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ON

Christian ILife anb tTrutfc

BY

JOHN BURTON

HAMILTON, ADAMS, AND CO.
PATERNOSTER ROW.
LEEDS: WALKER. AND LAYCOCK.
MDCCCLXXXIII.

CONTENTS

PAGE.
I. THE FIRST TRUE TYPE OF A RELIGIOUS MAN- 1
"And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared
to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God ; walk
before Me, and be thou perfect. . . . And Abram fell on his
face: and God talked with him."— Genesis xvii. 1-3.
II. MISTAKES IN LIFE - 22
"Then said one unto him, Lord, are there few that be saved? And
he said unto them, Strive to enter in at the straight gate : for
many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be
able." — Luke xiii. 23, 21
III. LYDIA'S HEART OPENED - ' 44
"And a certain woman named Lydia, a seller of purple, of the city
of Thyatira, which worshipped God, heard us ; whose heart the
Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were
spoken of Paul."— Acts xvi. 14.
IV. HOLINESS A METHOD OF LIVING 67
"But as he which hath called us is holy, so be ye holy in all
manner of conversation ; because it is written, Be ye holy ; for
I am holy."— 1 Peter t 15, 16.
V. CHRISTIAN DEVELOPMENT - 94
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child,
. I thought as a child : but when I be«ame a man, I put away
childish things." — 1 Con. xiii. 11.
VI. THE WARRANT OF PRAYER- 121
" What man is there of you, whom if his son, ask bread, will he -give
him a stone ? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent ?
If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your
children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven
give good things to them that ask him?" — Matt. vii. 9-11.
VII. GOD'S METHOD OF SAVING MAN - 146
"Sirs, what must I do to be saved? And they said, Believe on the
Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved."— Acts xvi. 30, 31.
VIII. THE PEOPLE'S QUESTION - 172
"Then said they unto him, What shall we do, that we might work
the works of God ? Jesus answered and said unto them, This is
the work of God, that ye believe on bim whom he hath sent." —
John vi. 28, 29.
IX. DOCILITY OF TEMPER IN EELATION TO THE TRUTH - 196
"These were more noble than those of Thessalonica, in tbat they
received the word 'with all readiness of mind, and searched the
soriptures daily, whether thoBe things were so. Therefore many
of them believed; also of honourable women which were Greeks,
and of men, not a few." — Acts xvii. 11, 12„

iv.. Contents.
X. THE NATURAL MAN - 225
" But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God :
they are foolishness unto him : neither can he know them, because
they are spiritually discerned." — 1 Cor. ii. 14.
XI. THE FORERUNNER WITHIN THE VEIL 249
"Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and
steadfast, and which entereth into that within the veil"; whither
the forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus." — Heb. vl 19, 20.
XII. RETROSPECTION THE BASIS OF PROGRESS - 275
"As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in
him, rooted and built up in him, aDd stablished in the faith,
as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving."—
Colos. ii 6, 7.
XIII. THE KINGDOM OP GOD AS THE GROWTH OF A SEED 293
"So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the
ground ; . . . and the seed should spring and grow up, he
knoweth not how."— Mark iv. 26, 27.
XIV. FINALITY OF THE DIVINE PURPOSE 320
"So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall
not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I
please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." —
Isaiah lv. 11.
XV. OBSCURITY OF THE DIVINE WORKING 344
"Behold I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I
cannot perceive him ; on the left hand where he doth work, but
I cannot behold him ; he hideth himself on the right hand, that
I cannot see him."— Job xxiii. 8, 9.
XVI. AFFLICTIONS NOT ACCIDENTAL - 368
"For the Lord will not cast off for ever; but though he cause grief
yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his
mercies. For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve fhe children
of men." — Lamen. iii 31 — 33.
XVII. PROBATION AND AFTER - 398
"But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime
receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things :
but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented." — Luke
xvi. 25.
XVIII. REDEEMED MEN IN HEAVEN - 425
" And I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps : and
they sung as it were a new song before the throne, . . . and
no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and
four thousand which were redeemed from the earth." — Rev
xiv. 2, 3.

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'And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared
to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God ; walk before
Me, and be thou perfect. . . . And Abram fell on his face :
and God talked with him."— Genesis xvii. 1-3.
I KNOW not how theBe words read to you. To our
own thinking, they fill the ear like the whispered
echo from some far-off spirit land — the interview and
the converse seem so strange, so unreal, so impos
sible in the cold, hard, realistic world in which we
dwell. And yet these words are full of human in
struction, pertinent to all the ages of time, and
exceptional only in the symbolism of their dress.
They disclose an impressive view of- God as he exists
in himself, in the directness and sovereignty of his
will, and in the intimacy and blessedness with which
he sanctifies the obedient life.
They were spoken to Abraham, " the friend of
God," and "the father of the Faithful," two desig
nations which set this patriarch at the top of the
human race. No one of the Old Testament heroes
stands out more grandly on the back-ground of his
tory than Abraham. "He was not an ecclesiastic,
nor a recluse, nor a learned sage ; he was a shep
herd, a chief, a warrior full of all the affections and
s

2 The first true Type of the Religious Man.
interests of family and household, and wealth and
power; and for this reason," says Dean Stanley, "he
has been chosen as the first true type of the Eeli-
gious Man and the first Eepresentative of the Church
of God." The Jehovah of Abraham is the God of
the Christian Age : the instruction to the patriarch is
the Law of the Christian Life. The obedience of the
one is the model of the other.
There are for us two things specially taught in this
incident : first, the simplicity of Christian Duty ; and,
secondly, the sanctity of the Christian Life. Some
reflections will follow these two thoughts.
I. The simplicity of Christian Duty : " Walk before
me." 1. And there is something exceedingly beautiful and
tranquil in this style of thought. It indicates order,
progress, quietude, fellowship, and sympathy. It is
the child in converse with the parent, the friend in
communion with his chosen friend. It is not figured
to us as a great, conviction', a special impulse, or a
momentary spasm, but a " walk with God," — a com
panionship in which life in all its details is wrought
out in harmony with the Divine will. It is the spirit
of a man inspired, directed, and ennobled by the
spirit of God; the fountain and the stream insepar
ably one.
The expression covers more than is seen. Then, as
now, to walk with God required a fitness of dispo
sition, a moral habit, a congenialized temperament of
the two natures — God and man. For how " can two
walk together, except they be agreed?" It implied

The first true Type of the Religious Man. 3
knowledge, resting on the first few great principles of
primitive Eevelation, generalised to their practical
uses; reverence, taking the form of habitual worship,
and in stone, or star, or family hearth, finding an altar
on which to present its offering; love, then as now,
the invisible bond holding the soul consciously and
confidingly to God ; and so service, in all forms" of
earnest speech, and reverent thought, and manly act ;
in a word, life — a lofty faith in God and charity to
man. These were some of the primary, underground
principles in the mind of these patriarch seers, out of
which blossomed the calm beauty of their daily walk.
What more those ancients knew of the higher
secrets of Truth ; of God, as he exists in himself ; of
Creation in its order, laws, and vastness ; of Provi
dence in its relation to time and history, to the indi
vidual, and to nations ; of the possibility, method, and
purpose of Redemption, how sin could be forgiven ; of
the certainty of a future state, with its Resurrection
body and the Eternal Judgment, we cannot know, and
need not surmise or discuss. Doubtless they knew
enough to feel that they were related to God and to
a future world, and that on their mode of living while
passing onward through the present, consequences of
infinite moment were dependent. They were not left
to grope their way through a world of vague mys
tery into a darker mystery beyond, without a chart
on which the guiding lines were sufficiently clear.
The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us,
" By faith Enoch was translated that he should not
Bee death ; for before his translation he had this testi
mony, that he pleased God ; " that is Religion as art

4 The first true Type of the Religious Man.
inward habit. "By faith Abraham sojourned in the
land of promise as in a strange country, for he looked
for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and
maker is God : " that, again, is Religion as a moral
trust, a prophetic hope. Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abra
ham, — " these all died in faith, not having received
the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were
persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed
that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth:"
that is Religion in its final reward. Wayfaring men
on their transit through the present to some future
world, " they desired a better country, that is an
heavenly ; wherefore God was not ashamed to be
called their God."
2. The sanctity of the Christian life emerges natu
rally out of this simplicity of Christian duty. It is a
life made reverent and noble by the interplay of the
divine with the human spirit. While, on the one
hand, religion puts man into the closest relationship
with God, giving to him a law and a life, a central
poise and principle from which all thought and feeling
with their related actions constantly spring ; on the
other hand, God puts himself into the closest and
dearest fellowship with man, he fills him with his
presence, permeates and glorifies him with the inti
macy and blessedness of his love; "as God hath said,
I will dwell in them, and walk in them, and I will
be their God, and they shall be my people."
Let us try clearly to understand the language of
the text, "I am the Almighty God, walk before me."
We can think of God only as he is a unit in the
essence of his being — one undivided and indivisible

The first true Type of the Religious Man. 5
self-hood, " a presence without a centre or a circum
ference," as the schoolmen say, or better, a circum
ference whose centre is everywhere. "Do not I fill
heaven and earth? saith the Lord." Let us think of
this centre in its space-conception, and then God is
a presence filling the totality of things, — " things in
heaven and things on earth." He is a fulness of
being in " the heaven of heavens which cannot con
tain him," and in the gathering of his saints beneath
the vaulted roofs of earth. An indivisible essence,
filling immensity and eternity, he must be contermi
nous with the universe of things, — alike with what to
us is near and remote, small and great, the populations
busy in a water drop, and the crowded firmaments of
space. Let us think of this centre in its time-con
ception, and then God is a presence in the totality of
duration, — past, present, and future ; not now and
here to day, in the blossoming of the young spring
flowers, or in the prayer of a human heart, and yes
terday or to-morrow away, building worlds or destroy
ing them in the fathomless infinitudes beyond ; but
always here and always yonder, filling the entire circle
of being at one and the same instant of, time with
the unabridged fulness of his originating, directing,
and sustaining life. Absenteeism, weariness, perplexity,
forgetfulness, are impossible to the " one God and
Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and
in all."
But, if essentially one and a unit in the essence of
his being, God is manifold in his attributes; and we
may speak of each one of these separately, and of all
in conjunction, as being expressed in his presence.

6 The first true Type of the Religious Man.
The presence of God is God manifested in his attri
butes. " I am the Almighty God, walk thou before
me." " The Almighty God." That was his revelation to
Abraham, and that, ordinarily, is our first conception
of what he is in himself, — "The Almighty God."
" Once hath he spoken, twice have I heard this, that
¦power belongeth unto God." Power absolute, resist
less, infinite power, working all things, controlling all
things, whether the affairs of men, or of states, or of
worlds. And this power is not the swing of a blind
omnipotent force ; it is the mind of God in action,
— a power wielded by intelligence and will in the
ministry of a boundless love. It surrounds us as a
presence, it upholds us as a strength, it guards us as
a defence. " Fear not, Abram : I am thy shield, and
thy exceeding great reward."
There is the Intelligence of God, — the calm, clear,
all-embracing thought in which we and all things con
stantly live. "All things are naked and opened unto
the eyes of him with whom we have to do." Those
eyes search us as a witness. They light up all the dark
places of life, and make luminous the hidden secrets
of the soul. " Thou hast searched me and known
me." " Thou, God, seest me." At home, on the
journey, alone, in the crowded city, in the silent secre
cies of thought, we live and move in the clear, burn
ing, crystal fires of those omniscient eyes of God.
" Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall
not see him? saith the Lord." There is no darkness,
neither shadow of death, where the workers of iniquity
may hide themselves from God.

The first true Type of the Religious Man. 7
This intimacy of the Divine presence invests with
awful sanctity the world in which we dwell. The
heavens do not shut us out from God, — they shut us
in with him. The earth is not adrift from his pre
sence, — it is his footstool, hallowed by his touch. It
is the theatre on which he works, the dwelling-place
which he inhabits, the temple which he fills with his
glory. All places are sacred under this inhabiting
presence of God; all actions are relatively near and
present to him.
This makes all the relations and ongoings of indi
vidual life a serious trust. When the patriarch Jacob
awoke out of his sleep on the stone by the wayside,
he exclaimed, "Surely the Lord is in this place, and
I knew it not. This is none other than the house of
God, and this is the gate of heaven." The thin trans
parent veil was for a moment withdrawn, and the
heavens of God were raining down their fires on the
cold stony earth. " And Elisha prayed and said,
' Lord, open his eyes, that he may see.' And the
Lord opened the eyes of the young man ; and he saw :
and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and
chariots of fire round about Elisha." And what a
vision of blinding glory would instantly arrest and
confound the senses of men, if their eyes were once
opened to this solemn, immediate environment of God !
On what a sea of fire should we find ourselves sail
ing! "But he covereth himself with a cloud." "He
holdeth back the face of his throne and spreadeth a
cloud upon it," that we be not blinded by the open
vision of his Godhead. But none the less does that
Godhead transfigure the veil with its glory.

8 The first true Type of the Religious Man.
And this presence of God gives a dignity to man.
It puts a grandeur and a solemnity upon the hum
blest child of earth. "His eyes behold, his eye-lids
try the children of men." "He spieth out the ways
of a man." As a man he may be individually little,
comparatively obscure, personally a nothing ; but he
can never be mean. He holds relations to this all-
surrounding, all-inspecting, all-loving presence that
lift him above all human distinctions, and make him
what no human grandeurs can secure. " The eyes of
all wait upon thee." But of all those myriad eyes
mutely challenging the divine beneficence, those of a
man alone can see God. He only can know God, and
speak to him and be spoken to. And this, finally,
puts a meaning into the faith of those ancient wor
thies — Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, — which, in
its insight and training power is a wonderful revela
tion to us. It shows how full of intelligence, of a
manly reason, of solemn dignity, and lofty courage was
the life they lived ; and in this relation it is that we
are instructed in the simplicity of Christian duty, and
the sanctity that belongs to the Christian life.
II. There are some reflections forcing themselves
upon us, as - in this way we get at the teaching of
the text.
1. And first, — It is impossible not to feel -how great
is the contrast between this view of ancient piety,
and that which obtains among ourselves. We are
the men in the household of God : those ancients
were the children. And yet, in the simplicity and
realness of the religious life, ours are the childish

The first true Type of the Religious Man. Q
notions, and the imperfect acts, while theirs belong
to the men. We seem to have inverted all the concep
tions of development and advancement, and practically
to have put the beginning at the end, and the end at
the beginning.
Religion, in greatly too much of its modern conven
tional practice, is little more than a senseless formalism,
an idea swathed in tradition, or wilted into inanity by
vapid and unspiritual ceremonies. With not a few,
it is a pompous parade of stereotyped words, into
which no ideas whatever seem to have entered, The
psalm, the prayer, the whole pretentious ritualism,
however artistic and imposing to the senses, are little
more than a glittering chain-work of dead unmeaning
mechanism, empty of all intelligent thought. It is a
" form of godliness without its power." There are
others, again, to whom Religion is altogether an affair
of knowledge. It belongs to the intellect, because it
is supposed to deal with the grandest objects ; or to
the imagination, because it infolds the highest beauty;
or to the emotions, because it stirs the hopes and
kindles the fears potential within us. In either case,
it is a mere spasm of the natural man, a galvanic
twitch of the sensibilities, rather than a grand
energizing power wrought in the soul by the Spirit
of Truth. It has a name to live, and is dead
while it lives. And last of all, one of the commonest
and most fatal forms of our modern religion, is that
which thinks of it as a relief, a solace, a refuge to
which we can betake ourselves when the holdfasts of
life are all giving way— a sort of spiritual "Life-boat"
into which we hope by a desperate, convulsive effort

io The first true Type of the Religious Man.
to leap, when the vessel is foundering in the surges
of death. The end comes to us all when the gilded
scaffolding of life crumbles, and the sheer nakedness
of the soul for the decisive future stares us in the
face. Then Christ is sought not for himself, but for
the loaves and fishes. We seek him, or think we do,
not because of what he is, but of our need of bim
in the bitter extremity of death. It is the mean
attempt of the cowardly sinner to sneak from perdi
tion, when the pleasures of sin are ended.
If now we turn to the Old Testament teachings, as
these are all interpreted and confirmed by the New,
we shall find that Religion is none of these things ;
that,- as definitions, and dependencies, they are all
fallacious and utterly worthless, and they must be
ruinous to the man" who leans upon them.
Religion, first of all, is a supernatural thing. In
its beginnings, as in all its after methods of progress,
it is the offspring of a divine influence, working directly
within and upon the moral nature of the man. And
this takes it immediately out of all the categories
of formalism — creeds, confessions, ceremonies which,
however strongly they may appeal to the sensibilities,
and captivate the taste, juggle the conscience out of
its ethical faculty, and leave the heart insensate and
dead. Man's first step backward to the paradise he
has lost, as it is his first step to the heaven he seeks,
is in the conviction of sin, with the guilty condemnation
in which it holds him to the Law of God. Regeneration
follows the initial work of repentance, the regeneration
of our whole nature in the totality of its powers, pro
clivities, and acts. " If any man be in Christ he is

The first true Type of the Religious Man.

ii

a new creature : " not a new thinker, but a new crea
ture ; not a metamorphosis out of a less into a more
picturesque style of living, but a " New Creation ;" " old
things are passed away, behold all things are become
new." The intellect may be converted and it often is,
as the conscience may be awakened, without changing
the impure currents of the soul, or breaking up the
old habits of sin. But that is not Rehgion. Religion
is man created anew in Christ Jesus.
Hence the pungent force of our Lord's language to
Nicodemus, the uncompromising severity, the incisive
sharpness with which he sets aside the position postu
lated by the intellect, and strikes down direct upon
the underlying necessities that belong to the heart.
"Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from
God : for no man can do these miracles that thou
doest, except God be with him." Think what a noble
confession that was, in itself, at the time, in the man.
While Scribe and Pharisee and the rulers of the people
clung with heartless bigotry to the vanishing glories of
the system of Moses, and refused to see its predicted
consummation in the majestic personage of the Son of
God, while the heart of the entire Jewish nation was
inflamed against the Christ, because it saw in his
mission, even in spite of its own bitter incredulity, the
sentence of decay written upon the walls of its magnifi
cent temple and hated the Nazarene for it, then it was
that Nicodemus, a master in Israel, a member of the
Sanhedrim, a man of position and power, broke with the
traditions of his people, and in this way affixed his
signature to the Divine mission of Christ. Nico
demus affirms the fact of Christ's miracles, and

12 The first true Type of the Religious Man.
the still higher fact of his personal relations to the
Father, itself the miracle involving the necessity of all
other miracles — a noble confession, a grand premise
with a manly conclusion ; but still it was a confession
stopping short of the master-fact in the necessities
of the man. "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except
a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of
God." That was Christ's rejoinder to the confession
of his ingenuous and philosophical apologist, as it is
his rejoinder still to every one who on the strength of
his concessions to the mission of Christ seeks to evade
the necessity of submitting to his personal claims :
" except a man be born again he cannot see the
kingdom of God" That kingdom, in its conceptual
form, is not a secretion of the human brain; it is not
a philosophy of miracles or of morals ; but a super
natural life, wrought in the soul by the spirit of God.
It is a mystery, nevertheless it is a necessity. "Except
a man be born of the Spirit, he cannot enter the
kingdom of God."
And if this language should sound harsh and anti
quated to our modern ears, it may yet render us the
deepest service, if it helps to strike through the hard
crust of a polished unreality into the imperative
necessities that lie, all undetected, within. You say a
man must breathe the vital air if he would live. Is
there any law of exemption that makes it possible for
one man to live without breathing, while another man
is made dependent upon it ? Is life to all men a
burden on its conditions ? Our Lord says, " Except
a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of
God." There are no degrees of more or less, to

The first true Type of the Religious Man, 13
one man in distinction from another man, in the
conditions of physical life; and there are none in the
kingdom of God. The nature on which is posited the
necessity of a new birth is common to all, Mere
incrustations of outward decency or defilement leave
the core radically the same in each. And if this be
so, the admission to the kingdom of God is fenced
round with conditions to which all must submit. We
cannot dodge round the gate of the New Birth, or
climb up some other way. We must be supernaturally
born into it, in whatever school of thought we have
been trained, or in whatever shining garments of
morality we may be adorned. There is no appeal
possible from the decision, "Te must be born again."
This then is the Bible concept of Religion. Not,
that we are believers in a Book or holders of a Creed;
not, that we worship a dead or distant Christ; but,
that we are "renewed in the spirit of the mind, after
the image of him that created us." Holiness, unclothed
of its technicalities, is religion shining in the beauty
of life. It is an inward force, a masculine energy, a
supernatural life, lifting the soul above the senses and
passions, and making itself dominant over the man.
That, as the Bible pourtrays it, is Christ's religion in
whatever age of the world, among all generations of
men, Patriarchal or Christian. The outward symbols
vary, the inward consciousness is permanent and one.
2. We get a sublime view of the province and power
of Christian Faith. And this is our second reflection.
In those ancient times, "Enoch walked with God;"
"Noah walked with God;" "Moses saw the Invisible ; "

14 The first true Type of the Religious Man.
and " Abraham fell on his face, and God talked with
him." Those venerable patriarchs, who sat in the
door of their tents and communed in this close and
familiar way with God, those grand old Chaldean
shepherds, over whose rapt meditations and patient
scanning of the heavens the glittering pomp of a
Syrian sky threw its evening splendors, saw more of
God, I think, and were nearer to him than we
moderns. To their unsophisticated sense God was a
personal and a conscious reality. They saw him in
the fleecy clouds ; they heard him in the whispering
winds ; they felt him in every pulse of their inner
most, heart. They walked with God. All nature was
a parable, each star a letter spelling out the mystery
of his name or reminding them of his presence.
Every thing was full of God. The heavens were
vocal ; the earth was not silent ; the mountains
shook ; the hills trembled ; the waves lifted up their
voice ; the floods clapped their hands ; the . bushes
burnt with fire; every blade of grass, every blushing
flower was a hymn of praise. And these men, as
they trod the young green earth, roofed with its
silent stars, and its mountain walls echoing with
music, felt as if they were " walking down the ghostly
aisles " of God's immediate dwelling place, and they
reverently uncovered the head and worshipped.
It is hardly so with us. A- remorseless science has
robbed us of the whole of this beautiful apocalypse
of a Father's presence in his works. It has emptied
a whole vocabulary of Old Testament teaching of its
rich and plaintive music ; and, in place thereof, has
get us down fa.ce to face with inexorable Physical

The first true Type of the Religious Man. 15
Laws. We are supposed, indeed, to stand in a vaster
presence than those ancients ever imagined ; to be
familiar with immanent and awful forces of which
they never dreamed ; but, then, they are forces
divorced from personality, unconscious, unsympathetic,
knowing nothing and caring nothing about men. The
heavens above us and the earth beneath us, the great
wide universe itself with all its play of wise and
orderly movement, is but a vast "out-door Infinity,"
a cold and empty orphanage, a stupendous engine-
house and manufactory, where " dead masses of mate
rial swing under the impulse of mechanical law," but
with no intelligent oversight of a Father to originate
or control them. We believe in a God, but then he
is too remote, too abstract to care for ephemerals like
ourselves. There is a Providence, such as it is, but
it is employed chiefly in driving the enginery of
nature. We pray, — but then to pray to a God, ex
pecting him to give us the things we ask, is, we are
told, like praying for the sun to rise at midnight.
There is a future of the human race, but we know
nothing of its what or where. Man has a history,
full of gloom and glory ; he is of few days and full
of trouble ; " he cometh up like a flower and is cut
down ; " he has strange thoughts, great powers, wild
ambitions ; he speculates on himself, on nature, on
God ; he takes the universe into his grasp, and sifts
through its tangled mysteries the light of his keen
analytical science ; and then he dies, with the fires of
his genius all aflame within him, and' all that is left
of him is in the urn that contains his ashes.
What a different being man becomes, and into what

1 6 The first true Type of the Religious Man.
a different world he enters, when, from these dreary
wastes and cruel mockeries of naturalism, we pass
into the clear sunshine of the Christian faith. Ac
cording to that, there is a Providence in the world of
things, and superintending the affairs of men — not in
some lofty impersonal, scientific way, unfolding itself
in the movements of natural law, but specific, humane,
intelligent, divine ; watching the growth of a lily,
feeding the fowls of the air, and numbering the hairs
of our head. It is the providence of an immediate
and efficient activity: "the eyes of the Lord run to
and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself
strong on behalf of those whose hearts are upright
towards him." It is a providence of minute and con
siderate sympathy : " If ye then, being evil, know
how to give good gifts to your children, how much
more shall your Father which is in heaven give
good things to them that ask him." It is a special
providence, a Fatherly providence, gathering within its
embrace each individual, and ministering to each sepa
rate want : " wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of
the field, which to-day is and to-morrow is cast into
the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, 0 ya
of little faith." This is a providence commensurate
with life, with reality, and with the necessities of man.
It is the providence of a prescient, personal, infinite
mind : " for he knoweth our frame, he remembereth
that we are dust." He knows us each, knows each
history, each condition, every want, in all change, and
through all the happenings and accidents of each
separate state. There is not a sigh of anguish, or a
cry of pain, or a prayer breathed in the humblest

The first true Type of the Religious Man. xy
home by the feeblest lips, that he does not hear.
He holds each human soul in the heart of his infi
nite knowledge and sympathy, and he can neither
forget it, nor be absent from it, nor withhold from it
his help. "0, Israel, thou shalt not be forgotten of
me." Forgotten ! Oh, no. There is not a star massed
in the galaxies of the glittering heavens that God for
gets. " He calleth them all by their names." How
much less can he forget the loving, trusting, sorrow
ing child of man? "Casting all your care upon him,
for he careth for you." 0 Christian man, 0 Chris
tian woman, thou art cared for by thy Father in
heaven. Beyond that veil of midnight glory he sits
enthroned in light, inaccessible to all mortal sense, —
yet here, in this house, in that heart, in that prayer,
at each moment, "he is not far from any one of
us." " He careth for thee ! " Think of it, bearing and
enduring man ; think of that presence when thou
goest to thy daily toil, or sayest thy morning prayer,
or liest down for thy nightly' rest. Think of it, 0
man, 0 woman. Thou canst not weep the tear that
he sees not, nor whisper the prayer that he hears
not, nor feel the pang that he heeds not. " Be
hold ! I have graven thee upon the palms of my
hands : thy walls are continually before me."
Compared with this teaching of the Christian Record,
the materialist's conception of a God is a madness and
a suicide. It is a mockery and an insult to the denied
and to the denier. It not only does not make better
what is bad in his condition, it adds to it the bitter
ness of despair. Is there a sepulchre in his garden, a
young green grave under whose daisy sod he has put
o

1 8 The first true Type of the Religious Man.
the little pale beautiful flower whose voice yesterday
was the music of his life? Nature, chance, philoso
phy, or fate is his only solace. Is there some inward
canker, a gangrene of the spirit eating out all the
freshness of his manhood ? How is he going to medi
cate the sore ? Is there any secret chamber of the
soul in which there is felt a sigh, a shame, a fear, a
regret — the bitter treading on the " burning marl ?"
To whom — to what can he appeal ? Can he pray ?
Does he weep ? Is there any messenger of hope
whispering peace, or speaking consolation to his dis
tracted heart ? Alas, no. The God of the materialist
knows nothing of his tears, nothing of consolation,
nothing of hope. " Stern as fate, absolute as tyranny,
relentless as destiny, merciless as death ; too vast to
praise, too inexplicable to worship, too inexorable to
propitiate, it has no ear for prayer, no heart for sym
pathy, no arm to save." And this great, unknown,
hideous and unpitying Something is the materialist's
only refuge and his only God. Verily " their Rock
is not as our Rock," even " our enemies themselves
being judges."
1. And now, if only we could think rightly of this
presence of God, if with a befitting intelligence we
could realise what it actually is, its immediateness, its
individualness, the dread sanctity of the Being of
whom it speaks — what a power we should find in it
as a stimulant and a check in the management of
life ! The darkness in which sin shrouds itself is its
license. It is a moral cowardice. It hates the light.
It shrinks from detection, Suspicion arrests and cir-

The first true Type of the Religious Man. ig
cumvents it. The impure consciousness recoils from,
as it is abhorrent to, the pure mind. "The evil doer
stands abashed, and feels how awful goodness is."
What, then, if the searching, solemn thought of God
as a veritable presence met the sinner side by side
with his temptation to sin? What if, on the front of
some blackened midnight cloud, a spectral form were.
suddenly to body itself out in fiery hieroglyphics, as
in the case of the Babylonian revels, making a sense
of the supernatural instant and appalling? Could you
sin in presence of that ? But that only faintly images
what really is. " The eyes of the Lord are in every
place, beholding the evil and the good." Always are
we with God ; always are we in his presence. We are
girt round as with the walls of a whispering gallery,
where every secret thought speaks into the ear of God.
No matter where we are, or in what engaged, or with
whom we are associated, the axis of purpose or of
motive on which we turn brings us evermore beneath
the searching glance, the judicial scrutiny of this all-
encircling God. " If I say surely the darkness shall
cover me, even the night shall be light about me.
Yea the darkness hideth not from thee, but the night
shineth as the day." Let the Christian man, in his
long-suffering and unrequited consciousness, think of
this and be encouraged. Let the sinner think of it,
and then let him add to this idea of a minute and
terrible inspection the hereafter sequel, when the scroll
of life is to be unrolled and its secrets read in fire.
2. But what are we to think of a being who in this
way can walk with God, of the Abrahams, the Epochs,

20 The first true Type of the Religious Man.
and Noahs of our Christian age? If I could shew
you a man walking our streets, possessed of the secret
of sending a telegram beyond the sun and getting an
answer back, would you not stop to look reverently
upon him ? But that is the Christian man in fellow
ship with God. He walks the earth an embodied
inspiration. He may create a language, or found a
kingdom ; he may build temples, and make poems,
and enact laws, and light up by his discoveries new
worlds in space ; but his grand distinction is that he
is a creature capable of communion with God. He
can speak to God. God can, he does, veritably com
mune with men. To walk with the good and the ex
cellent of earth, to commune with nature when the
summer flowers lift up their face to the beaming
heavens, or the skies flash with evening splendour,
to walk with the imperial dead as we commune with
their undying thoughts — that is a heritage of joyous
distinction beyond the purchase of all material wealth.
But to walk with God, to be inspired, lifted up and
glorified by the thoughts of the hving God streaming
through us, making all life clean and beautiful and
strong, that is the summit on which the greatness of
humanity culminates. To the man who is really alive
and responsive to such a communion, what distinc
tions on earth can be compared with it? And when
all earthly distinctions are dropping from us, when
earthly friends are failing us, when mortal ties are
all sundering around us, when the world is cold or
hostile to us, when there is none to understand or
sympathise with us, when we are alone, or in sorrow,
sick, or dying, — then to feel as Jesus felt, and to feel

The first true Type of the Religious Man. 21
it in all its lofty might and grandeur, " I am not
alone, because the Father is with me," that is to set
its peerless climax on the majesty of man. "Happy
is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose
hope is in the Lord his God."

Jftitffakjs in %xit.
" Then said one unto him, Lord, are there few that be saved ? And he
said unto them, Strive to enter in at the strait gate : for many, I
say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able."
Ldke xiii. 23, 24.
ARE there few that be saved ? In that ceaseless
drift of human beings out of time into the eternal
world which clasps the end with the beginning of
the race, are there many that are saved or are there
few? Is the balance of human destiny on the side of
gain or of loss to individual men ? It is no part
of the teaching of Scripture categorically to answer
this question. Revelation is a practical parenthesis,
thrown in between the useless and the impossible.
It deals with the essential and the present. The
cold, keen intellectual stare that would peer into the
mysteries of life, and the unwise curiosity which
seeks to meddle with the secrets of the dead, find no
countenance in the Word of God. It does not help
the man who attempts by any processes of arith
metic to forestall the disclosures of the Judgment-
day, or to compute the ratio of its results. It says,
" Strive to enter in at the strait gate : seek a solu
tion of the mystery in its relation to thyself ; thy
own, and not another man's salvation makes eternity
to thee."

Mistakes in Life. 23
The question, nevertheless, is a serious one. It
is a question, moreover, on which thoughtful minds
have long and anxiously brooded. Is there only a
minority of the human race that is being saved ?
After all that we know of the purpose and the
will of God, after all that we discern in the life and
capabilities of the human soul, after all the tender
teaching of the Son of God, his sacrificial death, bis
resurrection and ascension and rule on the throne of
his glory ; and, still more, after what we know of the
special arrangements and ceaseless activities of the
Holy Spirit, supplemented and abetted as these are
by a Providence so constantly. and warningly at work;
— after all this, is it to be accepted as the final
result, that only a comparative fraction of men are
ultimately saved ? Christ, who is himself the arbiter
of human destinies, does not answer this question
affirmatively, and say that it is so. He does not
answer it negatively, and say that it is not so. He
does not directly answer the question at all. And
yet the vagueness in which it appears to be pur
posely left is hardly less impressive than a definite
reply. There are occasions in which silence teaches
even more effectively than speech. It baulks curiosity,
but it feeds our wonder. The possibilities of the secret
arrest and prick with a keener tenacity our thought
than the bare assertion of what is. With the dead,
our Lord's reserve seems to say, the question is
settled, and no speculations of the living can alter
that. With the living, it has yet to be determined;
strive thou, therefore, and wait. "The day" will declare
the rest. If there be few that are saved, that need

24 Mistakes in Life.
not imperil thy own salvation. If there be many
saved, that will not of necessity include thy own.
" Strive, therefore, to enter in at the strait gate ;
for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and
shall not be able."
I. Here is, first, a mistake in life which men are
committing. Our Lord affirms the position that it is possible
for a man, possible for many men, to seek to enter
in at the strait gate and yet to fail. And this is
said, not of the openly vicious classes, the sensually
profane, the profligate worldling, the Sadducean sceptic,
men whose hearts are honeycombed all through with
the leprosy of sin ; nor yet of that vast motley mass
who, uncaring for themselves and uncared for by
others, are left simply to perish. Christ speaks of
many who, under the constraint of some kind of
motive, semi-religious men, are seeking to enter the
gate of life — and fail.
When first reading thoughtfully these words we feel
like one who, having listened to some unusual state
ment, doubts if he heard it aright ; or, having heard
it aright, doubts still more its meaning. It appears a
sufficiently astounding position when Christ declares
that " if any man will follow him he must deny
himself, and take up his cross daily ; " that " it is
easier for a camel to go through the eye of a
needle, than for a rich man to enter into the
kingdom of God;" that when the way to the king
dom is encountered in the bravest spirit and with
the sincerest purpose, there are difficulties in it so

Mistakes in Life. 25
full of peril that the manliest heart may sometimes
faint. But when, in addition to all this, it is added
that many men will seek really to enter it and yet
miss altogether the attempted goal, this does sound
like one of the hardest sayings of Christ, and we ask
instantly, " Why, why should any man seeking to
enter fail to do it?"
Do you mean to say that, seeking to enter into
that mysterious porch, any man has ever yet been
beaten back into hopeless dismay by the predeter
mining decree and sovereign rebuke of his Creator ?
or that there ever yet knelt a penitent, broken
hearted Magdalene, or publican, or prodigal, at the
gate of mercy, and was thrust aside by the all-
compassionate Christ ? Is there any thing in the
attribute of mercy as a weakness, or in that of justice
as a severity, or in the guilty circumstances of any
man as an impossibility, that can necessitate, or
justify, or explain a failure so anomalous as seeking
to enter the kingdom of God and not being able to
do it ? Or is it that, starting fairly, and with an
earnest intelligent purpose to enter into life, any one
human being has ever yet found the intricacies of
the way so baffling, or the antagonisms of the world,
the flesh, and the devil so overpowering as to compel
him, in the sheer hopelessness of despair, to give up
the struggle, like a drowning man who, beaten back
and back again by the hungry wave, ceases to fight
with death and is engulfed? Is that the explanation
of the language of Christ ?
We cannot think so. Deliberately and solemnly we
do not believe that any of these explanations is, or

26 Mistakes in Life.
can be, the true one. If I could believe that, for
some wise and foreseen reason, a special decree of
the All-holy One shut me out of his heaven, I think
I would be silent in my despair, if I could not be
submissive in my reasonings about it. The deter
minism of a sovereign pre-judgment would, at least
presumptively, be the final cause of my doom, and I
must bear it as best I am 'able. Or if the way itself
were so infested with evils, or my nature so inhe
rently weak in its encounter with them, as to make
my ruin a sheer necessity and not a suicide, then
my responsibility would be released and all remorse
impossible. Or if the great heart of the World's
Redeemer has no place of tenderness in which I can
hide my sin and shame, if the Magdalene's tears can
touch no pity, or the' prodigal's famine provoke no
relief, why, then, I must fall back on my wicked
undeservingness and be content to be lost. In the
very depths of our soul do we repudiate all such
explications of the text, as unworthy of tho. Father
hood of God as they are unjust and arbitrary toward
man. As we understand it, the language of Christ
makes the failure of men not in any sense a neces
sity, but a contingency, — a possibility, not in any
secret decree on the part of God, but iu the mischiefs
inherent in and incident to man. " God would have
all men to be saved, and come to the knowledge of
the truth." " God is not willing that any should
perish, but that all should come to repentance " and
live. There are in man's nature, and in the free
choices of his will, counteractive forces, working directly
against the Will of God ; and these forces, when

Mistakes in Life. 27
they dominate, so far defeat the divine purpose and
destroy the chances of salvation to men. They perish
in their own gainsaying. They are first the dupes of
their own evil passions, and then they are the victims
of their, duplicity. Men, then, may fail to enter the
gate of life, contrary to the intent and in defiance
of the will of God.
II. Let us trace this mistake to some of its more
immediate causes in practical life.
1. And, first, as to the way itself. The first mis
take, and oftentimes the most fatal one which men
make in seeking to enter God's kingdom, is in the
way they elect to do it. The question with which
they start is not, which is the one way and the safe
way ? but, which is the way that most commends
itself to their pre-conceptions, their intellectual train
ing, and belief ? "They stumble at the threshold.
There is one gate which Christ calls " the strait
gate," and one way which he calls " the narrow
way," which leadeth unto life. There is a right way
-through which to enter, and there is a wrong way.
Infinite consequences depend upon the start. A false
beginning draws after it a fatal ending.
What then is a right beginning ? What is the
narrow way and strait gate at which men must
enter, if they would be finally saved ? " Jesus said
unto Nicodemus, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a
man be born again, he cannot enter into the kingdom
of God." " Repent ye, therefore," said the apostle
Peter, " and be converted, that your sins may be
blotted out." " God so loved the world, that he

28 Mistakes in Life.
gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth
on him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
However we may interpret this language, whatever
we may choose to put into it of local terminology,
or throw out of its accepted theological import, there
still remains the fact that in some way the salvation
of man is relegated immediately to Christ. He is
" the way to the Father." In his name is salvation.
If we are to be reconciled to him against whom we
have sinned, if we are to make good our position
against the judgment which a just God cannot but
pronounce on sin, and so escape the consequences
which it entails, it must be done through our relation
to the Person and mission of Christ. " He is the
propitiation for our sins." The gate of life opens
only through the Cross of Redemption.
Now let us suppose that, instead of accepting this
way of salvation, we go about to construct a way
of our own, a shorter way, as we think, one more
direct and less encumbered with adventitious diffi
culties, and so more immediately within the power
of our own achievement. Instead of making Christ
the way to the Father, suppose we put the ladder
of our own speculations right up against his throne,
and attempt boldly to climb up into his presence in
this way? In place of the atonement for sin and a
personal reconciliation founded on a regeneration of
nature by the Holy Ghost, suppose we build an altar
of sacrificial merit out of our own righteousness, and
trust ourselves entirely to that ? Or let us assume
the impossibility of a direct Revelation from God, as
that is affirmed in the writings of Scripture, and so

Mistakes in Life. 29
put out of court all that pertains to the super-
naturalism of Religion, and in this way get rid of
all the intermediate conditions which God has set
up between himself and men ; let us suppose that
just this is the predicament in which we, or any
number of other men, are placed ; and the chances
are that we shall miss the entrance to the gate
of life. The narrow way is certainly not in that
direction, and to seek it there is to seek the living
among the dead. But then, this is just what men
are doing, and doing by thousands under the dicta
tion of what is called the enlightened thought of the
age ! The God in whom they believe, whatever else
he may be, is not the God of the Bible. The Christ
whom they patronise is not " the brightness of the
Father's glory, and the express image of his person."
The Bible which they study is not that of Moses
and the Prophets. They have no Gospel beyond the
revelations of the intellect ; no faith higher than
reason ; no atonement other or more efficacious than
personal merit; no regeneration deeper than morality;
no Holy Ghost but the inspiration of genius. What
ever deference such men occasionally manifest for
the moral teaching of Jesus Christ, they openly, not
to say scornfully, denounce his Godhead. They
are offended at the supernaturalism of his life, and
still more outraged at the propitiatory consequences
following his death. They say, in effect, " We will
not have this man to reign over us." They are the
children of a king, the born heirs of a kingdom
which is inalienable ; and they hate all religion of
mystery, of mediation, of miracle, of a supernatural

30 Mistakes in Life.
Christ. They are God's sons, and they claim in
herently to belong to him. And we say, "Well, so
let it be." There is to be no war on our side with
such a decision. Every man must bear his own
burden. He has his personal destiny in his own
hands ; and he holds the independent right to choose
his own way in working it out. To his own master
he standeth or falleth.
But then, this also follows, equally as a matter of
logic and of Revelation, that in this very freedom of
choice as to the way, man elects also the conse
quences which ensue, and by these he is bound in
all fairness of right reason to abide. If I choose
my own calculus in working out the destiny of my
being, and in that choice elect to work by some
method other than the one which is divmely
ordained, and so come out wrong at the last, the
upshot, however disastrous and irremediable, is my
own and not the Father's. " God hath in these
last days spoken unto us by his Son." I repudiate
that testimony : my understanding rebels ; my moral
instincts are all committed to deny, to reject, to
repugn it altogether ! Then I also accept the issue.
So the Apostle reasons. So Christ himself reasons.
The severance of the soul from God may be too
wide for your little artifice to bridge. God thinks
so, and he has so pronounced upon it. You doubt
it, you deny it altogether ; and so stretch your bridge
of cobwebs over the seething gulf. That is your
concern. God is not mocked. "If we believe not,
yet he abideth faithful. He cannot deny himself,"

Mistakes in Life. 31
2. Then, secondly, as to the time when not a few
men, having no intention to pass by the one way,
seek to enter the gate of life, we have a further
condition of this possible failure. Our Lord insists
on this view in the context. " When once the
Master of the house is risen up, and hath shut to
the door, and ye begin to stand without and to
knock at the door, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us ;
and he shall answer and say unto you, I know you
not whence ye are." The ancient custom of closing
the gates in Oriental cities at a certain hour, after
which admission was impossible, lends a significant
force to these words of Christ ; and the meaning
intended to be conveyed obviously is, that in all
safe experience there is a right time when a man
may seek to enter the way of life, and succeed; and,
of course, a wrong time at which if he seek to enter
he may fail.
We can hardly doubt, even against our strongest
self-delusions, that the Scriptures do, in manifold
forms, hinge salvation on opportunity. . They speak
of a "day of salvation," "the accepted time," a "day
in which a man can work:" and a "night in which
no man can work ; " modes of expression which,
however guardedly we may interpret them, seem
ominously to indicate a crisis in the religious his
tory of men, a culmination of redemptive agencies
in the dealings of God, a last convergence of chances
into one crucial moment in which the soul stands
face to face with its destiny, and salvation is finally
lost or won. The possibility that in the decadence of
age, or in a long course of vicious indulgence, the

32 Mistakes in Life.
moral faculties of the soul may become so enfeebled
as to be beyond all practical impression, its intellec
tual perceptions so darkened, and all its intelligent
susceptibilities to supernatural influence so radically
impaired, that all ordinary agencies of renewal may
fail to produce effect, and so the man be left, like
an ossified limb or a withered branch, simply to
perish, can be questioned only by the sheerest ob
stinacy. As, by the long indulgence of intemperate
habits, a man may place his health or life beyond
the possibility of all curative science, so undoubtedly,
in the persistent indulgence of sin, a man may so
trifle with himself, and so outrage the authority and
goodness of his Maker, as to put his salvation beyond
the plane of all mediatorial influence. It is a state
of mind in which all the mental and moral faculties
on which the Divine Spirit ordinarily operates have
become so completely a wreck that the simple de
struction of the man follows, not as an accidental
or involuntary inheritance, but as the judicial doom
of prostituted powers. The passion of sin has burnt
out all the finer tissues of the soul, and left nothing
but insensate ashes behind. And when such a state
of suicidal madness is reached, we can see no
remedy. The Scriptures, certainly, have no method
of putting up a new apparatus of intelligent, self-
acting susceptibilities in the mind of the worn-out,
automatic sinner. They give not the faintest hint
of any latent, mediatorial resources in which such a
man could be reached, without violating the integrity
of the soul as a conscious personality accountable for
its actions, and so, in effect, destroying the identity

Mistakes in Life. 33
of the man. And if not, and if we are not directly
to impugn the justice and the veracity of God, then
the sin and the doom of such a man must finally
meet. If it be said that in such a case the mercy of
God may supervene and so, at the last extremity,
interrupt the enforcement of doom, we reply, so it
might to heal a broken limb, or to extinguish a fire,
or to save from shipwreck, or to cancel any other
kind of mortgage which suffering holds on sin, but
then, also, we know that it never does so intervene.
And, further, in the case of a human soul petrified
into insensibility by a long course of sin, the question
of its rescue is not one of mercy, but of power ; it
is not, what infinite compassion might choose to do,
or would seek to do ; it is what sheer omnipotence,
acting upon a human spirit, ossified and stiffened in
its habits of sin, can do ; whether, in fact, the direct
power of God, acting upon the burnt out, uncon
scious susceptibilities of a depraved mind, can or
could so vitalise it as to put * it into a state of sal
vation without a virtual disintegration of the consti
tuent elements of its integrity, and so practically
destroying the man. And we have no reason to
conclude that it could. And if it could, we have
not the faintest shadow of a pretext to suppose that
it would. The sweeping optimism of the Universalist,
which makes a provision for the final salvation of all
lapsed intelligences in whatever world they may have
fallen ; the destructive logic of the Materialist, which
grinds down all mental phenomena into a ghastly
residuum of dust and ashes ; and the vague hope of

34 Mistakes in Life.
escaping the retributive consequences of a misspent
life by a retreat on the sheer omnipotence or com
passion of God are but, at the best, conjectural
hypotheses, as baseless in the Word of Inspiration as
they are perilous to men.
But in all this there is nothing specially per
taining to the religious question. Men perish phy
sically every day, and perish by hundreds, just
because they persistently violate laws which God has
ordained for their government and safeguard. But
he does not step in between the transgression and
the penalty, and arrest by a sheer act of power
the hapless victims from suffering. Some deadly pes
tilential disease comes, we know not whence or how,
and finding a people prepared for its fatal vaccina
tion, it riots in carnage and death. Great sanitary
laws have been neglected, and whole families are
decimated by zymotic disease. Meanwhile God stands
calmly by, unheeding the wail of a depopulated
city, guarding only the majesty of his laws. There
is a sudden fall in the barometer at sea. - The
impetuous Commander, taking no heed of the warn
ing sentinel, confident in his own skill and in the
strength of his splendid vessel, drives recklessly on.
The storm comes crashing down on that ill-fated
ship, — and the " London," with her cargo of frantic
men and women goes down a hopeless wreck. And
then we stand aghast and confounded at what men
call "the mystery of Providence!" No, not Provi
dence, but the presumptuous heedlessness of man, is
responsible for that ruin !
There is a prophetic voice, the finger-pointing of a

Mistakes in Life. 35
moral index, in the conscience which, if a man wisely
heed, will warn him of danger, but if disregarded or
trifled with, he may be left to sweep proudly on
until the storm meets him, and he goes down a
wreck. " He that being often reproved hardeneth
his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that with
out remedy." God would have all men to be saved.
He would eventuate in fact what he wills in purpose
and what he has made possible in provision, were
it not that his counsels are thwarted by the insane
perversities of men. "He will have all men to be
saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth."
The truth, the only stipulation as to the way; the
knowledge of the truth, the only condition as to the
time. Whether, outside of this way, and beyond the
limitations of this time, the unregenerate soul can
be saved is, we have said, a question not for the
pleadings of a partial mercy, but for the omnipo
tence of creative power. And on that question Reve
lation is silent ; or, rather, there is the finding, "He
that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the
wrath of God abideth on him." How long is that
abiding to continue ? What is to lift off that wrath
of God from the suffering soul?
3. But if in this way opportunity and method
enter into, and form the very basis of, our Lord's
injunction to strive to enter in at the strait gate ;
and if they are to be accepted as indispensable con
ditions in all safe contention to escape the peril of
which he warns us, then, to say the least, there are
serious difficulties in the way of salvation to some

36 Mistakes in Life.
men ; the odds against their being saved at all are
unquestionably great. We do not say that in all
Buch cases the difficulties are absolutely insurmount
able. It- is not a matter for the peremptory decision
of our human judgment, that the chances against a
man, however ominous, are necessarily fatal. We
must allow a wide scope to the peculiarities of tem
perament, the prejudices of education, the society,
habits, and culture in which different men have been
trained. And, further, we must concede a generous
latitude to the methods in which men, trained in
critical or logical exegesis, may sincerely interpret the
Divine idea of the redeeming plan. Even so extreme
a case as that of one who denounces as unhistorical
the entire supernatural framework of the Christian
religion, and yet professes subjection to its lofty per
meating ethical spirit, indefensible as we regard it,
and contravening, as it does, the unbroken tradition
of the Church from the beginning, must, in view of
many notable biographical facts, be left an open ques
tion as to the quality and extent of its imperilling
guilt. And, finally, we have no authority to foreclose
the possibility that, in the final judgment of each
man's case, the pitifulness of the Divine mercy may
come in with a sovereign amnesty of redeeming grace,
where the intention has been honest, and only the
method wrong. And in all cases we may venture
to hope that, in the final arbitrament of individual
destiny, where the integrity of the Divine Holiness is
not impugned, the atonement of infinite compassion
will avail to men, to multitudes of men, by whom
that atonement has been historically unknown or im-

Mistakes in Life. 37
perfectly understood. This is not to " add " to the
"Word of God," but to affirm its spirit. It ir not
to displace the relations of time and method to the
mass, but to graduate their inviolable conditions to
the exceptionally few. It is to leave unshut the door
mercy has opened.
Nevertheless, there are some finalities in the settle
ment of this question, to which heed must be given.
It is an unquestionable fact that the Divine Will has
been made known to us in a special revelation.
There has entered into our human history a redemp
tive scheme which has for its end the salvation of
individual men. The regeneration of our human
nature by a process of supernatural grace lies at the
foundation of this scheme. It is admitted in all
orthodox teaching that life, in its relation to men,
has some connection with a future world; and this,
not alone as a matter of physical continuity, but of
moral consequence. We are to unfold in the future
the germ of being we enclose in the present. Life
hereafter is to get its balance of equivalents adjusted
between right and wrong, that and this, now and
then, the sinner and the saint. Death and the Judg
ment-day will strip us of the shams, the dexterous
falsities in which we enrobe ourselves here, putting
the index on the outside of the man. Those saintly
graces which the good man is careful to cultivate on
earth will come out in the blossomed fruitage of
Eternal Life : the bad, ingrained habits of the impure
will emerge from their secrecy into fire. The being
" comforted " or " tormented " on the other side, lies
folded up in the ascendant habits, the dominant

38 Mistakes in Life.
reality of the present. These are postulates in all
our Christian creeds. They are all convictions in
the Christian conscience, which neither a refined
rationalism nor a vulgar scepticism can wholly dis
place. They are certainly finalities in the government
of God,
But who does not know that, while these beliefs
are among the foremost of our theoretic convictions,
we may yet entirely fail practically to cognise or to
apply them. We may be invincibly ignorant of the
Word of God in its purpose and in its spirit. We
may misapprehend what the relation between the
present and the future world really is, putting our
own vain thoughts in the place of God's. We may
not discern the method in which redemptively God
has determined to deal with the individual soul, and so
may put something else in the place of Christ. We
may be ignorant of God's righteousness in itself, and
as it is to be reflected by a personal regeneration in
us, and so wrap ourselves up in the ermine robe of
a pharisaical righteousness, putting up the worship
of self instead of " submitting to the righteousness of
God." Or we may retreat, not at all upon the ulti
mate compassion or mercy of God, but upon his
justice, and so our appeal at the last may be, " Lord,
when saw we thee an hungered, or athirst, or a
stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did
not minister unto thee ? " Or, intoxicated with the
dreams of a philosophical egotism, we may boldly
swing ourselves free from all such inexpedient uncer
tainties as these, and proclaim ourselves sceptics in
faith, disbelievers, materialists, deists, — atheists in life.

Mistakes in Life. 39
Religion, after all, is but an undecipherable riddle, a
cry out of darkness into darkness, without an echo.
And when the end comes, as come it must, we must
take our leap in the dark, and abide sternly our
fate. I am not intending to sum up the bearing of
these viewB on the future of individual men, nor
any further to deal with them than simply to remind
you that they are all facts in the creed and method
of living of not a few. Men and women in all
walks of life, in different schools of thought, rich in
the wealth of intellect, and otherwise accomplished in
personal character and in the amenities of social affec
tion, and with much that is noble and generous in
Christian action, are holding some or all of these
views, are more or less entangled in these doubts,
and yet are all at the same time and in some way
expecting to come out right at the last.
But if these things are so, if men are construing
their religious duties after their own rationalistic pre
conceptions, and not after the Word of God, and if
they are willing to run them boldly up into the un
known realities of another world, then the outlook
into that world to not a few is, we submit, a suffi
ciently portentous one. If man is in nature, in
habit, and in practice what both Revelation and ex
perience declare him to be ; if that Revelation is
what it affirms itself to be, a codified ultimatum of
the will and plan of God ; if Jesus Christ the Lord
occupies the rank and does the work which inspired
men everywhere with one voice declare and postulate
of him ; and if God himself, the Judge of all, is
in nature, in perfection, and rule what Revelation,

40 Mistakes in Life,
and reason, and the moral conscience, and the whole
economy of Nature and Providence agree in assert
ing him to be ; then how is it possible for any one
to look thoughtfully on the constantly disappearing
multitudes of his fellow-men without something of
bewildered doubt, if not with absolutely a shuddering
dread ? It is one of the surest of our clinical facts
that, in the majority of cases, men die in the temper
and with the habits in which they live. Exceptional
instances only establish the rule. The moralist and
the sensualist, the sceptic and the rationalist, the
saint and the sinner, the gay worldling and the
moiling man of business, the frivolous butterfly of
fashion and the sordid hunter, after pelf, the man
whose whole life is a grand liturgy of worship, and
the man whose whole career is a carnival of passion,
each and all die, in the main, as they live. " The
wicked is driven away in his wickedness ; but the
righteous hath hope in his death." And what after
that ? What comes next in the natural sequence of
such a life, ending in such a death ? If the wicked
is driven away in his wickedness, — the wickedness an
ingrained quality of his being both before and after
the catastrophe of death, — if in every age, through all
the avenues of life, and with an aggregate ratio which
advances with the total growth of the human race,
men are being so driven away at each successive
moment of time, self-immolated victims, offered up on
the altar of the Eternal Justice, — then is not the
question put by the disciples to Christ, " Lord, are
there few that be saved ? " one of stupendous and
appalling interest ? Does it not create even more

Mistakes in Life. 41
than a suspicion that all are not saved ? Is it not
suggestive of risk, of peril, of warning to us all?
And to the doubt and the distraction which such a
suspicion awakens there is no relief, but an aggra
vated confirmation in the only answer which the
Master gives, backed as it is with the terrible assu
rance of those truthful lips, " that many will seek to
enter in, and shall not be able." " For men and for
nations, the ' too late ' comes at last ! "
My fellow men ! What I am seeking to impress
upon you and upon myself is that religion, as our
Lord pourtrays it, is a sublime reality, a fact wrought
into the substance, the very essence of our being by
the working of a supernatural power ; that, its attain
ment, in all ordinary experience, is through a process
of painstaking, individual effort, demanding decision
and a manly courage; and that the end which it so
magnificently foreshadows is anything but an easy
slide, or accidental slip, into some imaginary heaven.
With all that is artistic and imposing in its modern
exhibitions, with whatever errors' it is being inter
mixed and degraded, however draped in fantastic
robes and misleading ceremonies, Religion is the great
creative work of God, a grand transformation of the
soul, — or it is nothing. It saves a man, or it leaves
him lost. And because it is this, its achievement is
always a struggle, a perilous strife : it is never a
natural development, or an arbitrary gift, but a life
won against the counter -hosts of destruction and
death. " For we wrestle not against flesh and blood,
but against principalities, against powers, against the
rulers pf the darkness of this world, against spiritual

42 Mistakes in Life.
wickedness in high places." These, surely, are no
despicable foes with which ta contend. And if those
principalities and powers and spiritual wickedness in
high places are the warriors, against whose banded
hate and accomplished skill and serried hosts we have
to wrestle, then your salvation and mine is no play
thing for idle hours or weary brains. It is no mere
. artistic tournament on some gala-day, amidst the
bannered throngs of applauding spectators, if it is to
be won by our conquering opponents such as these.
" The city which hath foundations, whose builder
and maker is God," is no Oriental or Mahommedan
Paradise for the imagination to dream about. It is
not the baseless fabric of a vision for the insolence
of contempt or the sardonic leer of the sensualist.
We have not the smallest apprehension that it will
turn out to be "the wide, lampless, deep, unpeopled
world of non-existence." It is the Temple of God.
It is his dwelling place, — the city of the Great King.
" The glory of God doth enlighten it." " The throne
of God and the Lamb" is in it. Angelic hosts, "the
church of the firstborn, the spirits of just men,"
hold their convocations within it. " The kings of
the earth do bring their glory and their honour into
it." It is the home of the weary exile, the solace of
wounded affection, the healing of the broken hearts
of humanity. But its attainment — free, open, full,
generously possible to all, is in every case girt round
with the fires of the Judgment-day. Over its gates
hangs the scroll, printed in letters of flame — Through
preparation and after struggle ! " And there shall in
no wise enter into it anything that defileth, neither

Mistakes in Life. 43
whatsoever worketh abomination or maketh a lie :
but they which are written in the Lamb's book of
life." Let us then awake up from the inertia of languid
indifference. Let us lay aside our inglorious ease, our
vain delusions, and play the man. Let us resolve
gravely as we can on the achievement. Let us strive
to enter in at the strait gate. And in co-ordination
with the arrangements of God, " principalities, and
powers, and spiritual wickedness in high places," — all
must go down before the all-unconquerable, all-con
quering might of the Christian man.

" And a certain woman named Lydia, a seller of purple, of the city of
Thyatira, which worshipped God, heard us : whose heart the Lord
opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of
Paul."— Acts xvi. 14.
THE conversion of the woman Lydia, like that of
Saul of Tarsus and of the Philippian jailor, is
one of those great historic events in which the mystery
of the Divine action upon the human soul comes to
the surface. It puts the secret of consciousness into
the logic of life.
Facts are the great speech of God. In a sense
unattainable by any mere alphabetical language the
actions of God are his great revelation. They are the
illumined text in which he has, from the beginning,
published himself to mankind. They stand, and they
are to be studied, as so many diagrams in which the
otherwise unseen and unknown thoughts and things of
God are expressed. "The invisible things of him
from the creation of the world," the apostle tells us,
"are clearly seen, being understood bythe things that
are made, even his eternal power and Godhead." The
first system of organised religious thought was a
Ritual, appealing to the spiritual consciousness through
material symbols. The miracles of Christ were a series

Lydia's Heart Opened. 45
of physical cures, which stood for signs of spiritual
healing. Redemption itself is not a doctrine, but a
fact. It may be more than doubted whether, antece
dently to this language of facts, God could, in his
infinitely abstract perfections, have so revealed him
self as to come within the apprehensions of men.
And so in the mystery of the kingdom of Christ,
¦truth gets its interpretation, as it gets its embodi
ment, in facts, such as those of Saul of Tarsus, the
Philippian jailor, and Lydia. They put into a pic
tured language the silent action of the Spirit of God
in his communion with the spirit of man.
Lydia, a woman of some worldly substance and
social position, it would appear, in the city of Thyatira,
a seller of purple, a dealer in those rich imperial
stuffs for which her city was famous, was called by
her business engagements to spend a day at Philippi,
a city remote from her home; and, for the time,
she seemed to be thrown loosely on the current of
circumstances, not knowing in what direction it might
drift her. A lone woman, in a strange city, on the
Sabbath day, with no business that could legitimately
occupy her attention, instead of wasting the hours in
vacant indifference, or using them to gratify an idle
curiosity, she joined herself to a company of godly
women, whose wont it was, early on the Sabbath
day, to meet for social prayer. And it was while
thus engaged, listening to the words spoken by the
apostle Paul, that the Lord met with this woman,
and opened her heart to the knowledge of himself.
And the lesson is thus powerfully taught us, that in
the drift of unusual or unexpected circumstances, in

46 Lydids Heart Opened*.
the sudden transitions of time and place, there may
be awaiting us unusual and unexpected blessings, if
the integrity of Christian principle be allowed to
govern us. Lydia was a worshipper of God at home,
after a 'fashion, probably a proselyte of the gate, or
an amiable moralist, and, faithful to her convictions,
God met her in a distant city, and opened her inner
most soul to the more excellent way.
We shall look at this incident in the light which
it casts on personal conversion. It is, in fact, a
luminous centre round which are grouped some of
the chief characteristics of that profound change
which relates the soul savingly to God.
1. And here, first, we have the central faculty on
which this change is wrought : " The Lord opened
the heart of Lydia."
The heart is the generic term in which primarily
we include the entire phenomena of the animal and
the spiritual man. Metaphorically, it concentrates
whatever distributively belongs to the physical, the
emotional, and the intellectual nature. In popular
speech, it is the organ of vitality, the great arterial
centre, the common ground and basis on which all
the functions of life are dependent. So we speak of
a healthy or a diseased heart as the index of a
healthy or a diseased man. In its Scriptural import,
the heart is the normal status that conditions man's
relations to God. It is the fountain of action and
character, the innermost index of our moral being.
What it is, that the man is. If it be right, he is
right. If it be wrong, he is wrong. "A good man
out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth

Lydtas Heart Opened. 47
that which is good ; and an evil man out of the evil
treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is
evil." Whatever, therefore, puts a master power over the
heart, shapes the destiny of the man; and the Chris
tian Religion claims to be such a power. It recondi
tions each of his separate faculties, and controls their
collective action. It determines the grade of a man's
nature by controlling the activities, the affinities, the
moral propulsions of his heart. " A new heart will
I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you :
and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh,
and I will give you a heart of flesh." The state,
then, of a man's heart, whether it be renewed or
unrenewed, is the under-tow that determines all the
currents of his being : "As a man thinketh in his
heart, so is he."
The heart, therefore, is the power in man that most
of all needs to be changed. Individual tendencies, con
stitutional idiosyncracies, even moral aberrations and
vicious practices can *be arrested, and are frequently
mastered by culture. The heart never outgrows its
inherent depravity. It is everywhere to-day, essen
tially, in all men, what it was in the beginning. We
have outgrown a thousand excesses which disfigured
the earlier ages of human history, but we have not
out-grown our nature. We have choked back into
repression our bad manners, but we have not changed
the man. The painted savage and the erudite sage
are scions from the same parent stock, " born in sin
and shapen in iniquity." And as all men inherit the
qualities of the one organic root of humanity, so all

48 Lydia's Heart Opened.
share in the outcrop of its fruits. We can temper
the external grossness, and confine and channel its
turbid outflow, but it is not within the power of any
advance of the ages, nor in the appliances of any
intellectual culture to disinfect the great primary
undercurrents which flow in upon us from this vital
font and head-spring of the race. We cannot "bring
a clean thing out of an unclean." Whatever, there
fore, was a necessity to the first man, to the early ages,
to the classic Nicodemuses, the Magdalenes, and the
Pauls of the Christian epoch, is a necessity still. The
same old virus throbs in the human heart under the
draped refinements of this nineteenth century, as in
the first. We cannot lift the entail from off the
inexorable past, or take ourselves out of the respon
sibilities of the present, We can neither unmake nor
escape from the heritage of our nature. Born in sin,
we must be born again.
Then, further, it is notoriously true that under a
momentary or a selfish motive man will surrender
to God, and often does surrender his most costly
possessions, while he persistently and wickedly with
holds his heart. Sometimes, as a compromise for
what he withholds, and sometimes as a substitute for
it, he will yield up what he values most in his
belongings, but he will -not yield up his personal self.
He will surrender his intellect, that it may be con
quered by the truth ; his time, that it may be given
to worship; his conscience, that it may be convinced
by the Spirit. With a princely generosity he will
give his money, and consecrate his influence, to up
hold and extend the kingdom of , Christ ; and all this

Lydia's Heart Opened. 49
he will do, not as having first given up his heart in
its innermost loyalty to God, but as a compensation
for having selfishly withheld it. " Israel hath for
gotten his Maker, and buildeth temples." So the rich
young ruler had enrobed himself in all the sanctities
of the Ten Commandments, while his heart was
fossilised in his gold. The Pharisee made broad his
phylacteries, and said his prayers, and gave his alms,
and was deep in the study of his traditions, while
his inward spirit was foul and utterly offensive to
God. To change the heart in man, then, whatever else it
may mean, is not merely to amend the life ; for the
life may be superficially correct, while the heart is
utterly false. For the same reason, it cannot be any
mere intellectual change, such as a new mode of
thinking of God, of his claims, or of his worship;
nor yet does it consist in any quickened sensibility of
the conscience in its outward reverence for the truth ; —
all of which are perfectly congruous with the felt,
ascendant alienation of the heart from God and good
ness. There are multitudes of men, in all ranks of
the social scale, to whom a traditional religion is a
matter of inherited veneration, of intellectual belief, in
whose lives the beauty of virtue is a worship, who yet
have no sense of religion in its relation to God. They
bow before the majesty of conviction, and they would
count it a treason against their manhood not to fol
low its behests up to a determinate limit ; but they are
not religious men. The conscience has an imperial
function as a power to touch the emotions, but these
may be profoundly stirred without moving the heart

50 Lydia's Heart Opened.
in its depths, or putting the prayer of penitence upon
the lip. The test of all emotion is in its power to
control the will. A conscientious man who follows
the beckonings of the light that is within him may,
ultimately, get to God ; but the following is the con
dition, not the thing.
The New Birth, as our Lord's language necessarily
implies, is the coming into life of that which pre
viously did not exist. Death, or a spiritual non
existence, is its antecedent. Instead of the spirit
dominating the sense and carrying over all the
activities of the man to the side of God, the sense
dominates the spirit and carries all over to the
servitude of sin. " The flesh lusteth against the
Spirit." Man is "sold under sin." He "fulfils the
desires of the flesh." Redemption through Christ
is, potentially, the re-creation of the lost Divine
order in the soul. Its aim is, not to awaken or to
direct, merely, the religious instincts, but to renew
the soul after the image in which it was created.
It is not to unmake the destructions wrought by
sin, alone; it is to rebuild the primeval type, to
set up the lost rule, to re-invest the soul with the
purity, the spirituality, and the blessedness of God.
Religion is thus, in purpose and in fact, the re-
entrance of God into man — God coming creatively
into the consciousness, renewing and controlling it,
and so filling it with the sanctities of a new life.
That return of the Creator, after his banishment
by sin, to the rightful allegiance of the man, the
re-enthronement of God over the will and in the
affections, as the one supreme Lord and Ruler, the

Lydia's Heart Opened. 51
source and the end of whatever constitutes the
creature-life — that is the "new heart" of Scripture,
which in regeneration God creates by his Spirit in
man. It puts an omnific force down among the
organic constituents of man's being, and " renews
him in the spirit of his mind." It builds a new
formation on the old basements, the primary ele
ments, the underground consciousness of choice and
affection, so that it is literally true that " Old things
are passed away ; behold, all things are become
new." And as the nature of man is one, in type
and stock, in parentage and inheritance, as the bond
of physical relationship regulates the condition of
all men and the possibilities of each, not by the
accident of adjacency, but by organic connection; bo,
in the obligations which implicate all men in sin
and' in the consequent necessity of a supernatural
deliverance from it. All men need this change, and
they must be brought into its experience just because
they are men. The cognate facts of a common
nature, a common sin, and a common redemption,
level all distinctions as between one man and
another. Human nature is a race-unity, whether
found distributed in the halls of refinement or in
the squalor and debasement of guilt. " God hath
concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have
mercy upon all." There is no difference in the sin
that vitiates and condemns ; and there must be no
exemption pleaded by man, on the ground of birth
or training, against the necessity of his being born
again, lest he shut himself out of the kingdom of
God.

