Title: Professor W. G. Elmslie, D.D.:Memoir and Sermons
Author: Elmslie, William Gray
Language: English
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Obvious printer errors corrected silently.

Correspondence included in the 'Memoir' has been indented. A notice of
another book by one of the editors has been shifted to the end.

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indicated by _underscores_.



 [Illustration:
 Yours faithfully,
 W. G. Elmslie]



 PROFESSOR W. G. ELMSLIE, D.D.:

 _MEMOIR AND SERMONS_.

 EDITED BY
 W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.,
 AND
 A. N. MACNICOLL.

 _SECOND EDITION._

 London:
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON,
 27, PATERNOSTER ROW.

 MDCCCXC.


Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.



ADVERTISEMENT.


My share in this book has been the writing of the brief introductory
Memoir, with the exception of the pages relating to Regent Square and
Willesden. These have been contributed by Mr. A. N. Macnicoll, who has
also given me the benefit of his advice throughout. I have also to
acknowledge the kindness of Principal Dykes, who has read the proofs,
and of the friends who have, amid pressing engagements, enriched the
volume with their reminiscences. The many correspondents who sent help
of various kinds are warmly thanked. There was abundant material for a
larger biography, and some of it will be utilised in another way. But it
was thought desirable that the memorial volume should be issued at a
moderate price, and that it should, so far as possible, consist of
Professor Elmslie's own work.

W. R. N.

       *       *       *       *       *

For the selections from Dr. Elmslie's sermons which are contained in
this volume I am entirely responsible. These sermons were seldom fully
written out, and some of them required considerable amplification. In
every case the thought of the writer has been rigidly preserved, and the
wording has been left, as far as possible, untouched. In cases where I
have had the benefit of short-hand reports I have, with the slightest
alteration, printed the sermons as they were delivered. Two "Sunday
Readings" are reprinted from _Good Words_, and an article on Genesis
from the _Contemporary Review_.

A. N. M.



CONTENTS.


                                                                    PAGE

MEMOIR                                                                   1


SERMONS.

 I.
 CHRIST AT THE DOOR                                                     81

 "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and
 open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he
 with Me."—REV. iii. 20.


 II.
 THE DARK ENIGMA OF DEATH                                               92

 ST. JOHN xi.


 III.
 THE STORY OF DORCAS                                                   108

 ACTS ix. 36-43.


 IV.
 UNFULFILLED CHRISTIAN WORK                                            118

 "And unto the angel of the Church in Sardis write; These things saith
 He that hath the seven Spirits of God, and the seven stars; I know thy
 works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead. Be
 watchful and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die:
 for I have not found thy works perfect before God."—REV. iii. 1, 2.

 Reading the last clause a little more literally will more fully bring
 out the meaning: "For I have found no works of thine fulfilled before
 my God."—R.V.


 V.
 A LESSON IN CHRISTIAN HELP                                            133

 "Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the [en]∆feeble[d]
 knees; and make straight [smooth] paths for [with] your feet, lest that
 which is lame be turned out of the way; but let it rather be healed
 [or, in order that that which is lame may not be caused to go astray,
 but may rather be healed]."—HEB. xii. 12, 13.


 VI.
 JOSEPH'S FAITH                                                        149

 (_Preached on Sunday Evening, October 20th, 1889, in St. John's Wood
 Presbyterian Church._)

 "By faith Joseph, when he died, made mention of the departing of the
 children of Israel; and gave commandment concerning his
 bones."—HEB. xi. 22.


 VII.
 THE BRAZEN SERPENT                                                    162

 "He [Hezekiah] removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut
 down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had
 made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to
 it: and he called it Nehushtan."—2 KINGS xviii. 4.


 VIII.
 THE GRADATIONS OF DOUBT                                               175

 PSALM lxxiii.


 IX.
 THE STORY OF QUEEN ESTHER                                             192

 (_Preached in Balham Congregational Church, on Sunday Evening, August
 11th, 1889._)

 ESTHER iv. 13-17.


 X.
 THE EXAMPLE OF THE PROPHETS                                           205

 "Take, my brethren, the prophets, who have spoken in the name of the
 Lord, for an example."—JAMES v. 10.


 XI.
 THE MAKING OF A PROPHET                                               220

 (_Preached at Nottingham, before the Congregational Union of England
 and Wales, on Monday Evening, October 8th, 1888._)

 "In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a
 throne, high and lifted up, and His train overspreading the temple
 floor. Seraphs were poised above, each with six wings, with twain
 veiling his face, with twain veiling his feet, and with twain hovering.
 And those on one side sang in responsive chorus with those on the other
 side, saying, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The fulness of
 the whole earth is His glory.' And the foundations of the threshold
 trembled at the sound of that singing, and the house was filled with
 incense smoke. Then cried I, 'Woe is me! for I am a dead man; because I
 am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of
 unclean lips; for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.'
 Then flew one of the seraphs unto me, having in his hand a burning
 ember, which with a tongs he had taken from off the incense altar; and
 he touched my mouth with it, and said, 'Lo, this hath touched thy lips;
 and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.' Thereupon I
 heard the voice of the Lord, saying, 'Whom shall I send, and who will
 go for us?' Then I cried, 'See me; send me.'"—ISAIAH vi. 1-8
 (_annotated_).


 XII.
 FOR AND AGAINST CHRIST                                                230

 "He that is not with Me is against Me: and he that gathereth not with
 Me scattereth."—LUKE xi. 23.

 "He that is not against us is on our part."—MARK ix. 40.


 XIII.
 THE PROPHECY OF NATURE                                                240

 "When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the
 stars, which Thou hast ordained; what is man, that Thou art mindful of
 him? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him? For Thou hast made him
 a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and
 honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands;
 Thou hast put all things under his feet."—PSALM viii. 3-6.

 "But now we see not yet all things put under Him."—HEB. ii. 8.


 XIV.
 CHRISTIAN GIVING                                                      248

 (_Preached in Willesden Presbyterian Church, September 24th,
 1882._)

 "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting
 of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to
 God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
 Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always
 abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your
 labour is not in vain in the Lord."—1 COR. xv. 55-8.

 "Now concerning the collection for the saints, as I have given order to
 the churches of Galatia, even so do ye. Upon the first day of the week
 let every one of you lay by him in store, as God hath prospered him,
 that there be no gatherings when I come. And when I come, whomsoever ye
 shall approve by your letters, them will I send to bring your
 liberality unto Jerusalem."—1 COR. xvi. 1-3.


 XV.
 OUR LORD'S TREATMENT OF ERRING FRIENDS                                267

 SUNDAY READINGS.

 I. Read Ps. cxxxviii., and John xiii. 1-17. THE SELF-ASSERTING.—John
 xiii. 4, 5.

 II. Read Job xvi., and Matt. xxvi. 31-46. THE UNSYMPATHETIC.—John xiii.
 1-3.

 III. Read 2 Sam. xxiv., and John xxi. 15-23. THE WILFUL.—John xiii.
 6-10.

 IV. Read 1 Sam. xxiv., and Luke xxii. 47-62. THE FAITHLESS.—John xiii.
 11.

 V. Read Isa. xl., and 1 Cor. xiii. THE SECRET OF MAGNANIMITY.—John
 xiii. 12-17.


 XVI.
 A HYMN OF HEART'S EASE                                                284

 SUNDAY READINGS.

 "Lord, my heart is not haughty,
 Nor mine eyes lofty:
 Neither do I exercise myself in great matters,
 Or in things too high for me.
 Surely I have behaved
 And quieted myself;
 As a child that is weaned of its mother,
 My soul is even as a weaned child.
 Let Israel hope in the Lord
 From henceforth and for ever."—Ps. cxxxi.

 I. Read Job xxvi., and 1 Cor. xiii. THE SOURCE OF UNREST.
 "Things too high for me."

 II. Read Ps. xxxvii., and Matt. xi. THE SECRET OF REST.
 "Lord my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty."

 III. Read Ps. lxxiii. and Heb. xii. CALM AFTER STORM.
 "Surely I have behaved and quieted myself."

 IV. Read Ps. xlvii. and Phil. ii. VICTORY BY SURRENDER.
 "As a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned
 child."

 V. Read Gen. xxxii. and Rev. vii. THE RECOMPENSE OF FAITH.
 "Let Israel hope in the Lord from henceforth and for ever."


 XVII.
 THE FIRST CHAPTER OF GENESIS                                          302



MEMOIR.


Although Dr. Elmslie was not destined to a long career, and died with
the greater purposes of his life work almost entirely unfulfilled, very
few men in the Nonconformist churches of Great Britain were better known
and loved. The expectations of many in his native Scotland were fixed on
him from the first; in England no preacher of his years had a larger or
more enthusiastic following. Among students of the Old Testament he was
beginning to be known as a master in his own subject, and as one likely
to accomplish much in the reconciliation of criticism and faith. Add to
this that he possessed the rarer charm of an almost unique personal
magnetism—that many were attached to him by the chain which is not
quickly broken, the bond of spiritual affinity, and it becomes necessary
to apologise only for the imperfections, not for the existence, of this
memorial.

       *       *       *       *       *

WILLIAM GRAY ELMSLIE was born in the Free Church Manse of Insch,
Aberdeenshire, October 5th, 1848, the second son of the Rev. William
Elmslie, M.A., and May Cruickshank, his wife. Writing to his parents
from Berlin more than twenty years after, he says, "How thankful I ought
to be that I was born in dear old Scotland, and in the humble little
Free Church manse of Insch!" His father was famous for his shrewd,
homely, genial wisdom. He was a native of Aberdeen, and had the strong
sense and quick perception for which Aberdonians are known. By no means
without the nobler enthusiasms of Christianity, he had shared in the
fervour of the Disruption movement, and was the popular and successful
minister of a congregation large for the district, and including many
members of earnest Christian principle. Mr. Elmslie was the father and
counsellor of the whole parish; his advice was sought by members of all
Churches, and cheerfully given. If there was any danger of his practical
nature becoming somewhat too hard and worldly, the influence of his wife
was a corrective. Dr. Elmslie's mother—a beautiful and accomplished
woman—was a religious enthusiast. "I recognised," writes her son, from
the New College, Edinburgh, "mamma's review in the _Free Press_ by the
words 'wrestling believing prayer.'" They were indeed characteristic,
and it was the rare union of mystic elevation and warmth with perfect
comprehension of ordinary life that gave Dr. Elmslie his separate and
commanding place among the teachers of his time. The austerity, the
somewhat chilly rigour which characterised manse life in the Free Church
were not found at Insch. The children never suffered from the want of
affection—what the French call _le besoin d'être aimé_. All the best was
brought out in them, and in the case of our subject the brightness and
sweetness of his disposition procured for him more than ordinary
endearments. Two lovingly preserved letters in a large round child's
hand give a better idea of the home than anything I can say. The first
describes a visit to Huntly and the home of Duncan Matheson, the great
evangelist, who did yeoman service in the Crimean War.

 "INSCH, _July 14th, 1856_.

 "MY DEAR MAMMA,—I am always glad when I hear that you are all keeping
 well. I have such a long string of news that I do not know where to
 begin, for I was at Huntly, and saw so many things there. I will now
 tell you the most of what I saw. I first saw the Bogie, and a few sheep
 being washed in it. When I arrived at Huntly, and had walked a short
 distance, Mr. Matheson and I met his dog Dash. When I got to the house
 I was first shown the Bugle, then the Drum, and three swords; one was
 broken after killing five Russians, and the man who had used it killed.
 And then I saw the Rifle, and fired it off, though without shot. When I
 got out of the house I went to a shop where I bought a gun and Almonds,
 and on our way home Miss Matheson and I called on the Lawsons, and
 brought Johny and Jamie home, where we met William Brown, with his Aunt
 Mrs. Douglas, waiting us. When we went into the house there were two
 pistols which William and I took, and frightened some boys with them. I
 saw a piece of the rock of Gibralter. I saw a piece of wood made into
 stone, and two teeth—one a shark's, and the other an Alligator's—
 hardened into stone. There were medals and coins of the various
 countries of Europe, a piece of a church in Sevastopool, and a thing
 which the Russian soldiers wear on their coats. I also saw a brush
 which the Turks use for brushing themselves. I also saw an idol and a
 great many pictures of the Virgin Mary. I saw a small picture-book with
 all the different priests of Rome. Our Rabbits are all quite well and
 growing. I am your affᵗᵉ Son,

 "WILLIAM GRAY ELMSLIE."

  "MY DEAR MAMA,—I am glad to hear that Papa is keeping better. How I
  would like to be with you, and see the beautiful scenery and the many
  rabbits. Tell our cousins to come here some time soon, and let them
  see our rabbits if they will come. I send some Heather and some broom
  which we got on the hill beside John Davison, and took tea with him. I
  enclose what I got down of the forenoon sermon. I am your affᵗᵉ son,

 "W. G. ELMSLIE."

 P.S.—We sometimes receive to small dinners, but sometimes pretty good.

 "W. G. ELMSLIE."

The religious forces of the time were those of that Evangelicalism which
has been the base of so many powerful characters, even among those who
have afterwards rejected it, like Cardinal Newman and George Eliot.
These were reinforced by the influences of the Disruption, then at their
strongest. It was something to be born at such a time, a time when, to
use the words of Lacordaire, there was a noble union of heroic character
and memorable achievement. The pecuniary poverty and spiritual opulence
of Scotland, on which Carlyle has said so much, were then seen at their
best. If a cautious, reticent race, impatient of extravagant action and
unmeasured speech, is to be found anywhere, it is among the peasants of
Aberdeenshire; but when possessed and stirred by religious feeling they
are capable of unyielding firmness and unstinted devotion. These
qualities were remarkably brought out at the Disruption. The religious
life of New England, pictured by Harriet Beecher Stowe, must have been
similar in many things, and Dr. George Macdonald, who was born in
Huntly, a few miles from Insch, has rendered some aspects with
incomparable beauty and tenderness in his first works. The preaching was
intensely theological. The great highways of truth were trodden and
retrodden. Texts were largely taken from the Epistles, and the doctrines
of grace were accurately and thoroughly expounded. Freshness, style, and
the other qualities now held essential to popular sermons were unknown.
But the preaching did its work, nevertheless, as Dr. Macdonald says,
because it _was_ preaching—the rare speech of a man to his fellows,
whereby they know that he is in his inmost heart a believer. As the
result, every conscience hung out the pale or the red flag. Dr.
Macdonald complains of the inharmonious singing, but others will testify
with Mrs. Stowe that the slow, rude, and primitive rendering of the
metrical Psalms excited them painfully. "It brought over one, like a
presence, the sense of the infinite and the eternal, the yearning, and
the fear, and the desire of the poor finite being, so ignorant and so
helpless." Not less impressive was the piety to be found among the
peasants. There were David Elginbrods in their ranks, men among whom you
felt in the presence of the higher natures of the world—and women
delivered from lonely, craving solitude by the Eternal Love that had
broken through and ended the dark and melancholy years. These were to be
found not only among the prominent Church members, but among others
willing to be unknown, to be stones sunk in the foundation of the
spiritual building. Under such influences the boy became a Christian
almost unconsciously. There was no crisis in his life, that I can trace.
When a mere boy he writes to his parents, during their absence from
Insch, that he had conducted family worship according to their desire.
"It required a great deal of previous thought and prayer, too, for I
have found that is useful, and not study only, in preparing for the
service of God. Yet I have good cause to be glad and thankful that I am
able to do it; and I feel it a real relief and privilege to commit all
to the care of God." At this time he visited an aged member of his
father's Church, and prayed with her. He repeats with pride the
compliment paid him in return, "Ye ken hoo to be kind and couthy wi' a
puir auld body." His faith and vision grew clearer, but in cruder shape
those thoughts were his from the beginning that haunted him to the very
end.

The intellectual atmosphere of the place was much more quickening than
might be thought. Insch is a cosy little village enough, and though not
in itself beautiful, has picturesque bits near it. But even in summer
sunshine it can hardly be called lively, and in winter, when the snow is
piled for weeks on hill and field, and the leaden-coloured clouds refuse
to part, it could not well look duller. But the Free Church manses of
the district were full of eager inquiry. The ministers were educated
men, graduates of the University, and in some cases had swept its
prizes. Their ambition was satisfied in the service of Christ. There was
a noble contentment with their lot which it is inspiring to think of;
but they cherished a righteous ambition for their children, and spared
no toil and no self-denial to open the way for them. From three Free
Church manses in that neighbourhood, all at first included in the same
Presbytery, have gone forth men whose names are familiar to the English
people. From the manse of Keig, Professor Robertson Smith; from Rhynie,
Mr. A. M. Mackay, of Uganda, the true successor to Livingstone, whose
early death is announced as these sheets are passing through the press;
and from Insch, Professor Elmslie. The educational facilities of the
district were of almost ideal excellence. The parish teachers, when
salaries were increased by certain wise and liberal bequests, were
almost without exception accomplished scholars. They took pride in a
promising pupil, and would cheerfully work extra hours to ensure his
success. Their fees were sufficiently moderate, one pound being enough
to cover all expenses for a year. At these schools a boy might remain
till he had reached the age, say, of fourteen or fifteen, when he might
go to Aberdeen to compete for a scholarship, or "bursary" as it was
called. Of these, perhaps forty were offered every year, varying from
£35 a year for the University course, downwards. It was thought wiser to
go for the last year or two to the Grammar School in Aberdeen, to
receive the last polish; but often lads went in from their native glens,
and defeated all competitors. Elmslie was trained at first in the Free
Church school at Insch, then at the parish school, under the Rev. James
McLachlan. He then proceeded to the Aberdeen Grammar School, where he
was two years, under the Rev. William Barrack, a teacher of rare
attainments and enthusiasm. He carried off one of the highest honours,
and in 1864 entered the University of Aberdeen.

It is, or was, the ambition of every hopeful youth in the North to wear
the student's gown. "Oh that God would spare me to wear the red
cloakie!" said John Duncan, afterwards the well-known Professor of
Hebrew in the New College, Edinburgh, when weakened by an early illness.
The life of the Aberdeen student has never, perhaps, been rendered with
sufficient fidelity, save in "Alec Forbes," and Dr. Walter Smith's
"Borland Hall," and it may have changed in some respects since Elmslie's
time. Then it was emphatically a period of plain living and hard work.
Eight shillings a week sufficed to cover many a student's expenses for
board and lodging, amounting to less than £10 for the twenty weeks of
the session, and the summer was spent at home. The spirit of the place
was democratic in the extreme. There were a few students who came out of
wealthy families, but any claim to respect on this ground would have
been fiercely resented. George Macdonald tells of an aristocrat among
the students condemned and sentenced by a meeting presided over by "the
pale-faced son of a burly ploughman." The high spirits of youth would at
times break out in coarse and even ferocious excesses, but these were
rare, and the characteristic of the place was a limitless persistency of
application. Most of the men felt that this was their one chance. If
they could distinguish themselves, there were scholarships to be had
which would open the path to Oxford or Cambridge, or give them a fair
chance in other fields of life. Some yielded to temptation, and became
wrecks; others, after a period of obscuration, recovered themselves; a
few soon abandoned the quest for University honours, and busied
themselves with other lines of reading and study; but Elmslie set
himself, without flinching or turning aside, to his task. Evil did not
lure him. There was no stamp of moral _défaillance_ on that clear brow.
His watchful parents were still with him, for they set up another home
in Aberdeen, and were constantly with their children. It ought, perhaps,
to be mentioned that Elmslie's father was an enthusiastic total
abstainer, in days when the practice was quite unfashionable, and in
many parts of the country entirely unknown. In this his son warmly
sympathised, maintaining the principle of abstinence to the end of his
life, and carrying out the practice even during his studies in Germany.
He wrote home, when assistant in Regent Square, "Glad you are getting on
so famously in the temperance line, and do hope it will have a permanent
and wide influence." But the secret of his University success was his
indefatigable labour at the prescribed tasks. Although he might well be
termed _l'esprit soudain_, he was capable of the long-continued and
daily application which belongs to the rare union of ardour and
patience. He had the characteristic of his countrymen—nothing could
daunt him from fighting the battle out. His success accordingly was
great and growing. In a class which numbered, perhaps, an unusual
proportion of brilliant men, he steadily made his way to the front. He
distinguished himself by taking prizes in almost every department of
study, specially excelling in mathematics, and closed his career by
carrying off the gold medal awarded by the Aberdeen Town Council to the
first student of the year, in April, 1868. The victory was not gained
without a price. From the first his studies brought on some occasional
headaches, and the first triumph resulted in a serious illness, which
his wise and skilful physician, Dr. Davidson, of Wartle, warned him
would reappear twenty years later—an ominous prophecy, which was but too
exactly fulfilled. The chief intellectual force in the Northern
University at that time and long after was Dr. Alexander Bain, the
Professor of Logic. In after life Dr. Elmslie frequently referred to his
influence. But other chairs were also occupied by powerful men. Geddes
infected many with his own enthusiasm for Greek literature; Fuller and
Thomson were admirably efficient teachers of mathematics; and to name no
more, "Jeems" Nicol, the Professor of Natural History, with his hoarse
voice, his homely kindness, and his thorough knowledge of his subject,
was a universal favourite. Thomson was, perhaps, the most original and
cynical character of them all, and his dry wit had a great attraction
for Elmslie.

The Rev. Thomas Nicol, of Tolbooth, Edinburgh, a distinguished minister
of the Church of Scotland and one of the most outstanding of Professor
Elmslie's classfellows, wrote thus to his father: "Since Dr. Elmslie's
death I have often gone back to the days, just twenty-five years ago,
when we first met at the bursary competition, and in the Bageant class
at King's College, Aberdeen. Even from the first he was one of the most
winsome and attractive members of the class, full of fun and mirth, with
a perennial smile on his beautiful and finely formed face, and with a
cheery word for everybody. I can see him to-day, with his neat Highland
cape and the college gown over it, coming through the quadrangle, as
distinctly as if it were yesterday, and it is easier for me preserving
that picture because we have met so seldom of recent years. He is
associated in my mind with another of our classfellows, who achieved
distinction early, and early met an heroic and tragic death—I mean Mr.
William Jenkyns, C.I.E., who died with Sir Louis Cavagnari, at Cabul.
Your son and he were unlike in some things, but in delicacy of features,
and expressiveness of countenance, and slimness of figure one associates
them at once together. When I was helping to get up funds for the
memorial of Mr. Jenkyns now in the University Library at Aberdeen I well
remember the cheerfulness with which Mr. Elmslie contributed, and the
kindly words of affection and esteem which accompanied his contribution.
Of both it might most truly be said that 'being made perfect, in a short
time they fulfilled a long time.' Like others of my classfellows, Mr.
Bruce, our first Bursar, now minister of Banff, W. L. Davidson, LL.D.,
minister of Bourtie, and our mutual friend John Smith, of Broughton
Place Church here, and many more, I watched your son's career with the
deepest interest, and as I have said, took quite a pride in the career
of usefulness and honour which by his ability and hard work he shaped
for himself in London. We really felt as if he were our own somehow, and
as if we had a share in all the honours he was gaining, both as a
literary and as a public man." The Rev. W. A. Gray, of Elgin, who was
brought up in a neighbouring Free Church manse, says, "What
characterised him then was his intense sense of fun, his perception of
the comic side of things, especially in regard to people, and his
never-failing stock of anecdotes, almost always humorous, never
malicious." Coming several years after Elmslie to the University of
Aberdeen, I only knew him from a distance. To an outsider his prominent
quality was winsomeness. There was no jealousy in Aberdeen of fairly won
success; if there had been, Elmslie would have disarmed it. Then, as
always, he took his victories with the utmost simplicity. He was always
humble, with the humility which is very consistent with strenuous effort
and even great ambition.

