is the concep
tion of God which is passing away.
It thinks of God as an infinitely good, just, and
powerful person, who has His seat outside the universe.
He is self-contained and impassible. In His essential
being He is so little engaged with the material or sen
tient universe that its passing away would not disturb
Him more than the vanishing of a dream or the pass
ing of a fancy would a human mind. For His own
pleasure He has fashioned the heavens and the earth,
projected them into time and space, and set them
spinning. From time to time, in ways and for
reasons which cannot be calculated upon, He makes
incursions, incalculable irruptions, into the world.
These visitations are irregular, extraordinary, attended
with, and shown by, mighty signs and wonders. But
ordinarily he remains in the heavens, and allows the
world to proceed by fixed laws and processes which
he established at the beginning. His interference at
any time is a miracle. He does interfere at times,

THE IMMANENT GOD. 137
being moved thereto by love or by divine indignation.
He comes to one here and there with a benediction,
and to whole communities now and again with a
curse. He is thought of as the Great Artificer.
Paley's watch is the symbol of his mode of acting.
He monopolizes in himself an absolute goodness, so
that mankind shivers in moral nakedness. He is
self-conscious, and therefore to be pleased with ado
ration. He is angry, and to be appeased by those who
know what the incense is which is grateful to Him,
and where it may be found. He waits serenely while
the generations of men are born, run through their
little lives, and die. When the tree of humanity shall
have dropped the last of its fruit He will have them
all gathered up and sorted. The good will be care
fully preserved for his delectation, and the bad will
be cast into the jakes of the universe so as to be out
of his sight. The Church is a little company of
men who have been wise enough to discover who and
what He is ; to adjust their lives to His arbitrary
requirements, and thus secure for themselves safety
and an assurance of continued existence in felicity
when the universe shall be presently broken up. As
the corporation which holds the monopoly of spirit
ual knowledge in the earth, it has the right to govern
men. It formulates the truth which has been given
to it at certain known times and places, holds it as a
" deposit," to which it has no power to add, and from
which it has no right to take away. In a word, it
conceives of the world as having been mechanically
created from without ; as mechanically governed from

138 SONS OF GOD.
without ; as having been thrown out of its original
harmonious movement by a malign influence from
without ; as redeemed and rescued by a complex de
vice introduced from without. It stands with its
back to the facts of existence, looks away off into
space, and inquires, " When shall the Kingdom of
God appear ? And what shall be the sign of its com
ing?" It is bewildered and irritated at the reply,
" The Kingdom of God is within you ; it cometh
not with observation." He who says, " Lo, here it
is ! or, Lo, there it is ! " shows thereby that he does
not understand what the thing is for which he looks.
But to change a habit of thought which has be
come rooted and fixed by ages upon ages of custom
and inheritance requires also centuries of time. I
think it is true that only now is the Church begin
ning on any large scale to comprehend some of
the profound teachings of Jesus. "The Law was a
schoolmaster to bring men to Christ ; " but that
schoolmaster did not lay down his rod and horn
book by any means as early as is usually assumed.
He is still at work, and numbers his pupils by the
myriad. Two things have happened, however, with
in late centuries, to bring his pupils to a truer thought
about God and his kingdom. These are the Refor
mation in the sixteenth century and the Doctrine of
Evolution in the nineteenth. ,They both produced
temporary scepticism, but they were both enormous
steps forward in the knowledge of God. The Refor
mation was an appeal from wliat claimed to be the
voice of God speaking from outside to the voice of

THE IMMANENT GOD. 139
God speaking from within the soul. It was an appeal
from " Authority " to " private judgment." But its
significance lay in its tacit assertion that the moral
judgment of men is trustworthy. It asserted that
the Kingdom of God is within, and must be sought
there if anywhere. This is why those who opposed
it did so so earnestly, and believed that thus they
were doing God service. The central principle of
the Reformation seemed to them to be idolatry. It
was an attempt to find God in a place where he had
never been looked for, and in a place where they had
been taught that only unclean things dwell. It was
an assertion of the indwelling of the Spirit of God
in man. The truth gained ground but slowly, for
all the habits of religious thought and action were
opposed to it. Indeed, it was but a little while until
the statement of the truth itself became a fetich
before which the Reformed Church demanded pros
tration under penalty. "Justification by Faith"
quickly passed from being the statement of an inner
principle to be an outward and mechanical law ; but
the essential truth had been seen, and has never been
lost to sight. It has operated throughout Western
Christendom to bring out into consciousness the
truth that men are the sons of God, and as such are
immediately and always in contact with the Father.
The Doctrine of Evolution has also powerfully
broken up the notion of God's outward and mechani
cal relation to nature and man. Indeed, it has smitten
that notion to its death. It has rendered impossible
many of the most generally accepted ideas about reli-

140 SONS OF GOD.
gion ; for example, the notion about creation, Provi
dence, and prayer. It is teaching men to look for
God, not in the " violations of natural law," but in
the movement of the natural order itself. This change
of habit is not easy. Some cannot make it at all ;
some rage against the doctrine itself as a satanic
deception to snare men's souls. The rage is idle and
useless ; more than that, it is dangerous : but it is
not difficult to understand and to sympathize with
those who feel it. They seek to heighten the idea of
God as a creator and ruler by representing Him as
working from without upon intractable materials, and
subduing them to Himself. We think of these same
materials moving forward slowly but surely toward
the shape and purpose wliich is theirs in God. The
processes are themselves divine. In the movements
of the universe, and not in its creation or its interrup
tions, is God seen. Suppose one had been present as
a spectator at the " creation," what would he have
seen ? He would not have seen the divine form nor
heard the divine voice any more then than now ; he
would have seen matter and life moving seemingly by
their own volition from chaos into order ; he would
have discerned there, not the person, but the garments,
of God. If he would see Him face to face, he must
then, as always, look within. The Doctrine of Evo
lution is swiftly and surely setting men to think of
God, not as a remote and inaccessible personage, but
as the Father who dwells and works in the same
house with His children. It fills with divinity all
the processes of life ; for it begins to see that they are

THE IMMANENT GOD. 141
not aimless, but lead to a definite goal. It looks at
the whole creation groaning and travailing in a com
mon pain, and sees in the travail itself the hope of
the final issue in the sons of God. It waits for
" That long-drawn divine event,
Toward which the whole creation moves."
It does not ask, Who shall ascend into heaven ? that
is, to bring down the Christ from above ; or, Who
shall descend into, hell? that is, to bring up the
Christ again from the dead: for it knows that the
Word is nigh us, even in our mouth and in our heart.
Says Cardinal Newman, " If I looked into a mirror,
and failed to see my face, I should have the same
feeling as if, when looking at the world, I failed to
see God."
Now, this new way, which beyond question is
Christ's way, of looking for God in the things which
we see, is bringing about some tremendous results.
First of all, it is attracting a new amount and a new
kind of attention to Jesus Himself. As a truer esti
mate of humanity has gained ground, men have be
come more ready to see God in the person of a man.
It is a significant fact, that all the " Lives of Christ "
have been written since the Reformation, and far the
most and best of them within the last half century.
Before that there was a feeling that there was some
thing unworthy in the attempt to examine closely
the human side of the Divine Man. To do so would
have the effect to bring Him within the borders of
that human life which was thought of as destitute of

142 SONS OF GOD.
all divinity. Now all that is changed. His life has
been traced step by step with painstaking exhaustive-
ness. All His human relationships have been eagerly
studied. The result is, that He is seen in the very act
of increasing day by day in wisdom and stature, and
in favor with God and men ; and as the man stands
out more clearly before us, the God becomes the
more unmistakable. Men look at Him, and then
turn to look anew at themselves, and are filled with
wonder, humiliation, amazement, and hope. They
discern the Kingdom of God within them where they
had fancied that slavery or anarchy held possessions.
The result is to change their ideas and their lives.
Sin is no longer a violation of an arbitrary statute
enacted by an absentee ruler, but the breach of a
vital law. Prayer is no longer the asking of favors
of a powerful person, whose good-will or existence
may be doubted if the favor be not granted, but the
effort to bring about an internal harmony with that
movement of things which is known to be of God.
Righteousness is no longer a series of actions to
which safety and reward are attached, but a personal
adjustment to the movements of the kingdom of which
one forms a part. The Church becomes a divine
institution, not because its structure is imposed from
without, but because it is the body which is formed
by, and which protects and gives expression to, the
divine life which is within.
I know there are some to whom this way of speak
ing is incomprehensible, and some to whom it seems
untrue. I hardly need to say that I think it to be

THE IMMANENT GOD. 143
true, and that they are in error. They do not think
that great events, great forces, great institutions,
like God, Creation, and the Church, are properly
introduced into the world without a marked shifting
and change of scene as each is presented. They
expect the kingdom of God to come with observa
tion. It never has appeared so, and cannot ; but its
obligation is none the less, because it comes unseen
and unsuspected. The facts and forces of human
life cannot be parcelled out and labelled " natural,"
and "supernatural." In Him we live and move and
have our being. Had the Ten Commandments no
Divine sanction for the generations which preceded
Moses ? Has the human conscience no Divine quality
because the rudiments of a moral sense are discern
ible in a dog? Is a man's kinship to God on the
one side rendered illegitimate, because on the other he
is related to the brutes that perish? Is the Divinity
of Jesus impossible, because his members were fash
ioned, while as yet there were none of them, in the
womb of a woman ? Is human government vacated
of Divine obligation, because it is achieved and en
acted by men ? Is the earth not of God's creation,
because we have learned to read the story of its
slow becoming off the rocky pages of its strata?
Is the Church not of Divine origin and obligation,
because the steps and processes through which it has
come into its shape can be traced ? I am persuaded
that a large part of the " evidences " for the truth of
our rehgion, which have been built up with such
labor and patience, are worse than thrown away.

144 SONS OF GOD.
They are attempts to say " Lo ! here is the kingdom,
or lo ! there." They offer to vindicate the super
natural by pointing out its unlikeness to the natural.
I am convinced that the immediate future of Chris
tianity is dependent upon the recognition of the
truth, that we live in the midst of an order which is
at once Divine and human, both natural and super
natural. The attempt to segregate holy from com
mon, sacred from secular, must be abandoned. The
Divine origin and authority of the Church and its
institutions will never be vindicated by emphasizing
its separation from the world. Nor will it be by
tracing up her title-deeds in the spirit of an attorney
or conveyancer. Its identity is not to be determined
that way. Humanity, under the operation of the
spirit of Jesus, is slowly producing righteousness.
This righteousness becomes organic in the Church.
The spirit produces the body, and not otherwise.
The spirit of goodness is streaming in from a thou
sand unsuspected sources, and under a thousand un
suspected forms. It is too subtile for identification,
and too large for definition.
One great excellence of Christ's way of thinking
about His kingdom is, that it makes one easy in the
presence of good men and good deeds which are not
visibly related to the Church. The old way did not.
It could not deal with goodness outside the organiza
tion. It drew the pernicious distinction between
religion and morality, and denied the latter any
Divine quality. Christ values goodness too highly
to miscall it wherever it appears. " He that is not

THE IMMANENT GOD. 145
against me is for me." All the philanthropies, the
sciences, the aspirations, the devotion, the charity, in
a word, all the goodness of men, He lays claim to.
They are His. The Church should be no less avid to
claim them. There is no fear of her " purity " suf
fering. She possesses that spirit of life which takes
up, and moulds to its own purposes, all human good
ness. If she would become conterminous with the
" kingdom of God," as she is meant to be, she must
become as catholic as was the Son of man. She
must claim for her own, absorb, and utilize every
movement toward righteousness. She must not be
surprised or unbelieving when she hears from the
most unsuspected quarter the cry, " Behold, the bride
groom cometh ! "

XII.
THE EARTH HELPED THE WOMAN.

XII.
THE EARTH HELPED THE WOMAN.
Keb. 3HHE. 16 :
"Che earth helpeb the fooman."
This text is taken from the most stupendous
drama ever conceived. Even the " Paradise Lost "
is petty beside it ; its actors move mechanically upon
an artificial stage. But in the vision of the seer at
Patmos real beings perform real parts. One may
frankly say that it is often impossible to make out
the movement. One is bewildered at the prodigality
of life and event which defiles before him. I think
one has much the same feeling of perplexity in the
Book of Revelation that he has at the spectacle of
existence itself. Its complexity and seeming con-
tradictoriness puzzle and often repel him. But this
is the result, not of any lack of reality, but from
its immensity. I do not propose to try to interpret
even a single act in this Divine Tragedy ; that is, to
try to fit it to some human movement to which it
may correspond, but to hold up a single mighty
truth which comes out incidentally. But to see it
I must rehearse a fragment of the drama.
. John saw a great wonder in the heavens. A
shining, dazzling woman, clothed with sunlight as
149

150 SONS OF GOD.
with a garment, and bedecked with the stars as with
a coronet of jewels, descending majestically upon the
fair earth, and immediately bringing forth her first
born child. The scene shifts, the sunlight fades into
a tawny gloom, and a great foul, fierce dragon comes
flapping to the earth, pursuing the gracious woman
whom in her extremity he would devour. The
woman snatches up her child and flees into the
wilderness from his presence. The dragon, at fault
in the chase, pours from his mouth a mighty flood of
water which spreads abroad and threatens to drown
the woman and her child in their hiding-place.
Then the earth itself comes to the rescue. It opens
its mighty lips and swallows up the perilous flood.
The baffled dragon, after a time of impotent rage,
lies down and dies.
The dragon is the personified spirit of evil; the
earth is the earth ; the woman is the Church of God.
When I say the Church, I mean something which is
not now anywhere to be seen, or ever has been, but
that ideal society which is meant to contain within
itself all righteousness. No organized society has
ever yet been identical altogether with the Church
in the true meaning of the word. The Church,
when complete, will equal the Kingdom of God.
But no organization as yet has existed, of which it
could truly be said that either in extent or in quality
it fulfilled this definition. The woman and her man-
child represent the incoming tide of righteousness.
The " Earth " is that complex aggregate of men
and things, in and among which the forces of moral

THE EARTH HELPED THE WOMAN. 151
good and evil have their play. It embraces all with
which men have to do, — things physical and things
spiritual ; circumstances, events, society, natural
affections, impulses, actions, in short, the sum total
of the myriad entities which make up and environ
human life.
Now, the noteworthy thing in the text before us is,
that it represents the earth to be by nature and dis
position on the side of the woman, and against the
dragon. " The earth helped the woman." That is
to say, the natural forces of life are on the side of
the good and opposed to the evil.
I think the opposite notion is very generally en
tertained. Natural and evil are thought of as synony
mous terms. The life which now is is contrasted with
the life which shall be, as wrong is set over against
right. We are largely under the domination of a
pagan conception of life. I have at other times
dwelt upon the ways and the time in which this
unworthy idea found its way into Christian thought
and theology. I now only speak of the fact. We
call ourselves "vile earth and miserable sinners."
We speak of "this naughty world." We uncon
sciously apply to life itself that sense of moral
ill-desert wliich we feel as moral beings. We think
of the earth as being under the domination of the
Devil. We conceive of the world in which we live
as being alert to thwart righteous motives, to in-
snare the spirit, and bring it to disaster, or, at the
very best, as being a dead weight to be overcome by
the striving of the soul.