52 Lydia's Heart Opened.
II. From the subject, we pass to the method of
this change.
1. Let us mark, first, the supernatural source in
which the change originates. Regeneration, whether
in itself a change in the subjective nature of the
man, or in his objective relations to God, or in
clusively in both, whether mediate or immediate in
its inducing causes, is a supernatural work, wrought
by the exercise of a Divine power upon the indi
vidual soul. It seems to have been this in the
history of this woman. It is always this where it
is real. It may not be miraculous, it probably is
not, — it would not be more real or superhuman for
being miraculous ; but it certainly is not the pro
duct of human nature. It may be simulated, but it
cannot be fabricated by any art or device of man.
It is a change radicated in the very being, the
central essence and constitution of the soul; and, as
such, it is, and it can only be, the achievement of
a supernatural power. " You hath he quickened,
who were dead in trespasses and sins."
There are two theories prevalent on conversion,
against both of which this doctrine is a dignified pro
test. According to the first of these theories, man
is an embryo saint to begin with. He may have
some aboriginal deficiencies to be supplied, some pre
cocious and ugly excesses to be repressed ; he may
be crude in thought and vicious in practice ; there
may be activities automatic and mischievous, and
which look as if they were radical and innate ; but
" the root of the matter is in him," and he will,
sooner or later, under this latent potency, " all un-

Lydia's Heart Opened. 53
*
consciously gravitate towards that which is right."
A Divine seed, the germ of all goodness, _lies, in fact,
folded up within all of us, waiting only the incite
ment of favouring circumstances to sheathe itself out
into the blossom and bloom of a godly life. The
moral growth of a man is really the man growing;
it is the abstract putting on the concrete, and he
needs no lien on supernatural aid to accomplish that.
The other theory makes the religious life to depend
on education. There is in all a capacity of becoming
good, as " there is in a plant the capacity of floral
and pomal life." It is the business of education to
cultivate that. The fruit-bearing tree may never pro
duce fruit ; but that is an accident, and no part of
the natural formation of the tree. The life-growing
capacity of a human soul may never be realised
in fact. A man may be virtually a child of God
and a future heir of heaven, but, from a defect, or the
absence of training, he may never become either.
That is the business of the educator. The capacity
is there, and it awaits only the skill of the directing
hand. " The sum of all education," a distinguished
philosopher tells us, "is the instruction of the intel
lect in the Laws of Nature." The circumstances of
a man's life may never bring him within the sphere
of such an education, — but that is his misfortune.
That both these are one-sided and incredible theo
ries is manifest from this, that it is with an ideal
human nature that they are dealing, and not with
human nature as it is. So far is it from being true
that we are all born into the world with the germ of
a holy nature folded up within us and waiting only

54 Lydids Heart Opened.
¦m
to be developed, that the Scriptures declare that we
are '"born in sin," under a sinful heritage and with
tendencies that are evil. And what the Scriptures
declare, the consciousness of man everywhere corrobo
rates. " The wicked are estranged from the womb :
they go astray as soon as they be born, speaking
lies." " I know," said St. Paul, " that in me
(that is, in my flesh) dweUeth no good thing." The
birth-root of human life is a depraved nature, with
its tendencies towards sin. Any growth, therefore,
out of such tendencies is a growth in evil, — the
unconscious proclivity expressing itself in outward
voluntary action, the action debasing to man, and
criminating him in the judgment of God.
Facts everywhere authenticate this teaching of the
Scriptures. " Foolishness is bound in the heart
of a child." Historically, the exception is not found.
Under the purest and the most benign of parental
influences, no one family has ever unfolded into matu
rity in which this noxious weed has not sprung up
and grown spontaneously, as if native to the soil. It
is true that, poetically, we speak of the innocency of
childhood. And there is an effluent, sensuous beauty
embosoming and blessing the young infant life which,
to the imagination, and still more in its appeal to
the parental instincts, seems quite to justify the
poetry. But in what an ominous back-ground, lurid
and threatening as the thunder-cloud, has that pic
tured beauty its setting ! What a seething mass of
contorted, demoniacal passions that little speck of
animated life sometimes becomes, putting to instant
flight all the poetry and all the hopes in which affec-

Lydia's Heart Opened. 55
tion had embroidered its faith, leaving only dismay,
astonishment, and disgrace in their place ! There are
rich affections, sweet sensibilities, bright imaginations
beautiful as dreams, and all unsullied as an angel's
thoughts, in the young child ! So we passionately
sing : so we incontinently think. But let the young
Titan awake and put on his strength : let " the
callow sinew " of a passionate will have time to
fledge itself for the flight, — and what then ? " There
is a spirit in man" more terrible than the lightning,
and potent as death. Under the statuesque repose
of that young seraph there lies concealed a power
holding the root-seeds of crimes which have made
the nations tremble. " Out of the heart proceed
evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts,
covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness," —
" all these," said the infallible Teacher, " come from
within." All this brood of diabolical births, iri their
potential germs, are " within us." They are the
patrimony of guilt, the heritage of nature; and if no
regenerating grace interpose to arrest and counter
poise their normal action, they will, sooner or later,
like the volcanic forces of the earth, burst into a
fiery flood of ruin, overthrowing the very foundations
of life. No : the natural innoeency of the human
heart is a fiction; the moral regeneration of man
based on the instinctive development of his nature,
is a myth. It is not an evolution out of some
primordial seed, nor an impulse of the self-asserting,
self-directing will. It is the creative act of God. It
starts, where all creation starts, in the efficiency of
the Divine Word. At the point where nothing is, it

56 Lydia's Heart Opened.
generates life. It is "not by might, nor by power,
but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts."
Education is a grand power. It is hard to assign
a limit to its vast resources in dealing with the in
herent wants, the faculties, the possibiUties of the
human mind. It is harder stui to beheve that, as
education becomes the, recognised and the associated
handmaid of religion, it will not lift our noble man
hood into a plane of cultured eminency loftier and
grander than the loftiest and the grandest past. But
there are things which education cannot do, which
it was never intended to do. It cannot correlate
with the forces of Omnipotence. It can map out and
marshal the individual faculties ; it can train and
polish the intellect ; it can refine and cultivate the
taste ; it can throw a grace and a glamour over
all the aesthetics of life ; but it cannot change the
human heart, it cannot "wash the Ethiop white." AU
education grafted on the stock of the " natural
man," all mere unfolding of the capacities before
latent within him, deals with the intellectual and the
animal ; it creates neither faculty nor disposition ;
while it fails to fathom the great deeps of the soul,
or to change its feculent currents into virtue.
Not, then, in the school, but in the laver of a super
natural regeneration is man's heart to be changed.
There are great physical forces playing round about
us in the economy of Nature, but it is not within
the power of any one or of all of these to originate
Life. And if all life, from the monad to the man,
were the product of physical causes, an impassable
gulf would still separate that life from the mystery of

Ly diets Heart Opened. 57
the New Birth. To re-create a dead human soul is
the miracle of creation. It stands alone in the uni
verse. It is, and it can only be, a birth into being
by the direct action of the all-creative God.
2. A second characteristic of this Divine power iri
conversion is in the variety of methods in which it
operates. In the instance before us, the statement is
that "the Lord opened the heart of Lydia:" a mode of
expression indicating quietness, calmness, the stillness
of unruffled tranquillity. The work was done silently,
as the young spring-bud is opened by the morning
sun. It was the sublime serenity of a translation out
of darkness into marvellous light. On the other hand,
in the history of the jailor, the same work is done,
not in silence, but in tumult ; not in a translation,
but in a resurrection. Instead of the gentleness of the
budding leaf or the silence of the falling dew, there
were the throes of the earthquake, shaking the prison-
waUs, and turning into a storm of agony the soul
of the man. " There are diversities of gifts, but it is
the same Spirit." And these diverse modes of reach
ing the same result are significant. To " open the
heart of Lydia " and win it through the sweet sereni
ties of her womanly nature, is one thing; to strike
contrition into the petrified sensibilities of a man
cased in the brutalities of a Roman jailor, is another
and quite a different thing. To have dealt with Lydia
as with the jailor would have been to crush her with
excess of terror. To have dealt with the jailor as
with Lydia would have been to toy at chiselling the
marble with sunbeams. In both cases there waa

58 Lydia's Heart Opened.
enough of power, and in each it was the same power,
but it was power graduated in its approach to its
end by individually constituted methods. " There are
diversities of operations, but it is the same God which
worketh all in all."
There are mental peculiarities, as there are diverse
habits of sin, in deaUng with which " the still small
voice," ' though issuing from " the secret place of
thunder," would be utterly powerless. And there are
idiosyncrasies of temperament, a tender tremulousness
of feeling, in which "the strong wind and the earth
quake " would only madden and destroy. The work
of conviction, of scathing rebuke, the self-scourging
with shame and remorse, must be done in some men,
throwing the soul back upon itself in terrible retribu
tions of biting anguish, before the healing touch of
mercy will be either sought or cared for. The dark
ness can be pierced only by the flashing fire. To
others, again, the first impulse is a gentle surprise,
a tender appeal, a winning revelation of the sweetness
and the beauty of the religious life. Attraction, in the
one case, conquers. Fear and distraction, in the other,
compel. But it would be a perilous mistake to make
either class a type of the invariable working of the
Divine power, or to suppose that, because in the one
the outward and distracting phenomena were absent,
therefore the power itself was less. It is not the
power that strikes down a man as with a thunder
stroke, but that which renews him in the spirit of his
mind, that is the grandest in its might. God's great
forces are all silent forces — as when he renews the
face of the young spring earth, or draws back the

Lydia's Heart Opened. 59
curtain of night, or hangs his rainbows across the
heavens. And this variety in the methods of the Divine
working according to the constitutional -differences in
men, unfolds to us, in perpetuity, the mental difficul
ties with which the Gospel has to contend, and the
different methods in which it proceeds in dealing with
..them. The power of the Gospel, while uniform in its
effects, is yet multiform in its modes of action. Take
the two sexes as types of the different orders of
thought and feeling which the Gospel has to deal
with. All the mental faculties, numerically, and in
proportionate strength, belong, it is said, equaUy to
the masculine and the feminine mind; but they come
out in each under a different classification. As, in
their physical organization, strength is the characteris
tic of man and grace of woman, so, in the constitu
tional difference and outcome of the mental powers.
Woman's queenly pre-eminence is in the strength of
her affections. Her .thoughts, as a whole, are woven
out of the weftage of her heart, as they are certainly
all coloured by it. Man, on the other hand, holds
his sceptre of power in his intellect. His intensest
affections are all coloured, as they are cooled, by
passing through the polar region of the brain. Woman
thinks through her feeUngs. Man feels through his
intellect. Her wealth is in the soul. His is in the
cerebral function. He reaches his conclusions by a
process of induction. She gets her thoughts by in
tuition. Man is speculative and critical. Woman is
emotional and religious. His strength is in the logical
faculty. Hers, in the magnetism of persuasion.

60 Lydia's Heart Opened.
Among men, again, as a class, you have the widest
possible divergences of individual temperament, and
of that mental configuration to which the Truth
makes its appeal. One man is constitutionally impres
sionable, sensuous, dreamy, magnetic. Another is
hard, practical, exact, suspicious, and repellent. This
one is rationalistic in his predilections and require
ments : he can see nothing, wiU believe nothing, but
what comes clear through the understanding and can
be verified by the coolest processes of reasoning.
Another is intensely ideahstic in his perceptions : he
revels in the poetry of imagination, and believes
without the trouble of thinking. There are men who
are unapproachable by any appeal, however powerful,
if made only to the understanding; they can be
reached only through the feelings. Others, again, are
equally incapable of being reached by any appeal to
the feelings ; they bow only to the majesty of in
tellect. The one is conquered by the self-evident
reasonableness with which religion encounters the
emotional nature. The other is convinced by its
authority, and submits only as he is logically subdued.
Now, it is upon this " equatorial line " of mental
differences that the Gospel plants itself and under
takes the achievement of its mission. Everywhere,
and in each case, while aiming at the same results,
it has to work its approaches in seemingly quite
opposite methods. St. Paul speaks of his ministry
as "commending" itself "to every man's conscience
in the sight of God ;" of himself, as becoming " aU
things to all men, that he might by all means save
some;" as "rightly dividing the Word of truth" —

Lydia's Heart Opened. 61
the Truth rightly administered, partitioned off, cut
into appropriate sections and phases; now as he stood
on "Mars' hill," and before the bearded sages in the
porticoes and temples of the Agora, and cut into a
different style as he confronts his accusers and judges
in the Roman Forum, and yet again in a style dis
tinct from each when preaching to a company of
praying women by the river-side, or to the bewildered
jailor in his prison. And so with the Incarnate Son
of God — the one teacher, the life and the pattern of
aU preaching, he who spake as "never man spake,"
— he " knew what was in man," and what was in
the Truth. Under whatever outward guise or in
ward habit men stood before him, he saw the
secret channel along which his words could reach
the individual heart. He knew how to pierce the
self-complacent logic of Nicodemus, to unmask the
master-vice of the rich young ruler, to calm the fears
and to soothe the crushed heart of " the woman
that was a sinner," and to flash the keenest and the
most withering rebukes upon the white-washed sepul
chres of the day, — the traditional Pharisee and the
immoral hypocrite, whose vices under the cloak of
rehgion were consecrated into virtues, — and he did
it. He focussed the burning rays of Truth upon the
unclean conscience, and, in each man's case, the
rays smote the salient angle of the character and
the sin, — and they hated him to the death because he
did it.
Dependent in its ministry on this constitutional
variety in men, and acting directly upon it, it is to be
looked for that the Gospel will vary in its methods

62 Lydia's Heart Opened.
of approach to different minds, that it will work
differently upon them, and that, as a consequence, it
will come out in exceedingly different results. To the
masculine mind the Gospel wiU appeal successfuUy,
chiefly as it appeals to the intellect, and so works out
its results through the logic. To the feminine and
finer mind it will appeal successfully, chiefly as it
appeals to the sympathies, the moral susceptibilities,
the delicate aesthetics of human nature. And in each
of these illustrative cases, while the conversion of the
soul will, in its inward reality, be singly and wholly
the same, the methods in which it is accomplished
will seem to be antagonistically unlike.
And hence this consequence emerges, that in getting
up the evidence of any given case of conversion, our
own or that of another, reference should be had less
to the specific mode in which it takes place, — whether
stern or gentle, sudden or gradual, with many tears
or with none at all, — and more to the grand totaHty
in which its fruits actually appear. The heart of the
decorous seller of purple was opened gently and in
silence, as the gates of the morning : but then it
was opened. That of the jailor was cleft asunder, as
the oak is shivered by the lightning-shaft : but then
it was cleft asunder — this no more, that no less.
The phenomena are wide enough to comprise two
separate orders of nature. The result, as it comes
out in the consciousness of both, is one and the
same. In each " It is the soul standing face to face
with God," and being supernaturally changed. And
that is conversion.

Lydia's Heart Opened. 63
S. The reality of Lydia's conversion was seen in
its immediate fruits : " She attended unto the things
which were spoken of Paul."
That was the first effect. If Ustless before, if
curious only, or speculative, she is awake now. The
word comes like a luminous stream of sacred warmth
into her newly-awakened soul, calling up thought and
feehng, wonder and faith, earnestness and decision of
purpose and of Ufe. She attends to the things that
were spoken by Paul, as if in the things spoken she
found the echo of a new life in herself. The waking
up of ihat "earnest heed" in the soul of Lydia set
into play a train of consequences which, in their
reverberations, will go sounding on under the arches
of the Temple for ever. Thyatira and Philippi and
the Tyrian purple are waifs of memory, hereafter to
be forgotten. Lydia's conversion is a faot, braced into
the architecture of heaven.
" She was baptized, and her household." She took
upon herself and upon her home the profession of the
Christian faith. A converted woman, she was bap
tized into a witness and confessor of Christ, whom
Paul preached. — A waste of power meets us just here.
Not a few estimable and truth-loving people, who feel
assuredly in their trustful hearts the power and grace
and the sweet constraint of a Saviour's love, yet
decline to embody their belief in a godly fellowship
with the household of faith. They stand outside of
the visible Church, on the border-land that keeps
them separate equaUy from the congregation of sin
ners and of saints. And there is a leakage in that
estrangement which, in many instances, not only

64 - Lydia's Heart Opened.
drains off and impoverishes the rich contents of the
heart, but in the end utterly wastes them. If the
woman Lydia had, after the solemn invitation which
set her face to face with her destiny, gone back to
Thyatira, resolved to keep the matter secret, trusting
to the loyalty of conscience and the integrity of her
feelings to preserve her in the faith, the chances are
that we should not now have met with her " Name
in the book of life." We cannot stand alone in the
perilous struggle of a rehgious career ; and if we
could, we cannot honour the Lord Jesus Christ, if we
decline to take up the cross and follow him "in the
regeneration." And, least of all, can we help to
sustain the burden God has laid upon our feUow-men
as trustees for the world's salvation, if we withhold
'from them the sympathy and the patronage of our
professional support. The soil of our Christian con
gregations is rich to repletion with a seed of Ufe,
which, if it were to ripen into a harvest of outward
confession, would transform the world into a garden
of beauty. The Church faints, not because bankrupt
in her resources, but because men refuse to consecrate
to her service that which is already her own.
Let me ask you, in conclusion, thoughtfully to pon
der those Providential teachings to which aUusion
was made in our opening remarks. Lydia was a
stranger, in a strange city. It was the Sabbath day.
There was a meeting for religious worship by the
river-side, and godly people, early in the morning,
were wont to resort thither for social prayer. If
Lydia, instead of honouring the Sabbath, had wasted
it in idleness, or devoted it to business, or allowed it

Lydia's Heart Opened. 65
to float on in the silent, dreamy inertia of indifference,
which sometimes steals over the lonely man when
adrift from home and out of his ordinary course of
things, then she had not met with those praying
people ; and then she had not encountered Paul and
Silas in their Christian teaching; and then the influ
ence which accompanied that teaching had not reached
her heart ; and then she would have gone back to
her native city the same amiable moralist she left it ;
and then — but who can imagine what then might
have followed in the wake of these successive misses,
through the unpausing continuity of the everlasting
ages ? " Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and work-
eth righteousness, those that remember thee in thy
ways." The way in which a prescient Providence
not unfrequently connects itself with what are called
the chance occurrences of human life is, in fact,
brought out in one of its most striking instances in
this incident. It shows us that the accidents, so
called, which interrupt the ordinary run of our human
affairs, do, in effect, connect themselves with the pur
poses of God. While they seem to play loosely with
us and with our interests, they are the causes which
drift us right into the secret currents of the Divine
will. Let this instruct us. When we travel to the distant
city, or are rushing along the rail, or unexpectedly
renew some old and all-but-forgotten friendship, let
the eye and the ear and the heart be open God-ward;
and we shall find that, in ways unknown to us, or in
unexpected places, and on unusual occasions, God
may have some special benefaction to bestow, which
v

66 Lydia's Heart Opened.
otherwise we might have missed. " They who watch
for Providence, shall never want a Providence to
watch." " In all thy ways acknowledge him," — and
in all thy ways he will acknowledge thee, making
every spot a home, and the heart . itself a temple,
radiant with light, vocal with worship, and guested
with the Godhead.

^oVawss a Jpltthob oi |pfain-g.
"But as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner
of conversation; because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy."—
1 Peter i. 15, 16.
THESE exceedingly exact and pungent words appear
to have been addressed to those in whom reli
gion was already a living power ; and the drift of
their teaching is to awaken a still further and higher
consecration. They are a claim for the integrity of
the individual life, in its surrender to the absolute
requirements of a holy God, " As he which hath
called you is holy, so be ye holy."
The word "called," or "calling," is a comprehen
sive formula for that specific message which God has
for the individual man, and for the life which, in
obeying that message, every man finds. Mediately,
this call is in the Gospel, which in its spirit and
purpose is nothing less and nothing other than a
provisional transcript of the holiness of God. He
calls us to come to him, to be near him, that in
the fellowship of sympathy he may put upon us
something of the breadth and blessedness of his own
being. Holiness is wholeness, completeness. It is the
sum of a man's obligations to his Creator, recognised

68 Holiness a Method of Living.
and made dominant in the service of Ufe. It is the
call of a man, not to occupy a status in the Church,
or to affirm the axioms of a creed, but to fulfil a
condition of his being. It is man as he comes
squarely up, meeting the claims of God.
The general term " conversation " covers the whole
of inward and outward life. It embraces each choice
of the will, all the affectional powers, and the mani
fold actions and verbal expressions of the man; and
over all these we are to put on the bright, beautiful,
and seamless robe of holiness.
I. Let us see, first, what is written. "It is written,
Be ye holy ; for I am holy."
It is written with the Divine finger, in a specific
proclamation, on manifold occasions, that God is a
Holy Being. This is the one supreme quality in
which, more than in any other, God chose to declare
himself to his ancient people. " Speak unto aU the
congregation of the children of Israel and say unto
them, Ye shall be holy : for I the Lord your God
am holy." It is the distinguishing characteristic
under which, and in accordance with which, he
chooses still to be known and intermeddled with by
man. " Sanctify the Lord of hosts himself; and let
him be your fear, and let him be your dread." "I
will be sanctified in them that come nigh me, and
before all the people I will be glorified." The text
itself is a quotation from the book of Leviticus, and,
as applied by the Apostle, it enunciates one of the
grand, unshifting, and majestic principles which abide
in the nature of God, and regulate his dealings with

Holiness a Method of Living. 69
men. It is the highest quality in which all that is
highest in the absoluteness of the Godhead has
clothed itseU, the pure and faultless unity in which
all his perfections combine. " Who is like unto thee,
0 Lord, glorious in hohness, fearful in praises, doing
wonders ? "
The altered relations in which we as a sinful race
are supposed to stand, consequent on the incarnation
and mediatorial work of Christ, do not diminish this
inherent sanctity of the Divine nature ; neither do
they abridge in any way the veneration of thought,
or lessen the sanctity of feeling, in which he claims
to be held.
There is a school of thought the drift of whose
teaching is, that to enable man to come up to the
requirements of the Divine Law, the Law itself has
yielded somewhat of its original claims, and so has,
in effect, lowered its perfect exactions to meet the
lapsed conditions of its transgressor. But this is
simply to misunderstand the nature of Law. Law
is the exponent of God : it is a revelation of the
will, founded on the nature of God. And to relax
its requirements, therefore, is to destroy its effect, or,
what is the same thing, to change the level of the
Divine nature, of which it is the expression. But
God cannot change. . On the summit of Sinai, or in
the softened tenderness of mercy and grace as seen
in the crucified sufferer on the cross of redemption,
" Our God is a consuming fire," — a fire which, while
it cannot but purify all moral natures on whom it
sympathetically kindles, so can only burn up and
destroy the evil to which it is opposed.

70 Holiness a Method of Living.
In our ordinary conceptions of this quality of holi
ness, we are apt to limit it to one aspect of the
Divine nature. We think of it mainly as a fixed and
unalterable attachment to the right, and a consequent
fixed and unalterable oppugnation to the wrong.
Holiness in God is all that, but then it is also some
thing more. It is the sum of all that God is. It
is the essence of God. It is God himself. The glory
of his Name centres in that. Each moral act, each
quality of his being, whether it create or kill, whether
it save a man or destroy him, is equally the outflow
and the expression of the holiness of his being. The
Divine will has its axis in this quality of his nature.
And if there are times when he seems to yield to
human entreaty and to bless, and other times when
he appears inflexibly to resist and even to destroy, it
is because, as Judge of all the earth, he must do
right — right first, and only, and always right. " The
Lord is righteous in all his ways, and holy in all his
works." It is not, then, of one phase, or of a single attri
bute or quality in the Divine essence, of which this
holiness speaks, — it is, of God himself. It is the
totalised whole of his perfections in their oneness of
nature and manifestation, and their unity of act.
God is not only a holy being : holiness is all his
being. "He is the high and lofty One, whose name" —
the exhaustless term for his nature — "is holy."
There are different methods in which the testi
mony to this holiness of God is written. So far as
language can make it manifest, the writing is clear
and emphatic from the beginning. Not a page in

Holiness a Method of Living. 71
Revelation but is inscribed with its affirmations.
" Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of Hosts," is the one
acclaim, whether in the song of the Seraphim in the
Temple, or on the lips of inspired men. From
Genesis to the Apocalypse, its imprint is a trail of
luminous fire.
But language, in its word-power of conveying abstract
ideas, is not the only method, n'or is it by any means
the most impressive one, in which this quality is
declared. The acts of God are a still more impressive
record of what he is, and of the contradictories to
which he is opposed.
First of all, we have that strange tragedy in the
lapse of moral life in the angelic world, antedating
our human history, on which the record insists. In
what specific epoch of angelic life that lapse occurred,
who were its instant victims, and by what inscrutable
promptings and agencies it was brought about, may be
open questions for debate : the fact itself is to be
credited on the veracity of God. " The angels which
kept not their first estate, but left their own habi
tation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under
darkness unto the judgment of the great day." The
outbreak of a moral epidemic amid the celestial hosts
threatened onpe the sovereignty of heaven. And though
they were among the peers of the realm, the tall
archangels who stood in the immediate shadow of
his throne, " God spared not the angels that sinned,
but cast them down to hell." It was a war, not of
powers but of principles — good and evil, holiness and
sin; and the battle went with the right against the
wrong.

72 Holiness a Method of Living.
The history of our own lost Eden goes in the
same direction. "By one man sin entered into the
world, and death by sin." That was enough. In that
one sin there was contained a seminal virus which, if
propagated, would have depopulated the universe of
virtue. "So he drove out the man; and he placed at
the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a
flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the
way of the tree of life."
The secret that underlies the occurrence of many
physical events in the world's history breaking up
the structure of national and social life, such as the
deluge of Noah, the rain of fire that burnt out the
the reeking rottenness of Sodom and Gomorrah,
the plagues, pestilences, famines, and wars of the
Jewish people; — and not less really is it true, if not
so directly traceable in their immediate precursors, of
not a few exceptional events in more historic times —
the revolutions, the civil commotions, the religious
reformations, which in long continued and resist
less movements have blotted out and re-written a
nation's history, the sanguinary wars, the sudden
and strange conflagrations, the unaccountable ship
wrecks, the accidents and calamities, the wreck of
colossal fortunes in the history of individual men and
of nations: — the secret lying at the back and down at
the cause of occurrences such as these, albeit " when
the hand of God is lifted up" men "will not see," may
find its ultimate, if not its immediate, exponent in
that inflexible rectitude of the Divine nature, which
first holds in check and then punishes the incorrigible
passions of men. " The wrath of God is revealed

Holiness a Method of Living. 73
from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteous
ness of men." All history is full of such revelations.
All nature is full of them. The earth in its distracted
strata and streaming fires shews them. The heavens
declare them in storms and tempests and poisoned
choking airs. All human laws are their witness, and
the conscience of man most of all. Providence has
its throne of judgment set amidst the dynasties of
time ; and, without the formality of any assize, ever
and anon reads off from its Book of Life the doom
of individual and associated men.
Redemption, as we have it embodied in the incar
nation and death of the Son of God, is the holiness
of God set up in a formal, persistent hostility to sin.
" The carnal mind is enmity against God : for it is
not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can
be." But then, none the less, the holiness of the
Divine nature is enmity against the carnal mind. It
is not tolerant of it, neither indeed can be. If two
forces come into collision, both equally resolute, but
not equally powerful, we know what must happen.
The weaker must go down. God and sin, the Divine
and the carnal mind, as these are seen colliding in
Redemption, are those two forces. To expound the enor
mous turpitude of that which he cannot but inherently
and eternally hate, to blacken it with his curse whfle
he rescued its victim from its punishment, God
" spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for
us all." That sacrifice of God, put upon the cross of
redemption, stands as the index in which the universe
of intelligent beings will read eternally " the good
ness and the severity of God " in his estimate of Bin.

74 Holiness a Method of Living.
The subtle and inappreciable influences put into
action by the Holy Spirit in all the methods appro
priate to men — influences but for which the momentum
of human passions would, in all calculable probabUity,
sweep down the barriers of our strongest civUization —
are in themselves a standing testimony to the holiness
of God. The series of warning notices against all
trifling with, "vexing," "grieving," and "quenching"
this Spirit, and the fatal finality of the consequences
which are foreshown to ensue, are a further writing in
which, in its severest style, the holiness of God has
been translated into the language of men. It is written,
not with "ink and pen," or on "tables of stone," but
in supernatural deeds, acts of God, which are God
himself in act ; written, not alone "on the sheeted
heavens or the burning earth or the angered ocean,
but down on the red-leaved tablets of the human con
science — a flash into the very crypt and centre of
man's being, which is itself a vision of God. It is
written there, as if the words were printed with Ught-
nings, that God is a holy Being.
II. What is required of us in view of what is
written?— "As he which hath called you is holy,- so
be ye holy."
God calls us into a fellowship with himself, founded
on a community of holiness. Congenial natures attract :
opposites repel. Our likeness to God, the measure in
which we are partakers of a Divine nature, is the
measure of our fellowship. There are two ways in
which this requirement may be understood. First, as
a mental state, which is expressed in the habitual

Holiness a Method of Living. 75
rectitude of the inner being; and, secondly, as a life,
brave and beautiful in all sanctity of act. Both these
interpretations are sustained by the text. "Be ye
holy, for I am holy:" that is the inward, subjective
state. " In all manner of conversation :" that is the
inward habit manifest in the outward act.
1. Holiness is, first, a state. As in God it is the
substance in which all his perfections inhere and out
of which they spontaneously flow, so in the sancti
fied heart. It is the essence, the sum, the vital
statistics of a regenerated man. The Christian man
is such only to the extent in which holiness is his
dominant quality. " The righteousness of the law,"
says the Apostle, is "fulfilled in us, who walk not
after the flesh, but after the Spirit." But this walk
is the balanced procession of a life, with its spring
and power in the righteousness of the law accom
plished in us — the latter the inward quality, the former
the corresponding act. " To be carnally minded is
death ; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace."
But spiritual-mindedness is a moral state, a mental
habit, with life and peace for its fruits. As the habit
predominates, so the fruits abound. A moral man, the
conventionally good man, is determined by what he
is not, and by what he does not, rather than by
what he positively is and does. The regenerate man
is distinguished by what he is and by what he does ;
the qualities are positive, and inherent in the sub
stance of his being, and are therefore inseparable from
his mode of living. The moral man "is an empty
vine, he bringeth forth fruit unto himself." The

76 Holiness a Method of Living.
Christian man is a " living branch, grafted into the
true and living vine," whence the fruits of righteous
ness necessarUy spring. Fruits are facts, inseparable
from this union, and impossible without it.
"In this," says the Apostle, "the chUdren of God
are manifest, and the chUdren of the devU." In what
ie this distinction manifest ? Not in any set of ethical
negations in which no positive qualities are expressed,
for these may be common to both. Not in the direc
tion or the vigour in which the understanding deals
with the sanctities of religious truth ; nor yet in any
pleasant emotions with which we may yield ourselves
up to the aesthetics of religious worship; for these also
are common equally to the sinner and the saint.
"He that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he
is righteous. He that committeth sin is of the devU."
" Whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God."
This is the inexorable distinction, the gulf that divides
the merely moral from the holy man. Religion is a
clean thing. It has no masks, no aliases, no mantle
of indulgence in which to wrap up even a small sin,
or a profitable sin, or a fashionable sin, jor indeed any
sin. It is not simply a state of not sinning. "Being
made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye
have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting
life." How complete in its practical comprehensiveness
this state is intended to be, we may learn from the
apostle Paul, when pleading with, the church at Rome:
" I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, that
ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, accept
able unto God, which is your reasonable service."

Holiness a Method of Living. jj
" Your bodies " — the corporeal organism, a part sym
bolising the whole. " A living sacrifice," in which
all is offered up in the consecrating act, — life the
altar, man the oblation. Anything short of this, any
thing instead of this, is an unreasonable return for
the wholeness of that creative and redeeming wealth
in which God consecrates himself to us. Holiness is
this consecration of the man — the whole man, one
yet manifold, — a single life in its consciousness, yet
multiform in its separate acts.
So, again, in that memorable prayer for the Church
at Thessalonica : "The very God of peace sanctify
you wholly ; and I pray God your whole spirit and
soul and body be preserved -blameless unto the com
ing of our Lord Jesus Christ." The whole man, then,
in his separate parts and functions, is equally receptive
of this consecrating affusion, each part a vital integer
in the wholeness of the sanctified man: — "Your whole
spirit and soul and body." It is not the body alone,
nor the spirit alone, nor the soul alone, into which
this sanctifying fire descends; but into the corporate
man. The body is the sacred shrine in which the
spirit, as a consecrating priest, offers up, through the
passionate, emotional soul, a sanctified life. No one
capacity is to be educated at the expense of another.
No function or department of our single complex
nature is to go into unhingement. God, in the whole
ness of his perfect being, is the eternal prototype in
harmony with which man is again to be created. And
that for which the Apostle prays is, that in this equal
sanctity of each of these co-ordinate parts — not only
in their triplex unity but in their separate, functional

78 Holiness a Method of Living.
action — the "spirit," the illuminating centre of self-
consciousness, with all its capacities of intelligence,
whether of wUl or conscience or reason ; the " soul,'
with its net-work of desires, affections, passions, in
stincts — all the native proclivities and automatic move
ments, however varied and impulsive; and the "body,"
with its senses, appetites, and manifold powers of
action; — all that goes as a constituent factor into the
make-up of a man should have put upon it this initial
quality and enrobement of holiness. And the Apostle
adds the assurance, as if to cap the wonderful climax,
so as to make doubt impossible, " Faithful is he who
hath called you, who also wUl do it!" Say then, if
you will, that this is only a prayer, that it shows
what ought to be rather than what actually is; still
the obligation out of which the prayer is incited
determines the possibility of the thing, or it is a
delusion, and the prayer itself a mockery. But we
can hardly thus interpret the prayer of an inspired
Apostle. And so, finally, it follows that holiness, outstepping
indefinitely all mere verbal forms and dogmatic dis
tinctions, as these are formulated into creeds, becomes
and is a Divine force, a subtle celestial fire, the Life
of God intermingling with and suffusing the life of
man.- And as the all-perfect life of the invisible
God has its embodiment and manifested type in the
all-perfect life of Christ, so the all-perfect life of
Christ becomes the prototype of the perfect Christian
man. It is "Christ in you," "Christ dwelling in your
hearts by faith," — living there in his own Spirit, ruling
there in the enthusiasm of love, as the root lives in

Holiness a Method of Living. 79
and rules in the quivering branch and green leaf and
clustering fruit: so is the enthronement of Christ in
the believing heart. Christian holiness is thus neither
more nor less than a supernatural culture, the re
educating of the soul back to its lost life and normal
type in the image and likeness of God. The orbit
of life once more gets its centre in God : so that
henceforth the holy man lives not to himself, or from
himself, or for himself ; he lives wholly, supremely
for God. He holds no property which he does not
count sacred to God; does no work that he cannot
perform in obedience to the will of God ; takes nb
pleasure, seeks no honour, but that in which he can
glorify God-. He is " not his own." Talents, genius,
learning, friends, fame, — all are handed over as a
free-wUl offering and voluntary sacrifice to God. " I
live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." "For all
things come of thee, and of thine own have I given
thee." 2. This brings up our second position, namely, that
Christian holiness is a method of living. Being some
thing in the man, an incorporate element of his
spiritual nature, and therefore inseparably identified
with him, it runs over into all his "conversation," the
manifold details and instinctive development of his
actual life; just as we- see it does in the life of
God. Holiness in him is never quiescent, or in abey
ance. It is manifest in all the Divine works — in
Creation, in Providence, and in Grace. Holiness is
the normal law out of which all the activities of the
Divine life get their impulse. And it is in this ful-

80 Holiness a Method of Living.
ness of pervasive quality that holiness in God be
comes the ideal and pattern after which to mould our
human life. "As he which hath called you is holy,
so be ye holy," — after this style, according to this
pattern. We are to be " followers of God, as dear
chUdren." In some conceivable sense, as between the
parent and the child, there is to be a following, a
correspondence — not alone in the quaUties of the
Divine holiness, but in its degrees and methods of
action — between it and the holiness of the Christian
man. __ We are ,to be "perfect, even as our Father
which is in heaven is perfect." But this impUes
limitation and distinction.
The perfection of God is the measure of his holiness.
It cannot be either more or less than it is. It is a
fixed quantity, because it is a perfect quality of the
Divine nature. " I the Lord change not." As the
perfect quality of an all-perfect being, holiness in God
cannot grow, and it cannot diminish. It is a tideless
flood. It is God in the perfection of his being. On the
contrary, our nature is progressive. AU our quaUties
of knowledge, power, goodness, grow out of conditions
antecedently less ; they continuously advance out of
the less perfect into the more. There can be neither
more nor less in God. Any movement here would be
so much taken from the absoluteness of his nature,
and so an imperfection. But a fixedness of condition
in the life of a finite being would be its paralysis,
would be its death. Batten down the life of man
or angel in the changelessness of a perfection in which
all development is impossible, and its very existence
would be arrested. Wherefore "giving all dUigence,

Holiness a Method of Living. 81
add to your faith." " Not as though I had already
attained : but I follow after." In this way we do of
necessity put a' wide distinction, not of nature but
of degree, between the perfection of the Divine holi
ness and its most lustrous human copy. In qualities
it is one and the same ; in quantity it is another and
infinitely less.
There is yet this further' distinction, that in the
Divine Nature holiness is always a complacency or
a repugnancy in accordance with the reality of things.
" The Lord is a God of knowledge, and by him
actions are weighed." But he himself is the balance
in which the quality of things is determined. " He
sits upon the throne, judging right." Things appear
to him as they are, in the abstract, and in the con
crete. We, on the contrary, are always open to
misconception, with its consequent impositions. We
can judge only as we see and hear, arid we can
neither hear nor see beyond our measure. However
intense and full our capacity of Christian sanctity
may be, it confers no infallibility o)f judgment. An
action may be abhorrent, therefore, to us, when it is
not reaUy so to God. We may fraternize with men
or things, when in their spirit they are utterly alien
and offensive to the holiness of God. " The Lord
seetb. not as man seeth : man looketh on the outward
appearance, but the Lord looketh upon the heart."
And this difference between absolute and finite intel
ligence is a further denominator of the distinction
which must always, both here and hereafter, differen
tiate the holiness of God from that of the holiest of
men. When, therefore, the Apostle enjoins upon us
a

82 Holiness a Method of Living.
to be " followers of God," to be holy as God is holy,
and when the Great Teacher himself commands us to
be "perfect even as our Father which is in heaven is
perfect," we understand thereby resemblance, not
identity, the spirit, not the measure, of our Ukeness to
God. The Divine temper is to be infused into our
human spirit, and it is then to extrude itself into
our human actions, so that if an abridged and finite,
we are still to be a real copy — a readable transcript,
a positive translation of the Father in heaven. In a
word, we are to be the " partakers of a divine
nature;" and so far as this is a real incorporation,
we shall be "followers of -God," and man in God
will be one with God in man. The likeness is real
in nature, but imperfect in degree. The sanctifier
and the sanctified are one, but distinct.
8. The practical eminence of this state wUl thus sub
stantially consist in our sympathy with God, in our
fellowship with Christ who is the image of God, and
with the objects, methods, and ends of his working.
Let us expand for a moment this focal idea.
To be holy as God is holy, is to possess the
Divine temper, shown in a correspondent conduct. As
the Divine Life in its administrative sympathy identifies
itself with the interests of individual and corporate men,
so, correspondently, the sanctified Christian soul, in
its affinities with God. A man possessed of the mind
of Christ, in all its breadth of detail as seen in his
life, would, if that were possible, be in perfect sym
pathy with Christ; he would so far be a moral
incarnation of Christ, in himself, and in his work.

Holiness a Method of Living. 83
So a man full of the temper of God would be in
perfect sympathy with God. He would, in his measure,
perfectly love, and perfectly hate, and perfectly desire
and do whatever is characteristic of the Divine Nature.
As the loving child copies the virtues of the beloved
parent, and is, in its measure of capacity, a reflection
of the parent, so the Christian soul in its adoration
of God.
What then are the chief objects of God's love ?
Those, certainly, that hold in themselves the greatest
possible sum of excellencies. Then he must supremely
love himself, his plans, his Church, and, as embody
ing and interpreting these, " his only begotten Son,"
Christ Jesus the Lord. All goodness out of God
attracts the benediction of the goodness in his all-
perfect and sympathetic nature. As is the Divine
love in its elective affinities, such approximately is
that of his saints. " As he is, so are we in this
world." What then are the objects of the Divine aversion ?
Not man as such, certainly — not any man simply as
a man, for man was made "in the image of God,"
and God cannot but love himself when seen, however
fractured the image in its setting. Not evil as such,
for evil is an impersonal force, having neither will
nor moral life: there is neither good nor evil separate
from the doer. "God is angry with the wicked
every day." It is against the unrighteousness of un
godly men, knowing better and doing worse, that he
denounces his wrath. And into this war against the
unholy actions of ungodly men the Christian's sym
pathy is unsparingly entered. He can have " no

84 Holiness a Method of Living.
fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness ;" no
participation with, no interest in, no tolerance for the
sins of men. " Do not I hate them, 0 Lord, that
hate thee ? and am not I grieved with those that rise
up against thee ? "
Then, what are the chief activities of God? "My
Father worketh hitherto," said Jesus, "and I work."
What is all this ceaseless, infinite working of the
Father and the Son about ? In whose interest ?
What direction does it take ? And where and how
is it seen? The activities of the Father are not im
mediately or chiefly busy with the creation of mate
rial worlds, for that, so far as the present economy
is concerned, is ended: no new shaft has been opened
in the solitudes of space, no young worlds or systems
of worlds have been organised into being, of which
we have any authentic record, since the sixth of our
creative days, when "the heavens and the earth were
finished and all the host of them : and God rested
on the seventh day from all his work." Not with
Providence, however wide its sweep, or grand its
events, or minute its inspection ; for that is not an
end, but a means to an end. Providence is a factor
in the interest of a preconceived purpose, a magni
ficent scheme of confederated agencies in the service
of Christ, who is "the head over all things to the
church." It is in Redemption and for it, through the
creation and government of the world, that the Father
and the Son continue ceaselessly to work. The
secret of the world's conservation in space, its wisely
ordered march in history, its broadening civilization,
and its future destiny, lies hidden in the mystery

Holiness a Method of Living. 85
and grandeur of Jthe Cross. In the past, the time-
point, the central focus in the Divine chronologies,
was reached when the Son of God became man. That
was "the fulness of times," the culmination of the
Divine working, up to a given period, in a definite
form. Up to that period, God had been educating the
race, working on man, on governments, on ages, on
all history. Since that period, a still greater influx
of the Divine energy, in the Truth, through the
Church, by the Spirit, has been and is constantly at
work, seeking to finaUy develope the historic problem
of humanity, and to educate it into the last dispensa
tion of its perfectibility in Christ and for him. After
that, comes the end. We know of nothing other
or higher than, or intermediate to, that. Whatever
reserve of power lies latent in the Christian system,
whatever its possibilities, or its final achievements in
fact — and there may be, and probably there must
be, revolutions in thought, and novelties in action,
and stupendous changes in all existing political and
ecclesiastical organizations, such as "eye hath not
seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the
heart of man," before the final catastrophe come — but
through all these, and as the foreshadowed result of
all these, we look for no greater marvels in the future
advance of Christianity than those which culminate in
the glorification of humanity as it has its representa
tive and type in the ascended and mediating Christ.
Then the time-drania for man ends, and the un
imaginable grandeur of the everlasting ages begins.
If there are special means yoked immediately to
this end, such as the Christian ministry, the weekly

86 Holiness a Method of Living.
Sabbath, the Sanctuary, the Church, and the School,
the confederacy of benevolent agencies going out into
the world "to seek and to save that which was lost,"
if there be Christian governments, and Temperance
organizations, and Guilds of art and literature and
science, having for their end the furtherance of this
plan and purpose of God, undoubtedly there wiU be
with all these a Divine sympathy, acting with and along
their several lines of agency, and giving to them its
almighty support. If there be any confederations
against that plan, by whatever power or patronage or
interest abetted, in whatever line of action they oper
ate, with whatever weapons they may contend, in
whatever issues they may seek to land their activities,
God will certainly oppose and counteract them. "The
counsel of the Lord, that shall stand," whatever
else goes down. As nations, as communities, as in
dividual action and combined organizations come
into harmony with the plans of God, God will come
into co-operation with them. All such as are oppug-
nant and more or less hostile, he wiU oppose. A
doom stern as fate and resistless as eternity awaits
all that fight against God. That is a war with
Omnipotence, and must end in ruin.
And so, finally, our contention is, that in our
human sympathy with this pre-ordained purpose of
the Eternal, in working out our sympathies into
these elected grooves of the Divine action, we put
on the holiness of God. We come into harmony
with him, in what he is, and in what he is doing.
And this is, so far as the finite in its limitations
can impersonate the infinite, to put upon our human

Holiness a Method of Living. 87
personaUty the injunction of the text. The Father's
will in heaven is our will on earth. His work in
the interests of humanity is our work. His glory is
our honour, and his praise our "exceeding great
reward." He is above all dependence, and beyond
all patronage, and indifferent to all neglect, in the
immeasurable plenitude and perfection of his being ;
but we are never separate in sympathy from him, and
in the fellowship of life and work he is never absent
from or indifferent to us ; and in whatever he wills
and we do, there, in the ongoing of the mutual life,
is the focalised centre at which the Divine and the
human meet and consentaneously blend: "I in them,
and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in
one; and that the world may know thou hast sent
me." And this is to test after a Divine method the
Christianity of the- Christian man. And what a test
it really is! "As he is, so are we." No experiment
of the scientist could ever more surely detect the
presence of an alloy in his metals, than does this
test detect a moral blemish in the regenerated man.
How far is our life just a copy of God ? To what
extent does he find a sympathy with himself in our
chief thoughts, our best work, our first affection, our
greatest ambition ? " Wist ye not," said the young
child Jesus, "that I must be about my Father's
business?" How much of our time, of our intellec
tual strength, of our personal effort is given up to
the Father's business ? Who would die of spiritual
starvation if our alms of mercy were withdrawn from
the Father's wealth? What one wheel in the great

88 Holiness a Method of Living.
enginery of the world's progression would stop if you
and I were dismissed out of our place to-morrow ?
And yet the Divine Personality can only impersonate
its action among men through the affiliated spirit
and sympathy of his people. The law that deter
mines the drift of the Church's action, determines
the activities of God. A non-existent or faithless
Christian temperament paralyses Omnipotence, and
bankrupts the world.
1. Let us understand, then, what is the sort of
religion that is demanded of us. It is a religion that
clothes its possessor with the sanctities of hohness.
It puts the aroma of a saintly purity into a man's
soul, and exhales its fragrance into the beauty of his
life. It is a single, simple, manly style of Uving. It
sets upon us the imprint of God, the seal and stamp
and image of a Divine paternity ; but none the less
really is its perfection human. It belongs to human
beings. It has to be practised in a human world,
and to mingle with the infirmities, and to be tested
by the common-place, earnest realities of a human
life, as the most delicate perfume mingles with and
is tested by the atmosphere in which it floats.
Are there different platforms of individual and
social responsibility, ranging up from the vulgar to
the refined, from the heavy cares of official life
to the undress of home, from the authority that
rightly rules to the obedience that knows how to
obey, from the nursery to the temple, and from the
closet of prayer to the market and the exchange? Over
all these, touching as they do some of the widest

Holiness a Method of Living. 89
divergences of individual life, and crowding them
selves into our daily history, "Holiness to the Lord"
is the seamless garment, the saintly veil, the bright
robe of purity, "clean and white," in which we are to
clothe ourselves, and act, and shine.
Are there distinctive relations, with their unique
and manifold functions in the economy of life, as
that of the child and the parent, the husband and
the wife, the seller and the buyer> the companion
and the friend ? Hohness of intent and act, of word
and spirit, must consecrate all in each. Are there
different faculties, powers, capacities, and affections ?
Are there manifold joys, hopes, sorrows, and fears,
the common property and heritage of man? Down to
their incipient root, and up through all their wind
ing circulations, and unfolding into all their subtle
and expansive variations, this pure distilment of the
life and energy of a sanctifying grace must insinuate
its lofty spirit. It is the fruitful parentage of gentle
ness, meekness, patience, magnanimity, courage, of
all that can crown and adorn the consummate man
hood of man or womanhood of woman, born of the
Spirit and cultured after the style of Christ in God.
Is this asserting too much.? Is it to put some
unnatural strain upon our human nature, or to seek
to invest it with an imaginary apotheosis, equaUy
absurd and impossible in itself? Consider a moment
how it only repeats, and barely fulfils, the Divine idea
in man's creation. For, that first creation of man,
what was it but the translation of God himself into
a ¦ human form? And what is this second creation of
man but his translation back again into the image

go Holiness a Method of Living.
of God — man getting back his lost possessions in
God, while God recovers his lost image in man.
This, then, is Christian holiness. It is just man put
back into the normal type of his creation, through
the redemption of Christ, under the sanctification of
the Holy Spirit. It is man once more, in the council
and co-operation of the Trinity, made in the image
of God, the grand old ideal embodied and made real
in the actualities of the new.
2. But this, none the less impressively, shews
exactly what sort of religion we do not want. Of
profession we have had more than enough. We do
not want a religion of hollow pretence, of decent in
difference, of icy propriety, of " morahty touched
with emotion." We do not want a religion that is
not truthful, that is unjust, impure, or dishonest.
The world and the Church have seen too many so-
called Christians who were known to be mean, and
envious, and spiteful, bitter in temper, gossiping in
speech, uncharitable in judgment, — men and women
who could not be trusted in the shop, in the market
place, in the distant city, or at the table. Such
mock-Christians have been and are the abomination
of God, as they are the curse and the shame of man.
The Christians the world to-day is waiting for are
stars and suns, not cheats and shams, — a race of
men and women of royal blood, the representatives
and heirs of God.
Do you say that this pure and sublime idea of
holiness is a great and a serious state of living after
which to aspire ? We say it is. But then it is also

Holiness a Method of Living. 91
a necessary state. We cannot be in harmony with
God as a whole, while any part of our moral nature
is at emnity with him. War with God is death. to man.
Do you say that a man may seek to be religiously
good without in this way taking holiness for his ideal,
or making its attainment a study and a pursuit ? We
say there is no religion separate from holiness in
man, as there is no perfection which in thought we
can separate from the' all-perfect life of holiness in
God. Do you say, But surely a man may hope to finally
reach the consummation and bliss of heaven without
this formal sanctity of heart and life ? We say, No —
that least of aU. The gates close in fire against
whatever in man "worketh abomination, or maketh a
lie." The pure translucent sun-light within the veil
would be the asphyxia of death to the morally
depraved spirit. The transcendent essence emanating
from the Throne, and constituting the very atmos
phere of the Blessed Ones, would choke and strangle
the coarse animalism of the sensual man, and if the
prerogative of power were a conceivable thing as
against the authority of right, so that hope might
put in a plea and wait against the imperatives of
reason, the decree has gone forth and is inexorable,
"Without holiness no man shall see the Lord." Out of
every other exceptional habitude of incongruous ele
ments men may get "through the gates into the city,"
— poverty, ignorance, crime, the ranks of the sceptic,
infidel, blasphemer, pagan, atheist, all have sent up
their waifs of regenerated humanity into the heavens
of God; but an unclean man, a soul wet with its

g2 Holiness a Method of Living.
unwashed pollutions — never. That would be a contra
diction to the holiness of God. And though he were
the monarch of nations, or the king of all human
thought, were such an intrusion possible, the expul
sive power of a Divine antagonism must sweep such
intruder down into the outermost heU. " There shall
in no wise enter into it anything that defileth."
But if this state is so great, and so serious, and
so essential, how are we to set about its attainment?
In what methods, by what agency, or on what con
ditions may we hope to secure it ? It certainly wiU
not come fortuitously. We cannot create it by an
act of the will : spontaneous generation is wholly out
of place here. It is the product of two factors — man
and God, the seeker and the giver. If instead of
holiness for our quest, we were to substitute educa
tion, or wealth, or the attainment of some prize of
scholastic distinction, and then ask ourselves, How
are we to go after its acquisition ? The answer in
that case need not be an inspired one. Wherefore,
"giving all diligence, add to your faith;" as the
merchant adds to hiB hoards of wealth, and the
student to his knowledge, graduating means to ends,
so it is here. There is a method : we must conform
to that. There are conditions : we must understand
and submit to these. There is a beginning in the
realities of a new birth into life; there is a progress
in the accessions of grace ; there is the willing sur
render, the utter self-abnegation of our own will to
the wUl of God, so that he, the eternal, all-sufficing
Life, shall have us to inspire, and mould, and inhabit
as his free and uncontested temple, dweUing there as

Holiness a Method of Living. 93
a loving guest and sceptred king. How, then and
thus, he will formulate us into the last possible
attainment of a perfected" Christian holiness, is a
question that must be left to the secrecy with which
he carries on his grandest processes. But this is
sufficient as incentive, method, and end, — " Faithful
is he that calleth you, who also will do it."

(Ekijefiian Jktakrpment
" When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child,
I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away
childish things."— 1 Cok. xiii. 11.
ALL birth is a mystery. The beginning of Ufe,
whether it be in the cell of the tiniest insect,
in the opening blossom of a spring flower, or in the
soul of a man, is one of the unfathomed secrets of
God. What that is which begins when life is created,
how it does begin, how the gulf between the mineral
and the vegetable, the vegetable and the animal, the
animal and the man is bridged, are questions which
science is always asking, but is not able to answer.
That all life has its genesis we know by the logic of
facts. The most inquisitive microscope has faUed to
explore the seat, or detect the process of its manu
facture. The coming of a human soul out of non-existence
into the consciousness of its life-dwelling in time,
and the passing onward of that same soul into
the conscious life of eternity, while holding much in
common with the mystery of all other birth, indefi
nitely transcend it — first, in the order of life which
they involve, and secondly, in the unimaginable futu
rities on which they open. And the mystery is

Christian Development. 95
none the less, but greater, in that this double birth
belongs to one and the same human being. A soU-
tary, thinking, human atom cast on the great time-
stream of the ages, and destined by its Creator to
form a living integer in the sweU and sweep of its
currents, it is also by the same destiny fastened on
to its inexorable doom of eternity. The passing from
nothing to something in time is not more certain than
its passing from this something to something else in
eternity. A forewarning of everlasting duration lies
folded up in the seedhngs of our life on earth. And
the relation by which these two states are bound
together, the methods and the training in which our
human life is to unfold itself into the life hereafter,
these are the lessons we have each to learn, and in
the learning of which we come into harmony with
the purpose of God, and into the only true relations
with ourselves.
In the words we have read for our text, Saint Paul
teaches by a figure the relation of continuity and
development that connects this present and our future
Ufe. We are children, and we become men: we are
human, and we shaU be immortal. As the manhood
of our human Ufe was developed out of our human
childhood, so our heavenly life is to be developed out
of our spiritual manhood. As all child-life is nature's
opportunity for getting a wise earthly training, so all
our human life-time is God's opportunity for train
ing us for heaven. We are so immersed in the
urgent visibiUties of time, so swallowed up in sense,
that we cannot stop to be astonished at this per
petual transformation of the earthly into the heavenly

96 Christian Development.
life. And, yet, that is the secret which gives to aU
human life its intelligible meaning. The growth of
the human into the Divine; the education of men
and women for the other side ; the passage of
human spirits into the Father's kingdom; the exit
and the new 'awakening, the sepulchral dirge and
,the young, fresh, morning life in the Father's
heaven; — these are the figured realities with which
the screen of eternity is being perpetually illuminated.
The childhood of humanity, as it is being constantly
translated into the manhood of heaven, — that, then, is
the Apostle's thought in the text.
I. Eet us look, first, at the basis on which this
analogy is founded ; " When I was a child."
The beginning of the Christian Life, its imperfection
and growth, its development and destiny, and the
contrast between what it is on earth and what it wUl
be in a future world, are forcibly suggested by this
word. The Christian is now, in relation to what he
is hereafter to be, what the life of a chUd is to its
adult manhood. In the sum of his mental powers, in
the wealth of his spiritual attainments, in the finish
and beauty of his character, in the richness and glory
of his enjoyments, when all these are sealed and
made perfect in the baptism of death, the Christian
on earth, in relation to the same man in heaven, is
what the unblossomed bud of infant life is to its
completed manhood.
This is not the only place in which the distinctive
qualities of childhood are made to prefigure the
Christian Life. When the disciples came to our Lord

Christian Development. 97
with the question, "Who is the greatest in the
kingdom of heaven ? " " Jesus called a little child
unto him, and set him in the midst of them, and
said, Verily I say unto .you, Except ye be converted,
and become as little children, ye shall not enter
into the kingdom of heaven." The soul in its
conversion and after-growth has its type in the
history of that child. Both have their beginning
in the mystery of birth ; in both there are unde--
veloped possibilities of being; both are dependent
on nutrition for growth ; and before both there is
an unknown and Unimaginable future. What that
child-Ufe is to the totality of the man's Ufe on
earth, that, in a yet more illustrious sense, is the
sum of the soul's regenerated Ufe in time to its
outcome in heaven.
And the relation between what is and what is to be
in the two cases strikingly agrees in this, that while
the young life in each suggests the future, in neither
can it adequately foreshadow it. The child is but the
outUne of the man: the saint on earth is but the out
line of the future saint in heaven. Both exist only in
the germ. In neither " doth it yet appear what we
shall be." Sometimes, indeed, in the flash of the
young child's intelligence, in the music that floats so
strangely on its untrained lips, in the movement and
grace of its quivering limbs, in the quick, eager glance
of its searching eye, there is a sure presage of the
future, a sublime prolepsis of the coming man, not
hard to be surmised by the instinct of the parental
heart; but, like all prophecy, the prefiguration is to be
read only in the fulfilment of the prediction. And in
H

98 Christian Development.
the "earnest of our iriheri tance" as Christian men, in
the incipient outlining, the initial grouping — not alone
of power and skill, but of rich and joyous and
beautiful life — which God puts into the regenerated
soul, we have a grand foreshadowing and a sure
pledge of the better things laid up for us in heaven;
but it hath not yet entered into the heart to imagine
what that heaven is to be.
Sit down and think of the present and the future
life of a child. AU the faculties it will ever possess,
all the capital it will ever make out of those facul
ties, are already virtuaUy within it. Intelligence,
conscience, memory, affection, will, — all the forces of
its manhood, are germinant in its being ; but they
are in it only as the mountain oak is in the acorn :
they are seeds of possibility, latent capacities, out of
which power is hereafter to be disengaged. No
prophet's eye could detect or foretell the history of
those faculties when they come to be trained. No
mother's heart, no father's sagacity could imagine the
strong man who, growing out of that baby framework,
shall hereafter lead the armies, or frame the laws,
or govern the destinies of a nation. The keenest
psychological science cannot surprise into expression
any one of the weird and silent powers with which
that cell of being is so replete. And there is no
introspection or self-knowledge, no intuitive conscious
ness, possible to the child itself. One of the great
mysteries of life is, that it knows nothing of the forces
of which it is the centre, nothing of its furniture,
and nothing of its future. The beginning and the
end, the start and the issue, the success and the

Christian Development. gg
failure, are a midnight blank to the individual actor.
He may hereafter be poor or rich, a prince or a
beggar; he may traverse the earth, or search the
heavens, or fathom the ocean ; he may write the laws,
or make the poetry of a nation, or sit in the councils
and put his hand on the helm of the State ; and yet
he himself know absolutely nothing of that future. He
knows no more of what is mapped on the horoscope
of his destiny than the marbles with which he plays.
To the mind of the all-seeing Author of life, that
future lies all etched clearly out, even to its minu
test details, as the photograph can picture on a
microscopic point the details of a landscape; but to
all else its name is secret.
So it is with the Christian man, in his highest
range and ripest culture of experience in the present,
as compared with the glory of his future life. Here
" we see through a glass, darkly : now I know in
part." The beginning is a reality. That which we
know is prophetic of that which we know not. And
the relation between these two — the beginning and
the consummation, we know as surely as we know
that the arch spans the valley or the river, when we
see only one half of its curve. We " have the first-
fruits of the Spirit" within ourselves. There are
powers within the regenerated soul, susceptibilities,
aspirations, — a genesis of expectations which outreach
time and space, and fasten inexorably on to the unseen
and eternal.' It cannot, if it would, grow downward
like the Indian fig-tree, making every aspiration a
new root with which to fasten itself to earth. By
an irrepressible law of its being, the soul ascends ;

100 Christian Development.
it must aspire. Faith and hope are the wings with
which it flies homeward to heaven and God. You
may hinder it, arrest it, imprison it, but you cannot
kill this quality of its being. It would throw the
earth out of its place, and hurl down all the scaffold
ing of creation, were its powers equal to its instincts,-
if that stood in the way of its uplift and outreach after
the Infinite and Eternal. The Christian hope is not
a dream of our human selfishness ; it is not a guess of
the imagination; nor yet is it the withered fragment
of some antiquated and worn-out phase of humanity,
which the effete faith of Christendom is seeking to
rehabilitate. It is the consciousness of man in its
most solemn pronouncement, under the teaching of
the Inspired Word. We do not dream, or guess :
" we know that if our earthly house of this taber
nacle were dissolved, we have a building of God."
But we hold these powers and these irrepressible
aspirations, as the infant holds its intellectual Ufe,
without knowing its meaning or its value.
" What am I ?
An infant crying in the night :
An infant crying for the light :
And with no language but a cry."
That first prayer of an infant's lips, " Our Father
which art in heaven," — what a mystery, aU unin
telligible, is that to the infant mind ! What
strange thoughts, what a crowd of vague and ghostly
images, will that nightly prayer at a mother's knee
sometimes kindle in the mind of a child ! What is
God ? Where is heaven ? Who are the angels ?
What undefinable apprehensions haunt such questions
as these, provoking what impossible conceptions in

Christian Development. 101
the young intelligence, to be answered only in dreams
stranger and more mysterious still ! And when we men
put up that same prayer, what are we but children
of a larger growth ? We utter a word that is heard,
it may be, beyond the remotest stars, — but how?
by whom ? — To be answered, perchance, — but when ?
with what results ? We are praying infants, nothing
more. As the life of the ocean murmurs in the
sheU, so in the Christian soul there are murmurs
of some distant, infinite sea, from which it draws its
inspirations, and towards which it tends; but "Dark
ness is upon the face of the deep." A veil, figured
with mystery, hangs in front.
II. There is, secondly, the discipline which braces
for future manhood, implied in this similitude.
In the young child there is an aggregation of
rudimental organs, of undeveloped faculties, of possi
bilities not yet put to the proof. There is capacity
without its power. There are many sensations, but
few thoughts, a rich experience, but an imperfect
knowledge. The child has no past or future ; it
lives only in the present. Its whole life is a dream
in the fairy-land of romance and poetry. Then comes
the time for action, for the stirring of the nascent
potentialities into powers. The great veil of life
begins slowly to lift. The untrained faculties, which
heretofore have run loose and restless, must be put
into gear, and made productive. The alphabet, the
copy-book, the grammar, the lexicon, the teacher, with
all the hard and vexatious discipline which schools us
into the responsibUities of individual thought, take the

102 Christian Development.
place of dreaming. The mind has to be trained to
think, to choose, to act. The body has to be hardened
into firmness of bone and muscle. Habits have to
be formed, self-denial to be practised. The softness
of the home experience must be exchanged for the
rough and tumble of earnest, real, practical life.
This is the child's first great lesson in Ufe's school.
Still further, — with the training there is to come
the direction; with the development, the devotion of
the different faculties of the body and mind to an
end : some one line is to be traced firmly out on
the map of the future, and there is to be a conse
cration of life to its pursuit. Hitherto there was
a vague, sensuous unreality, whose witchery con
cealed the true purpose of life. There is to be now
a self-elected mission. Instead of dreams and imagi
nations, the young wing is to unfold itself for flight
into the practical and real. The world takes the
place of home ; the individual emerges from the
tutelage of masters and governors. Instinctive im
pulses are subordinated to reflection and a purposeful
will. Growth comes out of action. Errors of judg
ment are corrected by experience. The chUd becomes
a man in thought, in purpose, in self-reUance : he
has put off the chrysalis of babyhood and become a
personal being. This is the second stage in the
development of human life. And all this is often
enough a great surprise, an unknown venture, and
sometimes a bitter experience, to the child itself.
Not unfrequently it is through much pain and with
many tears that trie young sensitive boy has to pass
through these first struggles in his advance to win

Christian Development. 1 03
the actualities of manhood. There are reasons which
he cannot understand, consequences which he cannot
anticipate, sufferings, and sometimes grievous and
bitter reflections, incident to that first break-up of
the young child's life, wliich it requires aU the years
of his after-experience fuUy to understand and appre
ciate. It is the fiery ordeal of a second birth, in
which the unreal and trie seeming is made" to slough
itself off from the real and abiding.
And Ufe is eminently all this in the training and
development of the Christian man. Men are but
infants. Christian men are but children in relation
to the Father in heaven; and he deals with them
as such. That strange, rich, joyous, wonderful ex
perience into which, as Christian believers, we are
now entered, is rather a dream than a sober reaUty,
the beginning of a life that is to be, rather than
one that is: its faith, its love, its knowledge, its
joys, its hopes, are seeds of indefinite possibilities,
but they are only seeds. The wisest man is but a
babe in knowledge. The oldest father is but a child
in experience. All Ufe is a school-house, with its
masters, and lessons, and training, and struggle for
that which is unseen and eternal.
How, then, does the heavenly Father train and dis
ciphne his infant children ? As a wise earthly "father
deals with his well-ordered household. He deals with
temperament, circumstances, age ; with the habits and
tendencies, the possible perils, the personal organiza
tion, and the positive realities incident to each ;
administering, now in one form and now in another,
the kind of discipline the best adapted to unfold the

104 Christian Development:
young life which here and now he has begotten within
us. Manifestly God does not indulge his children in
giving to them all they wish. No wise father after
the flesh does that. He allows those dependent upon
him to wish in vain for present indulgences, which he
could easily bestow, but does not. He knows better
than they do, to what the first inception of a question
able gratification might lead ; and the ultimate
well-being of his children has a more powerful effect
upon such a father's decision, than the most pas
sionate tears of his disappointed offspring.
" We have had fathers of our flesh," who have in
this way disciphned us ; and even so does the Father
in heaven. Not what we wish, but what we need ;
not what is the most attractive, but the fittest,—
that is God's rule. For the same reason, he does
not forego the rod any more than the bridle. " If
ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with
sons ; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth
not ? " It is not always that the rod teaches directly
its intended lesson. It may not be always related in
time and apparent sequence with the foible it is
intended to correct ; but it is never absent from the
Father's rule. " Whom the Lord loveth he chasten
eth." " Every branch that beareth fruit, he. purgeth
it, that it may bring forth more fruit." Sometimes he
puts his people out into the great currents of life, the
ceaseless ebb and flow of material things, that in the
wash now roUing them in one direction and now in
another, the angles of asperity may get rubbed away,
and the polish come. Not seldom he tries them by
silence. They are brought into straits in business, in

Christian Development. 105
the family life, or into personal discomfort ; and they
are left apparently to administer their own relief.
They have to submit to unexpected crosses, to long
afflictions, to bereavements, all of which seem to be
unaccountable, and without a reason in either their
uses or their ends. " Shew me wherefore thou con-
tendest with me ! " sobs the distracted child. " Be
still, and know that I am God," is the only speech
in which the Father responds to that struggling cry.
"Your life," says Saint Paul, "is hid with Christ
in God." Trie inward life — that future, immortal life
.which, in its beginning, you carry about with you in
your consciousness as Christian men, which lives in
prayer, in trust, in submission, in holy fellowship, in
all acts of obedient love — " is hid with Christ in God."
It strikes backward its roots into the darkness and
mystery of the unfathomable. Its genesis and its
growth are a secret. All life is an impact, in its
finality, on God; this life, most of all. It lies con
cealed, both in what it is and in what it is to be. To
put it into action by a process of preparatory experi
ment ; to unfold and feed its slumbering powers by
incitement ; to wake up the man out of the child, and
so to fit him for his grand development in glory, — that
is the end of your " life hid with Cririst in God." It
implies discipline ; it may require chastening ; it does
often impose a training that is severe and difficult ;
but the advent of the future man determines in each
case the method and the means of the discipline em
ployed. Hence come conflict and suffering, the strange
admixture of the bitter and the sweet, the tears and
the sunshine, the turmoU and the rest, the home and

106 Christian Development.
the separation. God dealeth with us as with chUdren.
He is educating us for the business of the after-Mfe.
As the winter frosts unlock the outer husk and let
the seed go free, that it may glorify itself in the
mission of its summer fruit and beauty, so with the
discipline of the Christian life. It begets patience,
self-reliance, meekness, manliness. God would have us
grow large and strong, full of a rich, luxuriant pro
mise, out of which the future is to report itself. "In
understanding" he is seeking to buUd us up into
"men." III. There is a wonderful contrast between our pre
sent and our future state of existence, indicated in
this figure.
" When I was a chUd, I spake as a chUd, I thought
as a chUd : but when I became a man, I put away
chUdish things." What does a chUd know of the stern
realities of life, of the mysteries of nature, of the
methods and intricacies of business, of the government
of nations, of the swift and awful forces swinging the
worlds around him, or of any one of the ten thousand
marvels with which he is environed? Put into his
hand a telescope or a mariner's compass, set him
down before a steam-engine or a printing-press, or
take him into the midst of the jars and retorts and
batteries of the chemist's laboratory, and of what ideas,
applications, or consequences would any one of these
things be suggestive ? Hereafter that chUd may come
to know well enough what these things all import,
and of the wonders of which they are productive.
With the telescope he may map the heavens, find any

Christian Development. 107
spot in the ocean's geography with his mariner's com
pass, or with his printing-press and steam-engine he
may flash his thoughts across the earth, and flood the
nations with his inteUigence : all that is in the keep
ing of his cultured manhood ; it is the future developed
out of the past. In the mean time, he speaks of them
as a chUd, understands as a chUd, triinks as a chUd.
And what more do we, as Christian men, know of
the mysteries of God ? of his plan, and providence,
and redemption, and of the upward, searchless eter
nities into which we are drifting ? What is our
wisest knowledge, but the discovery of our ignorance ?
What is all our most eloquent speech, but the prattle
of a wondering chUdhood ? We talk in outline ; we
think on the surface ; we miss the centre of things.
" I spake as a chUd, I understood as a child, I
thought as a chUd:" — does the most far-seeing seer
into this " mystery of God, and of the Father, and of
Christ," see any deeper or clearer into that abyss
than the gaze of the young criild sees into trie inner
most reality of the things of sense ? " But when I
became a man, I put away childish things:" — when
we, too, shall have passed through the school-room
and the training period, and put on the manhood of
intelligence in store for us, " then that which is in
part wUl be done away;" "we shall know even as
we are known." Instead of looking from below
upward, and seeing only the play of cloud-wrack and
mystery, we shall see from within. Lifted into trie
close vicinage of God, trie central Light of the Temple,
we shall no longer need the outward teachers. The
soul, etherealized and self-luminous, wUl become the

io8 Christian Development.
interpreter of the outward mystery through its own
experience. " We Bhall know even as we are known."
We shall absorb, and be absorbed. "And the city had
no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in
it : for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb
is the light thereof."
But if these things are so, there must be in reserve
somewhere for the Christian soul a state of existence
of which even the faintest conception is, for the pre
sent, impossible. Take the mental faculties, and
remember what they are to begin with ; how hard they
are to train ; how difficult it is to learn to think ; and
how feeble and uncertain at its best is our intellectual
life. What a bright exception to the dark, unintelligent
masses is a perfectly educated mind ; and when
educated the most perfectly, what a fraction of the
stock of all knowledge does it possess ! Those old,
old questions, — What is God ? What is the soul ?
What is the world ? How is it governed ? For what
end does it exist ? And what, if anything, is to come
after it ?— through what avenues of sUent and mys
terious sphinxes do these questions conduct us : in
what unanswering labyrinths do they leave us ! Then,
how vacant and utterly unfurnished are the generality
of even Christian minds with the pure thoughts of
God and the eternal world. We are infants, toying
with the play-things of the nursery, and content with
our play. " But when that which is- perfect is come,
then that which is in part shall be done away :
for now we see through a glass darkly" — our vision
is distorted ; the things seen are illusory ; we get at
the innermost reality of nothing; it is all but as a

Christian Development. log
day-dream, a grand bewUdering phantasm, — " but then"
we shall see " face to face." Our knowledge wUl be
clear, direct, and full: ourselves — the consciousness of
a perfect experience; God — the revelation of a personal,
perfect, infinite Being; the spirit worlds— an open
vision. " We shall see him as he is." Is there any
veU in that world that we may not hope to lift?
any limitation of faculty, we may not hope to com
pass ? any secret in the works, and ways, and wUl
of God, into wliich we may not hope ultimately to
penetrate ? We are afraid, almost, to triink questions
such as these. It is enough that we shall "know
even as we are known."
Then, as to the imperfection and fragUity of the
human body — for that, too, belongs in fee-simple to
the soul's future Ufe — what an inconceivable transform
ation awaits us in that ! " This corruptible must put
on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immor
tality." "We look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus
Christ, who shall change our vUe body, that it may
be fashioned like unto his glorious body." " And
there shall be no more death." Death, " the last
enemy, shaU be destroyed." It shall be " swallowed
up in victory." That which has swallowed up
the successive generations of men and left the earth
itself a grave, shall be swallowed up in a victory of
life. It shall no more be found at all. To beings
constituted as we are, living in a world where every
thing is dying, and where, as we sometimes think,
death mercifully puts an arrest on the flickering pulse
of a sad and weary life, it is utterly impossible to
imagine a state of being from which such an occur-

no Christian Development.
rence is altogether withdrawn. To live outside of the
possibUity of dying, to be fastened to, and dominated
by, "the power of an endless life" — a state of exist
ence in which the eternity of God is the warp into
which is woven the woof of a human destiny, — that,
to us, is an impossible conception. We cannot think
round it, or hold it, or even feel it approximately,
without a sense, of bewildered oppression. A life that
steps onward through an unpausing march into the
opening labyrinths and sweeping uplands of a duration
perpetually replenishing and renewing itself — to be
going up that ascent for ever, and not to get weary,
or satiated, or worn-out in vitality — that is a thing
to be hereafter realised, but not, with our present
faculties, imagined. With no God, and with no Christ,
and with no home in that world, we do not wonder
that to the atheist and the infidel the thought of
everlasting life is infinitely more terrible than that of
annihilation. Bankrupt in time and orphaned in eter
nity, the chafed and cheated human spirit can find
soothing only in the extinguishment of its being. So
utterly unendurable has this strain upon the resources
of a man's thought appeared, that some, not sceptics,
have imagined that in that endless hereafter there
may be the need, from time to time, of " a sleep and
a forgetting;" that, instead of a continuous living, with
its eternal consciousness, immortality may be a series
of successive births and deaths — each new birth bring
ing a new day of spiritual life, a higher capacity of
attainable action, a nearer revelation of infinite good,
and so a closer approximation, to the unfathomable
life of God, the soul being thus freshened and plumed

Christian Development. in
anew for its. everlasting pn-goings by these interreg^
nums of unconscious repose. — Who can tell ?
" Dreams ! all dreams and delusions ! " says the
sceptic; — "Vague assumptions, born of the imagination
and fed by vanity, with no foundation in reality to
rest upon," says the man of science. "Do we not
know that man in his last analysis . exhales, and leaves
behind only ashes and gas ? That what you call
the soul is but a collective term for expressing all
the functions of the brain; that thought and feeling,
imagination and wUl, are but the molecular changes
of the nervous centres, resolvable ultimately into
modes of mechanical action, and perishing when the
body dies?" "Man is," says the German sage, "what
he eats." And our divinest phUosophy, with a stern
realism in its facts not in any wise abridged] by the
tenderness and pathos of its poetry, has affirmed this
fragUity and evanescence of man. "Man that is born
of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. He
cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth
also as a shadow, and continueth not." But of what
is he a shadow ? Is there no reality of which that
shadow is the reflection? Is there ever a shadow
witriout a body to cast it? When Moses and Elias
appeared on the Mount of Transfiguration, talking
with Jesus of " the decease which he should accom
plish at Jerusalem," and then vanished suddenly out
of sight, and the Apostles "saw no man any more,
save Jesus only, with themselves," — would not that be,
in fact, the fleeing of a shadow ? But the shadow of
what? Of the spirit-life of which it was the expres
sion. It was a momentary form in which, for a signi-