The sons of Free Church ministers in those days, however great their
University successes might have been, generally desired no higher
position than that of their fathers. It was, no doubt, the wish of his
parents that Elmslie should be a minister, and his inclination fell in
with that. At the same time there were counter-inducements; for one,
many Aberdeen students had been winning high distinction at Cambridge,
the senior wranglership having fallen to some of them, and his teacher
and some of his relatives were anxious that he should try his fortunes
there. He had himself a strong bent to the medical profession. Whatever
line he had taken in life he would have been successful. A well-known
revivalist preacher, also a professional man, is understood to have
counselled him to go in for a business life. One who knew him well has
remarked to me, since his death, that his true pre-eminence would have
been shown in a scientific career. But his life, and especially its
closing years, made it plain that his own choice was wise.

A new era opened for him when he went as a theological student to the
New College, Edinburgh. The Free Church possesses a theological seminary
in Aberdeen which assuredly did not lack for able Professors, but the
number of students is small, and the more ambitious men usually go to
Edinburgh. In Edinburgh the Free Church College (known as New College)
had for its first Principal Dr. Chalmers, and in succession Dr.
Cunningham and Dr. Candlish, the three greatest of the Disruption
worthies. It had also some notable men among its Professors. When
Elmslie went up Candlish was at the head. His appearances were only
occasional, as he was also minister of Free St. George's, Edinburgh. But
although his contribution to the vitality of the New College was
necessarily small, it was real. Mr. Gray writes: "He gave no lectures,
his work being confined to the examining and criticising of the
students' discourses. There was always a considerable interest in these
criticisms, and a good turn out to hear them. They were usually strongly
put, both in the direction of censure and of praise; but any one who
knew the Doctor's methods, and made allowance for vigour of phrase,
could depend on a true and perceptive estimate of the merits or demerits
of a sermon. Sometimes he could be savage enough. Fancy a man tomahawked
with the following, delivered with the well-known burr, flash of eye,
and protrusion of underlip: 'All I have got to say about this discourse
is' (raising his voice) 'that one half should be struck out, and'
(lowering it again) 'it doesn't matter which half.' This may have
compared with another historic criticism, attributed to Dr. Cunningham
when addressing the author of a certain Latin thesis: 'Of this discourse
I have only to say two things—the writer has murdered the Latin tongue,
and perverted the glorious Gospel of Christ.' But Candlish was one of
the kindest of men. How well I remember the little figure, with the gold
spectacles flashing beneath the big hat; the loosely fitting coat; the
wide trousers, lapping two or three inches above the shoes, which were
usually set off by a foot of loose lace; the gruff greeting, which
usually changed into a warm, hearty smile if he were accosted."

Among the Professors, Elmslie evidently appreciated Dr. Davidson and Dr.
Rainy, while conscious of receiving benefit from others. The longest
personal sketch he ever wrote was an article on Professor Davidson in
the _Expositor_ (January, 1888). In this he says, "His singular and
significant influence does not consist in what he does, but in what he
is. It is not the quantity or the contents, but the quality and kind of
the thinking. It is not even the thought, so much as the mind that
secretes it. It is not its clearness nor its profundity, not its reserve
nor its passion, not its scepticism nor its superiority of spiritual
faith; but it is the combination of all these, and the strange, subtle,
and fascinating outcome of them. The central and sovereign spring of Dr.
Davidson's unique influence in the literature, scholarship, and ministry
of the Church is his personality.... If the Church of Christ within our
borders should pass through the present trial of faith without panic,
without reactionary antagonism to truth, and without loss of spiritual
power, a very large part of the credit will belong to the quiet but
commanding influence of the Hebrew chair in that college which rises so
picturesquely on the ancient site of Mary of Guise's palace in
Edinburgh." Of Dr. Rainy he has nowhere written at length, but he was
wont to speak of his "smouldering passion," and the great ideas with
which he inspired the receptive among his students. Dr. Elmslie, though
resolute and even daring on occasion, was a warm admirer of
statesmanship, and Dr. Rainy's skilful piloting of the Free Church
through many troubles he would often praise, emphasizing strongly, at
the same time, his belief in the Principal's perfect honesty and
singleness of purpose.

There are many kind allusions in his letters to Dr. Blaikie, to whom he
was specially grateful for having introduced him to practical mission
work. In this he was always intensely interested, maintaining that on
this ground the true battle of Christ must be fought.

"Blaikie gave us a capital lecture, its only fault being that there was
too much matter, so that we could not get down even a mere abstract of
the substance."

 "EDINBURGH, 1868.

 "Things are still going on capitally. At the hall Davidson is most
 admirable, and Blaikie every day coming out even better and better. For
 instance, speaking of the fondness the early apologists displayed at
 pointing not to the lives, but to the deaths of Christians, he added,
 'And indeed, gentlemen, I cannot help saying that in the course of my
 experience as a minister I have always noticed the hush and breathless
 attention such a subject ever commands, and I have found nothing make a
 deeper impression, or act more powerfully as a means of producing good,
 than a description of a triumphant death-bed.' This is practical, true,
 and useful."

Elmslie threw himself with intense energy into the work of his classes.
At first he found it difficult to maintain the place he had achieved at
Aberdeen, for he had able competitors, but his unweariable diligence and
quick apprehension soon put him at the head.

In one of his earliest letters from Edinburgh he writes, "On Wednesday
evening I did first copy of my essay with a headache coming on, which
came on with such heartiness that I went to bed, and I could not go to
college on Thursday. (N.B. It is remarkable that when I have no mamma to
nurse me my headaches never come to such extremes as they do when I have
a fall-back. This one was bad enough, but not one of the desperate
kind.)"

There was only one cure for these headaches, and he could never bring
himself to take it. It would be tedious to go over the story of his
successes. By this time his younger brother, Leslie, had entered the
University of Edinburgh, where his triumphs were scarcely less than
those of his senior at the New College. So used did the household at
Insch become to telegrams announcing new prizes and scholarships, that
at certain periods of the year the faithful mother had telegrams of
congratulation already filled up, waiting to be despatched.

Many students of theology are more impressed by the preaching they hear
than by their Professors, and Edinburgh has always been known for pulpit
eloquence. But it was the reverse with Elmslie. No preacher seems to
have had any great power over him. He attended the Free High Church,
then ministered to by Mr. William Arnot; but though he admitted the
freshness and fertility of the preacher's mind, he was not a warm
admirer of his sermons. He often listened to Dr. Charles J. Brown, in
the Free New North, and liked him: "he seems such a fine-hearted man."
One day he went to hear a fellow-student, and missed the way to the
church. He turned aside into the Barclay Church, where Mr. (now Dr.)
Wilson was preaching. "I like Mr. Wilson very much. He is thoroughly
practical, both in his preaching and in his prayers. For instance, in
the one after the chapter he prayed for boys and girls at school, that
they might be helped with their lessons when they were difficult, and
that they might learn obedience and courtesy and be made blessings to
their teachers; also for those persons who had not had a good training
in their youth, and felt it now in showing a good example to the
children, and especially for those parents and children who were
troubled with bad tempers." After remarking on the great predominance of
young people in the congregation, he says that the sermon was delivered
with a great deal of energy and action, and that the idea of the
preacher seemed to be to bring religion down on the every-day life, that
it might become the motive power in work. "On coming out I accosted an
intelligent-looking man, and said, 'Was that Mr. Wilson?' 'Yes,' he
said, and added, with a proud smile, 'And didn't you like him?' I
answered, 'Very much indeed,' whereupon he looked exceedingly gratified
and prouder than ever. I wish there were more such pride."

On another occasion he writes, "At present I had sooner hear Dr.
Candlish than any one. He is so strong and honest, and wide in his
sympathies. His address to the students was full of passion and feeling,
and sympathy with the difficulty of believing some of our Calvinistic
doctrines, such as eternal ruin, heathens' doom, etc. He went a very
great length indeed, and ended by saying it was too hard for him, and
his heart drew him the other way, and all he could do was to fall back
on his loyalty to Christ. It was more a picture of his own heart's
struggles than the Principal's address." But his usual note is, "Heard
————, in ———— Church: middling."

In 1871 he gained the Hamilton Scholarship in a most brilliant manner,
his marks being so extraordinary that as they came in the secretary of
the Senatus thought there must be some mistake. His fellow-students, he
writes, were overwhelmingly kind in their congratulations, and he
himself seems to have rejoiced in this success more than in any other of
his life. One thing was that in his after-work he would not have the
same amount of anxiety and despair that weighed him down in his
preparations. But the chief thing was the joy it would give at home. "I
need not tell you," he writes to his mother, "how _sweet_ your letter
was to me, telling me of your joy on receipt of the telegram. When no
letter came in the morning you cannot think how disappointed I was, for,
to confess the truth, I had been thinking all Sabbath of the pleasure of
reading the home letters, and in them getting the real joy of the
scholarship. For, except the pleasure of knowing the gladness caused at
home, there is not much satisfaction otherwise in it. It is strange how
soon, after the first surprise of getting it, the delight of getting it
passed away, and I think there was more enjoyment in the working for it
than in the having it."

This incident may stand as typical of many others, and of his prominent
place among men not a few of whom were of real mark. His comradeships
among the students filled a large place in his life. Of all his friends
the most intimate and best loved was Mr. Andrew Harper, now Lecturer on
Hebrew in Ormond College, Melbourne. I regret much that exigencies of
time make it impossible to include, for the present at least, any of his
letters to this brother of his heart. They were always together, for
ever disputing, and never quarrelling, very close to one another in
heart and mind. Two years before Dr. Elmslie's death Mr. Harper visited
this country. The friends resumed their ancient intercourse, visited
Switzerland in company, and found that the changes of the years had only
drawn them nearer. Some of the best life in the New College has always
been found in the Theological Society—an association of the students who
gather to discuss controverted questions, and do not fear to go into
them thoroughly. These meetings were greatly relished by Elmslie. Among
the leading members in his time was Professor Robertson Smith, whose
amazing keenness in debate is often admiringly mentioned in his letters
home. The first time Elmslie spoke in the Society was in connection with
a discussion whether the Free Church should return to the Establishment
on the abolition of patronage. He took the negative side, and was
complimented on both sides for the ability and ingenuity of his speech.
The speculative daring in the Society at a time when outside the old
orthodoxy was hardly questioned partly amused and partly pleased him. He
speaks of entertaining Dr. Davidson very much by telling him that the
men at the Theological fathered all their heresies on Dr. Candlish's
"Fatherhood of God," by, as they expressed it, carrying out its
principles to their logical conclusions. The subjects themselves,
however, were the main thing and took abiding possession of his heart.
"I intend," he says, "to still go on studying these themes of Christ
more deeply, for they have interested me intensely. By the way, I
believe what will be of more value to me than the scholarship, and also
far more satisfactory, is the feeling I have that in preparing for it I
have made an immense addition to my knowledge in several departments,
and done it so thoroughly that it will never pass away. Two subjects
have so interested me that I mean to go on studying them—namely, the
Person of Christ, and the Early Apostolic Church."

On his work and influence at New College the letters of Professor
Drummond and Dr. Stalker will give a distinct impression, but I cannot
leave the subject without giving room to what was almost before
everything with him—his work among the poor, and especially among their
children. They show the brilliant and courted student in another light,
and it is worth mentioning that the larger proportion of his letters
home is made up of such stories. His pupils in the ragged school greatly
interested him, and his letters from Edinburgh are largely filled with
picturesque incidents of his experience among them.

Edinburgh seemed to him more terrible in its undress than Aberdeen. "I
never saw such miserable squalid faces, intermingled with roughs and
coarse-looking women." There was a humorous side to it, also, which he
does not fail to give account of. One day in the Sunday-school a little
boy behind indulged in an occasional pull at his coat-tail, or a
facetious poke at his back, to all of which demonstrations he preserved
an appearance of utter unconsciousness. When the school was over, and
they were waiting their turn to get out, he turned round and said, not
with a very ferocious countenance, "Now, which of you young rascals was
pulling at my tails?" Of course, this occasioned immense amusement, and
one bright-eyed little fellow said it could not have been so.

"Oh, well," he said, "it is strange; I wonder if the forms could have
done it." This was a very tickling idea, and immediately the little
fellow said, "Sir, I gave you a poke." He said, "That is honest, now,
and I suppose some other one took the tails." "Yes, sir, it was me,"
said another merry young monkey, with a comical look. He answered, "I
know you are not good scholars. How do I know that? Oh, you never heard
of good scholars pulling the teacher's tails!" This was a very striking
view of things to them, and they did not know whether to be impressed or
amused.

The quickness of the city children, and their readiness of sympathy,
specially struck him. But the main issue of the work was practical. "I
cannot help saying that I feel that this work will do me real good, and
will give me an actual, and not a mere theoretical interest in the work
I have before me. And that is a thing very much needed. One other thing
I may mention here. We have been having worship once a day very
regularly, and to me at least it has been very pleasant and very useful.
And now good-night to both."

"I shall be very sorry to leave my poor little bairns, for I have come
to like them exceedingly, especially of late; they have become so
numerous that I have to put some of them on the floor—nearly fifty last
night. I don't know how it is, but I have a strange sort of feeling, as
if they were having a deeper interest in what I say than I ever saw
before; perhaps it is because I think I have myself. Since
Christmas-time I have told them every night about Jesus, and only
stories that directly illustrated His love and work, and I feel a
difference in the way they listen; some of them especially sit so very
still and quiet, with such an earnest, solemn look on their faces. Some
nights ago Donald English (who made the disturbance the first night I
began), as I was beginning, took hold of my hand and said, 'Oh, tell's
about Jesus again, the night!' I often end by asking them to pray Jesus,
before they go to bed, to make them His little ones; and several times,
as they went out, some of them have put their hand in mine and
whispered, 'I'll ask Him the nicht.' Last Sabbath, when I was speaking
of Jesus having died for our sakes, they were all sitting so very
attentive, but three little boys in one corner began quarrelling about a
bonnet, and disturbing me by the noise. I stopped twice and looked at
them, but they always began again. Presently I stopped for the third
time, and was going to speak to them, when one of the boys, who had been
very attentive, rushed at them, and before I could interfere dragged one
of them on to the floor, and commenced a furious onslaught of blows and
abuse for interrupting me. I had hard work in persuading him to stop.
Another very funny thing was the looks of reproachful indignation which
some of the attentive ones had been casting at the disturbers, previous
to the final outbreak. It was terribly annoying at the time, especially
as I saw that many of them were very deeply interested. When I was
ending I spoke of how Jesus deserved to be loved, and that they should
ask to be made to love Him. One little girlie whispered, 'I will ask
Him, for, oh, I do want to love Him!' and when I said it was time to go
away they cried, 'Oh, dinna' send's away yet, tell's mair about Jesus;'
and then they came round me, and made me promise to tell them 'bonnie
stories about Jesus' next Sabbath. I have found that nothing interests
them more than what is directly about Jesus. I could not help telling
you all these little things, but I never had the same sort of _feeling_
in teaching a class before, and I would like you to _remember_ sometimes
my poor little children down in the Canongate. I wish I could take them
all into a better atmosphere, for it is sad to think of their chances of
ever becoming good in such an evil, wretched place. Harper and I have
been having many nice talks. I mean to preach often in the summer—I
_want_ to."

Here he describes an incident of open-air preaching. A friend was
speaking, and Elmslie was managing the audience.

 "EDINBURGH, _Jan. 23rd, 1872_.

 "During this the man I had heard swearing at F———— came up to S————,
 who was standing a few yards off, and spoke to him. I went up just in
 time to hear him say, 'That fellow cannot even talk grammar.' I
 replied, 'We don't come here to teach grammar.' He was rather taken
 aback, but replied, 'Well, _I_ could have said all your man said in
 half the time.' 'Then wait till he is done, and you shall have the next
 turn.' 'No, no, I don't want that; if I spoke I should oppose you.' 'I
 am ready for that; will you do it?' I said; 'We don't come here to
 argue.' 'No; you are wise to decline to argue with me.' I answered,
 'Pooh! are you so conceited as to suppose that our arguing would make
 any difference to Christianity? Why, it has been argued hundreds of
 times over by men a deal wiser than you or me, and you see Christianity
 has not gone to the wall.' By that time I saw I was going to win, and
 got very cool and at my ease, while he got excited and put out; then he
 started on a new tack by saying, 'And what good do you expect to do to
 humanity by preaching here, and disturbing us?' I said, 'Well, perhaps,
 for one thing, we will get some drunken characters like those'
 (pointing to some) 'to give up the drink, and be decent, and keep their
 wives and children from starving.' 'Well, that may be, but speaking
 like yours will never do it.' I answered, 'No, you are quite right, but
 we are young, you see, and some of us have not much voice, and some
 have not much sense; but we are just trying to find out who of us can
 do the thing, and so, you see, we are just doing as well as we can.' He
 looked rather amazed at my frankness, and said, 'Well, I'm sure I have
 not any ill-will to you, but I don't believe in religion, and there are
 such a lot of hypocrites.' I said, 'Yes, there are a great lot, but
 that's just a reason why you should believe in the goodness of
 religion.' 'How do you make that out?' 'Why, you never heard of people
 making imitation of the stones and stuff like that' (pointing to the
 gutter), 'but it is sovereigns and things like that they make
 counterfeits of.' 'Ay, but I hate hypocrites, and say, Down with them.'
 'So do I; and if you could down with all the religious hypocrites you
 would do more for Christianity than we can by preaching here.' 'Ah!' he
 said, 'if that's your opinion you should not take to street preaching;
 they are all hypocrites.' 'Oh, nonsense!' I replied. He exclaimed, very
 bitterly, 'Look at ————' (mentioning a recent scandal); 'what good has
 that man done?' I answered, 'More than ever you or I have.' 'I would
 like to hear how.' he sneered. 'Why, you know, for one thing, he did
 manage, whether his preaching was sense or nonsense, to persuade a lot
 of drunken working men to give up drink and go to the kirk, and not
 waste their money in the public-house; and now you go and ask their
 wives and bairns whether R———— has done any good in the world.' 'Ay,
 but what do you say to,' etc.? 'That it was a great sin and shame to
 him; but that is no reason for refusing to own that he has done a vast
 deal of good before he did that piece of ill; and besides, I doubt if
 you or I are so good as to throw stones at him, etc., etc. Now I've
 listened to your criticisms on us, and pretty hard some of them were,
 so you will come up with me now, and hear what we've got to say.' He
 said, 'Well, I must say I like your way of taking things; I never heard
 them put in the way you have done; but I have not time now to come up;
 I have to take tea in half an hour with a mate.' I said, 'Still, you'll
 promise to come back next Sunday and hear us, and I may tell you, in
 secret, we shall have better speakers next time, and if you like, after
 the meeting is over, I'll have a talk with you. I never did meet one of
 your side before, but I've read some of your books. We won't call it a
 discussion, for I've not had any experience at arguing, and I suppose
 you are an old hand.' He gave a queer laugh, and said, 'Any way I never
 came across anybody on your side with half your sharpness and common
 sense; and besides, I must say _you_ are honest about it.' And then we
 shook hands, and he promised to come along next Sunday.... By the way,
 in my talk with the Deist my 'heretical' reading came in useful to me;
 for if I had not come through all that, I could not have heard his
 attacks on religion and kept my coolness, or taken them up the way I
 did; so it is _some good_; it will give me confidence in myself for the
 future—_another_ good thing."

Pleasant interludes in his New College life were a session spent at
Aberdeen University, as assistant to the Professor of Natural
Philosophy, Mr. David Thomson, and two sessions spent at Berlin in the
study of theology. At Aberdeen he had in his class Mr. Chrystal, now the
celebrated Professor of Mathematics in the University of Edinburgh,
whose abilities he repeatedly refers to in his letters. His work was
enjoyable, and his relations with Professor Thomson of the most cordial
kind. He was tempted in various ways to alter his life purpose, was
offered a professorship of Natural Philosophy with a large salary in the
Colonies, and was specially tempted to enter the medical profession. His
closest friend at the University, Mr. James Shepherd, now a medical
missionary of the United Presbyterian Church in India, was pursuing his
professional studies, and with him he frequently visited hospital
patients, finding a double interest in the work. Thus he writes:—

 "ABERDEEN, _March 14th, 1870_.

 "As to Medicine, I have read up most of the text-books prescribed here,
 so that I am really very well up on the subject, and Jim Shepherd says
 I would make a capital doctor. I went along with him to the
 'Dissecting-room,' 'Anatomical Museum,' 'Infirmary,' and 'Incurable
 Hospital,' and he did his best to sicken me (as you remember befell me
 three years ago), but I was all right, so he says I am now 'hardened'!
 It was very interesting seeing all the poor ill folk, and it was a real
 pleasure to speak to them, and joke with them, and leave them cheery."

In Germany it is evident even from his meagre notebooks that he
thoroughly enjoyed life, and entered into it with his usual zest and
brightness. But everything was subordinated to study. He made himself
master of the language, and did his best to profit from the lectures he
attended.

His good parents were naturally alarmed at the effects which German
practice and thought (more dreaded then, perhaps, than now) might have
upon their son. He warns them against uncharitableness. "There is
nothing so difficult," he says, "as to convey a true and fair picture of
the religious state of a people. Just as one's opinion of a person's
character is often wholly changed on coming in contact with him, so
actual life in a country alters one's estimate of it, and differences of
circumstances and training condition the development of thought." He
comes to the conclusion that it is not a breach of charity to say that
the Germans are in a lower state religiously than Scotland, but asserts
that at the same time there are many good and spiritual men among them,
and that Germany is not so much more irreligious than, for example,
London. He quotes Dorner as saying of missionary work, "You send more
money, but we send more men." At that time he was beginning to
understand Dorner's lectures, and says they are very good and very
useful, especially for Germany. "For instance, he has been defending the
doctrine of the Trinity, the personality of the Holy Ghost, the Divinity
of Christ, and eternal punishment. He is very practical and thorough."