152 SONS OF GOD.
Is this moral estimate of the world true to the
facts ? In reply, I would ask you seriously to think
of these following things, —
(1.) The strange fact that goodness steadily in
creases upon the earth. That this is the fact, any
one must see who will look candidly at any two
points of history widely removed from one another.
He will see that a constant, though irregular move
ment toward better things is the rule, and has been
during the whole period during which anything is
known about the earth at all. This movement is
far more strikingly evident in those places where the
influence of Jesus has been at work ; but it is also
evident everywhere. This ought not to be so, on
the current theory of life. If the " world, the flesh,
and the devil" be really conjoined in a trinity of
evil they must be, to all practical purpose, omnip
otent. A mighty movement toward better things
is the idea of Jesus. He looks for it confidently.
He points to the forces which operate toward it. No
one can see the growth of Christianity without a
certain feeling of surprise and bewilderment. It
ought not to have grown, as it would seem. What
hindered the dragon from devouring the Man-child in
His helpless infancy ? His life and doctrine were in
the face of the powers which held possession at the
time. Apparently the whole drift of thought, cus
tom, law, habit, tradition, convention, self-interest,
were opposed to Him. His life was a stumbling-
block, His words were folly. Yet against these
all His kingdom has come up as a mighty storm

THE EARTH HELPED THE WOMAN. 153
gathers against the surface winds, as the sea flows
into and fills the bays and gulfs against the currents
of all the mighty rivers. Why ? A common answer
is: Because a more potent opposing force has been
introduced, which beats back and reverses the natural
movements of life and man. I think the answer is
faulty. It is quite true that the gift of Christ to
the world was the Spirit of Holiness. We rightly
conceive of this spirit as a self-conscious force. But
we wrongly think of it when we imagine it to have
begun its work in the world at the point in time at
which the Incarnation occurred. It is introduced in
the Holy Scriptures, as the primal, eldest energy
which moved upon Chaos, and evoked order. Jesus'
work was to uncover a spiritual energy which had
always been at work, and which had never been
altogether without witnesses. The mark of divinity
in Him is that He recognized the essential divinity in
the world where He was, and put Himself at once
into communication with it. He expected the world
to grow better. He believed that its elemental
forces, though sore let and hindered, worked steadily
in the interest of God and not of Satan. The survival
of a pagan dualism, which early found a lodgement
within the Christian Church, has obscured this truth,
made it seem strange, and in some curious way,
" unsound ; " but one who reads the Gospels for him
self, and puts aside all traditional notions about
" original sin," " total depravity," and such figments
of the schools, will see how entirely Jesus believes in,
and hoped for, the world and the race with which He
identified Himself.

154 SONS OF GOD.
The facts clearly show that His conception of the
situation was the true one. Turn to what aspect of
human life you will, and you see that our text is
history as well as fancy. Watch the slow but steady
humanizing of savage man ; the progressive gentling
of manners within the periods of history ; the steady
decadence of the horrors and the perpetuity of war ;
the growth in political purity and social conditions ;
the more and more complete administration of equity
between man and man ; the elevation into dignity and
reverence of woman and the womanly qualities ; the
steady growth of the Church ; its gradual disentangle
ment from the ideas of law and force ; the ameliora
tion of the condition of children, and the poor, and
sick, and helpless ; the steady clarification of moral
judgment, — look steadily, I say, at all these things,
which are real facts, and you will become more im
pressed with the thought that the universe is ad
justed in the interest of righteousness. Mr. Matthew
Arnold accounts for it all by the existence of "A
stream of tendency, — a Power, not ourselves — which
makes for righteousness." There is no need to quarrel
with his phrases. They are striking, and up to their
measure, true. But St. John's phrase is better:
" The earth helped the woman " !
The truth is one which, when it is realized, must
profoundly affect one's whole thought about life, and
especially about religion. Every one knows that
motion is finally "in the line of least resistance." If
the environment amid which the soul dwells, as well
as the qualities of the soul itself, are such as make it

THE EARTH HELPED THE WOMAN. 155
move more easily toward wrong than toward right,
then toward wrong it will go. And it will be hard to
persuade it that it is blameworthy for moving so. It
follows its nature, as all things do. It brings forth
fruit after its kind. Can men expect to gather grapes
of thorns, or figs of thistles ? But if this be true, it
sets one to re-examine more carefully what is the in
trinsic nature of this plant man-soul. Is it a vine or
a bramble, a thistle or a fig-tree ? Is the soil from
which it springs a hateful compound of bitumen and
poison, or is it the kindly earth full of heavenly
juices ?
It is true that the Saints, both those whose record
is in Scripture, and those now living, often cry out
under stress of evil, that the world and the flesh are
leagued with the devil to bring them to death.
Through the smoke of their battle the heavens loom
lurid, and the earth gives a diabolic sound. Their
natures are torn asunder, and they find the move
ments of the members shaping itself into a fixed
law opposed to the law of the mind. But this is
always a temporary, passing despondency, a discolor
ing of the real vision. It is always followed swiftly
by a hopeful mind, in which the earth and all that
dwell therein are seen to be the Lord's and not the
devil's. The sober judgment of humanity is, that
the world is so constituted that right triumphs and
wrong is beaten down. The theme of poetry, fiction,
and the drama is the way in which circumstances
conspire to bring to naught the evil-doer. Who
would read a story in which the hero comes to grief

156 SONS OF GOD.
and the villain succeeds ? Who would go twice to
see a play in which the heroine is cast out ashamed,
and the betrayer brought to honor? The novelist
and the playwright but personify the deep instinct
which possesses all unsophisticated minds that the
universe is conducted in the interest of goodness.
Nothing could be worse than that devilish notion
which masquerades under the mask of godly fear,
that organized righteousness, as it is represented by
the Church of Christ, is fighting against odds. She
fights with certainty, because it is with ever spring
ing hopefulness. What man or woman is there who
has " come out on the Lord's side," who has not been
distressed and disheartened by the thought that they
were turning away from the real, stable, solid, win
ning things, to weak, sentimental, powerless, losing
things ? There is much in ordinary religious modes
of speaking and thinking which paralyzes all enthu
siasm. But, after all, that portion of the earth which
most concerns me is that piece of cunningly com
pounded clay in which I dwell. Suppose I take a
lamp in my hand, and set about to explore the re
cesses of my own nature. Do its natural avenues
lead toward light, or toward darkness ? It is hardly
needful to even formally disavow the hateful figment
of " total depravity." We, at least, have not been
reared under that blighting shadow. But in this
mixture of good and bad, of God and brute, which I
am, which is natural and which is unnatural ? Which
holds the rightful title to the possession of myself ?

THE EARTH HELPED THE WOMAN. 157
Jesus' opinion is not hard to find, although often so
strangely missed. "Except ye be born again," He
says. Be born again. But what does birth do?
Does it change the embryo of a jackal into a lamb, of
a tiger into a kid, of a demon into a god ? No : it
changes the environment of an already living crea
tion, but does not change its kind. It remains God's
offspring after the new birth, as it always had been.
In His other great parable of moral restoration, he says
that " when the young man came to himself " he turned
toward his Father's house. When he came to him
self, himself from which he had been estranged.
The great apostle says that " the spirit of God works
with our spirits." Works with them, not against.
The bent of humanity is toward God.
But let us take account of all the facts. A spring
wliich has been too long overloaded and pressed
down comes to lose its "life." Christianity lays
awful emphasis upon this fact. It fairly faces the
possibility of a human soul losing its native divine
quality. There is a sin unto death. There is a kind
of being of whom it were better that he had never
been born. The moral forces of the universe may
be violated, and may bring disaster even as those of
the physical world. But the question before us is,
What are those forces, and in which direction do they
operate? We believe that in God's world of men
and things, it is the law of moral gravitation that
things fall upward when unhindered. The earth
helps the woman.
I would be sorry to have you think that all this is

158 SONS OF GOD.
from mere interest in speculation, or from any love of
paradox. I believe that the principle I have tried to
set out is not only profoundly true, but of the suprem-
est practical importance. Surely the belief that he is
working with, and not against, the order of things,
will make one more hopeful in the struggle for inner
righteousness. It will set him free from that antece
dent despair which enfeebles the will, and paralyzes
the moral energies. He who struggles with evil
within or without will pick up heart of hope when
he sees that the elemental forces of life are on the
side which he has deliberately espoused.
Beside that, it brings purpose and meaning into
the seeming confusion of the things which we see.
A world thought of as intrinsically hateful will be
filled with a babble of discords, wrangling, jangling,
raucous voices. But when one comes, slowly, but at
last, to perceive that it is in very deed God's world,
he will hear in its multitudinous voices the harmony
of the sons of God shouting for joy.

XIII.
THE SPIRIT WHICH WAS IN CHRIST.

XIII.
THE SPIRIT WHICH WAS IN CHRIST.
Ph«. HE. %, 5.
" ILooft not eberg man on his ofon things, but eberg man also on
the things of others. ILet this minb be in gou, fohich foas also in
Christ 3esus." " As I walked by myself I talked to myself,
And thus myself did say to me,
Look to thyself, and take care of thyself
For nobody cares for thee."
This old rhyme is the concentration of human
"wisdom." Christianity pronounces it to be both
sin and folly. The Epistle for the Sunday before
Easter exhorts to an exactly opposite line of con
duct. It urges that this other method of living be
deliberately chosen, not capriciously, or for a moment,
but that it be adopted as the habitual manner of
living. It does not hesitate to assert that exaltation
comes that way, — by the way of renunciation. It
points to a supreme instance. It says that Christ
did so, and achieved the supreme place in the
universe thereby. He put aside all thought of His
own rights, the right of equality with God, which
includes all else, and abased Himself for His
brethren, with the result that every other name in
the universe pales before the lustre of His. It urges
161

162 SONS OF GOD.
men to adopt the same method of living, and
promises a similar outcome of it.
But the Gospel for the same Sunday proceeds to
show what was, in His case, the immediate con
sequence of the renunciation which He made. It
was crucifixion.
Was ever any more Quixotic project entertained
by sane men than that of which the Christian
preacher is the professional advocate? It proposes
to persuade men to renounce that manner of life
which the experience of the ages and seemingly
the necessities of existence pronounce to be the
only safe, only possible one, and of deliberate choice
adopt another, which is unnatural, fantastic, and
which, upon the Gospel's own showing, brought
Him who introduced it to irremediable grief. Is it
any wonder that the doctrine of the cross seemed to
the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks fool
ishness ? But the strange thing is that multitudes
since St. Paul have found it to be divine wisdom
and divine power. Let us see, if possible, how
these things can be. First of all, I want to correct
what I think is a wide-spread pious error in this
relation, that is, that there is any good in pain.
There is none. The lesson of the cross is not that
there is any excellent quality in suffering. Ad
versity — like the foul toad which hath yet a precious
jewel in his head — hath its uses, but a foul toad it
is all the same. There is nothing in the life of
Christ to intimate that there is any virtue in being
hurt. I know that it has been read so very often.

THE SPIRIT WIHCH WAS IN CHRIST. 163
But the reading is wrong. It is very easy to pick
up any one of the crosses which lie all about, while
it is so difficult to possess the same mind which was
also in Christ, that thousands have done this easier
thing, and fancied they were " imitating Christ."
The widely celebrated book of a Kempis is disfigured
by this very mistake. "It is vastly easy," says a
great preacher, " to be a John Baptist so far as the
locusts and wild honey go." The exaltation which
the Epistle asserts has not its spring in pain, but in
the spirit of which it speaks. Jesus went not a
single step out of His way to find a pang of body or
soul. Such hurts as might be avoided without
missing His purpose were avoided. He had no ex
perience of far the larger part of those ills that flesh
is heir to. They did not come in His way. No pang
of parturition, or paternal solicitude, or laborer's
fatigue, or lassitude of sickness, or racking of phys
ical deformity, or pang of hunger, or spasm of physical
terror, did He ever feel. There was no reason why
He should. Pain is not good, but evil. Nor does the
cross either glorify it, or open up its meaning. It is
to be avoided where it may be. But it is as unhesi
tatingly to be taken up when the spirit which we
are examining finds it in its way. It is to be taken
up, not because it is good, but because there is no
other way to the point we would reach. But is it
possible to induce men practically to adopt the spirit
of Christ, that is the controlling principle of His life,
when they know perfectly well that to do so will
make unavoidable many evils which could otherwise
be escaped ?

164 SONS OF GOD.
What, then, was the spirit which dominated Jesus
Christ? St. Paul does not call it by name, — and
indeed, none of the names by which it has been
called are quite satisfactory, — but he sees it at its
highest in the Great Renunciation. The Hindoo
prince, whom half the world reveres, sat under the
bo-tree and resolved upon his great renunciation.
Mr. Arnold has pictured it with dramatic fitness.
He forsook his princely pleasures, and his sweet
wife Maya, because all these were incompatible with
his self-development. He struck, indeed, a high
note, and myriads have listened entranced to his
music. But the apostle's theme surpasses it as
does the music of the spheres the harmonies of an
orchestra. " He who was in the form of God, and thought it
not robbery to be equal with God, emptied himself
that he might become a man ! " He yearned for
men, and renounced the glory which He had with
God before the world was, in order that He might
win them. This is the spirit which His Gospel
inspires, a love for men which will not allow itself
to be beaten down by any evil which may befall, not
even though the blow come from the hand of the
very one whom love seeks ! This spirit in Christ
accounts for the cross which He came to bear ; the
cross does not account for the spirit. Having become
a man, the rest was unavoidable. It is here that the
whole ascetic principle misses the truth. The whole
company of monks, and cloistered nuns, of stylites,
flagellants, anchorites, and Christian fakirs, have

THE SPIRIT WHICH WAS IN CHRIST. 165
missed of the spirit of Christ. They have looked,
every man, upon his own things, and not upon the
things of another ! Each has set before himself the
task to rescue his own soul at auy cost. Most have
vainly fancied that by bearing self-inflicted pain
they were paying a price. St. Anthony flies to the
desert to escape from himself, and finds to his horror
that himself had gone before him. The Florentine
ladies flung their jewels into a heap in the plaza,
because they fancied beauty to be a sin, and their
mistake overtook them before the month had gone
by. The " spirit of Christ " thinks not of itself at
all, either well or ill. It finds its exaltation in seek
ing for another. For the joy that is set before it, it
despises the cross, neither seeking nor shunning it.
I have alluded to the belief that fidelity to the
spirit of Christ will bring its possessor into pain.
That is true, it will. To " become a Christian " will
of necessity throw one out of harmony with at least
a part of his environment. It will change friends
into enemies, both within and without. It is true
that it will do so to a less degree now than it would
have done a century ago, — to an unspeakably less
degree than it would eighteen hundred years ago.
Life has been Christianized to an extent which few
realize, and in ways in which I will try after a little
to point out; but there still remains enough of it
hostile to make it certain that whoever bears Christ's
spirit must also share his cross. Whenever the same
spirit which was also in Christ becomes roused to
self-consciousness in a man it comes into distress.