112 Christian Development.
ficant purpose, the conscious life of those immortal
visitants was embodied, and — that purpose answered —
it then vanished away ; but surely the life of trie two
immortals did not perish with the vanishing of these
shadows ! And what, then, of man, with his manifest
place of superiority in the orders of life, with his
penetrating reason, his commanding conscience, his
self-determining will, his grand and holy affections, to
say nothing of his conscious kinsriip witri God, and
the stupendous realities of which in Redemption he
believes himself the centre, — are these all the shadows
of nothing ? the foregleams of nothing ? the splendid
buds of nothing? Like the vanished forms of the
geological ages, once gone, are they "clean gone for
ever?" For our own part, we are content to believe that
there is no closer physical relation between the baby-
life of a Milton or a Shakespere and the man-Ufe
which afterwards gave to the world their magnificent
poems, than there is between the saintriood of a good
man on earth and his glorified perfection in heaven.
Man is a mystery, but he is not a shadow. He is a
riddle to all his interpreters save owe— and that is
himself. In his self-consciousness, he knows that he
is not a lie.
IV. And this brings us to the law of successive
continuity, by which, through, all time and change,
and in both worlds, the man is the same unchanged
man. "Now we see through a glass, darkly" — then
we shall " see face to face."
If it be true, as Coleridge teaches, triat "man exists
in fragments," that one change after another takes

Christian Development. 113
place so rapidly and so surely in the same life, that
little or nothing seems to be left of the original per
son, it is stUl equally true that between these succes
sive fragments there is a conscious unity, a thread
of personal identity, along which are strung the sepa
rate epochs, incidents, memories, and experiences of
one and the same individual life. The phenomena
change : the man endures. The syllables out of which
life gets its meaning seem disjointed, and are succes
sive, but they co-ordinate into one and the same
history. The refrain of chUdhood, youth, and age,
tones itself into different chords, but it makes the
music of one life.
Instead of being a series of changes which he
knows only in their succession, or a piece of mosaic
work mechanically constructed out of various atoms
which he can know only in the aggregate, man is
the living centre out of which all these changes flow,
and of which they are the expression. The thinking,
intelligent soul is ,a unit in the midst of a ceaseless
flux. Our thoughts, our sensations, our volitions, our
material organisation — we ourselves are constantly
changing; we are never at one stay. No individual
at two successive periods is exactly the same indivi
dual. And, yet, every one knows intuitively that
there is a something of which these changes are the
manifestation, which in itself does not change. That,
"whatever it is, is the same to-day as yesterday, and will
be to-morrow. We cannot sever the link of continuity
between the past and the present; and if we could, who
would wish to divorce himself to-day from the being he
was half-a-century ago? and if he would, who could
1

114 Christian Development.
do that? By a strange process of introspection, we can
feel our way back through all the intervening years to
our veriest chUdhood. We can gather up the seerriingly
disconnected fragments of one stage after another, and
put the pieces together into their normal life. We
can go back to the gray dawn of the beginning, and
fill with a conscious reality all the vacant spaces we
have left behind us. We can, strangely enough, re
enter the old home, and reproduce the farriUy scenes ;
we can retouch the faded pictures, and put a tender
pathos into the once loved, but long ago sUenced
voices, and sport and gambol with the daisies on the
river-brink of our youngest chUdhood. " We can
hold ourselves upon our own knees," and look at, and
listen to, and question that strange, rich and joyous
young life, as if it and we were two separate beings.
But it can be done : and the questioned, the ques
tioner, and the question belong to one and the same
changed, yet unchanged man.
So we think, so we cannot but believe, in those
moments of chastened sadness in which the bereaved
heart seeks to commune with the loved ones whom it
has lost. They are not the same, in the mere habUi-
ments of their mortal selves, and they cannot be.
The generations of men who through the ages of time
have tramped across tlie fields of space into the realms
of spirit, are not, and they cannot be, the same as
when housed in "this miry cave of mortality." They
have put off the vestment of trie earthly, and put
on the enrobement of the heavenly. "They hunger
no more, neither thirst any more," and for them
" there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor

Christian Development. 115
crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the
former things are passed away." Oh, there must be
a difference, a transcendent difference, between the
inhabitants of that world and their former selves in
this ! That once wasted cheek is wasted no more ;
that once tearful eye weeps no' more; the voice once
so sUent in the bitter mockery of death,' is sUent no
more. All up there bloom, and flash, and sing, in
the ' freshness of undecaying youth. ' " This mortal "
has "put on immortality." For them "that which is
perfect is come." And yet we know, by the surest and
the sweetest instincts, that they themselves are all
unchanged. The environments, the mere swathings of
the mortal, iri which we once knew and loved them,
are indeed changed ; but they, the glorified spirits," are
stUl their own true selves, in the sameness of trieir
once loving hearts. They have ceased to be mortal,
but they have not forgotten that they were men.
They are our blood-relations still : and in all that
pertains to their glorified manhood in' its nature, 1; its
affinities, its rnembries, their sympathies interpene
trate and harmoniously blend with out own. As the
man whose splendid fortunes as a po'et, ' a statesman,
or a hero, have written their brilliant page into the
world's story, can read as from a book the pictured
memories of the' past, can reproduce and people with
a vivid reality all the teriderly cherished recollections
of his earliest home, sb those " spirits of just men
made perfect," the crowned and glorified ones who
"are before the throne of God" aiid kindle re-
splendently in the unfoldings of his glory, live in
the memories of the past. They have taken new

116 Christian Development.
worlds into the sweep of their knowledge : they
have entered into new confederacies and relations of
being : they have risen up into an order of existence
which immerses and glorifies them in communion
with the immediate Godhead; but they have not un
made or got beyond themselves. They cannot forget
the childhood of earth, out of which they emerged
into the manhood of heaven. Death has dissolved,
but it has not destroyed, their human selves. The
child has become a man : — that is aU.
Let me, in conclusion, remind you of the human
side of this analogy, on which the future is depen
dent. 1. And, first, there is a law of sustentation, a
method in which life is conserved and progressively
trained. Life, whether mortal in a child or immortal
in a saint, is never wholly the product of God.
The child developes not by miracle, but by human
methods. It is not otherwise with the saint. "As
new-born babes," writes Saint Peter, " desire the
sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby."
That is the food on which the young spiritual life,
not less than the natural, is to subsist. "The sin
cere milk of the word," — the word of Truth, unmixed
with our human nostrums, undiluted with the
infusions of our human reason, — that word must
enter into the deep places of the soul, quickening
thought, sanctifying feeling, and so building up the
man. There is another and a higher sense in which
to interpret this " word," that which makes it
not the word in its verbal form, but the personal

Christian Development. 117
Christ— "the Word," who is himself the Truth from
which the verbal word gets its life. It is "the word
dwelhng richly in us in all wisdom," not as a dogma,
or as so much of lettered thought or inteUectual
knowledge, but as an inward energizing force, a
personal Ufe, — " Christ dwelling in the heart by
faith," and, by the immediateness of a personal
fellowship, organizing the soul into a living temple,
the "habitation of God through the Spirit." And
this puts the soul-life back directly into Christ and
holds it there, as a consequence of our union with
him ; and there is no life in the soul apart from this
union with Christ, in which it can grandly, live after
the order and similitude of God. " He is our life."
The beginning, the sustenance, the end of life is
Divine. If man were only a human fungus, the
concrete form of so much sap and force and fibre,
then he might feed on ashes ; but with his affinities
in God, and with his doom of destiny what it is, he
can live a true life only as he conforms to the
heavenly pattern. All other life is fatuity and death.
2. There is, secondly, sustentation in its relation
to growth. The chUd grows as it feeds. It is as
natural for the young life to grow, as it is for the
healthy appetite to crave food. So it is with the
soul. And if the supply be equivalent to the need,
if it be absorbed and incorporated by the self-activi
ties of the mind so that, like the animal food in the
body, it shall mix with the vital circulations of the
man, there will of necessity be a spiritual growth.
Let me ask you to look for a moment at that word in

¦ 1 \
118 Christian Development.
Saint Peter' s address, on which he sets the emphasis
of his teaching, — "as new-born babes desire trie sin
cere mUk of the' word," — desire it. The word indi
cates a habit of mental action, with its consequent
effect. The healthy. chUd does not desire food that
it may be nourished : it is nourished because it
desires food. Let the appetite exist in its normal
activity, and the nourishment wUl take care of itself.
There is a kind of involuntary mental life which is
fed from the surrounding atmosphere of men and
things, whether we desire it or not. But this desire
,is a moral act, and involves a voluntary process. We
elect because we desire : we seek because we elect :
we go in, quest of what we need. A man who desires
wealth or knowledge, or a sick man in search of health,
does not wait upon accidents; he puts himself into
a course of appropriate action. The mind grows by
, self-activity. Its capacities ripen into powers, as they
are nourished into play by the governing wUl. So,
too, in that higher training through which God is
leading us up to our final manhood. He gives us
the power of getting ; he makes provision for our
sure success in attempting to get; but he also honours
the faculties with which he has invested us as moral
beings. He never, as God, invades our voluntary
activities as men. He wUl not save, any more than
he wUl feed or clothe us, or make us wise and strong
and good, by a miracle. He puts his Book before
us : he puts his Holy Spirit within us : he spreads
a beckoning Universe : around us ; and he then bids us
enter in and possess the goodly treasure, knowing that
we can possess it, if we wUl. But that purpose of

Christian ^Development, ng
' -~ ' ;-"• ¦> ¦ ¦ ¦ j
the will, that restless, prayerful, craving, importunate
desire, born of the serise of need, is the key with
which our own hand must open the gates of the
^ingdom. We cannot enter "by prOxy. We cannot
be wise, or great, or good', in the virtues of another.
It is, then, in this secret desire, this inward, in-
appeasable thirst after1 God, that we must seek to
culture trie spiritual growtri, out of wliich our ulti
mate glory is to develope. We must cultivate that,
and feed that, if it is to react as a power upon
ourselves. The patriarch went out to meditate in the
fields at evening-time. Iri the morning, Jesus rose
up, "a great whUe before day," and departed into a
soUtary mountain to pray. The grandest spirits in
the world's history have girded themselves for the
service of battle or of song, in retirement. And to
day the foremost men of the age, in their highest
Btudies, in their loftiest moods, are being nursed into
strength at fountains opened in the sequestered re
treats of soUtude and prayer. And we must follow
in that direction, if we would emulate their growth.
AU that is purest where all is pure, greatest where all
is great, has thus been won. All who have emerged
from the swathing bands and pupUage of a human
babyhood into a "perfect man, unto the measure of
the stature of the fulness of Christ" — the majestic
type and coronal of all, have been, are being, and
must continue to be, educated in the Father's school.
" Enter into thy closet, and shut thy door, and pray."
Step aside, 0 man, from the distracting throng. Go
up into the mount. Let the whirl of the wheel, and
the vibrations of the nrill, and the clang of the

120 Christian Development.
hammer, and the noise of the street, and the busy,
surging, anxious murmurs of the exchange, be all for
awhUe hushed, that you may commune with the still,
small Voice, speaking to you "from the excellent
glory." And with the sUence of eternity brooding
over you, and neighbouring immediately on the con
fines of the heavenly serenities, that care-worn heart
of yours shall grow stUl : "and the Lamb that is in
the midst of the throne shall feed " you, and lead
you to "living fountains of waters," — and there shaU
be a great calm, and a true life.

" What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him
a, stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye
then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children,
how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good
things to them that ask him ? "—Matt. vii. 9-11.
THIS is one of those judicial " sayings " of Christ
in which he settled authoritatively some ques
tions on which man in all ages had been perplexed.
" What is the Almighty that we should serve him ?
And what profit should we have, if we pray unto him?"
God does not change. His purposes stand fast.
How, then, does the contingency of human prayer
harmonise with the fixedness of the Divine will ?
This is an old question, which, as the human mind
has advanced in its strength, has lost nothing of its
ancient force. The insolence of our modern science,
which first denies the possibility of prayer, and then,
by its material gauges, challenges the Almighty to
dispute its conclusions, had not yet taken form. But
the germ of it was there ; only it took the shape of a
question as to the advantage of prayer, rather than
of a denial of its effect.
Our Lord disposes of all such doubtful disputations,
not by satisfying our curiosity as to how God can

122 The Warrant of Prayer.
answer prayer, but by the unqualified assurance that
he does. And this assurance has for its basis not
the mystery of the Divine nature, but the humanity
of our own. He makes the commonest and the most
potent of our human instincts express and iUustrate
the realness with which God responds to the entreaty
of men. Given the fact that certain relations exist
between us and our children — and on these Christ
founds, his demonstration of certain analogous re
flations between the heavenly Father and men: "If
ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your
children, how much more wiU your Father which is
in heaven give good things to them that ask him ? "
I. These words, then, are God's appeal to man, as
a basis of confidence in man's appeal to God.
First of all, the parental instinct is set over against
the fatherhood of God. "If ye, being evil" — if that
human heart of yours, with its ignorance and self-
absorption, can be conquered and loves to be con
quered by the beseeching cry of those little ones, —
" how much more will your rieavenly Father" — who
is not evU, but good — "give good things to them that
ask him?" The argument is addressed to our self-
consciousness. From what we know ourselves to be
-^evil, imperfect, selfish, yet loving to give to our
children — it passes on to what we are assured must
be in the transcendence and perfection of God. He
is all that we are, and is infinitely what we are not.
He is therefore greater and better and truer to, aU
the obligations and tendernesses of love, than the
truest and tenderest of earthly fathers can be.

The Warrant of Prayer. 123
Then, the good gifts which we bestow upon our
chUdren, are contrasted with the better gifts of the
heaverily Fattier. If our children ask for bread, we do
not give them a stone. The parental heart, when true
to itself, is prompt to meet the uttered want or the
pleading look with the needful " good thing." But our
best gifts to our children leave many of their wants
unsupplied. After we have given generously, and given
witri unstinted repetition, and with far-reaching saga
city, there are secrets, sorrows, sufferings, unknown
perils and distant occasions of ominous interest in
their history, to which we cannot minister. The time
comes, not unfrequently, when the lips of .a child are
sealed, or when those of a parent know not how to
speak. But the heavenly Father gives the "Holy
Spirit " to them that ask him ; and in that one gift
all gifts, for all times and places and emergencies — '¦
present and "future — are included or provided for.
Wo can never be where the Holy Spirit cannot be
with us. We can have no want, be in no peril, have
no secret pang, nor be under the shadow of any
cloud however dark, in which he cannot know and
help us. His presence makes the individual heart
the centre of his knowledge and activity.
And lastly, we have the comparative degree— in
measure, in fitness, and in fidehty — in which the
human and the Divine fatherhoods dispense their
gifts. The hypothetical mood in which the Divine
Teacher puts his affirmation, shews us that our best
human instincts may be perplexed or at fault. We
may be selfish, and refuse to give. We may be un
wisely affectionate, and over-give. We may become

124 The Warrant of Prayer.
worse than brutish, and forget that we have
ought to give. "A woman may forget her sucking
child : " she may be the victim of such a combina
tion of unmitigated agonies, shame, neglect, remorse,
want, that — one more turn of the screw and "a
woman may forget to have compassion on the son
of her womb." "Yet," saith God, "I will not
forget thee." He will not " despise the work of
his hands." He may be outraged in his nature
by the provocation of his children, but his nature
cannot forget itself when his children cry. " Your
heavenly Father will give good gifts to them that
ask him ; " — and wUl give them always at the time,
and in the measure, suited to the need.
II. Here, then, are two things : — Prayer in the
simplicity of its act ; and in the spirit of its exercise.
1. The simplicity of the act: " Your heavenly
Father shall give to them that ask." Asking is every
thing on the one side, and giving everything on the
other side : that is the soul of aU true prayer.
Nothing can be clearer as a definition; nothing more
simple or easy as a condition. It is, in fact, one of
the simplest formulas in which a wise parent speaks
to his child, — Ask for what you want.
And yet, simple as this teaching really is, we shaU
see how much of other and important truth it con
tains. Here are two parties, relatively distinguished
as the giver and the receiver ; here are two acts, the
asking and the giving. On the one side stands the
earnest suppliant, conscious of his dependence, and
in search of his supplies. One the other side is God,

The Warrant of Prayer. 125
in the fulness and blessedness of his all-sufficing
life, ready to dispense his gifts. And so prayer is
just that act of communion between two separate
but mutually related minds — the Father and the
child — which makes religion an intelligible and re
liable fact.
There is, in the first place, a personal, intelligent
Being, to whom in prayer we address ourselves. There
is a God, or prayer would be impossible. An atheist
cannot pray. The man who empties the universe of a
personal God, and fills it with an all-pervading, imper
sonal force, has nothing to pray to — no central Intel
ligence, no sympathy, no second self. An infinite
" It," a philosophical abstraction we call Law, knows
nothing about me, cares nothing about me. If I am
glad, it cannot rejoice : if I weep, it has no pity. It
can neither bless nor curse. " But our God is in the
heavens ; he hatri done whatsoever he hath pleased."
Then he is a presence, and not an abstraction; a per
son, and not a force or a law. He is "our Father
in heaven : " and therefore he can hear us when we
speak unto him, and answer us when we pray. He
can " give us good gifts."
Then further: — There is a method in which all
true prayer seeks to approach this Being. " God is
a Spirit : " how then can we speak to him ? God is
an infinite Spirit : where then can we find him ?
God is a holy Spirit, but man is sinful: how then
can a sinful man come into the presence of a holy
God? These are questions in the presence of which
the soul has ever been dumb. They are questions,
moreover, which the more authoritatively they assume

126 The Warrant of ^Prayer.
the. character and. the perfections of the Deity, make
the more impossible all approach unto him. without
the intervention of a Mediator. A pure Spirit, fiUing
the immensity of space and duration with his incor
poreal essence may be a grand conception, as it is
a necessary fact ; but then it is equaUy incomprer
hensible and unapproachable by us. Neither can we
imagine how such a Spirit can speak to us, or be
spoken to by us, in prayer. The man, therefore, who
empties the Creation of a personal God, and he
who denies the mediation of Christ, both, as it seems
to us, though, in different ways, disqualify themselves
for praying. We can know nothing of the uncentred,
infinite essence of God. But now, "through Christ,
we have access by one Spirit unto the Father."
He is our meeting-place, our Days-man, the " one
mediator " between this infinite God and man. When
tabernacling among men, he did not in his teaching
seek to merely disentangle the confused lines of human
thought along which man had been groping his
clouded way to God, nor say simply, This, or that
is the right way to find him ; he said, " I am the
way, the truth, and the life : no man cometh unto
the Father, but by me;" and his Apostles say, "If
any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father,
Jesus Christ the righteous." Here, then, is a resting-
place from the distractions of thought ; here, too, is
a refuge from the fear and the shame of sin. " We
have a great high priest, who can be touched with
the feeling of our infirmities. Let us therefore come
boldly unto the throne of grace." That is the con
fidence begotten of sympathy. If there be any other

The Warrant of Prayer. 127
way in which the Great Unknown can be spoken io,
or can speak to men, it is not found in the teachings
of Christ.
With this method, comes the moral help, which we
aU need in this service of prayer. " Draw nigh to God,
and he will draw nigh to you;" — but how can I do
this, with my thoughts aU in distraction ? With my
brain on fire with the worry and harassments of
business; with the nervous tissue all torn and unstrung
with suffering; with the tumult and anxiety of the
family sweeping around me, — how can I be calm in
this surging sea of excitement ? how, " when my heart
is overwhelmed within me," can I become reflective
and self-observant, so as intelligently to "draw nigh
unto God?" "We know not what we should pray for
as we ought : but the Spirit itself maketh interces
sion for us, with groanings which cannot be uttered."
Those inarticulate groanings may be utterly unintel-
Ugible and meaningless to aU, even to ourselves ; but
" He that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the
mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession
for the saints according to the will of God." So then
it is not so much we, as the Spirit that prays in
those unutterable groanings. "They are the touch of
God's finger on the human lyre," when the strings
are all jangled into discord; and he whose touch wakes
the wondrous music, " knows what is the mind of
the Spirit."
Let us understand, then, that this act of prayer,
which in itself looks so simple, does, in reality, touch
the very foundations of the Christian faith. It sup
poses fellowship of the soul with the Trinity of the

128 The Warrant of Prayer.
Godhead. In it man communes with " the grace
of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God the
Father," in " the fellowship of the Holy Ghost."
2. The spirit of its exercise is defined by Christ
in the words " ask," " seek," " knock." Here are
three terms, each one of which is used successively
to express the same idea, that of the spirit that
turns the soul of the suppUant into the substance of
of his prayer.
Ask : Let there be a consciousness of want. A
child puts to you a question because it is ignorant
and seeks information; or it is hungry, and asks for
bread. So with the man in prayer. Here are your
wants': there is your helper: there is the mercy-seat.
Now, ask for what you really need, and do it as if
your needs were real, making them turn themselves
into words, each word the echo of a thought or the
vehicle of a want.
Seek : Intensity of desire, prompting to a corres
ponding importunity of request, must be fed by the
knowledge of what we need. If the want has got a
real hold upon the intelligent sensibilities of the soul,
you are not likely to be easily denied in your request
for its supply. The lisping indolence of a formal
prayer for things we neither understand nor value,
dies on the lips it profanes. But a soul quivering
with the intensity of its irrepressible desires, when it
speaks is heard beyond the sun. " It sends out
words swift as arrows, and dear to the heart of
God." And "It shall come to pass that whUe they
are yet speaking, I will hear."

The Warrant of Prayer. 129
Knock. — This word indicates sustainedness in the
act, the persistent attitude of waiting which the
earnest soul takes, and in which it continues its
appeal, against aU discouragements. In the still
hour of midnight your chUd is struck with sudden,
perhaps mortal sickness, and you hasten in search of
medical aid. You' knock and Usten, but all is still.
But the cry of that chUd is ringing in your ears.
Your heart is in that knock. And again, and yet
again, the appeal goes rushing through the silent
midnight air, until the door is opened and the
relief obtained. " The effectual fervent prayer of the
righteous man," the prayer energised by the trans
fusion of his soul into its request, "avaUeth much."
Such was the prayer of the Syrophenician mother
for her chUd — " Lord help me ! " Such was the
prayer of the widow to the unjust judge — " Avenge
me of mine adversary." Such was the prayer of
blind Bartimeus that his eyes might be opened.
You see that man's soul in his impassioned attitude,
in the clasped hands, the upward eager look with its
very agony of longing, in his words — short, swift,
full, — " Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on
me ! " And the more the impertinent multitude
thought him impertinent and charged him to hold
his peace, "the more a great deal he cried out,
Thou son of David, have mercy on me." "Give
me Scotland," exclaimed John Knox, "or I die ! "
Life was staked on that prayer.
III. Let us now see. ihe authority of ihe warrant
we have for prayer. K

130 The Warrant of Prayer.
1. The warrant of prayer has its authority in the
reality of our spiritual wants. The wants which Ue
lower down in the soul than the senses, the sup
plies which those wants desiderate, and the method
in which they are administered, indicate the office,
as they justify the exercise, of prayer.
The soul, though not a creature of flesh and blood
like the body, has like the body its own peculiar
wants : and these wants are as essential in their
order, and as little capable of being cheated out of
their rights with impunity, as are the commonest
and most imperious necessities of our material
nature. The soul roots itself backward in the ever
lasting life of which it is the offspring. It is a
creature of God wanting God — "a never ending
sigh after God." "A man's life consisteth not in
the abundance of the things which he possesseth,"
but in "every word that proceedeth out of the
mouth of God." Only in Life can the soul-life live.
"A man's life" — that which holds the germ and the
outflow of his true wealth, that in whose contents
is summed up his real manhood, in its roundness,
wholeness, and true nobility, lies not in what he has,
but in what he is. "A man's life" — he being a man,
and not a machine, a beast of burden, a thing, but
a man, a rational, spiritual, glorious, immortal being,
a creature fashioned after the likeness of God and
capable of communion with him, from the actual
realisation of which he can never get, or struggle to
get, but he thwarts the purpose and so far diminishes
the erninency of his being as a man — that is not
a property in which to invest the wealth of his life,

The Warrant of Prayer. 131
it is the life in which he is to invest the wealth of
his property. A man prides himself on being a
merchant, a statesman, a philosopher. He builds
houses, enacts laws, writes books, creates poems;
and in all these he attains to a grand distinction as
a man, is wise and rich and great in himself, and is
applauded by his fellow-men. And yet, apart from
God, unrooted in the spiritual, calm, deep, rich, ever
lasting Life of God, such a man, with eternity for
the back-ground of his perspective, is "wretched, and
miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked." The
most exuberant life out of God is but a casket
without its jewel, a poor, dry, shrivelled fragment of
existence, cold and hungry, discontented equally with
its possessions and with itself. No natural or
acquired environments, however numerous or splen
did, can save such a life from the curse of con
sumption and death. A man's life is in the wealth
of what the man is.
Now it is the Divinely appointed ministry of
prayer to develope this latent potency of man's
spiritual nature, and then to minister to its reUef.
' And there is no ministry but this. As in nature
there are forms of life which can be developed only
under certain conditions, so in the culture of the
soul. There is a side in the subtle manifoldness of
man's life which can be reached and educated only
as it is trained by communion with God in prayer.
There is the physical gymnasium for hardening the
pulpy frame-work of childhood into the muscle and
vigour and elasticity of a manly strength. There
is the intellectual curriculum for the awakening of

132 The Warrant of Prayer.
the young mental powers and putting them through
their first initial strivings into the achievement of
independent intellectual results. And there is a
spiritual culture for the development and training of
" the hidden man of the heart." And just as the
physical gymnasium will not educate the intellectual
powers, nor intellectual exercises train the physical
powers, so neither will the one nor the other, nor
both riowever ingeniously combined, train the pro-
founder capacities of the spiritual man. There are
wants in the soul which have their roots and seek
trieir supplies only in God. There are aspirations
which outreach all occupations of business, aU attain
ments of wealth and pleasure, all the distinctions of
fame and power: and, with all these, there are hopes
and fears, dark regrets and dread forebodings, com
mon to us all as a race of sinners, which, without
their counterpart and solution in religion, can only
mock us with disappointment or madden us with
despair. "What shall it profit a man, if he gain the
whole world, and lose his own soul?" That question
will make itself heard, however we may seek to clam
our it down; it is never heard but it casts an omin
ous shadow over the thoughtful brow; and there are
occasions abrupt and fitting, in the hours of soli
tude or amidst the trirong of men, when its feeblest
whisper can freeze the blood, or rebuke the sneer
upon the most trifling lips. Hence the dissatisfaction
of which we have spoken. Man is a grand creature,
but trien he is a grand creature in ruins.
If these things are so, it follows that no man ever
yet attained to the highest possible growth of his

The Warrant of Prayer. 133
manhood, who did not take up into its culture this
communion with God in prayer. And it equally
follows that it is impossible that he should so attain.
We do not mean only that no man is complete in
his outfit as a man witriout trie culture of the
rehgious instinct, that no man, whatever his position
or eminence, who is not in filial relationship with God,
can exfigurate the style and port of a man as God
intended to exhibit him; but we mean also this, —
that no one faculty in the mind of any man can
reach its normal perfection or attain to its pro
phetic heights as a productive power, without prayer.
In the mind of the non-praying man, however
gifted and successful in whatever department of
life, the best of his faculties and the highest of
his powers are lying comparatively waste and inert.
There are forces latent within him, achievements
possible beyond riim, a right of entry into realms
and realities of spiritual citizenship, which he has
not reached, which he will never reach, whicri lie
can never reach, until the inspiration of the
Almighty lift and empower him with its inciting
and preternatural strength. It is only as a man
slopes up to God in the consecration and use of
his faculties, that he finds all his capacity unfolding
itself into its greatest strength. In all the lower
departments of life he may attain to eminence; he
may win wealtri and fame and power; rie may
climb the loftiest peaks of personal and social dis
tinction; he may be a great artist, a great poet,
a great scholar, a great merchant, or a great states
man; but he cannot be a well balanced, a squarely

134 The Warrant of Prayer.
developed and kingly man — a man in the set-up
and poise of his powers, as these were intended to
unfold themselves and glow in the Life of God.
It follows, moreover, that from the non-praying
man there is withheld that highest influence, under
the guidance of which he might reach an eminence
and win distinctions of which at present he is
deprived. "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask
of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and up-
braidetri not; and it shall be given him." Can any
one doubt that, if in this way a man were to
put himself into a compact of prayerful union
with God, his studies — whether in nature, or art,
or science, or politics, or literature, or in any of
the highest walks of professional life — would be
broader, richer, grander, — in a word, more successful,
through the glow and emphasis of the spiritual
help that would be communicated to him? "With
thee is the fountain of life " — a calm, deep, infinite
all-engirding sea, touching us sympathetically and
waiting to be visited by us : "In thy light shall
we see light " — a celestial radiance, more bright
than the flash of genius, flushing the soul's upward
look, penetrating, enfolding, directing all its personal
powers, and begetting new convictions of truth; —
can any one doubt the effect of sucri a fellowship
as this ? There is not a mechanic however poor,
or a merchant however successful, or a scholar
however advanced, — there is not a student of any of
the knowledges, who might not graduate up to a
higher range of thought, and sweep into broader
realms of imagination, if only he trained his brain-

The Warrant of Prayer. 135
power through this sacrament of prayer. There is
no mind however original or productive, in what
ever department of life it is found, that might not
become still more productive by being harnessed to
this transcendent power. " Men are sent into the
world," it has been said, "with bills of credit
which they seldom or never draw to their fuU
extent." They never do, certainly, who do not draw
directly on these resources of God. But the chil
dren of God are to be men, every one of them as
the son of a king. Hence for them this royal
heritage of the ministry of prayer.
2. Our warrant, secondly, is founded on the effi
ciency of prayer as a power with God. Read the
context: "What man is there of you, whom if his
son ask bread, will he give him a stone? If ye
then^ being evil, know how to give good gifts unto
your children, how much more shall your Father?"
The design of our Lord in this teaching would seem
specially to be to create the conviction that God,
the heavenly Father, is moved to give gifts in
answer to prayer whicri otherwise would be with
held. If this be not the idea Christ intended to
affirm, then we have failed to see any meaning in
the analogy which he employs. "How much more
shall your Father which is heaven give good things
to them that ask him:" — but how will he give such
gifts to them that ask him, if the asking has nothing
to do with the obtaining them ?
The matter on which Christ is discoursing is the
warrant legitimating prayer. And this, you will

136 The Warrant of Prayer.
observe, is a widely different thing from the method
in which the prayer itself is answered. That is
whoUy a matter pertaining to the Father. We know
absolutely nothing of the methods of the Divine
action. And if in this descent of Christ to the
facts of human nature as illustrative of trie realty
of the Divine sympathy we have the right and the
efficiency of prayer affirmed, that is aU triat we need
in order to cover the legitimacy of the act. The
method we leave willingly to God.
But if in this act of prayer we only tell to God
that which he already knows, and ask for what he
is willing out of the essential benignity of his nature
to bestow, of what use is prayer to man, and of
what necessity is it to God ? And in the same
spirit, and with quite as much of reason, we might
ask, why God requires a man to sow his fields, or
study his books, or to traffic in the marts of a
various commerce, seeing that he foreknows aU the
necessities such things imply, and is infinitely able
to supply them. On the ground of such an objec
tion, we might just as well refuse to buy and seU
and plough and reap, as refuse to pray.
If the question look only to the Divine omni
potence, the answer is obvious and conclusive. We
say, Yes — God could do all these things out of his
sheer omnipotence, instead of ministering them by
the beneficence of a co-operative Providence. He
could fill our barns, and turn our mills, and grind
our wheat, and make our bread, without any help
from us. So far as we can think out the Divine' effi
ciency, man might have been created at once per-

The Warrant of Prayer. 137
feet in aU his powers, and the world a self-yielding
magazine of suppUes. To create in the aggregate
were as easy to omnipotence as to create in the
detail. But how does this question look as a matter of
fact? Does the all-wise Creator work any tiling
after this fashion ? Did he ever do so, saving under
the exceptional law of miracle, and that only for a
special end ? WiU lie, under any pretence, or to
supplement any emergency, sanction by a miracle a
neglect of trie "rule which, trirougri all the activities
of human industry, makes attainment the purchase
of human toU ? WUl he ever repudiate that law in
the economies of our working life, or in any way
baulk our liuman faith in his co-operate efficiency,
if we ourselves are true to its conditions ? We
think not. You cultivate the soil, believing that he
will give the harvest, — and lie gives it. You build
your ships and freight them for distant markets,
believing triat lie will fill their sails with prospering
breezes, — and he fills them. God is partner with
you in every factory triat you build, or piece of
machinery that you construct, or journey that you
take, or meal that you eat. Your whole life is a con
federacy, a joint-stock proprietary, in which both you
and God are factors. He does not supersede man in
himself: he does not supersede himself in man.
We are " workers together with him." So in the
supernatural. Prayer runs a line of interaction be
tween the soul and God, a Une at one end touched
by dependence, at trie other end by supply. And
this interaction is the secret of prayer. Unfasten

138 The Warrant of Prayer
either end and you disturb the normal economy of
life. 3. Finally, there is the testimony of facts. The
belief that underlies the instinct and the efficacy of
prayer, is not exclusively the teaching of Christianity.
It belongs, in fact, to all religions. Its impress is
stamped indelibly on the human mind, and has been
printed into the page of its history. Nevertheless, we
found the true warrant of prayer, not on any usage
or belief of the uninspired mind, but jipon the express
authority of the word of God, upon what he has said
and done. Any position founded upon that word must
find its authority in the unimpeachable veracity of the
Divine nature. God is a God that cannot lie.
What then hath God said in relation to prayer ?
Take that ancient promise as a typical one : "If my
people, which are called by my name, shall humble
themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn
from their evil ways ; then wUl I hear from heaven, and
will forgive their sin, and wUl heal their land." That
may stand as representative of the teaching of the
entire Old Testament history. Then take our text,
with its collateral instructions: "Ask, and it shall be
given you ; seek, and ye shall find ; knock, and it
shall be opened unto you : For every one that asketh
receiveth ; and he that seeketh findeth ; and to him
that knocketh it shall be opened." That may stand
as equally a typical specimen of what is in fact the
substance of the entire Gospel teaching. And now,
add to this the authority of the speaker, his relation
to the "Heavenly Father," his possession of the

The Warrant of Prayer. 139
Divine secrets, his forethought and his sympathy with
men ; and what is the conclusion that is forced irre
sistibly upon the student as to this efficiency of prayer,
but that it is a transcendent reaUty ?
Run your thoughts over trie usages of men, from
the first history in Genesis when " Men began to
caU upon the name v of the Lord," down to trie
close of the Apocalypse of Saint John, and thence
onward through all the ages of time, and among all
nations of men, irrespective of all the conditions of life
— whether of age or sex, of learning or ignorance, riches
or poverty, joy or grief — and what do you find but
a race of praying men ! Men have been blasphemers,
scoffers, libertines, atheists, immersed in the most
besotted ignorance, or savage with the most brutal
cruelties, or infamous with the foulest crimes ; and yet
when the riand of God has touched them, searching
the soul like fire, prayer has been their one instant
refuge. This cannot be an accident. It certainly is
not the fruit of education. It is not even a mere
tradition. It is a great constitutional fact. But if it
is a primordial instinct common to the race, then by
wriom was that instinct planted in man, and for what
purpose was it given?
Then, take the special instructions, the many pro
mises, and the various helps, which from the beginning
have been given to men, and whicri run like a clear,
sUvery triread of light all through the inspired volume,
and what do we find but a Divine directory witri
special inducements to pray, inducements indited and
put upon the lips of men by the very Being to whom
they are invited to pray! Take trie men wriose names

140 The Warrant of Prayer.
are famous in the achievements of prayer — Abraham,
Moses, Joshua, Gideon, Samuel, David, Solomon, Je-
hoshaphat, Daniel; with these connect the testimony
of the Apostles of the early Church, and of the Criurch
in her collective gatherings; and, at the head of these
witnesses, place the one who stands solitary ahd unap-
proacried in his moral grandeur, "who in trie days of his
flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplica
tions with strong crying and tears unto him that
was able to save him from death, was heard in that
he feared:" take the answers which, not once but
many times, not to one class but to all classes, have
followed, or have been believed to follow, these
prayers, — the deliverances wrought, the victories won,
the blessings given, the strength bestowed, to suffer,
to do, to conquer, that in ten thousand brave and
beauteous instances have rung chimes of music in the
soul more loud and clear than the sweetest matin
bells; — and what have we in all this but God himself
affixing his own seal of authority to the sanctities of
prayer? As a mere crironicle of facts, it is true that
the grandest forces in the material world have been
mastered by prayer. The greatest blessings in the
spiritual world have descended in answer to it. It
has arrested for the time the most potent laws, and
turned aside the most destructive agencies at war with
men. We know how, at its voice, the fires of vengeance
lingered long over the doomed cities of the plain; how
the plague was stayed in the midst of trie rebellious
camp ; how the wavering fortunes of battle ended in
victory, while Aaron and Hur held up the hands of
Moses in prayer. It has held back the rain from

The Warrant of Prayer. 141
heaven for the space of three years and six months,
and again it has sent it down upon the earth. Time
itself and Death — the most implacable of man's enemies
and trie most inexorable of nature's laws — have paused
in their march of destruction before the omnipotence
of prayer. It has put up its hand into trie midst of
the wheels behind the screen of outward things, and
set fast and unfastened the mechanism by which the
worlds are moved. It has determined the mind of the
Eternal : it has entered into the ears of " the Lord
of Sabaoth," and the Creator has placed himself at
the service of man.
And yet there are men who parade their scientific
conceits, and propound their solemn philosophies,
against the reasonableness of prayer, and deny its
possibUity. They understand so well all about the
capacity and the intention of " the Great Unknown,"
they are so familiar with all the complicated and
subtle net-work of material laws within which he lias
imprisoned His own free volitions, and they so auda
ciously interpolate these laws between the soul and
God, as to be quite sure that, however salutary the
exercise may be in its reflex influence upon trie
emotions of the man, it is utterly impossible that the
prayer itself should have any effect upon God. No
act of humUiation, no cry for mercy, individual or
national, no matter what the bitterness or the terri-
bleness of the calamity in which we may be engulfed,
could bring down help from the all-merciful Father,
without creating a disturbance of natural law quite as
serious as the stoppage of an eclipse ! To arrest the
machinery of the heavens, to call up the sun at mid-

142 The Warrant of Prayer.
night, to roll the river up the falls of Niagara, — and to
answer the prayer of a godly man, are miracles equaUy
impossible to the free volitions of the Eternal !
As if the human soul in its deepest moods, with
its grand instincts all aflame with God, were, like
the body, a creature limited by organs of sense, and
could only beat hopelessly against the sUent walls of
its prison-house, to be beaten back again into despair !
As if God, who is himself the Law-maker of all the
laws of the Universe, whose wUl marks out the lines,
and determines the methods, in wriicri all material
forces act and reract, whether in suns or atoms,
thoughts or things, had by his own voluntary verdict
shut himself out from all access to the soul of man,
for whose training and government those very laws
were enacted ! " Yea, let God be true, but every man
a liar." If indeed it could be shown to be true that,
as some men affirm, God is too large and affluent a
Being, with too many other and costlier managements
on his hands, to care specifically for ephemerals like
men ; or if, as others have said, he is riimself but the
pantheistic soul of the world, and therefore has
nothing separate from himself for which to care; or
if, as others allege, he is imprisoned within the iron
grooves of his own laws, beyond which he can neither
issue a command, nor dispense a gift, nor commune
with man ; if, in a word, the Being whom we call
God and Father is nothing more than the grand
totalization of material force, a magnificent abstraction
projected from our own consciousness, or — that strangest
and newest of all anomalous things — " a stream of
tendency flowing through the ages;" — if triese things

The Warrant of Prayer. 143
are so, and if they must be accepted by us as being
so, we say, Well, then we must learn to submit,
although it be at the cost of stifling in one long
spasm of agony the profoundest cravings, with all the
God-like affinities, of our nature. But then, in speak
ing of such a Being, we are no longer speaking of trie
Christian's God, " The God and Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ ; " and to pray to any such priantom of
the imagination would be as wise and as useful as to
pray to the raging winds, the lightning's flash, or
the law of gravitation.
He who takes away the Christian's God, some one
has said, destroys the nobility of man. But he who
pronounces prayer to be impossible or useless, takes
away, in effect, the Christian's God, and therefore, as
a consequence, destroys the nobility of man. He sun
ders the unity of trie soul with God, and puts the
breadth of trie Universe between them.
Let us have faith in the veracity of God. "Your
heavenly Father will give good things to them that
ask him." No man whose soul has ever communed
with God on the hill-tops of life can doubt, or
would willingly forget, the sublime influences which
have followed the consecrated hour. When Moses came
down from the mount, his face shone suffused with
the glory shed over riis spirit. A sunshine from the
inner presence, a radiant flash as if from the face of
God, has, in myriads of instances, lit up the soul
as it stood in "the secret of his tabernacle," known
only to God and itself. But if it is to have this
effect upon ourselves, we must believe that prayer

144 The Warrant of Prayer.
will have its effect also upon " The Father in
heaven." God is too grand a being to play at
games with men. Man is too serious, too terribly
in earnest, too sorrowful and suffering, to cheat
himself with a magical illusion, merely for a
momentary enthusiasm of effect. No : if there is
truth where there is eternal goodness, there is a
reality in the interaction when God and man speak
together. Let us, then, encourage ourselves to pray. Life,
we have said, is a stupendous want. It may be a
distracting muddle. Man seems sometimes as if he
were but as the foam on the waves that dash and
moan on the sea of time, the play-thing of a law
less gyration from life to death, from joy to grief,
from the bridal wreath to the solemn mysteries of
the grave. In such a struggle, no man is sufficient
for himself. There is no help for him in the sur
plus strength of his fellow-men. He is one of a race
of sufferers. All are in the agonies of the same ex
perience. All are gasping for the same succour.
There is a break-down in the fortunes of human
life and destiny, which can be buttressed only by
an outputting of supernatural strength : " CaU upon
me in the day of trouble ; I will deliver thee."
Finally, let us consecrate life by this holy sacra
ment of prayer. Let us hallow its sufferings, and
unriddle its mysteries, and mitigate its strifes, and
direct its chastisements, and sustain its weaknesses,
and invest its solemn and tragic grandeurs with the
serenities of a chastened, dignified hope, by this
baptism of Christian prayer. With all our seekings,

The Warrant of Prayer. 145
let us seek this way of life. With all our askings,
let us ask for these better things. Let the young
man do this, with whom life's great lottery of
chances is yet undrawn. Let the man of business,
with his brain distracted with a thousand burning
cares, do this. Let the parent do this, as he
trembles to anticipate what may be the possible
future of his children. Let the Church do this, as
she weeps over the discords and the sins of the age,
and sees the ominous storm-clouds gathering in the
future. Let all hasten to put themselves into their
wants, their wants into their thoughts, their thoughts
into their prayers ; and then let them remember the
word that was spoken by Christ, " If ye, being
evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children,
how much more shall your Father which is in
heaven give good things to them that ask him."

%b'* Jfotfart) oi §at>ing Jflmt.
"Sirs, what must I do to be saved? And they said, Believe on the
Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." — Acts xvi. 30, 31.
THE conversion of the PhUippian jaUor is one of
the chief of those moral miracles by wliich the
gospel preached by the Apostles was demonstrated to
be of God. It stands out as a direct and perpetual
attestation of the truth, method, and end of the
Christian system; and, as a theme for Christian
study, it can never become obsolete or out of place.
And you will observe triat the question put by this
man, unutterably profound and inexplicable in itself,
gets its solution ; it is an answered question. It has
often happened in the riistory of the human mind,
triat great questions in morals have come near being
answered, great facts in science have come near being
discovered, or some new adjustment of old beliefs,
opening up fresh and wider realms of knowledge, lias
come near being made, — and they have failed, just
because some one factor essential to the solution was
absent from the process. In the dark and terrible
struggle of man with the problem of sin and its
cognate need of redemption, this failure has hap
pened the most disastrously of all : he has never been

God's Method of Saving Man. 147
able to escape from the dismal torture of discussing
the question of his own guUt, nor to discover a satis
factory method of ridding himself of it. And it is the
perfect solution of this world-wide and distracting pro
blem in the great historic incident before us, that
gives to the text such a transcendent interest. It
belongs to the category of successful experiments. It
is a specimen case, in which perplexing ideas, held in
solution by the Truth, and felt by the disquieted con
science, are made to precipitate themselves into facts.
However, then, we may discuss this question —
whether historically in its relation to the jaUor, or
ethically in its bearing on the race, or individually in
its application to the man — it is one of trie highest
questions open to the human mind. It has nothing
to do with speculation. It has to do with everything
that relates to practice. It is trie question that
anchors man down into the doom of eternity.
I. We shall consider this question, first, in its rela
tion to human thought.
The history of human thought is, to a great extent,
a history of the manifold forms in which this question
has betrayed itself to the consciousness of man, and of
the costly expedients to whicri lie rias had recourse
in his attempts to answer it. Older than the oldest
verbal revelation, and co-existent with the earliest
developments of the human mind, it belongs to a class
of moral convictions which strike down through all
the antecedents of man into the primitive accidents of
his being. The malady that underlies and is sym
bolized by it, the apprehensions and the fears which

148 God's Method of Saving Man.
it indicates, the ghostly superstitions, the passionate,
self-inflicted tortures, the blind and terrible struggles,
to which it has given rise, are facts in man's history
which no theory respecting them can falsify or displace.
Four thousand years ago, confused and anxious
whispers of this question meet us in the inquiry of
the patriarch seer, — " How shaU man be just with
God ? " They come up in the later question of the
prophet, "Wherewith shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before the high God ? " If we consult
the dusky records of Pagan antiquity, we encounter
everywhere, in its temples and altars, its bloody sacri
fices and mysterious rites, the dark eclipse of sin and
the uneasy suspicions which it has cast over the race.
If we listen to the creeds, the confessions, and Uta-
nies, of the wisest and purest of its teachers, we hear
everywhere the cry of affrighted men, fugitives from
a justice which their sins were felt to have provoked,
but which they knew not how to appease. Egypt,
India, Greece, and Rome, speak with one voice. In
the doleful, contorted self-expression of sin which runs
through their splendid mythologies, in the human
and other victims on ten thousand smoking altars,
in the worship of Hebrew, Heathen, and Christian
fanes, and in the solemn misgivings of the individual
conscience, we see how profoundly this question has
struck itself down through all the stratifications of
human thought, and how fruitless have been the most
elaborate attempts to answer it.
In our own age, with its boasted culture and refine
ment, with its hard utilitarian tendencies and material
istic spirit, this question, so far from being thrown

God's Method of Saving Man. 149
aside as a worn-out problem, thrusts itself up in quar
ters wriere we should the least expect to find it.
Scholars, thinkers, statesmen, men of science, in
whatever walk their professional studies conduct them,
cannot avoid drifting into the vague, infinite mystery
that belongs to the religious question. The mind,
grown weary of abstract speculations and almost afraid
to think, hungers for rest. The conscience, chafed
and outraged by unclean proclivities, asks for peace.
The heart of the man the most engrossed in worldly
pursuits wUl have its hours of ^awakening, of weari
ness and dissatisfaction, of acriing dread, in wliich
some whisper of the strange questions, — Wriat am I,
and whither am I tending ? — will make itself heard.
Is triere any relation between this present and a
future world ? is there any connection between my
own life on earth and consequences beyond the grave ?
if there is a God, does he riold any bond on my in
dividual service, and will lie hold me accountable for
the obligation in some other state of being? and if
so, how will that future world unfold itself to me, as
a personal, immortal spirit ? — no thoughtful man can
escape questionings such as these. They are, in fact,
assumed in all our philosophical speculations; our
different systems of religious thought are so many
attempts to answer them ; and all attempts at a self-
respecting peace are a mockery and a delusion, untU
some authoritative oracle speaks its answer into the
listening silence of the distracted heart.
Now, as Christian students, we have but one answer
to give to questions such as these : there is but one
answer that it is possible to give, and that is the one

150 God's Method of Saving Man.
made immortal in the text. Wrien from surging to
and fro in all kinds of dreary speculation a man
drifts at last on to what he feels are but the crumb
ling crags of human thought, and turns despondingly
away to trie Gospel, not knowing where else to look,
that Gospel meets him with an answer instant, direct,
and full, in the person of Christ. Striking down for
a moment upon its theological teachings, it says,
for a man to be saved is just for him to be recondi
tioned in his moral relations with the Infinite Father,
to " be reconciled," to " be at peace," to come into
harmony with God. Sin is disharmony. It puts man
out of his normal orbit, that in which he was intended
to move. To be saved is just to re-enter that orbit.
The antecedents to this state are, first, the intelligent
conviction that we need it, wriicri is a wise self-know
ledge, begotten of the truth ; and secondly, an ingenu
ous sorrow for sin, expressed in the practical goodness
of an amended life, which is true repentance. The
conditions on which its attainment hinges, are a behef
in the word of the Divine promise, and a trust in the
Divine Person of Christ. The consequence instantly
following is a new life-state in the man.
This is salvation in its initial act as the Gospel
declares it. It is the soul's genesis from a state of
judicial death into one of spiritual life. But now,
let this answer, as the record puts it, be pettishly or
scornfully set aside, as a purely theological doctrine ;
let the Gospel itself be denied as having authority
judicially to determine man's thoughts on ethical
questions : the denial of the Gospel does not get rid
of the questions which the Gospel undertakes to

God's Method of Saving Man. 151
answer. You have got rid of the Christian teaching,
but you have not got quit of the perturbations of
conscience. The Gospel, you say, is a fable. Very
well. But human life is a fact; the fears of retribution
are a fact ; the hell that flames in the imagination
of the Christian man, blackens and disturbs none
the less the conscience of the sinner. To deny it is
not to quench its fires. A sick man may loathe and
scoff at the remedy which science provides for his
relief; hut scoffing at the remedy does not stay the
disease. Facts are adamantine, whatever our beliefs
or our disbeliefs. With or without the Christian faith,
with or without the Christian's God, man cannot get
away from the appalling apparitions incident to sin.
He cannot escape from himself, or from God, or from
the consequences immanent in his birthright as God's
son. He may not know what this birthright is, or
knowing may not care for it nor seek to unfold the
solemn grandeurs with which it is invested; but there
it is — unabridged as a fact, and keen as fire in the
convictions it creates. And there will be times— there
are times — when over this kingly soul great waves of
passionate unrest, of famished aspiration, of infinite
dread will surge and wrestle, which will be to it as a
burning apocalypse of its discrowned royalty, on which
the conscience must fix its interpreting eye.
Let us, then, understand triat this question is not
the product of our scholastic theology. It does not
belong specially to the educated thought, or to the
Biblical creeds, of the Christian faith. WhUe it does
belong to that faith to answer this question, that faith
does not create it. Had the Roman jailor never ex-

152 God's Method of Saving Man.
isted, had the Cross of Redemption never been heard
of, were the Gospel henceforth to be pronounced a
fable, and all its attendant array of supernatural facts
construed into a stupendous fiction, this question
would still be asked, and an answer to it demanded.
The sadducism of the intellect may debauch the plead
ings of the conscience for a time, and a haughty
speculation impatiently avenge itself by the demal of
the truth, but there yet remains a ground-work of
fact and reality in the experience of man, out of
which this question will make itself heard. It belongs
to the ethical faculty, and it can be neither de
stroyed nor silenced.
II. We consider this question, secondly, in its re
lation to man's destiny.
And we widen greatly the scope of the question,
as we add indefinitely to its interest, when we put
within it trie solution of trie problem that relates to
the future. Man has been called " a yonder-minded
being, an embodied hereafter." He connects, in him
self two dissimilar natures — the material and the
spiritual : he belongs to two dissimUar worlds — the
present, which is transient, and the future, which
is eternal. He is so constituted in the qualities of
his being, in his faculties of knowledge, in his ca
pacity of progress, in his aspirations after riappiness,
in the apprehensions and terrors of his conscience ;
and withal, he is so manifestly distinct from, and
superior to, all other orders of terrestrial being, that,
by general consent, his future continuity of existence
is foreshadowed in the verdict of the present. The

Gods Method of Saving Man. 153
mdividual units in the successive generations of men
are links in the enchainment of being which fastens
itself on to the eternal.
But now, if this be so, if our behefs in a pros
pective continuity of existence are founded in reality;
if they are not the illusions of riope, seeking to
sootrie the faUures, or to compensate the disappoint
ments, of ambition ; then, what is that continuity of
being in itself, and what, retrospectively, is its re
lation to the present ? In the visions of the Apoca
lypse we read, " And I saw the dead, small and
great, stand before God; and the books were opened:
and another book was opened, whicri is trie book of
Ufe : and trie dead were judged out of triose things
which were written in the books, according to their
works." Here, then, two things are implied — first, the
continued individuality of each man on the other side
of death-; and secondly, the fixedness of moral condi
tions consequent on the antecedent individual life :
" The dead, both smaU and great, were judged out
of those tilings which were written in the books,
according to their works."
Every man in the present life is buUding out of
himself and for himself a character which belongs to
the future. He carries within his own speciality, here
and now, the materials, the germinal principles, the
moral self-hood, out of which his future is to come.
This little every-day life, with its round of ordinary
cares, its vexatious bustle, its sorrows and its sins,
is but the prologue of a mighty drama, the seed-plot
out of which the harvest of the future is to be
reaped. "It is appointed unto men once to die, and

154 Gods Method of Saving Man.
after this the judgment." This makes the question
of a man's death so unutterably serious and full of
moment — not to the world he is leaving, though it
may vacate a throne, or to those immediately con
cerned, though it may bankrupt a famUy — but to
himself. The great assize deals with the after-issue.
It does not create distinctions, or determine the
destinies of men : it simply catalogues results. Men
are, now and here, what the Judgment-day wiU shew
them to be. The antecedents being given in the
facts of a man's life, the consequences are but their
natural sequel. The supposition of a change induced
by death in the character and condition of men must,
therefore, be dismissed as, in the main, a delusion..
Death does not change — it only fixes. It disrobes a
man of his mortality, of all that belongs to space
and time, but it does not touch the man. It puts
a finality on the book of life, and hands it on to be
opened at "the judgment of the great day:" — that
is all. True, there will be a change consequent on
deatri, but it will be in the circumstances, not in
the individual.. Whatever disintegration of the human
personality death may entaU as in itself the cessa
tion of life, it does not touch the soul; and if it
did, there is no moral magic in its process or in
its isBues, by which to change the impure into the
pure, the sinner into the saint. When, therefore, we
speak of death as the decisive moment, the grand
climacteric in man's existence, we mean that it puts
its conclusion on the history of a human life. It
sums up the two columns — for and against the man —
of right and wrong, good and evU, and registers the

Gods Method of Saving Man. 155
result. That which gives to death its stinging power,
which kindles up its fires of agony in the endurance,
and wliich hangs its appalling gloom on the moment
of transit, lies on this side and not on the other.
"The sting of death is sin," and sin looks behind
and before the final catastrophe. The battle for im
mortal life is fougrit in the secret places of the soul,
and it is won or lost for each man amid trie perils
of Iris own earthly probation. Eternity in its doom
but chronicles the verdict of time..
What, then, is the bearing of our question on this
future condition of men? What, in view of his
eternal existence, must a man do to be saved? If
there were no dangers to be encountered, no mis
takes possible to the judgment, no sunken rocks, no
treacherous reefs or shifting sand-banks, on which a
man might drive in his run for eternal life, this ques
tion would be useless and impertinent. Or, if all
souls are sure in the long run to arrive safe in the
everlasting habitations, the question how is a matter
of comparative indifference. On the other hand, if
there is a risk, and if that risk be a perilous one, and
if, to make the chance of escape sure to all who are
in earnest about it, a revelation from God has been
vouchsafed, clear and definite in its details, then we
are infinitely concerned to know how that revelation
speaks; and we hazard eternal consequences to our
selves if we fail to listen to and instantly obey it.
" Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed
to the tilings which we have heard, lest at any time
we should let them slip." What are those things
about which we ought to give this earnest heed?

156 Gods Method of Saving Man.
They are the things which belong to the "great
salvation, which at' the first began to be spoken by
the Lord." " Wherefore the rather, brethren, give
dUigence to make your calling and election sure."
What are those things to which we are to give this
careful and diligent forethought ? They are the things
on which an entrance into the everlasting kingdom of
Christ is conditioned.
That we may answer this question categorically, and
so make our conclusion safe, let us say, first — that
there is a beginning of the religious life in man — a
first step, a first, thought, a first faith, the waking-up
within him of a first search after God, which, in its
after-issues, puts the soul and God into a fellowship of
peace. When a man, awakened to a sense of his evU
condition as a sinful being, seeks redemption through
the blood of Christ and finds it in the remission of
his sins, that man has taken the first step, chrono
logically, in the way of life : this is the beginning of
salvation. When such a man, being delivered from
the thraldom of his old bondage to evU, "yields him
self unto God, as one that is alive from the dead;"
when, amidst the perUs and vexing harassments of
tbe world, he maintains inviolate the sanctities of
conscience in its integrity of purpose and fidelity of
act, — that man has reached a second stage in the
process of his salvation, he has left " the things
behind" him, reaching on to "the things which are
before." When, at the end of life, this man conquers
gloriously in death, going down to the grave a victor
through the might of him that loved him ; when
amidst the naked, stern realities of the eternal judg-

God's Method of Saving Man. 157
ment, he stands " faultless in the presence of his
glory," a questioned but acquitted human spirit, and
in the coronation of this triumphant climax takes
his place and rank as " son and heir of God " — this,
in its time-relations, is "the end of his salvation."
That man is saved, — saved because he is safe — safe in
regard to the perUs incident to probation, and
saved in relation to the prospective certainties of the
future. The everlasting gates close 'him in. "The
salvation which is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory,"
makes his fruition of everlasting life secure.
Now, all this comes legitimately within the scope of
our question. It belongs to its primary elements, to
its theological conception, and to its eternal conse
quences in its applied results. " The gift of God is
eternal Ufe." " God hath called us to his eternal
glory." The question of the Priilippian jaUor is, in
fact, the equivalent, as it is the exponent, of that
other question put by the rich young ruler, " Good
Master, what good thing shall I do that I may in
herit eternal life ? " It sweeps into its circumference
all that pertains to the present in its perils, and to
the future in its issues. And we put it to the thought
ful mind, whether question can be graver in its import,
and more entitled to the calmest, the most serious and
earnest heed of men, than that around which there
gathers the bliss or the woe of an eternal future;
or if the answer which resolves it can be (I do
not say outweighed, but) equalled in its claim upon
the attention? But its solution is found only in the
answer of the text.

t.58 . God's Method of Saving Man.
III. Consider this question again, in ^its relation to
Christian teaching : " And they said unto him, BeUeve
on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved."
Two things are noteworthy in this answer — first,
its simplicity, and secondly, its immediateness. To
the question so anxiously put by the jailor, so full
of gloom and bewilderment to him, the Apostles give
this definite and dogmatic reply, "BeUeve on the
Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." They
set categorically before him an object, an act, and a
motive; and these finding instant response in the
man, the result immediately follows : " He rejoiced,
believing in God." And were we now deaUng with
this question within precisely the same limits, we
should need only to reproduce the same answer.
Speaking to the penitent sinner, in the crisis of his
perU, we should do no more than urge him to an
immediate trust in Christ ; and we should urge it
with the absolute conviction that, in the moment he
so trusted, he would be saved.
But we are dealing with the question of salvation in
its broader and more exhaustive signification ;. and the
answer must take in all the generaUzation which we
have given to the question, including the forgiveness
of sin, the adjudication of the soul to life, its sancti
fication for all time, and its admission, finaUy, to the
perfected felicities of the heavenly world. This is,
comprehensively, the salvation in question ; and it is
to the wider and more perilous range of necessities it
implies that we must construct our answer. What,
then, must he do, who anticipating aU this, under
takes to secure it? what must he do to obtain Eternal
Life?

.Gods Method of Saving Man. I5g
1. And, clearly, the wrong-doing, the sin on which
the necessity of salvation is founded, must, in the first
instance, be got rid of. We must " cease to do evil,"
before we can become good. " Let the wicked man
forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have
mercy upon him." This is a Divine assurance infi
nitely satisfactory as the basis of a treaty between
God and man, and as safe as it is satisfactory; but
it is also a decisive one. Triere can be no compromise
between the two terms which enter into this agreement.
We must give up sinning, if God is to forgive us for
having sinned. All sin — the outward sin, that by long
indulgence has soaked down through all the layers of
the soul's life, penetrating and corrupting its very sub
stance, till the man is little else than a loathsome,
leprous mass, — that of course must cease ; but, none
the less, the inward sin, the refined, the selfish, the
fashionable, the elegant sin, which, all unsuspected
arid secret, lies festering in the soul like a subtle
poison, — that also must die. We must let go our
pride, our vain conceits, our indifference, our lusts,
our worldly honours, pleasant pursuits, gay compan
ions* and even life itself, if these things stand in the
way of our being saved. The demand is a total ces
sation from and utter abandonment of sin. " Let the
wicked man forsake his way,"— -that is the first thing;
and any departure from that condition would be an
intolerable discrepancy between what is written and
what is required, fatal to the integrity of God's
method in deahng with man.
2. Then secondly, and further, — The remedy which,

160 God's Method of Saving Man.
in his plan of redemption, God has provided for -our
relief, the terms and the conditions on which salva
tion is subhritted to our .acceptance, must be not only
accepted as theoretically true, they must be personally
applied : " Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou
shalt be saved."
And this shuts out all the pretentious rights of
human reason to determine in what method it is
fitting that God should deal with the offending sinner.
It brings us squarely up with the one method in which
God will deal with us, with the decision that there is
not a second, or a variant one, to which we can be
take ourselves. God's plan does not alternate between
open courses — two or more — either one of which we may
safely choose. "There is one God, and one mediator be
tween God and men, the man Christ Jesus." " Neither
is there salvation in any other." It belongs to the his
tory of human folly, that, on this stupendous question,
the most extravagant hypothetical conjectures have
been resorted to, purposely to neutraUze and make
void this interposition of a sovereign mercy. Men
have invented their own petty schemes of salvation,
solely that they might get rid of God's ; and some of
these schemes are as wild in their imagination, as
they are insolent in their plea. Any conceit of man's
proud reason, whether it be rationalistic or universal-
istic, if only it flatter the insane egotism of the man
by making him independent of God, is preferred to
this unconditioned submission to the counsel of Grace.
Now, there is no vacillation with God : and there
must be no peddling with men. The method of salva
tion which has its centre in the Cross of Redemption,

God's Method- of Saving Man. 161
is one of, rigid limitation, made absolute by the irre
fragable judgment of God ; and it is not for man to
seek either to supplement or to supersede its supre
macy. " Other foundation can no man lay than that
is laid, which is Jesus Christ." " There is none
other name under heaven given among men, whereby
we must be saved." The statement is, that there is
one way alone, Divinely chosen, and authoritatively
announced, in which it is possible for man to be
saved, and that way is Christ. Whatever is done
for man in being saved, whatever is done by him
when he is saved, whatever is done for him, or by
him, or with him, by the grace and Spirit of God,
has its source and gets all its force, in one way or
other, inseparably from the man's dealing with Christ.
" God hath reconciled us unto himself by Jesus
Christ : " and we know of no reconciliation outside
or independent of that, possible either to God or
to man.
3. And the condition, the one thing that a man
must do in order to be saved, is just as distinctly
put as the method itself. It is that he "believe on the
Lord Jesus Christ." The Apostles had nothing more
simple and nothing more authoritative to set before
this rude barbarian, this half-civilized pagan, in the
first glimmer of his bewilderment, than Christ. And
they had no Christ but "the Lord Jesus Christ" not
a figurative Christ, or a fabulous Christ, not a Christ
of doctrine, or of some mythical, incomprehensible
ambiguity, with no facts to enshrine its memory and
no history to distinguish its person, but the Christ
of Bethlehem, of Gethseihane and Calvary: "Christ
M

1 62 God's Method of Saving Man.
Jesus the Lord," as the world had seen him, and the
Church had believed on him, — "Christ, the Son of the
living God."
And the act on which salvation hinges, the nexus
between the sinner and the Saviour, is as straight
forward in its enunciation, as its object is definitely
defined. It was so to the jaUor, and it is to us. The
Apostle puts in high relief the whole substance of
the Gospel, in its aim, in the philosophy of its whole
plan, into this single pregnant sentence, " BeUeve on
the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved."
You are not to think about Christ or to reason
about him, as so many men are now doing, only or
chiefly as a curious phenomenon in history that has
in some way to be accounted for and classified, as if
he were a new star shot into the firmaments of space;
least of all are you to fawn upon him, and flatter
him, and say grand nothings about him, as the
fashion of some is, while they betray him. You are
to " believe on him," — to submit to him, to trust
in him, to encounter him with the soul's keenest
tenacity of perception and purpose and will, that he
may forgive and heal you. And this act bf the soul
putting itself out in an intelligent surrender of the
whole personality of its being — mind, heart, will — to
Christ, is the man's trust for salvation. It touches
Christ and is touched by him, so that the man lives.
But between this personal trust and that intellectual
belief in Christ in which so many contentedly rest,
mistaking it for salvation, there is all the difference
that exists between a faith that saves and a belief
that, by itself, only condemns. As a matter of fact,

Gods Method of Saving Man. 163
we da believe in the Divine mission of Christ. There
is not a fact in the whole of that supernatural struc
ture, from basement to pinnacle, to which, if chal
lenged, we should hesitate to affix the signature of our
belief. As a series of propositions, each one. luminous
with its own meaning, and all compacted into a self-
consistent system, the Christian record is absolutely
complete ; and we accept it without a misgiving, as
"the testimony of God concerning his Son." And this
is a noble belief; it makes God's Word to us a
truth, a series of truths emblazoned in fact ; but it
is not that touch of the soul in its magnetic adhesion
to Christ, which brings virtue out of him as a Saviour.
" Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners," —
not to instruct the world merely what to think about
him. "Christ hath once suffered for sins, the just
for the unjust, that he might bring us to God/' —
not simply thai he might bridge the gulf between
earth and heaven, and clear for us a pathway into
"the eternal future. "We have redemption through his
blood," — "who is the. image of the invisible.. God."
Faith has its specialities, both in what it discovers
in Christ, and in what it verifies about him. It puts
its girdling clasp round the whole Christ, viewed in
what he is and in what he does, as a sacrifice for sin,
a Saviour of men, and the Image of the invisible
God. The drift of some loose, modern Church-teaching
goes indeed directly to dismembers this integrity, of
the person and. work of Christ. On the one hand, a
proud sacerdotalism, by its audacious pretenpe of
repeating and perpetuating the sacrifice of the Cross,

164 God's Method of Saving Man.
denies the absolute wholeness of his sacrificial death :
and, on the other, a latitudinarian theology obscures
the reality of his atoning death by exclusively magni
fying the virtues of his life. In the one case, Christ,
in effect, ceases to be a personality, and becomes a
mere symbol of salvation : in the other, he ceases to
be a Saviour, and is only a benevolent teacher. The
trust of faith that brings salvation, trusts in the
whole Christ — the person, and the work. Halve the
Christ, and he is not a Saviour. Accept the teaching
and ignore the sacrifice, and you mutilate the unity
of God's truth. "Ye are complete in him, who is
the head of all principality and power." Christ is
not divided. Neither is faith. It is all in each.
IV. Let us look at this question, once more, in its
relation to individual man.
1. The importance which attaches to this question
in its relation to individual man, it steems impossible
either to deny or exaggerate. If the premises which
it assumes be granted, — and no sane mind will deny
them, — then the consequences appended are and must
be of infinite moment, and no extravagance can be
charged on the extremest anxiety or vigilance that
seeks to prepare for them ; whUe the indifference
that neglects, or the profanity which flouts its scorn
upon it, is simply beyond contempt. It is a sheer
frenzy, on which we can look only with a pitiful
astonishment. By whomsoever this question comes to be seriously
asked, it is to him, for the time, the one question
that puts to silence every other. And it is being asked

God's Method of Saving Man. 165
by ten" thousand lips, in ten thousand forms, in ten
thousand places all over this disquieted earth, — in our
own sUent hearts, in our saintly closets, at the family
altar, in the cottage of the poor, in the palace of the
rich, by the lips of age and of youth. It haunts the
Bick man maddened by his delirium, and the dying
man terrified by his fears; it is heard in the solitude
of the wUderness, and in the scream of the tempest,.
amidst the horrors of shipwreck, and the carnage of
the battle-field, in our churches and chapels and in
the Gregorian chants of our vaulted cathedrals,
pitched in every tone of distress ; — in all the languages
and dialects of earth there is evermore rising up from
the congregation of all living men to the throne of
the All-merciful this one great distracted cry, "What
must I do to be saved?" And we say, by whom
soever this question iB being understandingly asked, in
whatever circumstances it comes to be regarded as
a stern reality and not a fiction or a dream, it is one
of the most imposing and impressive questions which
the mind of man in its moments of deepest solici
tude can originate, or his lips can utter. We say it
is more than . that : it is, in itself and in its issues,
the most stupendous question that man in his agony
can ask, or that God in his mercy can answer.
And it is none the less imposing or impressive in
that no where outside of its record in this Book is an
answer to be found. " The depth saith, It is not in me;
and the sea saith, It is not in me. It cannot be gotten
for gold, neither shall silver be told for the price
thereof." This magnificent material universe, with
the music of its marching systems, has not a whisper

1 66 God's Method of Saving Man.
of it. Those calm, grand laws, which move so
orderly, and strike down so unpityingly the man who
transgresses them, know nothing of mercy. Our
schools of phUosophy fumble blindly at the question
of man's origin, or lose themselves in seeking, to
fathom the abysses of the Godhead, but they know
nothing bf salvation. The science that so patiently
scans the heavens and the earth, and makes the
smallest atom and the remotest ' star tell the secret of
their birth, has not a word of pity for guUty man.
It can take the red fire out of the lightning-flash, but
it knows nothing of the redder fire that burns in the
justice of God against sin. It can track the wander
ing comet through the wUdernesses of space, but it
cannot open a pathway through the grave or Ught up
the gloom of death's deep midnight with the hope of
a life beyond. It sweeps with eagle eye the vast
and glorious outposts of the "heaven of heavens," but
the beacon-fires of a lost world's hope, as they flash
out in the Cross of Redemption, — these it does not dis
cover. "Nature," it has been said, "holds the secret
of our woe and its relief." Does she? Then the
secret, whether in crypt or catacomb or jewelled
Zone, baffles our keenest research. The "Mecanique
celeste" is the march of an imperial intellect through
a universe of worlds : but Laplace found no God,
and rio Christ, and no redemption, in Nature. No:
that grand and terrible question — the first, in all
probability, in which the anguish of the human
spirit got vent in language five thousand years ago,
and the last that will freeze the blood or fire the
brain to madness when the world is in flames — has

Gods Method of Saving Man. 167
but one answer, one solution, one relief. Can I submit
to receive it? And if I cannot, what then? What if
I refuse to kneel at the Cross of Redemption? —
"What must I do to be saved?" I cannot appeal to
the ancient religions, or to the gorgeous myths of
naturalism, or to any of the conflicting schools or
jarring creeds or changing systems of men. God, in
himself, is " the Great Unknown : " Nature is a
fathomless mystery : I myself am a distraction : my
fellow-men are a despair. Oh, tell me where, as a
burdened, terrified sinner, I am to fly for relief, if
I cannot, wUl not, fly to the Christ of Christianity ?
"Oh wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me
from this body of death ! "
2. We are not saying that this is the only question
that waits for man's thoughtful answer; and we are not
assuming that it is the only important question that is
suing for our attention, and that must have an answer
from beings like ourselves. There are many such
questions, grave and inevitable, on which, occasion
ally at least, we must think wisely and long — questions
in relation to the world of sense, in which we have
each to play so serious a part; questions which relate
to business, to the famUy, to society, to the Church,
to matters great and grave and full of practical value,
which interlock with politics, with science, with social
progress, and commercial responsibUities and duties —
and on all these, with a large number of other and
equally urgent collateral matters, forming, as they do,
the great practical staple of individual life, we must all
at fitting times think, and think wisely and long, that
we may learn how to act discreetly.