His attachment to Dorner grew as is witnessed by the following letter:—

 "Dorner is a thoroughly good and very able man, and I have found your
 remark true, for I have already got a great deal of good from his
 lectures on Romans. He is at present lecturing on the 4th chapter, and
 since I began to understand him I have enjoyed his lectures very much;
 formerly the first few chapters of Romans seemed to me almost
 unintelligible, but I now see not only the meaning of the separate
 verses, but the grand line of thought and argument running through the
 whole, and I have a far clearer conception of many of the grandest
 Gospel doctrines than I had before, and especially of the nature of
 Christ's sacrifice for sin, and the necessity lying on God to punish
 sin. I wish I could send you some extracts from the lectures to show
 you how very good they are, but I can only give you one illustration.
 On iii. 28—which Luther translates, 'We conclude, then, that a man is
 justified by faith _alone_, without the deeds of the law'—he remarked
 that the Romanists misrepresent the meaning of this, and accuse Luther
 of Antinomianism, but (he added) Luther's position is simply this: 'The
 fruit does _not_ make the tree, but a good tree cannot be without
 fruit.' When he was lecturing on iii. 25, where the question comes up
 whether Christ was merely the Altar for the propitiatory sacrifice or
 Himself the Sacrifice, he quoted Dr. Chalmers and another Scotch
 theologian with _extreme_ approval, viz., Morison—do you know who he
 is? (Dorner took strongly the view that Christ was Himself the
 Sacrifice.) It is a great pleasure to hear him reading the verses of
 the passage he is to examine, for he does it with such earnestness and
 impressiveness that they seem to have double the meaning that they have
 ordinarily; he has a great deal of eloquence in him, and I like him
 very much."

 "I always read Meyer's Commentary on Romans before going to the class,
 so that I am studying Romans very thoroughly, and as the other
 Professor I attend is lecturing on Paul's Teaching, and has been
 lecturing on his Life, I shall know a good deal more of Paul before I
 come back."

 "On Wednesday, the 9th, I bought two Commentaries—De Wette on Psalms,
 and Meyer on Romans; they were rolled up in a sheet of paper taken out
 of an old book, containing some sixteen pages. I happened to glance at
 it in unfolding it, and my attention was caught by these words, in
 German, of which the following is a translation: 'Look upon your
 children as just so many flowers, which have been lent to you out of
 God's garden; the flowers may wither or die, yet thank God that He has
 lent them to you for one summer.' I thought at once that I had surely
 known the style long ago, and on glancing down the pages I was not at
 all surprised to find where the letter broke off—'S. R.— Aberdeen,
 March 7th, 1637.' Was it not strange to come in that odd way on a
 German translation of Samuel Rutherford's Letters? (See if you can find
 the passage.) I also notice, in the bookseller's catalogue, that
 Bunyan's works are all translated, also Spurgeon's, 'Schonberg-Cotta
 Family,' Mrs. Henry Wood's novels, etc."

In the autumn of 1873 Mr. Elmslie came to London. Four years previously
Dr. Dykes had assumed the pastorate of the church at Regent Square. His
health made it necessary for him to receive, from the commencement,
assistance in his work. He was always anxious to secure the services of
young men who might be trained under him for high achievements in later
years. He heard of Mr. Elmslie's brilliant promise and invited him to
fill the position, then vacant, of assistant to himself. The invitation
was accepted, and Mr. Elmslie settled in London.

At Regent Square he flung himself into the work of the congregation with
eager sympathy. He rapidly became popular and was made welcome in every
home. In Dr. Dykes he found a wise and kind helper, to whom he became
warmly attached. He appreciated his methods of working and his power as
a preacher; but most of all he was struck by that grace of devotional
fervour which gave Dr. Dykes' prayers so constraining a power to draw
the souls of his people into communion with God. Nothing could have been
brighter and happier than the life of the young preacher in his new
surroundings, and his contagious enthusiasm and energy reacted on all
who knew him. Here in London, at the busy centre of so much of the
world's activity, his eager, questioning spirit found material for its
restless enquiries; whilst that knowledge of human nature and its needs,
which lay at the back of his most powerful spiritual work in later
years, was slowly moulded by the opportunities of this time.

He describes in a letter to his mother the opening of his pulpit work at
Regent Square. His chief fear was for his voice: "It looked such a
distance," he writes, "to the faces in the end gallery." He got a friend
to sit at the far end of the church, just over the clock, with a
handkerchief which he was to wave if the speaker were inaudible. The
subject of his sermon was, "The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from
all sin."

It is curious that the only despondent note that sounds through his
correspondence at this time is the lamentation that he is unfitted for
the pulpit. Repeatedly he expresses the fear that he will never make a
preacher. He feels stiff and ill at ease. Official trappings of any kind
he always disliked; and the pulpit robes, which he afterwards, as far as
possible, discarded, he even then, as he told Dr. Dykes, detested. "I
find it," he writes, "most hopeless to get anything I much care to say,
and even then it is a perplexity generally to see what really is the
reason. I am at the very point of giving over preaching altogether."
Again, "I am more sure than ever that I am not a preacher," "Romps with
Mr. Turnbull's children's singing-class are, on the whole, the most
satisfactory occupation I know of."

These doubts and discouragements are not surprising. From the very first
Dr. Elmslie conceived of the Christian Faith in a deep, comprehensive
way, and its ideals of purity and holiness touched and warmed his nature
at many points. Just because the outline was so large the filling-in
took years to accomplish. It was only by continuous and patient
self-analysis, by long observation and study of his fellow-men, that he
was able to meet the needs of humanity, at all points, with a message
which no one interpreted more largely. His sermons at Regent Square are
sketches and outlines which experience alone could embody and complete.
I have been much struck, in preparing a selection of his sermons for the
press, with the growth of their composition. The sermon, for example,
which stands first in this volume is, I think, the earliest he ever
wrote. But the sermon, as it was last preached and is now printed, is
not the sermon as he wrote it. The latter, though in outline identical,
has been emptied of its original contents and re-filled out of the
abundance of a heart which had grown in deeper knowledge of human needs
and the approaches of Divine compassion.

His greatest satisfaction he found in his intercourse with the young men
in the congregation.

"At the Young Men's Society," he writes, "I have been chairman for some
time, and have to sum up: it costs me no preparation, and yet how they
listen, and how I feel I can sway them as I please! I enjoy _that_ kind
of speaking."

It was at the close of these weekly discussions that Mr. Elmslie and I
used often to meet. Our homeward paths were not identical, but we used
to imagine that we were alternately escorting one another home as we
spent a measurable portion of many a night upon the pavement, heedless
of the thinning traffic, in keen debate over some of those deep
insoluble problems which, I am glad to think, trouble his eager heart no
longer. "I have long believed," he writes, "_thinking_ to be more
unhealthy than fever, cholera, bad drains, etc. I would give a good deal
to be only an animal now and then."

Almost the first hopeful word about his preaching in Regent Square
occurs in the following passage; it is interesting otherwise:—

 "On Monday evening I was at Mr. Bell's. He pressed me to stay; thought
 I should not be a Professor; meant for a preacher; would have great
 power; something quite peculiar about my sermons; made Christ and
 everything so real, and near, and helpful; and my prayers always did
 him good, etc., etc.

 "Curious, _that_ in my sermons tells with everybody, for it comes from
 my line of reading and thinking at college, especially from the _German
 books on Christ, such as Strauss_; they made me trust Him as a Person
 rather than a doctrine; besides, I know I have come to regard Him all
 round differently in consequence. I have had to pay dearly for the
 reading, and have often wished I had not, so it is a little comfort to
 find that my coming through it makes me more helpful now."

The following is worth quoting as an instance of his ready resource:—

 "48, REGENT SQUARE, _Tuesday_.

 "MY DEAR FOLKS,—On Saturday morning a shabby man called, said he was a
 cousin of Dykes, needing money too, etc., just come from
 America—awkward Dykes on Continent. I saw he was an impostor, so
 resolved to get rid of him. I answered, 'It _is_ awkward.' Then he
 said, 'What is to become of me? I look to you, sir.' 'Nothing will come
 of that, I fear.' 'But are you not Dr. Dykes's assistant?' 'Yes, I
 assist _him_, but not his relatives.' 'Well, but, sir, what would you
 advise me to do?' 'To say "Good morning," and not lose more of your
 time here.' As he got up he rubbed his stomach and said, 'I have had no
 breakfast to-day.' 'Very hard that mine is over, and my landlady does
 not like to have to make a second; do you often go without food?' 'Many
 and many a time, sir.' 'Ah, the doctor says it is good for the health!
 I wish I looked as well-fed as you do, going without breakfast. It must
 be economical. Good morning.' And we parted with mutual grins."

Among the congregation at Regent Square Mr. Elmslie formed many
friendships. He conceived a warm regard for Professor Burdon-Sanderson
(now of Oxford) and his wife; and other names might be mentioned of
those who became lifelong friends. Among men who have since become well
known, he saw something of Professor G. J. Romanes, who was then an
occasional visitor at Regent Square. About this time he describes a
meeting with Macdonell of the _Times_, whom he speaks of as "full of
light." On the same occasion he met Dr. Marcus Dods for, I think, the
first time. "_Dods, I like very much_," is his brief comment.

       *       *       *       *       *

Two years after his first arrival in London Mr. Elmslie settled in
Willesden as minister of the Presbyterian Congregation there. When he
left Scotland in 1873 he had formed no resolve to sever his
ecclesiastical connection with that country. Circumstances and
inclination, however, kept him in the south. He was much impressed with
the type of congregation which represented English Presbyterianism at
Regent Square. For many members of the session he had a warm respect and
friendly admiration. He was interested in the experimental position of a
Church, such as the Presbyterian one in England, comparatively young and
small. The appeal that came to him from Willesden was direct and urgent.
It is not to be wondered at that he yielded, at first rather
reluctantly, to its pleading. The next eight years of his life were
spent in active ministry in this little metropolitan suburb.

When Mr. Elmslie came to Willesden the place was much less populous than
it has since become. The streets were only partially lighted. The road
from the Junction Station to the little village of Harlesden, which is
now a continuous row of shops and houses, passed then between ragged
hedges, under a canopy of elms. The Presbyterian Church was not built,
but services were held in a hall, which was the first building the
Scotch residents put up. Mr. Elmslie took rooms near the site of the
prospective church, but shortly after moved to the little house in Manor
Villas which belonged to the chapel-keeper and his wife—Mr. and Mrs.
Oxlade—a worthy couple, who returned the respect with which he regarded
them by a loving admiration for the best man, as they phrased it, whom
they ever knew.

On November 23rd, 1875, Mr. Elmslie was duly ordained. His dear mother
was present at the service, and many friends. I had been with him during
the earlier part of the day. Among other subjects of conversation we had
been anticipating an episcopal discussion on the ethics of betting. He
recognized the difficulty of the subject, and as he got more hopelessly
perplexed in his effort to justify an absolute prohibition of the
practice on grounds which could be intellectually defended, he turned, I
remember, to his mother with a look of comical helplessness: "Here am I
going to be ordained, and I don't even know why it's wrong to bet."

The congregation under his watchful care grew and prospered. A more
united body of people never kept together in corporate life, and this
happy result was due in chief measure to the unwearied tact and resource
of the young minister.

In the spring of the following year the new church was completed and
opened for public worship. Mr. Elmslie seemed to be able to draw into it
men of all shades of religious opinion, and some even whose family
traditions were at variance with evangelical orthodoxy. One of
the distinguished sons of a famous Unitarian household was a
fellow-worshipper with Ned Wright the evangelist. Throughout the whole
of the little community which he ruled, for young and old alike, there
was life, energy, and kindly charity. He felt that the path of Christian
living was not to be trodden without ardent effort; and his example was
at once a stimulus to the strong and an encouragement to the weak. "Your
prayers," said a lady to him at this time, "always make me feel that it
is a terribly difficult thing to be a Christian—but you can't think what
a lot of good they do me."

The year after (1877) Mr. Elmslie commenced mission work. The London and
North Western Railway Company had just built an Institute for their
employés who are housed in large numbers in what is known as the Railway
Village, at Willesden Junction. Above the recreation rooms in the new
building was a large hall, which was placed at the disposal of Mr.
Elmslie, by the directors, for Sunday services. He willingly took
advantage of this kindness to gain a further hold on men whose hearts,
in many cases, he had already reached. An engine-driver, who had been
long ill, remarked to a friend about him: "He comes here, has a long
chat, and tells me about many things; but never lets me feel he knows
more than I do." The services then commenced are still continued under
the oversight of Mr. Elmslie's successor.

Four years later another mission was started from Willesden which has
since grown into an independent charge. The district of College Park
came into being beneath Mr. Elmslie's eyes, and its spiritual needs
attracted his attention. He applied to the London School Board for use
of a schoolroom in which to hold Sunday services. The application having
failed he bought, in the following year, along with his office-bearers,
the site for a hall and church. The hall was at once built, and by the
kindness of Mr. Andrew Wark, and other friends to whom Mr. Elmslie made
a personal appeal, the money to meet the cost was subscribed. The church
has been more recently completed.

One noticeable feature in his work at Willesden was his power to attract
the young. I remember his saying on one occasion, half jestingly, that
he liked to make children happy, as he knew how miserable they would be
when they grew up. He meant that the strain of living was bound to tell,
and that children should have all the happiness which can be enjoyed in
the elasticity of youth. I do not know which were more attractive to the
young people of Willesden—his children's sermons, or the sweets which he
used to produce from mysterious stores when they came to visit him. Both
were excellent and both did good.

       *       *       *       *       *

The following contains an interesting account of his pastoral work, and
is worth quoting at length:—

 "Though it is late, and the text for Sunday (Communion) has not been
 fixed yet, I am going to tell you a very sad story, that has made me
 think of many things. Over a year ago Mrs. X————, on my recommendation,
 engaged as governess a Miss Y————, a great friend of Mrs. Z————, who
 asked that she might be very kindly treated, because she had had a deal
 to bear, and was all but disgusted with religion. She was a bright
 young girl, very pretty and graceful, clever in talk and repartee.
 Often I wished to find a way of showing her some kindness, but
 naturally that was hardly possible. However, I knew that both Mr. and
 Mrs. G———— were good to her. She was to have left last Saturday, but
 took suddenly unwell—had to go to bed. On the same day I called in at
 Mrs. G————'s on my way to say good-bye to Miss Y————; learning of her
 attack, I did not go on.... Mrs. G———— had given her some
 eau-de-Cologne, and she had liked it much, so I took with me my little
 spray bottle. Her mother was with her; she looked wretchedly ill in
 face, eyes, and hands, but spoke in a very firm voice, and that made me
 think there was certainly no immediate danger.

 "I at once told her about the spray bottle, and making her shut her
 eyes, applied it on her temples. She said it was delicious, and took it
 in her hands.

 "I cannot try to describe her talk, for it was broken by moments of
 wandering, when she said very odd things, and in the midst she grew
 sick, and I had to go outside; she was too ill then to say much. I
 deemed it kind not to remain, but had a short, simple prayer. She said,
 very earnestly, 'Thank you so much for that!' I told her I would come
 again, and she must not fear to say to me all she wished. She answered,
 'Yes, come again.' Thursday was a very busy day, for I had many
 engagements in London. Though I tried hard, I could not get home early,
 but it would have made no difference. She had been delirious night and
 day, with occasional intervals, and died at a quarter to three in the
 afternoon. She was only twenty-three.

 "... J———— G———— went up and held her hands. She struggled for a moment
 or two, and then let her head down, and while he spoke to her, quieting
 her, she said she was going to be good and sleep now. Her wild eyes
 shut at last, and she was in a sleep, such as she had not had since
 Saturday.

  "The mother and Mrs. G———— stole out, leaving only a sister, thinking
 it was recovery; but it was death. In ten minutes, with a little sigh,
 she ceased to breathe. Mr. G———— was her great friend, and she died in
 his arms. You can hardly think how sad her death has made me. So many
 forlorn things are about it that I have no time to write. Those lonely
 nights of agony and death-like sickness, that she had said nothing
 about at the time, believing herself dying, a governess among
 strangers, etc.

 "Two things I am glad of—that Mrs. G———— was with her one night, and
 that I thought of the spray bottle. She said to me, '_You_ had Mrs.
 G———— to nurse _you_; is not she an _angel_?' and I said, 'Yes, as much
 as if she had wings,' and I meant it.

 "Then her sisters told me that all that last night and day, till close
 on the end, my little bottle was never out of her hand; the coolness of
 the air and the softness of the spray relieved her sickness so much.
 Once, when in a spasm she jerked the bottle on the floor, she cried,
 for fear it was broken. The mother has sent a message asking if she may
 keep it, since it was the last thing in her child's hand, and the last
 that gave her any pleasure. It seems, too, that she spoke more than
 once of my prayer for her. Before the mother left last night to go
 home, she said to Mrs. G————, 'I shall always love you and your husband
 for what you have done for my child. Your kindness to her and the
 preaching she heard in your church did her so much good. She came to
 you with her life embittered, and with her religious beliefs nearly
 gone. Only a month ago she told me they had all come back again, and
 she understood Christ better, and believed in Him more, because of the
 way Mr. Elmslie preached of him, and we all have seen that this last
 year at Willesden has been the happiest in all her life. If she had
 been taken a year ago our recollections would have been very, very sad;
 now it is different,' and then the poor lady burst out crying. To-day I
 tried hard to get some white roses to lay on her ere the body is taken
 home, but I could only get some smaller white flowers, and maiden-hair
 ferns. Mrs. G———— had also got a basket of flowers, and I think the
 sight of them will comfort the old folks at home a little, as also a
 letter I have sent the poor mammy, saying some kind things about her
 lassie.

 "Many other touching things the poor girl said and did come to my mind,
 and I could tell you more, but there is not time. I called it a sad
 story, but in some ways it is not sad. Indeed, I almost think that it
 is death alone that makes life at all sacred.

 "All these things have made me think that Christ's account of the
 judgment must be quite real. I mean the 'Inasmuch as ye did it to one
 of these,' etc., for that is just how we would feel, that is just how
 the poor mother of the dead girl felt. There is nothing to thank God
 for more than to have been able to do a kindness to a dying soul. To
 think that a poor troubled soul has gone out of the pain and tiredness
 of life straight into the arms of God from yours, with the touch of
 pitying hands fresh on it; to feel God sees that, and knows those hands
 were yours, seems to me to bring you and God very near to each other.
 If it be true that He loves 'the souls that He hath made,' surely He
 must love you for loving them. I do not think it would matter very much
 about other things, if you had loved a good deal. If a little child
 said, as you were being turned away, 'He made me so happy!' and
 another, 'He fed and clothed me;' and another, 'He held me so gently in
 the agony of death,' even if he were a very sinful man, what could God
 do to him who had been good to the 'little ones'? The Apostle John had
 thought of it, and said, 'He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God,'
 and Paul must have been in the same mind when he wrote 1 Cor. xiii."

They were very bright and happy, those Willesden days with their
expanding usefulness; and before Mr. Elmslie left the district his life
had been crowned by the commencement of that heart-union with another
which seemed to more than double the separate influence of each for
good. He worked unremittingly, and even his holidays were not given to
idleness or rest. When he came to London he knew little of French, and
one of his first holidays was spent in Paris, where he worked at the
language with conscientious thoroughness, and obtained an adequate
mastery over its difficulties. He returned to Paris on another occasion
for further study, and one late summer he spent in Rome studying Italian.

His second visit to Paris was very helpful to him in more ways than one,
especially in the influence exercised upon him by Bersier.

"I find that the £30 I spent on going to Paris is going to pay me far
more than I thought of, not merely in French, though I rejoice in that
daily, but in preaching. Perhaps you remember me saying that I had got
several hints from the style of Bersier, who spoke, not read—mainly in
letting out, adopting a free, direct style, variation, etc. Since coming
back I have had constantly to preach very badly prepared; but I knew
that (partly in consequence) I was much more free, bold, and roused. On
Sunday I was very ill-prepared, nothing written, even order of thoughts
not fixed; and I did not stick, even, to the line intended; but feeling
this, I let out tremendously in vehemence and language. I saw how it
took, and several spoke. Yesterday two old folks were on the sermon, and
then they said, 'But ever since you came back from Paris you have been
so much improved,' etc., etc. And indeed, I have heard more of my
sermons during the last few weeks than ever before. So I owe a debt to
M. Bersier. Another item, however, is, I fancy, that Paris made some
things a little more real to me than they were before."

During all these years Mr. Elmslie's reading was wide and various. At
the same time it was not difficult to see that the subject that
interested him most was the study of man, and the books that attracted
him were those that threw light upon the actions and passions of men.
When he returned from Paris for the first time, for example, the author
of whom he was most full was Rousseau—not Rousseau the philosopher and
speculative thinker—but the Rousseau of the "Confessions"—with their
strange candour and unblushing avowals. He read little of the works of
the great imaginative masters of English prose or verse. If he did read
a volume of Tennyson or Ruskin, for example, his criticisms were always
brilliant and penetrating; but he never nourished his spirit upon their
loftier utterances, nor was his style moulded by the melody of theirs.
One exception I should perhaps make. His study of George Eliot was
frequent and appreciative. One of his students has told us how, shortly
before his own death, he referred to the scene in which Mr. Tulliver's
is described to point a characteristic lesson in theology and charity.
The passage was a favourite one, from the day when a friend first gave
him the "Mill on the Floss" to read. I remember another remark of his
about George Eliot which is worth quoting, but to appreciate its point I
must introduce a word of explanation. I had, just at that time, drawn up
a memorial on a subject in which we were both interested. Avoiding the
conventional "wharfoes" which "Uncle Remus" has satirized in such
documents, I had worded the appeal with perhaps exaggerated directness.
Each sentence contained a distinct proposition, and the whole was
expressed with something of that oracular emphasis with which, in those
days, Victor Hugo used, from time to time, to address the citizens of
Paris. After talking of this composition, and the subject of which it
formed part, the conversation turned on George Eliot. I referred to
"Romola"—especially to the closing scenes in the life of Savonarola,
which, as it has always seemed to me, touch the highest point that has
been reached in analysis of the drama of spiritual conflict. As I
recalled the passage in which the disciplined imagination of the writer
shows us the great Florentine stripped, one after another, of all those
dazzling evidences of divine favour with which he used to feed his soul
in pride, till there is nothing left to tell him of the unforsaking love
of God save the lowly witness of his own bowed and penitent heart, the
eyes of my companion grew bright with a large approval. After a pause he
said, "If we find George Eliot is not in heaven when we get there, I
think you and I will have to draw up a memorial—in the style of Victor
Hugo."