166 SONS OF GOD.
It discovers that the environment in which it had
always lived, and in which it had felt at home, is not
the congenial place it had supposed. Movements of
the flesh which the man had always taken for
granted to be normal and natural, he finds to be
unnatural and monstrous. To bring them into sub
jection to the spirit, he discovers, to his horror, will
involve pain as sharp as that of cutting off a hand
or plucking out an eye. It produces disturbance
where previously there had been contentment. The
possessor of the newly-awakened spirit becomes
aware that his foes are of his most intimate house
hold, even his own thoughts and habits. Then
the conventionalities of life are not adjusted to this
spirit. They have been partially subjugated, as I
said before, so that society is to a degree under the
control of " Christian Customs," but there still sur
vives a large body which is distinctly antagonistic to
the spirit of Christ. These are confronted in every
sphere, in society, in trade and business, in politics
snd science, in every place toward which the Chris
tian turns. The cost of being a single-minded fol
lower of Christ is enormous. It costs in self-restraint,
in labor, in money, in repression of tastes, by cutting
off whole fields of pleasure, not because they are
intrinsically wrong, but because the Christian has no
time to work them. It brings one into very painful
relations to his fellow-men. It sternly bids him at
the very outset to stop choosing his companions,
as he has been doing, with a view to his own delecta
tion, but with a view to their advantage. That at

THE SPIRIT WHICH WAS IN CHRIST. 167
once compels one to turn to "the poor." But the
poor, by the necessity of the case, are the most un
pleasing of companions. They take everything and
give nothing. The spirit of Christ, whenever it is
awakened in any one, compels him to readjust him
self to his fellow-men, to art, and amusement, and
business, and manner of life. This is a cross. It
rise up before one whenever he resolves to " deny
himself." If he is affrighted, and turns back into
himself, the cross immediately sinks out of sight.
But such a one is thereafter shut up within himself.
Whatever he can find there he may have, but nothing
beyond. Now, what motive will induce a man to put him
self under so exacting a master as the spirit of
Christ? The Christian motives are potent beyond
all description. It would go without saying, that
they must be, in order to move so many and so pro
foundly as they have. They are two. They are not
to be sought in any new fact which Jesus has created,
but in eternal necessities which Jesus has uncov
ered. The first mentioned is self-interest. " He
that saveth his life shall lose it, but he that loseth
his life, for my sake, shall find it." Everybody
knows now that this is so. The glutton at the feast
of life who reaches out on both sides, and gathers all
to himself, is inevitably punished by loss of appetite,
and the capacity to enjoy. Who ever thinks of a
miser as being happy ? The word itself is the noun
whose adjective is miserable. But why is the suc
cessful avaricious man miserable ? He has secured

168 SONS OF GOD.
what he started for. He set before himself the
safety, adornment, and satisfaction of his life, and he
achieved it. What then ? Existence itself rounds
on him. He saved his life, — and lost it.
But St. Paul avers that honor and exaltation lie
along the path which Jesus walked. Is this not
true? Has Jesus not achieved "a name which is
above every name " ? Whose is above it ? The
plebiscite of the race has already been taken, and is
for Him. It has set Him in a category by himself,
not only as divine, but as human. Two men have in
late time called the roll of the world's heroes. But
both Carlyle and Emerson hesitate to classify Him.
The gods have all fled before Him. If one of His
disciples could have seen that in a few centuries it
would have come about that the only choice possible
for men would be Christ or atheism, — that every
other god had left the field, — would he not have
been ready to chant his nunc dimittis ?
Remember Heine's vision. At the gorgeous ban
quet on Olympus, where all the gods and goddesses
sat about the table, a wan, bleeding figure enters,
bearing a cross, which he lays down among the
flowers, while one by one the guests slink out into
the night, and have never been heard of since. It
has come about that every knee in heaven and
earth, which is capable of genuflection at all, bows
before Him.
Nor is it only a remote and barren admiration for
a majestic but impossible character. His spirit is
slowly but steadily dominating human society. In

THE SPIRIT WHICH WAS IN CHRIST. 169
one form or other it is inspiring the most notice
able movements of modern life. What does all the
social and political unrest of our time signify ? Why
has slavery gone? Why are men, and women too,
so deeply concerned about the condition of the poor ?
What has caused the swiftly increasing contempt and
indignation at the selfish and indifferent among the
rich ? Naught else but the spirit of Christ moving
among men. All these phenomena are to be found
only within Christendom, or in heathendom at those
places where Christianity has touched it. The mul
tiplication of charities, the decadence of privilege,
the extension of suffrage, all these are but the slow
dawning in the consciousness of humanity that every
man is of such value that every other man finds his
highest good in seeking him. Nothing could be
more idle, because nothing more contrary to the
facts, than to refer all this to " the law of progress."
Where is there any such " law " ? Where has it ope
rated in the past, and where can it be seen at work
now producing any such result, save among those peo
ples who have also voted the place of highest exalta
tion to Jesus Christ? Every high ideal has been
brought in, and gained a place for itself at the cost of
the blood of a Christian martyr. The first generation
set the Son of man above the son of Caesar, perished
therefor, and the world adopted their view. The
poor monk Telemachus leaped into the arena, and
sternly bade the gladiators cease from throttling one
another. The angry crowd poured down from the
benches and tore him to pieces, — but there were no

170 SONS OF GOD.
more such spectacles. Howard was the laughing
stock of Europe for his crazy attempt to have con
victs treated as men and not like brutes. But
before the world had done laughing the reform had
come. From the men and women who in their day
were derided, mocked, accounted fools, stoned, jeered
at, crucified, who despised the cross, thinking only of
the glory set before them, from these the world has
had its heart-hunger fed. None of them have ever
intimated that pain was good. But they have sought
the fulness of life. They have had faith to follow
the spirit within them which they recognized to be
divine, in the fixed belief that they would not be put
to intellectual confusion or to ultimate loss by so
doing. Many of them have apparently passed out of
sight without anything to vindicate their obstinate
faith. Many have looked along the via erucis, and
have feared to venture to its end. But many have
found even now that that way life lies. ¦ God is love ;
therefore, to be like Him involves cost. But God is
strong ; therefore, to be like Him is to be on the side
which must finally win.

XIV.
THE LAW OF PROGRESS IN RELIGION.

XIV.
THE LAW OF PROGRESS IN RELIGION.
3ohn IUJE. 12, 13.
"2 babe mang things to sag unto gou, but ge cannot bear them
nofej. f^ofofieit fohen he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he foill fiuibe
gou into all truth."
It is somewhat startling to observe the attitude of
Jesus toward the current religion of his time. We
are apt to forget that there was a Church then, and
that He was a member of it. Whatever obligations
in the way of belief and conduct such membership
carried with it for anybody, it carried for Him.
There was in the Church in His time, as there is
now, a set of doctrines, a code of rules, a system of
ordinances, a ministry, a code for conduct, a machin
ery of religion. Theological controversies and eccle-
ciastical were just as common as now. There were
"schools of thought" in the Church then as now.
What attitude did He take toward it all? This
question is not asked from curiosity, but for a
practical reason. Bearing in mind that He claimed
no exemption on account of His divinity from the
ordinary duties and perplexities which attend upon
the life of a man, He is just as valuable to us for
" an ensample of godly life " in things pertaining to
religion as in things belonging to morals. And
173

174 SONS OF GOD.
surely here, if anywhere, earnest-minded men need
and would welcome light. They belong by birth and
inheritance to a religious society ; in many cases they
have publicly professed their allegiance to it ; how
far thereafter are they left at liberty to dissent from
the doctrine or discipline of that society, and still
retain their membership in it ? The conduct of Jesus
illuminates this question. He was a member by birth
and inheritance of a Church whose divine establish
ment and authority He never once calls in question.
He permitted Himself to " fulfil all righteousness " by
complying with all its outward requirement's. He
was circumcised, presented in the Temple, made free
of the corporation. How did He thereafter bear Hiin-
himself toward the doctrine and discipline of His
Church? It seems clear that, in general, He went with it in
its mode of belief and practice. On one occasion, at
least, He invoked the aid of His divine power to
enable Himself and His friends to discharge their
ecclesiastical obligations, when He wrought a miracle
to find the wherewithal to pay the Temple tax. But
while He discharged His outward debt to it, He did not
he'sitate to dissent openly, and as a public Teacher,
from many of its accepted beliefs.
For example, with regard to the nature and
obligation of the Sabbath Day. Here He disagreed
entirely with the orthodox view. This was a subject
upon which His Church's opinion was well settled,
and had been for a long time. His words and actions
were thought by the religious world of His time and

THE LAW OF PROGRESS IN RELIGION. 175
place to be loose, dangerous, demoralizing, contrary
to the Word of God and to the law of the Church.
Nevertheless, He held, taught, and practised them.
It is often assumed that He simply used His superior
authority to abrogate and set aside the Law of Moses,
as He had a right to do. But did He have the right
to do so, under the limitations which He had set for
himself ? And did He do so, in point of fact? The
facts are the other way. He had not then abrogated
them. He only declared His individual dissent from
them, and His emphatic rejecting of the accepted
interpretation of them.
In the matter of marriage and divorce, which was
then a cause ecclesiastic, His position comes out still
more clearly. Here He dissented, not only from the
usual practice of His Church, but from the Law of
Moses itself. He declares that in the nature of
things that Law was temporary and transient, and
had been already outgrown. The moral condition of
the people to whom the Law had been given had
been long ago outgrown and left behind. He does
not say that a new and more strenuous law was
about to be put in place of it ; but that such a higher
obligation always had been in existence, and that
its obligation became immediate at the moment
whenever the moral perception of a people was
clear enough to see it.
The Ritual Law of His Church, He seems to have
disregarded almost entirely. He " went up to Jerusa
lem " with His disciples ; but certainly He could not
observed very punctiliously all those complex details

176 SONS OF GOD.
which an orthodox Jew would have thought bounden,
or the record thereof would have been given some
space in the minute daily record contained in the
Gospels. He observed, at least, one Passover ; but
He used that to change both its significance and the
manner of its observance. There is nothing in His
life like that curious carefulness of the dying Soc
rates to provide that the regulation cock should be
offered to iEsculapius. In speaking to His disciples
His phrase is, " Moses said unto you ; — but I say
unto you."
But all the while He retained His membership in
the Church of Moses, and recognized the Law of Moses
to be in general operation. In those cases where the
accepted views were inadequate or faulty He set them
aside, and appealed to a higher and more universal
truth. This He continued to do just so fast as His dis
ciples were able to comprehend Him. When He came
to a certain point with them, He tells them that He
has yet many things to say to them, but they are not
yet able to receive them. He says that His people
will be able to do so in the future, under the guid
ance of the Spirit which He introduces. It is clear
that He thought of that spiritual illumination as
to be slow, gradual, progressive, continuous. This
promise of progress in spiritual discernment could
not have been meant, in the nature of the case, to
apply to the particular individuals to whom it was
addressed. Some of them "went backward, and
walked no more with Him." Some passed away
while still very backward. One, at least, turned

THE LAW OF PROGRESS IN RELIGION. 177
upon Him, and betrayed Him to the conventional
ecclesiastical world whom He had offended. Like
the other promises and commands given to His then
followers, it was meant to be of continuous operation
through all time, so long as His Church should
endure. This is, indeed, the quality in wliich His
Church is distinguished from that one which it su
perseded. That was organized around the idea of
fixity, while His contained at its very centre the
principles of progress.
Christianity, then, is meant to be progressive in
every part of its structure, — in Doctrine, Organiza
tion, and manner of life. I do not mean only that
it must always move forward in the way of gaining
in bulk, in subduing to itself constantly increasing
areas of the world; but that it must also undergo
those inward and structural changes which are the
condition and accompaniment of growth. A large
portion of the Church has always been, and is, slow
to believe this. It is distrustful of present inspira
tion. It looks to some period in the past, at which
religious truth became complete, and stated finally.
It does not easily associate the idea of progress with
that of religion; for progress implies change, and
religion has to do with things which are abiding. It
is a very common way of thinking, that the phrase,
" The Faith once delivered to the saints," means the
body of truth given by Jesus to His disciples. The
fact is, as can be seen by any one who will turn to
the passage, that it refers to the truth about God
which had come slowly to be known through many

178 SONS OF GOD.
centuries in Old Testament times. The emphasis
ought to be laid, not upon " once," but upon " saints."
Faith always has been, and always must be, associ
ated with sanctity. But it cannot be the peculiar
possession of any particular epoch. But it is far
easier to think of religious Doctrine as consisting in
a set of definite propositions, strikingly displayed to
a certain set of persons at a definite time, and by
them passed on intact, than it is to think of it as a
living body of truth which changes its form of ex
pression from age to age, so as to adapt itself to the
various generations and peoples who receive it. It
is easier also to think it rounded and complete, as
it is ideally, than to think of it as coming slowly and
increasingly, as it does, into the apprehension of the
Church. The same thing is true about the Bible. The pop
ular mind always chooses the easier of two forms of
thought. It thinks of the Bible as a book. It thinks
of God as having sat down deliberately to reveal
something to man, and of His having caused that
revelation to ba written in a book for its preservation.
One has only to bring the idea out into a clear state
ment to see how inadequate, how childish, it is. But
then it is easy to think thus. On the other hand,
the real truth of the matter requires serious effort to
get it before one's apprehension. The Bible is not a
book at all. It is rather a library of many volumes,
written by all sorts of men, and at various times and
places, during a period of more than a thousand
years. It is the story of the way in which men

THE LAW OF PROGRESS IN RELIGION. 179
received a revelation of truth which God opened up
to them slowly, painfully, little by little, as the
world grew older and wiser, and more and more able
to apprehend it. Beginning with the simplest moral
proposition, the knowledge of good and evil, it goes
on slowly to the manifestation of God in the person
of His Son. But the Son expressly says, that although
the revelation had been made, and stood thereafter
staring men in the face, they would only be able,
little by little, to take it in. He declared that the
Spirit of truth which He revealed would constantly
lead the successive generations of disciples into a
better and truer apprehension of it. Sydney Smith
was right when he said, " We are the Fathers." No
generation of Christians, before the consummation
of all things, may, without arrogance, affirm that it
holds the whole, or even the best, truth of Jesus. If
it really possesses the Spirit of Christ, it must rever
ently expect that Spirit to do His proper work, that
is, to lead them into truth ; but not in such wise that
the next generation must receive the truth from it
solely as an inheritance and without the power to
receive immediate illumination. This is one of the
hardest things for the Church to learn, — to believe
in its own inspiration. It glorifies a past time which,
for those who were then in it, must have seemed as
gray and work-a-day as does our own time. We
transform it in imagination. When we would express
our belief, we tremble to pass outside the Creeds
which it formulated. When we would frame a
Liturgy, we seem to be smitten with a present

180 SONS OF GOD.
dumbness, and can find fit words for our devotion
only in the prayers of a dead and gone generation.
Do not misunderstand me ; no one could feel more
profoundly how fatal a thing it is to break with the
past in religion, to interrupt at any point the current
of Divine life. But I insist that even "they without
us cannot be perfected." The things of God, in
order to produce the sense of reality, must be ours,
not only by inheritance, but also by discovery. I
think that what we of this generation need, above all
else, is to believe that God has a blessing for us also.
That each stage of development in the kingdom
should show its own peculiar form or type of life,
ought to be evident for various reasons.
In the first place, because movement is the law of
Life. Only lifeless things remain unchanged. The
instant one ceases to think of the Church as an
" Institution " or an " Organization," and comes to
realize that it is a living organism, he sees that this
must be so. There is a profound truth in the phrase,
" The Church, the Lord's Body." His body, not His
monument, or His record, or His house, but His living
members. Being so, it must show the same phenom
ena that all living things do. It must integrate and
disintegrate. Dead and worn-out matter must drop
away from it (for the most part insensibly, as from a
living body), and be replaced by new and fit material.
But being plastic with life, it ought to be expected
that it will, while maintaining its unbroken life,
become modified in time and place to fit its con
stantly changing environment. This was clearly

THE LAW OF PROGRESS IN RELIGION. 181
our Lord's thought. What does He mean by His
parables of yeast and grain and vine? The leaven,
to fill the figure, must grow. But growth means
persistence of identity, together with change of
appearance. The little lump of dry cells which
begins the ferment, is hardly recognizable in the
moist, expanded lump of leavened meal. The same
yeast shows quite different appearances in barley-
meal and in flour of wheat. How unlike in their
several aspects to sight and sense are the fibrous
roots, the lusty stem, and the clustered grapes of the
game vine. Yet all see that they are the same plant.
Who will say that because the Church in America
in the nineteenth century is unlike in appearance to
the Church in Asia Minor in the second century, it is
any the less really or less completely the Church of
God? Beside this, the palpable fact is, that Christianity
has been profoundly modified in passing through the
centuries, without losing or even imperilling its
identity. Suppose an observer able to calmly observe
it in actual life at Antioch in the first century, and
again at Constantinople in the fifth, again at Rome in
the fifteenth, and at London or New York to-day.
He could not mistake but that it was the same body,
animated by the same spirit, in every stage ; but the
bodily features would be as diverse as are those of
the diverse races among whom it has lived, or as is
that of the child from the youth or the man. He
would see it at one stage with but a fragment of a
New Testament and only the rudiments of a creed.

182 SONS OF GOD.
He would see it again with the canon of its Scriptures
closed, its creeds drawn out in detail and settled by
formal council ; and again with an elaborate Ritual
and Canon Law added; and again, maybe, with
much of these dropped away. But at what point
could he say, Here it began, or here it ceased, the
living Body moved by the living Spirit of Christ?
That there is a possible peril in this way of con
ceiving of the Church cannot be denied. It is the
peril which attends upon living. If only it were
possible to have the whole subject matter of religion
settled, fixed, put in final shape once and for all
times and all men ! Ay ; if it were possible. If we
could only be assured that the last word of Biblical
interpretation had been said ; that the last clause had
been added to a Body of Divinity, no part of which
should ever again be in danger of decay; that the
Church's Order and Discipline were settled and
working with the precision of a machine ; that our
sole responsibility was only to preserve it all un
touched, and pass it over to our successors ! Then
there would have been at least one generation of
disciples to whom the Master would have had no
need to say, " I have many things yet to say to you,
but ye cannot bear them now."
But no: religious truth neither comes, nor oper
ates, nor abides, nor is transmitted after that simple
fashion. Religion is a vital process. The Church is
a living thing. As the nature of love can only be
known by loving, or the quality of life by living, so
the truth of God as He is made manifest in His

THE LAW OF PROGRESS IN RELIGION. 183
only Son Jesus Christ, is only reached by His Church,
or by any individual soul, as the Spirit thereof takes
of it and mingles it with the currents of the soul's
or the Church's life. This can only be as each life
is able to bear it.