1 68 God's Method of Saving Man.
But these — all of them confessedly important matters,
and not to be left uncared for, or under any pretence to
be set aside — are little, insignificant, and fugitive as a
dream, when put in comparison with that one question,
"What must I do to be saved?" how shall I buUd
my character for its eternal doom ? Weighed against
this inquiry — it is no extravagance to say — all other
questions whatsoever are trivial, whether economical,
or scientific, or social; all other themes, of whatso
ever interest, whether discussed in the haUs of science,
or in the study of the sage, or in the exchange of
commerce, or within the walls of a nation's parha
ment, — each and all dwindle into airy nothings, less
than the babblings of an infant's lips. To com
pare these things, though only for the effect of a
contrast, is to weigh the magnitudes of the material
universe against the filaments of a feather. One
hundred years hence, and what shall I know or care
about my banking account, or, who is the Premier of
the country ? But, one hundred years hence, what
and where shall I myself be ? That 'question lights
up all that future with a traU of fiery splendour in
comparison with which the blazing comet is a mid
night gloom. Those swift-rushing orbs are growing
weary, and the travellers of the heavenly spaces
must one day, we are told, mingle in the solar fires
out of which they came. But I shall be a spectator
of the grand catastrophe, immortal as God !
The highest thing in humanity is not found in the
accident of birth, or in the pomp of station, or in the
glittering ornamentations of wealth, or in all the king
ships of earth. It is something in the mind, in the

God's Method of Saving Man. 169
man, more innate and regal than all these. It Ues in
the realm of the spirit, where the heart of God beats
responsive to the heart of man : it is " Christ in
you, the hope of glory." To hunt after the last dis
coveries in science, to add to the last ingot of wealth,
to find out the swiftest methods of locomotion in the
transfer of commerce, to spend the energies of man
hood in speculating in stocks, in running an equipage,
or in any of those Uttle vanishing traffics in which
the soul and God are forgotten, — all this is, even at
its topmost bent of success, an infinitely mean thing
when it is the chief thing in a being so grand as man.
3. And now, when we 'say, finaUy, that this question
must be answered by each one for himself, and that
it must be so answered in aU the breadth of its present
and future consequences, it is plain, that if we are to
answer it wisely and weU, we -must answer it at
once. It admits of no postponement. It accepts of no
delay. Its entreaty is, — "To-day, if ye wiU hear his
voice, harden not your hearts." Time is on the rush,
and we are rushing with it into a timeless future.
Whether we answer this question wisely or not, whether
we are intending to answer it at aU or not, matters
but Uttle to any but ourselves. To ourselves it is a
matter of infinite concern. That other world, with its
sUent mystery, comes on with stealthy step to engulf
us aU. Yet a Uttle wlrile, and you and I shah awake
among the immortals. How we shaU awake depends
upon the answer this question shaU get from us here.
Whether we shaU awake to sing and shine among
the seraphim, or to sink and sorrow among the lost,

170 Gods Method of Saving Man.
must depend upon ourselves. And for ought that we
can know to the contrary, it may depend upon our
decision within a year, a month, a day, or an hour.
To-day, possibly, the balance of probabUities between
being saved or lost is even : to-morrow, it may be unal
terably determined on one side or the other. But if so — ¦
on which, to you and me ? Even now the sands are
falling by which the balance may irrecoverably dip.
How, then, do ybu stand in relation to God? Is
he your friend, or is he your foe? Do you ask,
What shall we do? how begin to determine this dread
alternative ? We say, Begin just as you are, just
where you are, with all your doubts, your wants, your
sins made manifest through your fears. Bend down
the soul within you in one searching glance into the
reality of things, as these are seen of God. Do you
ask, where you must go to do this ? We say, Go .to
that all-pitiful and merciful One, who " came into the
world to seek and to save that which was lost."
When are you to begin ? Now : here in this house,
in that troubled heart. " All things are ready, Come!"
That God against whom you have sinned so long,
says, " Come and let us reason together." That
Jesus whom you haye so long neglected, and whose
blood your neglect has trampled under yom' feet,
says, " Come unto Me, and I wUl give you rest."
That Holy Spirit whose influences you have so grieved
and vexed, and all but quenched, says, Come. " The
Spirit and the Bride say, Come." The heavens and
the earth, God and man, are beseeching a race of
sinful, dying men to come. A thousand voices, all too
finely attuned to catch the cold, vulgar ears of sense,

Gods Method of Saving Man. 171
are raining down their inviting welcome from the
Bpheres of spirit and in one acclaim say, Come !
Those loved ones at whose knees we knelt, on whose
bosoms we wept, on whose graves we put those flowers,
whose unfaded image stUl looks up into our face, all
ring out the gladdening welcome — Come ! " And.
whosoever will, let him come." WUl you come? —
Dare I refuse to come ?

Ifa $) zopk'is ^xttBtion.
" Then said they unto |him, What shall we do, that we might work
the works of God ? Jesus answered and said unto them, This is
the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent."
John vi. 28, 29.
THERE is a greatly more vital relation between the
two conditions of working and believing, and a
more subtle distinction in which they part asunder,
than the Jews who put this question to Christ seem
to have understood.
Faith and works are both factors, equally efficient,
in the product of salvation; but the action of each
is distinctive. Faith is the life-root of which works
are the fruit. The one is wholly a personal matter
between the soul and God ; the other is a consequence
emerging in the life. The Jew sought to justify him
self by his works, and he then inferentially organised
his faith. In God's plan, a man is justified by his
faith, and he then verifies his faith by his works.
Works are the formula through which the life of faith
is expressed. They are " a seal of the righteousness
of faith ; " but they are neither its cause, nor its an
tecedent, nor its substitute.
To "work the works of God," as the Jews under
stood it, was, in reality, to drive a bargain with God.

The People's Question. 173
In their materiaUsed conceptions, righteousness was a
marketable commodity, in exchange for which they
were not unwUling to barter their works. Their ques
tion was, "Good Master, what good thing shall I"
do, that I may have eternal life?" The Divine favour
was a purchasable property, a merchandise set in
the currency of life; and by the payment of so much
of ceremonial service as a set-off against their indebt
edness to God, they thought so far to square accounts
with him as to strike a balance in their own favour.
Christ shews them that the way to the Father is not
in any such circuitous route of legal serving, but
through faith in himself. "This is the work of God,"
— the one thing, the single act, on which God has
conditioned the salvation of man, is "that ye believe
on him whom he hath sent." And in this answer
we have the method in which God undertakes, once
for all, to settle the questions witri which a broken
manifoldness of legal serving distracts the conscience
of man. The way to the Father is Christ: the way
to Christ is faith : works are the verification of faith.
I. Here is first, a grave enquiry: "What shaU we
do, that we may work the works of God?"
This is not exclusively, or even- speciaUy, a Jewish
question. It did not spring up out of the teaching
of Christ, or out of the age in which he taught; it
was not the product of any school of thought or
form of rehgion; it has its causes not in any accident
of man's history, but in the primitive instincts of
his nature. It is man's question the world over, and
for aU time. It is the question of humanity.

174 The People's Question.
One of the most astonishing, facts in the history
of man is, that with all his atheistical jugglings he
has never been able to disenchant himself of some
belief in a God, nor to escape the shock of disturbing
apprehensions which such a behef creates. Man has
never been able wholly to forget God. God has
never utterly forsaken man. No age, no nation,
hardly a race or tribe of men, however ignorant, or
"effete with the drunkenness of crime," has been
found, in which a religion of consciousness has been
wholly extinct. Hence all men do, in effect, ask
the question of the Jews. In the thoughts which
they involuntarily think, in the actions which reveal
their thoughts, and in the feelings which underUe
both their thoughts and their actions, men are
virtually asking everywhere, " What shall we do,
that we may work the works of God ? " How shaU
we still the ache, how fill the void within, how satisfy
this dreary, restless search after God ?
There is a remarkable passage in the writings of
the prophet Amos which, although descriptive of
social wickedness and national infideUty in the
decadence of the Jewish kingdom more than twenty-
five hundred years ago, is yet so characteristic
of the religious unrest of our own age, that it
might have been written specificaUy of ourselves; —
"Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that
I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of
bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the
words of the Lord : and they shall wander from
sea to sea, and from the north even to the east,
they shall run to and fro to seek the word of

The PedpUs Question. 175
the Lord, and shall not find it." The prophet
describes a state of spiritual famishment, a great
mental hunger, a restless, jaded appetite crying
out for food, without knowing where to find it, or
in what it consists. And this mental hunger, with
its passionate eagerness of search, its confused
apprehensions as to the sources of its supply, its
disquieted, discontented spirit, unsettling ail the
normal lines of spiritual life, leaving the soul a
starved, hunger-bitten and disconsolate orphan, is
a characteristic of our own age, not less than of
that of the prophet's ancient past. There is the
famine-want, without its appropriate supply.
You see evidences of this mental unrest in the
distractions which unbelief is creating in all the
circles of religious thought, in the impatient break
ing away from the restraints of creeds and from
the time-honoured formularies of faith ; in the retreat
of devout and gifted men from the simplicity of
the present into the dreary traditions of the medi
eval past; in the haste with which so many are
rushing to the confessional, to the sacrarnent, and to
the various systems of mediatorial penance. You
see it still more forcibly expressed in the contra
dictory critical theories which so swiftly and so
daringly succeed each other in regard to the person
and work of Christ, in the impossibility felt of
successfully impugning the Divine Record, and in the
despair which ensues on its rejection. Even Philo
sophy itself, in its widest departures from God,
can neither answer this question, nor escape the
responsibility of discussing it. In its wUdest freaks1,

176 The People's Question.
the idea of some missing-link in the genealogy of
the human soul stUl haunts its speculations : and
if occasionally, in the heat of debate, or when
goaded by irritation, men seem to treat the ques
tion itself as a scoff, or to pass it by as a despair,
their conscience in its calmer moments rebukes the
blasphemy of the lip, and they are compelled to
do homage to its impressiveness in the vague worship
of " the Silent and the Unknown."
There is nothing, indeed, in the whole, range of
educated agnostic thought which makes the Christian
thinker feel more securely the impregnable reality
of his own faith, or in which he reads more clearly the
prophecy of its ultimate ascendency, than the tenacity
with which Scepticism clings to certain great spiritual
ideas, even while it rejects the Christian form of
words in which they are expressed. It secretes, by
a process of mental absorption, the Divine thought,
and it then denies its parentage. It has a Bible,
without its revelation; a creed, without its inspired
dogma ; a Christianity, without its supernatural
Christ ; a theology, without a personal God. And
in all this we see how impossible it . is for man
to contradict his instincts as a religious being.
He cannot get away from himself. However the
opposing current may boil and eddy, he cannot
escape fronting the perilous edge of a gulf, the
weird mystery of which fascinates while it mad
dens him.
Man is everywhere, so far as he is unreligious,
a dissatisfied being. The undertone of life is a
sigh, rather than a song. He is dissatisfied with

The People's Question. 177
himself, and with his possessions ; with his culture,
and with his ignorance; with his wealth, and with
his pleasure ; with his rehgion, and without it ;
with what he thinks of God, and with what he
denies of him; with this world as it is, and with
the next as he fears or hopes it may be. He
is dissatisfied when he disputes, and when he
applauds ; when he succeeds, and when he fails.
Discontentment with himself, with his condition,
with Providence, with Revelation, with God, — that
is the shadow clouding the brow and making
sorrowful the heart of man, whenever thought is
not stupefied by the narcotics of sense.
Hence the deep and deepening currents of dis
turbed rehgious feeling among aU classes of men.
They exist in our Churches, and beyond them.
They are felt on the highest crests of speculative
thought; and they wash up in the turbid eddies
of complaint and surly distrust which are sweeping
over and unsettling the half-educated, but whoUy
awakened, minds of the masses. There is a famine
in the land, "not a famine of bread, nor a thirst
for water, but of hearing the word of the Lord."
" Men are running to and fro to seek the word of
the Lord," and are not able to find it.
II. Christ's answer : " This is the work of God,
that ye beheve on him whom the Father hath sent."
1. The work of God is not alone work of God's
appointing, after which those Jews were blindly feeling.
It is God and man mutually working ; the interaction
of the Divine and the human will. "What shaU we
N

178 The People's Question.
do that we may work " with God, and to him ? We
must work on the human side as God works on the
Divine side, that so, by the conjunction of the two
activities, life may be secured. A fractured relation
of the soul and God necessitates for its re-adjust
ment that correlation of two forces — neither of them
complete alone — which is the normal conception of
religion. "By grace are ye saved through faith; and
that not of yourselves : it is the gift of God."
Then it is manifest that in this work a factor is
demanded that we cannot supply. However real our.
sohcitude or persistent our effort, there are imprac
ticabilities in the work, and impossibUities in our
selves, at which we must stop, and where God must
come in. We cannot do, in any way or in any part,
what he has it within his own power to do for us.
Standing on this extreme verge, "A man can receive
nothing, except it be given him from above." This
cry of the soul, then, is a cry for the descent of God
into our nature, that he may help and heal it. The
hunger that creates the cry can be appeased only
with " the bread of God." And that which our
working secures, and the only thing it can secure,
is just the preparation for this descent — the search,
the consenting wiUingness to receive what God, work
ing in and above us by his own power, alone can
give. The want that goes in quest of God, and the ac
tivity in which it reveals itself, the putting ourselves
into the search for the thing we want, — that is not
God's work, but ours. On the other hand, to pacify
the disquieted heart by renewing it, to strike down

The People's Question. 179
into the central shaft of a man's soul and quicken
life out of its natural death, to arrest and turn back
the will in the fierce democracy of its rebeUious
strife against the will of God ; to purge the affections
of their base alloy of passion and give to them
affinity with the pure in God, to make the free choice
of the right and good the law of the whole man,
and so to make conscience the assessor of peace ;
thus to " create a clean heart, and to renew a right
spirit within us," to beget new relations and new
obligations, and so to bind anew, with a new tenacity,
the dislocated soul to its Creator, — all this is not
man's work, but God's. And our first lesson, there
fore, in getting this question answered, is one that
touches the pride of our self-sufficiency. We are seen
to be powerless with all our power, where power
is needed most ; utterly helpless and hopelessly
ignorant, even when blinded with the splendour of
our imagined knowledge : we are not " sufficient of
ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves ; our
sufficiency is of God."
If you say, that thus to shut out the active agency
of man is, in effect, to silence all the pleadings of
his anxiety, and so to throw him passively on the
sheer omnipotency of God ; we say, Only as it throws
him upon the same omnipotence in the harvest-
field, and in all the manipulations and ongoings of
his daily life. All things impinge ultimately, some
where, on the efficiency of God ; and this work of
Christian salvation not less, but chiefest of all. "It
is God which worketh in you both to will and to do
of his good pleasure."

180 The People's Question.
Then, on the other hand, there are things which
we can do and are doing, that we must cease to do.
We must " cease to do evil," — but we must none
the less cease to do what we have been accustomed
to consider meritoriously good. We must get clean
away from all dependence upon our works, our own
virtue, our own religion, on all that has for its end
the putting away of the wrong and the moral disorder
of the past by mere self-emendation of the future, as
a ground-work for making ourselves righteous with
God. " To him that worketh not, but beUeyeth on
him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted
for righteousness." And this is probably the hardest
lesson we have to learn; it certainly is the most
difficult to practise. Man's revolt is less against
goodness than against this method of becoming
good. He is not unwilling to pay down a price, to
enter into a compact of service or of suffering, in
order to cancel the obligations of God upon him.
There is no mental thraldom however abject, no
bodily austerity however painful, no ceremonial how
ever unmeaning, no absurdity however monstrous, to
which he will not submit in fabricating a vicarious
religion, rather than yield up himself a self-con
demned sinner in a self-surrendering act of faith,
that he may be saved by grace. This was, in fact,
the initial point at which the Jews came into con
flict with the teachings of Christ. Their minds were
surcharged wholly with work, soaked through with
the drudgery of ceremonial serving. They were
willing to expurgate their sins by the severity of
their bodily mortifications ; to trade eagerly and

The People's Question. 181
sharply with God, giving to him so much in the
way of bodily service, and getting from him so
much in the way of a righteous offset. They made
scrupulously clean " the outside of the cup and
the platter," and tithed with exacting severity the
"mint and anise and cummin," but they "omitted
the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy,
and faith." The majesty of being good, as an
inward reality, was with them secondary to appear
ing good.
It was this call of Christ to beheve, in opposi
tion to their parading of meritorious works, this
utter abnegation of self in trusting to another for
salvation, that was " the stone of stumbling and
rock of offence " at which the proud aristocracy of
the Jewish intellect revolted and feU. They were
too strict in footing up their accounts with God to
accept of salvation as a gift. And this proud spirit
of pharisaical trafficking with God — giving to him so
much of serf-righteous service, and getting so much
out of him in return — has, we have said, lost none
of its ancient prestige. It has multiform types and
manifold forms of expression, but its root-idea is
one and the same in all. The untutored African
who trembles before his hideous fetish, the self-
tortured Fakir who swings on his burning hook,
the tonsured monk who macerates his flesh, the
sanctimonious rituahst who thrusts the shams and
shows of his paganized Church in the place of
Christ, and the protestant formahst who claims to
enter the kingdom of heaven through his system
of sacramental grace, aU give but dissimilar inter-

1 82 The People's Question.
pretations of the same dream, — the dream of paying
down a price to God out of our own coffers, and
so getting an equivalent of salvation in returjt.
" There is a remnant of fetish- worship," it is said,
" traceable in all our religions."
To all such punctilious, self-asserting attempts to
fabricate a righteousness of our own, the language of
Christ is a peremptory, as it is a perpetual, rebuke.
It is " not by works of righteousness which we have
done, but according to his mercy," that " he saved
us." Faith in- Christ is not self-mortification; godly
sorrow for sin is not a purgatorial penance ; " The
righteousness which is of God," put upon us in the
renewal of our nature, is not any pharisaical alb
in which we parade a profession, or the chasuble of
some sacramental decencies with which we decorate,
while we conceal, our inward vUeness ; but it is the
cleanness of " a new heart," " the washing of re
generation" and the " renewing of the Holy Ghost."
The beauty of holiness is in " the hidden man of the
heart," putting its celestial impress upon the whole
life. And this is the work, as it is the life, of God
in man.
2. The Work of Man : " This is the work of God,
that ye believe on him whom he hath sent." The
one work, that which meets at once both the Divine
and the human requirement, is that we believe
on the Christ.
Two things clearly are contained in this require
ment — first, faith in the mission; and secondly, faith
in the person of Christ. "BeUeve on him whom the

The People's Question. 183
Father hath sent." Then Christ claims to have been
sent from and by the Father. He claims to have
been sent into the world from the Father, on a
Divine errand, to perform a specific work; and, as
we know, he appeals to a series of stupendous signs
and wonders as the seal set by the Father on nature
and on man as his credentials. " The works which
the Father hath given me to finish, the same works
that I do, bear witness of me, that the Father hath
sent me." " If I do not the works of my Father,
believe me not. But if I do, though ye believe not
me, believe the works : that ye may know, and
believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him."
When John the Baptist sent two of his disciples to
Christ with the question, "Art thou he that should
come, or look we for another ? Jesus answered and
said unto them, Go and show John again those .
things which ye do hear and see : the blind receive
their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are
cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised
up, and the poor have the gospel preached unto them.
And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended
in me." If those works were wrought in answer
to the Baptist's message by the immediate power
of Christ, as they appear to have been, they were
an absolute assertion on the part of Christ of his
Messianic claims. If they were wrought by the power
of the Father, mediately through the humanity of
Christ, they were the official certificate, the public
protest and authoritative seal, set by the Father on
the Messianic mission of the Son. On either view,
the seal of miraculous works was set upon the
supernatural mission of the Son of God.

184 The People's Question.
Then, further, there is running all through the
active ministry and embedded in the very silence of
Christ, a quiet, subjective self-assertion, a profound
self-consciousness of his personality and of his
mission, that not only explains, but necessitates, this
supernatural signature of the Father's works. There
are mysteries in the timeless past with which he is
familiar : — " I know whence I came, and whither I
go." " I came down from heaven." " I came forth
from the Father." " I proceeded forth and came
from God ; neither came I of myseU, but he sent
me." "And now, 0 Father, glorify thou me with
thine own self with the glory which I had with
thee before the world was." There are purposes in
the present which he perfectly understands : — " I am
come that ye might have life." " God sent not his
Son into the world to condemn the world, but that
" the world through him might be saved." " The Son
of man came not to be ministered unto, but to
minister, and to give his life a ransom for many."
There are grandeurs in the future which he person
ally announces: — "Let not your heart be troubled:
ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's
house are many mansions : if it were not so, I would
have told you. I go to prepare a place for you."
" I am the resurrection and the life : he that believeth
in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live : and
whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."
Teaching such as this from the lips of Christ was
felt to be but the index of a reality working within.
Hence his wondrous power. " He knew what was in
man;" and by a direct and subtle apocalypse of the

The Peoples Question. 185
man, he made him know what was in himself. He
knew God, and the secrets of the invisible world ;
and by a few brief touches of his wonderful pencil
the unseen and the eternal stand pourtrayed before
us. There was infinite tenderness in this teaching;
there was absolute authority in what he taught. Men
felt, as they listened to him, that he was " a teacher
come from God." And men are feeling it stiU. The
speculations of eighteen hundred years have added
nothing to the ideas of God and of man, and of
man's relations to God and the eternal world, given
by Jesus Christ — nothing to their substance, nothing
to their authority, nothing to their working power.
They have a music caught up from those holy lips,
which is pouring itself grandly out in our temples,
in our homes, in our sick chambers, in our very
nurseries, and by the open grave, that makes them
the regnant rulers of thought, the master-magicians
which hold fast the foremost intellect of the world, as
they call forth all its human heart, as by the potency
of a spell. Christ is to-day " Trie way, trie truth, and
the Ufe " to myriads of struggling intellects, not less
than he is the one solace to man's orphaned and
sorrowful heart.
If then Jesus believed himself to be " the Sent "
and "the Son of God," — and was not; he was deceived
and a deceiver. If he said that he was the Son of
God, knowing that he was not ; he was an impostor
and a blasphemer. If he was the Son of God,
sharing the Father's counsels and doing his work, as
we know he was ; then what must it have been for such
a being to become incarnate, to " make himself of no

1 86 The People's Question.
reputation," to "humble himself, even unto the death
of the cross!" and what stupendous consequences,
both here and hereafter, must lie folded up in that
transcendent act ! Either the facts of the Saviour's
Ufe, as these are given by inspiration, must be aU
ignored, or this stupendous mystery of purpose must
be accepted. And then, the bearing of these facts
and of that purpose on the life of the individual
man and of the race through all the ages of the
everlasting future becomes one of the profoundest
problems on which it is possible for the grandest
minds to meditate. It puts a new and a terrible
responsibility into human life ; and it cannot but
add some new interest to the fortunes of humanity
in that darkly foreshadowed future world, in which
this " mystery of God " shall be " finished."
Can we, then, put ourselves into harmony with
God, otherwise than as we accept of this mission of
Christ ? If it be true, as he affirms, that the one
method of working the works of God lies in our
believing in him whom the Father hath sent, can
we do that work while not believing in him, and
believing in something directly the reverse ? In
becoming co-workers with God, whether in sowing
a field or in saving the soul, must we not find out
the methods in which his order of working runs,
and then practically make it our own ? And, failing
to come into that order, or going directly contrary
to it, have we any ground for supposing that, in
pity to our ignorance or to our caprice, he will
arrest the action of any physical law with which we
might otherwise come into fatal collision ?

The People's Question. 187
Hardly that. " God is not the author of con
fusion." He works after his own methods, but never
at random. His law is perfect. It holds the creation
in its place, and a trained, impassive science is eager
enough to pronounce on the unfaltering continuity
with which the Supreme Mind guards the action of
his own law. It is a primordial necessity in the
set-up of the material universe that precludes the
possibihty of any breach upon its unbending course.
A lawless creation would go to pieces. But Law is
nothing else than the sum of trie methods in which
God works out certain results in the physical world.
That is to say, God has a plan in doing physical
things, after which he works, and to which we must
conform, and from which he will not depart. We
may disregard that plan, wholly or in part ; but that
is at our own cost. We may be ignorant of it, or
we may hate it and fight against it ; still the law
goes grandly on, equally to save or to destroy. God
is good, but he is unbending; wise, but exact. And
he is exact in the execution of his law, even when
the interests of the individual seem to go to destruc
tion under its action.
Now, let us affirm for the moment no more
than this, — that Christ is God's method of working
in the domain of mind and morals; that in his
mission the world received, beyond all fair dispute,
a supernatural revelation of the Divine wiU, — a reve
lation so attested outwardly by the signature and
stamp of God, and so full inwardly of the evi
dences of its own divinity, as to lay upon every
one to whom it comes the most undeniable obliga-

1 88 The People's Question.
tion to receive and obey it. Must it not, then,
foUow that to disregard that method, and to turn
away the ear from that revelation, is to reject
God's teaching, and so to put ourselves contrari
wise with his order of working ? " This is his
commandment, that we should believe on the name
of his Son Jesus Christ." And if it be so, then
must not disobedience to that command be as
perilous to the interests of the man's soul who
runs counter to it, as the contravention of a physical
law is perilous to the body ?
I am told that if I thrust my hand into the fire,
and then petition the great Law-maker that it be not
burned, it is an act of presumption, a profane tres
pass outside the line of duty into the prerogatives
of Godhead. Why ? Because the law that makes the
fire burn is one of the fixed arrangements of Nature;
and to petition for its suspension, under any emer
gency, implies the expectation of a miracle, and
that is rebuked as a thoughtless absurdity and
an infatuation. But if I thrust away the Christ of
God, and refuse to condition my salvation on his
intervention, and then pray to the Great Father for
admission to his favour and to the fruition of his king
dom hereafter in some other way than by obedience
to the law which he hath set forth for its attain
ment, is there any less absurdity, is it any less a
presumptous audacity, does it any less imply the
expectation of a miracle, than if I thrust my hand
into the fire and then pray that it may not be
burned? The authority that makes the law is in
both regards the same. In both cases the will of

The People's Question. 189
man, with equal directness, sets itself in oppugnation
to the law of God. And if there is to be no setting
aside of the relation of cause and effect in the one
instance, why should there be in the other ? And if
there is no arrest of consequences when one method
is disregarded, why should there be in the other?
If the nexus cannot be broken in things, why should
it in thoughts ? If there can be no imagined or per
missible deviation from the uniformities which mark
the action of the Divine wUl in the physical, why
should there be in the spiritual world ? A poisonous
substance poisons, whether accidentaUy taken as a
wholesome food, or wilfully as a deadly drug. How
then are we going to evade the consequences of
"trampling under foot the Son of God, and count
ing the blood of the covenant an unholy thing ? "
" How shaU we escape, if we neglect so great sal
vation ? " No matter in what specific form the
neglect betrays itself, whether it be a purely intel
lectual recoil from the counsel of God as revealed
in Christ, or the besottedness of a deadly moral
sin, — if we do neglect it, if we do trample on the
Son of God and in denying him prove recreant to
the God that made us, how are we going to escape?
The kingdom of God is a rule of order, whether
its subjects be souls or stars, worlds or men.
The insane attempt to get rid of Christ without
getting rid of the consequences of doing so, is one
of the most astounding infatuations of the age. A
miracle is impossible, because it assumes an interfer
ence with the orderly concatenation of physical law!
Prayer is unphUosophical and impotent, because it

I go The People's Question.
supposes fickleness with God ! And yet, these inflex
ible laws must bend, this immutable God must change,
to meet the captiousness of men who in the arro
gance of their conceit deny the Divine authority of the
mission of Christ, and who nevertheless claim a share
in the usufruct of his kingdom ! They wUl not submit
themselves to this method of coming into the right
eousness of God : yet God must not vindicate his
authority or touch the offender with his rod, lest he
dismember the integrity of his being, and, in their
imperious verdict, cease to be God ! Surely it is hard
not to think that some men are given over to
" strong delusion, that they should believe a Ue."
" Nevertheless, the foundation of God standeth sure."
" This is the record that God hath given to us
eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that
hath the Son hath life ; and he that hath not the
Son of God hath not life."
What, then, does a man do when he believes on
Christ ? Obviously, he believes in the historic veracity
of the character Christ claimed for himself, that was
claimed for him by the Apostles, that was affirmed of
him by the Father, and on the ground of which,
moreover, he claims to be the author and founder of
the Christian Faith. "If we receive the witness of
men, the witness of God is greater : for this is the
witness of God which he hath testified of his Son."
What that witness testifies in its ultimate whole
ness as a subjective experience, is a question which we
need not discuss in this elementary view of faith.
Just now, and as lying at the threshold of his creed,
we need only to say that such a man's belief is the

The People's Question^ 191
creditative assent and conviction that the things re
ported of Christ and constituting the whole of his
official personality, are true, historically and intrinsi
cally true — true in themselves, and therefore true to
us. In this initial sense, to believe in Christ is just
to accept with an intelligent conviction the truth
concerning Christ, to embrace him with a large-
hearted welcome as " the sent of God," and so to
commit oneself with a large-hearted confidence to his
redemption. It is to accredit the testimony, — " The
witness of God." But surely no such man can read
with intelligence the documents of the New Testa
ment, and escape the further conviction that Christ
did claim a supernatural mission, and that he claimed
supernaturally to evince it. That, then, by a logical
process becomes the maris belief.
Accepting the Divine mission, what does a man do
when he further believes in the person of Christ ?.
What does a blind man do when he commits him
self to a guide ? He puts himself out on trust.
What does a drowning man do when he clings to
his plank? He lives suspensively on that to which
he clings. What, now, does a penitent sinner do
when he believes in Christ ? He gives himself over
on trust to be saved by Christ : he assents, con
sents, and submits, all in one. Faith, in this its
highest sense, is an inappreciable spiritual power,
induced into action by the Spirit of God, and, so
far, it is incapable of analysis or definition. On its
human side, and as proceeding from the intelligent
action of the man, it is the soul's conscious trust
ing of itself to Christ, that he may heal and save

ig2 The People's Question.
it. It is the blind-born sinner's yielding of himself
to the sight-giving Saviour. The man who feels
himself going down, puts forth his hand in quest of
help, is met by the hand of Christ, — and the clasp
is salvation. " Sirs, what must I do to be saved ?
And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ,
and thou shalt be saved." The assenting inteUect,
the consenting wUl, the accepting heart, — these unite
in the act of faith which brings salvation. And this
is the work of God, for us aU : for tbe strong man,
and for the weak; for the rich man, and the poor;
for the sinner, and the saint. " This is the work of
God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent."
1. Let us, then, understand this, — that rehgious
solicitude, such as the text has it to commend, is not
the offspring of fanatical ignorance or mystical Ulu-
sion. It is, on the contrary, the product of intelli
gent, far-seeing- thought, piercing through the fugacity
of outward things in quest of God. Man's nature
is a unity, with manifold wants. The animal in
stincts come out first ; then, the social affections ;
next, the intellectual powers ; and last of aU, the
religious conscience. And if this last in order is
usually the last also in its culture, it is because
the finer and more enduring feelings are overlaid
by the grosser and, for the time, more imperious
claims of the animal senses. But it is never de
stroyed. Under its, greatest abuse, the religious craving
holds indefeasibly its right of primogeniture in the
soul. The last analysis of man is, that he is a stu
pendous want, with its supply in God.

The People's Question. 193
Now, there is but one way in which this want can
reach its supply, and that way is Christ. Whether it
be the best way or not, whether it be a safe way for
aU or not, it is a final way for us : " God hath in
these last days spoken unto us by his Son." We
may object to the summary method in which this
way forecloses all appeal to our reason ; or we may
seek adroitly to shirk all personal obligation to it, or
interest in it; but that does not negative its exis
tence, nor disprove its necessity. "For ever, 0 Lord,
thy word is settled in heaven."
2. The faith which the Gospel exacts, and the life
it originates, are intensely more abstract and spiritual
than in our loose popular teaching appears to be
imagined. To believe in Christ, as an objective act,
is indefinitely more than to accredit the history or
verify the facts of his hfe. The validity of confidence
is in action. The spirit and power of faith appear
not in the belief, but in what comes after the belief,
not in the inteUigent cognition, but in the volition
that follows it.
When Christ made clay, and anointed the eyes of
the blind man, and said unto him, " Go wash in
the pool of SUoam," the man's healing was virtually
accomplished in his faith; but that faith was a moral
act, and not an inteUectual notion. It put the man
into his belief. Had his faith terminated in its own
virtue, or in the miracle-working power of Christ, or
in some imagined medicinal quality in the waters of
SUoam, the man's eyes had not been opened, his faith
notwithstanding. But his faith in Christ went out

194 The People's Question.
into the necessity of his going to SUbam, and that
again into an immediate volition to go ; and this
fusion of his belief with the volition and the act
secured the result. " He said, A man that is called
Jesus made clay, and anointed mine eyes, and said
unto me, Go wash in the pool of SUoam : and I
went and washed, and received my sight."
And it is in this way that we must commit our
selves to Christ, if his healing power is to reaeh
us. It is not in what we accredit about him,
but in the relation we hold to him, that faith in
the Son of God brings salvation. We must sit at
his feet, not to speculate about his mode of healing
us, or to criticise his right to heal us or his power
to heal us, but that we may be healed by his touch.
We must venture ourselves upon the credit of the
Divine veracity, assured that Christ is " able to save
to the uttermost all that come unto God by him."
And when we are healed, the new life wUl itself be
the ¦ best, as it wUl be the instant, voucher of his
right and power.
My fellow men! is there any need that you and I
should care about this work of God, or inquire into
the mission or person of Christ? Have we any
need of his help in settling any outstanding accounts
with God! Is there any transgression haunting with
its ghastly spectres the memory of the past, from
whose consequences in the future he might possibly
deliver us ? Is there anything in that future world,
with its weird mystery, its awful gloom and grandeur,
for which he might mercifully help us to prepare?

The People's Question. 1 95
Is there any shame, any remorse, any sorrow, any
sin, any embarrassment of doubt, or blind bewilder
ment of reason, here and now in this fleeting present,
out of which he might perchance be wUling to deliver
us? These questions may not get a hearing to-day, but
they wiU one day, I think. Now they saU out of our
hearing, Uke so many idle tales. But one day the
world's voices wiU aU grow sUent, the visibUities of
time wUl disappear ; and then, * voyaging through
strange seas of thought alone,' with an ' eternal
eternity of eternities ' before us, — then, I think, such
questions as these wUl come up before the grand
tribunal of conscience with a pomp and a pathos of
which we do not dream now.
Whether you are poor or rich, careless or troubled,
a behever or a sceptic now, then a great catastrophe
wUl be upon you; and though you had " climbed the
sciences quite beyond the God and Christ of vulgar
behef," a great cry wiU come to your Ups, " Save,
Lord ! or I perish ! "
Therefore, "Acquaint now thyself with him, and be
at peace : thereby good shaU come unto thee."

gonitis of ^Ltmym in relation to the %xvAh.
"These were more noble than those of Thessalonica, in that they
received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the
scriptures daily, whether those things were so. Therefore many of
them believed ; also of honourable women which were Greeks, and
of men, not a few." — Acts xvii. 11, 12.
THE self-evidencing power of the Christian truth
depends upon the. moral condition of the man.
A flash of lightning reveals nothing to him whose
eyes are closed. So a disinclination to believe what
we think it our mterest to doubt, can turn aside
and render powerless the most convincing appeals.
As moral agents, we are always determined in our
choice by self-elected preferences.
Two classes of people, both of them Jews, with
Jewish prejudices and Jewish sympathies, hear the
same gospel from the same apostles, under precisely
the same circumstances ; and they severally reach
directly opposite results. The Jews at Thessalonica
hear Paul and SUas discourse concerning Christ as
the fulfilment of their national hope ; and they cast
them out of the Synagogue. The Jews at Berea,
with the same national interests at stake, hear the
same apostles, on the same theme ; and " receiving
the word with aU readiness of mind," they believe

Docility of Temper. 197
on Christ and are saved. For every kind of truth
a special capacity or preparedness is needed. The eye
sees only what it brings with it the power of seeing.
We shall see how this faculty for receiving the truth
concerning Christ was trained in these noble Bereans,
in the further exposition of the text.
I. Let us look first at the teaching, the recogni
tion of which the writer commends: "They received the
word." 1. The "word" of the text is more fully expounded
in the opening verses of the chapter. "And Paul, as
his manner was, went in unto them, and three
sabbath days reasoned with them out of the scrip
tures, opening and alleging that Christ must needs
have suffered, and risen again from the dead; and
that this Jesus, whom I preach unto you, is Christ."
There were two things on which the Apostle in his
address at Thessalonica chiefly insisted — first, that the
Messiah, when he appeared, in accordance with their
own Scriptures, was to appear as a suffering Messiah;
and secondly, that the Jesus whose history and cruci
fixion he was then recounting, was, in fact, that
Messiah. It is, therefore, a fair inference that, to
the Jews at Berea, the Apostle pursued the same line
of argument as at Thessalonica. The people were the
same Jewish people, the facts and the issues were the
same in their interest and in their importance ; and
the reasoning of the Apostle would, it is natural to
suppose, be in keeping with both.
In the belief of Saint Paul, Christ had appeared in
the flesh. The grandest deed in the world's history

198 Docility of Temper
was accomplished. The Messiah of ancient promise
had come. " The great photographic shadows thrown
forward upon the sensitive page of prophecy had
taken substance ; " and the hour of the- world's
destiny had struck. " This Jesus whom I preach
unto you," he says, " is the Christ."
This was a position which he only would take who
was sure of his ground, and who felt that he could
make it good by the most indubitable proofs. In
coming before such an audience, chiefly a Jewish
audience, with the bold assertion that the Jesus whom
they as a nation had rejected and crucified, was,
in fact, their long-promised and expected Messiah, the
Apostle implicitly arraigned the judicial capacity of
the Jewish rulers, and condemned it. He tacitly
arraigned, with equal intrepidity, the justice of the
Roman court ; and, in the presence of his GentUe
hearers, he equally condemned it. He arraigns, in
fact, the Jewish tribunal in its verdict of blasphemy,
and the Roman court in its verdict of sedition, and
he openly denounces both. "This Jesus," he virtually
declares, "whom I preach, was neither a blasphemer
nor a seditious intriguer, but ' the Sent ' and the Son
of God."
Nor only this. A series of the gravest consequences,
touching both the national and the individual life,
were pendent on this vindication of the Christ against
his judges. If Jesus was, as the Apostle affirms, the
expected Messiah of the Jewish nation — the " ShUoh,"
the Prophet, the Priest and King of their ancient hope —
then, first, the death-knell of their national religious
pre-eminence had been sounded. " The sceptre shall

in relation to the Truth. ig9
not depart from Judah, nor a law-giver from between
his feet, until Shiloh come:" — then it was to depart.
And secondly, in his insistence on the mission of
Christ as concerning the individual conscience of men
and not the "aggrandisement of the Jewish nation, the
Apostle drew two conclusions, both of which warred
against the prejudices of his hearers, — the one against
the creed of the Jew, who believed his race exclusively
the people of God, and the other against the pride of
the Greek, to whose haughty egotism and voluptuous
religion the doctrine of the, Cross was an intolerable
offence. He who deliberately challenged the scrutiny
of such an audience with positions such as these,
must, we say, have been invincibly sure of his pre
mises. A mere subjective conviction, or the illusions
of a heated imagination, could only have ended in
confusion and disgrace.
2. Having taken up his main position, the Apostle
proceeds to establish it by an appeal to the highest
authority. " He reasoned with them out of the
scriptures," the Old Testament documents, in whose
inspiration he and his Jewish hearers equally believed.
In the first place, there were ancient prophecies,
manifold and direct, announcing and with a singular
minuteness of detaU foreshadowing the coming, char
acter, and work of the Messiah. " To him give all
the prophets witness." He was to be the " seed of the
woman," the " seed of Abraham," the " Sceptre of
Israel," the " prophet like unto Moses," the " priest
upon his throne," " David's Son and David's Lord."
Isaiah, Daniel, Zechariah, Malachi, and the rest, — all,

200 Docility of Temper
in one form or other, with more or less of characteristic
outline, had foreshown the approach and final appear
ance of the Son of man. Prophecy was the Divine index
in which the Jewish nation had for long ages been
studying this purpose of God. Their grandest memo
ries were big with its history, their loftiest hopes
pointed to its fulfilment. Then, further, there were
supernatural occurrences in the birth, the personal
history, the public ministry, the judicial rejection and
crucifixion of Christ, each one and all connecting
indubitably his appearance and person with these pro
phetic foreshadowings. There were not only Btrange
prophetic intimations visibly fulfilled in the advent
of Christ, there was a chain-work of supernatural
vouchers connected directly with his appearance and
mission, showing the Divine in himself and in his
official recognition from heaven in so many ways and
with such a force of evidence, that any legitimate
doubt was impossible. The nativity, the baptism, the
miracles, the crucifixion with its attendant prodigies
and subsequent events, were all so many solemn pro-
nuncements of a judgment not of man, but of God.
The Apostle is dealing with facts. He affirms the
official rejection and death of Christ. This was notori
ous to all. On the third day after the crucifixion,
he declares, that same Jesus " showed himself alive"
again, first to the women, then to the other disciples,
and, last of all, to a company of five hundred men.
The facts were incontestable. Jesus was " put to
death in the flesh." It was a veritable corpse that
was laid in the tomb. On the second morning fol-
owing the burial, the tomb was found empty, and

in relation to the Truth. 201
Jesus showed himself alive to his disciples. There
could be no delusion as to the person whom they
saw. Every recording sense, each of the verifying
faculties, was brought into requisition in attesting the
reality of the risen Master whom they adored. They
see him, hear him, converse with him, and handle
him. They had gone in and out with him from the
beginning, had hung upon his wondrous words, had
seen his marvellous works, and felt the magnetic
charm of his person ; they saw him arrested, accused,
condemned, and put to death. And now when, after
all this, Christ appeared to them — not as a phantom
but in his bodUy form, not on one occasion but
many, not to one witness only but to many witnesses —
there could be no doubt as to the identity, no mis
conception as to the reality, of the person whom they
saw. They not only thought they saw him ; it was not
a mere visional appearance imposed by the imagina
tion upon the senses : the apostles conversed with him ;
they ate with him; they handled him; they watched
him with their human and astonished eyes; and they
finally " beheld him " as, in his own concrete and
unfaded form, "he was taken up, and a cloud received
him out of their sight." It was the direct judgment
of eye and ear-witnesses, the clear, spontaneous, and
intelligent belief of men whose testimony, then and
since, no severity of dialectic analysis has been able
to disintegrate or to weaken.
Then, the question had come up for judicial exami
nation before the national senate, the highest eccle
siastical court of the Jews. The miracles wrought
in the name of Jesus by the apostles, and the

202 Docility of Temper
astounding effects they were producing on the public
mind, had forced, incidentally but really, the fact of
his resurrection upon the Sanhedrim. It was gathered
together in Jerusalem, where Christ had been put to
death. It was called into session for the special
purpose of sifting the allegations of the apostles
touching this very matter. It was composed of men
whose every interest and prejudice, whose passions of
hope and fear and scorn and hate, were all com
mitted against the resurrection of the man whom
they had put to death upon the cross; and whose
wits would, therefore, be sharpened into the keenest
edge of judicial severity in scrutinizing the testi
mony of its abettors. The examination was, we
may believe, a searching one. It was deliberate,
minute, and pubhc. The time, the place, the mode
of the reported appearances, the number and char
acter of the men by whom these were affirmed,
their interests, capacity, and motives, would aU be
raked up with a fierce zest of unsparing inquisi
torial strictness, suited to the transcendent interests
staked on the issue. And when, after this intense
judicial pressure had wrung from the apostles all the
minutest evidence in their keeping, " The councU" —
this body of grave-minded and judicial magnates —
" conferred among themselves, saying, What shall
we do to these men ? For that indeed a notable
miracle has been done by them is manifest to all
them that dwell in Jerusalem ; and we cannot deny
it ! " By the supreme tribunal of the Jewish nation,
sitting in its metropolitan city, called into session
for the avowed purpose of critically examining the

in relation to the Truth. 203
apostles in their testimony to the resurrection of
Christ, it was openly affirmed and decreed that the
testimony was true. Not one of those keen-scented
jurists attempts to traverse the apostles' argument; by
the cross-pleading of an iUusion, a cheat, or a confeder
acy among the followers of Christ. Not the shadow
of a plausible counter-theory is suggested. The mir
acle wrought in the name of the risen Christ is
by the Jewish Sanhedrim affirmed to he a fact. And
in that fact the resurrection of Christ is established.
But the resurrection of Christ, in the argument of.
the Apostle, is not done with when its historic valid
ity is established. It is the basis on which he Ipgi-
cally founds his after conclusions respecting the person
and work of Christ. "If Christ be not raised," then
"ye are yet in your sins." The resurrection of Christ
from the dead requires for its doctrinal antecedent a
sacrificial death upon the cross : if there be no resur
rection, the atonement fails us. An atoning death
postulates a Divine person in its sacrificial victim : if
the atonement is withdrawn, the Divinity of the Re
deemer falls with it, both as a necessity and as a fact.
But the Divine personality of the Son of God is of
the very essence of his supernatural mission: it is the
only explanation of his preternatural ingress into the
world of humanity, as that is the prophetic proem' of
his Divine egress out of the wprld. A sacrificial death
and a miraculous resurrection demand for their logi
cal complement a Divine person. They are a series of
Divinely organised facts, each one of which conditions
and -determines the other two. Take either one away,
and you destroy the organic relation* of the: whole.

204 Docility of Temper
If, then, Jesus rose from the dead, as the Apostle
affirms that he did, he was a Divine person, with a
Divine mission, and died to accomplish the purpose of
a Divine redemption. To the Jewish nation, he comes
as the Messiah, the Prophet-king, in whose mission
their magnificent hope of a deliverer from civic bond
age was to be fulfilled. To the world of men, he
comes as the Redeemer, the sin-bearer, "the Lamb
slain from the foundation of the world," in whose
life and death of sacrifice the sins and sorrows and
death-struggles of a despairing world were to be
healed. So the Apostle sums up his argumentation : — By a
careful comparison of your inspired scriptures with
the veritable facts of which our whole nation is cog
nisant, we have found, beyond all doubtful disputation,
that all that was foreshown, typified, and promised,
concerning the Messiah of our ancient hope, has
met its great fulfilment in the person and history of
"this Jesus, whom I preach unto you." The time,
the place, the man, his teaching, miracles and death,
with all that concatenation of superhuman consequen
ces since transpiring around us; all that went before
his coming, all the events that have happened since
his coming, and before which the world of ancient
thought and morals and the very forms of its re
ligions are being dissolved; — all these openly declare
and publicly attest the fact that "the promise which
was made unto the fathers, God hath fulfilled unto us
their children," and that this fulfilment is in the
person and mission of "this Jesus, whom I now
preach unto you I"

in relation to the Truth. 205
This, then, was "the word," these were the facts,
on which the Apostle insisted in his address to the
Bereans. It was through this majestic porch that he
sought to introduce them into the temple of truth.
The death and the resurrection of Christ are the
foundation on which he rears up his whole scheme
of evangelical thought, and out of which it archi
tecturally springs. "This Jesus," he alleged, "whom
I preach, is the Christ."
II. Let us, further, consider the spirit in which this
teaching was received : " They received the word with
all readiness of mind."
1. Here is, first, the docUity of temper, which
belongs to the right reception of truth. They
were in that balanced equipoise of mind which,
equally removed from a listless indifference on the one
hand, and a self-complete and haughty presumption
on the other, left them at liberty to listen with
attention to the Apostle's reasoning, to think dis
passionately on it, and, finally, to draw logically their
own conclusions. This judicial balancing of the new
with their old opinions does not at all imply that
those men committed themselves immediately, or with
out reflection, to the Christian faith. It means, in
fact, exactly the reverse. They did not surrender
their own honestly cherished convictions as to the
venerated creed of the past — and, with the noble
ingenuousness for which the Apostle commends them,
they could not surrender them — at the bidding of any
man, however important his message, or with what
ever authority he was charged. They could not as

206 Docility of Temper
hoaest men do that, they would not as Jews do 4hat,
until by some suitable and painstaking inquiry they
had cleared a safe foundation on which to justify
themselves to themselves in doing so.
That is, to say the least, a poor faith which neither
asks nor requires a reason for its believing. And
that is equally a poor scepticism which contents itself
with thoughtlessly denying. "A man can never be
said truly to believe what he has not at some time
questioned :" he can never be said to doubt what he
has not at some time examined with critical thought.
The weak credulity that grasps eagerly and gulps
immediately every newly adventured statement, whether
of science or religion, without waiting to know or
caring to inquire, is not less disastrous to the truth,
and ignominious to the man, "than the dogmatic, fore
gone incredulity of the sceptic. In either case, tbe
process is wanting on which conviction waits. The
Jews at Thessalonica rejected the word as preached
by Saint Paul, not because it was not true, but
because they refused to examine the evidences on
which it rested. They did not trouble themselves
with reasons for what they did, nor for what they did
not. It was sufficient that the doctrines were new
and full of strangeness. They were not in the categories
of their wise men ; they did not run easUy in the
grooves of their traditional faith ; and so they could
not be received as true.
Those noble Bereans were wiser than that. They
first "received the word," and then they examined the
evidences in verification of its truth. The open eye
went in quest of the teaching light. And as the

in relation to the Truth. 207
healthy body through its myriad open pores drinks
in the air and the sunshine, and turns them into a
ministry of Ufe, so did the ingenuous candour of
these Berean Jews. They were open to conviction,
accessible to evidence, prepared for results. The one
paramount question with them was, What is the
truth ? not, What do we wish to be true ? They
were doubtless perplexed, uneasy, possibly chagrined
at the unsparing iconaclasm of the Apostle, but
they were not inaccessible to reason ; and a true,
manly, independent reason knows how and when to
submit, equaUy as it knows when and how to dictate
and to be obeyed.
2. The course of inquiry which these men pursued
marks their fearless honesty and their manly inde
pendence of spirit. They were not afraid to examine
either their old opinions or the new. " They searched
the scriptures, whether those things were so." The
great question with which they charged themselves
was, whether those things were true as the Apostle
had put them; whether they were founded on fact,
and were therefore accessible to the ordinary methods of
moral conviction. It was not whether they were agree
able, or in harmony with their preconceptions, or with
their beliefs and customs ; whether they were ably
reasoned by the Apostle, or iU; but whether they were
true. And how did they go about to test this question ?
" They searched the scriptures," their own accepted
and venerated text-books of rehgion. The Apostle
had appealed to these scriptures as justifying the
great point of departure which he had Bought to

208 Docility of Temper
establish between the elder Jewish religion and the
newly inaugurated Christian faith. He had claimed
for his doctrine the authority of a revelation specific
in its Origin, announced in their ancient prophets,
attested by a series of stupendous miracles, written
down and transmitted by inspired men, all centring
in the promise of a Messiah, and having for its
object the redemption of the world from the degrada
tion and the curse of sin, and its re-adjustment
with God in holiness and truth. This was the
Apostle's argument. And step by step, as he con
tinued to unfold its successive connections and depen
dencies to its conclusion, and afterwards iri the
privacy of their own homes " daily," he was fol
lowed by these cautious Bereans. " They searched
the scriptures;" not the Apostle's argument, his logic
or his rhetoric, but the scriptures, the great fontal
spring and reason of all that he had affirmed. They
searched with keen, inquisitive eye, looking beneath,
and over, and all around, to see " whether those
things were so." And there is something exceedingly
winning and manly in this attitude of the Berean
students. The question on which they were chal
lenged was too grave for delay: it was too serious
in its consequences to be trifled with : it was too
personal to be honestly evaded. They were bound
to face the crisis. So " they searched the scriptures
daily, whether those things were so."
We say it was a manly act. The chUd has a
safeguard from perplexity in its ignorance. Where it
does not know, it is careless to inquire. With no
sense of danger, there is no fear. But the man must

in relation to the Truth. 209
interrogate. He must brood over the solemn mys
teries of his being, and seek to resolve them. He
must front the perilous unknown. The 'whence,' the
'what,' the 'whither,' haunt him like spectres which
he cannot disenchant of their weird and fascinating
spell. Whence is this ominous what? what is the
whither into which it drifts ? who is the mysteri
ous being that asks these questions? — into what un
fathomed deeps do these questions plunge that being!
What is life ? what is sin ? what is death ? how
am I to unfasten the fang guUt strikes in upon the
soul ? — these are not questions for idle speculation,
nor dreams for the imagination to toy with. They
grapple themselves down upon the coolest conscious
ness, or they search as with fire the very essence of
life and being. Thinkers are everywhere seeking to
unriddle this mystery of life — its beginning, its
purpose, and its end. The scalpel, the crucible, the
microscope, the keenest and the most daring experi
ments, are pressed into the inquiry; and the student
is learning to understand more or less of its secrets.
I, too, want to understand — not as a thinker, a
student, or a philosopher — but as a man, with a
man's history having its foothold in the past, in the
present, and, by possibility, in the future. I want
some key to interpret the mystery of my own being
as it holds the secrets of what has been, and pales
or crimsons with the foregleams of what is to be.
If my beliefs as a Christian are incompatible with
my knowledge as a man, still let me know. Why
should I seek to beguile myself with fables or make-
believes ? ReaUty is the only foundation that no

210 Docility of Temper
scrutiny can despoil of its worth. To know the truth
and to build upon it, whether it throw up a base
ment of rock or open into abysses of despair, that
is the only satisfaction for a man.
Then, the course pursued by these ingenuous
Bereans was equally a rational one. The argument
for Christianity, if it be true, must be in its facts.
There is " a reason for the hope that is in us," that
implies a reasonableness in the evidences without us,
on which the faith of a Christian man may securely
abide. The realism of Christianity courts investiga
tion to-day, not less but more than it invoked the
scrutiny and challenged the patient discussions of the
ancient past. It asks to be examined on its own
claims with the keenest critical research, whether as
to its documents, its spirit, its authorship, or its
effects. Its sacred books glow with the inspiration of
supernatural truths, sublime in their simpUcity, and
as pure and beneficent in their influence as they are
sublime. Its system of religion is not a figment
raked up from the mythologies of the past and reha
bilitated to meet the requirements of the advanced
present. It is original, because it is from God. It is
not a religion and therefore true : it is true, and
therefore a religion. Its personal author is from
above. " He was in the beginning with God, and
was God." He " spake as never man spake." He
lived as never man lived. He died as never man
died. He sits upon the throne of his glory ruling
the nations, as man never did. To call the founder
of the Christian system a man, as the founders of
every other system of religion — Brahminical, Parsee,

in relation to the Truth. 2ii
Moslem, or Mosaic — were men, is to traverse the
plainest facts of history. To call him an enthusiast,
a fanatic, an impostor, is a blasphemy equally against
nature and God. To -make his advent among men
one of a series of tentative experiments in the pro
gressive development of humanity, as in the case of
a Sakyamuni, a Socrates, or even a Moses, is to
deny the existence of final causes in the government
of the world. The platform of fact on which the
history of Christianity buUds its evidence reaches
backward through forty centuries of revelations,
miracles, sacred histories, poetic songs, and prophetic
inspirations. In itself it sweeps a stupendous circle
of preternatural thought, in which all that a man
need to know of himself, of God, and of the futuri
ties for which he has to prepare, is so written that
not to see its authorship is possible only as we deny
the genuineness of the record. These, then, were the
materials for the searching scrutiny of those ancient
Bereans, with all their hereditary and ancestral pride
about them, proofs which, if indefinitely less expanded
than subsequently they have been, and in no sense
formulated into the scientific system which we pos
sess, were yet wonderful enough to whet their keenest
curiosity, and Divine enough to conquer their doubts.
And so their course was a reverent one. They
went directly to the " scriptures." The problem to
be solved was outside of the ordinary run of the
schools : why then should they go to these ? It was
in its genesis a supernatural question : why then seek
its solution in nature ? If I want to map out a
diagram of the stars, I do not go to geology. I do

212 Docility of Temper
not seek my botany in the retorts and crucibles of
chemistry; nor a system of metaphysical science in
either. There is a cultus appropriate to the master
ship of the several departments of natural science, to
which he must betake himself who seeks to under
stand them : and there is such a cultus for the
study of rehgion. If true, its truth is inferable from
revelation, from history, and from human nature.
The question raised by Saint Paul, as between him
self and the Jewish nation was true, or it was false.
He had appealed boldly to their own scriptures in
proof of its truth. The doctrine of the Christ was
interwoven with the entire texture of their his
tory, with the religion of their patriarchs, prophets,
priests, legislators, kings, and poets. Its shadow was
over their cherubim. Its voice was in the inspira
tions of their temple. The footprints of its heralds
were on their holy hills. The liturgy, the history,
the struggles and the conquests, the very life of the
entire nation, found their interpretation and their
overarching glory in this testimony to Christ. And
the religion to which the Apostle thus appeals, —
what was that ? — a mist from the Chaldean plain? —
a legend from the Babylonish captivity? — a ritual
plagiarised from the sensuous symboUsm of Egypt ?
Or was it a supernaturally constructed piece of
architecture, in which the thoughts and purposes of
God were made to express themselves in a language
of material signs, first to educate the world's infant
thought, and then to embody and exfigurate to
man's senses the incarnation and redeeming mission
of the Son of God? Let the nations answer! Let

in relation to the Truth. 213
humanity answer ! Let the litanies of earth, and
the hosannas of heaven, give answer! But if the
Apostle's argument runs as a central thread through
the entire articulation of that ancient religion, ex
plaining, interlacing, and completing it, then at
either end the conclusion is inevitable. The Christ
of Christianity a fact, Mosaism is true : Judaism
true, the Christianity of Christ is a fact. So " they
searched the scriptures" — with what a calm, manly,
earnest brow we may imagine — " whether those
things were so."
3. And now let us see what foUowed on this
procedure: "Therefore many of them believed; also
of honourable women which were Greeks, and of
men, not a few."
There is a logical consequence involved in this
method of stating the result that is not without its
significance. " Therefore many of them believed."
Faith, waiting on the light of evidence, is met by
the evidence of light, and following that, is led into
the liberty of truth; as it always will be in the
things of God. "If any man will do his will he
shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God."
Will to do first: know afterwards. Obedience is the
spirit in which to seek, knowledge its after-product.
The old physical philosophy sought first to con
struct a science of nature, and then to bend nature
to its science. It put the earth in the centre of
its system and then sought to make the heavens
move responsive to the earth, — and it failed. Nature
refused to be coerced by the theories of her students.
With a perfect system of facts and her sublime laws

214 Docility of Temper
by which to co-ordinate them into a true science, she
refused any interpretation that did not legitimately
recognise both. Given the facts as these present
themselves in the outward world, and the laws as
these are discovered in the operation of the facts;
and a science combining the facts with the laws
is the result. We begin with what is known ; we
advance to the unknown ; and we end with a science
of things.
It is just so in dealing with the secrets of Reve
lation. A child-like' docility of spirit, putting the
mind into sympathy with the truth, wUl get into
fellowship with God. The act of submission to the
given premises of truth brings with it the reception
of light on the meaning of truth. " Then shall we
know, if we follow on to know the Lord." On the
other hand, a self-constructed scheme of interpreta
tion, which assumes the negative of Revelation, or
makes its teachings follow its own sceptical pre
conceptions, is sure to flounder into confusion and
hopeless doubt. And this pertinacity of self-assertion,
the dogmatic obstinacy in which the mind entrenches
itself within the infallibility of its foregone conclu
sions, far more than the intrinsic difficulties of
Revelation, is one of the most invincible impedi-
rnents to the right reception of the Truth. It puts
its conclusions in the place of its premises. It
shuts out the light, and then it affects to see.
But what to a blind man are the heavens, aU
aflame with their lightning-fires ? What to a deaf
man is the thunder-peal, as it goes crashing along
the sky ? To the man whose senses are aU shut,

in relation to the Truth. . 215
Omnipotence itself is a waste of power. I can close
my eyes upon the arch of midnight when it is
raining showers of meteoric fire, just as well as
upon a gas-light. Morning sunrise or midnight gloom
is all the same to the man who will not see.
Now, what the telescope does for our knowledge of
the stars, Revelation does for our knowledge of God;
it makes manifest what before was unknown : and
in both cases the value of the instrument is in its
use. If a man will reverently use the one as he
does the other, " he shall know." If he will not
use it, he " cannot know the things of God, for
they are spiritually discerned." He may speculate
about these things as a blind man might fumble
with a telescope among the stars, but he cannot
" discern " them.
" Therefore many of them believed." This word
therefore, we have said, is a marked one. It stands
as the sign of a mental process in which several
things are combined. There was in the case of
these Bereans, first of all, a clear" presentation of
the truth to the mind; there was then the actual
personal contact of the mind, the individual thought,
of the hearer with the truth, and a process of reflec
tion upon it. There was a readiness to surrender all
old convictions to the authority of evidence, at what
ever cost of personal state or attainment; and follow
ing directly in the course of this ingenuousness of
intent and act, the Ught came, — and "they believed."
And this belief was not a solitary act, or in
any sense a special or a miraculous act. On the
contrary, it was clearly a multitudinous and an

216 Docility of Temper
ordinary result. These were Jews, with aU their
doughty prejudices clinging about them ; and Greeks,
with the polish of their philosophical pride mingled
with the debasement of their pagan guUt, — and
" they believed."
It was something more than a vague conviction,
a mere sentiment of wonder, or the mist of a
bhnding confusion that in the calm, passionless elo
quence of Saint Paul swept over their minds. The
foundations of their religious behefs had, indeed,
been torn ruthlessly away in the march of the
Apostle's logic. But they were no longer adrift on
a sea of doubt, or driven they knew not whither
by their own fears. " They believed : " and faith
is trust, calmness, certainty. It is the eye of the
soul looking through and with the eye of reason,
and resting on the reality of things. God is ever
lasting truth, and faith is the soul's repose in him.
And this effect, it is safe to affirm, will, in all
ordinary cases, be produced wherever the same pro
cess of inquiry is pursued. If the truth be of God
and, Uke him, unchangeable ; if the mind of man
be organically the same in aU, though with constitu
tional differences in each; it is right to presume that,
when this contact is secured, the divinity of the truth
will be manifest in the method of its working. There
is an ingenuous kind of scepticism which, honest in
its doubts and sincerely in search of conviction, rarely
misses the certainty for which it seeks. "Except I
shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put
my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my
hand into his side, I will not beUeve," said Thomas.

in relation to the Truth. 217
That was not the dogged stupidity of the man who
has made up his mind that the prints themselves
are impossible ; but the caution of a cool and dis
passionate rationalist, ready to see the prints arid
to thrust his hand into the side, when they are
discovered ; but not willing to be hocussed by a
sham. Instead of postulating incredibilities first,
and finding reasons for their justification afterwards,
such a man carefully examines the facts, he weighs
the evidence, he founds his conclusions on the credi
bility of things. His very doubts provoke further
inquiry. Inquiry unravels first one thread, and then
another, of what at first appeared but a tangled web
of hopeless mystery, until the result is a certainty
of conviction from which no subsequent speculative
difficulty is able to divorce him.
So the Master met the honest doubts of his
incredulous disciple. So he meets the honest doubts
of all who would believe, but think they cannot.
" Thomas, reach hither thy finger, and behold my
hands : and reach hither thy hand and thrust it
into my side ; and be not faithless, but believing."
That gentle message, as it encounters the beseech
ing glance of the bewildered soul, begets instant
conviction' : conviction becomes insight : a revelation
of truth illumines the intellect and the heart, the
reason and the faith : the doubter and the revealer
meet in the focus of hght : Christ and the soul
interfuse and blend : and the only utterance possible
is, " My Lord, and my God ! " Henceforth, that
man could doubt his senses, could doubt his own
existence, could deny his own consciousness as a

2i8 Docility of Temper
man, as soon as he could doubt this finding in
his soul.
That " this Jesus," whom Paul preached, " is the
Christ," that he lived and died and rose again and
is to-day the King- and Head of the nations, as the
Scriptures affirm, are facts which such a man comes
to feel he can no more doubtfully debate or sus
piciously scrutinise than he can doubt or debate
the existence of the sun in the heavens, or of the
earth on which he treads.
Besides this satisfying conviction that comes from
conscious experience of the vitality and power of the.
Truth, there are the facts without. There is visibly
set before our eyes " the law-breaking and law-
keeping nation of the Jews," itself a living revela
tion, an embodied miracle, a standing witness of the
fulfilment of prophetic scripture in the past and at
the present, and sending onward foregleams into the
future. There is the existence, history, and standing of the
Christian Church, with its noble creed, its massive
hterature, its beneficent influence ramifying into and
permeating all the growth and structure of life and
society ; active and powerful to-day as at the first,
and with a vitality and a momentum strengthened by
the sittings and the seethings of eighteen centuries,
which are prophetic of an imperishable and aU-con-
quering future.
And there is the Christ of Christianity, as the
inspired Word reveals and as the heart of humanity
enshrines him., the miracle transcending all miracles
in its spirit and its grandeur, and making the grandeur

in relation to the Truth. 219
of all other miracles not only possible and probable,
but comparatively poor and commonplace ! He is a
star in the heavens of a royal magnitude before
which all others not only grow pale, but utterly
disappear, — " The brightness of the Father's glory,
and the express image of his person!"
If, then, a religious system, with its history, running
through some five or six thousand years, does centre
in the mission and person of Christ, if he is its
beginning, its centre, and its end, by whose plan was
that place assigned to him ? Was it by Abraham at
the beginning ? Was it by Moses in the middle ?
Was it by Christ himself at the end ? If the key
stone in the arch holding up the world's history
yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, is Christ, the Son
of man, by whose hand was the stone buUt into that
stupendous span? There is but one answer. There
can be but one answer. God has enthroned himself
in the heart of humanity, and that throne is the
Christ. And he who doggedly denies or pettishly
puts aside this testimony, linked as it is with the
entire chain-work of history, or refuses to see under
the veiled mystery of the Incarnation anything deeper
than a Hebrew sage or a phantom god, is not a
candid rationalist, but a disbeliever, and a determined
denier of the Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour and
the Life of the world.
1. The fitness of the Gospel to deal with dis-
simUar classes of men is the first conclusion to
which our subject brings us. The text tells us of
wide diversities of thought, of social condition, and

220 - Docility of Temper
of sex, on all of which the Gospel produced- the
same effects.
There were Jews, men of the one race brought
specially into covenant with God: to whom pertained
" the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and
the giving of the law, and the promises ; " the first
to receive, or the first to reject, the Christ as their
Messiah and King. And' these may stand as the
type of a dogged and infatuated prejudice, sacrificing
all to a cherished idea. " Nevertheless, among the
chief rulers also many" of the Jews "believed on
him ;" " and a great company of the priests were
obedient to the faith."
There were Greeks, the most intellectual and refined
and voluptuous nation of the world. And in these
we have the type of a blind passion, wedded to intel
lect. Whatever loftiness of character can come to a
people through its statesmen, its orators, philosophers,
warriors, poets, belonged to the Greeks. Whatever
can debase a people in intellect, in conscience, in
morals, was found in those foul currents of sensual
passion which, under the most beautiful and artistic
forms, swept through the temples, palaces, and homes
of the Grecian people. But the Gospel conquered
the Greek. It came boldly into conflict with his
splendid philosophy, his matchless poetry, his sen
suous worship,— and mastered it all. It undeified
the Gods ; it overturned the altars ; it shut up the
temples; it unfrocked the priests. The surging volup
tuousness of Greek manners was arrested by the
calm, grand, all-commanding ethics of the Christian
teaching. The pride of intellect bent before the

in relation to the Truth. 221
power of the Cross. " It came to pass in Iconium,
that Paul and Barnabas so spake, that a great mul
titude both of the Jews and also of the Greeks
believed." "Also of honourable women," — woman, with all
her shrinking delicacy of feeling, — and "honourable
women," with the cast of rank and ease and social
prestige drawn close about them, dared to be true to
their womanly convictions, and embraced the Gospel.
And honourable men — men distinguished for their
rank in the state or in the republic of letters — of
these "not a few" became obedient to the faith.
Sergius Paulus, the Proconsul of Cyprus, and Dio-
nysius the Areopagite, Erastus, the treasurer of the
city of Corinth, and members of Csesar's household, —
men and women moving in the higher ranks, and
among the distinguished ornaments of society, were
eager to listen to the Word and among the first to
succumb beneath its power. And there were the poor
and the ignorant, the unwashed and uncared for
hordes of desolate and abandoned men, 'the common
clay trodden into slime' by the heel of a proud and
scornful despotism, — " fornicators, idolaters, thieves,
covetous, drunkards, and revilers," — to whom, rather
than to the polished thinkers of the Athenian agora,
the Gospel became " the power of God, and the wis
dom of God." So gloriously attested is the fact that
the Gospel belongs, not to races, but to man; not to
schools of thought, but to hearts burdened and broken
by sin. It has ceased to be a novelty, or a grand
experiment. It is a Divine sympathy, an almighty
power; and it asks for its platform of action neither

222 Docility of Temper
an age, a territory, nor a class, but the humanity
of man. "It is the power of God to every one that
believeth," be he Greek or Jew.
2. Then, obviously, the great impediment in the
way of any man's salvation is not in the Gospel : it
is not in the ministration of the Gospel. It is in that
spirit of thoughtless indifference, that insolence of
contemptuous pride, in which men are wont to deal
with its transcendent statements.
Let the contrast be instituted between the relative
importance of the two worlds to which man equally
belongs, between what is legitimately the well-being
of a man with a temporal life, and of the same man
with a life that is eternal. Both are real" interests,
because they are equally true; and neither, therefore,
is to be wrongly abridged through any factitious de
ference to the other. But now, let the contrast be
further set up between the attention, the eager, pas
sionate attention, which men give to the interests of
the one world, and the indifference which they betray
towards the other. Take the case of a man, or of any
number of men, whom you may meet in the course of
a day, and ask yourself, What are these men all think
ing about? What is their great concern, their chief
care, their paramount hope and dread in passing
through life ? This mighty moving throng of human
beings that crowd our streets, each one with serious
brow, and hurried step, and silent aching heart, —
whither are they all hastening ? and about what are
they all chiefly thinking? Is it of the eternity into
which they are drifting, and of the issues that await

in relation to the Truth. 223
them there? of the wealth they are laying up in
heaven, and the character they are buUding for the
day that is to know no morrow ? How many, think
you, out bf aU that eager, anxious multitude whom you
shall meet during the next week give, on the aver
age, between Sunday and Sunday, one wise, honest,
self-analysing hour to the question, What is in reality
the estate I am buUding up for the future, and where
and what shaU I be. when that future becomes the
present? And yet these men, many of them at least,
drift into our sanctuaries on the Sabbath, and all are
swiftly disappearing into the grave, with this fever of
life all unquenched. The soul in its fine ethereal
texture, like the coarser fibre of the brain, is being
lolled ou,t of all healthy Ufe by this remorseless
absorption in earthly things. Is it, then, marveUous
or contrary to any recognised law of probabUity, that
the Truth, confessedly the most pungent and pressing
and intangible of all interests, should be comparatively
powerless in its encounter with men? Is it not ex
actly what we have a right to expect? Let the in
difference manifest on rehgious questions be imported
into our politics, our commerce, our Uterature, our
social usages, and life itself would become a stagnant
sea. Carry the same all-conquering spirit into religion
that you carry into the traffic of secular life, and the
wealth of both worlds is won ; the secret is dis
covered how to incarnate the Divine in the human,
and so to transfigure the human into the Divine!
This, then, is the secret lying at the heart of a
decrepit world and a powerless Gospel. We glorify
the material with a passionate realness that is felt

224 Docility of Temper.
to pulsate all through its complex machinery, grind
ing new acquisitions under an ever freshening impulse
of the individual and collective will ; while we gloom
with apathetic and sullen indifference the immortaU-
ties of the spirit, until practically they become the
vaguest fancies, powerless as a dream. That is why
the potential omnipotence of superhuman forces
held by the Gospel, fails to subjugate the world.
So " The cross of Christ is made of none effect ! "

Wxz Jtatttral Jttatt.
" But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God : for
they are foolishness unto him : neither can he know them, because
they are spiritually discerned," — 1 Corinthians ii. 14.
SAINT PAUL preached the Gospel to wise and
eloquent and scholarly men, to Roman patri
cians, to Greek sages, to the doctors and dignitaries
of the Jewish Church ; by all of whom it was
misunderstood. They were natural men, — men of
cultured intellect, of speculative understanding, of
keen and cultured sagacity in the dialectics of the
school, but they were unspiritual men, outside of
the experience and visions of the Christian con
sciousness, of which the Apostle was the inspired
exponent. They claimed to sit as a court of literary
judgment in which to try supernatural things, to
dissect by the processes of carnal logic phenomena
which can be only spiritually discerned. And God
" made foolish " their boasted wisdom.
" The things of God knoweth no man, but the
Spirit of God." The faculties of the natural man
are a splendid working apparatus fbr all the pur
poses of the natural Ufe ; but the natural life is
not the sum of a man's existence. There is a
supernatural world lying all round the natural and
9

226 The Natural Man.
interpenetrating it, in which there are things vastly
more real, and interests indefinitely more trans
cendent, than those which belong to the visibUities
of time ; and for the apprehension of these things
man needs a supernatural sense.
This incompetency of the natural man in dealing
with extra-mundane things and the reason for it
were not peculiar to the wise men of the Apostle's
age. They are pertinent to all time, are true of
aU schools of critical thought and methods of in
quisitive research to-day as at the first. " The
natural man," whether Jew or Greek, cultured or
illiterate, "receiveth not the things of the Spirit
of God : for they are foolishness unto him : neither
can he know them."
I. Here, then, are two distinct objects set before
us : The natural man, and the things of the Spirit.
1. " The natural man " is man as he stands
contrasted generally with the spiritual man, — with
man primeval as at first created, and with man
regenerate as " created anew in Christ Jesus."
There is a threefold classification in which the
Apostle shades off into its minuter distinctions
the exact position which a man may occupy in his
relations to God. He speaks of the " carnal man,"
the " natural man," and the " spiritual man."
In the carnal man, the sensuous wholly predomi
nates : he "lives after the flesh;" he "minds
earthly things." In all his proclivities, affinities,
and distinctive habits, he is " earthly, sensual,
devilish." His whole nature is the servant of

'The Natural Man. 227
sin. His whole life is in bondage to Satan.
" The prince of the power of the air " dominates
the man. In the natural man, the ethical element
may be first and chief in its pronouncement. He
may "live in all good conscience before God." "All
these things have I kept from my youth," he may
say. He may be, and he often is, a man of
cultured thought, of polished manners, of humane
sympathies, a believer in all the objective facts
and formal sanctities of religion ; and yet, so long
as he is all that, and only all that, he " cannot
discern the things of the Spirit." The gist of the
Apostle's reasoning is, that goodness in the ethical
man, and not merely badness in the carnal man,
is incapable of understanding the things of God ;
that goodness — not badness only — is compatible with
estrangement from righteousness ; that a man may
be outwardly just and inwardly chaste, beautiful iri
all his domestic attire, and honourable in his social
life and manners, without being in any discretive
sense a Christian man. There is vital force enough
left in the normal manhood of the race to yield,
under the pervading light of the Christian system,
fruits such as these, without the superadded energy
which religion brings. Only, it is aU nature still,
and belongs to a culture outside of the kingdom
of God.
The natural man, then, is man in the integrity of
his mental and moral powers, without the sancti
fying operations of grace. He is on the base-line
of nature. Whatever the outward proprieties and
cultured decencies in which he disports himself, his

228 The Natural Man.
instincts, appetites, desires, affections, inclinations
are all configured to nature, are the product of
nature, — of nature not in any hard metaphysical
sense as the creation of God, but in the sense
of a corporate humanity inherited by descent, and
which comes to each man deteriorated by sin. The
natural man is man without the redeeming grace
of Christ applied by the Spirit ; and he differs,
therefore, from the carnal man not in the quality of
his being, but in its expression, while the spiritual
man differs essentially from both. The spiritual
man is such by virtue of a new creation. He has
"put off the old man with his deeds," — the inrooted
nature, with its corruption and lusts ; and has " put
on the new man," with its new intellectual and
moral life, "which after God is created in righteous
ness and true holiness." The spiritual man walks
" in newness of life."
" So then" — this is the terrible conclusion, the
startling climax with which the Apostle caps his
scale of moral classifications — " so then they that
are in the flesh cannot please God." That graceful
girl, that noble youth, that affectionate parent, that
accomplished scholar, that lofty poet, that command
ing statesman, that belted Earl, or sceptred King,
while nothing more than that, — "cannot please God."
Beneath the hectic flush of all that outward beauty
there flow the undercurrents of defilement and of
death. " They cannot please God."
2. "The things of the Spirit" are, comprehensively,
" the things which God hath prepared for them that

The Natural Man. 229
love him." Specifically, they are the things which
enter into the life and constitute the consciousness
of " the spiritual man."
A first note of these "things of the Spirit" inheres
in their nature. They are spiritual things. Religion
deals with supernatural objects. It belongs to a
world outside of sense. It is the exponent, as it
is " the substance," of things not cognisable by the
natural reason. " Where the province of the other
faculties ends, that of religion begins." There is a
God, in whose will all existence has its cause :
there is a Christ, in whose incarnate life humanity
gets its redemption from sin : there is a regenera
ting Spirit, imparting the faculty by which spiritual
things are apprehended : there is a future world, in
the attainment of which man finds the complement
of his present imperfect being. And in the mutual
relations of these things, and the methods in which
they are righteously adjusted, consists the mystery
of that Christian consciousness not discernible by
the patient sense or the inquiring reason of the
natural man : " They are spiritually discerned."
There is open vision on the side of the spiritual
man ; there are windows in the soul through which
he looks into the mystery of invisible worlds : '"For
the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things
of God." The deep, dread, unfathomable rifts of
gloom that open down into the abysses of the
Godhead, on the perilous edge of which the cold,
piercing intellect shudderingly stands, are made com
paratively luminous to the regenerate man. " God
hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit."