When one thinks of the versatility of Dr. Elmslie's mind, and of the
keenness of his intelligence, one feels that he might have won laurels
in any domain of intellectual effort. And yet theology was the one
subject on which his heart was set. He conceived of it grandly and
nobly. He believed in it in that deep, derivative sense in which it is
referred to by Carlyle in the opening to his story of the Puritan
revolt, as a knowledge of God, the Maker, and of His laws. And for him
Christ was the Divine Lawgiver—sole Lord of his conscience as well as
Saviour of his spirit. For me at least, the facts of Christianity seemed
always to grow larger and more solemn as he pressed their spiritual
significance; its doctrines seemed to grow more real as he pierced
beneath the forms in which they are encased to explore their ethical
contents. God and man, and the relations between them, were the
absorbing subjects of his study. It was his constant brooding over human
nature as seen in the light of Divine pity, which gave its largeness to
his measurement alike of the deadly hatefulness of sin and of the
atoning charity of Christ. Sin was for him a thing far more terrible
than any punishment which could possibly await it; and his sense of its
dread, though still expiable, terror gave to him his Christlike
eagerness to watch for the faintest signs of contrition and amendment.
The following passage in a letter written to his mother some years
earlier contains, it seems to me, the heart and soul of all his
preaching.

"Am very much touched to hear about the poor Doctor. No matter what he
may have done, with his disordered brain and troubled home life, I had
rather go into the next world like him than like most of those who have
condemned, though there were even nothing more than that near the end he
tried a little to do right, and had a pitiful wish in his heart to be at
rest, and go back to his old mother, and live a Christian life. And if
it is really true that there is a heavenly Father who pities sinful men,
and a Christ who died to save them, then I think my mammy, in helping
him only but a little to better thoughts and hopes, did a greater thing
than most deeds men call great. Any way, she has the satisfaction of
having done kindly by an unfortunate man, and of knowing that it is all
well with him—unless, indeed, Christ was altogether mistaken. It is not
the first time, either, that she has done that sort of thing."

       *       *       *       *       *

In 1880 he was appointed tutor of Hebrew in the Presbyterian College,
London, and carried on the work along with that of his congregation in
Willesden. He made himself very popular with the students, and when a
permanent appointment came to be made in 1883, he was unanimously
elected Professor of Hebrew. He writes: "It seems that the speeches of
Walton, Fraser, and Watson were just perfect, so earnest and generous,
and loving and hopeful. That put the Synod into a melting and happy
mood. All yesterday I felt very grave, and almost afraid. I see that a
very great thing, of good or evil, has happened in my life. God grant
that it may be for good."

Almost immediately after his appointment to the Professorship, he
married Kate, daughter of Mr. Alexander Ross, formerly Rector of the
Grammar School, Campbeltown. The home which he made first at Upper
Roundwood, Willesden, then at 31, Blomfield Road, Maida Vale, will ever
have the brightest associations for his friends. He had all the
qualities that fit a man to bless and grace married life. When his son
and only child was born it seemed as if he were drinking the richest
happiness of life in its fulness. I shrink from quoting words so sacred
and tender as these which I take from a letter to his wife, but I cannot
otherwise convey the full truth:—

"It makes me so glad, dear, every time I think of it, to know that we
chose each other for no base worldly motives, but out of pure love and
esteem for what (with all faults and defects) was good, and tender, and
true, in one another. It was not for the mean things that the world and
fashion make much of and worship that we two came together, meaning to
go hand in hand through life with mutual help and kindness. We knew
quite well the world's ways, and we could feel the pressure of its lower
estimates and aims. But this act at least was done not with shallow
hearts and for mean ends, but in honest friendship out of true
affection, and with a very earnest wish to do only what was good and
right, and to help each other to live a happy and a noble life." Such a
life it was, though its years were few; and when the news of his death
came, amid all the absorbing and confounding regrets which filled many
minds, the thought was ever uppermost of the wife and child left
desolate in the home that had been so full of sunshine.

Dr. Elmslie gave himself unsparingly to the work of his chair. He
declined preaching engagements, and made zealous preparation for his
classes. Apart from his own high standard of duty, he greatly respected
the opinion of students. He thought Professors could have no fairer
judges. The diligent study of the Old Testament, with the aid of the
best German commentaries, was of course the main part of his preparatory
work. But he did more with dictionaries than with commentaries, and made
up his mind for himself. He always kept pace with the progress of
research, and followed with deep attention the absorbing discussions of
recent years on the structure of the Old Testament. As he was himself so
chary in expressing publicly the conclusions he had arrived at on these
subjects, it would not be right for me to say much. Of this, at least,
he was sure, that the worth and message of the Old Testament were
unimpaired by criticism, and would be so whatever the ultimate
conclusion might be. He was also exceedingly sceptical as to the
finality of the critical verdicts generally accepted at present: he
believed that the analysis would be carried much farther. But although
he diligently studied these things, and was an accurate and exact
grammarian, he had his own theory of the duties of a Professor, which
cannot be better described than in his own words, in an anonymous
article contributed to the _British Weekly_ for September 16th, 1887.
There he says—

"Theological colleges are not in the first instance shrines of culture
or high places of abstract erudition, but factories of preachers and
pastors. They are not so much fountains of pure scholarship, but are
rather to be classed with schools of medicine and institutes of
technical education. Their function is not to produce great theologians,
but to train efficient ministers—though they will hardly do that without
possessing all that is essential to do the other. The ideal Professor is
not your dungeon of learning, in whose depths he and his pupils are
buried away from all practical life and usefulness. Information is good,
in large measure indispensable, but the rarer gift of the heaven-born
teacher is infinitely more. The old institution of the "lecture"—
pretentious, laborious, in every sense exhaustive—must vanish. What was
spun out into an hour of dry-as-dust detail must be struck off in ten
minutes of bright, sharp, suggestive sketching. It is the difference
between the heavy leading article of our newspapers and the crisp
incisiveness of the French press. There must be much more teaching from
text-books, and direct instruction from the Bible and human life.
Dogmatic must deal less with theories and mouldy controversies, and more
with the actual forces of sin and salvation. Exegetic cannot be allowed
to fool away a whole session in a wearisome analysis of a few chapters
of an epistle or a prophecy, fumbling and mumbling over verbal
trivialities, blind to the Divine grandeurs that are enshrined within,
while the students are left without even a bird's-eye view of the
contents of the Bible as a whole, and destitute of any adequate
conception of its vital majesty and meaning. Above all, a new scope and
purpose must be given to the teaching of Practical Theology. Instead of
a few lectures on the doctrine of the Church, and the ideal construction
of a sermon, and the theoretical discharge of pastoral duty, this ought
to constitute the crowning and chief study in the curriculum. And it
should be in the form, not of teaching, but of actual training.
Montaigne complained of his physicians that they "knew much of Galen,
and little about me." They manage better in medical education now. Fancy
the souls of tempted and sick men, women, and children handed over to
the unpractised mercies of our book-taught young ministers. Colleges
cannot quite mend this difficulty; but they might do much. And still
more would be done if each student could be secured a year of travel
abroad, and after that be required to serve an apprenticeship as curate
or evangelist in connection with our larger congregations."

Through the kindness of my friend Mr. W. D. Wright, B.A., a student in
the English Presbyterian College, I have received some very interesting
reminiscences from his students. Space does not permit me to give them
fully, but they show that Elmslie acted up to his own conception of a
Professor's duties. One gentleman says—

 "In recalling my impressions of Professor Elmslie, nothing strikes me
 so forcibly as his unfailing gentleness towards his students. It was
 very seldom indeed that any student was inattentive or troublesome in
 class, but when anything of the kind did occur Elmslie never spoke a
 word to the offender, and but for the pained flush on his face, one
 would have thought he had not noticed the occurrence. Again, when a
 student had not prepared his Hebrew lesson, and was unable to read it,
 Elmslie always appeared more ashamed than the student himself, but
 never said a word in blame or warning. Only he was afterwards chary of
 asking the same student to read.

 "Elmslie was always ready to answer questions or meet any difficulties
 raised by the students, and he was often more eloquent on these
 occasions than when engaged in the ordinary routine of the class. He
 had rather a dislike for the schoolmaster's work that he was compelled
 to do with junior students, and hurried the class on until they were
 able to read passages in Hebrew. He did not aim so much at turning out
 Hebrew scholars as at making preachers, with a deep interest in Hebrew
 literature, and imbued with its spirit. If he could only secure our
 interest in a Hebrew author, and enlist our sympathies, he was willing
 to excuse any ignorance of ours in regard to grammar or syntax."

Another says—

 "Perhaps my most vivid remembrances of Dr. Elmslie collect round his
 criticisms upon his students' trial discourses. Always kind, invariably
 conciliatory, in his criticism, yet he pointed out very plainly the
 defects, and indicated what was lacking with unfailing clearness of
 judgment. Even in the midst of his rebukes he would frequently take the
 bitterness away by some half-playful remark or reference to his own
 experiences.... But better than any criticisms were his own concluding
 remarks on the text. Compressed, as they had to be, into a very few
 minutes, the whole intensity of his nature was seen in them. We often
 left the lecture-hall with our brains all astir and our hearts glowing
 with the inspiration of his words.

 "I rather think some of his first-year students generally thought him
 occasionally heretical in his remarks at the close of his criticism.
 The one thing he could not bear was dulness, a uniformity of mediocre
 unreproachableness about a sermon. So he loved to give with startling
 effect a single side of a truth, and thus to send us away with our
 minds in a state of rather anxious activity. Once he half-humorously
 gave us the advice to begin our sermons with a truth stated in an
 unusual, half-heretical way, if one liked; for there is nothing makes
 people listen so attentively as a suspicion of heresy. But these early
 doubts of our Professor's soundness soon vanished, and we found him, as
 one has said, 'not so much _broad_, as _big_.'"

 "He read to us a letter from a young man in much doubt as to whether he
 should enter the Wesleyan pulpit or no. His correspondent had read with
 relish Dr. Elmslie's article on Genesis. Could the Professor tell him
 of any books in which points of Christian faith were dealt with in an
 intelligent and convincing way? He, the correspondent, knew of no such
 books. Dr. Elmslie asked our opinion. I ventured to suggest that
 everybody had to hammer out these points of faith for himself. The
 Doctor was rather pleased with this remark, and at once said, 'Oh, yes!
 indeed he has, and to live them out too.'"

In his old students who had become ministers he took an earnest
interest, and their letters show sufficiently how they prized him. "I
feel," says one, "that you have inspired me with a something quite apart
from the detailed work of the class—with spirit and enthusiasm for
preaching."

       *       *       *       *       *

He himself was soon drawn back to the pulpit, and as he preached in the
various Nonconformist churches of the Metropolis it was almost
immediately felt that a new force of the first rank had appeared. He
preached frequently in Brixton Independent Church, then under the
brilliant and devout ministry of James Baldwin Brown. Mr. Brown's health
was very infirm when Dr. Elmslie began to preach there, and on his death
the congregation looked to the Professor as his natural successor.
Ultimately a cordial invitation was given. The inducements offered were
great, and the position was among the most influential London
Nonconformity can bestow. That a change of ecclesiastical relations
would have been necessitated by his acceptance would have been no
difficulty to Dr. Elmslie. But he feared to face the physical strain
involved, and preferred to continue his work as Professor.

The disappointment felt at his declinature of the invitation to Brixton
Independent Church was very deep, although the members construed his
refusal in the right way, and understood that no difference of opinion
on ecclesiastical polity and no doubt of their fidelity had anything to
do with it. Some of the letters written to him were very touching. Among
these I may quote the following:—

"DEAR SIR,—We are, with the exception of my husband (who is somewhat of
an invalid), closely occupied all the week, sometimes even the strain
becoming excessive. On Sundays, when you come, your teaching and
influence lift us above all our difficulties, and we start for the next
week full of hope, and feeling nothing too hard to be accomplished. With
regard to my sons, it is an especial boon, because, though they are
thoughtful and good, it has been almost impossible to get them to attend
church during the last two or three years. They did not meet, perhaps,
with a single service for many weeks into which they could enter with
the slightest interest, so they stayed away. We have all found our
Sundays very wearisome, but on those you have visited us all is changed.
All are deeply interested, one competing with the other in bringing
forward the ideas that have interested them." The writer goes on
reluctantly to acquiesce in a declinature which had evidently gone to
the heart of the whole household.

His sphere as a preacher steadily widened, and he became, in addition, a
most popular platform speaker at the May meetings in Exeter Hall and
elsewhere. There is no room to recount his triumphs, and no need to do
so. All who heard him bore the same testimony. If he was preaching in
one of the suburbs the trains towards the time of service brought a
company of admirers from all parts of London. The chapel would be
crowded to the doors. When he stood up in the pulpit strangers felt
surprise. Youthful in appearance, unpretending in manner to the last
degree, and in the early part of the service generally nervous and
restrained, it was not till the sermon began that he showed his full
powers. He usually read the first prayer, and was always glad if he
could get some one to help him with the lessons and the giving out of
hymns. But in preaching all his powers were displayed at their highest.
He did not read his sermons, but his language was as abundant and
felicitous as his thought, and his audience was always riveted. Alike in
manner and matter he was quite original. He imitated no preacher; he did
not care to listen to sermons, and was rarely much impressed by them
when he did. I doubt if he ever read a volume of sermons unless it was
to review them. His knowledge of the Bible and his knowledge of life
gave him inexhaustible stores; he had always matter in advance, and
never felt that sterility of mind which so often afflicts the preacher.
He would retell the stories of the Old Testament, and make them live in
the light of to-day. The reality and firmness with which he grasped
life—the life of toiling, struggling, suffering men and women—was his
chief power. His sympathetic imagination helped him to divine the
feelings of various classes of the young men in business, for example,
with a small salary, and little prospect of rising, forbidden the hope
of honourable love, and tempted to baseness from without and within. He
had an intense concern for the happiness of home life, and much of his
preaching was an amplification of the words—

  "To mak' a happy fireside clime
    To weans and wife;
  That's the true pathos and sublime
    Of human life."

Mothers' hearts he would win by praying for the "dear little children
asleep in their beds at home." Young couples he would warn to keep fresh
the tenderness and self-sacrifice of first love. But the sermons which
follow speak for themselves, though nothing can transfer to the printed
page the light and fire of which they were full as the preacher spoke
them.

Of the helpfulness of his preaching he had from time to time many
testimonies, of which he preserved a few. These were very welcome to
him, far more so than any appreciation of the intellectual ability or
the eloquence of his sermons. This, from one letter, is a specimen of
many more: "I wandered past my own church in a heavy weight of business
care, knowing that a mortgagee would this week likely take all I had,
and caring little where I wandered when I went in to hear you, and was
surprised at the text you preached from, and more so at the helpful
words you spoke, which I hope, by God's grace, will enable me to see—

  'Behind a frowning providence
    He hides a smiling face.'"

He delivered courses of lectures to Sunday-school teachers under the
auspices of the Sunday-school Union. These were very largely attended
and highly appreciated. He received many letters of encouragement, among
them one from the vicar of a London church, who wrote that although he
could not attend them all, owing to the exacting nature of his own work,
he listened to those he could be present at with the deepest attention
and the greatest thankfulness. "That a great scholar should fearlessly
approach these vexed questions, and with his grasp of them be able to
make them popular and understood by the people, and above all attractive
to the people, is to me a great joy. You make the Bible a living book,
filled with people met with in workaday life. You show that the social
problems which superficial minds imagine are utterly new are only old
difficulties under new names, and that the Bible has a definite word to
say upon them, and its 'Thus saith the Lord' is to be listened to still.
I venture to think that this is the great need of this fevered age of
ours, and I heartily thank you."

An attempt was made in 1888 by the Westminster Congregational Church,
where he had often preached with great acceptance, to secure him as
pastor. This invitation he was inclined to accept. The condition of the
Theological College was not at the time satisfactory, and for that and
other reasons it seemed not unlikely that the call would be closed with.
To me, as to others of his friends, it seemed certain that his physical
strength was wholly inadequate to the position, and I am glad to think
of the urgency with which this view was pressed on him. He was reassured
about the College, and gratefully declined the invitation. In connection
with it he received the following letter, which reflects so much honour
on all concerned that I venture to include it here:—

 "LONDON, _March 8th, 1888_.

 "TO THE REV. PROFESSOR ELMSLIE, M.A., D.D.—We hear with sympathetic
 interest that the Westminster Church is calling you to its pastorate.

 "The traditions of the Westminster Church are good, its ministry has
 always been highly spiritual and largely human, and its importance and
 influence have been second to none among the churches of our order in
 this great Metropolis.

 "We feel special interest in this call from the fact that it will
 involve on your part the crossing of the denominational boundary
 between Presbyterianism and Congregationalism. Identical though the
 churches practically are in the foundation of their theological belief,
 we appreciate the strain upon early and sacred association which this
 may involve, with, however, this compensation, that, borne in answer to
 a call for service and furtherance of the kingdom of Christ, it is a
 practical and valuable evidence that the sister denominations are truly
 wings in the one great army of God.

 "Should you accept this call to the highly honourable post which the
 Westminster Church offers you, we beg to assure you of the cordial
 welcome, brotherly sympathy, and, as the occasion may arise, the
 friendly co-operation of the ministers of our body.

 "It is unusual for the representatives of other churches to intervene
 in cases of this kind, but understanding there may be questions in your
 mind as to the feelings with which you would be received into the ranks
 of the Congregational ministry, we have thought it right, on the
 suggestion of a representative of the Westminster Church, to give you
 this assurance.

 "With best wishes for your future welfare and highest prosperity,

 "Yours fraternally,

 "Alexander Hannay,
 "Henry Allon,
 "J. C. Harrison,
 "J. Guinness Rogers,
 "Andrew Mearns,
 "Samuel Newth,
 "Joseph Parker,
 "Robert F. Horton,
 "John Kennedy,
 "John Fredk. Stevenson,
 "R. Vaughan Pryce,
 "Alfred Cave,
 "John Stoughton,
 "Henry Robert Reynolds."

It is unnecessary to refer in detail to the numerous invitations to
Presbyterian pulpits which reached him from time to time. Some of these
were from Scotland, on which he looked back with mingled feelings. He
did not willingly turn his face to the north, or think of it with much
pleasure. "I worked too hard there," he would say. On the other hand, he
writes from Edinburgh in 1880—"I had a splendid talk, fit to be printed,
with Taylor Innes, Davidson, and Iverach. I think I might become a great
divine with such stimulating society."

Elmslie's connection with the Congregationalists not only greatly
heightened his estimate of the loyalty and piety still abiding in the
Nonconformist churches of England; it also brought him more fully into
the current of modern life. He began to be deeply interested in
politics, which he had previously rather held aloof from, became a
diligent reader of newspapers, and was led to an absorbing interest in
Socialism, on which he delivered a memorable address in Exeter Hall in
connection with the Pan-Presbyterian Council of 1888. In politics he was
an ardent Liberal and a thoroughgoing Home Ruler.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dr. Elmslie added to his other engagements some of a literary kind. He
became adviser to the firm of Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton, of 27,
Paternoster Row, and occupied this position for a few years with great
satisfaction on both sides. His work was to write estimates of any
manuscripts Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton submitted for his
consideration, and that he did it incisively and honestly the following
specimen, selected almost at random, will show:—

"Energetic, intelligent, earnest discourses on the lines of the old
Evangelical Protestant school, not in any way original in exposition or
fresh in presentation, but quite sensible, vigorous, and good. That they
are not up to date appears in such a reference as this: 'The excitement
caused in this country by the publication of "Essays and Reviews," and
subsequently of Bishop Colenso's heretical works, is still fresh in our
memories,' etc. Even if thoroughly rubbed up and revised, the sermons
would only sell where writer's name would carry them, and to some extent
to preachers in search of ready-made discourses."

He ceased to act in this capacity some time before his death, but
continued to be a constant visitor to No. 27, where his appearance gave
pleasure to every one in the place. His inaugural lecture on Ernest
Renan was published in the excellent "Present-day Tracts" of the
Religious Tract Society, and was very well received. He had often heard
Renan lecture, and was thoroughly conversant with his books. To the
_Expositor_ he made some contributions, but in spite of pressure,
delayed publishing extended articles. In _Good Words_ and the _Sunday
Magazine_ some of his sermons were published from time to time. To the
_British Weekly_ he was a large contributor, mostly of short anonymous
reviews and paragraphs; occasionally he would write an extended critique
or a travel sketch. But he was making ready for work as an author. A
remark made by Dr. Marcus Dods had sunk into his mind; it was to the
effect that men should study till they were forty, and then publish the
result of their studies. He had arranged to begin writing and to give up
preaching, and had he lived this purpose would have been carried out.
His schemes were numerous, but the chief was to write a book which
should make the Old Testament intelligible—its contents and message—to
the common people. He had made a careful study of the Minor Prophets,
the result of which will shortly appear in a popular commentary.

       *       *       *       *       *

So his life went on, useful, happy, honoured, and but too busy. In 1888
he received the degree of Doctor of Divinity from his Alma Mater. In the
same year he preached the opening sermon at the Nottingham meeting of
the Congregational Union. This high honour was never before conferred on
a Presbyterian minister. He enjoyed social intercourse, and in recent
years had much of it. He had many pleasant Continental holidays. But the
claims upon him constantly increased, and alas! his strength did not. He
had the happiness of being under the care of an accomplished and skilful
physician, who was also an intimate friend—Dr. Montague Murray. I need
not speak of the faithful care that never ceased its vigilance. But
although often warned against overwork, and constantly paying the
penalty in severe headaches, no serious danger was apprehended. I am
anxious to make it clear that he did not wilfully throw his life away.
He apprehended no danger, and thought he was taking sufficient
precautions. The last summer of his life he took two Continental
holidays. He loved life. His last years were his best—the brightest and
the fullest of influence. If one had been asked to say who among his
friends had the prospect of the surest happiness and the greatest
influence, he would have named Elmslie without hesitation. It was in
such a noon that his sun went down.