XV.
RELIGION AND KNOWLEDGE.

XV.

RELIGION AND KNOWLEDGE.
Ban. HE. \.
" Men shall run to anb fro, anb ftnofolebge shall fie increases."
ILufte IUHEL 8.
" JERhen he cometh, brill he finS faith on the earth '•' "
There is a very strange connection between these
two passages of Scripture, spoken half a thousand
years apart from one another. When the prophet saw
the vision of the last days, the thing which made its
impression upon his imagination was the wonderful
quickening of intellectual activity. Men shall run
to and fro, aud there shall be a mighty increase in
human knowledge. When the Saviour looked upon
the same picture, it raised a question, apparently, in
His mind, as to whether the Faith which He had come
into the world to establish would be able to survive
such increase of human knowledge. There is cer
tainly not only a relation between these two passages,
but there is also a relation between the two things
themselves, — between the increase of human knowl
edge and the persistence of the Christian faith.
It has been thought sometimes that the one is in
compatible with the other. Or, at any rate, that the
very worst possible condition for the subsistence of
187

188 SONS OF GOD.
the Faith of Christ is, or would be, a time when
human knowledge would be greatly multiplied,
when men would run to and fro, characterized by
that restlessness which always marks intellectual
progress. Certainly it must be agreed upon, the thing which
characterizes our century is its increase of knowl
edge. We are blinded to this very largely by our own
familiarity with the fact ; but it is the simple truth,
that the world has increased in knowledge more in
the century in which we live than it had in the
twenty-five centuries which preceded it. It sounds
a startling thing, and yet it is simply true, thinking
of human knowledge and human discovery as a path
way along which men walk, that they have travelled
as far in the century in which we live as the race had
travelled during the twenty-five hundred years pre
ceding it. The astonishing quickening of intellec
tual activity, the extent of the domain which has
been conquered by man's knowledge, and brought
within the range of his understanding within the last
century or two, — indeed, within the last century —
is simply marvellous. You can hardly count on the
fingers of your two hands even the names of the sci
ences which have been discovered and developed
within the memory of men yet living. Just think
for a moment of a few of these as samples of the
extraordinary extension of human knowledge which
belongs almost to our own generation. Geology, for
example, has a history of less than a hundred years.
The very name is a new coinage ; and it is coined to

RELIGION AND KNOWLEDGE. 189
represent a new fact. It is only within the last cen
tury that science has at all begun to turn over the
leaves of the rocky strata in which our earth is
bound, and to read from them the records of creation.
Anthropology has extended its researches into the
remotest past. It has ransacked every cave in whicli
men hid themselves, whether five thousand or five
hundred thousand years ago. It has turned up the
drift that lies upon the earth's surface, and has read
off the record upon every tusk and arrowhead and
fragment of ancient civilizations that lies hid away
in every secret place upon the earth. Science has
taken its microscope, and followed the mysteries of
life away into their most secret recesses. Nothing
has been found so small but that human knowledge
can take it, and learn from it something which adds
to the sum total of human knowledge. It has traced
life away down to its very beginnings ; followed it
through all its secret ramifications ; traced its rela
tions ; has followed it far more than from the cradle
to the grave ; it has followed it from the very first
step of half-living existence, through every step to
the death and resurrection of the human body.
New arts have been brought into use. All the
marvellous triumphs which followed upon the discov
ery of steam and electricity, — and you may name
such things by the dozen, — I only name these as
samples. But I beg to press upon you this consider
ation, that all these things have been achieved
within the century in which we live.
Now, it would be idle to think that this extraor-

190 SONS OF GOD.
dinary amount of new discovery in the range of
human knowledge would not react upon men's
Religious faith. There is a connection, there always
must be a connection, between what men know and
what they believe. It is just as idle to imagine that
discoveries in the arts and sciences will not react
upon, and change, and in some sense permanently
modify, our belief, as it is to think that civilization
will not modify our ways of living, and therefore
our social customs, and therefore our affections and
habits of thinking.
I beg you to think for a moment how closely all
our habits of Christian believing are bound up with
the things which we learn from physical science,
which belong to the sum total of the world's
knowledge, When Copernicus enunciated his theory of the
solar system, he did very much more than write
books on astronomy. He changed the Christian reli
gion as well. If you will think for a moment, you will
see how. Suppose, as the world did suppose until a
few centuries ago, that this earth was the very centre
of all things, that the sun, an orbed blaze, was a yard
across its face, moving around it from day to day,
and the moon, another attendant around it, with the
diameter of half a dozen inches ; that upon this
earth, the one thing which stood pre-eminent for dig
nity and magnificence was man ; and then you can
easily understand how men believed that they were
in very close and immediate relationship with God.
For what was there between them? There was

RELIGION AND KNOWLEDGE. 191
God, that sat there in the remote space. There were
the angels, that had communication between God and
man. And then men, who inhabited this earth, the
most dignified, the greatest of all things, next to God
Himself. But now comes a new science which says to the
human race, You are mistaken about the position you
hold in the universe. Instead of your having your
habitation upon the central orb about which all the rest
wheel, you are simply little specks walking upon an
insignificant fragment, in one of the farthest off and
most remote corners of space ; you must abdicate the
honored position which you had in the universe.
As the world, the material world, was belittled, the
human race was belittled with it. And so it was
a natural step, although maybe a long step, from
that position which man claimed for himself, as
being only little lower than the angels, to the new
position which man claimed for himself as being
little higher than the apes. The step is a long
one, but it is by no means an unnatural one. It is
the necessary consequence of the dethronement of
our race from the place which it supposed itself to
hold in the universe.
The belief in miracles has been affected in a simi
lar way. Fancy reading the story of the miracle of
Joshua to the Christian world of four hundred years
ago. " The sun stood still over Gibeon, and the moon
over the valley of Ajalon." There was nothing
wonderful about that. Why should not the sun
stand still ? It was made to go around the earth, to

192 SONS OF GOD.
serve as its satellite. There was nothing wonderful
in the portent, nothing to stagger the imagination of
the Christian faith. But wait until men go to and fro,
and knowledge has increased. Then read the same
story to the world of the nineteenth century, and they
say, It is a mighty thing, this stopping of the sun over
Gibeon. It involves a paralysis, or at least a tempo
rary pause, of the whole solar system, of worlds beyond
worlds, sweeping away to the borders of the universe.
For this reason such a record as that contained in
the holy Scripture lays more stress upon our faith
than it did upon the faith of our forefathers. It does.
The resurrection of the body, for example, was one
thing before the laws of chemical metamorphosis
were discovered, and is quite another thing now.
It is idle to think that all these discoveries do not
have their influence upon the Christian faith. They
must do so. They have very seriously affected, not
only the body of the faith, but the way in which
Christian minds stand related toward the " Faith
delivered to the saints." There are certain secondary
doctrines, which at one time were held to be part and
parcel of the fundamentals of the faith, which were
once entangled with the Apostles' Creed, which now
have become obsolete. When it was said that it
might be that the world was not created in six
natural days, there were thousands of devout Chris
tians who were terrified at an idea which struck,
as they conceived, at the inspired record of crea
tion, an idea that would destroy the very possi
bility of believing anything. There was a time

RELIGION AND KNOWLEDGE. 193
when it was supposed that every word of the Scrip
tures of the Old and New Testament was absolutely
and literally the transcript of the revelation of the
Holy Ghost. Now both of these beliefs have been
profoundly modified. They have been modified at
the cost of casting many loose from the anchorage
which held them within the faith. But, apparently,
there has been no way of preventing it. When the
doctrine of Copernicus was enunciated, it was laid
under the ban of the Pope ; and there it lay, officially,
until the first quarter of the eighteenth century was
endad. And yet it steadily asserted for itself a
place in the knowledge of men. So, whenever a fact
has once found lodgement within the sum total of
human knowledge, it must have its influence upon
the Christian faith. We must adjust ourselves to it,
for the reason that a fact is one of those immutable
things which cannot be changed by any exercise of
faith. Now, a very disastrous consequence of this has
been, that there is at present an alienation of certain
whole classes from the Christian religion. There are
a considerable number of educated men who hold
themselves aloof almost entirely from the gospel of
Christ ; especially those whose education and train
ing have been in the physical sciences, along which
the line of discovery has been the most rapid. And
they have run to and fro so rapidly that they appear,
at least temporarily, to have outrun the faith wliich
belonged to their fathers.
There has also come about within the circle of

194 SONS OF GOD.
those who hold to the Christian faith something of
indifference, and very much of apprehension. It
seems to them that when our Lord cast his eye over
the years that were to come, and saw the end of all
things, the apprehension in his mind was a well-
grounded one as to whether or not the time might
not come before the consummation of all things
when, by the increase of knowledge, there should
have come about an almost entire loss of faith.
What shall we say to all this? Here stand
the two terms of the problem. Knowledge has
increased ; faith, in a certain aspect, has decreased.
What lies in the future? Is knowledge going on
increasing, and is faith going on decreasing ? or is it
possible that we have misread the signs of the
present time? I answer unquestionably, that the
faith of our Lord Jesus Christ is, by the very terms
of its enunciation, bound to grow, and to grow con
tinuously. If it could be shown at any moment,
that, taking the whole world together, the faith in
our Lord Jesus Christ is steadily decreasing, it would
justify very much more than apprehension for the
future of the faith. It would argue something
radically wrong with the faith itself. The Christian
man dare not admit at any moment that the faith of
his Lord Jesus Christ has ceased to move men's
minds. It must continue to grow, or it must be
seen to be stricken with the first symptoms of its
inevitable death.
Why is it, then, that we who are quite alive to the
facts, and deeply sympathize with the spread of

RELIGION AND KNOWLEDGE. 195
human knowledge, have no apprehensions concerning
the future triumph of religious faith? I will try to
say why none of these thing move us.
The first reason is this : Because Christianity does
not appeal to common sense, but to common necessity.
I beg you to ponder this. If Christianity made its
last appeal to the universal consensus of the human
understanding, there might come times in the world's
history when people would refuse to listen to the
voice of God. But it is not so. What we call
" common sense " is simply the average wisdom of a
generation. It is the knowledge that each individual
has taken and poured into the common stock, redis
tributed as divided by the number of the persons
who contributed it. Now, it may be possible, I fancy
it is possible, for a whole generation, as it is for an
individual, to go mad. But the salvation of the race
cannot be contingent upon its always thinking rightly
any more than that of an individual can. If Chris
tianity appealed to the understanding ; if, in its last
resort, it must give a logical reason for itself, — there
would be a danger that times might come when hu
manity might move to moral disaster because of an
intellectual fault. But you will notice this peculi
arity about the religion of our Lord Jesus Christ :
it does not appeal to the understanding in the first
instance, but to the common necessities of humanity.
These necessities are abiding. For instance, there
are some ineradicable instincts of the soul : one is the
fear of death; another is the hope of immortality.
Now, for the purposes of religion, it makes not the

196 SONS OF GOD.
smallest difference whether you and I have come up
by successive steps from the mollusks, or come down
formed in the image and fashion of God. It makes
not the smallest difference as to what our origin is,
so long as we are here, endowed with certain ineradi
cable instincts. To these Christianity appeals. It is
not because it is demonstrable in terms of the under
standing, but because it appeals to these instincts,
which cannot be crushed out, nor forgotten, that it is
so secure in the world. Remember, it is to the aver
age man that our Christianity appeals. And this, not
by accident, but because there is a reason for it.
" For you see your calling, brethren, how that not
many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty,
not many noble, are called." "Have any of the
rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him?" "I
thank thee, O Father, that thou hast hid these things
from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them
unto babes : even so, Father ; for so it seemed good
in thy sight." " Then said Jesus unto his disciples,
verily, I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly
enter into the kingdom of heaven."
I beg you to notice this, Christianity appeals to
the " common people," that is, to average humanity.
If for any reason a man is lifted up very far above
the average, by abnormal wealth, by abnormal intel
lect, or anything that removes him very far above
the average of his fellows ; or if anything drags him
very far below that average, — Christianity cannot
appeal to him. If it does, it does so " hardly," both
to the " fool " and the " rich man." Why ? For the

RELIGION AND KNOWLEDGE. 197
reason that these are either above or below the com
mon humanity to which Christianity speaks. Now,
then, the great mass of humanity can always be
trusted ; it can always be depended upon to receive
Christ, — always. Culture, pleasure, and luxury — I
care little in what shape or form it comes — soon
cease to move. For a little while a whole generation
may be so intoxicated with intellectual advancement
that it forgets God ; but the thought comes back
again to the mass, and may always be depended upon
to come back, for the reason that all these things are
not sufficient to satisfy those imperious necessities to
which Christ offers himself as an answer.
Humanity does not remain long either in the lyceum
or the dancing-hall. The tragedy of life may always
be depended upon to bring them back again to that
sober condition of mind into which the Christ can
come. So long as the fact remains, that human life
is ushered in with maternal pangs, that laughter
cease's when discretion begins, that men die with
groans, and that those who are bereaved sit beside
their graves, and shed tears of bruised and broken
affections, so long it will be that the tragedy of
human life may be depended upon to bring the great
mass of men back to the feet of Jesus Christ. And
it is therefore that He has appealed, not to men in a
mood of high exaltation, and not to men cast
down in despair ; but to the great mass of men, liv
ing, and loving, and hoping, and thinking, and suf
fering ; and never appeals for any great length of
time in vain.

198 SONS OF GOD.
The story is told of that French philanthropist,
Laravelere-Lepeux, that once he invented a new reli
gion. It was a sort of modified and improved Chris
tianity. He fitted for it a ritual and a series of
doctrines which he embodied into a creed ; but, to his
astonishment, his propaganda met with no success.
Men listened to what he had to say, turned away
and laughed, and went on with their frivolities. So
he came one day to the ex-bishop Talleyrand, com
plaining that his new religion could get no hearing ;
that men were so wedded to their old faiths, their
old worship, that they would not listen. The keen
old man sympathized with him, and said to him, " It
is true ; it is very hard for a new religion to get a
hearing. I am at a loss to advise you what to do."
And then, seeming to bethink himself, he said,
" There is one thing which you might try. I would
suggest it to you. Get yourself crucified, and rise
again the third day ! "
It was a flash of light. Our Lord Jesus Christ
has made His way into the very heart of the drama of
human life, because He has got Himself crucified and
risen again the third day ! He has gotten hold of the
two most potent and imperious instincts of the human
race, — the fear of death, and the hope of immortality.
And because He has gained the attention of these two
instincts He sitteth in the heavens and alloweth the
heathen to rage, and the people to imagine a vain thing.
Sooner or later, as individuals, they will be driven by
their instincts back again to cling, in the shipwreck of
all their hopes, to the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ.

RELIGION . AND . KNOWLEDGE. 199
Beside this, so far as one can see, faith is not de
clining. The century in wliich we live, the very
century which has seen all these wonderful strides of
human discovery, is the first century in the history of
the Christian faith in which the membership of the
Christian Church has doubled itself. In 1810 there
were, in the United States, one communicant to
every sixteen of the population. To-day there is
one for every five. Over and above that, although
conspicuous saintliness may be more rare now than
in the days of the martyrs, yet I think it is simply
true to say that the average holiness and righteous
ness of the world is higher and better and purer than
ever it was before. So that we listen serenely to all
the prophets of secularism. They may run to and
fro as they please, and cry out in the streets that the
end of our faith is come. We listen placidly to
them, as we do to the confused and frightened voices
of many friends of the faith.
We turn our minds to the parable of Lessing.
" Once upon a time a certain king of a great realm
built himself a palace, the most gorgeous that ever
had been planned, the wonder of the whole earth.
A strife arose among certain connoisseurs as to some
of the obscure ground plans upon which the palace
was constructed. The conflict lasted through a great
many years. While this conflict was going on, it
happened upon a time, that a watchman one night
cried out, ' Fire ! ' And the architects began running
hither and thither, each with his plan, squabbling as
to whether the fire had broken out in this place,

200 SONS OF GOD.
or whether it had broken out at that place, and as
to what was the best spot to apply the engines.
And its friends all took to wrangling. Alas, alas !
the beautiful palace will be burned. But it stood
there ; and presently they discovered that it was not
on fire at all. Behind it there was an extraordinary
display of northern lights, which shone through it
with such brilliancy that the palace itself seemed to
be full of flame."
So we say, Let knowledge increase, let it run to
and fro, let it lighten up the world all it will, it will
only illuminate, because it cannot destroy, the city
of our God.