230 The Natural Man.
A second note of these " things of the Spirit " is
found in the source and method of their discovery.
They are revealed to faith. They occupy a sphere
and deal with realities which " Eye hath not seen,
nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart
of man." They are emphasised as " The things of
God : " they are the product and the expression of
his thought. We have no faculties by which we can
think, no immediate, intuitive knowledge by which we
can apprehend, a being whose attributes are infinity
and eternity. God " dweUeth in the light which no
man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen,
nor can see." We can of ourselves know nothing
of his nature, or of his thoughts ; nothing of our
relations or duties to him, or of the fathomless
purposes of his will ; and least of all can we
have any fellowship or filial communion with him.
Neither the intellectual nor the emotional side of
our nature can find a resting-place in the absolute,
unrevealed God. But what cannot be discerned by
man may be revealed to him. God may, if so it
please him, do for man in relation to himself what
man never could have done by his own searching.
He may speak words, give visions, perform acts, robe
himself in manifestations, discerning which we may
know, commune with, and understand God. It may
be done by a world, by a book, by a person, by an
inward revelation ; and then, as we come into the
order of his dealing with us, we shall know of God
what others outside of this method, or hostUe to it,
do not and never can know. Now, this is what, on
the premises of Revelation, has actuaUy taken place.

The Natural Man. 231
God has spoken out of the silence of his eternity.
He has put- his invisible nature into visible acts.
He has, in a definite, concrete form, made known to
us " the mystery of his wUl." Instead of leaving
man to grope his way along the untrodden Bolitudes
of the infinite and eternal, or baffling him with the
dim shadows of his presence as they flit across the
magnificence of created worlds, God has voiced him
self in the life, in the thoughts, in the language
of men. He has dwelt visibly in our midst. " The
tabernacle of God is with men." " The only-begotten
Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath de
clared him." The question is no longer whether God is
a thinkable, or an unthinkable being (in the jargon of
a godless phUosophy), but whether he is self-revealed to
the intelligence, and therefore within the apprehension,
of men; whether, having organised within us the
consciousness of power, and measured the urgency
of our needs, he has by a process of self-manifesta
tion so abridged the abysmal spaces between himself
and us that certainty and not conjecture is now the
basis of our knowledge. And it is as we are
entered into the belief of this -truth, with its
affiliated experience in life, that we come into that
world of superhuman vision which, the Apostle tells
us, is " foolishness to the natural man." The veri
fying power, the special organ by which these
' visions of God ' are made to clothe themselves in
life and form, is a spiritual discernment, a super
natural sense — what Pascal calls ' an inner reason,'
and what the Apostle calls the faculty of 'faith' —
receiving, apprehending, and interpreting "the things

232 The Natural Man.
that are freely given to us of God." It is a power
inwrought immediately by the Spirit of God in the
soul, by virtue of which we " see, and hear, and
handle, the Word of life." As the senses deal with
the outer facts, as the searching reason deals with
the inner science of things, so faith visions God.
and the things of God to the soul. It is the
gaze of the soul as it looks straight out through
this supernatural faculty into the sun-light of truth
and beholds truth itself — not fictions, imaginations,
hypotheses, but the unseen verities of God, which
are not ideas but facts, on which the soul hves,
and by which it builds. " The eyes bf the under
standing being enlightened," we " know what is the
hope of his calling, and what the riches of the
glory of his inheritance in the saints."
And so, finally, these " things of the Spirit " are
experimental things ; they are attested and become
real in the consciousness of the believing man.
Religion has its outcome in supernatural products;
and these are " righteousness, and peace, and joy
in the Holy Ghost." The spiritual man is trans
lated into a new order of being. He is " born
again," — " born from above." He is entered into
a new condition of nature, in which the intellectual,
the active, and the emotional are fused into a new
unity of life, with its spontaneous will on the side of
God. Hence comes a new order of experience, a new
consciousness, a new ideal of life. The Spirit which we
have received is the fruitful source of a creative activity, -
illuminating, justifying, sanctifying, and guiding the
whole man. It is the health, as it is the harmony, of

The Natural Man. 233
the soul ; the consummation and the perfection of our
whole being. Out of this perfection all blessedness
comes. God and the soul touch; and the circle of
life is full, joyous, complete.
These things' are " spiritually discerned." The dis
coveries which the Spirit makes, the facts in which
he makes visible these discoveries, the realities into
which he inducts the consciousness of the spiritual
man, — these all belong to an agent, to a process, and
to an experience, which the natural man does not
and which he cannot comprehend. Knock as he will
at those closed gates of mystery, they will not open
to his appeal. He may shake out the secrets from all
other things, but the secret spring that unlocks these
" things of the Spirit " baffles his keenest research.
When he has emptied the material universe of its
last fact, its last law, its last mystery, he stands only
on the frontiers of the Creation, beyond which stretch
the unseen realms of the kingdom of God and his
Christ. " Neither can he know them." Set a man down on
one of the jutting crags of the Andes, and with the
shadows of midnight or the scarf of a morning mist
hanging around him he sees nothing of the shaggy,
fantastic grandeur with which he is environed. He
stands on one of the ' altar thrones ' of creation, with
the sweep of the firmament above him, and the
jewelled earth beneath him ; but until the sunshine
sifts its radiance on his sightless eye-balls, darkness
confused and confusing shuts him in on every side.
So with the spirit-world in its relation to the natural
man. That world envelopes him like an atmosphere

234 The Natural Man.
or a sea of life, touching him at every avenue of soul
and sense with its awe, its magnificence, and its
glory; but the perceptive faculty is wanting, and he
cannot behold it. The flashing skies are dark to the
closed eyes. Neither can the dark mind see God.
II. Let us gather some illustrations of the Apostle's
teaching. 1. And first : — There is a clas3 of outward things
which we can know only through the senses, as,
for example, the eye and the ear. Sight and sound,
although simple terms, denote multifarious and com
plex operations. A ray of light passes through the
pupil of the eye to the retina, on which an impres
sion is received which is thence transmitted by the
optic nerve to the brain, where a perception of sight,
or the consciousness of seeing, is produced. We see,
because a pencil of light passing through the com
plex organism of the eye photographs the outer image
of things on the inner sense of the conscious spirit.
Now a blind man, a man born into the world
without this faculty of seeing, can never know any
thing of this mystery and glory of vision. True,
you may describe it to him, you may make him
understand it as a matter of scientific theory; as was
the case with the gifted Sanderson, who, though
blind, filled with such distinguished abUity the
Optician's Chair in the halls of Cambridge. Or you
may train another faculty to do the work of the
wanting one ; as was the case with Laura Bridgeman,
the blind and deaf mute of Boston, whose tactual sensi
bility was like an inspiration, so that from her

The Natural Man. 235
little wooden alphabet she read herself up into all
joyous communion with the deep and glorious things
of God. All this you may teach a blind man. But
the actual sensation, the consciousness, the delicious
rapture, the indescribable charm, of seeing, as the
telegrams of light stream in upon the sensorium of
thought, painting hiU and valley, mountain and river,
waving forests, and heaving oceans, while these all
glow and pulse in mingled beauty and tesselated
glory in the great picture-galleries of Nature, — these
he can never know nor feel nor imagine, just because
the one grand organic medium of their existence is
wanting in him. There is no other inlet to this
thrill of poetic sensation but the eye; and this
failing to act, the sensation is impossible.
So with the ear, in its relation to all that wealth
of knowledge that comes to us syllabled in speech,
in eloquence, in music. Language is thought incar
nate. It is the essence of spirit embodied in sound.
Of course you can talk in symbols. The fingers
may be turned into letters, and two minds may con
verse by a set of algebraic signs or mathematical
diagrams. But that is not the language of nature,
neither can you make it- a substitute for nature.
There is no rainbow to the blind man ; no music
in the plash of the wave to the deaf ear. A fixity
of order determines the relation of outward causes
to their inward effects. So it is with "the things of
the Spirit." The keenest natural perception, the
quickest fancy, the most piercing intellect, can know
nothing of the things of God, until they are spirit-
uaUy revealed.

236 The Natural Man.
2. There is a second class of things which can
be known only by the intellect, the reflective faculty,
which gives us a knowledge over and above that of
the senses. The senses bring in their report of
things, but they know nothing of the science or
philosophy of things. If I put my hand into the
fire, I can feel that I am hurt ; but the pain tells me
nothing of the laws of combustion. Nature gives us
facts, the senses deal with facts : and then we are
left to find our way through the facts to the philo
sophy of things as best we can.
See how this distinction meets us in everyday life.
In building up this outward world with man at its
centre, God manifestly intended that the two creations
should be mutually subservient — man the interpreter
of nature, nature the servitor ministering to man.
And this not for the philosopher or the botanist or
the poet alone, but for all. Still, it is obvious that
in many things, and in multitudinous ways, God
speaks in a language which only the constructive
logic of educated thought can interpret. " The works
of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that
have pleasure therein." But this pleasure reveals
itself only to the search, the protracted investigation,
the far-reaching intellect, matured and patiently exer
cised. To the practised thought of a scientific man,
there is a place for everything and everything has
its place, from the sand-grain and water-drop to the
magnitudes massed in space. To the ordinary man,
nature looks pretty much like a jumble of accidents, a
vast seething chaos in which things come and go
without any remarkably clear relation or order in

The Natural Man. 237
their arrangements. How is that atom of dust blown
about by the winds ruled by the law of gravita
tion? How is the foam upon the crest of a wave
connected with the sidereal firmaments ? By what
subtle process does the heat of summer turn the sod
into fruits and flowers ? There is a classification in
the kingdom of nature which the man of science can
tell off on his finger-ends. This is not that, and that
is something essentially differentiated from something
else, he tells you.- But what to me is this fragment
of sponge which I pick up on the beach? Is it a
plant, or an animal ? Is it both, or is it neither ?
To what classification does it belong ? The dis
coveries and generahzations of science, Professor
Tyndal informs us, constitute a poem more sublime
than has ever yet been addressed to the imagination.
But to whose imagination is that poem addressed ? A
comet hangs out its lamp in the midnight heavens.
All eyes can behold its luminous trail. But by whose
imagination is that silent visitor tracked through the
labyrinths of space ? . To the trained eye, a pebble, a
bit of coal, a piece of chalk, is a book, a revelation, a
grand apocalypse, unrolling the history of cycles of
duration, in which now-vanished dynasties of animated
beings sported themselves on this earth, when man
himself existed only in the silent thought of God.
To me, to you, to ninety-nine men in the hundred,
that stone or bit of coal is a thing for use : it is
material for construction or warmth ; it lights our
fires or builds our homes, — and that is about all we
know. It is a very different thing when science lights
up its geologic history, and hears sounding along

238 The Natural Man.
those stony Corridors the music of primeval worlds.
Nature is a book of hieroglyphics, which only science
can interpret. God has built the world after his own
fashion, and for the benefit of man : and our sys
tematized knowledge is just the effort of the trained
intellect to chisel that plan out of its latent matrix
into concrete expression, and to generalise it into
law. But man can be taught the Maker's plan,
only as he is prepared to learn. The architecture
of nature is a colossal symbolism* but it needs an
interpreter. It is " spiritually discerned."
Then look at the Bible, at the seemingly discordant
but really concatenated departments of revealed truth.
Without the formality of a system, there is yet no
one department of the Bible without its correlation
with every other part. The Apocalypse has its fore
shadow in the Genesis : Genesis has its culmination
in the Apocalypse. A dramatic unity runs through
all the sections of Revelation, articulating itself
in promises, precepts, predictions,- — persons, histories,
facts : not a stray thread can be unwoven from this
entire texture without ravelling the integrity of the
whole web. The Bible is a book, — the book, one
book in the unity and grandeur of its plan. But
to what class of students is this systematic har
mony of inspired truth a discernible fact ? Does
every reader find the Logos in the proem of Moses?
Are the predictions and their fulfilment, the types
and their antitypes, the facts and the doctrines, so
webbed and morticed together that 'he who runneth'
must perceive it? The Bible contains a system of
truth, it has been aptly said, as the heavens con-

The Natural Man. 239
tain a system of astronomy—not apparent, but real;
or as the earth contains its system of geology — not
on the surface, but in its secret stratifications. The
upheaved and tangled rifts of rock are the stony
archives in which nature has written her history, to
be read only by the eye of patient research. And
there is a self-adjusting plan, a scheme of Divine
thought running through the Bible, embracing at
once the beginning and the end ; but that plan is
not given in the bare record, but yields itself up
only to the discipline and culture of the student.
Here, then, are two classes of truths, the one
reaching the understanding through the senses, and
the other through the constructive intellect; and
both have their analogue in the higher relations of
"the things of God."
3. There is yet a third class of realities, which we
can know only as they come to us through experience.
They are in the strictest sense " spiritual things,"
and they can be matters of knowledge only as they
become facts of consciousness. "For what man
knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of a
man that is in him? even so the things of God
knoweth no man, but the spirit of God."
The things of a man — the joys, the hopes, the fears,
the tragic griefs, the haunting memories, the dark
misgivings, of a man! What man can know these
things, save " the spirit of a man that is in him ?" Can
you make another man's bosom throb with the rap
ture or heave with the sorrow that is filling your own?
Is there any mensuration by which to get the sound
ings of a human spirit when some great tidal wave of

240 The Natural Man.
bereavement is stirring up its oceanic deeps, of the
speechless, tearless agony of the young mother as she
sits by the cradle of her dead boy? The father
throttled in his nightmare of anguish, crying, with
scarcely a cry, " 0 Absalom, Absalom ! my son
Absalom!" — the man crumpled into a spasm of
remorse, broken on the wheel of self-contempt, his
soul whipped into a thinking fiery ruin over his irre
coverable sin and shame; — can any one who has not
himself been scorched in the same fires tell what aUs
such as these? The things of a man knoweth no
man, " save the spirit of a man that is in him."
Language is a system of signs for the expression of
unknown things; but there are things of which it
can be neither the sign nor the expression. Thoughts
lie deeper than speech : feelings are deeper than
thoughts : consciousness, the deepest of all, is the
only witness of what is passing in the unknown,
mysterious world of mind. Those great tragic words
so volumed with meaning, — sin, guUt, remorse, despair,
death, — have no sign, and can never be interpreted
but by the reality that calls them forth. Then we
understand them. There is a luminous power in the
personal ordeal which lights these words up with an
appalling import, unimaginable and impossible before.
As " the things of a man " can be known only by
the consciousness of a man, so " the things of God "
can be known only by the consciousness created by
the Spirit of* God. There is no d priori analysis by
which the secrets of either the Divine or the human
mind can be fathomed. Coleridge speaks of a
philosophical consciousness lying behind the ordinary

The Natural Man. 241
consciousness, which a man must have before he can
become a philosopher : he must have the faculty, the
genius of philosophy, before he can phUosophise. And
if this be so, it is stUl more true, and infinitely more
important for us, that before a man can know the
mystery of the things of God he must be experi
mentally entered into them; the faculty of perception
must be born in him by a supernatural process. To
know what the reality of life is, we must live, not
dissect, it. To feel the bitterness of sin we must
repent, not speculate about it. To taste the sweet
ness and the power of Christ's forgiveness, we must
believe in Christ, not just catalogue or canonise his
virtues. These things are the secrets of the kingdom
of God. They belong to the "new name written,
which no man knoweth, save he that receiveth it."
In their transmission to the understanding they are
limited to one method, and to one agent ; and they
cannot, by any dexterity, or sophistry, or escalading
of the intellect, be got at in any other way.
" Religion is a life ; and until it has appeared in
the consciousness, we cannot cognise or understand it."
Hence the reason why so many unspiritual though
otherwise gifted men miss the entrance into the
kingdom of God. They lack the one indispensable
condition. They belong to Saint Paul's category of
"natural men," and they "cannot discern the things
of the Spirit." They do not believe in those things,
not because they are not true, but because they are
inscrutable and they cannot understand them. They
deny the facts of the Christian consciousness not
because they are not real, but because they cannot

242 The Natural Man.
verify them. But how should they verify these facts,
when in them the faculty by which alone they can
be verified does not exist ? They are as blind men,
groping in the dark. They are seeking by a false
apparatus to dredge the unknown in quest of what
they cannot understand. Even that great magician,
the imagination, so powerful a solvent of the
mysteries of physical science, has no talisman by
which to evoke the spirits from this infinite deep.
" The things of the Spirit are spiritually discerned."
Let us be consistent. I, as a non-scientific Christian
man, am warned off the ground of scientific induction
as a territory on which I have no factor of investiga
tion. My religion is not the organ of physical dis
covery. Very well : the scientist is warned off the
ground of spiritual consciousness as a territory on
which he is equally at fault. If I am not allowed to
contradict his conclusions because I cannot verify his
premises by my faith, neither is he at liberty to deny
my conclusions because the premises are beyond the
verification of his science. I cannot make the secrets
of nature open to the lens of my faith: the new birth
wUl not flash its Ulumination on the spectroscope of
his science. "The things of God" can no man know,
but by "the Spirit of God."
1. The limit which these considerations set to the
possibUities of mental culture, is one of the first les
sons we need carefully to study. And there are
few things man needs to know more thoroughly
than the foolishness of all his wisdom, in its
relations to the great questions of the soul and

The Natural Man. 243
sin. Nor is its impotency the only lesson. One
special phase of unsanctified intellect is its au
dacity, its irreverence. In the pride of its splendid
material achievements, it comes in direct antagonism
with God. It wUl not submit itself to the teach
ings of God. It wUl not aUow itself to be baulked,
nor put aside from the track on which it has won
its secular victories to take anything as a gift
from God, whether it relate to the past or the
present, to atoms or to men, to this world or
to any other world. Such marvellous realms have
been conquered, such splendid possibUities exist in
the man, in his instruments, in the tentative and
daring experiments of the age, that any conceivable
barriers beyond which, time enough * being given,
they cannot pass, are scouted as so much exploded
superstition and moonshine. Yet there must be a
Umit to human knowledge, if not in the things of
sense, yet surely in the deep things of God, — a
dark, grand, solemn barrier, across whose awful
summits the loftiest as the lowliest pinion cannot
soar. The kingdom of God is not a star that you
can hunt up with the telescope, nor a germ of
natural goodness which you can develope by culture.
No reverencing of the natural sentiments, no gradings
of the intellect, no high-flown laudations of 'the sUent
. and unknown ' can induct you into that. " The
kingdom of God is within you" — a shaft of super
natural light shot down direct from God into the
soul, turning it into a starry heaven ; — that is the
secret of its genesis. And, yet, hardly the whole
secret. There is a redeeming Christ, before whose

244 The Natural Man.
cross we must bow; there is a persona] sin, which
the proud, self-complacent heart must feel and
confess ; there is a penitence, a faith, a profound
submission to the regenerating Spirit, to which all
must yield, before the royal heirship of the soul
gets its voucher in the consciousness of the man.
And we know of no more melancholy sight on
earth, we can think of none sadder to the pure
sympathies of the heavenly watchers, than that of
men whose pathway of thought lies right across the
footprints and the autographs of the infinite God,
who yet refuse thus to confess him, and who are
even content and exultant at finding out everything
but God himself. We do not wonder at the sigh
of anguish, the deep inexpressible undertone of
despair, that *is felt everywhere to heave the bosorcs
of such men. How can it be otherwise ? They
are solitary, friendless, where the heart aches for
sympathy. They have nothing in the past, in the
present, or in the future, to which they can cling.
On their own showing, they are as bubbles on the
breaking wave, waifs of humanity unfathered here
and beggared beyond. " They seem like mourners
who have come up from the funeral of the great
God ! " How can such men do otherwise than
mourn? Their moan is the cry of outraged human
ity, gasping for help. It is the touch of infinite
pity, bespeaking the attention of hungry and perish
ing men. " Oh that they were wise, that they
understood this ! "
2. Our text affirms, by a process of the strongest
implication, the doctrine of regeneration as a neces-

The Natural Man. 245
sity of man's nature. If in dealing with man we
had regard only to his human relations, or if we
sought only to minister to his more urgent, because
animal, instincts ; if there were no personal Creator,
no immortal hereafter, no sin, no sorrow, and no
Divine Saviour to challenge his attention; the sum
of his necessities might soon be told. But man is
more than he seems. He knows more of some things
than he is wUling to confess. He knows something of
-the majesty of a broken law; something of the guUt
and misery of sin ; something of the moral issues
of life and death ; he is embarrassed and hedged
in with a class of misgivings and a " fearful look
ing for of judgment and fiery indignation," from
which he cannot escape. And he must know more
of these things — indefinitely more of them in their
redemptive relations, — or the knowledge that he does
possess must blister life with its bitterest curse.
There is a passion in sin which burns with a
keener intensity than the red fires that flame in the
sky. " The spirit of a man may sustain his infirm
ity, but a wounded spirit," — a spirit into whose raw
consciousness arrows are shot from the quiver of
the Almighty, "who can bear " that ? Those arrows
torture and scare in the present ; those convictions of
guilt burn furrows of remorse over the past ; and they
create horrors which leap and flash along the future
Uke the seething tides of a volcano ! "0 wretched
man that I am ! who shall deliver me from the body
of this death ? " But if these things are so, then the
change that man needs must be deep enough and
thorough enough to lift him clean out of this terrible

246 The Natural Man.
predicament ; it must meet it and medicate it in its
causes, and arrest it in its mischiefs in the present, and
bar out all its retributive consequences in a future
world : and for this man needs nothing less than the
sheer Omnipotence of God. If the interests at stake
were less weighty than the premises involve ; if the
change demanded were less organic and real,— if it
were only a new set in the current of his opinions,
his prejudices, or his feelings, some new adjustment
in the fashion of his religious sentiment ; then a force
less omnific than that of Omnipotence itself might
serve to effect it. But " the whole head is sick : the
whole heart is faint." The terrible under-tow, out of
which all the processes of life get their permanent
direction, is oppugnant to God. Man is a sinner, a
rebel, a moral leper. The spontaneity of his will is
hostile to the will of God. The vicious defilement
has got into the innermost circulations of his life-
blood. The whole fabric of his moral manhood must
be overthrown and rebuilt, the temple purified, the
altar relumined with its sacred fires, that God once
more may enter his home, and be welcomed as the
ideal and the life of the man. And for this, we say,
nothing short of what the Apostle calls " the exceed
ing greatness of the power " of God can suffice. Any
change less pronounced, any repentance, any amend
ment, any reformation of the man less radical than
this — whether it be effected by education, evolution,
or the progress of the ages — leaves man still an im
mortal orphan, and a moral ruin !
3. Finally, we have the rebuke which this teach
ing administers to the unhumbled questionings of

The Natural Man. 247
man's intellect. " If any man will do his will, he
shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God:"
action first, then the illumination, — that is God's
method. But suppose, now, that you seek to invert
this order, and demand that you know first and
afterwards obey ; that you account it a grander
thing, the proof of a loftier independence, to stand
up unabashed in the presence of your ¦ Maker and
demand of him that he first make it clear what
it is that he does require, and why he requires
it, before you accord to him the consent of your
reason ! Your reason ? Think, I beseech you, who
you are that thus venture to summon the Divine
decisions to the bar of your reason, and what it
is that you demand ; think of what the contention
really is, and of the consequences pendent on such
an infatuated challenge. God does not need you
to understand, or patronise, or vindicate him. " He
is of one mind, and who can turn him ? " Suppose
you turn proudly away from his proffered grace,
that you pour hot scorn upon his Christ and his
Holy Spirit, and mock the whole mystery of his
redemption : you will not consent to be helped and
saved by him in this way. But will that [spoil
God's happiness or frustrate his plan ? The smoke
from the fire of your torment wUl not put out his
life, however bitterly it may curse and blacken your
own. If you could unharness yourself from him
as you career wildly through the vortices of the
everlasting future, your hfe would be only a fam
ished gasp, a miserable, self-consuming mockery of
being, a spark of intelligence burnt to a worthless

248 The Natural Man.
cinder. Rather then, oh, infinitely rather than this
wUd joust with the Almighty, let us count up our
sins and fall in humble penitence at his feet. Let
us " kiss the Son, lest he " continue to " be angry "
with us. " God is not willing that any should
perish, but that all should come to repentance and
live." Christ is "the Saviour, of aU men," but he
saves those only who submit to be saved. He is
the Good Physician, but he heals only those who
are sick. Own the malady first : then you shall have
the healing.
Crush down the life of God in the soul into a
science, put it into the crucible of a syllogism,
make its essence to consist in just what your
reason can formulate into a system, — and you de
stroy it. Take it as a life and live it, — and it
is strong and real as God. " The kingdom of God
is not in word, but in power."

<3Che Jfomtttmer toithitt the leil.
" Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and Btedfast,
and which entereth into that within the veil ; whither the forerunner
is for us entered, even Jesus." — Hebbews vi. 19, 20.
THE entrance of the Jewish High Priest within
the Holy of Holies, first in the Tabernacle and
afterwards in the Temple, was typical of our Lord's
entrance into heaven ; and the allusion in the text
is to the veil, or screen-work, within which the most
significant part of the Jewish sacrificial economy was
enacted. This veU was a thickly woven and magnificent piece
of tapestry, let down between the inner and the outer
chambers of the Tabernacle, impervious to all eyes,
and inaccessible to all persons save once a year, when
the High Priest, on the great day of atonement,
passed within its guarded secrecy with the blood shed
for the sins of the people.
Outside of this veU were placed the altar of incense,
the golden candlestick, and the table of shewbread, —
furniture all emblematic of the people's worship.
Within the veU, in what was called the Holy of
Holies or 'the holiest of all,' were the Ark of the
Covenant, and the mercy- seat overshadowed by the
Cherubim of glory. And here upon the mercy-seat,

250 The Forerunner within the Veil.
itself resting on the Ark of the Covenant, the in
visible Jehovah, the God of Israel, not now as their
dread theocratic King girt with the thunders of the
Decalogue, but as the God of mercy, "forgiving ini
quity and transgression and sin," manifested himself
in a visible symbol to the ministering High Priest.-
The Shekinah-glory, the ' cloudy splendour ' in which
Jehovah dwelt and out of which he revealed his
covenanted presence, explained, as it constituted,
the special sanctity of the symbolism within the veU.
It was between these two compartments of the
Tabernacle — the one representing the Church in her
earthly life, and the other the Church in her life
with God in heaven — that, the veU was hung. "The
Holy Ghost this signifying, that the way into the
holiest of all was not yet made manifest," saving by
a figure. In passing within the veU, the Jewish
High Priest entered into the immediate presence of
God. He met Jehovah face to face, in the cloud of
glory. I. Here, then, is the first significant allusion of the
text : it marks ihe commencement of Christ's priestly
function. 1. As the Jewish Priest, after shedding the blood
of atonement, carried in person the memorial of the
sacrifice into the holy place and sprinkled the mercy-
seat with it in behalf of the people, so Christ, having
by the shedding of his blood in this the outer court
of his ministry made atonement for the sins of men,
" entered in once into the holy place, having obtained
eternal redemption for us." That entrance was the

The Forerunner within the Veil. 251
completion of one, as it was the commencement of
another series of mediatorial acts.
The death of Christ on the cross was the atone
ment in its formal act. It constituted the basal fact
on which all else in the mediatorial scheme was
dependent. To expiate sin, to mark its obnoxiousness
to penalty, to put its forgiveness on the side of
righteousness equaUy as of mercy, the blood of the
sacrificial victim must be shed. For " almost aU
things are by the law purged with blood; and with
out shedding of blood is no remission." So " Christ
also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the
unjust, that he might bring us to God."
The resurrection from the dead comes in as an
after-effect. It holds the place of an attesting power
or witness, intermediate to the atonement on the
cross and the ascension to the throne of Christ's
priestly function. As a personal fact, it validated
the mission of Christ ; in its witnessing power, it
demonstrated the expiatory character of his death.
" He was put to death in the flesh," the law taking
its course upon him as man's substitute. "He was
quickened in the spirit," "being raised from the dead
by the glory of the Father," who thus sealed and
accepted the significancy of his death. "He was
dehvered for our offences:" — that puts the death of
Christ into the category of a purpose. "He was
raised again for our justification : " — that puts upon
his resurrection the seal of the Father's authority.
On the one hand, he dies a Divinely appomted sacri
fice : on the other, he is openly vindicated as the
recognised and adopted Redeemer. God " raised him

252 The Forerunner within the Veil.
up from the dead, and gave him glory; that your
faith and hope might be in God."
The ascension within the veil, the going up from
the sacrifice of the cross and after his resurrection
from the grave, into "the holy places not made with
hands," into "heaven itself" — the innermost shrine,
the presence-chamber of the temple, with its throne
of glory at "the right hand of the Majesty on high,"
— that was the official commencement of our Lord's
priestly life. He went up in person; went up in the
wholeness of his mediatorial nature as the God-man,
the priest and the victim, making all the past per
petual in its vicariousness by the priestly intercession
and kingly rule on which he now enters "within the
veil." " Wherefore he is able also to save them to
the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he
ever liveth to make intercession for them."
2. Between the Old Testament type and its New
Testament antitype, as they are in this way figured
before us, there is a likeness, with a distinction. The
Levitical Tabernacle, with its sacerdotal furniture and
usages, was an elaborate copy, a grand adumbration,
of the greater and more perfect priesthood of the
Son of God ; but, like all prefiguration, while it
served well to indicate what was coming, it could
not reveal it. So while the antitype fills out broadly
and grandly all the significance of the type, it at
the same time indefinitely transcends it.
The priests are not alike, either in their nature or
in their tenure of office. Under the law, there were
" many priests " in hereditary succession, each one
in turn beginning a new epoch in the priesthood,

The Forerunner within the Veil. 253
because "they were not suffered to continue by reason
of death." They were only men, clothed upon with
the sacerdotal vesture, and the law of mortality was
stronger than the prerogatives of office. But " this
man " comes from no priestly descent ; has no suc
cessor; is not subject to the law of mutation: "Death
hath no more dominion over him." "Because he con-
tinueth for ever, he hath an unchangeable priesthood."
" Thou art a priest for ever ! " The priesthood of
Christ is founded on the uniqueness of his officiating
nature as the God-man, the Divine and human in
one person. He was, what no other priest could be,
the incarnation of Infinite Righteousness and Power
and Love. He is, what all other priests were never
intended to be, " the same yesterday, to-day, and for
ever : " living once a Divine personaUty in the flesh,
and Uving " after the power of an endless Ufe,"
now and always, in the heavens, he is " consecrated
for evermore."
Then the sacrifices were different. " When Moses
had spoken every precept to all the people accord
ing to the law, he took the blood of calves and of
goats, and sprinkled both the book and the people,
saying, This is the blood of the testament which
God hath enjoined unto you." But in that impres
sive prefiguration the victim whose blood was sprinkled
was unmoral, it had no affinity with the nature
offending or with its sin. It could have no sym
pathy with the guUt its suffering postulated, or with
the punishment it transferred from the personal
transgressor to itself. There was a substitution of
victims, with no transfer of virtue. " But Christ

254 The Forerunner within the Veil.
being come an high priest of good things to come,"
it was " neither by the blood of goats and of calves,
but by his own blood," that " he entered in once
into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemp
tion for us." " When he had by himself purged
our sins," he " sat down on the right hand of the
Majesty on high."
Then, the Jewish High Priest was himself one of
the people for whom atonement for sin was made.
He inherited not only the nature, but the guilt of
the race ; he was the official vindicator of the law,
and yet its personal transgressor; and so needed not
alone to make atonement for the sins of the people,
but also for his own sin. It was in our nature,
but not in its sin, that Christ officiated at the sacri
ficial altar, " He through the eternal Spirit offered
himself without spot to God." "He was holy, harm
less, undefiled, separate from sinners." "He did no
sin, neither was guile found in his mouth." By
descent pure in nature, he was by choice uncon-
taminated in life. He offers himself a sacrifice for
the sin of others : he needed none for himself. He
teaches others to pray for the pardon of sin : he
never prayed for it himself. He pronounces forgive
ness to all men being penitent: he is neither penitent
nor forgiven himself. "I do always those things-
that please him," he says of the Father. A bond,
intimate and precious as life, binds our great High
Priest to the interests of humanity : a gulf, wide as
the Infinite, separates him from its sin.
And so, finally, the effects of the two priesthoods
were not equal. "For the law having a shadow of

The Forerunner within the Veil. 255
good things to come, and not the very image of the
things, can never with those sacrifices which they
offered year by year continually, make the comers
thereunto perfect." The sacrificial knife took the
life of the animal victim, but of itself it cut into
no remorse, awoke no penitence in the sinner, and
averted no doom. The virtue of the Aaronic
atonement lay in the reflective consciousness of
the man : " For it is not possible that the blood
of bulls and of goats should take away sin." Then
further, in their comparative efficacy, the effects of
the two priesthoods were on a different plane. The
utmost virtue found in the ritual of Moses was
borrowed from its prefiguration of Christ. And if,
in this prefigurative sense, " the blood of bulls and
goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the
unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh:
how much more shall the blood of Christ, who
through the eternal Spirit offered himself without
spot to God, purge the conscience from dead works
to serve the living God." And lastly, the effects
differed in their perpetuity. In the one sacrifice,
" there was a remembrance again made of sins
every year." The old mischief was being constantly
repeated, involving the need of a constantly repeated
sacrifice. Man could never cease to feel his guilt,
indeed he was thus perpetually reminded of his
sin in its unslain and unpurged proclivities within
him. He was " all his lifetime in bondage " to
himself. " But this man, after he had offered
one sacrifice for sin for ever, sat down on the
right hand of God." " For by one offering he

256 The Forerunner within the Veil.
hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified."
His power to " put his laws into the heart " and
to " write them on the mind " of those for whom
he atones, comes from, as it attests the efficacy
of, his sacrifice to expurgate guilt; and the efficiency
of both rests on the inherent superiority of his
officiating nature. He "makes an end of sin:" he
" brings in " an " everlasting righteousness." We
are " complete in him." The atonement, as a medi
atory interposition, acts directly upon the throne of
government, giving to it a new direction in its hold
upon the sinner; but it is also a constructive force,
a new creative agency acting immediately within and
upon the man. " Christ is made unto us wisdom,
and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemp
tion." Judaism was a grand theocratic religion : but
it was, when at its best, but as a prefigurative
shadow, ' a sun-dial,' as it has been called, ' by
moonlight.' " But now once, in the end of the
world," Christ " hath appeared to put away sin by
the sacrifice of himself." And he, the aU-divine,
all-human, the all-adorable Saviour, " the Apostle
and High Priest of our profession, Christ Jesus,"
not only lived and died and rose again, the em
bodied expression of an infinite life, but he lives to
day, lives in man, and lives for man, a Divine-human
personality, " within the veil." " He is our life " —
its fontal spring, its organic substance, its majestic
type, its magnificent, end. "We have such an high
priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne
of the Majesty in the heavens:" "Whither the fore
runner is for us entered, even Jesus."

The Forerunner within the Veil. 257
H. — The lessons taught by this fact are, chiefly,
two, — one found in its relation to the past, the other
in its relation to the future. The veU of the Temple
points to what was, but is not. The Forerunner
within the veU points to what was not, but is. " He
taketh away the first, that he may establish the
second." 1. The first of these lessons has a backward look.
By our Lord's entrance into the " holy place not made
with hands," the sacrificial character of the Jewish
system, is explained, and the system brought to its close.
Its end is answered. "The law was our schoolmaster
to bring us to Christ." Its Lawgiver and its Judges,
its Pontiff and its Priests, its Prophets and its Poets,
were all foremost agencies in the education of the
young human race. It had a celestial origin, an
imposing ritual, a splendid history. It had its
temple, its national altar, its annual festivals, its
proud hereditary priesthood. It was a system
singularly rich in symbolism, and in all that could
appeal the most strongly to the senses of men. But,
with all this, it was in purpose and in constitution
a local and temporary system, — a foregleam on the
morning sky of a coming day. It was that, and it
was nothing more than that. And now in Christ
all that elaborate system is summed up, gets its
completion, and passes away. Its purpose, its types,
its teaching, its grand prefigurations, its imposing
scenic shows, its temple, its priests, its sacrifices, —
all find their allotted significance, and vanish out
of sight in the mission and work of " him of
whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did
s

258 The Forerunner within the Veil.
write." " Christ is the end of the law for right
eousness to every one that believeth."
With the passing away of this system, however,
something else comes in its place. We get in
definitely more in quality than we lose in quantity
of effect. As in the passing away of the mid
night splendour we get the sun, so in the passing
away of Moses we get the Christ.
We get, in the first place, a universal religion in
the place of a local temple. As their theocratic
King, God dwelt sensibly near to and in the midst
of his ancient people, but then it was as a king.
He dwelt in the pomp of magnificent state. His
throne was surrounded with invisible hosts. Ap
proach to him was marked by the most imposing
ceremonies. It was guarded in method, in time, in
place. " Once a year " only was the High Priest
suffered to enter 'the holiest of all.' "Three times
a year " the pious Hebrew went up to his metro
politan worship. The dwelling-place of Jehovah, the
God of Israel, was a shrine before which prince and
beggar alike knelt with a confused and silent awe.
And when on state occasions " the glory of the Lord
filled the house of the Lord," it was the scenic
splendour of a veiled and mysterious being whom
no man could see and live. To attempt to enter
within the forbidden lines, to draw aside the veil
which shrouded the inaccessible mystery, was a tres
pass punishable with death. " Thou canst not see
my face, and live," he said to Moses.
What a sweep into the reality of things, when
from this hard materialism and courtly splendour

The Forerunner within the Veil. 259
of the Old Testament dispensation we pass into
the tender, humane and fatherly teachings of the
New ! " The hour cometh, and now is, when
ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at
Jerusalem, worship the Father. God is a spirit :
and they that worship him must worship him in
spirit and in truth." But spirit is the essence of
a person ; truth is the quality of an action : and
wherever there is a truthful person, a mind in its
integrity of purpose, there is a temple in which
to worship, and there is God to be worshipped.
" The Father seeketh such to worship him." We
no longer stand outside of his dwelling-place, or
think of him as throned on the mountain-top, or
shiver before him as he shrouds himself in the
gloom and ghostly magnificence of the Temple. A
pure worship, enthroning God in the human heart,
makes him immanent in his Church, and per
meates the universe with his presence. And if
all this seem but as a worship of the silent and
unknown, as compared with the gorgeous material
ism of a Deity who sensibly descends and speaks
in flashing theophanies to men, it is only because
the intimacy is so much more vital and close
between the individual soul and God. God is a
reality: man is a reality: and the Father and the
child come together in the grand reconciliation of
love and peace in Christ.
Then, secondly, - we get a personal atonement in
the place of sacrificial types and shadowy symbols.
" Almost all things by the law " were " purged
with blood." Every individual sin was to be atoned

260 The Forerunner within the Veil.
for by its appropriate sacrificial or ceremonial rite.
But this atonement was a representative one. It was
never offered by the offending person, but through
a substitute. The sinning man did not feel himself
in a condition to commune face to face with a Being
of whose majesty and unsullied holiness his own
uncleanness could not but make him afraid. Hence
the institution of the mediating priesthood. The
offender brought his sacrificial offering to the priest,
and he made atonement in the sinner's stead. The
priestly function came in as an impersonal fact
between the individual conscience and God. But
now, in Christ, this veil of partition is done away.
Instead of a powerful sacerdotal order who, by virtue
of their mediatorial office, come in between the per
sonal soul and God, and so hold undisputed sway
over the offender's conscience, "We have a merciful
and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God,
to make reconciliation for the sins of the people."
The priesthood of Christ, while it individuahses the
sin in its personal offensiveness and guilt, equaUy
enfranchises the sinner in his liberty and right of
approach to the atoning Saviour. " If any man
sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus
Christ the righteous."
And so, finally, we get a Divine priesthood per
petuated in heaven, in place of a human priesthood
ministering on earth. The removal of the scene
of ministration beyond the mutations and the im
perfections of a temporary dispensation, now that
it is carried up immediately within the temple
services of the "heavenly places," closes for ever all

The Forerunner within the Veil. 261
other methods of priestly ministration, and makes
them useless, and indeed profane. As the " one
mediator between God and men," Christ is not only
the way of communication with the Father, he is
also the way of access to him. Instead of sending
through some official proxy, we go each one in his
own right, with his own sin, with his own inter
cession. " Through him we both have access by
one Spirit unto the Father." A pergonal, direct,
immediate access of the soul to God through the
one unchangeable priesthood of Christ, " boldness to
enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus," — this
is one of the distinctive glories of the Christian
scheme, as it is now the privilege and the inalien
able right of man. And any mediation independent
of {his, or in addition to this, whether it be of a
church or a sacrament, through a confessor or a priest,
is a sacrilegious intrusion on the sacerdotal headship
of the Lord Jesus Christ, as it is an impertinent
interference with the necessities and the constituted
rights of the individual soul.
Has the Christian system, then, no holy places,
no mystic rites, no consecrated temples, in place
of the pomp and splendour of the imposing cere
monialism which has passed away ? It has none.
With the advent of Christ, the sacred places —
the Horebs, the Sinais, the Bethels, the Tabors, the
solemn mountains, the magnificent temple in which
the God of Israel was wont specially to commune with
men — are all out of date. Voices on the mount, visions
in the temple, prophetic announcements and poetic
songs, are henceforth all sUent as the pyramids of

262 The Forerunner within the Veil.
the desert. God's temple is now the universe. The
human heart is his sanctuary. " The place whereon
thou standest is holy ground." The home where
thou livest, the workshop, the exchange, the mart
of commerce, as well as the sanctuary where men
gather to worship, are all, to the reverence of
Christian thought, consecrated places. Thou standest
evermore in the presence of the eternal All. Christ
has said, " Lo, I am with you alway:" "Where
two or thre'e are gathered together in my name,
there am I," — a veritable presence, an answering
spirit. He is never absent, can never be forgetful,
can never be otherwise than a self-revealing reality
in whatever spot of earth or moment of time the
heart lovingly opens its gates to give him welcome.
But the priesthood, the sacerdotal order, a elass
of men who by virtue of their mediatorial office
come in between the soul and God, — are not these
a permanent constituent of the Christian Church ?
No. Instead of a powerful, fabulous and insolent
hierarchy, enslaving the individual conscience and
lording it over the Church, Christianity knows of
no priest but one, no sacrifice but one ; and it has
neither need nor tolerance for a second. " There
is one mediator between God and men." As the
humanity which he represents is one, as the
maladies which he came to heal — the sorrows, the
fears, the guilt, the shame — are one in their bitter
ness and in their peril ; as life and death, law
and sin, man and God, are one in their judicial
relations ; so there is " one mediator, the man Christ
Jesus." The Church on earth has no place for the

The Forerunner within the Veil. 263
self-consecrated priest. There is no place in heaven
for a merely human intercessor. And he who seeks
in whatever way to interfere with that sovereign
prerogative, who makes it dependent on priestly mini
stration, or relegates its efficiency to the sacramental
symbol or to auricular confession, forgets, while he
prostitutes, the indivisible atonement made once for
all on earth, and perpetuated in its virtue in the
eternal priesthood of Christ in heaven. " When
he had by himself purged our sins," he " sat
down on the right hand of the Majesty on high."
He^^n have no assessor. He tolerates no rival.
Altars ! They are all overthrown. Sacrifices ! They
are all superseded. Priests ! They are all unfrocked.
Intercessors ! They are silenced. And we say, The
man, or the Church, who sets up the symbol for
adoration, who puts the sacrament in the place
of the crucifixion, the confessional in the place of
penitence and faith, or in any way whatsoever seeks
to arrogate to himself a participation in the one
sacrifice and the one priesthood of Christ, is an
intruder on the sanctities of the Triune Godhead,
as insolent in his pretentions as he is profane
and shocking in his act. Christianity knows of no
priesthood on earth but that which belongs to the
collective consciousness of the Christian Church. It
admits of none in heaven but that which is per
petuated in the sacerdotal headship of Jesus Christ.
It clothes all the sons of God with the pontifical
robes, and makes each one " a king and a priest,"
to " offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God
by Jesus Christ."

264 The Forerunner within the Veil.
When, therefore, this organic simplicity of the
Christian priesthood is being perverted by the absurd
pretentions of men ; " when priestly assumptions are
made about robes, and candles, and chantings,
and postures, and millinery," by men who, from
the mitred head to the unsurpliced neophyte, are
turning the extremest sacramentarianism into the
baldest materialism; and when this sickly, sensu
ous, emasculated Christianity is being ostentatiously
paraded and gloried in under the pretence of being
a transcendent religion ; then are we openly traitorous
to the pontifical headship of the Son of Go|^we
have drifted into the shams and shows of a Hybrid
ritualism, as audacious in its assumptions as it is
puerile in its artistic effect. A puling sentimental-
ism may plead for all this as being innocent in
itself, and as appealing more powerfully to the
senses through its spectacular effect ; but it is not
the Gospel, and it cannot be tolerated as such. It
puts the sacerdotalism of Moses and Aaron on the
throne of Christ, the materialistic services of the
Tabernacle in the place of a spiritual Church, and
a licentious rationalism, with its ornate and slippery
illusions, in the place of " the truth as it is in
Jesus." " Idolatry is the worship of forms." And
in whatever way that worship is being offered —
whether to a sacrament, to the position of altars, or
to the grotesque attitudes and vestments of the cele
brant — that worship is the sin of idolatry, lifted
offensively up in the temple of God. " Who hath
required this at your hands, to tread my courts ?
Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomi-

The Forerunner within the Veil. 265
nation unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the
calling of assemblies, the fast, the day of restraint,
I cannot endure. They are a trouble unto me ; I
am weary to bear them, saith the Lord."
2. The other lesson taught by our text has a
forward look. In our Lord's entrance within the
the veil,, we have ihe foreshadowing and the pledge
of our own glorification, as the fruit and grand com
pletion of his.
The idea of a forerunner is that of a messenger
who is sent on to announce and prepare for the
coming of a second party. John the Baptist was
the forerunner of Christ : Jesus in his ascent and
official enthronement in heaven, is the forerunner
of his people. He carried with him, in his life
and death, in his resurrection and ascension to the
unseen world, the fortunes of his Church. He
entered in once into the holy place, not in his
own person only, but as our forerunner — " having
obtained eternal redemption for us." " I go," he
said, " to prepare a place for you."
Let us mark the place of entry. When God
raised up his Son Jesus Christ " and gave him
glory," it was, we may assume, the glory for which
Christ prayed : " And now, 0 Father, glorify thou
me with thine own self, with the glory which I had
with thee before the world was." That glory could
be nothing other than the glory of place in which
to enthrone him in the glory of state. " God set
him at his own right hand." He is " set down
with the Father on his throne." That can mean

266 The Forerunner within the Veil.
nothing less than the highest heaven, the innermost
glory, the immediate vision of God. Whatever the
nature, the fulness, the locality, or the intimacy, of
that antecedent life of Christ with the Father from
which he came on his becoming man, into that, in
all its transcendence and positive reality, he passed
back again on his entrance within the veil. " For
Christ is not entered into the holy places made with
hands, which are the figures of the true, but into
heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for
us." Those heavens, which for long weary ages had
been shut down in strange silence on the distracting
fears and bewildering doubts and fruitless speculations
of men, were opened to Christ at the inauguration of
his baptism ; and afterwards, in his bodily presence, he
went up into them, and took possession of them as
the inheritance with which he should invest all whose
life is in him. " Father, I wiU that they also whom
thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they
may behold my glory, which thou hast given me."
Then, see the identity of interest which connects
this entrance of Christ within the veil with the
destiny of his people. "Whither the forerunner hath
for us entered." These are significant words. They
carry over all that Christ did, in his state of
humiliation and in his ascent to glory, to the credit
of man. They create a fund of merit on which all
his followers may draw, and on which they are
intended to draw in the final future.
The incarnation was the visible entrance of God
into humanity. It was a new conjunction of God
with the nature of man, that by a qualitative

The Forerunner within the Veil. 267
assimilation of spirit man might come into a new
conjunction with God. The atonement, as the middle
term between the incarnation and the ascension,
was the action taken immediately on the part of
God for the recovering and sanctifying of the spirit
of man. By the incarnation, God comes into union
with man as a race : by the atonement, man as
an individual comes into union with God. The one
bridges the gulf between the finite and the infinite :
the other closes up the breach between the sovereign
and the subject, the offender and the offended. Then,
the resurrection of Christ with his entrance into
glory, as the third of these great redeeming acts,
is in itself a representative fact. It attests all that
was official in Christ. It makes absolutely real all
that is bestowed on man. It makes the Body of the
Church one with its Head. It identifies the life of
the Head with all that is personal and real in the
glorification of its members.
If, now, we ask, For what end? in whose behoof?
with what results has Christ entered those veUed
heavens ? the Apostle answers, It is for us. He is
the first-fruits, the advanced guard, "the forerunner"
whom we, each in his own order, are to follow. He
carried with him the humanity of the race ; and in
that humanity the rights, the interests, the destiny
of the individual man. And whUe, as he went up to
his throne in the heavens, the mUlions of worshipping
spirits, the " Thrones, Dominions, Principalities, and
Powers" bent before him as their acknowledged Lord
and King; that at which all wondered, and before
which aU worshipped, was the "new thing in heaven,"

268 The Forerunner within the Veil.
that he comes as the representative of man, as the
man-race, that is redeemed and glorified in his in
carnate form. What he is more than that; what he
is in being that ; how greatly by becoming the Re
deemer of men he has multiplied his mediatorial
influence, and gathered around his throne the homage
of congregated worlds; and how he is now, by virtue
of his mission to this earth and its redemption from
sin, the centre of thought, of wondering awe, of reve
rent adoration to the outlying firmaments and sys
tems of firmaments stretching through the regions
of inhabited space ; whether, as Origen imagined, the
nexus between all finite intelligences of whatever order
throughout the universe and the absolute Godhead,
is the Christ of humanity, — we know not, and need
not ask. What we do know is, that in his present
exalted state, in the purity, power, and grandeur
of his humanity as the representative and head of
man, we have in Christ the one condition, the sure
pledge, the ineffable model, the bright and beautiful
foresplendouring of our own hereafter life. " When
Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye
also appear with him in glory." " When he shaU
appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him
as he is."
This, then, is our hope, — the solemn future, the
yonder-end, the crowning climax of that indefinite
and greatly abused and yet transcendent thing we
call human life. And it shows us into what a
grand reality man is yet to unfold himself, when he
is hereafter fashioned after the glorious image of
Christ, and dwelling with him in one of the "many

The Forerunner within the Veil. 269
mansions " in the " Father's house." What the grand
thing itself really is, what the mystery we call our
selves is to be at the other end — the beginning-end
of the unending future — we may for the present be
content not to know. And, for the same reason, we
may be utterly indifferent to any and all speculations
as to what we now are, or as to how and when we
came to be. what we are. It is not what I am to
to-day, or what I was five thousand or five mUlions
of years ago, but what I may be, must be, shall
certainly be in the eternal to-morrow, that con
cerns me. How the Maker of all things has been
pleased to construct my body and put within it the
flame of his own intelligence; out of what primordial
elements, through what elementary processes, after
how many abortive preparatory stages — if that could
be scientifically a matter of inquiry, I need neither
wish nor care to know. If this human body was
entered by the Son of God, as we know assuredly
it was; if he, the Son of God, has called up that
body into the "heavenly places;" and if in his own
glorified, theanthropic life, he perpetuates and perfects
its life in strange and awful, yet blissful fellowship
with the infinite, all-creating God; then I say, what
ever it was at the beginning — even if it were not
utter unreason to doubt its Divine origin — at the
coming, end it wUl prove a grand thing to be a
man. The "name" which is "above every name,
not only in this world, but also in that which is to
come," is the name of a man ! And that name
transfigures and makes immortal my own.
Put into the crucible of a fierce materialistic science,

270 The Forerunner within the Veil.
man is, indeed, a nondescript, without a parentage or
a home, either in this world or in any other. He is
a tadpole, a blossomed nebula, a thinking fungus, a
polished troglodyte, " a slimy heap of jeUy dredged
up from the bottom of the sea!" His past is a riddle:
his present a sorry jest : his future a blank. In the
categories of inspired truth, he is — in plan, in place,
in the vicinage and glory of his heritage — only less
than God. "Thou crownedst him with glory and hon
our, and didst set him over the works of thy hands."
If, then, the mediatorial scheme of Christ is to
be accepted as an integral fact in the teaching of
Scripture, and if that teaching come to us accredited
by the surest evidences of its unquestionable authority;
then are we brought face to face with the conclusion
that, in the life of Jesus Christ with its perpetuity
within the veil, the heavens of a future world are
open to men. Man is no longer adrift, a mere waif
on the sea of time, driven he knows not by what
forces, or into what future, or whether into any
future at all. The anchor of his hope is "cast
within the veil." Above all the glitter and the glam
our of materialistic science which, in its elabor
ate disquisitions, seeks literally to reduce his whole
selfhood — body, soul, and spirit — into ' dust and
ashes ; ' above and beyond the mutations and the dis
appointments, the weariness and the griefs, and under
the sudden collapses and incongruous abortions of
human life ; and still more, amidst the gloom of sin,
with its foreshadowing fears and apparitional terrors,
its inexorable Judge and eternal doom, a door is

The Forerunner within the Veil. 271
opened into heaven by the mediatorial and ascended
Christ, the "Lord of life" and the representative of
man, thrqugh which humanity legally holds its right
to pass. "Because I live, ye shall live also." In
the realness and immortality of that vicarious life,
man holds the indefectible charter of life in the
heavens. But then, secondly, let us be willing to confess
that this door of entry into this other world opens
only in Christ. It is in the steps of " the fore
runner " that men tread who enter through the gate
into that city. The Christian system, with its found
ation facts— the incarnation and death, the resurrection
and the ascension of Christ, followed by the heaven
of immortality to man — is not only the one, absolute
religion, — that is to say, the religion which is inher
ently and essentially and therefore absolutely true ; it
is also, and as a consequence, the only true religion. It
is not one of a series in which naturalism is a second,
or indifferentism a third, or rationalism a fourth, differ
ing only in their formal technicalities, but all in their
ultimately converging lines centring in the same truth.
It is the only religion for man. It is the only
religion that saves man by his union with God.
It is the only one that joins on 'man's nature with
its destiny in another world where his present
imperfect and prematurely exhausted powers are
to develope into the fulness and perpetuity of an
endless life. It is the only religion which opens a
door through which either the reason, or the science,
or the faith of man can look. Let that door be once
and finally shut, and what is there left on which the

272 The Forerunner within the Veil.
most adventurous spirit would dare to anchor his
hope? Is there, in fact, any thing in man to hope — ¦
any mind, any soul, separate from the brain- tissues
with which he thinks and eats and sleeps ? Is there
any thing to hope for — any heaven, any eternity, any
spirit-world at all? Or is it all a ghastly, blank
desolation, dark to individual man, and bright only
to the successive generations who kindle their fires at
his smouldering ashes, themselves to expire in 'the
cold unrestoring gulf of passionless necessity ' in their
turn ? Only one being can answer for us these preg
nant questions. Only one religion can break for us
this awful silence. But then, for this reason, the
religion of Christ, which is that one, claims to be
accepted and to be reposed in by us as in itself the
only, the all-sufficient, and the absolute religion. It
is no temporary religion, no mere system of religious
thought — though the grandest — which has taken the
place of all antecedent systems, to be followed by
some other system equally fugitive. It is in itself
the final religion. " There remaineth no more
sacrifice for sin." No more Sinais or Bethlehems,
no more Incarnations or Crucifixions will be enacted
among men, before the drama of this world's history,
with its interludes of mercy, its tragedies of woe, its
wild swoop of punitive catastrophes, and its millennium
advent still in reserve, is finally played out. If this
be dogmatism, it is still the ' dogmatism of inspired
reason, of infallible truth, of inflexible nature, of the
absolute God, — " whose voice then shook the earth :
but now he hath promised, saying, Yet once more I
shake not the earth only, but also heaven."

The Forerunner within the Veil. 273
Here then we stand, midway between two alter
natives that wait for our determinate choice. On the
one hand is Christ, with the opened heavens of a
future world : on the other hand is the sheer,
blank, hopeless gulf of naturalism and nothing
ness. With these alternatives before me, what choice
shall I make ? I cannot be neutral, and decide for
neither. On the one side is life; on the other side is
death : but there is no neutral side, on which there
is neither life nor death. What then is my decision?
With the Christ of God, and the eternities imma
nent in him, — or with the scowling negations of
the sceptic, with his infinite despair ? There is no
getting the anchor "within the veU," but as it is
cast in Christ. With him — all: without him — nothing
at all!

fletrospectton the §xms> oi $ xoqxz&s.
"As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in
him : rooted and built up in him, and 'stablished in the faith,
as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving."—
Colossians ii. 6, 7.
THERE are two difficulties, partly speculative and
partly practical, lying at the threshold of the
Christian faith, at which men not unfrequently
stumble. The first of these difficulties relates to
religion itself, and the other to the method in
which we obtain and then preserve it.
Men are everywhere asking, What is rehgion?
Which is the true religion ? Is it a belief, or a
feeling, or an action ? Is it worship, or service ?
Does it necessarily involve the conception of a
God ? And, if so, is it a sense of dependence
upon him, or a feeling of obligation to him, or is
it both in one ? With not a few, religion is simply
an idea which can be expressed in a creed. With
others, it is a ritual which can be embodied in a
worship. And with others again, it is a morality
which can be practised in the life.
Then, as to the method in which we acquire and
retain possession of religion, the notion held by some
seems to be, that it is a thing to be gotten once for

Retrospection the Basis of Progress. 275
all in some crisis or spasm of the soul, and then
practically done with for the future. So men are
sometimes said to be " converted," when in reality
they have only been carried through a paroxysm of
animal excitement.
On the first of these difficuties, the answer ought
not to be an uncertain one. Religion has three main
ingredients — knowledge, feeling, practice; and these in
co-ordinate and proportionate degrees. Knowledge
without feeling is theory : feeling without knowledge
is fanaticism : and practice without either knowledge
or feeling is formalism : and none of these alone is
religion. These three elementary constituents, in their
due combination, give the one substance of spiritual
life ; but no one of the three suffices alone.
Then, as to the second difficulty : — Religion, in
its origin, is a supernatural birth. It is " not by
might nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the
Lord." In its continuance, it is conservation by
progress. The knowledge feeds the feeling ; feeling
nourishes practice ; practice makes us perfect ; and
perfection is the end of the Christian life.
And we are thus brought face to face with the
central thought of the Apostle in the text, — that of
retrospection as the basis of progress: "As ye have
received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him."
What we have is the groundwork of what we are
to become.
I. The Christian consciousness in its apprehension
of Christ : " Ye have received Christ Jesus the Lord."
Here are three words, each one of which has

276 Retrospection the Basis of Progress'..
its own significance, " Christ Jesus the Lord,"— the ~
Anointed, the Mediator, the King. In the first of
these terms, we affirm the testimony concerning
Christ as true. In the second, we embrace his
mediatorial life as real. And in the third, we
submit to him as Lord and King. The understand
ing in its assent, the heart in its moral trust,
and the life in its submission, concurrently act in
this apprehension of the person of Christ.
1. There are two opposing theories prevalent on
the person of Christ, — the one the rationalistic
theory, which rules out his Godhead ; the other
the revealed theory, which is the basis of the
Christian catholic faith. The one holds to him
as the perfection of humanity ; the other as the
incarnation of Deity. In the first, he is a relic of
the past, a consecrated memory, a stupendous fact,
the prototype and the apotheosis of humanity, — but
he is not God. He is the ideal head to which
society in the sweep of its progress is tending and
by which it is to be regenerated, the completest
example and the highest religious genius of all the
ages, — -but he is not a Divine person. He is
neither a vicarious sacrifice for man's sin, nor a
sovereign head for his homage. He is " the man
Christ Jesus," the grandest outcome and blossom
of the race,— -but he is nothing higher. He was
" in all things made like unto his brethren," — but
was nothing beyond that.
-According to the revealed theory, Christ is God
" manifest in the flesh," the God-man — man in all
.the constituent qualities of humanity as we are men,

¦ Retrospection the Basis of Progress. 277
and yet with no abridgement of the fulness of the
Godhead. He is " the image of the invisible God."
2. Two systems of theology, widely distinct from
each other, are dependent on these theories. The
one puts man at its centre, and is wholly human:
the other enthrones God, and is essentially Divine.
Two of the widest possible extremes of religious
life are involved in and flow from these two systems.
The first is a religion of self-development, and depends
upon personal culture. In the second, regeneration
is a supernatural birth, and can be superinduced
only by a power coming directly from God. The one
has its type in education: the other in faith.
Of course, nothing can be further apart from its
opposite than the practical consequences of these
two forms of belief. The one deifies man, and
makes him his own redeemer : the other humbles
him, and makes his redemption a gift. The first
wants power, because it lacks truth : the second
satisfies as it conquers us, because we feel that it
is real. Faith in God and faith in the self-
sufficiency of man are the two opposite poles of the
Christian truth and of Nationalism respectively ; a
gospel of self-sufficing reason being the main article
in the creed of the one, a gospel which makes man
in his ruin an object of infinite solicitude to God
being the fontal principle of the other.
3. Now, there is only one Christ, one faith, one
salvation. Christ is not " divided." Neither in
history, nor in fact, is Christ a variable or divisible

278 Retrospection the Basis of Progress.
quantity that we can critically dissect, eliminating
one part and appropriating another. Christ is 'one
Lord,' 'the same Lord'— "yesterday, and to-day, and
for ever." His personality as Revelation declares
it, is definite. Down through all the ancient past,
from the first prophecy in Eden to the last promise
in the Apocalypse, it is around this one Name
that all events co-ordinate into history. His claims,
as both reason and revelation affirm them, are
absolute. In personal attribute, in official function,
in miraculous work, in his redeeming death, he
stands alone among men, — the purest among the
mighty, the mightiest among the pure. His work
is specific. "I am come," he said, "that ye might
have life:" "Jesus Christ came into the world to
save sinners." Other men have been prophets,
seers, teachers, enunciating great systems of natural
and revealed truth : Christ unites in himself the
origin, substance, and end of whatever truth nature
or revelation has to teach. Other men have been
reformers, lifting successive ages to higher plat
forms of ethical life : Christ is to man " wisdom,
righteousness, sanctification, aud redemption." By
his pure human nature, he touches the great heart
of humanity, and regenerates it : by his Divine
nature, he touches the great heart of God, and
actualises his personality among men. He is, on
the line of his genealogical descent, what no other
teacher ever was. In the purpose and effect of
his mission, he is what no system of reformation
could be. " He is the scintillator of aU epochs, but
the scintUlation of none."

Retrospection the Basis of Progress. 279
4. Now, it is within the one or the other of
these two systems of thought, the one of which
affirms and the other denies, that we must posit
our decisions. We cannot accept of both. If the one
is true, the other is false. " To us," says Strauss,
"Jesus has no existence, or he exists only as a
human being." On the contrary we say, If Jesus
exists only as a human being, he has no existence
for us. A human being and a Saviour are not
compatible terms; and they cannot be accepted as
equivalents in the categories of Christian thought.
It is, therefore, on the side of a limiting, humanita
rian theory that we must range ourselves, and so
deny the testimony of the Father concerning the
Son; or, standing on the revealed side, we must
accept of that testimony, and so affirm the Godhead
of Christ. To repudiate both and accept of neither,
is the infatuation of madness A middle course is
impossible, equally to ourselves and to Christ. We
must be for or against him.
II. The Christian consciousness in its reception of
Christ: "Ye have received Christ Jesus the Lord,"
1. There is a substantial agreement, with some
shades of difference, in the terms receiving, believ
ing, trusting in Christ. Each contributes something
towards the one complete effect. He who intelli
gently believes the testimony, trusts in the promise
and receives the gift. "To as many as received
him, to them gave he power to become the sons
of God, even to them that believe on his name."
Here are two things impUed :—

280 Retrospection the Basis of Progress.
First, Faith receives the whole Christ — the Christ
— " Christ Jesus the Lord," as the bright, clear
image of his person, in all its artless grandeur,
stands sculptured on the inspired page. " The
Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and
we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-
begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth."
All that the partially lifted veil permits us to see
of the hidden mystery, all that the unrevealed
suggests of a mystery deeper and diviner still,
faith accepts. All that we see of the incarnate
Word in his human acts, in his wise teachings, in
his Divine working, in his sublime death, in his
resurrection and ascension to glory, his session on
the throne at the right hand of God, and his
coming in fire to judge the quick and the dead, —
all that a wise discernment discovers of the per
sonality of Christ under the seal of inspiration, the
Christian faith accepts in its reception of Christ.
Then, as to the truth of which Christ is the cen
tral fact, faith puts its signature equally upon all
that. A supernatural person necessitates a super
natural mission. If in the birth of " the young child
Jesus" the eternal Word was himself "made flesh,
and dwelt among us," we should expect to find,
what we do find in fact, a supernatural system
growing out of that fact and allied with it. The
system itself being given, we should expect to find,
what we do find in fact, a supernatural person
its central and controlling figure. Christ and his
system are co-ordinate and virtually identical. We
cannot logicaUy separate the one from the other.