He spent September 1889 in the Engadine. Although he enjoyed the trip he
benefited from it less than he had hoped, and began the work of his
classes with a certain feeling of weariness. He did not, however,
imagine that anything was seriously wrong, and accepted many engagements
for the winter. He preached with wonderful eloquence to crowded
audiences in St. John's Wood Presbyterian Church on the Sunday evenings
of October, and had promised to take anniversary services on Sunday,
November 3rd, for the Rev. John Watson, M.A., of Sefton Park Church,
Liverpool. Although unable to go to College on the previous Friday, he
was anxious not to disappoint his friend, and accordingly went to
Liverpool. His medical adviser reluctantly allowed him to preach once.
He officiated at the forenoon service, getting help from one of his
students in the service. That afternoon he spent in bed, and he was too
unwell to return to London till Wednesday. Dr. Murray saw he was
seriously ill, and ordered that all his engagements should be postponed.
On Thursday, however, he lectured at the College, but on Friday he was
prostrated, and remained so till Tuesday, when unconsciousness set in.
He suffered from agonizing headache. Symptoms of diphtheritic sore
throat set in on Sunday, November 10th. On Tuesday the medical man in
attendance pronounced the disease to be typhoid fever, and after the
evening of that day he was never conscious. His busy brain worked on.
The faithful friend and physician, who hardly left his side, says he
never heard such intelligent unconscious talk. If his mind travelled to
the scene of his recent journeys he would give directions in German
about ordering rooms, arranging for dinner and the like, with perfect
clearness. More often he would fancy himself in his class-room teaching
Hebrew, and urging the students to put heart into their work. Over and
over he spoke to his wife of what had been the master thought of his
life. Lifting his hand he would say with great earnestness, "No man can
deny that I always preached the love of God. That was right. I am glad I
did not puzzle poor sorrowful humanity with abstruse doctrines, but
always tried to win them to Christ by preaching a God of Love." Once he
turned to her with wistful eyes and said, "Kate, God is Love. All Love.
We will tell every one that, but specially our own boy—at least you
will, for I seem to be so tired these days, and my one wonder and
trouble is, that all these people (meaning the nurses) try to prevent me
from going home, where we were always so happy." He was reassured for
the moment, when some familiar object was pointed out, and asked that he
should often be told that he was at home. He was soon to go home indeed.
He recognised his wife on Friday, with the last signs of consciousness.
Shortly after he became faint, closed his eyes, and never opened them
again on earth. About four o'clock on the morning of November 16th,
1889, he quietly passed away.

       *       *       *       *       *

Scarcely any death could have made a greater rent than this, and the
tokens of sorrow—public and private—were almost unexampled in the case
of one who held no high office in Church or State, who had not lived
long enough to make his mark in literature, who had sought no fame or
honour, but had been content with doing his duty as it called him day by
day. The funeral service was conducted in Marylebone Presbyterian Church
(Dr. Donald Fraser's), of which he was a member. Dr. Fraser and Dr.
Allon delivered addresses, while Dr. Dykes and Dr. Monro Gibson offered
up prayer. The great church was crowded with a deeply moved audience of
two thousand persons, every one of whom probably represented some word
spoken or some service rendered by the kind heart then cold. He was
buried at Liverpool next day by the side of his mother, his attached
friend and colleague the Rev. Dr. Gibb, being among those present at the
interment. A service was conducted at the Presbyterian College, where
Principal Dykes delivered a deeply moving address. "You may send us
another Hebrew Professor," said he, "and we shall welcome him, but you
cannot send us another Elmslie."

Tributes from the Presbyteries of the Church, from congregations of
various denominations to which he had ministered, from well-known Church
leaders, from old students, and, not least, from unknown men and women
whom he had helped and comforted, poured in. They were too numerous to
be quoted or further referred to, but the intensity and turmoil of
feeling expressed in them, showed that the sorrow for him was as deep as
its appointed signs were extensive. One for whom much sympathy was felt,
his aged father, seemed to bear up bravely against the blow. He received
with eager gratitude the abundant testimonies to the honour and love in
which his son was held. But the grief had gone to his heart, he soon
began to sink, and died a few months later.

       *       *       *       *       *

What was said of Henri Perreyve is eminently true of Elmslie: he was
gifted for friendship and for persuasion. During the last years of his
life, the period when I knew him intimately, he came to what has been
called the grand moral climacteric, and all his nobler qualities were
manifest in their full strength. There was about him the indefinable
charm of atmosphere, at once stimulating, elevating and composing. He
had an inexplicable personal attraction that drew to it whatever
loving-kindness there might be in the surroundings, as certain crystals
absorb moisture from the air they breathe. In his company speech became
of a sweeter and purer flavour. There was no austerity, no Pharisaism
about him; he delighted in fun and gave himself a large liberty; but
nothing he said or welcomed marred the moral beauty which he had reached
through long self-discipline.

No one could know him long without perceiving that he was full of
generous ardour for pure aims. His was not the coarse ambition for the
glittering prizes of life, nor was his enthusiasm such as would have
cooled with time. In that delicate and watchful consideration for
others, which has been called the most endearing of human
characteristics, he could hardly be surpassed. He concerned himself with
the whole life of his friends, and especially with their trials and
perplexities. Dr. Elmslie was, indeed, one of the very few men to whom
one might go in an emergency, sure of a welcome more kindly if possible
than would have been accorded in a time of prosperity. His whole
energies were solicitously given to the task of comforting. If things
could be set right he delighted in applying his singular nimbleness of
mind to the situation. He was adroit in action, and almost amusingly
fertile in schemes and suggestions. I think it is safe to say that all
his friends felt it was better worth while talking over a difficulty
with him than with any one else. Even in cases of moral failure—perhaps
I should say specially in those cases—he was eager to do what was
possible. He had a profound and compassionate sense of the frailty of
men, their sore struggles and thick temptations. Wherever he saw true
repentance he would do his utmost to secure a fresh opportunity for the
erring. He thought the Christian Church sadly remiss in allowing so many
lives to be ruined by one great fault. Out of an income which, for a man
of his talents, was not great, he gave largely, secretly, and with the
most careful discrimination.

His spirit in speaking of others, whether friends or foes was always
charitable. But I must guard against the danger of mistake. He did not
indulge in indiscriminate laudation. His perception of character was
very keen, he was not a hero-worshipper, and he had always a certain
impatience of extravagant and unmeasured speech. But he had learned the
secret of not expecting from people more than they have to give, and
this, along with the generosity of his nature, helped him to make large
allowance for what seemed unhopeful and disappointing, and made him
eager to do justice and more than justice to whatever was good. On
occasion however, he would with grave kindness point out the limitations
of a character, and sometimes, though very rarely, he would be moved to
vehemence as he spoke of modern religious Pharisaism.

In conversation he was ready alike to listen and to speak. Nothing gave
him greater delight than a long and animated talk. He loved
individuality in whatever sphere it was manifested, and would often
relate with delight the racy remarks made to him by poor people. Of
decorous commonplace he was rather impatient, and complained once that a
young man of promise, with whom he had spent a day, had said nothing
during the whole of it but what he ought to have said.

Dr. Elmslie had abundantly that charity which "rejoiceth not in
iniquity." It gave him real pain to hear of the mistakes and misfortunes
of men. Without a trace of jealousy, he delighted in any success or
happiness that came to his friends. Of all virtues he most admired
magnanimity, and when he was told of generous actions, his face would
glow with pleasure. To the spirit of malice and revenge he was always
and utterly opposed. Like other public men he was occasionally attacked;
the fancied breadth of his religious views excited animosity in certain
quarters and was at times the subject of anonymous letters. He would
regret that his critics did not know him better, and might show pain for
the moment, but it was soon past. He never in any way retaliated.

Dr. Elmslie had no dæmonic passion for literature. For books as books he
had no love, and this indifference disturbed some of his associates not
a little. When he had got out of a book what he could he exchanged it
for another. Hence his personal library was small, consisting mostly of
Oriental literature, and some favourite French and German works. But his
reading was wide, and he knew the best in everything. He was master of
French, German, Italian, and Dutch, and had a working knowledge of other
languages. Of his preferences in literature he did not often speak; when
he did he would say that to George Eliot and Goethe he owed much and
very much.

No one could be his friend without perceiving that he was through and
through a Christian. In his later years his doubts seemed completely
conquered. You saw nothing but the strength he had gained in overcoming
them. He held his faith with a certain large simplicity, but with
absolute conviction. Among all his attracting qualities the chief was
his great hope in God. He was indeed "very sure of God." Latterly, he
could hardly listen without impatience to gloomy forecasts of the
future. He believed that all was right with the world; that Christ was
busy saving it, and would see of the travail of His soul. Men prone to
darker thoughts loved him very much for that. No sickness, no bodily
suffering, ever altered this mood of trust and hope.

His dogmatic position is not easy to define. Although liberal in his
views he disliked rashness; and avoided giving offence so far as he
could. My impression is, that he held an attitude of suspense towards
many debated questions. He did not feel the need of making up his mind.
The truths of which he was sure gave him all the message he needed, and
these were independent of the controversies of the hour. But he kept an
open mind, and was ever ready to add to his working creed. He could not
preach what did not thoroughly possess his own soul, but never dreamt
that he had reached finality, and I think was increasingly disposed to
respect the doctrines, which, as history proves, have stirred and
commanded men. A thorough Liberal and Nonconformist, he knew
comparatively little of the Church of England, and was repelled by its
exclusive spirit, but when told of the great qualities of the younger
High Church leaders, he listened with interest and pleasure. He was
happy in being able to think more kindly and hopefully of men from whom
he was divided in principle. As has been already said, he considered the
spiritual life of Congregationalists very deep and true; he loved the
warm old-fashioned piety he found among them, and heartily believed in
their future. Of the differences among Nonconformists he made nothing,
was a vehement advocate of union, and strongly opposed to whatever
interrupted cordial relations between Churches.

Though never chary in speaking of his religious experiences he did not
obtrude them. A real belief in immortality he thought could hardly exist
without other faiths being right. Such a belief would give life its true
shape and colour. He was very patient of honest doubts, but had to make
himself sure that they were honest, not the cloak of moral laxness. What
he loved best to speak of was the magnificence of Divine grace—the love
of God commended in Christ's death.

       *       *       *       *       *

But it is time to lay down the pen. We may apply to Dr. Elmslie words,
used, I think, about an American writer: his charm was of the kind that
we fail to reduce to its grounds. It was like that of the sweetness of a
piece of music, or the softness of fine September weather. In a certain
way it was vague, indefinable, inappreciable; but it is what we must
point to, for nothing he has left behind gives any adequate idea of his
powers. Friendship occupied an immense space in his life, and all who
knew him are conscious that,

              Now the candid face is hid,
  The frank, sweet tongue has ceased to move,

something has gone from them never to be replaced till that daybreak
which shall unite all who belong to one another. But over the sense of
their own loss there rises and remains the feeling how much God
indicates in this life of which only some small portion is fulfilled.
The world of expectation and love thus suddenly closed for earth must be
open somewhere. There must be ministries in other spheres for which he
was prepared and summoned. His life must—we know not how—be complete in
Him, Who alone of all who lived fully achieved His life's programme, Who
came down from Heaven to do His Father's business, and having done it
died.


I.

 FROM THE REV. PROFESSOR MARCUS DODS, D.D.

 "From my first acquaintance with the late Professor Elmslie, I availed
 myself of every opportunity of seeing him, for intercourse with him
 never failed to be inspiring. Our acquaintance may be said to have
 culminated in a five weeks' tramp through the Black Forest and the
 Tyrol, in company with Professor Drummond—to myself a
 never-to-be-forgotten holiday. Often compelled to sleep in one room,
 and always thrown upon one another from sunrise to sundown, we came to
 have a tolerably complete insight into one another's character. And for
 my own part, I never ceased to marvel at the unfailing good humour and
 gaiety with which Elmslie put up with the little inconveniences
 incident to such travel, at the brightness he diffused in four
 languages, at the sparkling wit with which he seasoned the most
 commonplace talk, and at the ease and felicity with which he turned his
 mind to the gravest problems of life and of theology, and penetrated to
 the very heart of them. His cleverness, his smartness of repartee, his
 nimbleness of mind, his universal sympathy and complete intelligence
 were each hour a fresh surprise, and were as exhilarating as the
 mountain air and the new scenes through which we were passing. I have
 often reproached myself with not treasuring the fine sayings with which
 he lifted us into a region in which former difficulties were scarcely
 discernible and not at all disturbing. But, indeed, one might as well
 have tried to bottle the atmosphere for home consumption, for into
 everything he said and did he carried a buoyancy and a light all his
 own.

 "As a preacher Professor Elmslie was, in many of the highest qualities
 of a preacher, without a peer. No one, I think, appreciated more highly
 than he the opportunity the preacher of Christ has to apply balm to all
 the wounds of humanity, and no one exercised this function with a more
 intelligent or tender sympathy or with happier results. No human
 condition, physical, mental, or spiritual, seemed beyond his ken, and
 none but found in him the suitable treatment. His wealth of knowledge,
 his unerring spiritual insight, and his rare felicity of language gave
 him the ear of cultured and uncultured, of the believer and the sceptic
 alike. It has always seemed doubtful to some of his friends whether
 such exceptional aptitude for preaching should have been, even in any
 degree, sacrificed to professorial work. Yet he himself delighted in
 that work, and the very last time I saw him he was full of enthusiasm
 for Old Testament studies, and hopeful of what might be done by himself
 and his fellow-labourers in this field.

 "When so energetic an individuality is withdrawn the world suffers an
 appreciable loss; and one cannot yet think of the place he filled, or
 of the place we all hoped he would yet fill, without a keen shoot of
 pain."


II.

 FROM PROFESSOR HENRY DRUMMOND.

 "DEAR MR. NICOLL,—It is futile to plead want of recollection as an
 excuse for what must be a too brief contribution to your little
 portrait, for no one who ever knew Elmslie could ever forget him. But
 the truth is, I never knew him well. At college he was too much my
 senior for me to have presumed to know him, and in after years we
 scarcely ever met, except on one occasion, for more than a passing
 moment.

  "I never heard Elmslie preach, or lecture, or do anything public. I
  knew him chiefly as a human being. Elmslie off the chair was one of
  the most attractive spirits who ever graced this planet. It was not so
  much his simple character, or the bubbling and irresistible
  _bonhommie_, or even the amazing versatility of his gifts, but a
  certain radiance that he carried with him, a certain something that
  made you sun yourself in his presence, and open the pores of your
  soul, and be happy. I think I can recall no word that he ever spoke,
  or even any idea that he ever forged, but the _man_ made an impression
  on you indelibly delightful and joyous.

 "My first distinct impression of him was crossing the College
 quadrangle with 'Romola' under his arm. He was kind enough to stop and
 introduce me to the authoress, whom I forthwith proceeded to cultivate
 assiduously. Shortly after this Elmslie gave a supper-party, a function
 much too rare among Scotch students. I had the honour to be invited to
 represent the juniors—an act of pure mercy, for I then neither knew
 Elmslie nor his set. If I were now asked by a senior man at college how
 he could best influence his less-advanced colleagues, I should answer,
 'Make him your debtor for life by asking him up to your rooms.' Of the
 entertainment itself—the literary entertainment, I mean—I remember
 little; it was the being there that helped me. And what I do remember I
 do not know that I ought to divulge, for the _pièce de resistance_ was
 the Hans Breitman Ballads, which Elmslie carved and served himself,
 with extraordinary relish, throughout most of the evening.

 "It was this same man, unchanged by the weight of years and work, whom
 I met several years after in the Black Forest, and accompanied for some
 weeks in a walking tour. The third member of the party was Dr. Marcus
 Dods, and we tramped with our knapsacks through the Tyrol, the dolomite
 country, and the Saltzkammergut. Elmslie at first was full of the
 Strasburg professors under whom he had been studying, but after a few
 days I saw no more of his wisdom, for he gave himself up like a
 schoolboy to the toys of St. Ulrich and the Glockner glaciers. But of
 this most perfect of all vacations nothing now remains with me but an
 impression of health, sunshine, and gentle friendship.

 "Elmslie's graver side I can only dimly realise from the appearances he
 used to make in the Theological Society of the New College, Edinburgh.
 I do not remember even the theme of any debate in which he ever took
 part, but the figure and voice, and especially the look of the student
 as he stood up there amidst the almost awe-stricken hush of his
 classmates, lives most vividly in my mind. When Elmslie spoke every one
 felt that he at least had something to give, some message of his own.
 He never seemed to be merely saying things, _i.e._ 'making a speech,'
 but to be thinking aloud, and that with an intensity and originality
 most inspiring and impressive. His voice and tone had that conviction
 in them which was as impossible to define as to resist. I could with
 difficulty imagine any one moving the previous question after Elmslie.
 Another peculiarity, which added greatly to his power, was that he
 thought with his whole face. In fact, in listening to him one did not
 so much hear a man speaking as see a man thinking. His eyes on these
 occasions would become very large and full of light, not of fire or
 heat, but of a calm luminosity, expressive of a mingled glow of reason,
 conscience, and emotion.

 "One of the last things I read of Elmslie saying was that what people
 needed most was _comfort_. Probably he never knew how much his mission,
 personally, was to give it. I presume he often preached it, but I think
 he must always have _been_ it. For all who knew him will testify that
 to be in his presence was to leave care, and live where skies were blue.

 "Yours very sincerely,
 "HENRY DRUMMOND.
 "BRINDISI, _March 17th, 1890_."


III.

 FROM THE REV. JOHN SMITH, M.A.

 "BROUGHTON PLACE UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, EDINBURGH.

 "It is very difficult, in a few sentences, to convey to another the
 impression which gradually grows up from frequent contact with a nature
 so sympathetic, clear-sighted, active, and many-sided in its activities
 as that of a fellow-student and friend like Elmslie. Acquaintance with
 him was mainly confined to two widely sundered periods, both of them
 anterior to the last, crowded, brilliant years.

 "It was during the session of 1866-67, at King's College, Aberdeen,
 that I first met him. As every one who knew the Aberdeen of that time
 is aware, the third year was to most students peculiarly severe. Bain—a
 consummate teacher—made distinction in his class appear the blue ribbon
 of the college course, for which the best men earnestly contended.
 Fuller was merciless in his demands upon his senior mathematical class,
 who found, as the months went on, that it was less and less possible to
 keep him in sight. And with 'Davy' Thomson there was no trifling,—fear
 of his sarcasm greatly helping our thirst for natural philosophy. As
 the session advanced the chariots of most of us drave heavily. Elmslie,
 however, who studied everything, seemed to do his work with a masterful
 ease which impressed us all. He came up smiling to an examination as if
 it were a thing of nought. Study could not blanch the fresh bloom on
 his cheek, or damp the lively play of spirit which characterized him
 then as much as in after years. I have just been looking at his
 portrait in our class group, and at his clear bold signature in the
 lithographed autographs which accompanied it. To a singular extent his
 personal character was formed, and his peculiar excellencies were
 developed, at that early date. He was, when little more than a boy, a
 man whose words clung to you, whose ways lingered in your memory. Even
 then, too, he had something of that sweet hopeful Christian spirit
 which was to make his preaching so helpful. One student, whose
 opportunities had been few, whose struggle had been painful in the
 extreme, used to speak to me with enthusiasm of Elmslie's kindly notice
 and assistance. While other natures were but emerging from chaos,
 barely conscious to themselves, giving but the faintest indication to
 others what they were to be, he whose course was to be so soon run, was
 already girt up and disciplined for life's way.

 "After our college course was completed, I did not meet him till 1878,
 when already he had been for some time minister in Willesden. On more
 than one occasion, I stayed with him for a day or two, and saw with my
 own eyes how full and many-sided a life he was living then, even before
 fame came. He was carrying on his studies, advising publishers with
 regard to learned and bulky MSS., superintending a railway mission,
 maintaining in briskest activity the work of his congregation, and in
 these and many other channels winning 'golden opinions from all sorts
 of people.' Especially did I admire his faculty of adapting himself to
 English ways of thinking and feeling. And amid this abounding life, and
 with the promise of all that came after bright before him, he was so
 unaffected and ingenuous and humble, never shrinking from his future,
 yet not feverishly anticipating it, that it was impossible not to love
 him. Here, too, he showed his skill in discovering elements of strength
 in men whom others would dismiss as incompetent. I remember a
 missionary who succeeded to the astonishment of everybody, and I verily
 believe of himself, under his kindly and stimulating superintendence.
 It is one of the pleasant memories of my life that I carried the motion
 in Synod which made it possible for him to be elected as permanent
 Professor. I remember how the Willesden flock were between smiles and
 tears all that day, and how when the second vote was carried which
 severed the tie between their minister and them, they did not know
 whether to be grieved or glad, so strong was their love, so eager was
 their desire for his advancement. No one could hear him speak that
 night and doubt his future. All that the great world has since seen in
 him, we knew to be there, and more, which would have been revealed had
 not death so soon sealed his lips.

 "Of the later years, others will speak. Out of these earlier memories I
 have woven—all unskilfully I fear, yet with sincere affection—this
 modest wreath for his tomb."


IV.

 FROM THE REV. JAMES STALKER, D.D.

 "6 CLAIRMONT GARDENS, GLASGOW,
 "_March 24th, 1890_.

 "DEAR MR. NICOLL,—What a bright time it is to look back to! There is
 nothing else in life afterwards quite equal to it. Never again can one
 mingle day by day with so many picked men; never is thought so free;
 never are there such discoveries and surprises. Those years in the New
 College have in the retrospect almost a dazzling brightness, and
 Elmslie contributed more, perhaps, than any one else to make them what
 they were.

 "I just missed being by his side all the four years, for we entered
 together; but after a week or so I left to go abroad with the Barbours,
 to whom I was tutor. I have no recollection of him that session, for I
 had not gone in for the bursary examination, where any one competing
 with him was pretty certain to be made aware of Elmslie to his cost.
 Next session, when I returned, I was of course separated from him by a
 year, which makes a great difference in college life. But for three
 sessions we must have met nearly every day, and I was thrown into the
 closest contact with him in the committees and societies where students
 of the different years come together.

 "The Theological Society was at that time the centre of the life of the
 College. Under Robertson Smith, Lindsay and Black, whose last year was
 Elmslie's first, it had entered on a career of the most brilliant
 activity, in which, I suppose, it has never faltered since. We used to
 say, in our exaggerative way, that we got more good from it than from
 all the classes put together. And indeed it would be difficult to
 over-estimate the gain to be obtained from debates for which the
 leading men prepared carefully, being stimulated by audiences of fifty
 or a hundred to do their very utmost. Questions of Biblical Criticism
 were at that time the staple of the most important discussions; and
 then were fought out in secret the very battles which are now about to
 be fought out in the Church under the eyes of the world, with very much
 the same division of parties and amid the play of the same passions.