XVI.
BREAD OR GOD.

XVI.
BREAD OR GOD.
JPHatt. WE. \-h.
"Chen foas 3esus leb up of the Spirit into the foilberness, to fie
tcmpteb of the bebil. <&nb fohen he hob fasleb fortg bags anb fortg
nights, he foas afterfoarbs an hungereb. anb fohen the tempter came
to him, he saib, If thou be the Son of ffiob, commanb that these
stones be mabe breab. But he ansfoereb anb saib, Ut is foritten,
ffflan shall not libe bg breab alone, but bg eberg foorb that proceed
eth out of the mouth of ©ob."
Fibst of all, I wish to call your attention to a
word by which you may possibly be misled. " Then
was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to
be tempted." Since our Bible was translated into
English, the English word "to tempt" has very
greatly changed its meaning. At that time it meant
to test. It expressed such an action as when you
take a cable and apply a weight to one end of it, the
other being secured, to find out how much it will
bear. Or as one takes a piece of ordnance and tests
it with charge after charge of increasing weight of
powder to see how much it will endure. Then was
Jesus led up of the spirit into the wilderness to be
tested. I beg you to bear this in mind, because the
argument that I propose to lay before you will largely
depend upon this distinction ; Le., the fact that
203

204 SONS OF GOD.
" temptation," wherever the word is used in Scrip
ture, means trial or testing, — as when one applies an
acid to a coin to see whether it is good metal or
base. Every year the Church sets apart forty days to be
used in a particular way, and distinguished from the
rest of the year. Many would give as a sufficient
reason for doing this, that it is an ancient and pious
custom. That the Church has always done this, per
haps may be a sufficient reason. I think it is usually
well to assume that a thing which has been done
over and over again by thoughtful and good people,
must rest upon some sufficient reason. But I think
that the time may be well expended, if we look a
little farther than that, and try to ascertain if there
is not some reason much more profound and farther-
reaching than custom in regard to this matter ; for I
think there is no custom of the Church as difficult
to understand, and which is as generally, I may
say as universally, misapprehended, as that of the
observance, of Lent, or rather the principle upon
which the observance of Lent rests. If you will
notice, every time when Ash- Wednesday comes and
Lent begins, the newspapers begin to make merry
over it. Sometimes they affect an air of profundity,
and give a reason for it, but ordinarily the reason
they give is the wrong one. They crack that joke
upon the dibutante now about to become the devotie.
The fashionable man now retires from company and
takes refuge in his club, and waits in a wandering,
desolate frame of mind, until his forty days be over.

BREAD OR GOD. 205
The rest of the Christian world looks upon us Church
people in our observance of Lent, our mortification
of the flesh, and are not well able to make out what
it all means. They see that good people do practise
it, — people whose judgment is safe to follow in other
directions, — but they do not always find these people
able to give a clear reason for what they do. The
philosopher has a reason. He says : It is simply a
survival of an ancient custom. The time was when
it showed itself in starvation, and' scourging, and
hair-cloth, and pease in one's shoes, and lacerations of
the flesh, and pilgrimage, and standing upon pillars,
and letting one's hair grow, and going hungry. All
that has passed by, or at least the most of it has ; but
there has come down to our age a certain survival of
the ancient habit. To be sure, there remains but the
shadow of a great name ; but there are always certain
persons who have inherited some peculiar weaknesses,
superstitions, or traditions, which have mostly passed
out of the world, and which will also, sooner or later,
pass out of the world too. And the philosopher adds,
that, to his way of thinking, there is enough misery in
the world anyhow ; that every man's life is sufficiently
empty, to take it at its very best ; it begins in pain,
and it is marked all through with privations, and
denials, and sufferings ; that it is sufficiently empty,
and that, instead of taking away from it anything
which would sweeten it or lighten it, or make it
more pleasant, the part of wisdom would be rather
to minimize the suffering and to magnify as much
as possible the innocent pleasures and amusements,

206 SONS OF GOD.
so as to make life more comfortable instead of more
wretched. There are also those inside our Church who do
practise the duties that belong to the fasting season,
who also give a reason for it, which, to my mind, is
not satisfactory, although a good reason so far as it
goes. They say: It is the duty of all men, more
particularly of all Christian men, to mortify the
flesh, to bring the body under, to elevate the spirit,
to control one's passions, to cut away a temptation
and gratification on this side, and an extravagance
and luxury on the other side, and bring life under
control ; that this is best done by during forty days
in each year taking the body in hand, stripping it of
certain things which are allowed it at other times,
saying to it : I am the master and you are the slave ;
you will have to do for a little while as 1 tell you to
do; that it rests upon a certain inherent struggle
between the body and the soul, between the flesh and
the spirit.
Others say that neither of those which have been
assigned is the true reason. The reason is this : We
sacrifice certain things, or deny ourselves innocent
indulgences during a certain period of the year, not
because we expect to find any advantages from self-
denial, nor because the things themselves are hurtful,
but in order that we may have to give. It is for
sweet charity's sake. We abstain from this thing
and that thing during Lent, not because the thing
is wrong, but that they may have the wherewithal to
put in the alms-basin on Easter Day.

BREAD OR GOD. 207
These are explanations of Lent. It is the sur
vival of a superstition ; it is in the interest of self-
mastery ; it is in the interest of alms-giving.
Now, there is a little truth in all of these, but to
my mind they are inadequate. I think the phenome
non is altogether too large, the practice too striking
and extraordinary, to be satisfactorily explained by
any of these. Call to mind, in the first place, the
extraordinary prominence of fasting and self-denial
in the Scripture. The Old Testament is full of it.
There is the " fast of the fifth month, and the fast of
the seventh month." Every fifty years there was to
be a general relinquishment of all individual posses
sion in property, and a redistribution. From the
beginning to the end of the Old Testament, you will
find an unbroken series of general fasts, set at cer
tain periods of the year, and lasting for days and
weeks some of them. Over and above these you will
find particular fasts enjoined for particular occasions.
You will find that certain persons again and again
religiously vow, that for such a length of time they
will take no food or chink, or that they will let their
hair and beard grow, or that they will mortify their
flesh after some fashion. But it passes over into the
New Testament also, and occupies a position of promi
nence there, wliich, I think, is not usually realized.
Our Lord Himself distinctly recognized and incul
cated the duty of self-denial under the simplest of
all its forms, that is, the form of abstinence from food.
He not only enjoined it, but He said how it was to be
done, and the spirit of mind that was to go with it.

208 SONS OF GOD.
" When ye fast," He says — assuming that they would
fast — " when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a
sad countenance : for they disfigure their faces, that
they may appear unto men to fast. Verily I say unto
you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou
fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face ; That
thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father
which is in secret : and thy Father which seeth in
secret shall reward thee openly." What for ? Why,
for fasting. Take two or three examples as illustra
tions of the way that St. Paul treats this same subject :
" But in all things approving ourselves as the ministers
of God, in much patience, in afflictions, in necessities,
in distresses, in stripes, in imprisonments, in tumults,
in labors, in watchings, in fastings," thus ranking it
with prayer, with endurance, with endeavor, with love.
"Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the
flesh, to live after the flesh. For if ye live after the
flesh, ye shall die, but if ye through the Spirit do
mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live." Now,
bear these things in mind, — the extraordinary promi
nence of this duty of self-denial in the Old and New
Testaments ; and then add to that this most extraor
dinary thing, that it has been practised universally
throughout the whole of Christendom. If you will
read the history of the Christian Church you will find
passing before you a procession, unbroken from
the days of the apostles until now, — penitentes,
flagellantes, stylites, and all sorts of ascetics.
Then consider still farther that it is an idea wliich
is by no means confined to revelation ; that it reaches

BREAD OR GOD. 209
out far beyond where the knowledge of our Lord and
Saviour Jesus Christ has gone ; that it is a custom
as widespread as humanity itself. The Hindoos
cast themselves before Juggernaut ; a mother throws
her baby into the Ganges ; the Canaanites fling their
children into the fiery arms of Moloch ; the fakir
whips himself, and treads upon burning coals ; and the
Mexican swings himself with a hook by the flesh of
his back. All the history of the world is full of it.
It is no new idea. It is no invention of those who
wrote the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament ;
it is lodged deep in the heart of humanity. Now,
an idea whicli spreads out so widely, and gathers
so much into itself, and occupies so prominent a
place, is not to be explained by simply saying that it
is good for a man to bring his body under control ;
and that it is still better for a man to give to the
poor. If the first one of these were the object to be
attained, it might be done better by putting one's
self into training as for a boat-race. The second one
misses the mark. The question is not whether one
shall follow the " model of knighthood " and be like
Sir Philip Sidney who gave away the cup of water
for which he was famished, to another soldier who
needed it worse than he. This is not the question at
all. The question is not whether Sir Philip shall
give the cup to the soldier who needs it more, but
whether he, famishing with thirst, shall pour it out
on the ground and refuse either to drink it himself,
or to let the other man drink it. Self-denial, as it is
taught in the Scriptures, is entirely distinct from the

210 SONS OF GOD.
duty of almsgiving, and from the virtue of self-control.
It rests on reasons of its own.
What does it rest upon ? The truth is, it is the
most subtle and easy to be missed of all religious
ideas. It is so easy to mistake it for the Pagan
thought, that one may " give of the fruit of his body
for the sin of his soul." It is so easy to empty it of
all its divine meaning, and turn it into a sort of a
histrionic, make-believe fast and self-denial. I ask
you to believe that it is one of the highest and
most transcendent of all Christian ideas and duties,
and to notice now, a little, what seems to be the
ground upon which it stands. Here, as everywhere,
when one is concerned about a temptation or a duty,
the best thing to do is to go to the Master. Let us
go to Him and see. When He was about to begin
His great life's work, it was necessary that He should
be tested to find out whether He was fit. He recog
nized it. He sought no exemption. All human
souls have to be tested at some time or other in their
lives. Sometimes the test is a sharp and bitter
process ; sometimes it spreads over a long period of
time ; but no human soul can escape it. When He
was ready to engage in His life's work, He found it
necessary that He should be put upon trial. While
He was undergoing this trial His whole nature was
so taken up with it, that apparently He forgot all
about the necessities of His body. He went not up
into the mountain to fast, He went up to be tried ;
and the fasting was only incidental to the testing.
Afterwards, however, He woke up and discovered

BREAD OR GOD. 211
that He was hungry. Then came a test. The
"tempter," the great spirit of evil, says to Him:
" You are hungry ; here are stones : you are almighty ;
turn them into bread and feed your hunger." Now
mark what the alternative was, and what His answer
was. He says: "Not so: hunger is a bad enough
thing, to be sure, and I am hungry ; but there is
something more important than that. 'Man shall
not live by bread alone, but by every word that pro-
ceedeth out of the mouth of God.' " Now observe ;
He has got down to the very foundation of His duty.
It is a duty which involves a choice. The question
is Bread, or God ? That is the alternative that faces
Christ. It is the question that faces every man
who touches Christianity. He stripped it of every
thing that is extraneous, and, being there as else
where our great Exemplar, He set the example in the
most striking and simple of all ways. This was His
dilemma : — Shall He satisfy His body ? or shall He
satisfy His soul ? It is upon this that this whole idea
and duty of self-denial rests. It grows out of the
necessity for a choice between this world and the
other, — between a man's own self and God.
But the issue does not ordinarily present itself
after this simple fashion. If it did I fancy there
would be few mistakes. If the bald question came
to any one between his birthright or a mess of
pottage, I trow very few would choose the mess of
savory meat. But it does not present itself so. The
truth is, that in an ordinary man's life these two
alternatives, instead of confronting each other and

212 SONS OF GOD.
allowing him to make a clean, distinct choice, are
continually confused ; and the difficult thing to do is
to separate them, to put one on this side and the
other on that side, so that one can see what he is
doing. We all promised at our baptism, "to re
nounce the Devil and his works." If one could see
the Devil as he is he could renounce him very easily.
The difficulty is not in the renunciation, but in
knowing who the Devil is, — to recognize him, —
because he comes in such a questionable shape.
Now, precisely this is true in regard to all the things
in life, — the good and the evil come to us so
entangled and mingled, one with the other, that
ordinarily it is impossible for a man to make a choice
until he has first taken some pains to disentangle the
right from the wrong, to put one on the one side, and
the other on the other, so as to see the difference
between them. Now, our Blessed Lord has done
this in the simplest of all possible ways. He has
reduced life to its first principles ; and we, following
the example of His temptation, endeavor to do the
same thing? What is it we are trying to do? We
are simply trying, as I say, to reduce life to its first
principles, — to its lowest terms, — so that we shall be
able to see what is good and what is bad in it. I
think you must be conscious of how entirely human
life does revolve about bodily necessities, — food,
clothing, and shelter. These things represent con
stant quantities in man's wants. Food, clothing,
and shelter! Notice what these do signify. They
are most complex entities. Think of, the magnitude

BREAD OR GOD. 213
of the machinery for the production, transportation,
and distribution of food ; of all the commercial life
and action associated with it ; of the social life and
hospitality which depend upon it. Take the matter
of clothing. The most imperious of all laws, the
law of fashion, grows out of it. Competition, vexa
tion, vanity, pride, pleasure, — all have their root in
this bodily necessity. Or shelter, — houses, orna
ments, luxuries, all have to do with it. In combina
tion with one or the other of these two things, it
carries with it all practice of hospitality, all kindli
ness, all friendliness, all interchange of human courte
sies. They spring ultimately from one or the other
of these three bodily necessities. Now, the bad and
the good in these things are so commingled that no
man can tell what is right, and what it is wrong, unless
he take some trouble to disentangle them. When,
therefore, we come, as Christian people, to our Lent,
we simply say, we are going to attempt to do what
Christ did. We are making an effort to see the
great alternative, to solve the problem of what is the
supreme necessity of life, to see what is " bread " on
the one hand, and what is God on the other. As one
should say : " Life is a very serious matter at its
best, generally attended with much pain and priva
tion. Usually I lighten it as I go along with pleas
ure and with innocent amusement ; but now for a
little while I will strip it bare, and see what it is. I
will reduce it, as far as I can, to its simplicity, in
order that I may see what is necessary, and what is
not, that I may choose between them."

214 SONS OF GOD.
Now, it seems to me that this is what the whole
duty of self-denial, the whole practice of Lent, rests
upon. It is the endeavor to realize what is the
supreme necessity, — whether it is the body or the
soul, whether it is this world or the other, whether
it is " bread " or God. The practical outcome of
the attempt is most beneficent. In the first place, it
brings one into the Spirit of Christ ; for this is what
He did, putting on the one side " the glory that He
had with the Father before the world was," and
which was an innocent glory, emptying himself so
as to become as one of us. Now, as we empty our
selves we come into the Spirit of Christ, and are
able to understand Him. And then remember the
consequence, that in proportion as we see Him as He
is, in the same proportion we grow to be like Him. In
practice it works out most wholesomely. Dives,
when he was clad in purple and fine linen, at his
dinner-table faring sumptuously, was a most excellent
man, full of good impulses, which even hell could
not destroy within him ; for even in the torment his
second inquiry was whether something could not be
done to save his five brethren : still, Lazarus was
starving at his gate. Why ? Not because Dives was
cruel, but because he did not know what was going
on outside his garden-wall. Now, it may be in this
Lent, that within a half-dozen squares of your house,
children are hungry, women are crying, men are
blaspheming and thinking of suicide. It may be
unavoidable, for sometimes poverty is not to be re
lieved. Poverty is a penalty which at times the

BREAD OR GOD. 215
Christian man cannot relieve without doing violence
to right. But the great question for us to settle is,
whether we are taking our " bread " instead of our
God, while the man at our gate is taking his God
instead of his bread, or may be going without
them both alike.
We may as well confess, however, that this ques
tion has no interest or meaning except for those
who are hungering and thirsting for God. Some
will find in their Lent a measure of " self-control,"
and they will do well, for it is worth finding. Some
will find the means to gratify sweet charity, and they
will do well; but they will all miss the mark and
fall short, unless they set themselves to satisfy that
divine hunger whose poignant pangs lead one to
forget even food and clothing, and to satisfy them
selves with that bread of which " whoso eateth shall
never hunger."