Retrospection the Basis of Progress. 281
Accept of Christ as delineated in the record, and
you must receive his system of truth. Receive the
record, and you must accept the person of Christ.
" They are like the warp and the woof of his
garment, which is woven throughout and cannot be,
divided." Christianity, so called, "evaporates into
intellectual mist and verbiage," — it becomes, in fact,
non-existent; its power, vitality, grandeur, historical
veracity are reduced to a mere residuum of myth
and Gnostic legend, if we accept of Christ without
his supernatural history, or affirm the history with
out the supernatural Christ. Faith thus makes all
the truth a welcome guest to the Christian heart.
It neither elects, nor repudiates. It simply receives.
Then, secondly, on the side of faith, Christ asks
and gets the whole of man. In embracing Christ in
the undivided oneness of his person and work, we
surrender the whole of our personal self-hood to his
claims. The full integrity of the mental and moral
life goes over in this act of faith to Christ. Faith
is thus a single act, embodying the whole man.
It is a single act not alone in that it believes all
and appropriates all of Christ; it is single also in
that it carries with it equally the all of man : it is
the one act of the mind, in the unity of its powers, —
perceptive, emotional, trusting. And so, further, while
it is a single act, it has at the same time a variety,
and fulness in its consequent effects, absorbing and
using the whole collective capacity and contents of
tho mind, in what it thinks, in what it feels, in
what it is. Nothing of self is left unappropriated,
when the man is thus surrendered to Christ. Nothing

282 Retrospection the Basis of Progress.
of Christ is left unapprehended, in this acceptance
of faith. There is a virtual exchange of two indivi
dual persons, a mutual transfer of relations and
interests, out of which comes the subhme unity of
a new and indivisible -life. " I am crucified with
Christ : nevertheless I live ; yet not I, but Christ
liveth in me."
2. The life of faith, as embodied in the moralities
of Christian living, is thus provided for, and follows
this consecrating act : " Rooted and buUt up in him,
and stablished in the faith." Life has its genesis in
a root. And this root is faith in Christ. " The life
which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of
the Son of God." Out of this root comes the spon-
taneousness of growth. And life is a feeding thing.
All life is so. From the flower in the wall or the
limpet on the rock, up to the brain and the soul
of man, all things live by what they feed upon. In
all life there is that into which life strikes its root.
Growth is a result of manifold processes. It is not
a mechanical product. You can fabricate material
structures : growth is an organic creation, implying a
root with its apparatus of life. The corn in the ear
is connected with the root in the earth, the earth
with the ocean, the ocean with the sun, and the sun
with God who feeds patiently and lovingly its secret
fires. To create an atom or a world, or to destroy
them both, may require no more than the instant
volition on the part of God. To grow a grain of
wheat into bread he employs the grandest forces in
the universe; and these are yoked into gear by a

Retrospection the. Basis of Progress. 283
thousand subtle laws interlaced and kept at work by
the active presence of his personal will. How much
more specific and* grand and recondite are the agencies
by which he origiriates, feeds, and glorifies life iri
the soul of man, is seen in this, — that in the one
service he harnesses law, in the other he incarnates
himself; The one is indirect and unconscious in its
action : the other is the embodied blessedness of a life
.that throbs through the universe of unconscious worlds
into the conscious soul of a man. "He is our life."
In the fervid enunciation of figures in the text, the
Apostle appears for a moment to get into a complica
tion of incongruous similitudes, — "walking" implying
action, "rooted" demanding rest; and yet this oppo
sition in figure is consistency in fact. We grow as
we stand. The corn does. The progress upward comes
out of the fixedness of its root. UnrOot it, and you
kill its growth. So in the culture of the soul. We
" grow up in all things into Christ, which is the
head," only as we rest in the fixedness of faith.
Nature and grace bind themselves as much by limita
tions on the one side, as they glorify their activities
on the other. So we "grow in grace, and in the
knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ," as
we " stand by faith."
III. The Christian consciousness in its subjection to
Christ : " As ye have received 'Christ Jesus the Lord,
so walk ye in him."
1. The emphasis here is On the word "Lord,"—
"Christ Jesus the Lord." "Ye call me Master and
Lord," he said, "and ye say well, for so I am!" I

284 Retrospection the Basis of Progress.
am your Lord and Master— not alone your teacher,
your mediator, your example, your helper : but your
Lord and Master ! What, now, is this sovereign
headship of Christ over his people ?
In the Church on earth, we know that Christ is
Lord and King. Mediatorially, "He is the head of
the body." Administratively, "He is Lord of all."
Virtually and in fact, "Christ is our life." "Ye
are complete in him, which is the head of aU
principality and power."
Higher up in the ranges of spiritual life, we also
know "that in all things he has the pre-eminence."
" God hath highly exalted him, and given him a
name which is above every name." "That same
Jesus," who was cradled in poverty and weakness,
and whose life was a blending of mystery and mis
conception ending in a felon's death, — "that same
Jesus he hath made both Lord and Christ." "He
raised him from the dead, and set him at his own
right hand in the heavenly places, far above all
principality, and power, and might, and dominion,
and every name that is named, not only in this world,
but also in that which is to come." There is no
name or rank or office in the celestial hierarchies
high enough to be filled by "this Jesus." None
share the throne of God with him. There is not one
of the kingly spirits who wait upon the throne and con
stitute ' the equipage of God's almightiness,' who do not
own subjection to Christ the Son. " Thrones, dominions,
principalities, powers " bow before him. " All the angels
of God worship him." " Things in heaven " are all
subordinate to Christ. He is the "Lord of hosts."

Retrospection the Basis of Progress. 285
In the material worlds, as these are all massed
into systems and marshalled under law, "He is
before all things, and by him all things consist."
They are what he makes them. They are where
he places them. They get their use and their glory
as he employs them. They march to the music of
laws whose harmony he has taught them. " Of him,
and through him, and for him are all things." All
the economies of being, every constitution and con
federacy of action, whether in creation or providence,
owns his sovereignty, and ministers to his will.
There is no wheel in the complicated mechanism of
nature but rolls in sympathy with his purpose ; not
an event in the drama of providence but is tributary
to his plan ; not a force in mechanics but he har
nesses it to his chariot. He turns the wheel that
moves the worlds. All agencies, all influences, all
events, all the ages, are tributary to Christ.
So in the future of the world's history. " He
shall live : " " He must reign : " " All nations shall
serve him." Man's proud intellect, with its restless
activities; his enterprise, with its broadening dis
coveries ; his wealth, with its glittering stores ; his
art, and science, and literature ; his laws, and
governments, and commerce, — all are coming and
must finally come to serve him. " He shall have
dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river
unto the ends of the earth." "And men shaU be
blessed in him, yea all nations shall call him
blessed." Already the hills are being tunnelled and
the oceans bridged across for the pathway of his
conquering march, and aU the highways of the

286 Retrospection the Basis of Progress.
world's thought and traffic are made to lend him
passage. And "the end is not yet." The certitude
of the Divine counsels necessitates his triumph. All
history foreshadows and proclaims it. Empires, in
their revolutions and their crimes ; Time, in the
tramp of its hurrying centuries, each one more mag
nificent in its events and mellow in its fruit than
the last; Sin, with its frenzied aberrations; Infidelity,
with its scornful hate ; the sorrows, the pathetic
cries, the dark despair, the grand, struggling hopes
of man ; all things on this earth, all in yonder
heavens, all down through those sweltering fires of
perdition, have been, are being, and are still more
to be, subject to the Lord Jesus Christ. The world,
with its tossing and perplexed nations, is once more
waiting for " the desire of all nations " to come,
and " to him shall the gathering of the people " be.
" God hath get him at his own right hand," and
hath sworn to the nations that to him "every knee
shall bow."
2. But there is another aad a greatly more close
and vital relation than all this in the faith that
gives to Christ the Lordship over his people. "Ye
call me Master and Lord, and ye say well, for so I
am.'' What, then, is the inherent reality of the
dominion, the sovereign supremacy, under which we
voluntarily place ourselves in our surrender to
Christ? What is its sphere? What laws does it
impose ? And in what forms and methods is it
.administered ?
Its sphere is specific. When he was demanded of

Retrospection the Basis of Progress. 287
the Pharisees, "when the kingdom of God should
come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of
God cometh not with observation : neither shall they
say, Lo here ! or, lo there ! for, behold, the kingdom
of God is within you." It is where the personality
of the man is — in the mind, in what it thinks, in
what it chooses, in what it is. The mind of each
separate man, the mind of the one universal
Church, — that is the kingdom filled and ruled by this
sovereign ascendency of Christ.
Its claim is absolute. "What? know ye not that
ye are not your own ? " Your mind with its
wealth of ,thought, your body with its splendid
apparatus of varied action and achievement, your
innermost spirit with its mystery of life, its quenchr
less desires, its aching sobs, its stirred, infinite
gropings after the good and true, the beautiful and
eternal, — that, too, is " not your own." Christ
claims to be your Master, the master of the man,
the Lord of the soul, — of the affections, of the will,
of the life, claims to be the monarch absolute*
for this among other reasons, that "ye are bought
with a price." Your ri,ght to be, as existences in
the creation of God, is a purchase. Your mental
life, your material life, your wealth, your working
plant, your opportunities of service in -the Church
and in the world, with all the ennobling .possi
biUties of a glorified hereafter, these are all
privileges purchased by the incarnation and death
of the Son of God. They are gifts of grace, in
vestments of possibility, from the hand of Christy
and he claims to possess and to use them as such,

.288 Retrospection the Basis of Progress.
to reign over the innermost and manifold life of
the individual man, without a rival and without a
challenge. "Ye are not your own, for ye are bought
with a price : therefore glorify God in your body,
and in your spirit, which are God's."
And the mind is free and unconstrained in its
surrender to this authority of Christ. Its subjection
is a voluntary and a self-elected one. It cannot be
coerced, or artificially manufactured. It is of the
soul's spontaneous acting. Man's wUl is free as the
lightning flash ' in the summer cloud ; and, yet, there
is a something within and above that freedom of
the human will. Call it a law of nature, a law of
conscience, or the law of Christ, which arrests and
limits and controls it : there is a law within the
man which he may transgress, but cannot evade. I
am free to think, free to choose, free to hate and love
and sin : but how I may exert that freedom — on what
objects, for what ends, and with what results, — that
is to be determined by the authority of the Lord
Christ. "The kingdom of God is not in word, but
in power." It is the power of restraint, of metes and
bounds, the power of a solemn constraint within and
over all the teeming interests and conflicting forces
and surging passions of that most potent and des
potic of all despotisms, — the despotism of a man's
own mind. And that power of constraint is in the
sceptre of Christ. "One is your Master."
Think then, my brethren, on this most intimate
and all-pervading control, and let the thought de
termine all your voluntary actions. " Ye call me
Master and Lord, and ye say well, for so I am."

Retrospection the Basis of Progress. 289
In the high-toned sanctities of our Christian worship,
on the lower plane of domestic life with its secret
cares and silent griefs and angry frets, Christ is
our Lord. On the crested wave of business with
its glittering spray and argosies of wealth, and
among its turbid and choking shallows, Christ is our
Lord. In all the undress and innocent relaxations
of life — on the heathery hills, or placid ocean, or
in the crowded city, — s'tUl Christ is our Lord. In
the retreat of the counting-house, or the perilous
whirlpool of the public exchange, in the obscurest
corner and nook of life, Christ is your Master and
Lord. You have chosen him as such. Your faith,
your profession affirm him as such, and he responds
to that profession. He is the Lord of your spirit,
in what it thinks and feels and is; of your wealth
and time and influence ; of your pursuits and
pleasures and possessions; of the most hidden ger
minal and unbetrayed proclivities of the soul ; of
the totalised aggregate man — Christ is " Lord of
all." And you are his servants, put in trust with
his goods, stewards of his wealth, factors in his
household ; and he, the Lord and Master, is even
now on his return journey, to call each servant to
his account and to assign to him his final position
and award. But what a weight of responsibility
does this assumption of the regal sovereignty of
Christ entail upon its subjects ! What a solemnity
does it lend to the ongoings of human life, and
what a- tragic interest does it give to the dis
mission of each occupant from his trust ! " What
manner of persons," in view of all this, "ought ye
u

290 Retrospection the Basis of Progress.
to be in all holy conversation and godliness, look
ing for and hasting unto the coming of the day
of God?"

We cannot say our last word on this subject
without feeling how scant, after all, is the homage
" Christ Jesus the Lord " gets from his own people,
how faint the affection, how niggard and poor the
service. When we think closely of Christ— of himself,
of his work, and of his relations to men ; when we
remember who he was, how he lived, and how he died,
and for what end and in whose interest, how he has
been from the beginning and is to-day the Ught of
the nations and the life of men; when we think of
the countless multitudes of people who are everywhere
thinking about him, and writing books in his defence,
and buUding temples for his worship, and sending up
their prayers in his name, and trusting aU the bur
dened finite present, and all the unknown infinite
future to his death, and how in all this he is ac
knowledged to be the grandest fact and the most
stupendous miracle in the world's history; it does
seem incredible that we, his own people, can have a
thought, a feeling, a pleasure, or a pursuit, that does
not pulse with the life it gets instantly from him.
It is not that we do not think plentifully about
Christ, or talk frequently about him; or that we are
not occasionally moved to tears by the story of his
life and death. It is not that we refuse subjection
to his rule; or that we cool with suspicious whisper
ings and the chill of doubtful disputations the fervour
of our faith in his person. It is that the innermost

Retrospection the Basis of Progress. 291
soul is not penetrated, occupied, magnetised by the
all-conquering charm of his personal spirit. The wave
of a passionate or poetical excitement sweeping over
the sensibilities of a listening throng, the hosanna
in which it breaks and expends its transient emotion^
— that is common enough. But that is1 not to honour
Christ. To "call him Lord" while practically we
disobey him, to put his name as a chant upon the
lip while the world gets the homage of the heart, —
this is not the recognition Christ will accept.
That which he does ask, that which he claims,
is the supremacy of our love. He asks to be hon
oured not by empty declamation or the pageantry
of unmeaning show, but by a trusting affection,
by the pure, manly way in which we seek to translate
his own noble spirit into the poor, prosaic ver
nacular of our daily life. To assemble with the
decorous multitude in his sabbath-day worship, to
step out into the vulgar throng who on some
high festive occasion cast their palm-branches
before his triumphant march through the nations,
is one thing : to put on the pure robe of his
spirit in its meekness, its self-forgetfulness, its
tender, infinite charity, and to live it out right
down through all the mire and moil of our daily
traffic in life, — that is quite ' another and a dif
ferent thing.
But that is just what Christ does require. " If ye
love me," he said, " keep my commandments." He
asks us not to lend the patronage of our influence,
or to contribute our wealth, or to cast our garments
before him as he rides in the pomp of his corring

292 Retrospection the Basis of Progress.
kingdom, the acknowledged Head and King of the
nations ; not to weep unfelt, sentimental tears over
his passion as he is projected before the imagina
tion in some rhetorical flourish ; but to obey him
as the king of thought, as the Lord of life, to be
subject to his rule, to worship him as the soul
and substance of our being. That we must yield, or
nothing ! Christ all in all, and above all ! That
is to put the halo of our humble homage around
the brow of him who wears the diadem of the uni
verse, — " The King of kings, and Lord of lords."

^he pttgoom of <&oa nz the Srototh of a §zto.
"So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the
ground ; . . . . and the seed should spring and grow up, he
knoweth not how."— Mabk iv. 26, 27.
CHRIST calls himself a king; and he claims in his
own right a kingdom, which he came into the
world to set up over men, of which, all men are
to be the subjects, and earth and time the only
-boundaries. This kingdom is founded on the mediatorial work
of Christ, and. it is therefore distinct from that
aboriginal rule which God, by virtue of his creative
relations, holds over men. It», is a kingdom of
which Christ is the head, and the Holy Ghost the
prime administrator. This kingdom forecasts for its
territory the entire field of humanity, and it seeks
to embody its prophetic outlook in the subjection
of individual men. The laws by which it is governed
are those of spiritual truth, made practical forces in,
the understanding, the conscience, and will of its
subjects. Its method of progress is in conformity
with the normal economies of nature : beginning
with what is young and new and individual in the
world's multitudinous life ; and advancing as the
world advances, from the unit to the aggregate and
from the immature to the perfect, growing out of

294 The Kingdom of God
one phase into other and different phases in its
governments, commercial interests, schemes of educa
tion, literature, art, science, and social politics. It
seeks to graft itself upon, and it intends ultimately
to subordinate to itself, all the various orders of
public opinion and private sentiment and social
usage, and to give a direction and a management
to the great currents of life and time as they
sweep onward to their predicted end. Finally, this
kingdom is never to be destroyed. It cannot be
arrested or superseded. It asks no patronage from
men or states, kings or parliaments, synods or
Popes, to make good its right to universal dominion.
And the nation and the kingdom that will not yield
to its sceptre of supremacy, that nation and king
dom Will be destroyed. All obstructionists will be
conquered or put out of the way. What it fore-
prints in the possibility of things, it will verify in
the reality of facts. Such is the kingdom of God.
It is not any philosophy of man : it is not any
system of belief in the Church : it is no mere so-.
ciology aiming at the refinement of life. Specifically,
it is the reign of righteousness, set up in man's
soul by the agencies of truth, under the ministra
tion of the Spirit.
In the series of parables of which our text forms
a part, our Lord teaches by a figure how this
kingdom gets itself set up, first in the individual
conscience, and then in the world. It is " as if
a man should cast seed into the ground, and the
seed should spring and grow up." He shows how
between the natural and spiritual laws of growth

as the Growth of a Seed. 295
there is in their innermost working not only a like
ness, but a correspondence, in authorship, methods,
and results. A man casts seed into the ground,
and it grows. So far the growth is a joint product
of the Divine and the human. The husbandry which
casts the seed into the earth is of man : the vital
momentum, the energising force that makes it grow,
is of God. Neither is alone, or independent. The
fruit comes from the co-ordinate action of both. So
is the kingdom of God in the world, and in men.
It is as if a man should cast seed into the ground,
and it should grow.
I. Our first thought, then, is the analogy under
which Christ pourtrays the advent of his kingdom.
" The kingdom of God " is as the growth of a
seed. In the word of truth, as in the natural seed,
there is a final purpose, and an efficient power, both
of which are intended to issue in the production of
fruit. And the analogy between their separate opera
tions is traceable, — first, in the vitality that belongs
to the seed ; then in the conditions on which that
vitality is dependent ; and lastly, in the quality and
quantity of the result. And in each of these respects
the analogy is absolutely real.
1. There is a vitality in all growth, of whatever
quality or degree, that relates itself ultimately to
, God. Nothing can act before it is. No life can
create itself. Seed, whether in the natural or
spiritual kingdom, is the embodiment of a super
human force. " God giveth to every seed its own
body;" and the truth, which is "the incorruptible

2g6 The Kingdom of God
seed" of the kingdom, is the medium of a power'
which always in its last analysis relegates itself
to God. In the material kingdom, you have the
seed, the soil, and the vital force ; all of which
are concurrent but distinct. In the kingdom of
grace, you have the truth, the human conscience,
and the Spirit of God ; and these are equaUy
essential to the one result. Without the seed,
you have nothing to grow : without the soil, the
condition of growth is absent : and with both the
seed and the soil, there would be neither life nor
growth without the vitalising energies of nature.
As in the physical world these three forces — the
seed, the soil, and the subtle chemistry stored up
in nature — must co-ordinate their action in the pro
duction of all growth, so in the kingdom of grace
in the soul. Truth is the instrument; conscience is
the medium through which it operates ; and the
Spirit is the efficient agent. Any one of these co-
factors being absent, the result is impossible. " So
is the kingdom of God."
2. Then, as to the conditions of growth. In the
productions of physical nature, the seed must get a
lodgement first of all in the soil : it must act there
and be acted upon. And it must be further sustained
and nourished by those hidden processes of absorption
and assimilation, through which it emerges finally
out of the mere seed-form into its organic life. " Ex
cept a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it
abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much
fruit." The natural seed may retain its vitality in a
state of unproductive quiescence for a thousand years,

as the Growth of a Seed. 297
just because it has missed the matrix of its con
ditioned development. It may be potentially what
it was at the moment of its ripened birth, as in the
case of the mummy-wheat of Egypt, old, perhaps,
when history itself began; but unless you give it a
lodgement in the fostering motherhood of the earth,
it will not germinate into bread-making corn, any
more than the mummy itself will develope into a
man, — and until the seed does germinate, it wiU
bring forth no fruit. So it is with the truth, which
is " the seed of the kingdom," the germ of God's
life in the soul. The reception of that truth into the
mind, acted upon by the Spirit, constitutes the ordinary
productive medium through which conversion ensues.
The mind must embrace the truth ; the truth must
occupy the mind ; and it must be nourished and
stimulated there in the brooding sanctities of thought,
in the tenderness of feeling, and in the conscientious
ness of action. "Let the word of Christ dwell in
you richly in all wisdom." We are to "receive with
meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save
the soul." And out of this subjective contact of the
mind with the truth in the laboratories of thought,
under the holy fire kindled by the sanctifying Spirit,
as out of a congenial soil, there comes up " first
the blade, then the ear, then the full corn" of a
rich spiritual fruitage, the harvest of a godly life.
The word of God " effectually worketh in them that
believe." 3. And so, finally, in the reality and glory of the
effect, we have a stUl further application of this
analogy. "The kingdom of God is as if a man

2g8 The Kingdom of God
should cast seed into the ground, and it should spring
and grow up." And whether it be a grain of wheat
in a field or a great spiritual truth in the soul, this
power of growth is one of the most astonishing things
in the works of God. It is a perpetual miracle, the
majesty of which is concealed only by its commonness.
Seeds are thoughts, the rudiments of things : they are
so many points of contact at which a Divine action is
set up in its commerce with man. You sow a field
with grain, and you are in fact planting so many
centres of creative energy. Seeds sown are deeds
accomplished. Unsown, they are so many atoms of
dead dust : committed to the custody of the soil,
and touched by the currents of the creative will,
they are among the forces of Omnipotence. " And
God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb
yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit!" — and
so mountain and meadow, forest and glen, flamed
out in beauty, a revelation responsive to the thought
of God.
" So is the kingdom of God " in man. Get the
truth into the mind; spread its influence through
the family and the school; sow it broadcast over
the nations ; and it will work there — sUently it may
be, and by methods too subtle for analysis, but all
too potent for the cunning of man to arrest. A coiv
relation of forces, as real as that which belongs to
the dynamics of the baldest materialism, carries
forward a process, which first awakens the conscience;
then invigorates thought into self-inspection ; and
lastly, conquers passion and lust and sin, toning
into chasteness and beauty the coarsest affections,

as the Growth of a Seed. 299
and shedding a celestial radiance over the once brutal
life and desolate home. It is " as if the seed should
spring and grow up, he knoweth not how." Through
the misconceptions of ignorance, and superstition, and
fanatical abuse ; in spite of the opposition of a brutal
scorn, of fierce persecution, and passionate vice,
and banded interest, and scholarly scepticism, and
imperial edict ; against the hate of unclean hearts
and the contumacy of hostile wills in individual and
confederated men, its grand and mighty principles
have been gradually transmuting the heathenism of
humanity into the righteousness of truth, rectitude
of life, and the sanctities of God. " Go," said its
Divine author, — " Go into all the world, and preach
the gospel." And the world, as it has continued to
slough off its paganism century after century, and to
deck itself with the robes of moral life and beauty,
has been, as it is to-day, the witness to the Divine
authority and power of that command. Souls and
seeds are the great print — the illuminated letters — in
which God speaks of himself to men.
II. Let us look at the agencies of law lying at the
back of this analogy: "As if a man should cast seed
into the ground, and it should spring and grow up."
1. Here is, first, the law as it pertains to God.
" The seed springeth," no man " knoweth how."
The preparation of that seed, the manipulation of
the soil, and all the appliances belonging to the
physical husbandry are of man. Growth is of God.
In the fructification of a grain of wheat, we have
said, there is a- power lying back of all secondary

300 The Kingdom of God
agencies a power which, when traced up to its
last reachable analysis, sets us down immediately
in the presence of God. It is just the grand old
wonder of the multiplication of the five loaves, —
with this difference, that in the one case there
was the Creator's will putting forth its might from
behind the mechanics of nature, and in the other
there is the same will working in harmony with
nature. In both " it is God that worketh." In
neither is it other or less. Give us something to
start with, says the man of science, — the tiniest
cell, the minutest egg, the protoplastic atom, the
smallest fragment of the primeval world-stuff out of
which life is evolved — and, without any supernatural
intermeddling, we can manage all the rest. But it
is just in that indefinable something, that imaginary
atom, that so-called primordial cell with its electric
currents and subtle potential forces, that we postu
late the action of the creative will. God is himself
ihe life, antedating all the conditions of life, and
creating them. The seed-germ out of which the
organism comes is antecedent to the organism it
developes : but the creative life is itself the parent
of the germ. God is the all-sufficient, the aU-
efficient life, of which all other life is but the efflor
escence. So is it in the setting up of his kingdom
in the soul. In whatever form that kingdom is set
up, in one man or in many, in one age or nation
or in all, it is never set up out of nature, but in
the power of God.
Go back in imagination to the beginning of
the Christian era, when the Gospel was but as

as the Growth of a Seed. 301
a "leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three
measures of meal." Its Founder has just been put
to death as an impostor and deceiver of the people.
His disciples are few in number, and powerless in
influence : they are without parentage, or learning,
or any of the cultured arts of persuasion that could
make them attractive or even tolerable to their
fellow-men. They were, in the current thought of
the times, a band of fanatics, against whom the
phUosophy and the learning, the power and the
rank, the wealth and the religion, the passion and
the sin of the age scowled in open and malignant
hate. Their message was provocative of the most
contemptuous scorn. It traversed the sentiments, it
rebuked the usages, it condemned the sins of the
very men whom it sought to win. Favoured by no
public school, in league with no secular power, and
offering no earthly reward, it refused to pander to
the prejudices or stoop to the passions of men. It
went straight in the teeth of customs sharp as steel
and fast as the hills. And yet, within the first five
decades, it shook to its centre the world in its
confederated thought, and custom, and sin. At the
first ignored, then despised, then trampled on in
the blood of its martyred heroes, the Gospel went
on its march pf mercy as the heavens move on in
their resistless might, until it put its hand upon
the throne of the Cassars, and gave its laws to the
world. " So mightily grew the word of God and
prevailed." It was " mighty through God." That
was the otherwise inexplicable secret.
The conversion of individual men is a standing wit-

302 The Kingdom of God
ness to the inherent supernaturahsm which belongs
to this advent of the kingdom of God. Wherever
the Gospel comes into its appropriate contact with
man, its power to save is the seal set by the finger
of God to its truth. And men of all ranks, in ail
the orders and grades and conditions of life, have
been and are being its witnesses. Men of every
degree of refinement and culture, of every dye of
degradation and sin — the voluptuous, the idolater,
the blasphemer, the persecutor, the harlot and the
thief, the embruted slave and the pampered debau
chee — have all been, not once only but times innu
merable, " turned from darkness unto light and from
the power of Satan unto God " by this power of
the Christian truth. It penetrates the most inac
cessible retreats ; it conquers the most brutal ignor
ance, and softens the most savage ferocity ; it wins
sullen apathy, and rekindles burnt-out sympathy,
and restores hope to the frenzied and despairing ;
and out of all these incongruous elements and de
graded habits, it creates a new order of manhood
among the races of men. " The kingdom of God
is not in word, but in power." It is a power that
arrests men. It provokes attention. It awakens
feeling. It kindles the slumbering faculties into a
potent energy. It convicts of sin. It will make
itself heard and felt without waiting for the man
damus of the intellect or the passions of men.
And if to transform one dead human soul into a
living spirit, if to snatch a single dying thief to
life when far down the slopes of perdition and to
carry .him on the same day to paradise, bespeaks

as the Growth of a Seed. 303
a power issuing as directly from God as that which
lifts the ocean or wings the lightning, — what are we
to say of the tens and hundreds of thousands of
similar -achievements of power which the Gospel in
every age has left upon its track ?
This power of creating life in the heart of a dead
world by means of the truth, has from the beginning
been the evidence on which the Christian system has
founded the proof of its Divine origin. It stands on
the testimony of facts. It appeals to its creative energy
in " turning men from the power of Satan unto God,"
rather than to the homage of cultured thought, or to
any outward manifestoes and applauding patronage
on the part of its adherents. It has put holy tempers
in bosoms once foul and black with hideous sin. It
has opened blind eyes, and unstopped deaf ears, and
changed wicked hearts, and created manly lives and
sweet, pure homes ; and has sent up myriads of men
and women, once the slaves of lust and pride and
ignorance and shameless vice, now washed and made
beautiful, into the heavens of God. It has christian
ised humanity. It has created a new vocabulary of
language, a new order of worship, a new calendar of
time ; wiser and juster methods of government, purer
social usages, and whatever gives integrity and con
fidence to the commercial activities in which each
man deals with his fellow-men ; but chiefly, its
grand distinction is, that it is God's method of
saving men. Broken hearts rather than critical
intellects, refined and beautiful lives more than the
artificialities of society, are the insignia of its triumph.
For, in its view, the soul of each man is an in-

304 The Kingdom of God
dividual personality of more worth than the linked
immensity of material nature ; in that it can be
individually saved, and may be individually lost.
And it is precisely here, upon the evidence of its
practical power, that the Gospel founds its prophecy
of the future. Whatever it has been, and now is, in
its conflict with the manifold forms of human want
and human woe and the multiform and inveterate
workings of sinful error, that it will continue to be.
The necessity of the Gospel — the sense of sin and
guilt, and the dread remorse begotten in view of a
lost eternal future — must cease to haunt the human
spirit, before the application of the Gospel wiU cease.
In that case, humanity must change, and so no longer
need the Gospel; or the Gospel must change, and
so no longer be fitted for men ; or God must change
in the purposes of his plan, and so dissolve the bond
which from the beginning he hath set up between
himself and them. But " the gifts and calling of
God are without repentance." The redeeming econo
my strikes backward in its first inception to the first
man, and forward through all the succeeding ages
down to the last of the human race.
For eighteen hundred years and more, Christianity
has virtually been creating the humanities of the
world. It has not only built itself into the frame
work of history, it has built up all history out of
itself. And the question, therefore, whether now, at
last, it is to be put upon its trial as to whether
it shall continue to rule or be pronounced effete ;
whether being cast as it is now into the crucible of
an intensely sceptical age, it shall still go on from

as the Growth of a Seed. 305
conquering to conquer, or be cast aside as a vener
able and gigantic failure, admits of but one answer.
The question of its continuance is settled in its
origin, as that is settled in the divinity of its effects.
"Art thou a king?" asked Pilate: "I am a king,"
was the grand reply, but "my kingdom is not of
this world," else " would my servants fight " for
me. It is a supernatural empire, set up by the truth
over the wills and hearts of men. And this kingdom,
founded on truth and not by force, and set up in
the royalty and rule of regenerated human spirits,
claims the brotherhood of the race for its subjects.
Its plan, geographically, maps out the countries of
the earth for its territory. Its reign, chronologically,
sweeps through all the ages of time. It seeks to
put its sceptre upon humanity and individual man.
Falling back upon " the secret place of thunder,"
and wielding in his conscious right all its mightiest
agencies, Jesus dared to say : " And I, if I be lifted
up, will draw all men unto me"! This Bethlehem-
born man, this Galilean peasant, surrounded by a
handful of uninfluential men, and with no machi
nery for kingdom-making, deliberately proposes to
make himself the king of men, the king over human
thought, the lawgiver of humanity, to rule over the
wills and the affections, and the homesteads, and
the brotherhoods of the race. The kingdom of truth
of which he is the king, aims to win the world of
men, the parliament of nations, for its subjects. It
' is to be an empire not of Gentries or of Jews, not
of Oriental or Occidental tribes, but of men — men
"out of "every nation, and kindred, and people, arid
x

306 The Kingdom of God
tongue." And he predicts for its continuance a
futurity co-existent with the ages of time. "Go ye
into aU the world, and preach the gospel to every
creature." " Go, preach " it to the Jew and to the
Greek, to the Barbarian and the Scythian, to the
.mitred pontiff and the sceptred monarch. " Go
into all the world, and preach it" — in the town and
city, in the Portico and the Grove, on Mars' Hill
and the Capitol. Go where the merchant finds his
exchange, and the scholar his school, and the artist
nis studies, and the pleasure-seeker his paradise,
and the sage his audience. Go where the sick man
weeps, and the worn man droops, and the broken
in heart and the desponding in hope die in despair!
" Go, preach the gospel to every creature : " — " and
lo ! I am with you alway, even to the end of the
world." And he who feeds the springs in the valley,
and leads on the grand processions of nature with
out asking the permission or the help of man,
sets himself down in these matchless words as
the abettor of his truth to the end of time. It is
too late for men to patronise the Gospel. It is
madness to oppose it. It is the sheerest fatuity
for men, single or associated, in governments or in
synods, in congresses of science or haUs of scepti
cism, to caU into debate the presence or seek
to impede the march of the kingdom of Christ.
" Christianity," some one has said, " came into the
world without asking any man's leave," and it will
certainly stay there in spite of any man's dismission.
Until its mission is accomplished in the universal
regeneration of humanity, "the heathen" may "rage,

as the Growth of a Seed. 307
and the people imagine a vain thing ; " but the Gospel
abides, even as the stars abide aloft in then- glory,
the same calm, grand, light-dispensing orbs as when
they first flashed their splendours on the young
creation. "The Lord of hosts hath purposed, and
who shaU disannul it ? And his hand is stretched
out, and who shall turn it back ? "
Martin Luther is reported to have said that,
" sometimes, over the folly of his creatures, God
Almighty must laugh ! " And the inspired Psalmist,
we know, did say, when speaking of the rage of
men against the Lord and against his Anointed,
" He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh ; the
Lord shall have them in derision." And if under
any conceivable outbreak of human folly this ter
rible irony of God can be imagined, when is it
bo conceivable as over these vaticinations of the
false prophets, the ' profane babblers,' the professional
betrayers, the scientific mockers, the dishonest per-
verters, the motley- group of the disbelievers, men
whose yeasty intellects are frothing out their insane
predictions of a defunct Christianity, with a sickly
sanctimoniousness as offensive to all manly taste as
it is insulting to the Christian faith ? When wUl
these babblers learn that "the foolishness of God
is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is
stronger than men?" "Trie fool hath said in his
heart, There is no God." But does that insensate
raving stop the marchings and the wheelings of.
the midnight heavens ? And when God puts his
hand to the wheel of the world's progress in the
kingdom of his Son, your whimpering about ' another

308 The Kingdom of God
gospel,' and ' a new church,' can no more arrest its
march of conquest than the madman shouting to
the stars can extinguish their shining. " I say unto
thee, Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I wUl
build my church ; and the gates of heU shaU not
prevaU against it."
2. Trier e is, secondly, the law which pertains to
man. " The kingdom of God is as if a man should
cast seed into the ground." And this brings us to
the human side of that complex instrumentality by
which the kingdom of God is to be set up, the
side on which the Supreme ceases to act inde
pendently and the omnipotence of the creative power
waits for the co-operation of man.
A Divine power, we have said, works at the centre
of all efficiency, whetrier in the economies of nature
or in the mystery of grace; but it works co-ordinately
with secondary means, and ordinarUy through the
intelligence and will of man. Seeds are the great
thoughts with which God has printed his Bible of
nature, waiting for a human interpreter. They are
so many initial forces, in which there is packed away
a whole harvest of purpose, of capacity, of power;
but it is by the riand of man that the secret
message is translated into fact. Preliminary to this
action of God and essential to it, triere is a province
for human means, which man must enter into and
fill. So our Lord, in his parable of the sower, teUs
us of seeds that " fell by the way side," and were
devoured by the fowls ; on " stony places," and
" because they had not much earth, they withered

as the Growth of a Seed. 309
away ; " and of others which " fell among thorns,"
and were choked. In all of which instances, the
normal condition of growth on the part of man was
absent ; and that being so, there was a correspon
dent suspension of the creative agency of God.
It is possible, then, to limit, and even to frustrate
the action of the Divine laws by human neglect ;
and this equally in the spiritual and in the natural
world. Walk through the glades of a forest in trie
autumnal season, and mark the myriad acorns that
Ue scattered and useless on the earth's surface.
There is not one of these, as they are annually torn
from their leafy branches by trie storms of winter,
that does not contain within itself the potential
growth of an oak. There is, in fact, the fruitage of
a forest wrapped up in the capsule of each one of
those acorns ; and all that is needed for this out
come is a certain adjustment of outward conditions,
in soil and air and sunshine and moisture, and
nature then becomes sponsor for all the rest. It is
not required of man that lie go about to formulate
the tree ; to buUd for it a trunk, or to mark out
a diagram for its branches, or to concern himself
in any way about the mystery of growth. All that
is required is just triat he fit the acorn with the
conditions demanded by the laws of its dependent life.
But, then, it does require this : and getting this, it
wUl, by the inscrutable methods of physical assimila
tion, buUd for itself an organisation, and grow into
the majesty of a tree ; and missing just this, it wUl
•perish. How else did that Egyptian wheat lie alone
and practically dormant in its mummy bed for those

310 The Kingdom of God
thousands of years ? Its capacity of reproduction was
complete: its power to produce was "dead,, being
alone." That capacity must be joined to something
else, its co-factor, to become a cause. And it is for
the want of this something that not one in ten -
thousand of those annually shed acorns ever becomes
a live oak. They perish through faUure of the out
ward conditions necessary to growth.
But this negative action of law relates itself not
the less really, and all trie more seriously, to the
working of trutri in its contact with man. That
truth asks for fellowship, sympathy, reverence, loyalty,
— all, in a word, that can fittingly express the
homage which man owes to a communication from
God. A system of supernatural verities which sweeps
the highest ranges of human thought and takes
hold in its issues of the infinite and eternal, which
has its basis immediately in God, and its middle
term in Christ, and its final end in trie regeneration
of man, has certainly, in its own right, a claim to
be heard when it condescends to speak. It - is not a
history, or a philosophy, or a poem : it is a message
from God, full of infinite instruction, of tender be
seeching, and of the most serious warning. Not to
give heed to it, not to entertain and examine care
fully triis message, is an outrage alike to itself and
its Author. And not only this. It asks for the
awakened attention, the quickened triought, the obe
dient wUl, the loving service, as terms on which its
vitality is conditioned to us. And these being absent,
from whatever cause withheld, the truth is bereft of
its essential co-factor in the regeneration of man.

as the Growth of a Seed. 311
Hence the importance of preaching 'the word,' as the
direct method of putting live truth into contact with
the living man. Hence, too, the relation of cause
and effect between the methods cf didactic instruc
tion by which the truth is brought to bear upon the
understanding, through the sensibriities of the heart
and the power of the Spirit, and the renewal of the
soul. That we riave trie truth stereotyped in the
letter of the word, and that we can translate its
fervid spirit into the vernacular speech of the nations,
is in itself a priceless treasure. That we have it
formulated into creeds and catechisms and summaries
of belief, that it percolates through our liturgies
and hymnologies, is one of trie grand results of our
Christian art and literature. But the truth must
enter into the man. It must get a lodgement in the
sense,- trie brain, the soul 'of the individual thinker.
It must be flashed into the very crypt and centre
of the man's nature, by a power born of the Spirit,
and borne in by the Spirit ; or its mere announce.
ment will be as unproductive as the shimmering of
an Arctic midnight.
There is, in fact, a double action in trie truth.
It seeks to draw life from the man, as the seed
does from the soil, — from the thought which investi
gates, from the conscience which approves, from the
affections which interpret and beautify and by which
the life of the truth is fed ; while, reciprocally, the
truth acts upon and transfigures the thought, the
affections, the life, the man. The process is an inter
change. That the soul may get at the vitality of the
truth, the truth must get at "the vitality of the soul.

312 -The Kingdom of God
The two forces correlate and interact. We are co
workers with God : " We then, as workers together
witri him, beseech you also that ye receive not the
grace of God in vain." "But the word preached,'
writes the Apostle, " did not profit them, not being
mixed with faith in them that heard it." How does
faith " mix with " the word ? There is the reception
we give to it, "not as the word of men, but as
it is in truth, the word of God : " that is the mind's
assent to the authority of the truth. There is the
belief of the mind in the obligations concurrent with
the truth : which is the result of reflection on what
is true. And there is the power held by trie truth,
which is set free to act upon the accepting and
believing mind. This is the method in which the
word,, mixing with trie faith, becomes a power in
trie renovation of man. It encounters the soul in
the solitude of reflection. Its appeals, its motives,
its authority, the spirit with which these are charged,
get a foothold and leverage within the man; and the
"action is creative. What, now, if these appeals are
all unheeded ? If instead of taking the truth home
as a welcome guest, and sitting down before it as
a reverend teacher, — what if we keep it out in the
cold, icy intellect ; or bury it in the stony sepul
chres of unbelief ? Can the truth find its way to
meddle with a man's sin so as to overthrow it whUe
the intellect sets its interdict on reflection ? Can
the intellect incite and aid reflection whUe the con
science refuses to impeach trie will, or while the
heart under the control of passion is positively trai
torous to both ? To understand the truth we must,

as the Growth of a Seed. 313
in some sense, stand in it : we must be fair to it
as it puts forward one by one its propositions — to
be disallowed if we can rionestly prove triem un
true, to be accepted, trusted, followed, absorbed and
assimilated, if found to be true.
Here is one of the chief causes of the many
faUures of the trutri in seeking to bring about its
appointed result. The ' lost acorn drifts, indeed,
back into the currents of creative forces; and so it
is not wholly without a mission: only, it misses its
real mission, that of becoming an oak. So it is
with the failure of trutri. Triere is a power of
" life unto life " in the Gospel, which is its end :
and there is also a power of " death unto death."
It generates results always ; out of its abuse not
less than out of its use. It is " the letter " triat
"kUleth;" or it is "the spirit" that "giveth life."
And it is by the mind's individual method of
dealing with- the Gospel that this power to kill or
to make alive is elected. A disallowance of the in
tense spirituality of the truth as trie Gospel reveals
it, a fixed unwillingness to accept it, to believe it,
to fall in with its determinate issues, is the exact
point at which the way of God is being blocked to
thousands.' The petted self-sufficiency of reason has
never cared to own its need of supernatural truth.
The proud aristocracy of intellect, wiser trian God,
thrusts aside all revelation as an impertinent inter
ference with its lordly power. It scorns the severe
judicial dignity with which the conscience will some
times dare to impeach its arrogance, and demand
its suffragO on the side of the truth. Hence men

314 The Kingdom of God
"reject the counsel of God against themselves;" and
So the Holy Griost judicially passes them by, because
they wUl not aecept his message. They thrust per
versely away from themselves the instrument of his
personal revelation; and then he leaves them in the
blindness of their sin.
Triat this is presumably true in the history of
some phases of our modern rehgious thought, we
cannot reasonably doubt. Notwithstanding the utter
impossibility of making any thing of revealed truth
but a master, still the desperate endeavours on the
part of sceptical criticism to set aside its regnant
'spirit, the dishonest attempts to conceal or distort
its evidences, the base trickery which palms off a
caricature of its doctrines, the blotting out of the
whole of its extra-mundane and transcendent pur
pose on the part, of men who, while they applaud
its morality and plagiarise its wisdom, dare to
vent their scorn upon its veracity and deny its
inspiration, continue to be amongst the saddest
and the most astonishing perversities of the age.
They un-Christ the Gospel, as another class of men
un-God the universe. And then they prate about
' anotrier gospel,' and laud and glorify ' another
gospel,' a gospel without a creed, without a Christ,
and without a God. Do the lights of the sky go out
because the drunkard blinks at their shining? Does
the midnight marching of the star-lit heavens stop
because some men are atheists ? Drunk with the
pride of intellect, these men blink at the greater lights
of revelation, and " denying the Lord that bought
them, bring upon themselves swift destruction."

as the Growth of a Seed. 315
"Nevertheless, the foundation of God standeth sure."
It stands as the cokimned hills of creation stand, in
the immutable purpose of the Eternal !
1. In seeking, then, to set up the kingdom of God,
whether in the corporate or the individual man, let
us understand trie two-fold agency by which it is to
be accomplished. The metriod of the Divine working
is never magical. It is not miraculous. God works
with man. Man co-works with God. It is no part
of our plan to intimate the point of convergence at
which -these two forces interblend and mutually act.
Their distinctness in their oneness, their oneness
in their distinction is all untraceable by us. " The
Spirit bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the
sound thereof, but canst not teU wrience it cometh,
or whither it goeth. So is every one that is born of
the Spirit." But so it is in physical providence.
When in some sharp scientific and critical mood we
sit down to watch the growth of a seed of corn, or
the transmutation of an egg into an animal, we
speedily get confounded in the presence of insoluble
mysteries. God works. He is the life upon which
all life reposes. But in all this man is a factor
too. He posits the conditions on which Omnipotence
itself waits for its impulse ! God kindles the fires,
and feeds the forces, and turns the great wheel of
nature's manufactory : but he only gathers the sheaves
into his bosom and fiUs his barn with plenty, who
goes out patiently into the field and becomes a co-
actor with God. And in the salvation of the soul,
man is as necessary an actor as the Spirit of God.

316 The Kingdom of God
God will no more dispense with his voluntary pre
sence and co-ordinate activity in the business of
religion, than he will dispense with the sowing of
seed or the cultivation of the soil in bringing about
the harvest. "Faith without works," in the realm of
providence, " is dead, being alone." " Without me,"
said Christ, " ye can do nothing." But then he
also said : " Y^e will not come unto me, that ye
might have life." And the one side limits, as it
conditions and interblends with, the other.
2. While we are thus rightly to distinguish and
distribute this twofold agency, let us hold fast our
belief in the reality and power of the Holy Spirit,
as the essential, primal agent in setting up the king
dom of Christ. The proud self-sufficiency of human
reason rebels against the immediateness of this secret
and all untraceable power in saving man. This
is the age of man-worship. Man has become man's
God. The splendid achievements of the human in
tellect in all departments of material science have
bewildered our common sense in its application to
the inception and progress of supernatural truth. We
have scaled the heavens, and fathomed the sea, and
discovered the secrets hidden in the hoary catacombs
and crypts of the earth ; and we are now on the
high-road to surprise and conquer nature in her
last retreat and citadel of life. Give us only a few
more hundred millions of years, and we shall come
behind the curtain and see how the thing is done, —
and be able to do it ! And what more than this
.cannot man do ? This : he cannot supersede the

as the Growth of a Seed. 317
action of God in turning men from the power of
sin. He cannot give a ransom for the soul of his
brother. He cannot create the materials, or kindle
the Ufe, or put up the new nature, in the domain
of the soul. He can bridge the distance between
mind and mind by his intermediate thought. He
can flame along the connecting chain the electric
currents of a fiery emotion. He can reason, and
convince, and move with intensest passion the
slumbering sensibilities of his fellow man. He can
make him a self-hating, a self-hopeless, a self-sick
and self-condemning man, a -pale, trembling, igno
minious coward, utterly ashamed of himself as he
discovers the wrong and the immeasurable mean
ness and perfidy of his sin. This he can do. But
the power that saves him, that goes straight down
into the central consciouness of the man and breaks
it up into penitence and prayer, and then plants in
it the freshness and the beauty of a young, new
life, — that belongs to him who roofed the world with
its solar fires. With him, the feeblest instrument
becomes omnipotent. Without him, the omnipotence
of aU human means is powerless as an echo.
3. And why should we hesitate to claim this
power, or count it an incredible thing that God
should put it into action ? He does not deem it
an unseemly thing to invest with his omnipotence
the growth of a grain of wheat. Why then
should we hesitate to beheve in its grander sweep
in the conversion of souls ? To save is a higher
work than to create. To regenerate dead human

31 8 The Kingdom of God
souls is a grander achievement than to build material
systems. The cross of Christ outshines the figured '
firmaments of space. When, therefore, we claim for
the pulpit, and for the school, and for the nursery,
and for the mission-station a power direct from God,
more lofty and more glorious than that which buUt
up the vaulted architecture of the heavens, we are
only claiming a greater power for what is in itself
a greater and a more magnificent end. " The
setting up of the kingdom of God in one human
soul," it has been said, "may be, in the totaUty
of its history, a sublimer event than putting up the
colossal structure of suns and systems." We think
so. To save that one soul emptied, so far as we
know, the Divine exchequer of its costliest treasure.
And when the mission of dead matter harnessed to
its magnificent laws has run itself out, and time
itself is dead, the joy of that one soul in the kingdom
of God will be but as a spark of infant intelligence,
brightening upwards and onwards into the everlasting
perfection and plenitude of its Creator. Souls are the
survivors, not trie peers — they are the interpreters,
not the servants of the stars and suns and systems
of the material universe ; and when the great solar
clock shall have stopped for ever, they will write its
epitaph, not sink into its tomb !
Go then, Christian men, go sow this precious seed.
Sow it widely, and wisely. Sow it with tears, and in
prayer. Sow it over the family and in the school,
and along the way-sides and across the wildernesses
and the deserts of human life. Go each one, and
sow this " incorruptible seed " of the kingdom. And

as the Growth of a Seed. 319
in thus sowing it remember how you are depositing
so .much of the conditioned Omnipotence of him who
hath said : " He that goeth forth and weepeth, bear
ing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with
rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him."

Jitraliig of the gibtite Itorpojse.
"So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth : it shall
not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I
please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." —
Isaiah lv. 11.
IF we connect these words with the verse immedi
ately preceding, to wliich they properly belong,
we get this master idea: namely, that the finality of
the Divine purpose and the method of its fulfilment
in the two kingdoms of nature and grace are so
related, that the history of the one becomes a
prophecy and pledge of the other. "As the rain
cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and re
turneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and
maketh it bring fortri and bud, — so sriall my word
be." In the material world, the Divine purpose and
its accomplishment are united by natural laws. The
sun shines, the vapours ascend, the clouds are
formed, the rain and the snow fall ; and these
meeting with the co-ordinated activities of man, the
grass and the corn grow, and man and beast are
fed. These are the ordinary mechanics of nature ;
and they never weary nor faU.
The statement of the prophet would, then, seem to
be that, as in the natural world certain causes produce
determinate effects,, so equivalent causes shall produce

Finality of the Divine Purpose. 321
correspondent effects in the kingdom of grace. The
snow and the rain do not return to heaven; neither
do they perish. They are not formed by chance ;
they do not descend by accident ; triey are not fugi
tive nothings. Each has its mission to fulfil, and
fulfils it. They " water the earth, that it may give
seed to the sower and bread to the eater." " So
shall my word be." The end proposed in the
arrangement of both these kingdoms is foreshadowed.
Trie means connected with that erid, in. both cases,
are congenital therewith and efficient thereto. And
the certainty of trie results is provided for in- the
veracity of God, the Author of both.'
The mission of truth, the difficulties encountered
by it, and the certainty of its effects are the points
embraced by this analogy.
I. Truth in its mission : "It shall accomplish that
which I please, it shall prosper in the thing where
to I sent it."
¦ 1. We may take our first Ulustration of this
mission from the spirit and contents of the truth
itself. It is the " word that proceedeth out of the
mouth of God." The first outspoken word of God
was a creative act : — " He spake, and it was done ;
he commanded, and it stood fast." " By the word
of the Lord were the heavens made." That is the
word of Iris power. The Bible is the word of his
mouth. The one deals with things: the other "with
thoughts. The first is in cypher : the last is in speech.
That belongs to trie few who have the key or can
find it : this is in language vernacular to the race.

322 Finality of the Divine Purpose.
These two records are equally true in what they
teach; but their teaching is in different dialects.
Nature is a system of material facts : the " word "
is a revelation of supernatural thougrit. One is a
manifestation of being : trie other is a declaration
of will. The one appeals to the senses and thence
to the reason, making science : the other is a voice
from within the veil, speaking to trie consciousness
of faith, creating a religion. Nature roots itself
ultimately in God, and speaks of him and for him;
but its teachings are for the most part too recon
dite, too high up in the abstract and unknown, for
the popular apprehension. They must be brought
down and interpreted" by the trained thinker for
the less able to think, before their language can be
understood. The Bible is an open book. It is the
unveUing of a great secret, — " a lamp shining in a
dark place," a message of grace " appearing to all
men." Hence, further, whUe the teaching of the two
records is equally Divine and equally true, trieir
methods of teaching are essentially distinct. That
something is at the back of all the complex and
orderly working of nature, accounting for and actu
ating it, wliich itself is not nature, is patent to
all who think. What that something is, is nowhere
apparent. We see only phenomena. No man sees
anything more. We are each alone amid the dread
mystery of a silent universe. There is everywhere
around us the swing of infinite, awful forces : there
is nowhere a word of interpretation, or the whisper
of compassion or of sympathy for man. We are

Finality of the Divine Purpose. 323
a race of orprians, for wriom nature has no pity.
But "the entrance of thy word giveth light; it
giveth understanding to the simple." Triat word is
addressed to trie individual man, not to man massed
into his confederated humanity, but to man singly
and alone. It enters into trie secret soul, and
speaks to the intelligence of each. It is trie con
secrated veriicle of a power that without sign or
symbol invades trie profoundest retreats of con
science, and wins its assent in spite of all protest.
Chiefly, it is a redemptive power. There is a Divine
Redeemer : a Divine Spirit : a Divine redemption : a
redeemed man. Triese are trie cardinal verities, the
seminal ideas to which the truth has to witness.
The one grand secret that has put the Bible
down into the heart of man and made it the most
precious, as it is the most potent, of his treasures,
is this directness and power of its witness. It is
not the sanctity which enshrines it as the oldest
book in trie world's religion; not the fact that it is
the best book, the wisest book, the grandest book
in the world's literature, that has won for the Bible
its confessed, ascendency over trie riuman mind. It
is not that it is a book intensely interesting in
itself; or infallibly true in its teaching; or curiously
antique in its history; or confessedly marvellous in
its contents ; or transcendently sublime in its doc
trines. It is not that it is a code of Divine laws,
or a theory of Divine morals, or the great pan-
tology of Divine knowledge — all of wliich it is — but
this : that it is a living power, a great light, a
direct revelation of " the light of the knowledge of

324 Finality of the Divine Purpose.
the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,"
shining into the heart. The Bible is the vocalised
thought of God. It is "the law of his mouth," — a
message direct from his throne, warm and loving,
full of all the wise utterances and authoritative
counsels of a Father's heart. Hence its distinctive
ness from the silent heavens and the speechless
earth. " We do all hear in our own tongue the
wonderful works of God."
2. Then, secondly, there is the regeneration the
truth is intended lo effect. " It is the power of God
unto salvation." It " effectually worketh." It is not
mere inoperative truth lodged in the heart of a
dead world ; it is a latent efficient force. It is to
be as the leaven, transforming the meal into bread,;
as the seed, turning the sod into life. It transforms
the' souls of men.
According to its own testimony, man individually,
through all his diversity of condition and character,
is to be reached and renewed. Society in its aggre
gate, as this again is broken up into families,
communities and nations, is to be regenerated.
And finally, the world of men, throughout all its
geographical territories, its varieties of climate, colour
and race, is to be made subject to the authority of
truth. The Bible is • to be the master of man's
soul ; the teacher of man's intellect ; the sanctifier
of. man's heart;' the sovereign ruler of his life: —
and this for all.
There is a method in this regenerating process.
First of all, life is to be infused into dead souls,

Finality of theVDivine Purpose. , 325
As in the first, so in triis second creation, the
" word " is the instrument of a creative efficiency.
"Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and
arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee
light." "The dead shall hear the voice of- the Son
of God, and live." Life being infused, character is
next to be trained. The word comes in its after
influence with " a Phidian toucri," to shape and
polish after a Divine pattern. It illuininates, that it
may sanctify : it sanctifies, that it may transfigure and
glorify the man. " Beholding as in a glass the glory
of the Lord, we are changed into the same image."
In the prospective history of humanity as that
contemplates a state of future perfected being, we
have a stUl further insight into this mission of
trutri. Saint Paul, wrien affirming trie scope of his
own ministry, enunciates this thought : " Whom we
preach, warning every man, and teaching every man
in all wisdom, that we may present every man
perfect in Cririst Jesus."
Mark here, first, the habit of individual complete
ness which this language implies. " That we may
present every man perfect " — in faculty, in exercise,
in aim, in act. And this in all — the simian savage
as the laurelled sage.
Trie one type after which this perfection is to
be constructed is " Christ Jesus " : — ¦" The divine
man," as Goethe calls him; "The greatest soul of
his time or of all time," as Renan says he was ;
" The highest moral idea to which," Strauss says,
" the world can expect to attain ; " " The great re-
. generator of humanity," as Frances Power Cobbe

326 Finality of the Divine Purpose.
thinks him. Putting the Christ of Christianity no
higher up on the plane of being than these assump
tions claim for him, looking at him only as the great
typical man in whose sublime humanity every other
man is to find his counterpart, the transformation
which the truth is aiming to accomplish is, even
on this showing, a sufficiently stupendous one. It
is to " make every man perfect in Christ."
Lastly, there" is this final result : " That we may
present every man perfect." To whom is this pre
sentation of a perfected humanity to be made ? To
"God the Judge of all," "the God of our Lord
Jesus Christ, the Father of glory." He wrio at the
first creation embodied his own life in man, and set
the wondrous jewel all aflame in its curious casket,
will get back his first work embroidered with a stUl
richer beauty at the hands of the redeeming Son, —
the jewel the same, but its settings grander. At
what period in the cycles of duration is this pre
sentation to be made ? At " the end," — when he,
the Son, " shall have put down all rule and all au
thority and power." Before what spectators ? " The
thrones, dominions, principalities and powers," — those
white-winged messengers, the subordinate peers and
potentates who wait upon the throne of Almighti-
ness, and to whom is to be " made known by the
church the manifold wisdom of God." And sur
rounded with what events, antecedent to what issues,
is this crowning inauguration to take place ? The
end of time, the great assize, burdened with the in
finite, final destiny of individual souls : " When all
things shall be subdued" unto the Son, "then shall

Finality of the Divine Purpose. 327
the Son also himself be subject unto him that put
all things under him, that God may be all in all."
Then commences the unpausing, endless ever of
individual doom.
But into what sublime and awe-inspiring futurities
does this thought of the Apostle lift the destinies of
a regenerated humanity! What a grand creature
man is yet to become ! And what a value is thus
set on the possession and the mission of truth,
as the instrument through which this lifting up
of the race is to be accomplished: "That we may
present every man perfect in Christ," — man in his
nationalities, in his generations, in his separate
individualities, to the end of the ages, perfected by
the truth. This is its mission.
II. The obstructions the truth has to encounter : " It
shall not return void; it shall accomplish that which
I please ; it shall prosper."
It would be to violate all experience and to ignore
every principle of sound reasoning, were we to speak
of this mission of truth apart from its antagonistic
impediments. Essenifflly innovating and aggressive
in spirit, it must come into collision with opposing
forces. Its existence involves a struggle. It is a
power to conquer,, and to renovate. It seeks to
cast down high imaginations, and to "bring every
thought " into obedience and subjection to Christ.
And on the magnitude of the conflict depends the
greatness and the glory of, its victory. There are
obstructions arising from the nature of the truth
itself, and from the disposition of man.

328 Finality of the Divine Purpose.
1. Truth is a holy thing; it can fraternise only
with what is kindred to its own spirit : man is not
a holy being. Hence antagonism. " Thy word is
very pure," said the Psalmist, "therefore thy servant
loveth.it." And this is a perfectly conceivable thing.
That a pure mind should discern the truth and feed
on it as its strong food is as natural as the flower's
feeding on the sunlight. And the dislike of the
truth by a mind vitiated by unholy tastes is just
as conceivable in itself, and not less decisive in its
manifestation. " This is the condemnation, that
ligrit is come into the world, and men loved dark
ness rather than light, because their deeds were
evil." Set the requirements of the Gospel on a plane
parallel with the tastes of the unholy man, and
you challenge one of the chief batteries whence . he
is wont to assail it. Bring out the intense spiritu
ality of the Gospel as in every sense hostUe to the
carnalism of man, and you provoke his bitterest
hate. He hates it because he is unhke it. He
hates it stril more because it condemns his unrike-
ness, and denounces against blha consequences which
he can neither encounter nor escape.
There are some kinds of truth that do not depend
for their acceptance on moral conditions : they get
access to the convictions of reason independently of
the moral sentiments. A man may graduate suc
cessfully in all trie schools of secular knowledge, —
he may be an accomplished chemist, a profound
geologist, a brilliant astronomer, without being essen
tially a moral man. He might be a more eminent

Finality of the Divine Purpose. 329
scientist in any one of these departments if he were
a godly man ; but he may attain to eminence and
win high distinctions therein without being in any
sense religious. He may even pride himself on
being entirely at the opposite pole. He may be a
great mathematician, or a great physiologist, or a
great philosopher ; he may be a distinguished
' Fellow ' of all the learned Societies of Europe : and
with aU this he may be, what in fact he often is,
only an atheist in his heart. To be a believer in
the truth, on the contrary, a man must be in har
mony with the trutri. " Truth of spirit is essential
to the right apprehension of spiritual truth." To
know the truth as it " is in Jesus," we must our
selves be true. To enter into the spirit of truth,
the truth must first enter into our spirit ; and
before the truth can enter into our spirit, we must
be conformed to the righteousness of truth. In the
natural world, there are ten thousand things which
we cannot see with the naked eye : they can be
reached only by an extra-natural sense. So it is
in the kingdom of God. " They are spiritually dis
cerned." 2. Truth is dogmatic in its teaching. It speaks "as
one having authority." It has little consideration
for the whims or the passions of men. It makes no
account of their preconceptions or their prejudices.
It rarely explains what it affirms. It postulates
rather than argues its positions. It speaks out
peremptorily its decisions, and asks only that we
believe and obey.

330 Finality of the Divine Purpose.
There is a dogmatism in its revelation of the
Divine Persons : " There is one God," " one Media
tor," " one Spirit by whom we have access unto
the Father," — distinctions, it would seem, not in
function alone, but in the Godhead itself. If we
inquire how there can be three and yet one, one
and yet three, the Word is sUent; as if it were
enough for its purpose to affirm the fact, not to
afford the explication.
There is a dogmatism in its statement of facts :
" In the beginning God created the heaven and the
earth." When, or how, is not said. The origin of
things is Divine. The universe is not eternal; it is
not self-beginning, or self-continued, or self-governed.
It is created — that is all: thoughts are the genesis of
things. Again, man is a race: "God hath made of
one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face
of the earth." If Saint Paul, it has been said, had
been acquainted with the higher philosophy of our
modern schools, he would have known better than
that. He would have know, indeed, that man was
not made at all, but accidentally developed out of
some fatherly oyster, or anthropoid ape. As he was
not a dabbler in conjectural hypothesis, but an in
spired apostle, he affirmed only what he knew; and
his anthropology, therefore, is less likely to be a
vain imagination, and may possibly turn out to be
true. There is a dogmatism in its doctrinal requirements:
"The times of this ignorance God winked at; but now
commandeth all men everywhere to repent." It as
cends the dais of royalty, and with its imperial seep-

Finality of the Divine Purpose. 33!
tre touches its haughty occupant not less than the
man grinding at the mill, and delivers its authorita
tive statement : " Verily, verily I say unto thee, Except
a man be born again, he cannot enter the kingdom
of God." "Go ye into all the world, and preach the
gospel to every creature. He that believeth shall be
saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned."
So in the ethics of life : " Remember the Sabbath
day to keep it holy;" "Thou shalt not covet;"
"Thou shalt not steal;" "Thou shalt not commit
adultery ; " " Thou shalt do no murder ; " " Thou
shalt worship trie Lord triy God, and riim only shalt
thou serve." There is nothing loose, or timid, or
truckling about these requirements of truth ; nothing
that admits of compromise, or waits to be adjusted.
To Jew or GenfcUe, Greek or Barbarian — to the man
higri up in the heights of his science or down in
the depths of his learning, as to the man half
smothered under the incubus of his brutal stupidity
and sin, its voice is peremptory and final. It fore
closes speculation. It condemns doubt. "He that
believeth not shall be condemned."
Against triis lofty dogmatism of inspired truth,
man lifts up his heel of proud contempt. He refuses
to be lectured, even by his own Creator. He will con
cede nothing to infinite intelligence that he cannot
put into the formula of his own reason. He hates to
be bored by the imperatives of truth. He claims the
right to question the Scriptures, as the Scriptures
claim to question him. He declines to accept of
Revelation as a gift. He disowns it as a condescen
sion to his weakness. Above all, he is averse to

332 ¦ Finality of the Divine Purpose.
goodness and in love with sin; and this puts the
soul out of gear with the nice mechanisms- of the
truth, and shuts out its pure inspirations. So the
Bible is contemned — its statements denounced as
legends, its supernaturahsm denied as incredible, its
doctrines set at nought as irrational. " They are
counted a strange thing."
3. It was said by a distinguished sceptic of the last
century, that if the solution of one of EucUd's pro
blems could be shown to war against the selfishness
or the pride of the human heart, there would not be
wanting men to contradict it. A startling concession,
and yet a conceivable fact. Euclid's problems do not
touch our moral nature. Triey provoke no suspicion.
A man may be a mathematician without a conscience
quite as well as with one. It is otherwise witri the
truth. It reveals what we are shy of discovering.
It affirms what we dislike to believe, and therefore
wish to doubt. It asks what we are unwilUng to
yield. It puts in a plea for all rights which place
themselves on the side of God ; and so makes con
fession of our wrong-doing a first step in our becom
ing right with God. It "teaches us that, denying
ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly,
righteously, and godly, in this present world."
And what, now, if some other things in their attain
ment were fenced round with precisely the same
conditions ? If the arts and the sciences, now so
eagerly cultivated, imposed upon all who studied them
precisely the same moral quaUfications that the Gos
pel imposes ; if the key to aU secular as to aU sacred

Finality of the Divine Purpose. 333
knowledge was found only by " the pure in heart ; "
and if eminence and power, and statesmanship and
king-craft, and all the renown that comes from success,
were awarded only to the men who graduate in
obedience to a law which is "holy and just and
good;" why, then, it would require the same power,
the constraint of the same supernatural influence, to
lead men to study those arts and to master those
sciences and to win those distinctions, that it now
does to induce them to accept the Gospel. The ob
structions are in reality not on the plane of the truth;
but are found rather in the alienation and disloyalty of
the human heart. The Bible, simply as a book, contains
profounder truths, grander facts, stranger mysteries,
is far richer with the thoughts of God, and throbs
with a Divine presence infinitely more near and tender
than the stately volume of nature about which so many
rave, and which they affect so passionately to adore.
But then its portals are sacred. The Cherubim with
the flaming sword keep trie way of the Tree of Life :
and " whatsoever worketh abomination or maketh a
lie " is warned off from its sacred precints as a
profane intruder on the sanctities of God. Its com
mandment is, "Put off triy srioes from off thy feet,
for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground."
III. Under these difficulties, Truth has its encour
agements : "As the rain cometh down, and the snow
from heaven — so shall my word be." Here are
grounds of confidence.
1. There is the relation truth sustains to a purpose.
" So shall my word be ; " it shall ,be as the rain

334 Finality of the Divine Purpose.
and the snow. The relation of that word to a
specific purpose and its ultimate effect in the world
of men are as real in themselves, and as certain in
their issue, as is the action of the rain and the
snow upon the earth. Nature roots itself in a
purpose trie fulfilment of which is already realized :
the word roots itself in a purpose the fulfilment of
which belongs to the future. The action of the
snow and the rain in the kingdom of nature, as it
is seen in the past, illustrates and confirms trie
influence of the word in the kingdom of truth, as
it will be seen in trie future.
The veracity of the Divine word as we see it in
nature, belongs to history : as we see that veracity
in its relation to the truth, it belongs to prophecy.
What is history now in the material world was pro
phecy once : what is prophecy now in its relation to
truth will be history in the future. And the veracity
concerned in each being the same, the certainties
are equal. "While the earth remaineth, seedtime and
harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter,
and day and night, shall not cease." To the earhest
generations of men, that promise indicated a purpose
and plan of action which lay undeveloped in the
mind of God. It sowed the earth with the seed of
hope. And this young spring-day, this morning sun,
the verdant earth and the moving heavens, the sea
sons as one by one they put down their stately tread
of orderly succession, utter their consentaneous and
magnificent verdict on the fidelity of that primeval
promise. All nature is shouting into the ears of men
its testimony to the yeracity of its creating God. "§q

Finality of the Divine Purpose. 335
shaU my word be." It is a promise now: it wiU be
history. What is prophecy to man is history to God.
2. There is the connection of truth with a suitable
agency : " The rain and the snow come down from
heaven." Under the warm glow of inspiration, we
are not allowed to account for so small a thing as a
rain-drop or a snow-flake independently of the agency
of God. Crystallization is not simply a law in physical
mechanics ; it is the expression of a law which has
its efficiency in God. " He maketh small the drops
of rain;" "He casteth forth his ice like morsels;"
he " hath made summer and winter:" "I the
Lord do all these things." Few things are a greater
marvel of beauty than a snow-flake ; nothing seems
frailer or more fugitive than a drop of rain. A
feathery particle of vapour gyrating in the air, an
invisible rain-drop sent down athwart a slanting sun
beam into the cup of a young spring flower, — these
are among the most innocent and powerless of things,
mere ' blossoms of cold,' which the breath of a baby's
lips may dissipate. But taken up into the manage
ment of God, and wrought into his enginery of
nature, what a stupendous power do they become!
Mass the snow-flakes of winter into the Alpine glacier;
let the rain-drops of summer run into the springs
and feed the rivers and flow back into the ocean,
and let the ocean itself come under the grand
dynamics of the summer sun ; why then these little
fragments of liquid or frozen vapour go to make up
that Niagara of force with which nature turns the
great wheel of Ufe. "So shall my word be that goeth
forth out of my month,"

336 Finality of the Divine Purpose.
And this directness of supernatural agency carries
over the truth from its relation to a purpose into
the efficiency of an act. When the telegraph sends
its message through the air or under the sea, there
is something more than electricity at work. There
is a mind, a personal intelligence, from whose direc
tive will that electricity gets its action. So in the
efficiency of truth. It supposes a power not in the
truth, not in man, but in God; a power which,
however inscrutably to us, works after its own
methods — going down to the conscience, and up to
the intellect, conquering prejudice, and silencing
doubt, and turning men " from darkness unto Ught,
and from the power of Satan unto God" — not less
efficiently than the silent chemistries of nature carry
the rain and the snow down to trie hidden root, and
tip the smallest branch with its blossoming fruit.
Let us be forgetful of the instrument : let us think
of the hand that holds and employs it. It is "not
by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith
the Lord."
3. There is confidence in the end which this word
is to accomplish : " It shall prosper in the thing
whereto I sent it." What is that thing ? Along
what central lines is the truth intended to act ?
There is the promise of the Father : " Ask of me,
and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheri
tance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy
possession." This, we are sometimes told, is already
done. Done? Yes; as the redemption of the world
is done, — done in purpose, but not in effect. There

Finality of the Divine Purpose. 337
is the kingdom of the Son: "He shall have domi
nion also from sea to sea, and from the river to
the ends of the earth;" "And there was given him
dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people,
nations, and languages should serve him : his domi
nion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not
pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not
be destroyed." There is the advent of the Spirit:
" It shall come to pass in the last days, saith God,
I wUl pour out of my Spirit upOn all flesh;" "I
will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods
upon the dry ground."
There is the glory of the Church : "It shaU come
to pass in the last days that the mountain of the
Lord's riouse shall be established on the top of the
mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and
all nations shall flow unto it." Triere is the mil
lennium of man: "In thy seed shall all the nations
of the earth be blessed." " His name shall endure
for ever : his name shall be continued as long as
trie sun : and men shall be blessed in him : all
nations shall call him blessed."
There is the triumph of the Cross: "And I, if
I be Ufted up from the earth, will draw all men
unto me." The lapse of ages has not sundered
the magnetic link between the ascended Christ and
a sinnirig, suffering, dying world. " This man, after
he had offered one sacrifice for sin for ever, sat
down on the right hand of God ; from henceforth
expecting till, his enemies be made his footstool."
That session on the throne, as it marks the com
pletion of a cycle in the plan of the Father, so it
z

338 Finality of the Divine Purpose.
presupposes a purpose in the expectation of the Son.
What that expectation forebodes ; how long it may
continue ; what gathering of new and as yet unde
veloped agencies it may involve ; when first it will
be seen unfolding itself in final action ; how it wril
launch its fiery bolts, and what may be the sudden
breaking up of the banded hostilities, whether in
their separate or combined action, — we know not.
But he waits: "From henceforth expecting!" Not
hesitating, never doubting, amid the strifes and
tumults of the ages, amid the conflict of nations
and the debates of cabinets and the tramp of
armies, amid the shock of opinions, amid the cries
and the tears, the sins and the death struggles of a
disquieted, hungering and famished humanity, Jesus
waits, — calmly, grandly, surely " expecting tril his
enemies be made his footstool." Who are these
enemies of the Lord's Christ ? In what forms of
doubt, of denial, of insult, of wild opposition, of
insane blasphemy does this enmity reveal itself ?
No matter. " He that sitteth in the heavens shall
laugh ; the Lord shall have them in derision."
" His enemies shall lick the dust." " His enemies
will I clothe with shame: but upon himself shall his
crown flourish."
Let us not grow petulant or fret ourselves into
despondency because of the delay with which these
final issues seem to be encumbered. God's time-plan
sweeps through our human centuries, making a day
out of a thousand years, and a thousand years into
a day. And he who can wait and work through a
thousand years as if it were a day, or crowd into

Finality of the Divine Purpose. 339
a day the work of a thousand years, works all the
more surely not working in haste. The buried seed-
corn may have a long waiting; but it blossoms at
last. " God is patient, because he is eternal." " He
will have respect unto his covenant."
4. There is the calm, dignified attitude of truth in
view of opposition: "It shall not return unto me void;
it shall accomplish that which I please ; it shall
prosper in the tiling wriereto I sent it."
Shall it ? Then the Divine and the human plans
are manifestly in collision. Men say it shall not pros
per : and they devise their schemes, and utter their
prophecies, to show that the word of inspiration is
an impertinence and a failure; that God is mistaken,
and the whole Christian scheme a worn-out and boot
less venture, to be shuffled aside as a creed outgrown.
But so it has been from the beginning. In her
earliest conflicts with a mighty confederated hostility,
men set^the time when the Church on earth was to
expire; and medals were struck to commemorate the
event. And later on, Hume and Gibbon, Woolston
and Diderot, Voltaire and Paine, Strauss and Renan,
Theodore Parker, and a whole tribe of less notable
men, have a hundred times said the same thing.
Sceptics, and materialists, and atheists are saying
the same thing to-day. And stril the Church sur
vives, — "Fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and
terrible as an army with banners!"
In our own time, indeed, scepticism has grown
more discreet and wary in its attacks. It is no
longer to trie coarse jest, the low buffooning of

340 Finality of the Divine Purpose.
Paine, or the polished ridicule of the Encyclopedists,
that the world's ear will listen. Our doubters and
deniers no longer scoff at the Son of God. They
seek only to get rid of him as the one factor in
the world's progress to-day. " Christ is dead and
buried," they say : " why not leave him alone, em
balmed in the hallowed memories of the past ? "
But the world will not leave him alone. Man's
conscience, man's intellect, man's sin, his bruised
and broken heart when bereavement nips some one
of its fairest flowers, or wrien over his own death-
pillow the flash from some unseen world puts its
fire upon his brow, wUl not leave him alone. No :
man cannot, wUl not leave the Christ of God alone.
He who was at the first the carpenter's son, is
to-day the centre of trie world's wondering thought,
with the nations in his train. Three hundred and
fifty millions of men call him blessed. SUence that
voice, — and you strike dumb the world's hope; you
stiffen its heart in despair ! Take down Jesus Christ
from the centre of the world's history, — and you put
the nations in mourning for their God !
"It shall prosper." Shall it? Then the fears of
the timid and the calm determination of trie Divine
mind are not in harmony. Men, like old Eli, are
sitting down in their weeping places trembling for
the ark of God. Like a frail vessel when the storm-
clouds are around and the breakers ahead and ship
wreck is looming, in the distance, the Church is thought
to be in danger, and the truth about to perish from
off the earth. No! the might of Omnipotence has
its bridle on the storm. " The eternal purpose " is

Finality of the Divine Purpose. 341
embarked in the fortunes of that vessel. The Master
himself rias his hand upon the helm : and with the
olouds gathering ahead, and the deep working be
neath, and " men's hearts failing them for fear " of
the things that are coming upon them, his voice is
heard above the scream of the tempest, serene as
the strain of the seraphim, — "Be still, and know
that I am God!" "I will build my church; and
the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."
" It shall accomplish that which I please." Shall
it ? Then the machinations of the Adversary must
be defeated. " I wUl work," saith God, " and who
shall let it?" Who answers to this imperial chal
lenge ? Where is the potsherd who dares to enter
the lists with his Maker? "Behold, ye despisers,
and wonder, and perish : for I work a work in your
days, a work which ye shall in no wise believe,
though a man declare it unto you."
" It shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent
it." Shall it ? Then man universally shall receive
and know and obey the truth ; for to man singly,
and to man as a raoe, " is the word of this salva
tion sent." Then the sabbath shall be revered in
all lands ; and sanctuaries shall be built, and
schools endowed, and a thousand channels opened
all through the world for correcting the ignorance,
and repressing the crime, and alleviating the sorrows
of men : for this is the very soul of the mission
of truth.
It shall do all this. My brethren, let us listen
to this pronouncement of one who never unswears
his oath. " God is not a man, that he should lie ;

342 Finality of the Divine Purpose.
neither the son of man, that he should repent :
hath he said, and shall he not do it ? or hath he
spoken, and shall he not make it good ? " But the
Lord hatri spoken. He riath sworn by himself that
as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
and do not return thither, but water the earth and
make it bring forth and bud, " so sriall my word be."
It shall not return void. It shall accomplish that
which he pleases. It shall prosper in the thing
wriereunto he sent it. Then Infidelity with its "great
swelling words" of vanity, pouring contempt on the
Gospel, hating it because of its purity and auda
ciously blaspheming it because it is Divine, — Infidelity
must die; and Mahommedanism, and Polytheism, and
Pantheism, and Positivism, and all. forms of Pagan
ism, whether barbaric or classic, must go down. And
Popery, "drunken with the blood of the saints," rank
with crimes, and foul with corruptions it dare not
confess and wUl not abandon, whispering with its
white Jesuitical lips curses it is afraid to utter and
in love with fires it has no longer the power to
kindle, — Popery, the foulest and the most stupendous
abomination of the earth, must perish. God wiU
" smite it with the breath of his mouth." And in
difference, standing in the way of duty, and holding
back the charities of salvation from men ready to
perish, must be smitten. And sin in its myriad
forms and inscrutable disguises, subtle as the serpent
in the garden and venomous as death, blinding the
understanding and hardening the heart, — sin, the
many-handed, many-minded, monster bropd of hell,
must be crushed and curBed and clean stamped out

Finality of the Divine Purpose. 343
as a foul, slimy protrusion into God's earth. For
the Son of God, the world's one redeemer, the
world's great want and healer, "was manifested that he
might destroy the works of the devU ; " and " he must
reign, till lie hath put all enemies under his feet:"
and "the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death,"
— the sin of death, and the death of sin.
Into what chronologies all this may drift the world
of men ; out of what convulsions it may spring ; what
overturnings of human thought and of all the staple
elements of human life it may induce, — those wrio
live may know. We predicate only the fact. The
long wail of the earth's agony will one day be hushed
in the triumphant march of the redeeming Conqueror.
And then wUl come the shout, ringing out clear above
the hUls and through the vales of eartri, to be taken
up and echoed back by the jubilant hosts of heaven,
— "The kingdoms of this world are become trie king
doms of our God and of. his' Christ ; and * he shall
reign for ever and ever." Even so ! Amen.
In the meantime, confidence is to be placed in the.
plan of God. " Faithful is he that calleth you, who
also wUl do it." Nothing is lost by delay. In the
past, no prophetic word missed its historic mate. All
has been fulfilled. In the future, the prophesyings
of to-day wUl be read into history. All things are
working to a predetermined end. Cririst must reign.
He wUl burid his Church. The nations shall be
subdued under him.

dDbaamtg of the §xbinz SEorMttg.
" Behold, I go forward, but he is not there ; and backward, but I can
not perceive him : on the left hand, where he doth work, but I
cannot behold him; he hideth himself on the right hand, that I
cannot see him." — Job xxiii. 8, 9.
THESE words come down to us as the confession
of a great man baffled and utterly bewridered in
his attempts to understand God. And they show,
also, how from the beginning the most impressive
phenomena have left an impassable gulf between the
discoveries of the human inteUect and that unpene-
trated mystery of being which is the secret of God.
Job wanted to find a place in which to speak to
God, to " come even unto his seat," that he might
" order his cause before him ; " and in the storm and
darkness of the great thoughts that were rolling
through his mind like the surges of a chaos, he
cannot find such a place. God is so great, that he
seems too great for this insignificant world to con
tain him. He fills so much space, that there is not
space enough for him to fill.
So the baffled man " goes forward," seeking for him
amid the indexes and dim prophesyings of the future ;
" and backward," scanning the monuments and reve
lations of the past ; " on the left hand, where he doth
work," — but nowhere doth he encounter the presence

Obscurity of the Divine Working. 345
of God. "He hideth himself on the right hand,
that I cannot see him."
The perplexities felt by Job on this and kindred
problems were not greater or more harassing than
they are to us. Our advanced position in revela
tion, in knowledge, in experience, rerieves us of no
embarrassment felt by men of ancient times with
regard to this greatest of all mysteries — the mystery
of God as he dwells within himself, and of the
methods in which he governs the worlds of men
and things. They seemed to dwell in God's uni
verse, while he did not always appear to dwell in
their individual world. They felt his presence,
and believed in him : — that is all that we do.
The upheaving of thought since then has loosened
the soil in which that idea strikes its roots : it
has added nothing to the idea itself. The world's
ripest rehgious thought is to-day what it was at
the beginning of time, — a bright abyss into which
men look "by faith, not by sight." All things
are contained in God : he is uncontained in aU.
AU things reveal God: God is unrevealed in all.
" Behold I go forward, but he is not there ; and
backward, but I cannot perceive him." There is a
presence ; but it is . veiled. There is activity ; but
it is silent. " He hideth himself on the right hand,
that I cannot see him."
Here are two things : — The activity of trie Divine
working; and the obscurity of its methods.
I. The activity of the Divine working : "On the
left hand, where he doth work."