 "It was here that Elmslie first unfolded his marvellous powers as a
 speaker. At the University I had been a member of the Dialectic, where
 there were one or two fine speakers. One of them was more fluent and
 agreeable to listen to than any one I have ever heard since;
 another—long ago, alas! gone over to the majority—spoke with a freer
 play of mere intellectual force than even Elmslie possessed. But I had
 never before, and have never since, heard speaking which, taken all in
 all, quite came up to that to which Elmslie treated us Friday after
 Friday. The combination of powers was the marvel of it—the knowledge,
 the clearness of exposition, the fecundity of ideas, the telling force
 with which he put his points, the play of fancy, the exuberant wit and
 humour, the tenderness and pathos into which he could glide for a
 moment if it invited him; there was no resource which he had not at
 perfect command. Yet it was entirely without display; he was always
 perfectly natural and familiar. He never won a triumph which humiliated
 any one; and, whilst others by expounding the same free views excited
 bitter feelings of opposition, he had the gift of saying the most
 revolutionary things in such a way that no one was hurt; his weapon,
 though it cut deep, having the marvellous property of diffusing an
 anæsthetic on the wound it made.

 "If it is necessary to throw some shade into a picture so bright, I
 should say that in those days his speaking had one defect: while he had
 always complete mastery of his subject, he rarely made the impression
 that the subject had complete mastery of him. He could play with it so
 easily, and he could play so easily with his audience, that, as part of
 the audience, you felt that you were not quite sure whether he was
 giving you all his mind or only as much of it as he considered good for
 you. He had not yet been gripped so tightly by the realities of life as
 he was later, when his sense of the wrong and misery of the world
 transformed his eloquence into an irresistible stream of passion and
 made him the most earnest and whole-hearted of comforters. As yet the
 bantering, laughing element was in excess; and he did not always
 remember where to draw the line in the _abandon_ of animal spirits. I
 used to wonder how it would do when he was settled as the moderator of
 a session of 'douce' Scotch elders.

 "But to us at the time it was splendid. It was in one of our sessions
 that Dr. Blaikie founded the College dinner, which has since proved so
 valuable an institution, bringing all the students together daily in a
 social capacity; and any day you could have told where Elmslie was
 seated at the table by the explosions of laughter rising in that
 quarter all through the meal. Men strove to sit near him, and he
 diffused a glow up and down, his budget of stories never getting
 exhausted or his flow of spirits flagging. I well remember a speech he
 made at the close of the first session during which the dinner existed,
 to thank Professor Blaikie for his efforts on behalf of the students
 and congratulate him on the success of his experiment. It was, perhaps,
 the most remarkable of all Elmslie's speeches. Professors and students
 alike were simply convulsed with laughter, and one explosion followed
 another, till the assembly was literally dissolved; yet under all the
 nonsense there was capital sense, and the duty which he had undertaken
 could not have been more gracefully or completely discharged.

 "On the serious side of college life he was equally a leader. His
 enormous influence over his fellow-students was uniformly pure and
 elevating; and in confidential hours, when conversation went down to
 the depths of experience, it was easy to see that his life, which was
 so gay and exuberant on the surface, was deeply rooted in loyalty to
 Christ. He threw himself heartily into the work of the Missionary
 Society in the Cowgate and the High Street. We began one winter to
 speak in the open air, but none of us were successful till we brought
 down Murray, who afterwards also went to the English Presbyterian
 Church and finished his career even sooner than Elmslie. Murray was no
 scholar, but in ten minutes he had a crowd round him extending halfway
 across the street, while we could never attract more than forty or
 fifty. It was a lesson which we often afterwards discussed with no
 small astonishment.

 "I remember an incident of the Mission which Elmslie used to tell with
 great gusto. He was addressing the Children's Church on the story of
 Samson and the lion, when, observing that the children were not
 attending, he, instead of saying that the lion roared, emitted as near
 an approach to the roar itself as he could command. Instantly there was
 breathless attention; and when, after pausing long enough to allow for
 the full effect, he was about to proceed, a little girl cried out
 anxiously, 'O sir, do it again!' On another occasion he stopped to
 reprove rather sharply a boy who was very restless, when a companion,
 springing up, told him with great solemnity that he ought not to speak
 so to this boy, because he was deaf and dumb. Taken completely aback,
 Elmslie began humbly to apologise, when the whole class burst out into
 a shout of laughter at the skill with which he had been taken in. The
 boy could both hear and speak.

 "After he went south I saw him very seldom. Once he caught me in London
 and took me out to preach at Willesden, where I was immensely impressed
 with his hold on the people and the extent of the field of influence he
 had opened up. Like his other friends, I was very impatient for some
 literary production worthy of his genius, and, when the brilliant tract
 on Renan appeared, I took the liberty of writing him urgently on the
 subject. It was always my hope that before very long we should be able
 to entice him back across the Border, to adorn a chair in one of our
 colleges. I did not hear of his illness till you wrote me that he was
 just dying. 'God moves in a mysterious way.' I have no hesitation in
 saying that Elmslie was by far the most brilliant man I have ever
 known, and there was never a human being more lovable. He seemed to be
 the man we needed most; but it is little we know; the Master must have
 had need of him elsewhere.

 "Believe me yours most truly,
 "JAMES STALKER."



SERMONS.



I.

_CHRIST AT THE DOOR._

"Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice,
and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and
he with Me."—REV. iii. 20.


God is close to us. Every moment of our life He is doing countless
things in us and around us. If a man were to do these things we should
see him with our eyes, we could touch him with our hands; we should not
fail to observe his presence. Because we cannot see God with our bodily
eye, or grasp Him with our hand, we forget His working, we lose sight of
His nearness.

When you were children, some time or other, I suppose, in your young
lives, you got hold of a flower-seed, and planted it in a pot of moist
earth, and set it in the sunniest corner of your room. Morning after
morning, when you awoke, you ran to see if the flower had begun to grow.
At last your eagerness was rewarded by the sight of some tiny leaves
which had sprung up during one night. Then the stalk appeared, frail and
tender, and then more leaves, and buds, and branchlets, till at length
there stood, blooming before you, a fair and fragrant flower.

Who made it? Somebody worked to produce that flower. It could not make
itself. The dead earth could not shape that lovely leaf; the bright
sunshine could not paint those tendrils. A deep-thinking man, when he
sees these wonderful things, must ask himself, Who fashioned them? Not
the sunshine nor the air, but God, if there is a God, willed that that
plant should grow. God toiled to make the plant—in your room, at your
side.

At this moment, in your breast, your heart is beating. All your life it
has gone on beating. It is not you who sustain its motion. Even when you
forget it, when you are asleep, its pulsations do not cease. Somebody
works to keep your heart beating. God, who is the foundation of all
life, out of whose loving heart it streams, and back to whom it must
return, has to remember your heart.

But God comes still nearer to you. Do you remember a time in your life
when, in your inmost heart, that hidden, secret chamber where you dream
your dreams, and love your loves, and pour out your sorrows all alone,
you felt a strange influence? It was a vague unrest, a great
self-weariness. It was as if all brightness, hope, and satisfaction had
gone from your life, and had left behind them, in departing, a sick,
wistful longing to find something new, something brighter, better, and
more noble than you yet had known. It was as if you could hear voices
calling, and your heart moved within you, as if some new friend might be
there. Do you know what that was? It was God. It was the great Heart
that made your heart, longing and pleading to have it for His own.
"Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and
open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with
Me." Do you believe that? You, men and women, who love your Bible, and
are angry if any man seems to speak against it, or throw doubt upon one
jot or tittle of its letter, have you ever thought what that means if it
is true? Ay! it stands written there, and you have read it a hundred
times, and think you believe it; but do you indeed know what it means?
It means that God, the Eternal, Infinite, Almighty God, who wields these
worlds of shining stars, and keeps them in their mighty courses; that
God, the Spotless, the Holy, the Stainless, cares with a great longing
to have the heart and love of _you_; you, who are no saint; you, the
most commonplace and lowly, the most insignificant and sinful of men. Is
that easy to believe? Is it easy to believe that God would miss
something if your heart never went out in tender affection and adoration
towards Him; that He should take pains and trouble to get Himself into
your poor, battered heart—that heart which is so filled with sordid
cares as to how you may make a living, and the envyings and strivings
which accompany; in which such sinful, base, and vicious thoughts too
often dwell? Is it possible that the great, holy God wishes to get in
there?

It is not easy to believe it. One of the greatest religious thinkers who
ever lived, by the confession of believers and unbelievers alike; a man
who laboured so much under the effort to find out God, and became so
absorbed in the quest, that the name of "God-intoxicated" was applied to
him; a man who conceived more than any one else of the grandeur and
transcendency of God, till he found this poor world of ours and the
whole universe fade into insignificance before the thought of Him; this
man, this great philosopher, Spinoza, said, "A man should love God with
his whole being, but he must not expect God to love him in return." And
the bible says, "We love Him, because He first loved us." Which is true?

There are two things, I think, which make it hard to believe that we can
be of consequence to God—that God holds each one of us in a separate
thought of knowledge, sympathy, and Fatherly affection. One of them is
this: How is it possible for God to do it? Think of the myriads of men
and women on this world of ours, and the possibility of this universe
teeming with countless creatures of God's creative power and Fatherly
love. How is it possible that God should know each one of us, and love
us each one? God, so omnipotent, so transcendent, so almighty! But the
very thing that makes the difficulty to our reason seems to me the very
thing that should undo it. If God were not so great, then I could not
have the hope that I was something to Him _by myself_.

Is it not a fact that it is precisely a weak, uncultured, low, and
undeveloped intellect that finds it difficult to give attention to a
great mass of details, holding each apart, and doing justice to each?
Precisely as you rise in the scale of intellect and mental power, that
capacity increases quite incalculably. It is the great genius of a
general who not merely directs his army as a mass, but holds it at every
point, knows the value of every unit of force at his command, follows
the movement of each squadron, troop, and even of each single
individual, and precisely by this faculty is able to overthrow the enemy
and lead the army to victory.

You have listened to a beautiful oratorio, where scores of instruments
and hundreds of voices were all blended together in one tide of
magnificent harmony. How is it possible for a small intellect to keep
them thus in unison? It requires a master-mind in music to do this—one
that is fully conscious of the value of each string and voice, and who
can therefore combine them all in glorious harmony. And God is almighty;
it is nothing to Him that He is far away from you; you, a speck of dust
upon this world. It is precisely because I believe in God's omnipotence
that I can believe that He cares for each separate creature He has made.

But then there is another question. Even if God can love each one of us,
apart from all the rest, with an individual, personal, watchful
kindness, what right have we to think that He should care to do it? Once
again, that difficulty need but be faced, and you discover that it is a
delusive spectre and empty of reality.

Is it likely that God should miss the love of me, His creature?

Turn to the early chapters of Genesis, and read the story they have to
tell you. They tell you how through measureless periods of time, in the
fields of infinite space, the great God built up our world; first the
stone foundations, layer upon layer; above that, the strata of mineral
wealth, to be used hereafter, clothing the surface of it with a verdant
soil. Out of the mineral world he evolved the nutritive, vegetable
world, out of vegetable life the higher creation of animal life, and out
of that emerges man, standing on the summit of God's great toil and
building, with eyes that see, ears that hear, and mind that can
understand, answering to the call of God, interpreting all the wisdom,
patience, beauty, and love in that mighty labour of creation, and
saying, "Father, I adore Thee." Do you think that man, then, His last
crowning work of creation, is nothing to God? What should you say of one
who spent years and years, and sank uncounted capital, upon a great mass
of wonderfully contrived machinery, to produce some beautiful fabric of
beneficence to mankind, and when it was produced turned away and left it
all? You would call such a one a fool, and mad.

God made this world, and spent toil and industry in making the heart of
man, and keeping it conscious of Him, capable of loving Him. And do you
mean to tell me that God does not care for human love? It is impossible.
There is no God at all, or the Gospel is true. He does miss it when your
heart does not bend to Him. The supreme gladness we can give our Maker
is the simple, sincere adoration of our poor human hearts.

There is a picture that paints the idea of my text. It says, to those
who look at it, what I could not say in many paragraphs. A cottage
neglected, falling into ruin, is shown in the picture. In front of the
window tall thistles spring up, and long grass waves on the pathway,
leading to the door overgrown with moss. In front of that fast-closed
door a tall and stately figure stands, with a face that tells of toil
and long, weary waiting, and with a hand uplifted to knock. It is
Christ, the Son of God, seeking to get into our sinful hearts. Is it
true that there can be a man or woman who refuses to admit so fair a
guest, so great and good a friend? It must be true. "Behold, I stand at
the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will
come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me."

But you think you can justify yourself. You say to me, "I feel it were a
mad, foolish thing to refuse to admit to my own, if it be true, the
loving heart of God, and a thing altogether unjustifiable. You say He
comes and knocks at our hearts—that He calls and asks us to let Him in.
No; many have called at the door of my heart, but I never knew Christ to
call or knock. If ever He had, I think I should have let Him in." I
believe you speak the truth, but I am certain that Christ has been to
your heart.

Let me speak plainly to you. There may be various reasons why you have
failed to detect His presence. Perchance your life has not been so good
as even common morality would have made it, and now your heart is a very
dreary place, filled with painful memories. Perhaps you are always
outside, gadding about, and do not like to dwell alone in your heart and
think; and so when Christ knocks and calls He finds empty rooms; or if
even you are there you are not there alone, but you have filled its
chambers with a noisy, revelling company and din. The call has reached
you as a dim, half-heard, strange sound, which moved you half pleasantly
and half with pain. You turned in your heart and listened for an
instant, but there was something in the sound too painful, and you
plunged back again into revelry and mirth. You did not know that it was
God, the very heart of God, that had knocked and called.

Again, your life may have been very respectable, but very light and
frivolous, engrossed in earthly affairs; and Christ has come, and you
did not know it. For He comes in such simple, human guise. You remember
when He came on earth the poor Jews did not know Him for more than the
carpenter's son. He comes like that to you and me. He takes a human
hand, and with its fingers knocks, but all you see and recognise is the
human touch. You do not see the heart Divine that touches you through it
with an appealing thrill.

Thank God, there are so many good mothers in this world. Thank God for
the little children, and the lads and maidens here, whom a mother's
memory follows like a very angel, often after she herself has gone. You
remember that Sabbath evening custom when you and the little ones knelt
at your mother's knee, and she told you the stories of the Bible; and
the last one was always about the gentle Jesus, meek and mild, who came
to the world with such a great heart of love, who knew no sin at all,
who was so good to women and children and the very worst of
broken-hearted sinners, and whom men with hard hearts and cruel hands
took and crucified; oh, such a death of pain for _you_! till you could
almost see His face on the cross. And your mother's voice had got so low
and reverent that it felt as if some one else was in the room, and your
young child's heart grew so soft and loving to that Christ that died for
you. Yes, He was there. Did you take Him quite inside? Or if you took
Him in for a little while did you let Him go again, when your heart grew
colder? Oh, young men and maidens who had a mother like that, remember
her, and take that Christ into your hearts!

Some of you can remember a time when you had grown many years older, and
perhaps had memories you would not like your mother to know of. And God
struck you down with a great illness, and for a long time you were at
the point of death. But at last the crisis was past, and you woke out of
unconsciousness, brought back to life again, weak as a little child. All
the din and turmoil of your manhood's life seemed to have faded in the
distance, and once again you became as a little child. Do you remember
how you felt when you turned that corner between life and death?
Somehow, old memories came back to you—perhaps because your body was so
weak—the memory of old days, of the father and mother, and the church in
the country, and of all the things that were said and done. And then
there came a wish that many things in your later life had never been
done by you; a strange, solemn sense that there is a God; and into your
heart a feeling of repentance for the past, and a wish to do better in
the future. And you were so tired, and wished for a friend to speak to
you in these words: "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy
laden, and I will give you rest." Afterwards you got stronger and said,
"Perhaps it was only weakness." But I tell you it was the living, loving
Christ, seeking to get into your heart.

I cannot stop to enumerate the countless knocks and calls that come to
all of us, in those strange aspirations that come with the secret,
tender affections, the dreams of love and truth. For God's sake, never
be ashamed of them, and be true to the dreams of your youth. Do not
think that Christ is part of a creed only, or belongs only to church and
Sunday. No, Christ is in everything holy, everything pure, everything
loving, and everything that draws your heart. I would have you
understand that Christ works to get into your heart, and not into your
head. There is plenty of time for the latter after He has once secured
possession of your heart and life. Into the homeliest chamber of your
heart, too, not into a state apartment, opened only on occasions of
ceremony, He seeks to come, that He may stay with you and sup with you,
and be with you in your home. There are some people who think this would
be treating Him with very scanty respect, and so they think they must
take a nook of their heart, like a piece of consecrated ground, and keep
Him there, and only visit it on Sunday. No; Christ wants to come into
your life and mind. Take Him to your office, and consult Him about your
business; your affairs will not be managed with less skill and wisdom,
but perhaps more honourably. Take Him to the fireside, where you plan
your plans and dream your dreams, and make out a future for your little
boys. He loved little ones on earth, and do you think He has lost that
love in heaven?

Take Him into your heart to overcome the evil passions and habits, the
things you would be ashamed to own to the most loving earthly friend,
which you are fighting in God's name and cannot conquer by yourself. You
say, "Tell us how we can do it. He is so very good, we fain would have
Christ in our heart, but it seems so difficult when our heart is so
unworthy." No, it is so easy—and yet so difficult to describe in words.
The moment you have done it you wonder that you ever asked how it must
be done.

I can tell you some things like it. You know what it is for a great
grief to come into your heart, the first great disappointment in love,
in friendship or ambition. You did not see it enter with your eyes, but
you knew it had got in, for it changed everything, throwing a dark, cold
shadow over all your life. Some of you know what it is for a real, true
joy to get into your heart. Some of you, fathers and mothers, know what
it is for a very true friend to get there. You hardly know how it
happened, but one came right in to the inmost being of your life, and
ere you knew it, you would be nothing without him—without him loving
you. Love was all joy and happiness, and has stayed there ever since. It
has made you different; you have learned to love the things he loves,
and the love and knowledge have brought peace.

It is just like that when you take Christ into your heart. Go to the
Gospels, you who feel the want of a friend like that, and read what He
said to poor weeping men and women, till you feel the breath of His love
encircle you, till your heart goes out to Him, and you will be vexed to
grieve Him, and want to please Him; and you will think as He thinks, and
love men as He loves.

There are many, many things about the mysteries of our religion which I
do not understand. But this I say to you, before God: Beyond all this
world holds of pride, splendour, pleasure, and joy, to have taken that
real, living, holy Jesus Christ into your heart, to be your Saviour,
Counsellor, and Friend, your Divine Lord and Master, means blessedness
both here and hereafter.



II.

_THE DARK ENIGMA OF DEATH._

ST. JOHN xi.


This morning I ask your attention to the story that has been read in the
eleventh chapter of the Gospel of St. John.

The rulers of the Jews at Jerusalem had resolved on Christ's death, and
the mass of the people sympathised with them. The Master's life had been
threatened by a popular outburst. His work on earth was not yet done,
and so He withdrew into the country, to escape from the violence and
danger of Jerusalem. He went away to the Jordan, to the point, not very
far from Jerusalem, where John first began baptizing, and there He
remained in comparative seclusion. But people knew where He was.
Probably people in the surrounding districts gathered together to hear
Him teach; and possibly, as a very ingenious commentator has suggested,
Christ, reaping the harvest of John's prolonged teaching in this
district, succeeded in winning the faith of a great many of his hearers;
and so He was busy doing good and happy work, building up His kingdom on
the banks of the Jordan.

Meanwhile, sickness came to the home at Bethany, where most He felt
Himself at home during His wanderings in this world of ours. Lazarus was
stricken with a very dangerous illness, grew worse and worse, and at
last all hope was gone. Now, I should fancy that from the very first day
that it became evident that their brother was seriously ill, the hearts
of Mary and Martha longed to have Jesus come to them, if it was only to
be with them in their anxiety, and suspense, and watching. And the heart
of the sick man must have longed for that great Divine Friend of his to
be by his sick bed. Why did they not send for Him at once? I think there
is a very simple reason. They were not selfish, as we sometimes tend to
be in our sickness or in our sorrow. They thought about others as well
as about themselves. They remembered that for Jesus to come back to the
vicinity of Jerusalem was to risk His own life, and not even for the
safety of their brother could they bring themselves for a long time to
ask the beloved Master to run such a risk as that, and so they delayed
really till too late. In the extremity of their grief and despair they
sent a messenger to Jesus—not to ask Him to come: there, again, I read
that that was their meaning—they would not take it on themselves to ask
Him to imperil His life, but they could not resist just letting Him know
that their brother, whom Jesus so loved, was very sick. It is
exceedingly touching, that simple message, "Lord, behold, he whom Thou
lovest is sick." And they knew that it would say to Jesus, "Thou knowest
how much we would like Thee to come and recover him, and Thou knowest,
too, the last thing we would ask of Thee would be, out of favour and
kindness to us, to risk that life on which so much hangs—the kingdom of
God upon earth."

There was real danger in Christ's return to Jerusalem. He was conscious
of it, for you find that when He did make His way to Bethany He seems to
have taken care, as far as possible, to conceal the fact from the
inhabitants of Jerusalem. He came very quietly. He did not at first
enter into Bethany. He remained outside the precincts of the village. He
sent word secretly to Martha, so that not even Mary or the other persons
that were with them in the house knew of the fact. And then, again, He
sent Martha back, or Martha went back, to Mary, and, with somewhat
studied concealment, warned her of the Master's vicinity, so that when
she went out those who were with her fancied she was going to the grave.
I point all that out to you in order that you may see that it is not a
mere imagination or fancy, but that one of the great elements in
determining the conduct of the family at Bethany, and the action of
Christ, was that real hazard of His life, which He dared not needlessly
risk in perils at this time, since His time of toil on earth, His
daylight of labour, was not yet over and done.