XVII.
OLD AND NEW.

XVII.
OLD AND NEW.
&cb. ff. U.
" |£ris heab . . . foas fohtte lifte foool, as fohite as snofo ; anb his
cges foere as a flame of fire."
John, the last survivor of the personal friends of
Jesus, an old, old man, sat musing by a summer sea.
An empty world lay all about him. The hoary glory
of the Orient lay out of sight beyond the eastern
sea. The hoarse roar of the Empire was too far off
for him to hear. He sat alone and mused of —
" The vision of the future, and the glory that would be."
He pondered of the Faith for which he had been
exiled to Patmos, his brothers had been stoned at
Jerusalem, crucified at Rome, scourged at Antioch,
and thrown to the lions in a hundred amphitheatres.
He thought of what it was, and whereunto it would
grow. Like the Oriental he was, his thoughts
shaped themselves into a vision. His deep ques
tionings took outward form, and found their answer
in a majestic Figure which stood beside and spoke to
him. The Person whom he saw was at once the
Genius of Christianity, and its Master. When John
turned and looked at Him, he saw a man whose " hair
219

220 SONS OF GOD.
was white like wool, and his eyes were like a flame
of fire." His head was hoary, but his eyes were filled
with the fire of eternal youth, and his speech was as
multitudinous as the many-voiced ocean.
This is the religion of Jesus : venerable as eternity ;
modern as the changing times ; and capable always
of " speaking to every man in his own tongue wherein
he was born."
I want to speak to you of the Old and the New in
Christianity. What in it is abiding, and what may
legitimately be changed and renewed ?
That there are both elements in it, all men allow
in theory. But how the two may practically be dis
tinguished and adjusted is the question which is, at
this moment, exercising the Christian world. It
shows itself in the regions of Doctrine, Worship, and
Discipline. How shall the Church preserve her own
past, and, at the same time, fit herself to the pres
ent? How shall she hold fast the Faith delivered to
the Saints of long ago, and, at the same time, find
room for tlje Faith delivered to the Saints of to-day?
How shall she pray in the ancient Liturgies, and,
at the same time, find fit forms for the expression of
the new aspirations growing out of the new needs
of to-day?
How shall she hold fast to an old order, and yet
make herself comprehended by a century whose very
conception of government is different?
Was Lord Macaulay right in his dictum that, "so
far as his religious condition is concerned, a Chris
tian of the second century with his Bible was neither

OLD AND NEW. 221
better nor worse off than a Christian with his Bible
in the nineteenth "?
Speaking soberly, is Christianity capable of being,
in any way, touched or modified by the passing gener
ations ?
Some will at once answer, "No: by the very
nature of the case. It came from the hand of the
Master complete. The Spirit led the first generation
into all truth, and they placed it upon record. They
ordained the structure of the Church as from a pat
tern given in the mount. She proceeds in a path of
her own, which runs parallel to the world's course,
but does not touch it. If she be perplexed at any
time, or at fault concerning what to believe or what
to do, she should go back in her own steps until she
picks up the trail, and then go on along the path
marked out for her."
Well, she is perplexed. In every direction old
arrangements are being felt to be unsatisfactory, and
changes are being desired. Confessions of Faith
have grown obsolete. Articles of Religion, which
once were deemed sufficiently accurate and suffi
ciently important to be fought for or fought against;
to warrant men in persecution or in martyrdom for
their sakes, — are being allowed to fall into oblivion.
A Liturgy which many generations pronounced " ad
mirable " has been officially pronounced inadequate
and clumsy. Doctrines like, for example, the Verbal
Inspiration of the Scriptures, or the Substitutionary
Theory of the Atonement, or the Miltonic Notion of
the Fall, which have been deemed at times the very

222 SONS OF GOD.
core and essence of the Christian Faith, find no one
now to say a good word for them.
The truth is, that from time to time the whole
conception of the universe is revolutionized by some
change in the habits of human thought. Such a
change was compelled by Copernicus. When the
earth was dethroned by him from her astronomical
place at the centre of the spheres, and the sun set
up in her stead, the theology which had adjusted
itself to the old cosmogony, had to be entirely re
adjusted. It is not to be wondered at that the theo
logians detested Galileo. Men always dislike those
who give them trouble. The trouble he gave was
past all count. It compelled them to do all over
again, slowly and painfully, what they had fondly
thought was done and finished for all time. We
smile now at their folly. Let us be quite sure that
we understand the genius of Christianity better than
they. An equally profound revolution has been compelled
in our time. Darwin has compelled greater changes
than Copernicus did. The system of physical science
and philosophy in which his name holds the place of
honor has compelled the religious world to picture
to itself all anew the process of creation. It has
changed the connotation of the very word creation.
It has compelled a re-reading of Genesis and the
Apocalypse. It has expanded each creative day into
an seon, and carried backward the beginning of man
to a point which would have made Archbishop Ussher
dizzy to contemplate. It has given a new and awful

OLD AND NEW. 2!16
significance to the theologic phrase "Original Sin,"
by showing it to be a synonym for brute inheritance.
It has laid its axe to the root of the popular notion
of the "Fall," and thus will compel a re-writing
of all systematic Divinity. When Anthropology
changes, Theology and Soteriology must be modified
to correspond.
A similar change in the very substance of religion
has been brought about slowly and insensibly by the
spread of Democracy. The writers of the Scripture,
when they spoke of the government of God, used the
terms of speech with which they were familiar. But
the only government they knew was that of despots.
Historical Christianity is tinged all through with
monarchical ideas. These have, in our day, not only
ceased to be fitting, but they have, to a degree we
seldom realize, ceased to be intelligible. If one were
writing a Catechism to-day in America, would he
counsel the child "to submit itself to all its gov
ernors, and to order itself lowly and reverently to all
its betters "? But it is idle to think that men's very
conceptions of human law and liberty can be pro
foundly modified without their ideas of Divine Laws
being changed to correspond.
Speaking broadly, it is not too much to say that
we Americans of to-day are as different from our
fathers, say at the Reformation, as they were from
the members of the Council of Nice. Our mental
habits, our mental furniture, our moral judgments,
the tests of truth which we instinctively apply, the
forms in which our conduct moves, the very eyes
with which we see Truth, are all changed.

224 SONS OF GOD.
Now, in secular things, we do not resist change.
We know it to be the law of progress, and we assume
progress to be desirable. We know that an institu
tion which stagnates dies, just as an organism which
ceases to grow begins to degenerate. If it could be
said of any science that its text-book in use to-day
is the same one which was in use fifty years ago, we
would know from that fact that that science was mori
bund. It does not disturb us that the language
which we speak has, by slow and imperceptible mod
ification, changed itself since the time of Chaucer,
so that he and we could not understand one another.
Governments, laws, customs, manners, speech, — all
these may change utterly, and we may gain, not lose,
thereby. So far as all these things are concerned,
the history of the race may be broken in two at any
point without disaster. All these only concern the
particular generation at any time alive.
But men have the instinct that it is not so with
religion. That concerns not only the generation
that now is on the earth, but those who have been
as well. It looks to " the whole family in heaven and
earth." "Where are my forefathers?" abruptly
asked the old Saxon chief with his foot upon the
Baptistry steps. " In hell ! " replied the dogmatic
priest waiting to baptize him. " Then to hell I'll go
too," answered the Saxon, as he turned on his heel,
and strode out of church with his brave men behind
him. Religion must bind the generations together.
A break of continuity in it would introduce confu
sion in heaven. Jesus avowed that He did not come

OLD AND NEW. 225
to destroy but to fulfil the Law and the Prophets.
A few years ago a review article attracted much
attention. Its title was " An Advertisement for a
New Religion." It dwelt at length upon the impo
tency of the present forms of Christianity to satisfy
the present needs. It proposed a substitute, of which
it sketched the main outlines. In a future number,
a keen critic pointed out the absurd hopelessness of
the substitute proposed. But both the Advertisement
and the answer pointed the double fact that newness
in the Contents of religion is impossible, and that
newness in its methods and forms is always necessary.
Four hundred years ago the Church in Europe faced
a like situation. There was a new Science and a
new Philosophy, as there is to-day. The physical
facts of life had changed their aspect by the dis
covery of a new heavens by Copernicus, and a new
earth by Columbus. An intellectual ferment was
working in every department of life. The language
of the Church had ceased to be the language of the
people. For generations she had been able to secure
obedience. But an authority which does not rest
upon the assent of the understanding of the subject
is doomed. The Ecclesiastics had overlaid the simple
order of the Church with multitudinous and vexa
tious ordinances. The Schoolmen, in the ages of
their busy idleness, had spun their subtleties about
the simple Faith, until the whole system had ceased
to be intelligible. The Humanists turned away from
the thought of religion with the same distaste,
though without the moral earnestness, that the man

226 SONS OF GOD.
of science does to-day. Then the Reformer began
his task. His work was to clear away accretions
and get down to solid fact. But at every turn he
confronted a doctrine or practice which, though once
it had been new and strange, had long since become
intrenched and venerable. When he challenged the
literal " Inspiration of the Church," devout men
regarded him with the same horror that devout men
did him who, thirty years ago, challenged the literal
" Inspiration" of the Scriptures.
They dismissed his thesis with the epigram, " There
is something in it which is true, and something
which is new : but the true part is not new, and the
new part is not true. "
But the spirit of truth was with the Reformer.
It was the eternal vitality of Jesus. It compelled
the whole Western Church to re-state its message.
Nor was this confined to the so-called Reformed
Churches. Rome also, though to a lesser degree,
yielded to the same necessity. The Church of Rome
owes as much to the Reformers as does Protestantism.
It, also, is reformed. It learned a lesson in the
sixteenth century never since forgotten. That was,
that if the Church is to lead the people, it must be on
such terms with them that they can mutually under
stand one another. And so it has come about that,
from the Bishop of Rome, who used to make Con
cordats and sign Pragmatic Sanctions with Emperors
and kings, appears now an Encyclical to working
men, saying, " Come, now, let us reason together."
But it was Protestantism which stood for the final

OLD AND NEW. 227
authority of each man's reason and conscience as
against all prescriptions. " Private Judgment, " with
its attendant responsibility, is the price one must
pay for being a man. No man may escape from it,
let him wish it ever so much. So long as it remains
true that each one must bear the consequences of his
own acts, both in this life and in the next, so long
will it remain true that he must stand out for the
right to order his own acts and thoughts. Of course,
unless he be a fool, he will have regard to the judg
ment of his fellow-men in making up his own. But,
when all is said and done, he can no more escape the
necessity of acting upon his own judgment than he
can escape from his own shadow. If he determine
to submit himself to the authority of the Church, the
act of submission is itself a supreme act of private
judgment. If he accept the authority of the ipsis-
sima verba of an infallible Book, or the official utter
ance of au infallible Man, the situation remains the
same. The recognition of any " authority " whatever,
outside that of " the answer of a good conscience
toward God, " requires the expressed or implied assent
of the individual will, an assent yielded with the
consent of the understanding.
A little reflection ought to make evident that
authority of any sort in the domain of religion must
defeat its own purpose. Neither the Bible nor the
Church, nor any process of Reason, can do what God
Himself cannot do ; that is, to compel the spirit of a
man to yield itself to God. Would the Spirit of
God have continued all through the weary ages to

228 SONS OF GOD.
strive with men if there had been any authority that
could have been practically applied ? The very heart
of Protestantism is its recognition of the fact that
individual liberty must be commensurate with indi
vidual responsibility. Unless the Church will under
take for her part to guarantee the eternal welfare of
a man independently of his belief or conduct, then
he must be at liberty to regulate his own belief and
conduct. The Church of Rome has declared her
readiness to do just this. She asserts her power to
draw so much of merit as may be needed from the
treasury of the Saints, and to set it to the credit of
any sinner she may select from the millions now in
purgatory. Let him believe it who can, but let it
be borne in mind that this guaranty on the part of the
Church is the only condition upon which a sane man
would be justified in yielding her the " obedience "
of which ecclesiastics sometimes prate, and which
they seldom render.
The injunction to "try all things, hold fast that
which is good, " did not exhaust itself upon the first
generation bf Christians. It is always in force. In
theory, no one doubts it. But when one undertakes
to act upon it, he is sure to be warned, both by his
own inner sense of reverence and by clamors from
without, that each particular thing to which he offers
to apply his test is sacred.
Let us face the question : " Is there anything in the
body of Christian Doctrine, as such Doctrine has been
generally accepted, which a loyal Christian and
Churchman may properly challenge ? If so, what ?

OLD AND NEW. zzy
And which ones? Are there "closed questions?"
.ind do all the things belong in that category which
the Bishop of Springfield puts there? Is Dr. Dix
right when he claims for the Church an authority of
such a sort that, when she, by formal action of a
General Council, puts her imprimatur upon any
proposition, it thereafter becomes a sin for any man
to question its truth. Was Urban VIII. right when
he pronounced the Copernican astronomy to be con
trary to Holy Scripture and the teaching of the
Fathers ? Was Moses Stuart right when he denounced
the heresy that the earth is more than six thousand
years old? Was Dean Burgon right when he de
clared that every chapter, verse, word, and syllable
of the Bible is inspired and free from error? Is the
Presbyterian Church right when they arraign their
foremost Biblical scholars for teaching that Moses did
not write the Pentateuch; that the Levitical system
was not generally introduced until after the Captivity;
that parts of Daniel are not prophecy, but history
written after the fact? In a word, where is the line
to be drawn between those things about which men
may differ, and those things about which they must
agree ? which is but another way of asking, " What
things are abiding, and what things are changeable,
in Christianity?"
This is the problem now before the Christian world.
Its solution is far from easy, but there is no escape
from the necessity. Many would gladly postpone it.
Many do not see why it should ever be proposed at all.
Many see in the attempt the destruction of the Faith.

230 SONS OF GOD.
"Religious belief, as it lies in almost every man's
mind, is associated with beliefs erroneously supposed
to be implicated in it. Beyond the truth itself, on
which a man really lives, there is a mass of connected
belief which not one out of a hundred either attempts
to dissever from it, or imagines it possible to dissever.
To disconnect this accretion of secondary beliefs from
that which is vital is tacitly taken for granted to be
impossible. That which would remain after the
amputation, it is assumed would bleed to death.
Religious beliefs are in the average mind so inter
woven with one another by mere effect of association
that, when one of them is assailed, all are thought
to be in danger."1
The difficulty is in seeing the relative values of
institutions and doctrines; to distinguish between
substance and form, between body and clothes, be
tween the essential and the accidental in Christianity.
This is the perplexing task which God, in His Provi
dence, has laid upon us. To preserve unbroken the
continued spiritual life of the Christian centuries,
and at the same time be in whole-hearted sympathy
with the age in which we live, — to think with it, feel
with it, hope with it, speak its speech, and share its
spirit — this it is to be a preacher of the gospel to-day.
The most fatal thing which can befall him is a
doubt of the spiritual capacity of his own generation.
This is the besetting temptation of the priest. He
has in mind the saints and doctors of past ages, and
forgets that they also had the frailties and follies of
i Fisher: "The Grounds of Belief," p. 454.