346 Obscurity of the Divine Working.
And we have but to open our Bible to find how
all through its pages this great truth runs as the
soul of its teaching. In every form of language,
in regard to every mode of life, in relation to
all events, God is represented as the great actor,
primarily the sole actor, in whose will all other
activities originate and are. " He worketh all things
according to the counsel of his own will."
Events which are held to be quite independent
of all special causation, the Bible puts into the hand
of God. " He maketh the sun to shine." " He
sendeth the rain." "He maketh the grass to
grow." "He giveth snow like wool." "He holdeth
the winds in his fist." " The lightnings go before
him." " Fire and hail, snow and vapour," and the
"stormy wind fulfil his word." All material forces,
as they are set into action and get their interplay
in the management of • the worlds, are the servants
of God and do his bidding ; and they are forces
only so far and so long as they are the channels
of his will. A change in the direction of the
latter, a suspension in the purposes of God, — and
all material activities perish. They are the out
flow of his intelligence, uniformities which mark
the action of the supreme WiU : " I the Lord do
all these things."
Personal endowments, which we count innate and
constitutional, are his gifts. "There is a spirit
in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty
giveth him understanding." Talents, whether of
the body or the mind, are distributed by him.
" It is he that giveth thee power to get wealth."

Obscurity of the Divine Working. 347
"He holdeth our soul in life." "He teacheth
man knowledge." "Genius is his gift; poetry his
inspiration ; art his wisdom." The skUl to govern,
the heroism to defend, the science to construct
and adorn a nation's life are conferred by him.
" He teachetri " man's " hands to war," and his
"fingers to fight." Everything in the outward
world of sense, everything in the inner world of
spirit ; all the movements in nature which he
penetrates with his presence, and every thought in
man's soul which he inspires by his intelligence,
are to be accounted for not as the results of
chance, of unintelligent laws, or of accident, but
as the working of God. There is running through
every part of the inspired volume a profound
recognition of law; but it is law into whicri there
is inserted the ceaseless activity of a Divine
volition. A causeless causation, a self-originating,
self-acting law is unknown in nature ; as it is
non-existent in the creed of those ancient men
to whom God revealed the earliest transcript of
his thoughts.
This activity of the Divine presence brings human
life, with all its interests, very close to God. It
makes each one of our own concernments real and
very precious in its relation to him. The individual
is never slighted, can never be overlooked, is never
forgotten in the magnitudes and the multiplicities of
the Divine care. Amidst the play of his magnificent
thoughts as these embrace the universe of things,
his eye is set upon the one as upon the all, upon
the atom as upon the mass ; and as are his thoughts,

348 Obscurity of the Divine Working.
such are his actions. While the magnitudes and
the multiplicities of worlds and systems are within
the sweep of bis plan, that plan takes in the
obscurest individual, the most insignificant event —
trie flight of an insect, the faU of a sparrow, or
the prayer of a man — as if that atom, or that
prayer, alone existed to engage his thought. How
this is, how it can be, we know not. We only
know that it is ; and that so it must be, by the
laws of his own all-perfect being as the infinite
God, and by the assurances in which he has
revealed the fact in the records of his word.
" Behold, he that keepeth Israel, shaU neither slum
ber nor sleep." " Put thou my tears into thy
bottle : are they not in thy book ? "
If from these general statements we pass on to
those that are more specific in their detaris, the
same truth still more impressively comes into view.
Afflictions are not arbitrary visitations. They are
never a lawless or a purposeless infliction. They
come often unexpectedly upon us ; are seemingly
capricious in the times and methods of their advent;
and they come upon all. They invade all classes;
penetrate all asylums ; are deaf to aU entreaties.
Utterly untraceable in some of their remoter causes,
they baffle all our skill either to mitigate or arrest
their stroke. They are, in some of their visitations,
resistless as the lightning's flash, and as insatiable
as the grave. Who, as he looks around him on
the gaps and the furrows ploughed by affliction into
the safest strongholds of health and life, does not
feel how perilously he stands as a mark which at

Obscurity of the Divine Working. 349
any moment some calamity may fataUy hit ! " In such
an hour as ye think not, the Son of man cometri."
Now, the Bible tells us that, in some significant
sense, all triese afflictions come from God. However
apparently accidental, and without any order in trieir
known antecedents, they all have a parentage in the
providence of God ; and they are all made tributary
to a purpose. Whetrier they overtake us in the form
of a public or a private sorrow; whether they affect
trie body or the mind — sweeping away our property,
or breaking down our health, or making desolate our
homes — it is stril claimed that our afflictions come
from God. They are in his hand : they are his
" rod ; " they do his bidding. " He woundeth, and
his hands make wriole." He chastiseth, and he
rebuketh. " Thou, 0 God, riast proved us : thou
hast tried us. Thou broughtest us into trie net ;
thou laidest affliction upon our loins." Triey are
neitrier accidents, nor necessary appendages, nor
arbitrary adjuncts of our nature or condition as
men. Triey are methods of training, modes of cor
rection, admonitory whispers^ wise teachings in the
dealings of God with us as fallen, as sinful men ;
and so far they are fraught with trie kindest inten
tions, and minister to most important and salutary
ends. " Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and
scourgeth every son whom he receiveth." God does
not create evU. He does not necessitate suffering.
He works it into his plan, and uses it for good.
" He does not afflict willingly the chUdren of men."
StUl he does afflict — if unwrilingly — under a higher
law, " that we may be partakers of his holiness."

350 Obscurity of the Divine Working.
Death, avowedly the most impressive and terrible
of all our afflictions, and coming upon us in the
most unanticipated surprises of time and place and
mode and victims, is claimed as the supernatural
visitation of God. " The Lord kUleth, and maketh
alive : he bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth
up." Whatever views we may hold of death as the
physical consequence of sin, the law that entaris it,
and which inflicts it in each separate case, is in the
hands of God. " Thou hidest thy face, they are
troubled : thou takest away their breath, they die,
and return to their dust." And lie can take away
a man's breath, or he can preserve it — and some
times he apparently does both — independently of all
outward circumstances in which the man is placed,
whether they be of the most impregnable security
or the most imperUled exposure. The poor, worn-
out, attenuated frame, that sways to and fro like
the last leaf in the blast of autumn, lives on for
long, wearisome years; wririe the shaft strikes down
the young man and the mighty man in trie fulness
and pride of their strength. The old, decayed,
driapidated buUding stands; whUe the stately column
falls. " It is appointed unto men once to die." When
ever it comes, however it comes — whether it be by
disease or accident, in youth or in age, at sea or on
land — death is the appointment of God, and comes
at his bidding ; and the time, the place, the method
are to be accepted and submitted to as being sepa
rately in his hand, and determined by his wril. As
in. the domain of life, so in the infliction of death

Obscurity of the Divine Working. 351
there is no chance in the government of God. A
man may forestall his appointed time and die by
his own hand, as Ahitophel did, waiting not for
Providence to open his grave, but cowardly ending
the battle and the strife by leaping into his own
tomb ; but he cannot forestall the permission or
baulk the prescience of God. No man ever slips by
stealth out of time, or appears unexpectedly in his
Maker's presence. " The keys of death and of hell "
are in the hands of the Lord of life.
So on the grander scale of national visitations.
" His eyes behold, his eyelids try the children of
men." "He changeth the times and the seasons : he
removeth kings, and settetri up kings." " He enlarg-
eth the nations, and straiteneth triem again." When
a great nation is suddenly crippled in its resources,
or blighted in its harvests, or wasted by the pestil
ence ; when fires or floods carry havoc and death
among a people; or war lays waste a peaceful terri
tory, leaving only 'its rills of blood and drifts of
bones' -where once the homestead bloomed in wealth
and beauty; still the demand is, "Shall there be evil
in a city, and the Lord hath not done it " ? ShaU
there be collision on trie rail-road, or explosion in the
coal-mine, and the Lord know nothing about it?
Shall there be a cry upon the sea, and our shores
be covered with shipwreck and our homes filled with
lamentation and mourning and a great woe, and the
Lord have nothing to do with it ? Are the politics
of nations only a great chess-board on which con
flicting politicians play their little games of ambition,
while God is out in trie distance, unconcerned in the

352 Obscurity of the Divine Working.
petty strife ? Nay : through all these strifes and tos-
sings of human pride and ambitious cupidity, there
runs the thread of a Divine purpose, permitting all,
holding all, guiding and subordinating all to a deter-
rninate end. Trie sriuttle shot through the tangled
web weaves it all up— woof and warp and pattern—
mto a consistent ultimate plan; the lifting up of
which, however it may confound trie more immediate
actors, will redound to the praise and honour and
glory of God. " 0 the depth of the riches both of
the wisdom and knowledge- of God ! How unsearch
able are his judgments, and his ways past finding
out ! "
II. The obscurity of the methods of this working :
" Behold, I go forward, but he is not there : . . .
he hideth himself, that I cannot see him."
1. There are reasons, depths and mysteries, in
the methods of the Divine working, into which we
cannot look ; causes in which that working origin
ates, and purposes which it intentionally subserves,
past our finding out. God rules : he purposes ; he
works ; his will is accomplished, — but how ? when ?
by what means ? How, through all this maze of
human things, is the Divine will a creative force?
We cannot tell.
Sometimes, as if through the small chinks in the
interplay of events, as by a sunbeam sifted through
a rift in the clouds, we seem to get a moment
ary glimpse of the Actor and his plan. " The
Lord uttereth his voice," — and we can scarcely
doubt whose voice it is, or what is the message

Obscurity of the Divine Working. 353
it conveys. While our Lord has warned us against
making the Tower of Siloam a monument of the
guilt of its immediate victims, there is undoubtedly
in some occurrences a connection so directly trace
able between the cause and the consequence — the
blow appears to find so direct an exposition in
the guilt of the smitten — that caution itself can
scarcely hesitate to pronounce upon it. When
Korah, Dathan and Abiram "go down quick into
the pit " which the earth opened to " swallow them
up;" when Nadab and Abiriu are struck dead before
the altar which they had profaned ; when Ananias
and Sapphira perish, their lips freshly blistered
with the sacrilegious lie; or when the people
shouted and said, "It is the voice of a god, and
not of a man," and "immediately the angel of the
Lord smote " the impious Herod, and he " was eaten
of worms, and gave up the ghost," — the judgment in
these cases follows so directly on the heels of the
transgression, that we are compelled to read the
import of the visitation in the guilt of the offender.
It is not alone the hand of the smiter that we see,
but the reason also of its smiting.
But it is not always thus. It is not frequently so.
And least of all is it so with the sufferings of God's
people. However clear our views, however firm our
convictions of the rectitude and wisdom and goodness
of God may be, events are constantly taking place
that confound all our reasoning; and whUe they tax
severely our submission, they impose a heavy tribute
upon our faith. " The Lord hath his way in the
whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the
2a

354 Obscurity of the Divine Working.
dust- of his feet." He tries his people with affliction:
he surrounds them with distressing perplexities; or
suffers them to be bereaved of their holiest treasures;
they pass through fires which threaten to consume
them, and into rivers which half swaUow them up*
And in the meantime, " He giveth not account of any
of his matters." A silence, unbroken as the grave —
absolute, awful, infinite — seems to mock tho agony of
the sufferer, without the solace of a momentary relief*
" We wait for light, but behold obscurity ; for bright
ness, but we walk in darkness." "We go forward, but
he is not there ; and backward, but we cannot perceive
him : he hideth himself on the right hand, that we
cannot see him."
2. One cause of this obscurity is, undoubtedly, to be
found in ourselves, in the imperfect instruments with
which we seek to gauge the purposes of God. I do
not mean in the limitation of our human powers,
making it impossible for the keenest scrutiny to pierce
into those abysses of gloom in which God is surely
and silently working; but, in our want of a spiritual
temper, the absence of a moral affinity between our
selves and God, which so surely puts us at a distance
from him, and so leaves the highways of his providence
incomprehensible to us. Our unlikeness to the Divine
nature is, I think, one of the main barriers which shut
out the light from the sufferer's eye. We do not see
so far or so clearly into some of the Divine dealings
with us as we might do or as God intends we^ should
do, just because the range of our spiritual eyesight is
limited by some inward blur or film. Faith is the

Obscurity- of the Divine- Working. 355
soul's supersensuous eye; but when it is darkened by.
the distempers of sin, it is like a broken lens in a tele
scope, it fractures and distorts the image.
In these matters it is with our spiritual senses very
much as it is with the man who seeks to get a bold
and commanding view of nature's scenery- almost
everything depends on the position we occupy. To
those on the mountain-top the light comes the earliest,
and with them it lingers the longest. The air is
purer ; the range of vision is wider : while the skies
without a cloud seem dark and distant to those
down beneath the shadows in the valley. And so,
doubtless, it is in the scope and power of that
spiritual analysis by which we seek to understand
the darker mysteries of providence. We lack sym
pathy with the great Operator in the intrinsic
excellency of his being; and this puts remoteness
upon our position and dulness upon our perception,
as we seek to penetrate his policy in dealing with
us. "We see through a glass, darkly." We are like
a blind man standing in the presence of some vast,
complicated machinery : he hears the whirl and the
jar, and feels the vibration of the moving * forces,
and discerns dimly, it may be, the forms of men flit
ting confusedly past him ; but the machinery itself, —
what it is that works it, with what interests, and to
what results — that is all a confounding puzzle. " Thou
hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence
it cometh, and whither it goeth."
Hence the remoteness in which men habitually think
of God. The unvisioned eye sees him only as a dis
tant presence, a cold and Bilent spectator on the

356 Obscurity of the Divine Working.
outermost confines of nature ; or as utterly outside
of his own world of men and things. God is so far
off that our voice cannot reach him, his hand cannot
reach us; and though his arrows fly swift and ter
rible as the lightnings in their fiery tracks through
space, they do, somehow, seem without a purpose.
God reigns over the world; but we do not see how
he governs it. To a man who thinks thus, Ufe
necessarily becomes a gulf of silence, in which aU
flow of thought between the sufferer and the Supreme
mind stagnates into melancholy doubt, or the black
ness and distance of a positive despair. On the
other hand, the purified eye, the soul made clean
from sin, pierces the gloom with a quick, intelligent
gladness, that brightens everything, even tho dark
and sorrowful, into light and beauty. " The secret
of the Lord is with them that fear him; and he
will show them his covenant." " Blessed are the
pure in heart, for they shall see God." Likeness
to God, loyalty to conscience, trust in goodness,
obedience to truth, — these unseal the eyelids of
the soul, and flood with meaning the purposes of
the Divine will. Triey turn the darkest day into
the light of morning ; they give to silence itself a
voice that turns the bitterest grief into the musio
of a song. "It is the Lord : let him do what
seemeth him good." What such a man sees of God's
method of working, he sees to be right and good;
what he cannot see, he feels to be equally right and
good. He " dwells in the secret place of the most
High," and so " abides under the shadow of the
Almighty."

Obscurity of the Divine Working. 357
8. The comprehensiveness of the plan on which
providential enactments transpire, must of necessity
entail obscurity in many of its details. " We are
but of yesterday, and know nothing, because our days
upon the earth are a shadow." Our little world is
but an atom of the great whole of men and things.
The great whole of men and things is but an atom
in the wholeness of the Divine plan. That plan must
embrace all time and place ; all worlds, with their
inhabitants ; and all events, with their issues. It
takes in time; but then it takes in also eternity. It
contemplates man individually ; but also the race.
It takes in a day or an riour ; but it embraces the
ages past, present, and to come. The history of all
past generations, the outcome of twice ten thousand
lives in their collective entail, is with us to-day.
All life is a unit with God, manifold and infinite as
are its roots in relation to us.
Hence, first, — events are never single. They have
their antecedents, and their consequents. They may
be the offspring not of one antecedent, but of many.
To the all-embracing mind of Omniscience, each pas
sing event of to-day must intertwine with all the
events of yesterday; as these will in turn embrace all
other events in giving birth to those of to-morrow.
So with the race of man. " We are all links in the
great chain which winds round the two axles of the
past and the future." Alone in his unshared personal
life, a man is never solitary in his personal history.
He is a consequent made up of many-sided, many-
folded influences, reaching indefinitely into the past.
Ancestral blood, ancestral sin, ancestral history, flow

358 Obscurity of the Divine Working.
through each man's veins, and colour the complexion
of his aggregate being. He is a complex, made up
of a hundred generations. "We who liye," says
Comte, "are ruled by the dead."
Here, then, is one of our grand mistakes in seeking
to understand the ways of God. We are in too great
a hurry to decipher passing events. We look for
reasons too close to ourselves, too isolated and speci
fic in their range; and so we seek results too immediate
in time. While the Supreme mind contemplates the
whole of life in each link, and the whole of each
separate link in the one chain, we narrow the great
drama to one solitary act, and that beginning and
closing in ourselves. We overlook the past, which to
many of us may hold the secret of those very events
whose occurrence overwhelms or distracts us in the
present ; and we shut out the future as well as
the past : and, yet, both the past and the future
may sustain some immediate but inscrutable relation
to the mystery of the suffering present. "God's
thoughts are not our thoughts, neither are his ways
our ways." " Counsels and plans within his spaceless
being and timeless eternity are the sweep of one
infinite conception ; and they cover, incomprehensibly
to us, all possible relations, conditions, exigencies, and
acts " of the individual and collective life of man.
What can we, — what can angel minds know of this
strange problem which Providence holds for sol
ution ? How can it be otherwise than confounding
to the individual actors, shut up within this. moment
ary fraction of space? We "go forward and backward,"
and we see a little of the arc up which the stupendous

'Obscurity of the Divine Working. 359
pendulum swings ; but the curve itself, the im
measurable all of individual life as that is engirdled
by the solidarity of the infinite and eternal, — that is
the secret of God.
4. Then, the moral purposes which some, possibly
many, of our darkest experiences are intended to
accomplish, must not be left outside of the causes
which perplex us. The response, " What I do thou
knowest not now," may indicate a mercy not less
than a necessity. Light, making clear the purpose,
might defeat the end. Tell me beforehand why this
is, and you destroy the basis of trust and make sub
mission impossible. "It is good that a man should
both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the
Lord." "Tribulation worketh patience."
By these moral purposes we mean the sum total
of religious gain that afflictive visitations are intended
to secure — first, to the individual sufferer; then, to
those with whom he may be more immediately re
lated; and lastly, to the universal good.
All human events, of whatever order, under what
ever apparent exceptions, are to be construed by the
Christian man according to that rule, "We know
that all things work together for good to them that
love God;" or by a more distributive threefold rule,
containing, first, the negative assurance, that "there
shall no evil touch " him ; secondly, the positive
pledge, that "no good thing shall be withheld from
him ; " and thirdly, the constructive, all-embracing
promise that "all things" shall "work together for"
his "good." "All things" — the greatest and the

360 Obscurity of the Divine Working.
least, the brightest and the darkest, far off and
near, past, present, and future — all things as they
are in God's hands and are the servitors of his
will, so they are made tributary to his people's
good. This threefold promise is the statute law, the
blessed triune charter, under which the Christian
lives ; nor is any event ever suffered to befall a good
man, but one, or both, or all three of these great
laws come into benignant operation. This is the
providence of grace. And it is in the methods
through which these laws come out in their action,
that one source of our perplexity not unfrequently
reveals itself. Even when the vision is the clearest,
it is often impossible to see which first, and some
times how at all, these several promises are being
manipulated in the interests of the individual man.
How this sudden descent of a great cloud of
blackness can be the foreshadowing of a glorious
light ; how this violent unhingement of the indi
vidual or the family life can be turned to a bene
ficial account ; how there is to be no evil in it ; how
all good is to come from it ; by what strange process
the whole mechanism of life, so suddenly thrown
out of gear, can be made to work together in its
disjointed fragments for a perfect benefaction at the
last, — this is a puzzle which only the ingenuity of
faith, as it waits in patient silence, is permitted
finally to unravel. But so, nevertheless, it is.
As on a cloudy morning the blackened sun, en
veloping the young spring flowers in the eclipse of
a disappointed hope, nevertheless works up the very

Obscurity of. the Divine Working. 361
shadows into its one mission of life-giving, so in the
providence of the all-watching, all- working, all-l.oving
God, the guide, the educator, and the Father of
his saints. Everything in the sweep of his magnificent
thoughts as these embrace the universe of worlds,
is taxed for his people's wealth. And this, again,
brings its perplexities.
Sometimes the end proposed is not related im
mediately to the means. As in the case of Joseph
and Job, Daniel and Esther, the end to be reached
appears wholly out of the way of the method employed.
And doubtless, by the personal actors, no connection
of immediateness or of relevancy could be discovered.
But to God the beginning and the end, the purpose
and the method, are one. All intermediateness van
ishes in the omniscience of the result. The relations,
the conditions, the intermediate exigencies, the issues,
are all co-existent factors in the prescient forecast
which sees the end in the beginning. To us, on the
contrary, it is all a labyrinthine puzzle — a dark
enigma, the reading of which seems to await us only
in some extramundane and supernal light.
Then, the good contemplated in some dispensations
of Providence is not single, but manifold. In the
history of Joseph, the afflictions of which he was the
the immediate victim had a mission backwards into
his own family circle, and forwards into the Egyptian
court, and so onward through all the world's future
history in its preparation through the Jewish nation
for the incarnation and redemption of Christ, — results
these, all of which seem to us incongruous and
immeasurably distant in their relation to the " coat of

362 Obscurity of the Divine Working.
many colours," and the exile and slavery in Egypt;
yet, to God, they were all braced into a consistent
and instant present, the last link parallel with
the first, the first coincident with the last. God is
not only wise and infinite : he is infinite in wisdom
as in being. What is duration with us, is but con
sciousness with him. In our own history there are
purposes of moral training which are best reached,
which possibly can be only reached, in darkness.
God is going to do some great thing for a famUy.
The father sends his son to school, educates him at
college, — and buries him, when his trained powers
have all ripened into their consummate blossom. A
mother through a long series of tedious watchings
rears to blooming health and ripening inteUigence tier
baby boy ; and then, in a moment, the frost nips
her flower at its root, and she lays it away in
the grave. The plougri-share of the destroyer goes
crashing through the centre of a household, upturn
ing suddenly its very foundations, and in the ghastly
wreck extinguishes a whole spring-time of youthful
hopes in a father's grave. Do you ask, Why all
this? Why does God hide his purpose, and robe his
presence in clouds and darkness even from those
who love him ? The answer, sufficient for us, is :
that our manhood may be trained to trust. We
grow strong by endurance. If we knew all before
hand, there would be no room for faith, for sub
mission, for the balancing of motives. If we knew
as God knows, we should be as God. But we are
infants, being trained. Patience is the fruit of trial.
Our faith is born in struggle. We, " walk in dark-

Obscurity of the Divine Working. 363
ness, and have no light," that in the gentleness and
patience of faith God may make us great.
1. Here then is, first, a rebuke to our petulance.
It says : "Be stUl, and know that I am God ! "
We are in the dust before him. " Our God is in
the heavens : he hath done whatsoever he hath
pleased." Above us, beneath us, all around this
drifting earth, are wonders, sublime expressions of
the infinite, inscrutable God. " VerUy, thou art a
God that hidest thyself." " Clouds and darkness are
round, about him." What then can we do ? Wriat
can we know of these deep things of God ? What
can we understand of his whirlwind path, as
it sweeps over this unfathomable sea ? What can
we see of this complex of causes at work in any
one of those events before which we stagger ? What
can the insect ephemeron know, whose world is a
leaf, and its life-time a day, about the foliage of
a forest ? What can a chUd, on the scaffolding of
some unfinished colossal pile of architecture, know
of the skill and purpose of its construction ? And
what are we but baby builders in the plan of God, —
ephemeral insects, wriose life is a leaf in the forest
of worlds ! He who robes riimself in light, and rolls
. on his plan out of the infinite past, across the
. .infinite present, into the infinite future, bids us, " Be
still; and know that" he is "God." The course of a
man's life is a tangled one. Our own little thread
gets jangled into dissonance with some other threads;
or ravels itself into what seems to be a labyrinthine
web of inexplicable mystery. We are distressed,

364 Obscurity of the Divine Working.
afflicted, bewildered. We cannot understand God;
we cannot read bis plan. His sUence mocks our
speech. " My way is hid from "the Lord, and my
judgment is passed over from my God." "Zion said,
The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath
forgotten me." "All these things are against me!"
Who are we who thus speak ? But yesterday we
were in the cradle, and to-morrow we shall be in
the grave ; and now, forsooth, we wonder and grow
perplexed because we cannot understand all about
the unsearchable God and his work. That is not
God's method. In his great scheme of things I can
see only myself, my own interests, my own little,
petty and selfish ends. God sees the good of the
whole working for the good of each. Let us learn
to be submissive, to " rest in the Lord and wait
patiently for him;" and "he wUl bring it to pass."
2. Let us see how this present obscurity ministers
to riope. The darkness which now envelopes the
Christian's path, and which for the reasons we have
shown must continue to envelope it, creates, as it
justifies, the expectation that riereafter, in this or in
some other state, light will arise out of obscurity,
and we shall see as we are seen, and " know even
as also" we are " known." It cannot be that trie limita
tions, the disappointments, the chafings of a bitter
unrest are to be perpetuated beyond the grave. The
fragmentary outcome of our mortal life, its unde
veloped possibUities, its sorrowful histories, its un
explained mysteries are a presumption, as they are a
grand prolepsis, of the revelations of the everlasting

Obscurity of the Divine Working. 365
future. The mind is so framed that it must and
wUl ask questions to which ' it cannot, to which it
was never intended to find answers here and now.
It cannot escape the difficulty; and it cannot but
interrogate and challenge it : " Show me wrierefore
thou contendest with me." And what is this but a
presage, set among our surest instincts, of a future
in which such questions wUl beget their answers.
Some of the sorrowful chapters of life may be
made clear even on this side of the screen. They
sometimes are. Who can estimate the effect to-day of
Borne bitter disappointment whicri years ago threa
tened to leave us utterly a ruin? Who has not felt
.that wriile "no criastening for the present seemeth to
be joyous, but grievous : nevertheless afterward it yield-
etri the peaceable fruit of righteousness?" Nay, that
bitterest of all our troubles, the bereavement that
put the sun out of our sky and clothed trie eartri
in sackcloth and ashes, that cut clean through all
our quickest sensibriities, and for the time left us a
prostrate wreck — even out of that bitter stroke there
has come a new grafting of the soul with life, from
which righteousness has sprung !
3. StUl more fully, still more tenderly, this assur
ance of light takes in the future world : " What I
do thou knowest not now ; but thou shalt know here
after." There are profundities in creation which from
the beginning of time have been struggling to get into
expression, and have not spoken yet. And there are
mysteries in our human life — events, epochs, dispen
sations — whose cloudy advent in time will constitute

366 Obscurity of the Divine Working.
apocalyptic visions for our studies through, eternity..
"The times and the seasons the Father hath put in
his own power." The unveiling is for the children
when their nonage is past. The disjointed chari*--
work of the sorrowful past will be all perfectly placed
in the lettered scrolls of the unfolding future; and
we shall see, doubtless, how all trirough the in
explicable adversities of time our God turned the
curse into a blessing. Many a seal on the mysteries
of God may remain unbroken, many a cloudy laby
rinth of memory unexplored, long ages after our
personal advent to the spirit- world ; and even after
" the books " of trie Judgment-day have all been
finally closed. But with the pure mind constantly
expanding, with the field of vision ever brightening,
and witri the period of investigation opening out
wards into trie serenities of an eternal future, the
epoch may — it will surely come when we shall have
sounded the meaning of many, of most, possibly of
all those puzzles and distracting enigmas of which
we were the individual subjects. In the wide uplands
and glorious expanse of the eternal life, God wril
surely tell thee, thou poor, solitary sufferer, why
thou wast left alone, without a sheltering hand or a
counselling voice, when in the inexperienced days of
youth thou neededst them the most. God wUl surely
tell thee, by some one of his ministering angels, thou
poor, tempted, disconsolate disciple, why thou hast
been suffered to go' mourning all triy days, with
every chord that ought to have made music jangled
out of tune. God will surely tell thee, thou poor,
broken-hearted parent, why thy chUdren were taken

Obscurity of the Divine Working. 367
from thee and hidden in the sea, or in a foreign
grave. God wUl surely tell thee, "thou afflicted,
tossed with tempest, and not comforted," why that
struggle failed, why that disappointment came, why
possession when attained left only a sense of bitter
weariness or disgust. God wUl open to thee, 0 man,
0 woman, the seven-fold seal that now clasps with
sUence the reasons of thy widowed life. Be still,
0 my soul, and wait ! "It shall come to pass, that
at evening time it shall be light."
Up there, on yon shining rieigrits, we sriall look
back on a thousand things now dark, all lit up and
made, luminous in the visions of God. Be patient,
suffering man. Let me not ask when, or how, or
where it shall be : let me wait. Let me not ask if
aU that I have lost will be gathered there for the.
renewing : let me wait. It is enough that the once
wasted channels of life shall be all filled again, and
the once broken urn of the heart be healed for
evermore. Man, be still! "Trie nigrit is far spent:"
the morning breaketh !

Jlfftfction-js ttot JUabentd.
" For the Lord will not cast off for ever : but though he cause grief,
yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies.
For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men." —
Lamentations iii. 31—33.
A MORE melancholy, dirge-like plaint than that
of ' this heart -broken' prophet never fell from
human lips. Not Job himself, in his sorest straits,
ever uttered a lamentation more tragic or despairing.
Read carefully the first twenty verses of the chapter,
and you will see into what an abyss of gloom, taking
all light from the heayens and eating all joy out
of the heart, this prophet had fallen.
The lofty confidence of this suffering man in
the fidelity and compassionate rule of God, his own
bitter grief notwithstanding, is not less majestic
than his sorrow is plaintive. Read again the sublime
refrain, as it breaks over his gloom like the shaft of
sunshine through the storm, in verses 22 to 26 : " It
is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed,
because his compassions fail not." Then comes this
grand prophecy of a triumphant faith in the providence
of a Divine compassion, under which all suffering is
being ministered with a purpose and mixed with a
tenderness out of which emerge definite and healing
results, as it is given in the text : " For the Lord

Afflictions not Accidental. 369
will not cast off for ever : but though he cause grief,
yet will he have compassion. For he doth not afflict
wUlingly." Triis apparent contradiction between the Divine
compassion and our human griefs, between wriat we
desire and need and what we feel to be real, is to-day
what it has been from the beginning, the .standing
problem, the bitter tragedy of human life. It has
but one solution. Man as he actuaUy is, is under
a providential training for what it is possible for him
to become. There are not two Gods, as the old
Persian theosophy imagined, one good and the other
evil, contending for man ; but one God, contending
with the evil .that is in man. There is a mischief
in man's nature producing discord in his condition,
begetting the necessity and the mercy of a Divine
chastening; and this, both in the end it contemplates
and in' trie methods it employs, is a providence of
compassion. I. Here then is, first, the fact that grief is the heritage
of man.
"The whole creation," said the Apostle, "gfOaneth
and travaileth in pain together until now." Things
have not altered much in their outer aspect in this
matter since the Apostle's time. Life is still the
natural history of sorrow — man's life the bitterest of
all. "Although affliction cometh not forth of the
dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground;
yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly up
ward." As surely as the spark escapes from the
smitteri- steel, so surely does trouble follow in the
2b

370 Afflictions not Accidental.
wake of man. He is born into a world where he does
not so much find the trouble, as the trouble finds
him. It anticipates, attends, and consummates his
advent into being. He is born into it, as the insect
is born into the air.
There are the troubles which belong to the lot of in
dividual man. And in this form they are the impartial
inheritarice of the race. All men, in whatever other
things they may differ, agree in this, that they are
alike born heirs to a patrimony of sorrow. If we
escape it in one form, it meets us in another; if
at one time it passes us by, at some other time we
are surely its victims. AU through the world, and
independently of all the accidental distinctions of
life, from the throne to the cottage, in youth and in
age, affliction, in some one form or another, has
its grip on man. And so it has been from the be
ginning. "Man is born unto trouble." It is the
inherited destiny of all. It is the counterpart of sin.
There are the troubles wbich afflict the community,
which fall upon the mass in its aggregation of families,
neighbourhoods, communities, and nations ; in which
men indiscriminately seem to be the victims of a
common affliction, of which no account can be given.
The air gets contaminated, and chokes them whole
sale with its pestilential fevers ; the earth sends up its
putrid miasma ; and the wells and rivers are foul with
contagion : there is scarcely a neighbourhood or a
house in which there is not the cry of some one sick,
or the mourning for the dead. And this, too, is a lot
common to all. From the palace to the cellar, in
town _and _ village and solitary hut, at the couch of

Afflictions not Accidental. 371
the lonely sufferer where disease is slowly wasting
the frame, or in the privacy of domestic grief where
families are suddenly broken up, — and thence onward
through a never ending gradation of misfortunes in
business, commercial embarrassments and hopeless
bankruptcies which dismember and shock the solid
Ufe of a nation, human life in some, in many of its
aspects does appear to be like the prophet's scroll,
"written within and without," with "lamentations, and
mourning, and woe."
Then, there are the troubles which overtake us not
Unfrequently in the form of sudden calamities, the
" terrible things" which, in the shape of accidents,
explosions, fires, and shipwrecks, strike dumb a nation's
heart. The judgments of God, or some strange license
in the physical agencies of the universe, seem em
battled against the interests and the safety of man.
The fatal epidemic is generated in .certain abnormal
conditions of the atmosphere, of which he is ignorant.
Whole fleets are driven to the bottom of the ocean
by tempests he can neither foresee nor escape. The
earthquake lifts the solid earth ; subterranean fires
ascend; coasts and islands are submerged; the crowded
city and the busy wharf sink ; and myriads of human
beings go down together suddenly into the fathomless
gulf. And these troubles have always been the heritage
of man. For more than sixty centuries this planet,
in its progress through space, at every turn of its
axis has spread before the eye of the All-merciful
a scene of universal suffering, an 'Iliad of woes,' a
Golgotha of ruins, a dark Aceldama, wet with the
tears of anguish and crowded with the mute but

372 Afflictions not Accidental.
eloquent monuments of human woe. The great and
the good, the beautiful and the wise, the aged and
the young, all races and all conditions of men, have
gone down under this terrible euroclydon of grief.
And there is no cessation in this onslaught on the
fortunes of man. Suffering, like sin, has no vacation :
it keeps no holiday. Pain and poverty and hard
ship, sorrow and disappointment sharp and incurable,
with death bringing up and crowning the climax, have
been and are being meted out in a full cup to the
pale and quivering lips of man.
If in this huge complex of human grief it were
true that the guilty only suffered, or triat the profane
and the incorrigible were chiefly its victims, one
might suppose that a natural providence were some
how at work to guard the rights of the virtuous
against the wrongs of the sinning. But as we have
seen, " there is no discharge in this war." " There
is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked." " I
am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of
his wrath. He hath led me, and brought me into
darkness, but not into light. Surely against me is
he turned ; he turneth Iris hand against me all the
day." That is trie riistory of all men in one. " Life
is drugged witri wormwood to the brim." As a great
sufferer once bitterly said: "There is not a sorrow
wliich. the imagination can picture ; no sign of anguish
which nature agonised can exhibit ; no accent of woe
that the human lips can utter, but what is familiar
to the ear of afflicted humanity." And this not
only in seeming disregard of the character, but in
the veriest mockery of the age, position, and virtues

Afflictions not Accidental. 373
of the individual sufferer; as if calamity, like some
other evUs, loved a shining mark. " Man is born
unto trouble" — all men are — " as the sparks fly
upward." Hide himself as he will, lift himself up
to whatever height, bury himself [in whatever retreat,-—
he is the mark on which the unerring shaft, soon
or late, wUl surely strike !
2. Let us bear in mind that we have been speaking
only of facts, not of causes or theories. That they are
facts ; that sucri facts constitute trie staple material
of human history ; that they should be tolerated
under the government of an all-wise and beneficent
God ; that triey sriould seem to exist independently
of his power ; how they can be reconcried with his
wisdom in its creative foresight, or in its final
purpose, — this has ever been the mystery in which
the wisdom of man has been baffled, and where aU
his philosophies have gone to pieces. And it is just
the world's problem to-day — dark and insoluble as
at the first.
And, further, let it be remembered that these facts
are independent of any belief or disbelief as to their
origin or purpose, and as to the relation, if any,
which man holds to a moral government. They are
not the creations of our Christian philosophy; and
they are not trie coinage of our Christian faith. If
with all the appliances of its sanatory and amelio
rating forces Christianity has not prevented evil, or
even greatly lessened its total amount in our world;
neither has it in any sense created it. It does
not belong to those who believe in this system to

374 Afflictions not Accidental.
account for these 'facts, any more than it belongs to
those who reject it. They are a difficulty to the
Christian philosopher ; but they are equally so to
the sceptic. They are to both equaUy facts. They
pertain as much to the newest infidelity, as they
do to the oldest Christian belief. If a man ask why
Eternal goodness permits the wide-spread, enormous
miseries under which creation groans ; why the earth
from the beginning has been covered with the
dying and the dead; and why there is neither
abatement nor termination within the reach or
even the hope of man ; still the question, if an
unanswerable one, is one with which the unbehever
as well as the Christian theist has to do." It
belongs to Deism as much as it belongs to
Christianity; and to Evolution, or Pessimism, quite
as much as to either. Nor will Atheism itself, the
doctrine that chance or fate rules the destinies of men,
afford its advocates even a momentary reUef from
the perplexing enigmas of fact. That doctrine, indeed,
deprives us of a personal God, and, consequently,
of all intelligent prevision in the arrangements of
the universe; it cuts us adrift from all relation to a
fatherly providence, in the permission or the control
of the evils we encounter ; but it neither prevents,
nor mitigates, nor explains the evils themselves.
Atheism is a creed of disbeliefs. Instead of "the liv
ing God," "our Father in heaven," whose "tender
mercies are over all his works," it gives us an un
conscious, unintelligent, and eternal Nature. In the
place of creative law and a final purpose, it sets
up a grim and remorseless Fate. But it mitigates no

Afflictions not Accidental. 375
evil; alleviates no pang; dries no tear in the sor
rowful history of man. Be we theistic or atheistic
in our belief, all evil things print themselves in
facts on every page of life. Wrongs, outrages, mur
ders are perpetrated ; slavery, tyranny, and horrid
wars still grind men to the dust. The air is all
sick with disease. Trie earth is everywhere broken
with graves. Hearts break with despair. The great
wheels of nature, or fate, or law — or whatever it may
he — move on, calm and relentless, clawing up with
their jagged teeth individuals, families, communities,
nations, ages, races, without pause or pity, explana
tion or relief !
You ask: Why, if there be not only goodness but
an almighty justice reigning over the world and men,
does it not stretch forth its hand to rescue and save
from suffering? But why, if there be an almighty
chance, or fate, does it not do that ? If thinking
matter, or materialised thought be God, still it is a
God under whose creative auspices man is born into
a world of trouble. In either view, man's life is a
riddle, sternly realistic — with, however, this stupendous
difference : that on the one view, the key that helps
us to unlock the mystery is furnished ; on the other,
no key exists. " By one man sin entered into the
world, and death by sin ; and so death passed upon
all men, for that all have sinned." Man is a fallen
being, a self-ruined intelligence — poised and quivering
between two infinities ; from the one of which he is
banished, for the other of which he is being trained.
He is God's child, in exile. He suffers as a discrowned
king. That is the one intepretation. Suffering and

376 Afflictions not Accidental.
guilt are correlated facts. They mutually involve
and explicate each other. Given the one, the other
follows. In the other view, all revelation, all history
of the past is impossible; all hope of the future a
dream. " It makes the universe, man included, to be
an automaton ; God to be the uniformity of physical
law ; and man's future a coffin ! "
II. We have, secondly, the Divine compassion, in its
relation to suffering : " He doth not afflict wrilingly
nor grieve the children of men."
1. And here, first, it is claimed that all human
suffering comes within the foreknowledge, and is
under the control of God. While, as a fact, suffering
in its origin and infliction does always hinge on to
secondary causes in the fatalities and falsities of
man ; those secondary causes in their action do
always, immediately or remotely, fasten on to the
purpose of God. Afflictions are not an accident.
It is no blind chance that launches the fiery bolt.
It is not an unintelligent agency that wings the fatal
shaft. Somehow, and somewhere, and for some pur
pose, there is running all through the seething mass
of what appears to us little else than a complex of
sorrowful accidents, the activity of a prescient fore
thought, a permissive providence, and a governing
will. " Trie curse causeless shall not come."
The writers of the Old Testament scriptures are
never more emphatic than in their assertion of this
double parentage of human sorrow. If they knew
but little of the scientific set-up and mechanical move
ments of the laws of nature, they knew a great deal

Afflictions not Accidental. 277
mspirationally of the Supreme life, of which those laws
were the appointed expression. They never ignore
the immediate presence of God in his works ; they
never unfasten his governing hand from the smallest
or the greatest events. They neither substitute the
sovereignty of the Divine will for natural law ; nor
put natural law in the place of the Supreme will.
As these writers uniformly teach, the plan of Provi
dence takes in the universe as a whole. It embraces
all space and all time, all worlds and all their in
habitants, with aU their minute and separate histories.
He " worketh all things." " Trie Lord hath pre
pared his throne in the heavens ; and his kingdom
ruleth over all." The individual is never forgotten
in the multitude or the magnitude of the Divine
cares. The interests of the man have a place in the
complications of his actings in trie world. " His eyes
behold, his eyelids try the children of men." It
makes one of reason's greatest demands upon faith,
absolutely to realise this; and scepticism itself might
be pardoned if for the moment it recoils, confounded,
from tbe assurance that amidst all the imagined
and unimagined magnificence of trie Divine triought
and care, the individual man is never either slighted
or forgotten. That it is so, nevertheless, is one of
those revealed facts on wliich faith gets its final
warrant in the inductions of reason itself. " The
eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding," as
they must, " the evil and the good."
Even in what are held to be the accidents of life,
those. strange, unforeseen, and as we are apt to think,
purely fortuitous events, whicri anticipate all our fore-

378 Afflictions not Accidental^
sight and calculation, and which entail so constantly
so large a measure of suffering upon the man and
the community, the inspired writers have a place for
the anticipation and the activity of a prescient provi
dence. The sudden blow that takes away my life,
or the life of my friend ; the accidental slip or shot ;
the fatal collision, the dreadful explosion, the cap
sizing of a boat, the shipwreck, or the conflagration, —
to us all these and kindred events are fortuities, a
game of chance, whose course no human sagacity can
foresee, and which no caution, therefore, could pre
vent. They are contingencies to us, a mere chapter
of accidents ; but not to the foreplanning and all-seeing
mind of God. However inscrutable and seemingly
without order to our earth-bound vision, they may
have a direct relation to the hidden purposes of God.
Amidst the wild swoop of a battlefield, in trie history
of the Jewish kings, " a certain man drew a bow at
a venture, and it smote Ahab, the king of Israel,
between the joints of his harness, so that he died."
It was a chance shot, without plan or purpose, from the
bow of an unknown Syrian archer; and yet the track
of that accidental arrow was foreseen, and its issue
directed by the overguiding providence of God, who
had said that Ahab, a monster of iniquity abhorred
of God and man, should die that day on the battle
field. The scenes in human dramas such as this
shift, as we think, strangely enough, and sometimes
they appear to shift without -a reason ; but they are
always, directly or indirectly, shifted by the invisible
hand of a wise and calculating providence.
And how strangely, how unexpectedly do men die,

Afflictions not Accidental. 37Q
every day! In what unforeseen circumstances, at what
unlikely ages, in the midst of what unfinished plans, .
and against what probabilities of health and fame
and future, crushing down and cruelly disregarding
all the prophesying and the pleadings of our agonised,
hungry human hearts, does the bolt strike its un-
pitying blow ! There is not a day in which multi
tudes are not being hurried away by sudden calamities,
by unexpected hurts, by the rupture of some tiny
vessel of blood, by apoplectic fits and paralytic
strokes, by fires and collisions at sea and on land !
With a sublime audacity of skill, man not only
harnesses the stupendous forces of nature to the
bent of his purpose; he seeks also to master them.
He boasts of his science, his mechanical skill, his
conquests over nature ; he enters proudly the lists
against infinite odds in the winds and the waves, —
and, in three minutes, the " Captain," the most splen
did specimen of naval architecture the world had
seen, with its five hundred confident, scientific, and
heroic men, sinks like lead in the remorseless deep !
Would you dare to say that at the moment of that
fatal plunge the Supreme mind was away, busying
himself in the affairs of some extra-mundane world,
and was therefore unobservant of what was taking
place in this fraction of the world of men? or that,
being present, and in immediate contact with it, he
was indifferent to the awful wreck of life and fortune
it involved ? or that, being both present and pitiful,
he was yet unable to prevent the intrusion of such
a gigantic overthrow into the affairs of men? Surely,
there can be no absenteeism, no indifference, no

380 Afflictions not Accidental.
incapacity in the all-perfect, infinite God. Along
the myriad antecedent lines of concatenated human
agency at any point of space or time, he, indeed'
is alone able to look. But that the first Unk and
the last link and each intermediate link in the chain
of human causes leading to that and similar catas
trophes fasten on to the foreknowledge and governing
will of God, we can accept on the testimony of his
word. " I was dumb, I opened not my mouth ;
because thou didst it." A gigantic accident! an
appalling calamity ! Yes; but not without its law and
order in the government of God. " Thou didst
blow with thy wind, the sea covered them : they
sank as lead in the mighty waters." " Who is hke
unto thee, 0 Lord, among the gods ? Who is Uke
thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing
wonders ? "
We are speaking of foresight, of that prescient
outlook of Providence, which takes all human oc
currences out of the run of chance surprises, and
puts them amongst foreseen and permitted events.
There can be no accidents in the scheme of infinite
thought : there can be no surprise to the intelligence
triat infinitely knows. We see only results. To God
the beginning, with its antecedents all hidden and
remote, is a presence. The disaster that extinguishes
a hundred lives comes to us as a surprise, without a
reason : to him, the flaw in a bit of steel, or the false
position of a railway switch, on which tbe catastrophe
depends, is a foregone fact. The wildest freaks of
chance as they seem ; the most exorbitant anomalies
in nature ; the slightest incidents in the constitution

Afflictions not Accidental. 381
of mind or matter; storm, and earthquake, and fires;
the shoot of an avalanche, the dropping of a leaf,- the
wanderings of a comet; the birth, and life, and history,
and death of a man, — all come within the foreknowledge
and are beneath the sovereign sweep of the purposes of
God. " Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in
heaven, and in earth, in the seas, and in all deep
places." It is on these so-called accidents that God
intentionally, as it would seem, sets up the mementoes!
of our fragility, of our dependence, of the blindness)
and the ignorance which beset even our wisest
knowledge. He sets them up in youth and in age-
in the scenes of business and in the haunts of
pleasure, as amidst the security and the sanctity
of home ; that we may have no spot, and no moment,
and no pursuit, in which to think ourselves entitled
to forget him, — "in whom we Uve, and move, and.
have our being.'"
2. Many of our troubles, probably most of them,
have their causes in ourselves. They come within the
Divine plan not as visitations which God foreordainsj
or directly inflicts; but as actualities which he foresees*
emergent in the history of man. They would be
equally facts if they were not foreseen : that they are
foreseen does not necessarily make them facts.. This
is not to shut out all direct intervention on the part
of God from the sufferings of man; it only puts in
a protest against the notion that makes all suffering
the direct and arbitrary infliction of God.
Providence is the action of God through law;
and, as a general rule, providential laws work

382 Afflictions not Accidental.
best for him who works the best with them.
They work — it may be silently and in secret —
but they work surely against the man who works
against them. There are laws of health, physical
and mental, which, if a man wilfully disregard or
habitually transgress thern, will work directly against
and not for bim. A man is intemperate in his
habits ; he lives in excess. Very well. Subsequent
temperance may alleviate, but it cannot wriolly ex
onerate him from the penalty of a long course of
riotous living. The mind neglected in early youth
can never afterwards become what it would have
been, had it been properly trained. The laws of
Providence work not arbitrarily, but retributively, in
accordance with and through the self-elected choices
of men. So it is in the ordinary visitations of
affliction. They are, undoubtedly, in numberless in
stances, if we could get at their historical diagnosis,
a self-inflicted visitation. They are the scourge with
which Providence chastises our perverseness, our
ignorance, our self-indulgence, or our positive sriv
We ourselves not only drink the bitter cup, but
we supply and mix all its ingredients. " Medical
science," it has been said, " has never gauged, has
never enough set itself to gauge the intimate con
nection between moral fault and disease. To what
extent, or in how many cases, what is called 'illness'
is due to moral springs having been used amiss,
whether by being overused or by not being used
sufficiently, we cannot tell." Undoubtedly, to an
extent quite beyond all ordinary belief or imagina
tion, it is to this misuse, to the personal abuse of

Afflictions not Accidental. 383
the normal constitution of nature, that a large pro
portion of our suffering is to be attributed. And
when we recollect the many sanitary precepts and
promises which run through the Old Testament,
coupled as these are with allusions to the physical
laws under which human life holds its tenure, it
does seem triat, to a large extent, we riave our own
health in our own hands ; and that, without the
least approach to a trespass on the Sovereign will,
acting in careful conformity to trie Divine laws, we
may learn how to maintain both our health and
life ; while by indifference to or neglect of trie same
laws, we may sap the foundation both of healtri and
life, and prematurely die.
In riow many ways, and with what a perverse
tenacity of wilful ignorance, we are violating these
laws and are suffering bitterly and hopelessly in
consequence, can be known only to God. That we
do violate them, that many of our sad experiences
are due to such violations, it would be idle to dis
pute. There are certain hygienic laws, entering im
mediately into the very constitution of our nature
and touching every one of us at every moment,
on the transgressing or obeying of which our whole
complexion of existence is dependent. They concern
the air we breathe; the houses we live in; trie
clotriing we wear ; the food we eat ; the pleasures
and amusements we pursue, — hygienic laws which
have the command of the nursery and the drawing-
room, the office and the school, not less than of the
dust and din and choke-damp of the cellar, trie
factory, and trie mine, wriicri, if men and women

384 Afflictions not Accidental.
would first seek to understand and then strive
honestly to obey them, would keep a thousand bitter
ingredients out of their cup. God has made it a
condition of health that we breathe a pure air,
and eat wriolesome food, and accustom ourselves to
physical exercise ; and, with all these things at com
mand, how many thousands of both men and women
are there who every year get UI, or melancholy, or go
mad and die, just because they choose to live in a
feculent atmosphere, to eat and drink pernicious things,
or too much of things that are good. They drug
themselves with evU excitement, or chafe and worry
themselves with the distractions of care ; they are
indolent when they ought to be active, and active
when they ought to be at rest ; and otherwise, in a
hundred fashions, they invade the very citadel of life,
until insensibly they stagnate in apathy, or become
the miserable victims of some chronic functional de
rangement ending in insanity or self-destruction, — -
nature's penalty for violating nature's laws. Triis
suicidal raid on the economies of life, in spite of
the warnings and protests of God, is one of our
deadly sins.
So, too, in what is called the mystery of sudden
death. In the case of many a successful man of
business, the cup is dashed from his lips just when
its fragrant sweetness is being filled to the brim.
Some terrible wrencri prostrates him in hopeless
sickness ; or he is struck down in a moment by
a paralytic stroke, and dies witri years of unused
strength shut up in his blood and brain. Of course,
every one is shocked at the mystery of Providence

Afflictions not Accidental. 385
wbich, in so arbitrary a manner, puts its arrest on
the Ufe of such a man. To God, it may be, aU
the mystery of the ease is explained in that man's
dogged determination to crowd the work of two Uves
into one. The engine-work of the brain was driven
at high pressure ; and so the machinery broke
down. " Oh that I had known the art of Ufe,"
said the dying Theodore Parker, '• or found some
book, or some one had taught me how to Uve ! "
And if some one had taught Theodore Parker, and
Hugh MiUer, and thousands more of nature's gifted
sons and daughters this great secret ; or had they
been wise enough to learn it for themselves : there
might have been fewer broken heaits, and more of
active virtue in the world than are found in its
records to-day. But man learns often only when it
is too late to amend; and his wisdom perishes with
his foUy. We eat the bitter fruit of the tree we
ourselves have planted.
8. But, now, there are troubles and afflictions —
and these not few — which we must consider only as
the punishment of sin.
' ' The Lord doth not afflict willingly nor grieve
the chUdren of men." But then he does afflict and
grieve them, when they offend. " He wfll not cast "
them " off for ever. He wUl have compassion ac
cording to the multitude of his mercies." But
the compassion is in the use of the rod, not in the
withholding of it. There are moral statutes in the
government of God over men, as there are physical
laws in man's government of himself. And as the

386 Afflictions not Accidental.
infraction of the one class entaUs suffering, so the
transgression" -of the other class brings punishment.
We thus suffer because we sin. And, presumably, we
all suffer in some form and at some time, because
we have aU sinned against some law or command
ment of God. Even the pains and the penalties
which appear to come upon a man without any known
immediate fault of his own, do yet spring out of a
fault somewhere. They are a consequence, directly
or remotely, of transgression. Trie sin triat when com
mitted by an individual brings individual punishment,
when committed "by a nation brings national suffering.
If one man or a thousand men violate the laws of
health, the consequence is that they suffer when they
transgress. If a nation or if individuals infract the
laws which hold them in their allegiance to God, the
penalty follows when they sin. God " will by no
means clear trie guilty." Do a wrong thing, with
a bad intent, — and though you put the breadth, of
creation between you and it, the penalty wiU reach
you. " Though hand join in hand, the wicked shaU
not be unpunished."
In the Old Testament Decalogue we have a sum
mary of the moral statutes under which man is
placed. And as these were intended to determine
trie actions of men and do determine triem, all men
keeping or breaking, or alternately breaking and
keeping them ; so the providence of God, as the
guardian of law, deals retributively with men. Of
these Old Testament laws we may instance three, as
these, constructively, contain and enforce all the rest.
The first affirms the absolute supremacy of the One

Afflictions not Accidental. 387
God : "I am the Lord thy God ; thou shalt have
none other gods before me." The second asserts the
sanctity of trie seventh day: "Remember that thou
keep holy the Sabbath day. In it thou shalt do no
manner of work." And the third provides for the in
tegrity of the individual life, in its relations to God and
to our fellow men: " Triou shalt not steal; thou shalt
not commit adultery; thou shalt do no murder; thou
shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour;
thou shalt not covet." These laws were laid down,
primarily, in trie constitution and nature of man at
trie beginning. They were afterwards codified into
a formal system of enactments by the almighty Law
giver in person, when humanity was organised into
a visible theocratic churcri. And lastly, they were
interpreted and enforced, for all time by the teaching
of the Lord Jesus Christ. They concern God in his
regnant supremacy ; the Sabbath day in its obligation
and sanctity ; man in his personal responsibility and
duties. These are laws laid at the foundation of
the government of God over men. How do men
treat these laws ? How, as a consequence of man's
treatment of his laws, does God deal with men ?
There is the Sabbath day. We go into no ques
tion or controversy as to the origin, or the change, or
the necessity of the sacred seventh day. It is sufficient
for our purpose triat from the beginning until now,
and now as at the beginning, the sanctification of
a seventh day is a matter of positive appointment.
Certainly, the primal enactment has not been re
voked ; and untU it be revoked, it must stand in
force. " Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath

388 Afflictions not Accidental.
day." " Ye shall keep my Sabbaths, and reverence
my sanctuary : I am the Lord triy God." " If ye
wilt not riearken unto me to hallow the Sabbath day,
then will I kindle a fire, and it shall burn down the
palaces of Jerusalem, and it shall not be quenched."
How far as a nation, how far as individuals do
we keep this law ? As a nation, we are supposed
to profane the Sabbath day less than our neighbours
on the Continent, and, in the outward excesses of
desecration, it is certain that we do ; but in how
many other ways do we as a people profane it, never
theless ! I say nothing of the men who denounce it
as the effete, worn-out institution of an obsolete past;
nothing of the ignorance, the coarse brutaUty that
can distinguish between the Sabbath and any other
day, only as it affords a less restricted Ucense to
open, deliberate vice. Neither do I dwell on the
insult offered to God and man in the sinister
attempts of men in authority to enforce by ParUa-
mentary enactments the opening of places of pubhc
amusement on the Sabbath, a measure utterly at
variance with its spirit, and destructive of all its pos
sibilities of rest. Away from all this, there is stril
a terrible margin on which to ask the question : How
do we as a nation, how as communities, how as
families, how as individual men and women do we
regard the Sabbath day ? Does not the question
disturb every one of us ? Ought it not to disturb
and humble us ? Look through the public streets ;
look into your separate homes ; into your individual
hearts; let the quest be carried on all through our
Church assemblies : and, if it be honestly done, the

Afflictions not Accidental. 38g
pestiferous vapours of impiety with whicri the air is
laden on our Sabbath days, may well arrest and as
tonish, if they do not stifle us. There is a great cry
in the land against its inhabitants going up to God.
Then, look at the sin of intemperance, and of open,
unblushing ungodliness. And this brings us to the
third great division of the Decalogue, which provides
for the integrity of individual life : " Honour thy father
and thy mother;" "Thou shalt not kill;" "Thou
shalt not steal;" "Thou shalt not commit adultery;"
"Thou shalt not* take trie name of trie Lord triy God
in vain." If these laws did come from the mouth
of God ; if they were intended to control and govern
men; and if the great Ruler and Lawgiver be, as the
Scriptures assure us, jealous of his honour; and if he
will not and cannot deny himself, or trifle with, or
unsay his words ; trien we may well tremble as we
think of the wanton and shocking profanity, the
debauchery, the villainous excesses, the ten thousand
times ten thousand enormities spreading themselves
before the eye or rolling up in such volumed masses
into the ear of the eternal Judge. Think of the
myriad forms in which each one and all of these sins
are being committed by men in every rank of life, on
each successive day, through every day, in each suc
ceeding year ! Think of the names of some of those
men — their position in society, their education, their
office, their influence, the offences with which they
are charged; think of the assassinations, the murders,
seductions, and suicides, the gigantic forgeries, the
shameless profanities of the middle and upper grades
of society ; and then look into the blacker reek of brutal

3go Afflictions not Accidental.
debasement which goes steaming up into the heavens
from the unwashed Bohemianism of the gutter : and
is it not the marvel — not that man suffers under the
whip of a retributive Providence, but that the earth
itself does not instantly gape and bury the wriole race
out of the gaze of an indignant universe ! " Hear
the word of the Lord, ye children of Israel : for the
Lord hath a controversy with trie inhabitants of the
land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor know
ledge in the land. By swearing, and lying, and
killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they
break out, and blood toucheth blood. Therefore shall
the land mourn, and every one triat dweUetri therein
shall languish." Has God forgotten himself, — or man?
The highest law in the Decalogue is that which
pleads for the supremacy of God — in the thought and
affection, the reverence and the obedience of men :
" God spake these words and said, I am the Lord
thy God: thou shalt have no other gods before me!"
And surely, it may be said, men are not atheists :
they believe in God. Whatever other questions may
be held to be unsettled, the fact that God is, and
that men owe him reverence — that is not an open
question, surely. But if we are not verily atheists,
are we not idolaters, worshippers of self, of mammon,
of pleasure ? Is not one of the crying sins of. the
age its intense worldliness, its utter absorption in the
things of sense, its utter forgetfulness of the things
of God ? A wave of enormous magnitude has over-
swept us as a nation, in which all grand thought, all
high aspiration and noble living seem to be overlaid and
made impossible. There is neither the time nor the

Afflictions not Accidental. 391
inclination for introspection, the reflective self -inquiry
which the higher nature demands. And this incessant
whirl of occupation and excitement degrades while
it dissipates. Men grow inwardly frivolous ; or
they become hard • and grasping, self-indulgent and
ungenerous. The nobler aspirations of the soul are
all quenched ; and trie man becomes an animated
machine. It is an age in which, as never before,
brilliant fortunes are being made, — and souls by trie
myriad are being lost.
But are we not, in some veritable sense, really
atheists ? Are not men everywhere asking, " Who
is trie Lord that I should obey him ? " Is it not
the business of some of our teachers, formally and
by a scientific process, to ungod the universe ; and
to account for it, and uphold it, and altogether to
manage, as they use and enjoy it, quite independ
ently of the old Scriptural notion of a personal, all-
ruling, almighty God ? To say that God does this
and that, that he is this and not the other, that he
is near to and busies himself iri the affairs of men,
is to talk in language of the world's babyhood ! It
is unscientific and unpriilosopriical ! "To speak of
trie service of God," Dr. Strauss tells us, " is insult
ing to humanity ! " There is no God but force ; no
providence but law ; no beginning, no ending but
chance. The figment of a Supreme Being is a de
cayed superstition. And as to man, do we not know
that all his religion is a dream ; that the doubts
with which he wrestles and the hopes with, whicri
he peoples his dreams are all a mocking phantasma
goria, without a reason, fictions of the imagination,

392 Afflictions not Accidental.
from which education is to set him free ? ^ Nor is
this merely a denial. As the Christian conscious
ness grows in its loyalty to the grand conception of
the character and perfections of God, and becomes-
more intelligent and reverent in his worship, so the
antagonism of the atheistic heart becomes more pro
nounced , and spiteful. There is a bitterness in its
tones, a scurrility in its language, a malignant
venom in its spirit, which show at what and how
it could strike, if its puny arm were equal to ' its
will. There is a terrible hate in the hearts of such
men against God. And they hate him because he
is God.
And if these things are so, is it likely that in
such a controversy man wUl be the only, speaker ?
May we not expect that God will claim the right to
be heard, and to vindicate himself and his works
against the insults of men ? And if so, in what
language may we suppose he will express hiinself ?
Let history answer that question. Let, the human
conscience answer it. Let the warnings and the
protestations and the prophetic foreshadowings of
Revelation answer it. Let the hecatombs of agonized,
human victims,* piled up in the horrors of war and
rapine, and in plague and pestilence and - earthquake,
answer it. Let the pent up energies of nature, as
it struggles and fights with the hot frenzy of man,
crushing him ever and anon in its- fury, answer it.
Let the doom of individual men, whose crimes are
chronicled in history's blackest page, answer it, — men
who entered the lists as the chiefs, and plumed
themselves on their heroism in the game of sin;

Afflictions not Accidental. 393
and who perished, abhorred of their fellow men and
accursed of God — cursed in their haunting memories,
cursed in their maddening fears, cursed in their life
long despair, and dying at last in their guilt, cursed
everlastingly : let the blighted, blasted doom of such
men answer this .question !
No : God will not abdicate his throne because of
the atheism of men. We may refuse to see any
convincing proofs of his busy presence with us. We
may openly deny triat any sucri presence exists ; or
we may distress ourselves with a superficial reading
of the many mysteries which are burdening the air
witri shrieks or breaking human hearts witri grief.
But that presence, if unseen and unrecognised by
men, is immanent and real. God works in silence.
He works and waits, on lines that stretch into the
eternal. He is " long-suffering, not wriling that any
should perish." He " bears long, and is kind."
Trien he " speaks unto " men " in his wrath, and
vexes them in his sore displeasure." *' He doth not
afflict wrilingly:"' but he will not abrogate his law.
He does not destroy: but- he will humble the pride
of the disobedient. He will not annihilate man : he
will be God alone. " Thou shalt break them with a
rod of iron."
And now, wriat, in view of these conclusions, is
the first sentiment with which we ought to fill our
minds ? Is it not that of profound thankfulness for
that revelation in wriicri trie origin and the purpose
of all human suffering are made known ? Scientific
men are tracing life. back through endless genealogies

394 Afflictions not Accidental.
to some original germ, itself no bigger, and no more
vital, than the smallest fractional part of a grain of
sand. They appear to have run everything out into
nothing, and see nothing behind. They make a God
of science, — and a myth of religion. But no advance
of science has gone to help us better to understand
the facts of human misery, as these are inherent
in the nature and constitution of man. It has not
prevented it, it does not prevent it; and it cannot
much alleviate it. Evolution (the flowing out of one
thing into some other and higher thing) is the most
paraded triumph of the modern physicists. But out
of what thing did the first evU come ? Into what
other form is the world's evil all to flow? What is
the final outcome into which all things, past and
present and future, are to be finally evolved ? Is
there any other state of existence into which, by
the same law, man is to be developed ? Thirteen
hundred millions of human beings are living to-day
upon this planet, the majority of whom are living
in misery and sin ; they have been developed into
a state of existence of which misery and sin are
the dominant attributes. Are all these myriads of
human beings really men ? or are they so many
millions of germs — not finished entities, but germs,
splendid potentialities, capable of being worked up
into men ? And is it so that in trie struggle for
existence, in the survival of the fittest, those only who
develope advantageously and in harmony with their
environment pass into some advanced condition;
while all the undeveloped are left to perish utterly
in this embryotic condition or earthly stage of their

Afflictions not Accidental. 395
being? What does science know about these future
contingencies, any more than it knows of the past
catastrophes in trie riistory of man? And what of
the intermediate present, with its infinite load bf
sins pressing down the race into one perpetuated
agony of suffering and deatri ? It coldly specu
lates about trie origin of things : about persons and
destinies, and trie moral link that fastens on the one
to trie other, it is silent. For all such solutions we
must get out of the mist of speculation into the
calm, sure sun-light of revelation. The whence, the
what, trie whither — the what I am, the how I came
trius to be, and the glorious future into which I
may train myself under the aids of a supernatural
grace — all these are facts in trie creed of the
Christian man. He believes; and obeys. He learns
to submit; and is happy. They are all incredible as
sumptions, unproved hypotheses to the natural man.
He disbelieves them, — and stumbles on in a darkness
deepening into a hopeless night.
In the meantime, let us always recollect this, —
that the dealings of God with men are regulated
and are to be interpreted by the fact triat we are
a race of sinners. Strife is the essence of sin. It
is self-wiU pitted in avowed antagonism to God. Man
is at war witri his Maker. In such a strife on the
one side, there must be resistance on the other.
God will not vacate his sovereignty because man
rebels. He wril not be indifferent because man is
Bullen, or proud, or presumptuous. In such a world,
there must be suffering — sometimes individual, often-

396 Afflictions not Accidental.
times national, not unfrequently unexpected, wide
spread, and terrible. God does not spare the rod.
" He will by no means clear the guilty." He cannot
be defeated, or bribed, or bought off from his pur
pose even by prayer. The bitter, bitter cup must be
drunk. The chastisement must come. But with all
this, there comes also the presence of an infinite
compassion. He. does not willingly afflict. He does
not needlessly grieve trie children of men. He never
does it arbitrarily or capriciously, as if in trie mockery
of his own gifts. He governs his household by law.
And if he sees not fit to interfere with the law that
makes suffering a necessity, he yet attempers — 0 how
sweetly — its infliction. He succours his children, while
the law oppresses them : he soothes them, while its
lash is lacerating them into agony : he delivers them
speedily, when its mission is accomplished. " In all
their afflictions he was afflicted, and the angel of his
presence saved them : in his love and in his pity he
redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them
all the days of old." Think of this, when trie skies
are dark ; when the reason falters ; when the hand
is powerless ; when fires are burning quick into the
flesh ; when the gateways into death and the grave
are bieng opened. Think of it all, thou poor, afflicted
human spirit, when alone, in silence, in sorrow; when
the white spray of the tempest is over thee like a
garment! Think of the precious assurance : "The
Lord will not cast off for ever : but triough he cause
grief, yet will he have compassion, according to the
multitude of his mercies. For he dotri not afflict
willingly nor grieve the children of men."