When Jesus received the message He behaved in a seemingly strange
fashion. Apparently He just did nothing, but went on with His teaching
and preaching for two long days. Did He think how often anxious faces
would be at the door of that house in Bethany, peering along the road
that led to the home, looking for the figure that had so often trodden
that way, because His heart drew Him to that happy family circle? Did
Jesus know that Lazarus was dying? Did Jesus think that the hearts of
Mary and Martha were breaking? Oh, He had the most loving heart that
ever man had on earth, and yet He delayed two days before He set out for
that home of distress. Now, that fact is often presented in a somewhat
revolting fashion, and I think it is worth while just to diverge from my
main theme to remove the effect of such presentation if it weighs with
any of you. It is said that Jesus deliberately hung back for two days in
order to let Lazarus die. That is a mistake—a total mistake. Lazarus had
been already buried four days before Christ arrived. Now, suppose He had
lost no time; suppose He had set out at once, He would only have reached
Bethany two days earlier, and so, you see, Lazarus would have then
already been buried two days. The real fact is just this, that the
message was sent too late, and the sick man had died; and even if Christ
had gone at once, all the same He would have found him in the grave. But
none the less the story is so told as to shut us up to this conviction,
that it was planned, and purposed, and accepted in the will of God, and
in the will of Jesus, that Lazarus should be sick, and grow worse and
worse, and should sink and fail, and die and be buried. Indubitably
Jesus, with His knowledge, could, of His own action, have returned
earlier to have intervened and prevented the sickness ending fatally. He
was absent that Lazarus might die. When He spoke of the thing He told
His disciples, first of all, the perfect, complete truth. "This," said
Jesus, "is not to end in death's darkness. Its real goal and termination
is to be the glory of God, revealed in the glory of his Son, the Christ
on earth." That is the end of it; nevertheless, Lazarus must die. God's
glory is to find its consummation, not in rescuing Lazarus from the
grave, but in restoring him from death, and bringing him back into life.
It was part of the material Christ used in building up His kingdom—the
sickness and the death of Lazarus. He did delay, not in that seeming
revolting, cold-blooded fashion in which it is often portrayed. He did
deliberately hold His hand and delay; ay, and He held His loving human
heart too, and He let his friend sicken, and suffer pain, and die, and
He let the hearts of those two women that loved Him well-nigh break. He
did it.

Can we justify Him? Did the sisters divine truly when they sent that
message, "He whom Thou lovest is sick"? If He loved him, why did He
prolong the agony? Why did He not intervene? Why did He not at once
cancel death? Why those terrible four days of mourning, and gloom, and
darkness, and doubt? Now that is precisely the painful position of all
of us in this world of sin, and pain, and sickness, and parting, and
death. We think a good God made our world; we think a loving Father
holds our lives in His hands; and then we turn and look at this world,
we look at the terrible strifes and struggles, we look at the great
entail of sin that lies on our race, we see the ravages of disease, and
disaster, and violence, and cruelty, and see everywhere the last black
enigma of death and the grave, and this in spite of all our Christian
faith, learnt from the Bible; ay, learnt from God's Spirit speaking
often in the instincts of our heart and nature—we, too, are forced to
ask the question, "Lord, why art Thou not here? Why does our brother
die? If Thou wert here Thou couldest save him. Dost Thou love him? and
if Thou lovest, why are we sick? Why do we die?"

The inmates of that house at Bethany had received Jesus with a rare
degree of sympathetic feeling and heartfelt welcome. They entered into
the meaning of His teaching and preaching with a degree of fellowship
and quick response that moved His heart and soul even beyond the best of
His disciples. One of them at least—Mary, and almost certainly Lazarus
too—had come very near to that Divine Lord, in full understanding of all
His grandeur, His sinlessness, His mighty love Though yet all ignorant
of a great deal about His person, and about the fashion in which He was
to make His kingdom, with a genuine purity and ardour of attachment and
affection, they worshipped Him, they recognised the Divine within Him,
they hailed Him as the world's Christ and Saviour. Listen to Martha's
cry in her perplexity: "I cannot understand it all, but I know Thou art
the Christ come from God, the world's King, the world's Saviour. That I
know, that I hold to." It was that understanding, that sympathy in that
home, that made it so sweet a place of rest to Jesus. More than
that—manifestly the two sisters and brother lived a life of sweet human
affection. There was an atmosphere of tender love in their home, broken
by little storms of misunderstanding, as may be in the very best of our
imperfect human homes, but in reality a great depth of tenderness, and
clinging attachment, and loyal love to one another, bound the household
together. Oh, thank God for every such home on earth! That is the real
bulwark against all pessimism, the charter of our eternal birthrights.
Given the grandeur, the reality of human love, as, thank God, most of us
know it in our homes, that is the absolute guarantee that it came from
the creating hands of grander Love Divine.

Jesus was not merely loved by the family where He came to spend the
nights when He was working in Jerusalem, but He got to love them with a
very wonderful tenderness. You remember that chivalrous, impassioned
defence of Mary, when she was assailed by the coarse attacks of the
disciples. You catch it, too, in that message sent to Him—"He whom Thou
lovest." Ah, many an act of affection, many a look that was a caress,
many an appeal for sympathy that bespoke brotherhood, had passed between
Jesus of Nazareth and that Lazarus, else the sisters would not have
thought of saying, "He whom Thou lovest is sick."

And yet into that home so dear to the heart of Jesus, the Son of God,
into that home that had for its Friend the Man that was master of life
and of death, of calamity and prosperity, of all earthly powers and
forces, into that home there penetrated cruel, painful, deadly sickness.
The man Jesus loved lay there on his bed dying.

Now, I emphasize that, because there used to be a great deal of thinking
about God's relation to those that love Him and whom He loves—a great
deal of teaching in the Christian Church that counted itself most
orthodox, and which was, indeed, deadly heresy, coarse, materialistic,
despicable, misunderstanding the ideal grandeur of the Bible promises.
Some of you know the sort of teaching that used to prevail—the idea that
God's saints should be exceptionally favoured; the sun would shine on
their plot of corn, and it would not shine on the plot of corn of the
bad man; their ships would not sink at sea, their children would not
catch infectious diseases; God would pamper them, exempt them from
bearing their part in the world's great battle, with hardness and toil
of labour, with struggle, and attainment, and achievement. It came of a
very despicable conception of what a father can do for a child, as if
the best thing for a father to do for his son was to pet and indulge
him, and save him all bodily struggle and all difficulties, instead of
giving him a life of discipline. As if a general in the army would,
because of his faltering heart, refuse to let his son take the post of
danger; as if he would not rather wish for that son—ay, with a great
pang in his own soul—that he should be the bravest, the most daring, the
one most exposed to the deadliest hazard.

Ah, we have got to recognise that we whom God loves may be sick and
dying, and yet God does love us. Lazarus was loved by Jesus, yet he whom
Jesus loved was sick and dying. Ah, and there is a still more poisonous
difficulty in that materialistic, that worldly way of looking at God's
love; that horrible, revolting misjudgment that Christ condemned,
crushed with indignation when it confronted Him. "The men on whom the
tower of Siloam fell must have been sinners worse than us on whom it did
not fall." Never, never! The great government of the world is not made
up of patches and strokes of anger and outbursts of weak indulgence. The
world is God's great workshop, God's great battle-field. These have
their places. Here a storm of bullets falls, and brave and good men as
well as cowards fall before it. You mistake if you try to forestall
God's judgments, God's verdicts on the last great day of reckoning.

Still we have got the fact that Christ does not interpose to prevent
death, that Christ does not hinder those dearest to Him from bearing
their share of life's sicknesses and sufferings, that God Himself
suffers death to go on, apparently wielding an undisputed sway over
human existence.

What is the consequence of it? Well, the first consequences seem to be
all evil. You might look on the surface of life, and when you read
superficially the narrative of this chapter in St. John, it looks as if
mischief and evil came of the strange delay of God and of His Christ.
Look at the effect upon the disciples. Now here there is not enough told
to justify me in putting more positively to you the picture of their
inner hearts, but I am going to present—I dread that I may be guilty of
a want of charity, at all events of disproportion—but as I read this
chapter, and try to think myself into it, this is the conception I have:
Had these men known that Lazarus was very sick, they would not have
wished their Master to go back to try and save him. They were selfish
enough to have been rather glad that He was at a distance, to wish that
He should not know. When the message did come I think they were puzzled
and perplexed. Selfishly, they were rather pleased that He did not set
off to go. But, on the other hand—for, mind you, a selfish man
understands the dictates of love—they said to themselves, "It is not
quite like Him. Well, it is wise, it is prudent not to go, but it is a
little cowardly. Does He love Lazarus so much as we used to think?" Oh,
if I am right, what a painful thing, all these bad, poor, selfish
thoughts of the Divine heart in Jesus! all created, mark you, because
Jesus suffered the man whom He loved to be sick, and at last to die, and
did not go and check death, and drive the dark King of Terrors back.

Then Jesus says to them that He has resolved to go and visit Lazarus. It
is here I get the ground on which I stand in forecasting that
selfishness in them. Then they thought He was wrong. They did venture to
blurt out what was a censure: "He will go; He ought not to do it. What
are we to do who see with clearer eyes the pathway of prudence? To let
Him go and die? It was a total blunder, a mistake, but all the same we
cannot let Him go and die alone. Let us go and die with Him."

Oh, what a dearth of understanding of their Master, His love, His power,
His real character, created by the enigma of Christ's conduct, that He
had held His hand, that He had suffered His friend to be sick, that He
had permitted him to die!

Then come to the two sisters. Ah, what a struggle must have gone on in
their hearts, as hour after hour passed after the point had come when
Jesus should have been with them if He had listened to their message, if
He pitied their brother, His own beloved friend. What could the Master
mean? Did something hinder Him and prevent His coming? or was it the
danger to His life? Was there a little selfishness? or had they any
right to expect it? Either He is lacking in love, or else He is lacking
in power. What could it mean? And then, when at last the poor sick eyes
shut and their brother lay there dead, their hearts were like stones
within them. And the burial, following swiftly after in the East,
because decay begins so quickly there; and then the mourning and the
hired mourners, professional mourners, all around them, and these poor
women there saying in their hearts, "Surely, surely it need not have
been; certainly if the Master, who healed so many sick, had been here,
if He had come, if He knew, if He had been here all this horror, this
agony, this pain, might have been escaped."

So when Jesus did come, look at them, how they met Him. Martha goes away
out, and the first thing she says is just what they had said so often to
one another and to their own hearts: "O Master, if Thou hadst only been
here our brother had not died." And then the spirit of the woman told
her that perhaps she had hurt Jesus' feelings, that perhaps He was not
to blame, that perhaps there was some explanation, though she could not
see it, and so, in her blundering way—for she had not the fine tact that
was in Mary—she tried to mend it, and only made it worse by volunteering
that she did believe in Him after all.

The soul of Christ felt the intended love, and shuddered at that
tremendous distance of sympathy and understanding. "You believe in Me."
He could not hold it in. "Thy brother shall rise again." And poor Martha
was unable to rise to the height of Christ's meaning. "Oh, yes, Lord, I
know, at the great resurrection. Yes, he will rise again." Then comes
Jesus' declaration, "I am the Resurrection and the Life. The man that
lives in Me, in whom I live, has in Me a deathless life. I am here
to-day to prove that." That was what He meant, but He was far away above
her. The poor heart in her had lost Him. She was dazed, and so she just
fell back upon the one thing that she was quite sure of, even if He had
not been quite kind to her, or even if His power was limited. "Yes, yes,
Master, I know Thou art the Christ, the Son of God, come into this world
to be its Saviour and its King." And then, perhaps, with a sort of sense
that Mary could understand the Master better, could read His meaning and
tell it to her, she slipped away, and she found her sister, and
whispered in her ear, "The Master is come, and asks for thee." Then Mary
went away to meet Him too.

It is much harder to read what was in that sweet heart of Mary. I have
no doubt that she, too, had fought a battle with doubt. The story seems
to show that she had attained to greater faith than Martha. She had been
pained, but still there was a divining instinct in her, like the
divining instinct that warned her, when all the disciples were blind to
it, that He was going to die, and she went and anointed Him to His
burial; a divining instinct in her that somehow the cloud was going to
be rolled away. And she went out and said simply, "Lord, if Thou hadst
been here our brother had not died." And then she was too wise to say
one word more. With her finer tact, with her deeper understanding, she
knew that was all she should say. But it was like saying, "There is
perplexity in this visitation, in Thy delay, in my brother's death; Thou
couldst have made it different if Thou hadst seen it well to be here. I
cannot understand the right and the love of it." It was a question. It
did say, "Master, what art Thou going to do?" And Christ felt it was. As
she broke out and burst into tears, He lost control and wept with her.

But there were others—the Jews, the enemies of Christ; men who hated
Him, men who disbelieved in Him, men who grudged Him all His glory and
the love He had won on the earth. They had hurried out—some of them with
a degree of human compassion—to that home of bereavement. It was known
as the home of Christ, and I think some of them had come with greater
pleasure that Lazarus had died. What they said when they saw Him weep
betrays their mood. "This is He who professed to be able to open the
eyes of the blind and heal all sicknesses. How, then, is it that He
allows His dearest friend on earth to be sick, and die, and be buried?
He has lost His power, if He ever had it." They were rejoicing over His
seeming defeat. They had no love for Him, and so had no faith in Him.

Is not that true of our world to-day? The best of you, Christians, when
death comes to your own homes, do you manage to sing the songs of
triumph right away? Well, you are very wonderful saints if you do. If
you do not, perhaps you say, "If God is in this world, how comes that
dark enigma of death?"

And others of you grip hold of your faith, but yet your heart cries out
against it. You believe that God is good, but has He been quite good to
you? Like Martha, you feel as if you had some doubt; you feel bound in
your prayers; you say, "O God, I do not mean to reproach Thee;" weak,
sinful if you will, yet the sign of a true follower of the Christ.

And then the enemies of Christ, the worldlings all about in this earth
of ours, as they look upon death's ravages, they are saying, "If there
were a God, if there were a Father, if there were a great heart that
could love, why does not He show it?" Now, I said to you that at first
it looks as if nothing but evil came of God's delay to interpose against
death; but when you look a little deeper I think you begin to discover
an infinitely greater good and benefit come out of that evil.

I must very briefly, very rapidly, trace to you in the story, and you
can parallel it in the life of yourselves, that discipline of goodness
there is in God's refraining from checking sickness and death. Christ
said, the end of it is first of all death, but that is not the
termination. Through death this sickness, this struggle of doubt and
faith, should end in the glory of God. He meant this: In the preparation
of His life and His death the death and resurrection of Lazarus held a
central position. It was the turning-point, the thing that determined
His crucifixion on Calvary. That tremendous miracle compelled the rulers
of Jerusalem to resolve on and carry out His death. That miracle of
Lazarus' resurrection gave to the faith of the disciples and of Christ's
followers a strength of clinging attachment that carried them through
the eclipse of their belief when they saw Him die on Calvary.

Now, what would you say? Was it cruel of Christ to allow His friend
Lazarus, His dear friends Mary and Martha, to go through that period of
suspense, of anxiety, of sickness, of death, and of the grave, that they
might do one of the great deeds in bringing in the world's Redeemer? Oh,
men and women, if God be wise, and if God be great, then must it not be
that somehow or other the structure of this world is the best for God's
end, and our tears, and partings, and calamities but incidents in the
grand campaign that shall end in the resplendent glory of heaven? Yes,
for the glory of God, and for the sake of others, for the sake of the
disciples, for the sake of the world, says Christ, I have suffered My
friend Lazarus to die.

"Ah," you say, "you have still got to show God's goodness and kindness
to me individually. My death may be for God's glory, it may be for the
good of others; but how about me and those who mourn?" Well, now, look
at it. You must get to the end of the story before you venture to judge
the measure, the worth, of God's goodness. After all, was that period of
sickness and death unmitigated gloom, and horror, and agony? Oh, I put
it to you, men and women, who have passed through it, watching by the
death of dear father or mother that loved the Lord and loved you, and
whom you loved—dark, and sore, and painful enough at the time; but oh,
if I called you to speak out, would you not say it was one of the most
sacred periods of your life—the unspeakable tenderness, the sweet
clinging love, the untiring service, the grateful responses, the
sacredness that came into life? Ay, and when the tie was snapped, the
new tenderness that you gave to the friends that are left, the new
pledge binding you to heaven, and to hope for it, and long for it—death
is not all an evil to our eyes. Death cannot ultimately be an evil,
since it is universal—the consummation, climax, crown of every human
life. Ah, if we had the grander majesty of soul to look at it from God's
altitude, we should call death, not a defeat, but a victory, a triumph.
I think sometimes that if death did not end these lives of ours, how
weary they would get. Think of it—to live on for ever in the sordidness,
in the littleness, in the struggle, the pain, the sin of this life of
ours. Oh, we need that angel of death to come in, and now and then stir
the pool of our family life, that there may be healing in it, that there
may be blessing in it! Death, holding the hand of God through it, to
those that stand by and see the sweetness of human love, the triumph of
faith celestial, has a grandeur in it, like Christ's death on the cross;
it hides out of sight of the people the ghastly, the doubt-creating
features and elements of its external impediment—death becomes God's
minister. It is going home to one's Father.

Yes, but you want the guarantee that death is not the end, and that day
it was right and lawful for Christ to give it, to anticipate the last
great day, when in one unbroken army, radiant and resplendent, shining
like jewels in a crown, He shall bring from the dark grave all that
loved Him, fought for Him, and were loyal to Him on the road, and went
down into the dark waters singly, one by one, in circumstances of
ignominy often, and yet dying with Christ within them, the Resurrection
and the Life.

Ah, that great, grand vindication of God, and interpretation of this
world's enigma was made clear that day when Christ called Lazarus back,
and gave him alive to his sisters in the sight of His doubting
disciples, in the sight of those sneering enemies. And what I like to
think as best of all and most comforting of all is this, that Christ did
that deed of love and goodness to hearts that so misunderstood Him, were
so ignorant of His glory, denied and disbelieved so much of His claims,
were then and there so despairing, so hopeless, that perhaps it was only
in one heart, the heart of Mary, there was hope or faith like a grain of
mustard-seed. Yet He did it. Why? He whom He loved died, and they whom
He loved mourned. It was not that they loved Him; it was that He loved
them.

Ah, when I read sneers at the simple Evangelical Gospel that says, "Put
away all thoughts of earning heaven; your good works are rags"—true
enough, true enough—the sneers are mistaken. It is a very grand Gospel
that, for what it says is this, "There is hope, salvation from sin, life
eternal, for you and for me, not for anything in us, nor for anything we
can do, even if we did the best we could. We hold the hope and
confidence of redemption, resurrection, in our hearts, because the God
that made us loves us;" and so—as I read lately in a recently published
book, amid much that I think is foolish, what yet struck me as
singularly tender and true—"When in the hour of death we cry, 'Good
Lord, deliver us,' we might stop and leave out the 'deliver us.' It is
quite enough if we are dying in the arms of a God that is good."



III.

_THE STORY OF DORCAS._

ACTS ix. 36-43.


To a man who believes in a living, personal God the world's history is
the record of God's actions. The Bible story is an account of an
exceptional period in the Divine activity, during which God's dealings
with men are peculiarly significant; as it were more immediate, frank,
and expressive, more true to His inmost character. Then, traits found
utterance that in general are mute. Repression gave way to expression.
The incidents in this expression are out of the common, look marvellous;
we call them miracles. Such things do not happen to us, but we hold they
happened for us. They are, so to say, a personal explanation on God's
part, at once a disclaimer and a declaration. He is not altogether to be
judged by the normal course of events. His feelings do not quite answer
to appearances. His heart does not correspond entirely to His hand. He
is more than His deeds. Measure Him by these, and you mistake Him,
because for the most part He acts under restraint. His love may be much
greater than His language, His kindness warmer than His conduct.
Reticence is often imposed on affection. You do not always tell your
child all the praise you might express, and admiration you feel. When he
has entered the struggle of school-life you look on while he battles
with a hard task, till his weariness pains you, but you hold back and do
not help him. It may be my lot to know of a friend contending against
unjust accusation, well-nigh crushed, and I may not stand by him,
knowing my aid would harm, not help, though at the risk of his
misunderstanding me. God would have us know, as we with perplexity look
to His silent heaven out of our sin and sorrow, that spite of strange
seeming, His heart is love. We do not fare as our Father fain would have
us fare. Things are not as He would wish them. There is a discrepancy
between the desires of His heart and the doings of His hand. He cannot
quite trust us as He would. There is an obstacle; we should be better
off but for that. We do right to say, with Martha, "Lord, if Thou hadst
been here my brother had not died." And that we may be sure it is so,
once He broke through His reticence; He _was_ here; He gave His heart
full play, and treated men as He always feels towards them. Their
sicknesses were healed, their sins forgiven; the Infinite Love laid soft
hands on their pain; the Eternal Pity whispered peace in their souls.
Now we can look on Christ and say we know what God is. But for
hindrances, we can say, He would always act so. Spite of our fortunes,
that is how He feels. At length the barrier will be overthrown, and He
will treat me so likewise.

This is the practical use we are to make of such stories of Scripture as
Dorcas's restoration from death. It is a marvel—what, precisely, we know
not. But, for this woman God did a splendid and wonderful act of love,
that dispelled the eclipse of death in a sunshine of endless security.
What happened to her happens not to us. But God's heart is unchanged. If
you be like her, such another, the Divine regard round you in life and
in death is as tender and strong as it was about her.

In the important seaport town of Joppa there were gathered together some
believers in Jesus. Among them was a woman named Tabitha (Heb.), or
Dorcas (Gr.). The name signifies Gazelle, or Fawn. It was one of those
pet names given to woman, a name of beauty, though the bearer of it may
have been plain enough. Not much is told about her, but what is told is
of such a kind that we may conjecture more. Little things have a
significance in combination. Thus we can fill in the meagre outline that
is given us, till the picture grows into completeness.

Dorcas was a lone woman. Of husband or of children we hear nothing.
Unlike those others with whom she is linked in Bible story as
fellow-sharers in the miracle of restoration to life—unlike Lazarus,
unlike the daughter of Jairus or the widow's son at Nain—we read in her
case of no loving relatives who soothed her dying bed and wept when she
was gone. She stands alone in the world—one of those women of whom we
speak as of persons to be pitied, unhappy; with a woman's natural hopes
and occupations, in which she finds rest for her instincts, denied or
blighted.

Dorcas is a forlorn figure, stricken by grief and woe. We feel inclined
to turn away from such. The bleak, cold winds that blow across the
lonely spaces where they find their planting seem to chill our joy. We
forget that it is not thorns alone which grow in spots that we deem
waste; not seldom God's fairest flowers and fruits spring up on what we
count barren and forsaken ground. In Dorcas, we may well believe, there
was nothing woe-begone or repellent; it is as pleasant, amiable, and
beloved that we think of her. The tree of her life had been stricken by
the lightning; its own leaves and branches stripped; but it did not
remain a bare and unsightly stump, naked and alone. Lichens and clinging
plants had gathered at its roots, and twined about its stem, and clothed
it with a new verdure and beauty.