OLD AND NEW. 231
flesh and blood, and belonged to the same race we do.
He finds it hard to think that his own contemporaries
possess a spiritual insight and power of doctrinal
statement equal to the men who were at Nice, or
Chalcedon, or Aries, or Hampton Court, or West
minster. This leads him to attach an undue impor
tance to the forms in which the men of the past
stated their doctrines and framed their prayers.
It it, indeed, hard to believe that the promise of
the Spirit which Jesus gave was meant to find its
fulfilment, not in the first generation of disciples, but
in every generation: " He shall take of the things
which are mine, and shall show them unto you."
Nevertheless, the truth which, it seems to me, is
more important than any other to be grasped by the
Church at this present, is that the nineteenth century
has the same right to state the truths of Christianity
for itself as did the sixteenth or the fourth, and may
as certainly expect the guidance of the Holy Ghost
as they.
What I mean is this: Christianity is essentially
a few fundamental truths. They are the Fatherhood
of God, the Person and Work of Jesus Christ, the
presence in the world of a conscious Divine Spirit,
a Society called the Church, composed of men and
women who look confidently for a definite form of
immortality. It has never lost or changed any one
of these, and cannot be conceived of as doing so.
But these central truths remain, practically, barren
and inert until they are expanded, examined in detail,
and find a lodgement in the apprehensions of indi-

232 SONS OF GOD.
viduals. The necessity of so expanding them has
given rise to a large number of so-called systems of
doctrine and discipline. Some of these have been
formally adopted by sections of the Church, as the
Augsburg Confession by the Lutherans, the West
minster Confession by the Presbyterians, the Thirty-
nine Articles by the Church of England and America,
and the Tridentine Formularies by Rome. They were
all formulated nearly four hundred years ago. They
were easily intelligible by the people to whom they
were addressed. They were all popular documents.
They all proposed to put what they conceived to
be Christian doctrine in a portable, available form.
Their promulgation was in every case immediately
succeeded by a period of enormous activity and suc
cess on the part of the Church. They have never
been officially withdrawn, but the Christian world
has grown away from them. They have largely ceased
to be intelligible. They no longer express adequately
the truths which they once did express. In not a few
cases, they have come to be serious stumbling-blocks
to men, both within and without the Church. They
state propositions which are not tenable. It is against
them that popular attack is led. Dr. Draper, Pro
fessor Huxley, Mr. Ingersoll, et id genus omne, find
their occupation here. Now, the ground is often prac
tically taken, and sometines avowed, that we ought
to cling to them until we axe forced to abandon them;
that we should part with the traditional opinion only
when the concession is extorted by evidence no longer
to be withstood. " Never yield an inch of ground

OLD AND JSEW. *oo
until it is found impossible to hold it." No policy
could, it seems to me, be more foolish or more un-
Christ-like. Surely, it is not the part of the Church
to hold a position which should never have been
taken, until the defenders are forced to abandon it
and seek another, grumbling and discouraged!
Dissatisfaction with many of the current state
ments of Christian truth is making itself felt on
every hand. In one body a committee is apointed to
draw up a new creed, and report it to the next coun
cil ; in another, a movement for the revision of the
confession is going forward. One group of dissatis
fied seek for a truer statement among the mediaeval
formularies. Another set content themselves with
preaching about the absurdities of Orthodoxy. An
other class stands in its pulpit and laments the
decadence of the old, simple docility, and finds in
the specific principle of Protestantism the necessary
eclipse of Faith. But none are unmoved by the
spirit of the time. Even the Catholic scholars of
Oxford band together, under the leadership of the
Principal of Pusey House, to re-examine the Church's
doctrine. What does it all mean ? Is the Gospel of
Jesus Christ to be supplanted by a new Gospel ? Has
the Faith once delivered to the saints been lost?
And are men groping blindly to re-discover it ? Has
the genius of Christianity grown old and purblind ?
I reply: this restlessness is not the nervousness of
senility, but the product of the ever youthful vigor
of the majestic person St. John saw at Patmos.
Surely, no one who looks with open eyes at the facts

234 SONS OF GOD.
of life to-day can fail to recognize the strong Son of
God going forth to war ! The love of truth for truth's
sake, which marks the science of this age, that enthu
siasm of humanity which shelters the outcast, strives
to reform the criminal, makes laws to protect the
sailor, taxes the rich to educate the children of the
poor, builds hospitals, asylums, homes, nurses the
sick, commands the rarest surgical skill and the cost
liest anaesthetic for the beggar's brat, that deep sense
of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of
man which refuses to be content with the structure
of society, until the weakest shall be guaranteed his
place and share at the banquet of life, — what are all
these but the manifestations of the Son of Man?
The task of the Christian preacher is to translate this
deep and widespread ethical spirit of Christ into
intelligible words. The voice of Jesus which John
heard " o'er land and sea " was a multitudinous voice.
"Like the sound of many waters." It speaks like
the roaring of a torrent or the rush of an ocean wind,
but it also speaks like the lapping of the incoming
tide and\he murmur of the thousand springs breaking
up out of the earth. One who has been used for a
long time to hear the voice of God in some single
monotone, misses many a sound which is as really
His voice. It is literally true that " day unto day
uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowl
edge. There is no speech nor language where their
voice is not heard."
I think I appreciate the dislike that many have to
this whole manner of speaking and thinking. It

OLD AND NEW. 235
seems to them to resolve Christianity into a vague,
formless influence which cannot be identified at any
particular point. They love precision. They want
to state their doctrine in clear, definite, categorical
propositions. They ask, in exasperation, " Does a
man, then, hold his creed without knowing precisely
either what it contains or how long it can be retained
without revision ? " They wish finality in doctrine.
They would have the Church's forms of faith and
mode of life fixed once and for all.
I sympathize with the wish and share in it: — if it
only could be ! But, alas, fixity is only possible to
dead things ! Only by endless integration and disin
tegration is life possible. The Orthodox Eastern
Church stands to-day an awful warning before the
face of Christendom. Centuries ago she lost the
power of motion. She said, " As I am, will I remain
through all the ages." And so she sits, a spectacle
in her Basilica. Old she is, but not venerable. Her
hair is hoary, but the fire of youth is all gone from
her leaden eyes. Wrapt in her embroidered vest
ments, she slumbers on, as powerless to touch or to
be touched by the life of the flesh-and-blood men and
women of Russia and Greece as the mummy of Seti
is that of the Felaheen of Egypt.
Thank God, the Church in England and America
has retained the power of motion! The life which
thrills in her is, in our day, seeking new forms of
expression. The fundamental facts of her life do not
change, of course. The Apostles' Creed and the gen
eral structure of the Church are as changeless as the

236 SONS OF GOD.
architectural design of the human body or the con
stant faculties of the human soul. I cannot imagine
why any one should be uneasy as to their continuity.
Surely, the apostolic men were not. " The removal
of those things that are shaken signifieth those things
that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken
may remain!" They do not ask the exemption of
any article from this process of " shaking." They
rest serenely in the confidence of its power to main
tain itself.
It will be well for you to bear in mind that our
Gospel is as multiform as are the myriad-faced aspects
of human life. In order to be efficient, it must be
spoken so that every man will " hear it in that tongue
in which he was born;" that is to say, it must be
stated in terms of that inner speech which is not the
same in any two men. The preacher is only the
interpreter. He takes the words of God, and " tar-
gums " them to men. He must do this so that neither
their sanctity nor the meaning be missed. He must
" speak with tongues." To do this he must know
men and love them. He must know his own age
and love it. He must believe in it. He must be
quick to detect the motions of the Spirit of God in
the movements of society, and be able to interpret
the voices which the Spirit is striving to utter. He
will remember that the Truth which he proclaims is
older than the Reformation, older than the Councils,
as old as God ! The glorious company of the Apostles,
the goodly fellowship of Prophets, the noble army of
Martyrs, the venerable line of Patriarchs, the shining

OLD AND NEW. 237
host of angels, have all shared in it. To each the
Spirit of God has made it intelligible in part, but not
exhaustively, " God having provided some better
thing for us, that they without us should not be made
perfect." The Spirit of Christ is as protean as is
life, for " the Spirit is life." This is why it is safe
against all assaults of its opponents. They cannot
find it. When the crowd would cast Jesus down
from the rock, and so make an end of Him, He
always passes away out of their midst. But it is
only to reappear again to some other man or group of
men. I bid you, then, not to be dismayed by the doctrinal
unrest of this our day. It is but the shaking which
God has ordained. Those things which cannot be
shaken will remain ; and those things which can be
shaken ought not to remain.
Let me commend to you the strong words of one of
our greatest preachers.
" Our Faith can suffer and grow pale only if we
shut it out from the increasing light, and fancy it
will abide in darkness. The clear shining of knowl
edge may dissipate a thousand fancies which we have
mistaken for realities; but it shall bring to faith
health and vigor and new life. While many run to
and fro, and knowledge is increased, Christianity
cannot be preserved as a cloistered virtue or a schol
astic art ; but out in the breezy world, under the open
sky, rejoicing in the light, its strength shall not
be abated nor its eye grow dim. Reverently and
humbly, but nothing doubting, the Christian of our

238 SONS OF GOD.
day may follow wherever new paths of knowledge
seem opening to his approach ; and though he go down
into the depths, or wander through realms of strange
shadows and endless confusions, nevertheless, if he
remains true to the Spirit sent for his guidance, like
Dante following Beatrice from world to world, —
he shall find himself walking in a cloud of light, full
of all melodious voices."

XVIII.
THE FIRST ADAM.

XVIII.
THE FIRST ADAM.
ffien- ffffff. 22.
" anb the ILorb Cob saib, Beholb, the man is become as one ai
us, to ftnofo goob anb ebil."
A well-known writer in a well-known Review
lately made this statement : —
"It is easy to see that the 'New Theology' is
about prepared to join hands with Darwinianism,
and obliterate the doctrine of the Fall as underlying
the fact that ' the Word was made flesh.' "
It is the peculiarity of the ' New Theology ' that
no one is officially authorized to speak for it, but I
venture to think that the above statement will be
silently admitted by those who are under its influ
ence as being substantially true. I venture also to
say why this judgment is accepted by those in whom
it has reached the distinctness of a judgment.
The existence of moral evil is not denied by
any. There are in the field three theories as to its ori
gin and nature. Of course these theories are not held
distinctly and unmixed. The same person may, and,
in point of fact, often does, hold mutually antagonis-
241

242 SONS OF GOD.
tic fragments of different theories in doctrine and
philosophy and may be as strenuous in support of one
part of his contradictory creed as of another. But
in the case before us the three theories are easily
separable, in thought at least.
(1.) The first is that of what for convenience'
sake may be called " orthodoxy."
According to it there was, long ago, a primeval
world which was a paradise. It had a genial climate
and a fertile soil. No ice-bound oceans or burning
deserts, no thorns or brambles, no predacious beast or
pestilential wind, were there. The world was young
and wholesome. No nerve had ever thrilled with
pain, nor any living creature looked upon the face
of death. The plains were smiling with perennially
golden grain, and the forest bountiful with pen
dent fruit. In this Paradise God walked, and was
lonely. In it He set the newly fashioned Adam, the
first individual of his race. Into his arms He gra
ciously gave the maiden Mother of us all. He
created them immortal. Their wisdom was tran
scendent ; their innocence absolute.
But with Adam God made a covenant. The mat
ter of the agreement was, that perfect obedience and
unbroken righteousness would be rewarded by con
tinual bliss, and warranty against pain and death ;
and that for disobedience the punishment should be
capital. The parties to the agreement were God of
the first part, and Adam the party of the second
part. Adam did not enter into the covenant for him
self alone, but as the representative of all his race

THE FIRST ADAM. 243
yet unbegotten. They were to have their chance in
him, and to stand forfeit if he failed. (Whether
the covenant were to remain in force eternally, or
whether, after a certain time passed in obedience,
he was to have been confirmed in an indefeasible
right, does not appear.) The simple test for the
first man's power of moral endurance was to be his
abstention from a certain attractive kind of fruit in
the garden where he dwelt. An insidious tempter
appeared from some unknown and unsuspected quar
ter, enlisted the more pliable nature of Eve on the
side of disobedience, and through her broke down
the moral resistance of man. He failed in the test,
and catastrophe unspeakable was let loose ! Smitten
suddenly with shame and pain, the offenders crept
away already moribund. The voice of God rolling
in thunder discovered their hiding-place. The flash
ing lightning of an offended heaven burned between
them and their bower. The jealous earth shot up from
her bosom the " upas and the deadly nightshade "
among the kindly forest, and choked the wheat with
thorns and brambles. The wild beasts, filled, for the
first time with cruel rage and hunger, rent and de
voured one another. The natures of the offenders
themselves underwent a sudden ferment, which left
them transformed and totally depraved. Their un
born children not only inherited the taint, but were
bound by all the penalties appended to the original
contract broken by their father and representative.
Thus death physical and moral, the depravity of
every son of Adam, and all the thousand ills that

244 SONS OF GOD.
flesh is heir to, both in this world and in any world
yet to come, are all the outcome of that transaction
which, in popular religion and in technical theology,
is named " The Fall." Most Continental and Amer
ican theology is based upon this notion. So uncon
ventional a thinker as Dr. Bushnell has a strange
chapter induced by the theory. If death literally
came by Adam, how then to account for its un
doubted dominion over the lower animals for seons
before Adam was made ? The " dragons weltering
in their prime " lived by tearing one another, and
were so equipped by nature that they could not live
otherwise. Dr. Bushnell, seeing this difficulty, hits
upon the ingenious theory of what he calls " The
anticipative consequences of sin." J That is, the sin
which was to be, cast its shadow backward, and cov
ered the earth from its beginning !
The theory before us cannot be more clearly stated
than in the words of the " Larger Catechism " ap
pended to the Westminster Confession of Faith:
" The ' Fall ' brought upon mankind the loss of
communion with God, His displeasure and curse, so
that we are by nature children of wrath, bond slaves
to Satan, and justly liable to all punishment in this
world and the world to come."
Now, whence came this notion ? In the Old Tes
tament there is no allusion to it whatever. There
every case of moral obliquity is referred to the delib
erate and wanton choice of the person offending.
His fault is never modified, or the quality of his
1 Nature and Supernatural, ch. vii.

THE FIRST ADAM. 245
guilt deemed to be affected, by his relation to Adam.
He is in every case accounted worthy or blameworthy,
not for what he is qua man, but for what he does of
his own choice.1
The "Fall" is never referred to by Jesus in
any form. If His words and precepts stood alone
in the New Testament the transaction would be
overlooked completely. He concerns Himself with
the springs of human conduct as they exist now.
He uncovers and fortifies new and obscured motives.
He refers righteousness to the indwelling of the
Spirit of God, but never refers sin to the indwelling
of the spirit of Adam.
In the Apocalypse, which unfolds the last scenes in
the drama of humanity, there is no reference to a
great catastrophe at its beginning, and the dSnoue-
ment would seem to be incompatible with such a
first act.
The Catholic Creeds are entirely silent concerning
it. The Articles of the Christian Faith, assent to
which is a condition precedent to membership in the
Christian Church, have nothing whatever to say con
cerning the transaction known as the " Fall."
From all this it seems evident, that if the " New
Theology " sits somewhat loosely to this theory, it
does not thereby argue itself to be irreverent towards
the highest authority or indifferent to fundamental
truth. The portion of Christian Scripture by wliich the
1 Edersheim: " Life of Christ," vol. i., book 1. "It is entirely unknown
also to Rabbinical Judaism."

246 SONS OF GOD.
theory has been always upheld is St. Paul's Epistle
to the Romans, the fifth chapter, beginning at the
twelfth verse. To the untheological reader the
meaning is sufficiently evident. The propagandist of
the new Faith declares that his principal, Jesus of Naz
areth, is of divine origin, and has moral relations with
every human being. But, just as all men are affected
by the character and actions of their original ances
tor " Adam," so the whole race stands affected by the
character and actions of the Second " Adam." This
seems to be all that the writer had in mind. He is
concerned with the position of Jesus, and only uses
the accepted story of Adam as an illustration and
analogy, good for what is good. But instead of be
ing allowed to remain in the subordinate position of
an analogy, it has unfortunately been elevated into a
capital position among Christian dogmas.
The history of the dogma is, in rough lines,
easily traced.1 It was developed by that great sys
tem builder, Augustine. It passed, together with
the rest of his theology, into general acceptance in
the Western Church. It was elaborated into curious
detail during the busy idleness of the scholastic
period. Dante popularized the story of the Edenic
Paradise for the Latin races, as did Milton for the
English-speaking people. Luther, the Augustinian
monk, brought the theory with him from his cloister.
Calvin accepted it from his master Augustine, and
made it the starting-point of his system. Through
these various channels it has come since the Refor-
> Hagenbach : " History of Doctrine," p. 59.