Afflictions not Accidental. 397
And, finally, let us also remember that the issues
of this strife between God and man are not all
played out in trie present world. They do not
expire always in the waste of health, in the loss of
friends, the wreck of property, the crumbling down
of the pride of man. The last settlement will cover
all the future ; as it will explain all the past. Let
us then be patient and submissive. " The Lord is
at hand."

probation: ano «Jtfi?r.
" But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst
thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is
comforted, and thou art tormented." — Luke xvi. 25.
THESE terribly scathing words occupy a chief
place in the colloquy between two human
spirits in two different regions of the invisible world,
in what is usually caUed " the parable of the rich
man and Lazarus." In no part of our Lord's teach
ing was the veil Ufted with such scenic effect from
the final destinies of men, as in this parable. In its
tragic grandeur and pathos it is an apocalyptic
vision, in which the contingencies of time are made
to visage themselves out in the stern retributive con
sequences of eternity.
The question has often been mooted — one on which
opinions greatly differ — as to the exact class of writing
to which this so-called parable is to be referred;
whether it is to be altogether relegated to the class
of fictitious narrative, or to a class in which . fiction
blends witri a substratum of truth ; whether the persons
and the incidents, as they are portrayed, were a sketch
from a real drama, or parabolically assumed for the
purpose of a moral effect. It has been supposed by
some, that the rich man and Lazarus were real per
sonages, known by intercourse or by tradition to

Probation and After. 399
Christ. By others, they are held to be purely ima
ginary creations, draped in the semblance of living
persons, for the purpose of asserting great and
momentous lessons, true in themselves to individual
men and to all the ages of time.
It does not at all affect the teaching, or lessen the
interest we have in the result, which one of these
opinions we accept. On either view the great moral
is trie same. Possibly, both opinions alike are par
tially in the right. , There may have been real facts,
embodied in parabolic imagery : as in the case of
dramatic literature, wriere trie incidents are real, but
set to fictitious characters ; or the persons are histori
cal, but surrounded with fictitious incidents ; while in
this admixture of the real with the imaginary great
moral lessons are intentionally taught, and as forcibly
impressed. This parable, then, may be interpreted as the
poetry of truth. Triere is a basis of probable fact
in trie persons, or in the incidents, or in both, with
a scenic, imaginative surrounding. It is not, however,
with the persons who figure in this parable that we
have so much concern, as with the great moral issues
of individual life which they are made to represent.
Trie ricri man and Lazarus may have been fictitious
personages ; probably they were. Neither are we
intending to build a fabric of doctrine on a founda
tion of metaphor. But let the supposition be that
two men from among ourselves live and die as these
two are set forth to have done, and the moral ideas
which our Lord appends to his imagery would, in their
case, become terribly real.

400 Probation and After.
Let us, then, recall the contrast set up between these
two men, with the lessons it supplies.
I. In the case of Lazarus, we have a touching
description of piety in circumstances of the most
abject destitution.
"There was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which
was laid at the rich man's gate, full of sores, and
desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from
his table : moreover the dogs came and licked his
sores." This is a picture not so much of poverty, as
of famine ; and of famine in some of its most appall
ing forms. Pain, and want, and disease, and loneU-
ness, — every ingredient that could enter into the con
sciousness or exhaust the bitter severity of the most
absolute destitution, was familiar to Lazarus. He
was a friendless, homeless, helpless, suffering man.
Let us follow for a moment the pencil of the Divine
artist. Lazarus was a beggar. Beggary is sometimes a
fiction, a gross imposture, a heartless fraud practised
by cunning on incautious benevolence, and winning
by its stealthy, sanctimonious whine what is due only
to the virtuous poor. But in the case of Lazarus
all was sheer, frightful, unmitigated reality. Of those
who might have soothed him by their sympathy he
appears to have had but a scanty few; of food he
had less; of comforts least of all. His cup was
"drugged with wormwood to the brim," and without
any of the assuagements which beggary, with its
' meagre aspect and naked bones,' rarely fails to
command. "He desired to be fed with the crumbs

Probation and After. 401
which feU from the rich man's table," — not always,
it would seem, getting even these.
"He was full of sores." Poverty in itself is a
burden sufficiently heavy to weigh down the spirits,
and even to break the courage of an ordinary man;
but when it comes wedded to disease, as in trie case
of Lazarus, the bravest mind may be pardoned if
for a moment it utterly succumb. It is not improb
able that Lazarus was the victim of some malignant
cutaneous disease, such as was common to the coun
try,^ — a leper, laid outside of the city gates. Of course
he was by the Levitical law an outcast from the
Temple ; he was an aUen from society, a soUtary unit
of woe, waUed in with an environment of loathsome
ness, making not only the amenities, but the common
hospitahties of Ufe impossible. He " was laid at his
gate " — alone, unsoothed, and helpless.
The enormous misery, the unutterable sense of
wretchedness that must have settled down on» the
mind of Lazarus under this dread complication
of Uis, it is impossible for us adequately to im
agine. It must, however, have been intense. His
abject poverty, his terrible suffering, his unsoothed
loneUness — each in its separate pang, and aU in
their unalleviated aggregate severity, entered into his
experience, and made up the everyday heart-agony
he was caUed to endure. For let us remember that
Lazarus was a man, a human being, with chords of
sensibility which, strung over a crushed and suffer
ing body, ached not the less, but more, at every new
touch of pain, just as we feel it in ourselves.
" It came to pass that the beggar died." After
2d

402 Probation and After.
suffering with uncomplaining meekness this weary
weight of misery for we know not how long, nature
at length yielded to the pressure, and Lazarus gave
up the ghost. One day the lonely man is missed
from his haunt: and there had been a gathering of the
angels in the street ! How long the bitter endurance
continued, or in what form the end came at last,
we are not informed ; but Lazarus died, as he had
lived, a leper and a beggar. "It came to pass" —
as in mercy it does to the most wretched — " that he
died." That he was decently buried, the narrative
does not say; and tradition is silent. Probably not.
The scarcely cold and unpitied corpse of the outcast
leper might be hastily thrown into the nearest ge-
henna, among the vulgar dust, to be consumed by
fire ; or it might be hurried to some unwonted
place of sepulture; or left to blacken in the winds
of heaven ; or it may have helped to feed " the
dogs" which, in their unconscious sympathy, had "ricked
his sores." "The rich man died," and we are told
that he " was buried " — he was borne to the family
mausoleum, as became his rank; but in the case of
" the beggar," there is nothing stated beyond the
finish — the simple end. No voice of lamentation is
heard bewailing that man's death ; not a solitary
mourner is seen in the streets ; not a tear is shed.
There was nothing before or after its occurrence to
mitigate the cold, stern severity of death. " It came
to pass that the beggar died : " — that was aU.
And, yet, hardly that. " It came to pass that the
beggar died, and was carried by the angels into
Abraham's bosom." By angels ? Did they know

Probation and After. 403
who and what he was, whose transit to another
world they were commissioned to guard? Did they
know whose was that new-born, fluttering human
spirit, whose advent to immortahty they were usher
ing in ? But did they know trie shrine, the for
saken dust, from which that gentle spirit had just
escaped, over whose infant widowhood they threw
their plumy mantle? What — the leprouB, homeless,
friendless Lazarus? Doubtless, they knew it aU; and
gloried in their mission. Lazarus, we have said,
was a lone and a stricken man. And, yet, never did
he lie at the gate of the rich man's palace, or rest
on his stony pillow his weary, drooping head, but
angel ministries, we may well believe, were gathered
to his aid. And now that trie soul, set free from
its loathsome prison-house, unfolds its long slumber
ing pinions to catcri the sweet breezes setting in
from the calmer skies and sunnier climes of the
Father's heaven, angels are there to charge them
selves with his interests, and to pilot him on his
passage: he "was carried by the angels into Abra
ham's bosom." ;
Run up in thought the yet unfaded silvery line -of
light, stretching away from the rich man's gate to
the entrance of the celestial city ! Triink of the
wonder, the tumult of bewildered, ecstatic emotions
heaving that saintly spirit, as the angelic squadron
moves on through the burning ranks of patriarchs
and prophets, kings and poets, the wise and vir
tuous of the imperial dead of every age ! Pass with
him into the glorious mansions, the " Abraham's
bosom" of the Old Testament heaven; and think of

404 Probation and After.
the contrast between his surfeit of woes while on
earth, and the " exceeding and eternal weight " of
blessedness on which he has consciously entered.
Let the contrast be further extended to the redemp
tions, the resurrections, the ascensions of the inter
mediate state ; and into the unseen eternities of the
heavenly world, with its " new song " and " the
throne of God and of the Lamb." And while looking
reverently on all that and listening to its refrain
of wondrous music, let us remember that such was
the end of the beggar Lazarus : "It came to pass
that he died, and was carried by the angels into
Abraham's bosom."
II. In the history of "the rich man" we have
exhibited to us the voluptuous ease and enjoyment, the
pride and splendour, the utter godlessness of an
unsanctified heart.
" There was a certain rich man, which was clothed
in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously
every day." And nothing, certainly, can be more
finely drawn or more ¦ effectively finished than the
dramatic outline of the personal conditions in the
outward estate of these two men. It is the contrast
of the utmost possible extremes in human allotments.
It exhausts the last possibility of experiment on the
capacities of human nature. They were wide as the
poles asunder, in everything save that both were
men : the one wrapped in the embroidering brilliancy
of magnificent wealth ; the other a living corpse, an
embodied starvation, a hideous, nameless thing — a
fly broken on the wheel.

Probation and After. 405
Look, first, at this man's social rank. " There
was a certain rich man " — an eastern prince, a
territorial Nabob, a frequenter of courts and camps,
as his " purple and fine linen " would seem to indi
cate. He had, by both inheritance and acquisition,
ample possessions, abundance of material wealth,
silver and gold, and rare and costly gems; men-
servants and women-servants ; lands and houses and
cattle. He had his palatial residence, his numerous
attendants, the set-up of a princely home, with
" much goods laid up for many years." He was
an oriental Emir, whose daily necessities, however
exorbitant, were less than the lavish munificence
of his daily supplies.
From his wealtri we pass to his princely living.
" He was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared
sumptuously every day." This lordly man's wealth
was not in his bullion or in his cattle, but in the
gratifications to which they ministered. The silly vanity
of hunting after a fortune for the sake of being
counted rich, was not the foible of Dives. He was
proud, doubtless, of his possessions, but he was
prouder of his pleasures; and in the fulness and
pomp and vanity of these, " he fared sumptuously
every day." And, possibly, in all this, this rich
Nabob was only keeping up what would be con
sidered his proper role, his social prestige, in the
proprieties of life. Like all other things, wealth
may be abused ; and more than most other things,
it is prostituted to the service of the passions ; and
thus it becomes the parent of enormous evil. But
wealth is a distinction which, in itself, all men

406 Probation and After.
may honestly covet, and as innocently may seek to
possess ; and in the refined tastes and luxurious
habits to which it usually conducts, and in the
large expenditure which it creates and fosters, it
may be legitimately fulfilling one of its Divinely
appointed missions. We say this may have been the
case with the rich man before us. He was plaeed--
on a perUous pinnacle of society, where, according
to the usage of his country, he was called to keep
up appearances ; and so far he would, of course, be
justified in doing so. He had his princely estab
lishment, his numerous retainers, his own set of
friends, and his costly feasts ; and in the presence
of all this, " he was clothed in purple and fine
linen, and fared sumptuously every day."
Possessed of ample means, and surrounded with
exhaustless methods of enjoyment, he also enjoyed
mental quietude, an unperturbed self-complacency in
whicri the mind was left to pursue its course. He
"fared sumptuously every day." There was a mutual
balance, a perfect concord between the inward and
the outward man. There are natures in the world
so superficially shallow, and so egotistically self-
complete, as to be incapable of either a thought or
a care beyond the glittering present. So long as the
senses are gratified, there is no break, no pause, not
even an eddy in the calm flow of their contented
happiness. There are no deeps in the soul which
the merest spray of sensual enjoyment cannot fill.
Neither life as a trust, nor eternity as a fact, nor
God himself as a being separate from themselves, is
large enough to overlap the present, or to project

Probation and After. 407
even for a moment any prophetic warning of the
future. It appears to have been just thus with "trie
rich man" of the parable. It is not shown that
from any quarter, or at any time, a single disturb
ing element found its way into his cup. There is
no ground to suppose that he was troubled with any
uneasy recollections of the past, or with any imper
tinent intrusions of the future. The memory had no
regrets, the conscience had no fears, on which the
outline of any painful shadow in the future could
set its print. Possibly, he was a sceptic in religion,
a denier of God, a disbeliever in the immortality
of man, an infidel in philosophy, a self-idolater in
practice. The present life, in his view, is man's
great banqueting-hall, if he have the means to fill
it : the future — that is a blank. And thus, between
the splendour of his wealth, and the flattery of his
friends, and the festivities of his daily carousals, life
was a carnival of voluptuous enjoyment. The earth
as it rolled round on its axis, roUed round the car
of his triumphs, pouring into his possession a suc
cession of new wants with new and still more costly
entertainments, without exhaustion, and without a
pause." He " fared sumptuously every day."
Now see the end. In the midst of all these scenes
of pampered ease and passionate enjoyment, on the
topmost wave of his social revels, "it came to pass
that the rich man died." At ease in his possessions,
throned on the summit of worldly greatness, feasting
to satiety on every luxury that the heart could wish
or wealth could purchase ; with a vigorous mind, and
an iron constitution, and counting naturally enough

408 Probation and After.
on a long series of years in which the song and
the jest and the debauch should drain out stiU more
of their nectared sweets, — in the midst of all this,
and with no painful heralding of his approaching,
stealthy footsteps, the cold, gaunt spectre of death
appears upon the scene. " He waves his bony arm,"
— and all is still. " It came to pasB that the rich
man died ; and in hell he lift up his eyes, being
in torments."
If amidst the wreck and ruin of mind with which
the madness of man is strewing the shores of the
eternal world, there is one wreck more frightfuUy
portentous than another, more stupendously hideous
in its effects than all others, it is the wreck, surely,
of that man's soul, who from the midst of wealth
and voluptuous ease and lordly enjoyment is suddenly
struck down into hell! To go down direct, and for
ever, from all that had constituted his god and his
heaven; and, in exchange for it aU, to find himself
engulfed in the maddening horrors of perdition — oh
this, if there be any meaning in language, any reality
in feeling, this is a catastrophe compared to which
all our ideas of the terrible in human suffering are a
bauble ! Whatever images of horror, of consternation,
of woe, of utter, hopeless anguish the human imagin
ation can call up and embody, must be dismissed as
metaphors utterly meaningless, when employed to
denote the ruin of a gay rich man's soul, suddenly
sent down the lurid slopes of eternity, and finding
itself in hell ! That is a ruin that takes in the over
throw of all that is past, of all that is present, and
mortgages the man to the still more appalling pos-

Probation and After. 409
sibilities of the future. To be bereft of all that the
heart has ever clung to, and to be sent forth a lonely,
trembling, guilty thing, with nothing but its unclean
ness, its shame, its remorse, its self-contempt ; while
through all this hideous squalor there flames the
biting consciousness that the man himself is lost, and
lost for ever ! — we say that is a ruin which the reason
of man refuses to formulate, and at the bare imagin
ation of which the brain reels bewildered and is sick.
But that was the end of Dives: "The rich man died;
and in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments."
III. We have witnessed the life, and deatri, and the
transit into a future world, of these two men. Let
us ponder the lessons which are so obviously taught
in trie parable.
1. And, first, as to the verdict which it so impres
sively pronounces on the one theory of human life, —
the life of a man not as it is clothed upon with the
adventitious distinctions of time, but in its relations to
God, and to trie destinies of another world. In the
contrasted futurities of these two men, one and the
same theory is in fact affirmed. As the veil is with
drawn from off the other side, we see indeed the two
human spirits diverging into two strangely different
conditions — the one of consummate joy, the other of
the most riopeless and appalling misery ; but it is the
one life of each man, perpetuated after its human
type. " Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime
receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil
things : but now he is comforted, and thou art tor
mented." That which constituted the substance of

410 Probation and After.
this present life in each case, yields its appropriate
fruit in the life beyond. What we now are, therefore,
in the theory of life which we elect, — that, in the
finality of our future condition, God determines we
Bhall continue to be. The choices of men are
free to elect the present : the justice of trie Eternal
determines the future.
Now, there are different theories of life adopted by
different men. There is the vicious theory: in which
man, having an angel's faculties and an angel's des
tiny, chooses to herd with the animals in the stall.
His passions are his god: his whole life an altar;
and himself is the sacrifice with which he worships.
This is the Epicurean theory : " Let us eat and
drink ; for to-morrow we die."
There is the mammon theory: in which, without
being necessarily vicious, the man works himself in
as a cog in the world's machinery; he turns his brain
into a steam-engine, witri which to coin himself into
gold. This is the worldly man's theory ; in which
morality becomes a mere question of profit and loss.
There is the old Sadducean theory, witri its modern
refinements and polish : which denies that there is
either "angel, or spirit" in man. It denies his
parentage, as created in "the image of God;" it robs
him of his freedom and responsibility as a moral
being ; it turns his consciousness into a physical
secretion ; and makes his immortality as impossible
in itself, as it would be worthless in fact. Man is
an accident, thrown up in the play of unconscious
forces : his Ufe a grand phenomenon ; and his end —
" dust and asheB."

Probation and After. 411
The first of these theories animaUses man. It sees
no divinity in his intellect ; no prophecy in his
aspirations ; nothing high or grand or godlike in his
affections : he is an animal, and his business is to
minister to his brute insRncts. Trie second theory
makes man a pack-horse, a beast of burden, a wheel
in the great human factory, an intellectual machine.
It puts the coUar of serfdom on his neck, the tools
of labour in his hands; and having ossified his heart,
it dooms him to the curse of perpetual toil. The
third theory reduces man to an apparition, which
"appeareth for a little time, and then vanishetri away"
into the nothingness beyond.
And as is trie theory a man elects, so is the Ufe
that practically it involves. H it be vicious, — his
capacities and his opportunities are the measure and
the law of his gratification. If it be worldly, — it
transmutes aU things into material with which to feed
his passion for gain : " Time is money;" the brain is
money ; aU life is money ; and the value he puts
upon eacri is just its power of producing wealth. If
it be the materialistic theory, — all that belongs to a
future world is relegated to the shows and shams of
the passing present : the lease of life terminates at the
mouth of the grave ; man's right to draw on the great
bank of existence is dishonoured at death ; and so he
magnifies the present world into that which is the
eternal to him. Such are some of man's theories of
Ufe : and such, not always in fact but in legitimate
effect, is the outcome, such are the consequences into
which they unfold themselves in the morahties of
action.

412 Probation and After.
There is one other theory of human life to be con
sidered, in contrast with these; and that is the Divine
theory — the ideal with which God has charged him
self, with the government under which it is his pur
pose to deal finally with if. And this theory, whrie
taking cognizance of all the discords and apparent
irregularities in the condition and the characters of
men, and whrie, as it Seems, equally tolerant and
indifferent to all, has yet one great and unshifting
principle at work, by which all the tangled web of
human interests is hereafter to be adjusted ; and in
the scales of an inflexible justice, eacri one is to get
into its appropriate place. " Son, remember that thou
in thy life time receivedst thy good things, and like
wise Lazarus evil things : but now he is comforted,
and thou art tormented."
Here, first of all, is the fact, that the future, what
ever it may be in its personal contents, is only a
continuance of the present. Death does not take a
man out of the run of his human nature, or out of
the groove of his chosen habits. It only projects
onward into the eternal after that which is distinctive
of both. The man, on the other side, renews his
lease of the life he has chosen on this side, with the
on going consequences which God as the righteous
Law-giver has determined to annex. " For he that
soweth to the flesh, shall of the flesri reap corrup
tion : but he that soweth to the spirit, shall of the
spirit reap life everlasting." The seed, no matter
which or what, bears its own fruit. It may be the
white enrobements of the celestial city, with all that
belongs to its princely heirdom : or it may be " trie

Probation and After. 413
weeping and the wailing " wliich belong to a soul
in flames, and the torment that no water can cool.
In either case, the time-germ enfolds the eternal
fruit : the yonder development culminates out of trie
present seed. The young chrysalis of earth gets
its exact transmutation according to the law — " first
the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in
the ear."
On this principle, " the rich man " got " good
things " in the present life, and his " evil things "
in the hereafter life ; while Lazarus got his " evil
things " in time, and his " good things " in eternity.
Both got their equivalents : both were the reapers of
their own seed-sowing. To both a seedtime riad been
given; and both, in their separate order, were drii-
gent husbandmen, casting the seed into the ground :
but the law of reproduction was not yet manifest.
Those ten thousand secret processes that were going
on in each, changing, moulding, ripening the inner
character for the harvest ; the influences, subtle and
innumerable, that were telling on the mind, like the
imperceptible touches by wliich "time mellows a picture
or eats into a ruin;" the responsibility which con
sciously mingled with every guilty pleasure in trie one
case, and witri every unbefriended tear and unrelieved
want and wasting sorrow in the other, — all this in their
respective seedtime was, in its consequences, projected
forward into the harvest of the everlasting future.
And then trie sowing and the reaping are instantly
adjusted; the one follows inexorably on the line of
trie other: and no misery, and no mercy, is allowed
to interpose so as to unhinge, or in any way abridge,

414 Probation and After.
the absolute rectitude in which the sovereign, eternal
justice metes out the appropriate doom. " Son, re
member that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy
good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things ; but
now he is comforted, and thou art tormented."
But would any other issue have been either pos
sible or just ? Would it not have shocked every
sentiment of right in the human mind to - have been
told that this rich man, after having run his round
of glittering sensuality, ignorant of himself, of his
sin, and of his God, had been handed on to a
perpetuity of enjoyment in the world to come ? or
that Lazarus, after drinking- the bitter cup, "drugged
with wormwood" to the very brim, had passed out of
one phase of suffering to have it repeated still more
endlessly in another ? Such a miscarriage of the
eternal justice would have turned the affrighted
universe into a congregation of atheists. Even as
it now stands, this future act in the drama of Ufe
gets but a scant hold on the impassioned madness
of the sensual man : but in that case, the impulse
to excess had been at a premium ; the voluptuous
and the unclean had rioted with a license. There
could have been no virtue, no safeness, no man
hood, — no heaven, and no ^God. The earth would
have become a pandemonium ; and man a race of
demonised brutes.
No, sirs : not thus does the throne of right
eousness turn itself into a solemn sham ; not thus
can it confound the distinctions between right and
wrong, in dealing with man or angel, in this world
or any other. You and I are men — human, |rational,

Probation and After. 415
responsible beings. We have each a definite status
in a world of men : our tastes, our choices, our
pursuits, our habits, individualise and make us each
what we are. And as these are all fostered by use
and harden into a second nature, they make us in
life what we shall be found to be at death. Triat
which we are found to be at death, we shall cer
tainly continue to be after it. I myself, the man
living in time and dying in death, emerge the same
man into the life beyond; just as the flower emerges
from the seed that dies. I am now creating, or
acquiring and storing up, precisely triat innermost
substance and reality of being that I shall carry out
of time into the eternal future. No matter what the
theory of hfe I elect, if it be the exponent of myself
here and now, on that will the all-just Arbiter set
his imprint for ever. And were it not so — could it
be otherwise imagined than so — then, whether we are
Christian or atheist, whetrier we laugri or weep, sin
or pray, life would be turned into a stupendous false
hood ; and the sin and the prayer, the laugh and
trie tear, the shout of the debauch and the shriek
of despair, would be equally a snare and a delusion.
No : you cannot pawn yourselves out to the service
of sin for three-score years and ten, and then, at
the last, by a libation of repentance bribed by fear,
get back your pledge. The stern march of an in
fallible justice must endorse the individual choice,
in the eternity of its results. " He triat is unjust,
let him be unjnst still : and he that is righteous,
let him be righteous still." So shuts the Book of
Life : — " And these shall go, away ! "

416 Probation and After.
2. There is a second lesson, in which a faint, sha
dowy light is thrown by the parable on one source of
misery in the condition of the finally lost. We refer to
the office which the memory is made to sustain, and
the material which it supplies to the conscience of "the
rich man:" "Son, remember!" To us it seems as if
triat one, dreadful word must have choked down all
consciousness into the agony of unutterable despair!
We all know something of the dogged tenacity with
which the memory will, in certain cases, hold on to
a guilty past ; of the judicial fidelity with which it
will unroll the page on which some dark misdeed
or ungenerous word has left its burning print, and
which we would give the cunning of our right hand
to expunge or forget, but cannot. It is with all but
a maddening influence that the recollections of home
and childhood will come upon the sinner, wrien for
the first time he is made to pause under some
terrible arrest of conscience in his career of guilt.
The cottage in which he was cradled, the school
where he was taught, the companions with whom
he associated, the brothers and the sisters who were
his mentors and his examples ; the grey-headed old
man and the tenderly loving mother long since
gathered to their rest, who made him kneel down
in his nightly prayers, and who warned him with
their parting tears to be true to them, to him
self, and to God, — these, and a thousand kindred
recollections, will come up from their hiding places,
and wring the guilty man's soul with an agony
compared to which the breaking of his every sinew
upon the rack were a thing of naught !

Probation and After. 417
Now, let this faculty of memory go off with us
into eternity; and let it be fed with the materials
gathered from a long, misspent life, an exact copy
of which has been registered and stereotyped on its
burning page — the early training, the Sunday teach
ing, the godly example, the personal history; all the
thousand calls, and warnings, and opportunities, and
neglects ; the tender beseechings of parents, and
friends, and pastors ; the many appeals and the
various methods in which God has sought to win
us to himself; our own good intentions, and yearn
ing desires, and half-formed purposes, and partial
attempts at becoming good ; our selfishness, and
pride, and love of sinful pleasures ; the world of
Bense we have chosen, and the Christ and right
and duty we have sacrificed ; the special strivings
of the Holy Spirit within us, and tbe all-engirdling
Providence with its ten thousand pealing applica
tions working around, upon, and against us ; our
sense of right, and our choice of wrong ; God
neglected, offended, and sold by us for the deliber
ately accepted gratifications of sense; the utter over
throw and final wreck of what we once called the
chances of life ; — let all this, hereafter and for ever,
come back upon us — each terrified recollection feeding
the bitterness of our regrets,, the bitterness of our
regrets exasperating the terribleness of our recollec
tions, and all intensified with the despair of a con
scious perdition, and we ask for no scorching "fire,"
or rolling "flame," or choking sulphur of a material
hell. Turn the sinner adrift on eternity, with all his
crimes chronicled on the memory, and that memory
2e

4i 8 Probation and After.
stung into the fiercest tenacity by the demon of
despair ; and in that man's central soul there will
be a hell, compared to which the fires of a thousand
raging Etnas were an iceberg !
We say nothing on the question as to what the
sufferings of the lost hereafter may consist of any
otherwise, beyond what this function of memory implies.
All we say is : Let a man be lost, and in that lost
condition let all the secret haunts and burial places
of the memory give up their dead ; and then, could
the anguished soul vault over the flaming waUs of
the universe and escape even from the all- engirdling
presence of the Omnipotent, it would still be in
heU. The self-distilling poison, the undying ."worm,"
the blistering, blasting curse that would kill the
mind without destroying it, would be in the mind
itself. " Son, remember ! " There is an awful severity, a
fierce poetic justice, mingled with a tender pathos in
this language, that is absolutely appalling : " Son,
remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy
good things." Oh, if in the unsuccessful battUngs
of life I am finally worsted in the struggle, and
go down a wreck and a ruin into the eternal world ;
then hide me from the near presence of those
mocking demons, who have successfully plotted my
ruin ; hide me from the companions of my guilt,
whom here I have tempted into sin, or by whom I
have been tempted to my fall ; hide me from the
" great white throne " of the eternal God and the
Lamb, and from the hosts of the blessed worshippers
with whom I might have mingled; but, most of all,

Probation and After. 419
hide me from myself, from standing face to face with
myself, from being clearly, consciously, and eternally
my own self-revealed, self-murdered, self-condemned,
and actual self ! Stupify, drug — annihilate, if that be
possible, this conscious, corroding agony of my own
remembered self ! For it is in the mind's own self
hood, more than in its place or its environments,
that the sacrifice of a lost soul, offered up a suicide
on the altar of the eternal justice, will be "salted
with fire."
8. There is one other thought, big with no less
of terrible interest, and lending, indeed, a torturing
advocacy to what has gone before, suggested by this
parable, — and it is this: that the state of existence
into which every man is introduced at death, is one
on which eternity sets its irrevocable seal. "And
beside all this, between us and you there is a great
gulf fixed : so that they which would pass from hence
to you cannot ; neither can they pass to us, that
would come from thence." No : there is no change
in the relative conditions of those two states;— and
there is to be no end.
Assuredly, we have no taste for dabbling in the
metaphysics of eternal perdition. We have no sym
pathy with the heartless declaimer who revels in
fanning the fires of a material hell. On the contrary,
we tremble at its barest prospect. Its imagined
shrieks appal us : its misery and its despair, its
haggard, hopeless, gleaming terrors stun and bewilder
us with a feeling amounting to consternation. And
we say, moreover, were it possible to turn aside from

420 Probation and After.
it, to ignore it, to doubt it, to forget it ; could we
see reason to believe that endless torture in a finite,
human spirit is an impossibility and a contradiction, —
that the fires of the soul burning up its purer and
nobler material must, in the long run, burn the soul
itself into a cinder — " a blackened crater, filled only
with its own ashes," we would, it may be, gladly
accept of the dreadful alternative : for the sheer, un
mitigated, eternal future punishment of a human
spirit is just one of the last things on which we
should regret the "shipwreck of" our "faith." It is
just the first thing we could drop into oblivion,
without a regret or a tear. We cannot poise our
selves on the edge of that "great gulf" or look down
willingly into its infinite deep, and people it with
the vitalities of a conscious lost humanity, without a
shudder !
But the book ! The all-disclosing, solemnly assert
ing, and oft repeated affirmations of " the Book,"
the white, pure scroll on which, in letters of
fire, the eternal doom of a lost soul seems to be
so surely printed — what are we to do with that ?
My fellow men ! he whose all-righteous justice hath
scooped out that fiery lake, hath traced in flaming
outline the certainty, the misery, and -the eternity
of the fact. A hundred statements, more or less
clear and full of warning, tell us that it is so.
Alarm beacons are set up all along the summits of
of Revelation, in the events of Providence, and in
the silent suspicions and uneasy whisperings of con
science, to prernonish us of its peril : a thousand
messengers are ever on our path, to aid and to

Probation and After. 421
counsel us in our escape. And if these things
are so, trien some dreadful secret is at the back of
it all : and if all this be unheeded, disregarded,
trifled with and scorned, " triere remaineth no more
sacrifice for sin ; " and then, so far as we can see,
the headlong, bounding career of the sinner must
be projected onward in a course of sinful suffering
for ever.
" These," said the all-compassionate Redeemer of
men, he whose lips were the gentlest instrument of
trie tenderest and most humane heart that ever beat
in human form — " these shall go away into everlast
ing punishment." " The smoke of their torment,"
says trie all-loving disciple, he who in his personal
idiosyncrasy had drawn into his innermost being the
purest essence of the Christ — " the smoke of their
torment ascendeth up for ever and ever." " For ever
and ever ! " — these are the cycles through which
the pendulum of a suffering intelligence swings its
measureless vibrations !
For ever and ever! The mind aches with the
burden of an unendurable agony, while trie boom of
triat everlasting knell is sounding in our ears. It
shrinks back affrighted and paralysed from this
flaming, unimaginable abyss. And yet, with our hand
of faith set solemnly on that "Book," and with our belief
in the veracity of him "who is the faithful witness,"
from whom it came and by whom and of wriom it
speaks, the dreadful sound of "weeping and wailing
and gnashing of teeth" haunts us with a potency
of anguish that no spell of our human logic can
disenchant of its terrors. And are they thus to

422 Probation and After.
weep and to wail, unpitied, unsoothed, unredeemed
" for ever and ever," — listening only to the dread
clock of eternity as through the endless ages it tolls
off the successive but unabridged periods of that
everlasting night ? — 0 God ! the answer is alone with
thee — with thine infinite pity, and yearning love, and
reasons that belong to the eternal right. Before
trie majesty of that right, in its march through the
everlasting future, we bow in silent reverence and
trembling awe. " Unto thee, 0 Lord, belongeth
mercy : for triou renderest to every man according
to his work."
My fellow men ! if the moral painting of this
parable is but the canvass on which the Divine
artist has sketched intentionally and really the future
fortunes of men, then what an astonishment awaits
not a few on the other side of death ! What a
reversal of all that which once constituted their only
inheritance is in store for some, when triey once enter
the shadowy aisles of the supernatural world ! How
many who now dream of heaven will find themselves
on the other side of the great gulf ! How many
others, who through the long, weary ache of a suffer
ing life have known little else but tears, and dare
never seriously to hope for heaven, will, on the
morning of their awaking, find themselves at home
in the Father's house ! Oh, it is indeed sad to think
that in this gay and fascinating world there are
aching heads, and throbbing hearts, that must ache
and throb for ever ; burning agonies and chafing dis
appointments whicri are now in secret corroding the

Probation and After. 423
soul, that in a future worM may corrode . and burn
for ever.! A great gulf, but not impassable, separates
these two states in time: a final fixedness of doom,
we are solemnly assured, belongs to each in the
future. It was Jesus, the God-man, the Media
tor, the Great high priest, he who possessed and
uttered trie supernatural secrets of that unseen world,
who said: "They which would come from thence —
cannot ! "
To which one of these two sides in the future
world are we intending to commit ourselves ? To
which one of these two sides are we now committed ?
— for that is the question whicri alone can answer trie
otrier. You are eacri one now, in all the essential
qualities of being, related to one of these states, of
to the other; but you are related only to one. No
man's grasp of life is sufficiently comprehensive to in
clude the two states in one co-existent history. He
cannot live like the rich man on earth ; and then
live witri Lazarus in heaven. There are impossibilities
even to Omnipotence : and for one and the same
man to hold successively two opposite states of
being without a specific preparation, is one of these
impossibilities. You cannot " yield your members
as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin" in one
world, and then reap the fruits of holiness in
another, without a miracle of power which, if it
could be wrought, would not only collide with trie
justice of God, but would in its expression be the
utter destruction of the man. To create a new per
sonality may be possible : but it is impossible to

424 Probation and After.
glorify an unclean nature. Taken into trie arms of
God, batried for ever in "trie river of Ufe," trie un
clean soul would stUl be lost !
You must, then, take your choice : finding in the
sanctified sorrows and manly training of trie present
your future heaven ; or in trie unsanctified passion
and gloating of trie present, finding your future heU!
" Ye cannot serve God and mammon."

JLebtemtb ^eit in Ijeatoen.
"And I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps : and they sung
as it were a new song before tiie throne:. ..and no man could learn
that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were
redeemed from the earth." — Revelation xiv. 2, 3.
THE ' marveUous Ught ' into which the Gospel
translates the human mind brightens some old
things, whUe it stiU more astonishingly reveals things
that are new. It brightens many of the problems
which perplex us in Ufe. It puts a meaning into the
sUence and mystery of death; and it none the less
surely traverses those ' vast deserts of eternity ' so
long haunted by the fears and so baffling to the
hopes of men, and makes them bloom with the fresh
ness and fragrance of immortal Ufe. Christ " hath
abolished death, and brought Ufe and immortahty to
Ught through the gospel."
The Book of the Revelation is fiUed with strange
glimpses into this unseen world. The writer seems to
have a ' second sight,' a prophetic vision, before
which the veU hiding the unknown future lifts
itself : the fate of human souls is thrown upon the
canvass; and we are permitted to hear and see some
of the secrets of the dead.
Some of these things are set forth in~a style_of
gorgeous imagery. There is a weird grandeur, a
majestic ruggedness about the scenes which are

426 Redeemed Men in Heaven.
described. There are definite outlines of persons,
places and things, which perplex, all attempts to
understand them. There are dark and cloudy shapes,
engirt with woe and anguish ; storm-clouds and
thunderings and forked lightnings, fire and hail and
bloody rain, on which it is perilous to meditate.
And there are ever and anon, flashing as if through
a rent in the dark foldings of the fire and smoke,
gleams of bright and glorious visions within and
beyond, which find their instant interpretation in the
instincts of the Christian heart.
One of the brightest of these flashes is in the text
we have read. We do not -understand all its Apoca
lyptic symbology ; we care but little for its exact
lexicographical meaning, or its chronological relations
to time and history : we are content to seize its one
graphic suggestion, as it anticipates the possibilities
awaiting us in a future world. " And I heard the
voice of harpers harping with their harps : and they
sung a new song," which only " the redeemed from
the earth " could sing.
I. Here then is, first, the fact that redeemed men
are now in heaven.
Men of our own blood and lineage, of our earth
and common humanity, who were, in all their human
characteristics, the same sinning, suffering, dying flesh
and blood that we ourselves are, are now in heaven;
and with the highest angels participate in the im
mediate presence and glorious manifestations of God.
1. This is a great fact on which to meditate. And
it was not always a fact. There was a state in past

Redeemed Men. in Heaven. 427
duration in which, however inconceivably to us, God
dwelt alone — a solitary, sublime and infinite Spirit ;
communing only with the distinctions inherent in his
eternal Godhead. The all of existence — the perfec
tion and the manifestation, the thought and its
response — centred in the oneness of his absolute
being — eternity the silent counterpart of the alone-
ness of God. Utterly impossible as it is for any
finite intelligence to imagine such a solitude, the
necessity of an inexorable logic compels us to accept
it, or to postulate a co-existing, eternal creation.
That which began to be, at whatever date in the
past, began by reason of that which did not begin ;
and in that unbeginning life, out of which came the
beginning of whatever else is, we have the absolute,
eternal, unshared, all-potential being of the infinite
God. As the sole being, then, who never began to
be, eternally antedating the beginning of whatever
is, God was in himself the lone occupant of that
sUent universe, which is now so populous with its
manifold and glorious life. "Before the mountains
were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed trie
earth and the world, even from everlasting to ever
lasting, thou art God."
2. At what date we know not : but there came an
epoch in the flow of this silent eternity, when the
first finite intelligent spirit was created; when the
first world blossomed into space; when 'the bright
abyss of his own timeless eternity' was flecked with
the first marvels of God's creative might. "He spake,
and it was done : he commanded, and it stood fast."

428 Redeemed Men in Heaven.
Wlien — how far back in that undated chronology, or
in wriat specific form this first, unparalleled event
occurred — of this nothing is or can be known. The
regress of any millions of years or of ages added to
the scroll of our human time, makes the past eternity
of God no less : nor can the comparative youtri of
created time add to the age of the eternity triat went
before. This thougrit opens vistas into the past in
which the wing of imagination falters. But it appears
inevitable, that before trie beginning of life in trie
first created spirit, or of the first created atom,
there must have been a timeless duration in the
absolute eternity of God, in the flow of which there
came at length trie wondrous hour when the first arch
angel knelt, and the song of the seraphim was heard
for the first time before the Creator's trirone. That
hitherto sUent and unparticipated glory of the
eternal Godhead was henceforth to unfold itself
in trie life and trie fellowship of created, responsible
spirits; and "thousand thousands ministered unto
him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood
before him."
3. Later down, inconceivably later it may be, in
the course of duration, there came the next, still
more wonderful riour in wliich the first human spirit,
a stranger from trie young and distant province of-
humanity, went up into the heavens of God, — a being
altogether new and unlike to all the native riosts;
and the timid, trembling, astonished spirit of Abel
stood before the throne of the Eternal ! With what
emotions itself was filled, with what new astonisri-

Redeemed Men in Heaven. 429
ment such an apparition filled the minds of those
elder spirits, hitherto the sole occupants of the royal
sphere, we are not told, and cannot imagine. But
the hour came once when, for the first time in all
duration, a human being knelt in adoring worship
amid the hosts of heaven ! The glorified spirit of the
martyred Abel was alone in its advent to the skies.
4. And since then, since the advent of Abel's glori
fied humanity to heaven, multitudes which no arith
metic can sum have gone up continuously from this
earth into the holy city. From all lands and in
every age — Patriarchs, Prophets, Pagans, Christians —
column has passed after column, and tribe has gone
after tribe — the gifted, let us believe, of all nations,
followers of all religions, the 'accepted' of all
faiths, climes, castes and colours, " from the east
and from the -west, and from the north and from the
south ; " and are " sat down witri Abraham, and Isaac,
and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven." And, now,
we -think of that world as holding within its temple-
convocations not a thinly scattered population of ex
ceptional and extra-kingly spirits, but a concourse of
human beings, men and women " out of every kin
dred, and tongue, and people, and nation," — "a great
multitude which no man could number," who are our
kith and kin, our brethren elder born, whose hearts
have throbbed with the same passions and yearnings
and aspirations and sins as our own. Death has not
disrobed them of their humanity. Their transit beyond
the disc of mortality has not deprived them of our na
ture. They are " the spirits of just men made perfect."

43° Redeemed Men in Heaven.
And still that concourse is swelling ; still that
throng continues constantly to augment; and unless
" the travail of the redeemer's soul " shall fail, and
"his seed" be cut off, "unless the mighty prophecies
that go up from our collective humanity are a mockery
and a lie," that great concourse of glorified manhood
must continue grandly to increase. •' The nations of
the saved" are coming, with their levies and their
conscriptions gathered out of all lands and by a
thousand different ways, and are being added to "the
saints in light." And "the end is not yet." "The
gates" of that city "shall not be shut at all by day:"
and "there shall be no night there. And they shall
bring the glory and honour of the nations into it."
He who is the foundation of its temple, as he is its
song and its life and glory, "Bhall see of the travaU
of his soul, and shall be satisfied." Many a loved
one whom we have dropped from our companionship
by the way, and over whose departure we have wept
bitter tears, is already there. Many another whose
acquaintance we have yet to make, of whose history
we have not dreamed, whose faith we could not
explain, is going up and passing in at those gates.
Not a moment in time, it may be, is chronicled, but
it marks the transit of some human spirit to "the
city of the great King." The living world of men in
which we now are, is filled with the stir and the move
ment of those who are waiting to depart. The fields
are whitening unto the harvest.
There is the tramp of uncounted hosts of men and
women, still in reserve on the earth to-day, on their
homeward march. A procession of saintly spirits,

Redeemed Men in Heaven. 431
emigrants to "a better country, even the heavenly,"
the leading columns of which, as they file off through
the gateways and under trie arches, are to be followed
by broadening bands and gathering • multitudes ; until,
as the mystery of God rolls onward to its comple
tion and brings up its predicted future, the " many
mansions " in the " Father's house " shall be filled,
and the triumph of the redeeming Son shall be
complete. "And he that sat upon the throne said,
Behold, I make all things new."
Heaven is now, and is still more to be hereafter, a
realm thickly populated with a sinless humanity.
And we say, this is a great and a precious truth. It
is doubly precious because so many of us have lost
our loved ones by the way, and prematurely as we
thought ; and in the' dark moments of our bitter
agony, the heart was torn to desolation as we sought in
vain to follow them into the shadows of a pathless
whither. The righteous dead now "sleep in Jesus;"
and "them wriicri sleep in Jesus will God bring with
him," II. Our text assumes, in the second place, the posi
tion which the redeemed men occupy: " They sing before
the throne."
1. We must of necessity localise in some way the
future dwelling place of the glorified human spirit, as
we must locate the life of the spirit itself. " The
throne," " the city," the " service," "the river of life,"
"the crowns," and "harps of gold," are all terms
that imply a place, quite as significantly as they are
symbols which . designate a state of being. They are

432 Redeemed Men in Heaven.
not only material conceptions of spiritual ideas : they
are spiritual ideas embodied in a material dress, and
require a fixed habitation somewhere within the boun
daries of celestial -space for their expression. " There
fore," said the seer, in one of those flashes of inspira
tion which light up so strangely with a human meaning
that marvellous world, — "Therefore are they before the
throne of God, and serve him day and night in his
temple : and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell
among them." "And he showed me a pure river of
water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the
throne of God and of the Lamb." "And they shaU
see his face; and his name shall be in their fore
heads." Our notion of a finite, human spirit, from what
ever point we survey it, requires a place for its
future existence. It is not a metaphysical nothing.
" There is a spirit in man : and the inspiration of
the Almighty giveth him understanding." • There is
a spiritual substance, a constituted intellectual and
rational personality, inurned in the body and separ
able from it. At death, it neither sleeps with the
body; nor is it evaporated into space. It is, by the
very laws of its being, stUl a something — somewherp,
in some place, with some limiting environments,
as well as in some state or condition of being. The
spirit, the Apostle tells us, is " clothed upon with
our house which is from heaven, — that being clothed
we should not be found naked." But this requires
a definite location, not less than a spiritual corpo
reity, as the basis of its being. We cannot diffuse
a finite spirit through infinite space, any more than

Redeemed Men in Heaven. 433
we can concentrate infinite space into a finite spirit :
but a created, finite spirit without some corporeal
form to confine it within a given orbit, must cease
to be finite, and so become infinite Uke its Creator;
or it must cease to exist. A created, finite spirit
with a corporeal form must, by the same necessity,
be circumscribed by its own organism; and therefore
it must be in some sense localised. Hence, were it
possible for us by some process of celestial mensura
tion to run a line all through and across the terri
tories of creation, we should somewhere intersect the
geography of the celestial city. We should come in
front of the "twelve gates," and "the city that Ueth
four-square," out of whose echoing arches the seer
"heard the harpings of the harpers," as they stood
on the " sea of glass mingled with fire." We may
not materiaUse too much after our earthly patterns
this lofty imagery of Revelation: but neither must we
spiritualise it so as "to leave nothing for faith and
hope to lean upon but a vague abstraction. Accord
ing to the Apostle, the man Uves on the other side
of death in aU the personal consciousness which on
this side made up the complex of his individual life.
But the soul-life on earth is defined and bounded
by the limitations of the body in which it is
enclosed. The language of Scripture, if sparing and guarded,
is yet fuU of the most emphatic demands for condi
tions out of which this personal consciousness is
hereafter to unfold itself. It speaks everywhere of
the future heaven of glorified men as the abode, the
special dweUing-place of Christ and God — a definite
2f

434 Redeemed Men in Heaven.
locality which, while it does not and cannot Umit,
yet in some way concentrates into a visible glory the
ineffable presence. " In my Father's house are many
mansions : if it were not so, I would have told you.
I go to prepare a place for you." " Christ is not
entered into the holy places made with hands, which
are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself,
now to appear in the presence of God for us." Near
ness to Christ in that presence, fellowship with him
in the distinctions and royalties of his mediatorial
glory — that is the "heaven" of his people. "Father,
I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be
with me where I am ; that they may behold my
glory." To die is "to be with Christ:" "to be
absent from the body" is "to be present with the
Lord." There is " a 'city wriicri hath foundations,
whose builder and maker is God " — a city, it may be,
the centre of the universe — the centre of all centres
as it is the sun of all suns — in which God thrones
himself in some signal, embodied magnificence to the
vision of his saints. The Scriptures are reticent on
the details of this future home and dwelling-place
of the redeemed, as they are on a thousand other
things ; but surely these and cognate statements are
not all illusions. They are not the gorgeous drapery
of a sensuous Orientalism, employed merely for effect.
Man's hope of a future life is not pawned to a
deceptive phantom. It is a supernatural secret; but
not an unreality. "We know that if our earthly
house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a
building of God, an house not made with hands,
eternal in the heavens."

Redeemed Men in Heaven. 435
It is whUe relying on statements such as these,
which so unequivocally affirm the realism of a future
state, that a Christian philosophy, as certainly as a
Christian' faith, must reject not only the coarse
materialism that denies the existence of the soul,
but also and equally trie refined pantheism which
asserts its final absorption into the soul of trie
universe. To predict for man a perpetuity of being
only in the sense of living perpetually swallowed up
and lost in the all-embosoming life of .trie universe,
is to make him immortal, but at the same trine to
strip him of every thing that distinguishes riim as
a man. It is to baulk our holiest aspirations, to
mock our divinest instincts, to make useless and
unintelligible all our Christian hopes. To thrust the
human spirit into trie briglit abyss of the uncreated
essence, to anniririate it, or to send it out a sub
lime vagabond to wander wearily and alone over
trie unfenced fields of immensity, without a resting-
place in which to refresh its unwasted yet ever
wasting vitality, is equally to destroy it.
2. We are told of the song which ihe redeemed sing.
"And I heard the voice of harpers harping with
their harps." "And they sing the song of Moses
the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb," — "of
Moses the servant of God," and "the Lamb" that
was slain : trie greatness of God, as seen in pro
vidence, the mystery of God, as it is brought out in
redemption, — these are the substance of the song ;
these we may consider as the two triemes out of
wriich this "new song" gets its everlasting music.

436 Redeemed Men in Heaven.
Providence, as it unrolls the creative activities of
God in all the departments of life, with a history
gathered out of all time, comprehending the meaning
of all events, in all worlds, orders, ranks, arid classes
of being, will open a wonderful yolume in wliich
hereafter to study the manifold perfections of God.
God we shall contemplate, as we shall come to under
stand him in his works ; his works, as we shall
come to study them in trie light of the perfections of
God ; the heavens, now so sealed up in their sUence
and mystery; the earth, in" its past hoary epochs
and creative periods — when triey were, and what, and
how ; the Church, in its origin, conflicts, progress, and
fortunes, from its beginning to its final end ; nations,
in their rise, separate monarchies, growths, wars,
collapse, and ruin — Assyria, Nineveh, Persia, Babylon,
Egypt, Rome, Greece, India, China, England, Europe;
events, such as have a thousand times convulsed and
changed the face of the world ; individual men, whose
thinkings were trie seed-plot of after civriizations, and
whose shadow had haunted the memory of the ages
from the beginning of time onward to its close —
patriarchs, prophets, poets, sages, heroes, warriors,
statesmen, kings ; our own little but significant
history, an invisible thread in the shuttle of the
great weaver, yet how surely, as we shall find it,
woven in witri the weftage of his plan. Standing on
that ' sea of glass,' as Moses stood on the shore of
the Red Sea, we may be permitted to look back all
along that seemingly tangled pathway of our human
pilgrimage, and to see how bright and wise it will
all then appear, lit up in the visions of the eternal.

Redeemed Men in Heaven. 437
Questions which down here have a thousand times
perplexed us ; events that took all the bloom out of
the cheek, and all courage from the heart; strag
glings, and fearings, and failures, and dark imaginings,
which we could neither understand nor escape, will
all get brightened up in their innermost intent and
meaning, and fall certainly into their allotted place
of order in the forecast and providence of God. A
glance, cast ever and anon as we climb the slopes
of that perennial summer-time, at the results we
have reached, wUl be sufficient to turn the soul itself
into one of those " riarps of God," discoursing music
sweet and rich as angels' song. "Thou shalt remem
ber all the way whicri trie Lord thy God hath led thee."
And that way, however embarrassed and circuitous
and weary it may appear now, whrie we are passing
through its dusky labyrinths, will then shine like a
silvery thread of light down the mountain side, up
which the Father's hand has so wisely conducted us.
We know but little of the immediate working of
God in any of trie worlds of life which go to make
up this book of Providence. The most gifted seers
penetrate but a little way into this misty deep of
Divine things. Individual life, national life, world-life,
in their causes, convulsions, and issues — who writes the
history of all that ? How little do we comprehend of
the Divine dealing with ourselves, or with the age in
whicri we live; of the mysteries which perplex our
faith, of the afflictions, griefB, disappointments and
deaths which cloud the sunniest landscape of life!
There is a profound silence in all the movements of
God, out of which comes not even a whispered echo

438 Ridamid Men in Heaven.-
to the plaint of weary, wounded hearts. "He holdeth
back the face of riis throne, and spreadeth riis cloud
upon it." "Clouds and darkness are round about him."
"He giveth not account of any of his matters."
We wander in darkness and in tears, with no stay but
the faith that will not be baulked, even when reason
seems most at fault. Its foothold is on the rock, against
which the surges are breaking. It "abides under the
shadow of the Almighty," — but it abides in sUence.
Still less do we know of life as it ebbs and flows
on the shores of the stellar worlds, of the peace, the
dreams, the dread convulsions, the birth-throes and
the death-struggles which in the cycles of duration
empty and repeople, gloom and light up those
solitudes of space, which stretch between the throne
of God and the infinite beyond. Who knows any
thing now of the angels, of their studies, or their
employments? They were wont to know a good deal
about us men. Their marshalled legions have been
the prime actors in all the great dramas of creation,
providence, and redemption. They have done grand
service as the immediate executors of the Divine will.
To patriarchs and to priests, to prophets and poets,
to the holy men of the olden time, angelic ministries
were not dreams or the illusions of fancy; they were
the recognised administrators of the immediate provi
dence and will of God. Well! those angels hold in
their pure intelligence and perfect memory a history
of Providence, which when narrated in its details to
us their younger brethren, may have the freshness of
novelty when, as we count duration, the ages of
eternity may be growing old.

Redeemed Men in Heaven. 439
There must be "seals," unbroken as yet, to be
opened in heaven, — mysteries to be unravelled, his
tories to be studied, discoveries to be made, other
worlds to be visited, old companionships to be renewed,
new friendships to be formed, unfoldings of the mani
fold wisdom and grandeur of God in which to freshen
our studies; and in each new discovery some new
meaning to be thrown upon ourselves and our acces
sories, upon the present, the past, or future, that
will add a sweetness to the "new song" more tender
and full in its strain than when its first notes fell
from our harp. Men have sometimes shuddered at what
they have imagined must be the tedium, the insuffer
able monotony, the sickening satiety of immortal life.
The perfect sweetness of heaven palls upon the
appetite : they think its routine and safety tire with
out satisfying the demands of the active, ever craving
and immortal spirit. But not untU we riave emptied
the volume of Providence of its wonders; not until Ufe
in man, in angel, in God has yielded up its secrets ;
not until the last field in the outlying universe has
been gleaned of all its treasures, or the mind itself
has become extinct or effete, can there be satiety in
heaven. It is "the power of an endless Ufe." Life
in heaven feeds itself in trie abyss of God.
Redemption, stiU more wonderfuUy trian this wonder
ful Providence, will give its tone to the "new song."
" They sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to
take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou
wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy
blood." Somehow, and for some end, these heavens
of God and of the holy angels are filled with allusions

44° Redeemen Men in Heaven.
and imagery commemorative of the Christ. One witri
the eternal Father, and co-ordinate with him in
majesty and might and glory, " every creature that
is in heaven, and on earth, and under the eartti, and
sucri as are in the sea," lift their worshipping acclaim
to him. And this "Lamb, slain from the foundation
of trie world," this "Jesus Christ whom the heavens
have received," the Christ of our Christianity, "the
author and the .finisher of our faith," the Saviour,
friend, brother of a new order of humanity on earth
and in heaven, — he it is, who in the mystery of his
person and in the grandeur of his redeeming work, is
the substance of the new song. "They sing a new
song before trie throne."
This is, in the minstrelsy of heaven, a new theme on
whicri to sing. Triere was an epoch in the calendar
of those elder spirits, when the thoughts inspired by
redemption were wholly new. In the unchronicled
milleniums of antecedent life the angels had sung
their own celestial melodies, on themes appropriate
to their place and rank and history. The power and
the wisdom and the glory of God, as seen in
the manifold displays of creative and ruling might ;
his magnificence and majesty, his unimagined great
ness and mystery of being as gradually unfolded to
appreciative, intelligent spirits, had doubtless provoked
their thought and kindled their feeling, and stirred
through all their burning ranks songs of jubilant
gladness, that rolled down like the voice of thunder
into the solitudes beyond. " The morning stars sang
together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy,"
when "the foundations of the earth" were laid. Re-

Redeemed Men in Heaven. 441
demption was altogether a new, a strange, and a
grander unfolding of the perfections of the Almighty
— a new creation, in a universe filled with the
marvels of the Creator's work; and when its advent
at length came, they went down in their serried
ranks to Bethlehem, to see the " strange thing that
had come to pass." It was a new scroll in the
archives of the universe, a new page in the registry
of infinite perfections on which to ponder.
It was a new emotion in their mental life. When
this feeling of surprise, of wonder, of perplexed as
tonishment, of eager and baffled curiosity was first
evoked in the angelic minds in view of man's re
demption, we may not know. How long they had
brooded over the coming mystery; with what holy
surmises they had bent their eager flight to this
planet, the scene of the coming transaction, to wit
ness its earliest unfoldings ; how they mused, what
they communicated in their rapt assemblages one to
another of this apocalypse of the imperial Monarch,
about to be ushered in ; how some master mind
among the archangels sat apart intently watching the
perturbations of his brotlier spirits, and from the
magnitude of the tremor felt all through their ranks
predicted clearly the astonishing issue, — all this is
thrown in only faint and shadowy outline on the
canvass of the imagination. But when the event
itself came in its first human instalment into their
veritable presence ; when the first representative of
a new order and rank of intelligent beings went up
into heaven, and they could study and understand
the marvel of his parentage and history; when the

442 Redeemed Men in Heaven.
soul of the martyred Abel went up into "the holy
place," and his astonished rapture had subsided into
intelligent happiness, and he then swept for the first
time his trembling emotions across the harp of
redemption, — it does seem to us as if that strain
must have hushed into silence the note of every
seraph, and all bent down to catch the new, sweet
music of earth ! They had sung before, often it may be,
their own songs, jubilee anthems, grand oratorios, in
which the perfection of creative power and stately
administration were their exultant themes ; but their
rehearsals awoke no responsive echoes in the listening
earth. Redemption is a new anthem, the chorus of
which is sounding its music through the earth and
through the heavens, waking up its resounding
echoes " throughout all the ages, world without end."
" Ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands
of thousands say with a loud voice, Worthy is the
Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches,
and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory,
and blessing ! "
And this is a perpetual song. It wUl never lose
its freshness of interest, its power to awaken new
emotions, to kindle and excite new thought. It will
be new to each of us on the first morning we reach
the City, new in its thrill of rapt enjoyment to our
hushed and wondering spirits ; and its newness to us
will lend a new pathos to the joy of the greeting
spirits who will congregate around us to give us wel
come. It will be always new. We are living to-day
in the midst of stupendous cosmical realities which,
in the future ages of time, are all to pass away like

Redeemed Men in Heaven. 443
fugitive pageants. Our earth is but an animated
slag ; the fires of the sun are waning ; a doom of
decay is set upon the entire system of material
worlds — planets, satellites, systems, suns. The forces
of all are dying out : science is disclosing the solemn
mutations and the final disruptions which are in
Btore for this magnificent universe ; and from Revela
tion we know there is to be a grand universal pause,
an arrest to the ongoing of all material things. But
after all these permutations and catastrophes, with
whatever after issues of new administrations, are
played out, the " Son of man shall sit upon the
throne of his glory." The purpose of redemption
does not end with time : it spans eternity ; it
encircles the throne of God. Its past history is one
of progress and development, of problem and
mystery, of conflicts and triumph ; and after time
and earth have passed away, the results of this
redemption, like the tide-ripples of the ocean, will be
widening and perpetually spreading through the
shoreless future, unrolling new marvels and deeper
splendours, and inspiring richer songs for ever !
Who shall imagine how new to the oldest spirit
in heaven is this song to-day ? how fresh and
full of rapture it will be to us, when time itself
is forgotten, in the ages which have no chronology?
Nay, who has not felt how soft in their echoing
melodies, how strange and rich and sweet the
" harpings " of those harpers, as their notes have
seemed to come ringing down the everlasting hills to
us, as if to cheer us in our weary, toil-stained
travel, as hopefully we look up and Usten to their
music !

444 Redeemed Men in Heaven.
3. But what shall we say of the song itself ? Do
they sing in heaven ? Is there any outlet to the
emotional life of heaven that has its analogy in
our songs on earth ? Why not? It has, indeed, been
conjectured that the future Ufe may introduce a
method of communication between mind and mind
that will dispense with words and sounds altogether,
a method in which even music wiU be srient music,
and songs wordless songs ; just as there is a music
on earth too ethereal for the grossness of ordinary
human ears. This may be possible. But a voiceless
heaven, over whose throbbing life there broods an
eternal silence, is a conception so repugnant to aU
our human sympathies and experiences triat we feel
it is impossible to satisfy the cravings of our restless
nature with it.
Heaven is a temple of varied service, of great
social communings. It may be a school of manifold
thought, in which to train all finite faculty in the
unfolding wisdom of the infinite God, as seen in
creation, in redemption, in the history of the Church,
in the economy of otrier worlds of intelligent deni
zens, of which we now but vaguely dream ; with a
spreading out and grouping in celestial diagrams and
initial problems for infantile study, of the vast pro
fundities and progressively unfolding perfections in
the absolute Godhead. It may have its periodical
congresses of concerted harmony, epochs for the inter
change of thought, and for the greetings of rejoicing
multitudes wrio come up from the outlying provinces
to the metropolitan City. It may have its advents of
birth into new realms of being, into wider ranges of

Redeemed Men in Heaven. 445
intelhgence, into new sources of enjoyment, in which
the younger minds shall graduate into the older and
more perfect life of the elder spirits ; there may be
a blending of the lower ranges of the white-robed
multitudes with the distinctions of the angeUc and
hierarchical peers, liftmg our human plane into the
dignity and capacity of " the thrones and dominions "
in heaven : — and aU this coming round in the un
measured cycles of a duration which " fainteth not
neither is weary ! " Oh there must be emotion, intense,
infinite emotion in heaven ! — emotion utterly beyond aU
human conception, but surely not without some power
of expression, whose symbol has its equivalent in the
glorious uplift and outreach of song and music !
4. And what of the singers ? If in the future
world, as in this, the singer is to give tone and pitch
to the song ; if the musical cadence, the wealth of
the rich and roUing melody, is to take its set from
trie instrument employed, some of us may wonder at
its possible artistic effect. We sing badly here —
badly in voice, and worse in time, and worst of
aU in the power of producirig musical concord. The
instrument and the theme are incongruous ; the per
ception and the expression are out of harmony
with each other ; and both are incommensurable with
the reality of things. We stand outside the cloudy
splendours of ' the deep things of God ;' and even when
a sudden flash lights up for a moment some super
natural secret in the vast profound, our ignorance is a
greater discovery than our knowledge. Well, but in
the other world we shaU have got into another school

446 Redeemed Men in Heaven.
and under a different training, and with different
surroundings. Think of the better conditions, the
wider range of opportunities, the nobler teachers, the
vaster impulses kindling thought and conquering diffi
culties; of the immediate vision whicri reahties in the
place of shadows must create in that purely spiritual
state-! Think of the absence of aU that now limits,
distorts, and confuses our perceptions of God in himself,
and in the reality and grandeur of his works; of how
we shall be ensphered and held in a conscious oneness
with riis own directly manifested life — riimself trie one
incentive, impulse, and blessedness of our own being!
Think into what a higher range of a totalised celes
tial manhood we shall have entered, when these
' visions of God ' are all flaming in radiant actualities
around, before, and beyond us — the intellect growing
in strength as it widens its researches, penetrating
facts, unravelling mysteries, tracing laws, gathering
new cognitions for its premises and new data for
its inductions, — not only taking in the study of, but
winning the mastery over, the works and ways and
manifestations of the ineffable Godhead, through all
the unreaped and ever unfolding fields of immensity;
so giving a newness to the song that can never lose
its freshness, and a power to the singer that must in
all be equal to the song! We shall not grow old or
infirm in heaven : we shall be learning always,
attaining always; without the arrest that feebleness
brings, and without trie forgetfulness which exhaus
tion entails.
With possibilities such as these in prospect, we
can afford to wait, to hope, to believe for the reality.

Redeemed Men in Heaven. 447
"It doth not yet appear what we shaU be." Imagina
tion must be at fault, when it seeks to embody the
realism of heaven. It can never be in excess in
seeking to idealize its possible perfection. " Your life
is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our
life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him
in glory." The after eternities are to be the life-time
of our growth in being and in bhss.
IH. But now, in the meantime, let us not forget
the training through which redeemed men pass into
heavtn. 1. As wise men, our chief concern is with the
present, — with the rehearsal of the song. And for
our own part, we are anxious to master its first
lessons on earth; and are quite wUling to leave the
question how we shall come out in the execution of
the great oratorio to the future. " No man," we axe
told, "could learn that song," but the "redeemed
from the earth." They did not learn it after they
entered heaven : they entered heaven because they
had learnt to sing its songs on earth. That is a first
thought, fuU of awakening power. A course of moral
training, in which the Ufe of heaven is anticipated
and made familiar to us, is the prologue to heaven
itself. Let us give honest attention to this solemn
conclusion. For "there shall in no wise enter into
it any thing that denieth, neither whatsoever work
eth abomination, or maketh a lie : but they which
which are written in the Lamb's book of Ufe." See
how analogy confirms aU this. In the physical world,
organisms are fitted to locahties : minds are fitted to

448 Redeemed Men in Heaven.
bodies; and laws are fitted to both. In the social
world, character graduates ihe possession of place.
In the intellectual world, scholarship fills the pro
fessor's chair, and sits on the bench of magisterial
justice. So it is in the society above. The unclean
man, the sensualist, the worldling, trie godless and un-
devoUt man, would be out of place amid the adoring
hosts of heaven. To feel at home with God, in any
world, we must be like him. To iriterblend and fra
ternise with "the saints in light," we must be unrobed
of these garments of earth. For "flesh and blood
cannot inherit the kingdom of God." " These are
they which have washed their robes, and made them
white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they
before the throne of God."
2. This training purpose of human life, this learn
ing to sing the heavenly song by experiment, whUe
it consecrates life and time, sets an unspeakable value
on a sanctified, Christian manhood. We complain,
sometimes bitterly, of the labours, the weariness, the
griefs, the ghastly mockeries, the crushing disappoint
ments of life. We are chafed by its frictions, over
thrown by its calamities; its bereavements leave us
prostrate and helpless in anguish. The "waters of a
full cup are wrung out" to us. Our "way," as it
seems, "is hid from the Lord." But let us under
stand this : life is a training process ; it is a school
for development, for discipline, for the preparatory
culture of untried and nascent powers for the future.
This world, with its complex and sensuous environ
ment, is a house of instruction. It is " neither a

Redeemed Men in Heaven. 449
prison nor a penitentiary." It is not " a palace of
ease, nor an . amphitheatre for games and spectacles."
Least of all -is it a series of accidents, a succession
of abortive generations of men, the product and the
sport of chance, without a purpose and without an
end. It is God's seminary, his infant-school, for
educating a race of immortals. Families first, then
the Church, then society, and most of all personal
culture, are for the enforcement of its several pro
cesses — " tUl we all come in the unity of the faith,
and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a
perfect man, unto trie measure of trie stature of trie
fulness of Cririst." If you wish to understand the
genesis and the final cause of humanity as it puts
its mystery of life before you here and now, you
must wait untU you have got " over the Jordan," with
the light of the great Teacrier and the supernatural
issues of the eternal shining around and within
and before you — then the solution comes ! Till trien,
its enigmas are the test, as they are the conquest,
of faith. We " rest in the Lord, and wait patiently
for him."
3. But what an air of imposing solemnity, of
unique and lofty interest, does this view give to
the' earth on which we Uve and to the Ufe we are
Uving upon it, as the birthplace and training-ground
of a race of men for eternity ! A mere speck in its
architectural dimensions ghnting faintly amid the
lights of creation, a leaf quivering in the forest of
unimaginable worlds, a material scroll that shaU
" wax old as doth a garment, and as a vesture shall
2o

450 Redeemed Men in Heaven.
be folded up " and laid aside : but in its moral
history, a jewel without a , rival ! Here the Son of
God became incarnate, was crucified, and found a
grave. Here salvation is wpn, or it is lost, by the
successive generations of men. It is the highway
over wliich millions of men and women have entered
into the city of God. Millions riave been entangled
in its besetments, . and lost in its bogs. Its very dust
holds the record of hosts innumerable now in glory.
Its wailing winds, and moaning oceans, and shriek
ing tempests, are the requiem of the spirits of the
lost. A battle-ground is this planet of ours, in
which great conflicts, with infinite stakes, are
being fought out. Here, on this arena of time, the
destinies, diadems, kingdoms of eternity are lost or
won ! Who are the warriors ? On which side is
our contention ? ' How are we, each of us, using
this world ? What are. we getting out of it ?
What are we building upon it ? When it is gone,
what other dwelling-place have we in prospect ? Let
the conscience of each man answer, — "For the day
shall declare it !"

WALKEB AND LAYCOCK, PBTNTEBS, 37, BHIGGATE, LEEDS.