THE FLRST ADAM. 247
mation into the popular mind to be the accepted
Christian teaching concerning the moral status of
man. That the theory, both in itself and in its conse
quences, is entirely untenable would seem to be evi
dent from merely stating it. It is so well intrenched,
however, that more than this is necessary. To any
one who has come under the influence of that mode
of thinking known as evolutionary, such a catas
trophe as that of the " Fall " is a priori incredible.
Such a thing is out of analogy, both natural and spir
itual. On the face of it (if it be so read), it is a
case of sudden and violent degradation interjected
between two periods of steady progress. Up to the
date of the " Fall," and from that date forward, the
progress is undenied. Instances of degradation, both
in individuals and families, are very common, but
they differ from this alleged one in that they are
slow, final, and irretrievable. Their subjects are left
stranded on one side of the stream of progress.
There is no farther use for them, and they cease to
be. The Miltonic " Fall," on the other hand, is sud
den, inconclusive, and the penal cause assigned is no
sufficient rationale in the absence of any moral or
religious obligation to accept the fact. The" " total
depravity " supposed to have been the consequence
of this transaction is not a fact, and never has been.
A human being without inherent moral goodness —
inherent in the same way as his humanity itself — is
something no one has ever seen. It has been ima
gined in technical theology, but its actual counterpart

248 SONS OF GOD.
is to be looked for, not in any man or woman, but in
Mephistopheles or a Houyhiihnm. Apart from the
somewhat artificial language of the pulpit, neither
the idea nor the fact ever occurs.
The associated dogma of inherited guilt is practi
cally obsolete also. True, it survives in the stand
ards of some Christian bodies, but it has ceased to
be a conviction to which one may appeal to influence
conduct. What preacher would dare to assert boldly,
" You deserve to be damned for your share in Adam's
act of disobedience " ?
The dogma is no longer held on the authority of
Augustine, or rejected with Pelagius ; it has simply
fallen out of sight in consequence of its intrinsic
unworthiness and essential immorality. The "New
Theology " does not accept it or reject it ; it passes
it by. (2.) The theory has in some quarters been rudely
displaced by another, which seems to be radically
opposed to it. Indeed, the place occupied by it is
the one most strenuously fought for by all the forces
at present in the field. The Theist, the Secularist,
the Evolutionist, or the Christian, — whichever one is
able to capture and hold this ground, — possesses
the key to the battle of modern thought. What is
the ground and origin of human Right and Wrong?
Whoso holds the key to this will win the battle.
For, practically, men value morals above all else.
It is admitted on all hands that the sense of right and
wrong does exist, and that it is, in its degree, at any
rate, the distinguishing mark of man. But the real

THE FLRST ADAM. 249
question is, " Whence comes it, and in what consists
its binding force ? " Those of the extreme Right say it
is an original endowment of man from God, formerly
perfect, but now shattered and untrustworthy. Those
of the extreme Left say, without hesitation, that it
is a faculty which has been slowly developed in man
out of the interaction of himself and his fellows
with their surroundings. In the crude barbarianism
which they consider to be the original status of the
race, certain actions were quickly found to tend to
the general welfare, while certain other actions were
found to work detriment to the tribe. The first sort
of course tended to the popularity, and the second
brought pain or danger to the individual producing
them. The glow of satisfaction produced in the
doer of helpful things encouraged him to the habit
of such actions. Murder, theft, adultery, having
been found to be dangerous to the community, were
warmly reprehended. This public sense of dislike
to the deeds reacted upon the individuals who felt it,
gradually became fixed in each one, and was trans
mitted to his descendants. It had its origin in the
public weal. It emerges, however, generations after
wards, in a permanent faculty, which " had lost its
memory and changed its name." Nor has it re
mained the simple faculty it was when it first became
self-conscious. Long afterward it, in Mr. Matthew
Arnold's happy figure, came to be touched by the
fire of Emotion, and burst into the flame of Reli
gion. Since the death of the late Professor Clifford,
this theory has not had another so able and uncom-

250 SONS OF GOD.
promising an advocate. With certain modifications
due to his more cautious and judicious habit of
mind, it is the doctrine of Mr. Herbert Spencer. In
popular scientific periodicals it is assumed to have
been demonstrated. It has found a lodgement in
the text-books of schools. It is the basis of action
for " Societies for Ethical Culture." The theory is
claimed to be, in Professor Clifford's language, " a
scientific basis for morals." That very prevalent
habit of mind which abhors an unsolved problem
as nature abhors a vacuum, receives and rests upon
it with peculiar satisfaction. Wherever this theory
and the popular notion of the " Fall " are sole rivals
claiming entertainment by educated men, this one is
almost certain of a welcome.
And this, notwithstanding the fact that it is
attended by the very gravest difficulties, both scien
tific and moral. The more sober-minded evolution
ists, whether Christian or Secular, do not accept it.
They do not consider it scientific. The facts in the
case cannot be co-ordinated under it. The savage
state where the conscience is supposed by the holders
of it first to emerge is precisely the place where the
possessor of moral sensibility would be most unfit to
survive. Where might is right, right is doomed to
death. Among unmoral creatures, any variation in
the direction of morality tends toward the extinction
of its possessor. The faculty coming into existence
there is compelled by the exigency of the case to
commit hari-kari. It is " too good to live." " The
survival of the fittest" is an irrefragable law, which

THE FIRST ADAM. 251
may not be suspended even in the interest of moral
theory. Then, again, the induction upon which its advo
cates base the scientific theory of morals is open to
the grave suspicion of having been arranged in the
interest of the theory. In the nature of the case
the facts are difficult to come by, and one cannot
help suspecting that the same skill (as of Sir John
Lubbock, e.g!) which arranges them in one way could
just as easily sort and arrange them so as to produce
an entirely different result. Within the historic
period, at any rate, there has not as yet been forth
coming any instance of a tribe or people making
moral advance without the aid of light brought to
them ab extra. In many instances a very high
degree of civilization has been attained to by their
unaided development. A Venus di Milo, and a
code of Roman Law, have proven themselves to be
within reach, but not a Sister of Charity, or a John
Baptist. Present facts are also against the theory. There
is no constant relation between knowledge and good
ness, nor is there any evidence of a tendency now on
the part of the vicious to learn righteousness by the
bitterness of their experience in sin. The theory,
indeed, is discredited by the eagerness with which
the chronic wrong-doer accepts it. Anarchists,
Socialists, Ingersollites, — the whole ignoble com
pany of questionable morality— hail it as truth. One
cannot avoid the feeling that it is, at least in part,
welcome because it lightens the stress of moral obli-

252 SONS OF GOD.
gation. The charge of Lacordaire would seem to be
at least colorable, that " it consoles us for our vices
by calling them necessities, bringing in as a witness
to this a corrupt heart disguised in the mantle of
science.' (3.) But the two theories above indicated are
not the only claimants to a hearing upon the ques
tion of the moral progression of man. A third,
contained compendiously in Genesis ii. and iii., and
writ large in the whole Christian Scriptures, we
believe. The story in Genesis is too familiar to need re
hearsing. It will suffice to point out that it assumes
to be a distinct account of a veritable occurrence.
It is sharply separated from what precedes and
follows in the narrative, though evidently related to
both. Like the portion of the story which precedes
it, it moves with majestic stride, an aeon in a para
graph, with space for a year of God's days between
verses. It is couched in a language so Oriental
and so poetic that even Augustine warned against
dangerous literalness here.
The first chapter, and to the fourth verse of
the second, sketches the whole of creation, from the
chaotic nebulous mist to the introduction of the crea
ture fashioned in the image of God, which is called
" Adam," i.e., man. This sketch is the mighty frame
into which all that comes after is to be fitted. This
having been completed, it proceeds to recount the
history of the creation in which the whole long-
drawn movement has culminated. It refers most

THE FIRST ADAM. 253
briefly to the preparation of the earth to his use,1
connects him as to his physical side with matter,2
endows him with life,3 and then enters upon the
history of the development of man's moral and reli
gious life, which is the subject matter of the Old and
New Testament Scriptures. This progress is con
ceived to be by a series of continually recurring selec
tions. The first of these is recorded in the story
before us. There is no intimation there that " Adam "
and " Eve " were the absolute beginning of the race.
There is nothing in the word Adam to indicate
whether it means man, or is a proper name for an
individual. It may mean either. In point of fact,
it is used in both senses — as the word " day " is
used both for the whole time covered by the creative
process and for one of its periods. For the writer
of Genesis, having for his purpose to narrate the
moral development of the race, it was sufficient to
begin where that began. To this end he states that
God took a man and a woman, — (i.e. a family), —
set them in circumstances where the new faculty
with which He had endowed them would have its
proper and necessary environment. That this selec
tion left to the natural process of degradation those
who were not chosen would seem probable from the
following considerations : —
1. It is in the analogy of God's method of
dealing with men since history has recorded the
same. Thus Genesis occupies itself only with the
fortunes of Seth and his line. Cain, his brother, is
1 Gen. ii. 5. 2 lb. 7. *> lb. 7.

254 SONS OF GOD.
permitted to wander to the land of Nod,1 where he
founded a nation, — a nation which passed through
the stages of pastoral life,2 concentration in cities,3
developed the industries, blossomed into art, burst
into music,4 and then passed forever out of sight and
hearing. Abraham is selected from his Acadian fol
lowers, while they are left to complete the cycle of a
civilization untouched by any divine Spirit, and then
sink into their decay. Isaac is taken, and Ishmael is
left. Jacob is chosen, and Esau rejected, — and so
following. " One shall be taken, and the other left "
seems to have been the method of God's procedure
always. Selection implies a corresponding rejection.
The Bible is as remorseless as science itself. For
the purpose of Scripture, moral fitness is the test.
The calling of Adam would seem to be only the first
of many such selections, not differing in kind from
that of Abraham.
2. In certain obscure nooks and corners of the
earth, there exist small groups of creatures, which,
while among men, seem not to be of them.5 They
have in their persons and their languages traces of
better days. They seem to have been left stranded
by the stream of development. So low in the scale
of intelligence, so destitute of moral sense, are they,
that it is difficult for one to look upon them and
believe that they belong to the race which has the
first Adam at its start and the second Adam at its
culmination. 1 Gen. iv. 16. * lb. iv. 20. > lb. iv. 17. ' lb. iv. 22.
6 For example : the Bushmen, the Australian aborigines, the Veddahs ol
Ceylon, etc.

THE FIRST ADAM. 255
3. Traditions of the " Fall " are only found
among those whose ancestry can be traced to a com
mon origin, or who have come in contact with the
race of Adam at some point in their history.
A family is chosen by God, and led by His provi
dence into a fertile and well-watered country,1 rich
in gold and precious stones,2 surrounded by the flora
and fauna3 which are the concomitants always of
civilization.4 In these surroundings occur that chap
ter in human history, which, whether relatively or
absolutely the beginning, is, at any rate, a supreme
epoch. It is the beginning of human religion.
The story sounds far away, and strange. To one
who is accustomed to the precision of modern scien
tific statements, it even seems grotesque, — an echo
of the childish stories of a youthful world ! Taken
broadly, however, it manifests an insight which on
any theory, save the Christian, it would be folly to
look for in such an early time. It rests morality
upon those clear foundations where the broad com
munis sensus of intelligent and upright men in
stinctively look for it. It declares : —
1. A personal Cod who can speak.
2. A human faculty which can hear.
3. A power of will which can choose.
4. That the essence of wrong-doing consists, not in
damage to the community, but in disobedience to Gfod.
> Gen. ii. 8. * lb. ii. 11. 3 lb. ii. 9. 20.
4 It seems hardly necessary to point out that " Garden " in this connec
tion is a misleading term. The idea of extremely limited space, which the
word conveys, is foreign to the story. " Paradise," in its classical use, is
better. The idea is, an expanse of park-like territory.

256 SONS OF GOD.
This new family of Adam, alone of all creatures,
having reached the stage of knowing right and
wrong, have their new-born faculty nourished and
developed by food convenient, and in a fit environ
ment. In the garden of the world they feed upon
the fruit of the "tree of knowledge of good and
evil." " Forbidden " fruit it is indeed, — food which
may be eaten only at a dreadful risk. Knowledge
brings judgment always, and must pay the price of
its being. When moral faculty rises to the state
of self-consciousness, brute-like innocence is left
behind forever. The way of return is closed as by
Cherubim with fiery swords. Profound degradation
is possible thereafter, but not along the lines by
which the creature came. He can move downward
but not backward. His fellowship is no longer with
the gentle creatures of the garden, whose nature he
heretofore shared, but with their Maker and their God.
" And the Lord God said : Behold the man is
become as one of us, to know good and evil. And
now, lest he put forth his hand and take of the tree
of life and live forever, — therefore the Lord God
sent him forth from Eden; and He placed at the
East of the garden Cherubim, with flaming sword
which turned every way."
" And so I live, you see,
Go through the world, try, prove, reject,
Prefer, still struggling to effect
My warfare ; happy that I can
Be crossed and thwarted as a man,
Not left, in God's contempt, apart,
With ghastly, smooth life, dead at heart,
Tame in Earth's paddock as her prize!"

THE FIRST ADAM. 257
Of the outcome of the transaction, there can be no
doubt. It was clearly great gain, — maybe a falling
short of the best then possible, but clearly a rise above
what went before. Something better still did come
into the field of moral vision, even then. The " Tree
of Life," the possibility of immortality, was there.
But it came into sight only, a long way off, and out
of reach. Only as a memory and a hope did it sur
vive in the tedious steps of progress, until, in the
fulness of time, the perfect Man " brought life and
immortality to light."
Moreover, there comes crawling upon the stage,
the wily, ignoble representative of moral Evil. When
man emerges as a moral being, he must take his place,
perforce, in the league of spiritual states. He has
thenceforth to do with many interests. He is a
" being of large discourse, looking before and after."
It is no fantastic Oriental conceit which introduces
Satan to the first man who could comprehend his
forked speech. That man must confront the Eternal
Nay in virtue of his station. The doctrine of super
natural evil is developed in the Christian Scriptures
pari passu with the process of redemption. The
Christian smiles when he hears the fact of such
existence called in question. He is quite aware that
in the Secular Creed there is no Prince of Darkness.
But he knows also that there be a thousand things
not dreamed of by that philosophy. He reads hope
fully the obscure prophecy of better things to be
attained through much pain, by the seed of the
woman, and he knows that much of that evil is

258 SONS OF GOD.
neither brute nor human. If it were, he should de
spair of the race at the outset. His solace and his
ground of hope, when the brute within him is turbu
lent and the spirit of man is overladen, is the consid
eration that "it is not I, but sin that dwelleth in me."
The first of these theories, briefly sketched, is pro
pounded by the popular and so-called " Orthodoxy ; "
the second by the Secular Science ; the third by the
Christian Scriptures. The first is moribund. The
second is dangerous. The third is substantially true.
Make what allowance one will for the obscurity, the
puerility, of the story, the fact still remains, that the
moral progress of the race has been but the develop
ing of the picture there sketched in broad outline.
He whose way of thinking has been most profoundly
impressed by the great thought of Evolution compre
hends it best. He finds himself caught in the sweep
of a majestic movement similar in kind to that which
he has followed from the monad to the man. Here
again, as at other times, the progress halted, either
helpless or at fault, and God vouchsafed the gift of
a new motive force. Here His Gift is nothing less
than the inbreathing of His own spirit. It endows
its recipient with that Divine quality in virtue of
which he is capable, under suitable conditions, of
being "born again." It accounts for the complex
and contradictory impulses which contend in the
arena of the soul. It accounts for the old man as
well as the new. It tells him the name and origin
and limitation of the strange tempter which whispers
in the secret chambers of his heart. It brings him

THE FffiST ADAM. 259
in sight of immortality, and bids him long and strive
mightily therefor. It bids him work amid briers and
thorns ; but when he lifts up his face he hears that
" he has become as one of us." It binds him to God.
It gives him sanction for conduct, and hope for infi
nite progression. It sets him in the sweep of a dra
matic movement. It accounts for the faults of the
patriarch, for the faith of the apostle, and the fault
lessness of the Perfect Man.

HISTORY
OF THE
AMERICAN EPISCOPAL CHURCH,
FROM THE PLANTING OF THE COLONIES
TO THE END OF THE CIVIL WAR.
BY
S. D. McCONNELL, D.D.,
Rector of St. Stephen's Church, Phila.
8vo cloth, plain, $2.00 ; with gilt top, $2.25 ;
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SERMON STUFF.
By the Rev. S. D. McCONNELL, D.D.

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