All this might have been so different. Dorcas might have succumbed to
sorrow, and amid the ruins of her shattered home she might have flung
herself on the ground in despair. She might have been moping and
repining, selfishly nursing her grief, embittered, envious, and grudging
to others their joy. God pity those who are; it is often that the milk
of human kindness has turned sour: the fault is of misfortune. She might
have made herself a burden to all around, held the world a debtor, and
herself a wronged creditor. She might have insisted on being
miserable—as if a long face made a lighter heart. Some in her position
act so. They resent the smiles of others, and hold that if weeping is
their portion, then all should weep. Others hide under a smiling face a
sad heart, and laugh with you. Dorcas did none of these things. She set
herself to be of use, to give aid and help to others. Ah! I think it
sometimes happens that God removes the home of a woman's love, breaks
down its walls, and unroofs it before the storm, in order that the love
may go out to embrace a larger family. The hearts of some women are made
to shelter and console all homeless ones. Their love takes wings, and
flies through the earth in search for the desolate and afflicted. It
does not need the ties of home, of husband and children, to form a
loving, useful, warm-hearted woman.

How long had Dorcas been such a woman as the story tells of? We cannot
say. Perhaps she was humbly good and sensible, and had borne her sorrows
bravely from the first, an unconscious follower of Jesus. Perhaps she
was once soured, bitter, and woe-begone, till she heard of the great
Sorrow-bearer, and learnt from Him to make her sorrow an offering, and
to use her knowledge of sadness to lighten others' woe. For she was "a
disciple." That means just one who looks how Christ went about the
world, and sets to to go likewise.

Having made up her mind to do good, what could she do? Nothing much. She
could not preach; she could not be an apostle, and do great deeds of
healing. She was too poor, too stupid, too uninfluential to start a
mission or build a hospital. But she could darn, and stitch, and plan
garments for widows—and how many such does not the life of a seafaring
town create! She could speak kind words and do good turns, go to
meeting, and be a quiet, gentle, sweet, helpful woman. That she could
be, nothing more; and that she was. Why should she be more? That is what
God means a good woman to be.

A homely, unromantic, dull, unattractive life, you say; good, but
uninteresting. So, perhaps, the neighbours said. So we all go on
thinking and saying, while the angels laugh at our folly. As if God did
not often conceal under the hardest, coarsest shells and husks the
silkiest of downy lining and the very sweetest of fruit-kernels. Yes,
outside it looked a stripped, bare, monotonous life. But within there
was a whole world of beauty and pathos. God knew the tender thoughts of
the dead; the rising of old cravings that woke and called once more for
buried loves; the silent, speechless prayers in lonely eventides. He
knew of memories that were tears to her, but turned to warmth and cheer
for others; of very kindly thoughts and gentle love woven and sown into
those garments. No, the neighbours did not see all this. But God's eyes
looked, and saw a very garden of the Lord for beauty and fragrance. I
know it must have been so, from the love her way of doing kindness won.
Merely to do good is not enough to get love; one must be good. It is
wonderful how some people do endless good, and yet none cares for them.
Dorcas was not a machine, actively good because actively wound up.
People do not weep such tears as fell when she died for the loss of a
sewing-machine, useful though such might be, and working for nothing.
Nor was she a woman with a mission, bustling, important, loud-voiced;
useful and needed such may be, respected, but not quite loved. Nor was
she a lady patroness, looking down on those upon whom she showered her
benefits. Those who work like Dorcas do not work of mechanical duty, nor
for fuss of fame, nor for thanks. It is but little likely that thanks
were given her. People would say, "She has nothing else to do;" "She has
no family to look after;" "She has plenty of time on her hands;" "It's
almost a kindness to take her sewing;" "She had sooner work than not."
Exactly, that was it. She was nothing more than a kindly,
humble-hearted, womanly soul, that feared God and loved men, and did
good in solid ways; one whose life made other women glad that she was
born. What more would you have her be? Are you sure you understand what
that was?

She became ill. She did not tell how ill she felt, but lay lone and
sick. She would not burden others with her pain, and to die she did not
fear. Her neighbours found it out and nursed her tenderly, but she died.
Then there was nothing to do but reverently to lay her out, to put
flowers on her breast and in her hands; it was all the kindness they
could do now; how they wished they had done more when she was alive!
Then they thought what to do next. When one is dead there is so little
you can do, and yet you want to do so much. Then some one thought of
Peter. The Apostle was only twelve miles off. He will surely come to see
poor Dorcas once again, and show honour to her memory. And so the little
groups of busy, tearful talkers united in one resolve to send for Peter.
They would like him to be with them, to tell him all their trouble and
sorrow, and pour into his sympathetic ears an eager chronicle of
Dorcas's holy deeds. It is wonderful how much good your neighbours know
to tell of you when you are dead, and how much evil while you are still
alive.

This was the reason why they sent for Peter; not that they expected him
to restore the dead to life. Had they not laid the dead body of their
benefactress out, and washed and prepared it for burial? Why should they
expect a miracle on her behalf? Stephen and James had trodden their
martyr path, and no voice from heaven had called them back to leadership
and witness-bearing in the Church. What should they expect for Dorcas
from the Apostle beyond his sorrowful compassion?

Peter came. He found the room full of weeping women, telling of her
goodness, of her clever fingers; showing him _on them_ (_middle voice_)
the dresses and petticoats she had made. How many they seemed when
gathered together in that little room! All the results of the toil of
her busy hands, scattered through the town, now gathered in the chamber
of death to tell of her goodness after she was gone. Herself, she did
not know the whole. "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord; for their
works do follow them."

We die and are not much missed. The world rolls on. Yet none is quite
unwept, unnoticed. There are two sets of people who will mourn. There
are those who loved you and found their joy in ministering to you; a
mother, a lover: good or bad you may have been, but they will weep over
your grave. Or, in heaven, they smile; in smiles or tears they love. And
there are those you loved, on whose souls are the marks of your
kindness, warmth, help, and cheer; they will miss you.

How came Peter to conceive the hope of recovering Dorcas to life? It was
not through the message of an angel, or the narrative would tell us of
it; nor was it through a special communication of the Spirit, or the
sacred history would record it, as the habit of the Bible is. It seems
to have been in an ordinary way, though under the Spirit's guidance. A
little thing in Peter's doings suggests that he followed the train of an
old memory, that he was dominated and inspired by a bygone incident.
Amid those weeping women his heart was moved: he recalled an unforgotten
scene. He remembered an old man coming to the Master with a white,
anxious face and quivering lips, to plead for his sick child. He
remembered their hurrying steps, and the eager impatience of the
stricken father as they turned their faces to his house; the messenger
bringing the sad tidings "dead;" the Master's face lighting up with a
quiet, strange resolution as He said, "She is not dead;" and then how He
put them all out and restored the maiden to her parents. Why should he
not ask the Master now? He put them all out. He prayed. Confidence
filled his heart. He summoned the dead woman from the shadow-land. She
opened her eyes. To the weeping, mourning, loving women he gave her
again—alive from the dead!

It was a tremendous deed of wonder and glory. It was done on a lonely,
simple, humble woman. Why on her? Why not on James or Stephen? I cannot
tell, for certain. God knows. His reasons are other than our thoughts.
But I see this as possibly a cause: You observe that two narratives are
conjoined. Dorcas, for her alms-deeds, receives this miracle of
resurrection; while, for alms-deeds, Cornelius is acknowledged in a
miracle also. Nowhere else in the Acts of the Apostles are alms-deeds
made so prominent. In each story, and in the conjunction, I see design.
God meant to set a mark of honour on the love that was displayed. I
think He would guard the Church against undue estimation of preaching,
apostles, miracle-working, deeds of show, gifts; and teach us that
beyond all is love. So He singles out not an apostle, not a martyr, but
this gentle, kind, womanly life, and crowns it with grandeur and glory,
makes it conqueror of death, encircles it with a halo of most wonderful,
Divine, loving care. Not preaching, not angel speech, not
mountain-removing faith, but love is the centre. God judges differently
from us. We worship the great leaders, orators, reformers, creed-makers;
our statistics are of Churches, prayers, and preachers. God reckons all
love for Himself and man as vaster, wider, and grander. Ah! while we
think not of it, in unseen corners, in hidden nooks, He sees and garners
a harvest of love and lowly service that shall be the beauty and glory
of heaven. Let us think as God thinks. Let us learn to worship not
gifts, but graces, not greatness, but goodness only. Bend your knee to
such a woman with a reverence you will yield to no king, to no genius,
however Godlike; and bend it, for you bend it to Christ. Humble, lonely,
simple Christian souls, God cares for you as for her, if you are like
her. Patiently toil on; God feels towards you as towards her. Go forward
to death, sure that He will gather your life with equal care, not back
into earth's struggle, but up into heaven's glory.



IV.

_UNFULFILLED CHRISTIAN WORK._

"And unto the angel of the Church in Sardis write; These things
saith He that hath the seven Spirits of God, and the seven stars; I
know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead.
Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready
to die: for I have not found thy works perfect before God."—REV.
iii. 1, 2.

Reading the last clause a little more literally will more fully bring
out the meaning: "For I have found no works of thine fulfilled
before My God."—R.V.


The passage forms a picture—God on His throne, Christ by His side, the
work of the Churches on earth travelling up to God, and presenting
itself before the throne Divine, and Christ, as the Churches pass in
procession, judging them. The religious activity of the Church in Sardis
swept by before God's throne, under Christ's eyes, and as it passed He
saw that not one single task undertaken by that Church was done fully;
everything was half-done, and therefore worthless. It was not that the
church was doing nothing, but it was doing nothing worth doing. These
were the facts. Christ's judgment on the facts is this: "Thou hast a
name that thou livest, and art dead." A Church all whose labours are but
half done is dead. Yet there were good men and women in the congregation
at Sardis. If you read on you find this said by Christ: "Thou hast a few
names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments."

So, then, a Church may be dead though it contains living members. How
can that be? A Church is not a mere number of individuals added to one
another; something results from that combination of separate
individuals; something very different, with fresh powers and added
responsibilities, rises out of grouping together a number of individual
Christians, that is a Church. A Church, a congregation (it is in that
sense I use the word "Church" all through this discourse), has an
individuality of its own; a Church has a character of its own; a Church
has a spirit of its own; a Church has capacities of its own; a Church
can do what no individual nor any mere number of individuals added
together can do; a Church, as soon as it is constituted, creates a new
kind of life, a new kind of being, a new kind of activities. No
individual Christian, however good he may be, can out of himself make
Christian fellowship, Christian devotion, Christian labour and
co-operation, all that social life which springs from the union of
severed individuals; no separate Christian, nor any number of separate
Christians, can produce that. A Church, therefore, is something distinct
from the individual members of whom it is built. A house is not a
thousand bricks; it is something quite different, something made not
merely by the presence of the bricks, but by their being built together.
Each separate element of the building, when united, is able to do its
share in the great work that none of them, or any member of them, could
do without that combination which forms the edifice. A Church, a
congregation, has its own character. Each provincial town in England has
a character of its own; and an intelligent man, with quick sympathies,
recognises the difference of spirit when he enters a town from that
which was prevalent in the town he left. One is Radical, one is very
Materialistic; one is full of poetry, and imagination, and literature;
and the individual residing in the town is affected by the general
spirit of that town. Every school has a character of its own, a spirit
of its own; not that each boy in the school is just modelled on that
type, but to a large extent each individual pupil is affected by the
spirit of the school. The spirit of the school exists in the boys that
dominate it. It is the same with Churches. In one congregation you are
conscious of warmth, and enthusiasm, and friendliness, and love; in
another congregation you are conscious of stiffness, and a rigid
propriety, and distance, and coldness, and artificiality. In one Church
you are conscious of a large, and liberal, and generous spirit; in
another Church you are conscious of factions, fighting, and meanness and
stinginess. That is a fact; you have felt it. A mere stranger entering
the building on a Sunday morning feels it; it is there, there in the
very faces of the people as they sit in their pews, there in the
minister as he stands in the pulpit. A public speaker said to me this
last week, "I may come with my address to a weekday meeting, but it all
depends upon the spirit and mood of the meeting; it is one thing in one
place, and another in another;" and if you have ever tried to speak in a
Church or at a meeting you will have found it to be so. There may be a
dozen men present in that meeting whose spirit is all that you may want,
but they cannot make the result; the general result of it is determined
by the mass. So it may come to pass that in a congregation there may be
not a few individual members who are warm, living, earnest servants of
Jesus Christ; but their goodness is not of the dominating kind; they
have piety, but they lack manly power; they have good feeling and good
intentions, but they have not character; they cannot command the whole;
they cannot give their spirit to the mass of men; they just survive, but
they cannot take the offensive; they have need of protection. They live
themselves, but do not live half so strongly or half so healthily as
they would in a congregation which was warm to the very tips of its
fingers and the fringes of its garments; they are living, but the Church
is dead.

What is the life of a Church? The life of a Church is loving loyalty to
Jesus Christ, present more or less in the actual human heart of all the
members; an inner, hidden thing, that you cannot weigh in a balance,
that you cannot set down in figures in an annual report, that you cannot
exhibit to a non-believer or a worldling, but the greatest, the most
powerful force in all our world.

The life of a Church is a living, real presence of Jesus Christ, as a
daily influence on the conduct, the thoughts, the words, the deeds of
all the members of that Church. The life of a Church is the living
presence of Jesus Christ in every committee of management, in every
meeting of Sunday-school teachers, in every social gathering of the
congregation; a living loyalty and devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ,
born out of a grateful certainty that He died to save us, born out of a
grand sympathy with Him, and under the belief that He is willing to save
all the men and women and all the little children who are round about
us. That is the living life of a Church, and nothing else is. You may
have a perfect orthodoxy, and death; you may have great activity, and
yet you may have death. Nothing is the life of a Church but actual
living loyalty and love to the real living Lord of the Church, Jesus
Christ.

Christ stands at the right hand of God, judging the Churches. He judges
them by their works. But the life of a Church is not a thing of the
hands or of the tongue; it is a thing of the heart. At the same time
Christ has to make His judgment just; He has to go upon visible facts,
and He can safely proceed upon the Church's work. Wherever there is life
it cannot be still; it works, it moves, it beats, it becomes warmed; it
must come out. If a Church has no works it has no life. What are those
works which are the visible signs of a living Church? They are these: No
dry, spasmodic zeal for orthodoxy when some heresy crops up which makes
a public sensation; no straight, rigid propriety, and fineness of
outward form, and æsthetic culture of ceremonial. The life that is
loving loyalty to Christ, present in the heart of every individual
member of a congregation, comes out in this way: it makes hearty singing
on a Sunday. Even a man who has no musical voice, and who is a little
weary, cannot help singing when his heart is stirred, even if he stops
short in case he should make discord to his neighbours. It is all
nonsense to say that people have grateful hearts to Christ when they sit
with shut mouths to Christ's praise. I know well that habit has a great
deal to do with it. It is the way of some Churches to sing heartily, and
it is the way of some other Churches to let the choir do the singing;
and I know, therefore, that you must not too absolutely take such a test
as a standard by which you will judge whether or not there is a living
warmth, and enjoyment, and cheering in the service and in the
congregation. I believe all that, nevertheless I have seen the most
stiff and silent congregation roused to sing when their hearts were
aroused. Such silence is a bad habit. And how about the prayers? Men
will not merely listen to the words, and will not criticise a man when
he prays; men will be reverent; men will, by their very attitude, make
it felt that souls are face to face with God. Men will not be sitting
finding fault with all the blurs and blemishes that there are in the
services (which there must be in every human service) when their hearts
are being fed, and when their souls are going out to God. There will be
no lack of Sunday-school teachers; and the Sunday-school teachers in
such a Church will not do their work in a listless and negligent way,
and fail in keeping their appointments and engagements, but will do it
as if it were a pleasure. It is not the blame of Sunday-school teachers
in a dead Church if they are teachers of that sort; it is the blame of
the dead Church. How can they keep alive? Shall we put the penalty upon
those who are partially living? No; it is the great mass of death, and
decay, and coldness which is to blame. Let us visit the sins on the
guilty parties.

A living Church will show its life in hearty, generous liberality to
every good cause. A living Church will show its life by bravery and
courage in taking up new responsibilities that may offer themselves, and
working them most heartily. A living Church is living, not because it
does one or all of these things, but because it loves loyalty to the
Lord Jesus, who died for it, and feels that goodness and holiness are
the grandest things in the world, and is eager to have all the children
taught to love the Lord Jesus, and all the young people who are going
out amid the temptations of life strengthened and helped to withstand
them, and old people whose lives are embittered when a disaster comes
upon them made tender, and soft, and submissive, by the life of Christ
in that Church and among their Christian neighbours. Yes, the life of a
Church is not a mere liking for what Christ loves, and a wish to please
Him, but real life and real love to Christ will come out, not in
correctness of creed, but in life and in work. It is an awful thing when
a Church is dead, with all the children in it gathering to go to a
Church which is cold, and to a dragging service, and to spiritless
singing, and to melancholy prayer, and to a dry preaching. Ay, I have
seen children who hated religion, because their parents, as I believe,
were living in a dead Church. I have often said, "Cut your connection
with such a Church; go rather to another denomination, which has life."
I venture to say that a father who loves his child will sacrifice
anything in order that that child may have pleasant and attractive views
of religion. But shall the child's first idea of religion come to him in
the shape of a crippled and broken-down failure? Fathers and mothers are
absolutely bound thus to promote the spiritual interests of their
children; it is worth more than anything else that is done for them; and
I say that a Church which is gathering those young people around it, and
keeping them from more dangerous places, and leading them to have it in
their hearts to come and sit down with Christian people, is doing more
than all the world will ever do. It is worth taking a great deal of
trouble to belong to a living Church, and it is the absolute duty of
every member of every Church to do all he can not merely to make himself
alive, but to make the whole Church full of warm, living life.

When a Church is dead, or only half alive, the defect shows itself
specifically and certainly in this manner: The Church's work is only
half done, and can only half be fulfilled, when only a portion of its
members fulfil their allotted task to their Master. If, in a Church
which numbers five hundred, only fifty are doing the utmost they can do,
the Church's measure of work will not be fulfilled before the
judgment-seat of God. Fifty individuals cannot do what it takes five
hundred to do. A half done work, how it is spoiled! The army were
defending the frontier bravely and successfully; but one cowardly
regiment gave way, and the ranks were broken, and all the bravery, and
the blood, and the death of the brave men were lost—lost by the
cowardice. The work of a Church that is wearily done, in its life and
extent, by a few living men and women in it, is poorly done; they do it
with such a struggle; they are so weary and worn out; they have not
pleasure, they have not enthusiasm, in doing it. How can they have? Oh,
it is hard when a few men and women have to do all the teaching, and all
the visiting, and all the work at the meetings! it spoils their work; it
is not fair play. I appeal to you to determine whether I speak truly or
not. One man cannot do another man's work. One link of a chain cannot do
duty for another link, and if the one goes, sometimes the chain is worth
nothing at all. The work of a dead or half-dead Church stands before
God's judgment-seat unfulfilled. How can it tell on the careless? how
can it tell on the worldly? Do you think that they will be just, and
say, "Ah, look at what the fifty are doing"? No, you may be quite sure
that they will look at the deficiency of the four hundred and fifty, and
say, "Is this a Church of Christ?" Who blames them?

A living Church must work, and it must work on, and it must send life
through every part and fragment of its whole frame, or else it has begun
to die. It is not a small thing, of no concern, if some members of a
Church are doing nothing by being idle. The work that a Church has to do
is the creation of living Christian character, and of the conviction
that being in Church on Sunday and belonging to a congregation make a
man a kinder brother, or a more loving father or husband, and make a
woman a better mother or a more kindly neighbour. That is the best work
a Church can do, and that does not come to a man through a dead Church.
A living Church must be making itself felt all around in the world
outside by work of that kind; and I say that it is not a matter of no
consequence if some members of a Church are not receiving and not
transmitting that warmth and activity. It is not a small matter if one
organ of my body be dying, be passing into mortification; it means death
to the whole body, and I must cut it off unless life can be brought back
again into it. It is the very law of life, as God has made it, that
everything which has life in it must be working; it cannot stop. If your
heart stops it is death; nothing else can make it stop but death. If any
organ in your body is always receiving, but giving nothing, and not
sending out what it gets, improved, to the rest, it means diseased life,
it means death. Does the stomach receive its daily food to keep it to
itself, as we so often receive the prayers and sermons in a Church? No;
as soon as the feeding is done the hard work begins; the stomach gives
it to the blood, and what does the blood do? As the great carrier of the
system, it delivers it here and there—here a little to this muscle,
there to that bone, there to the brain, and all through the body. And
what the muscles and the other parts have received do they keep? No; if
the various portions of the body did not give out what they receive they
would get choked; it would be death by surfeit; they must work. And so
the circle of life goes round; stop it at any one point, and you spoil
the whole circle. If the blood-vessels do not do their work, if the
muscles do not do their work, and so on throughout the entire system, it
means this, that that body is not healthy; it means death to the whole
frame. A business man said to me yesterday, "As soon as a man ceases
pushing his business, and does not endeavour to extend it, it falls
off." He does not want actually to increase it, but he must adopt that
plan to keep it up to its present mark. The Church, alas! has
not been willing to increase its work, desiring to take on other
responsibilities; it does not say, "I cannot rest while people are cold
and not interested in doing the Church's work, not bent upon bringing in
sinners, and bringing children into the Sunday-schools to be taught to
love and reverence religion, and causing people whose life is sour and
bitter to be soothed and comforted."

What I have been pressing upon you is the law of life. Is it a hard law?
No, it is a kind law. That is how God rewards you for what you have
done; He gives you more work to do. In reading the parable of the men to
whom it was assigned to rule over the cities did you ever mark how they
were rewarded? Here is a man who has actively and effectively used ten
talents. How does his lord reward him—by giving him a sinecure? No; he
says, "You shall be ruler over ten cities;" and in the same way the man
who has been successful with five talents is made ruler over five
cities. Did you ever know a man who had served his country well, and
benefited it, wish to withdraw into a drawing-room, and spend the
remainder of his life in luxury and ease? Did you ever know a successful
general who wanted to get a big fortune and to retire? No; successful
men cannot be rewarded better than by giving them a deal more to
do—larger responsibilities, larger powers, a larger sense of strength
successfully exerted. That is the blessing and the joy which shall go
with larger toil, and grander accomplishment, and brighter goodness. The
few who are used to work shall have plenty of work. I take it as a sign
that God is pleased with the results of a Church when He gives them new
work to do, and the heart to take it up. It is not extra work; it is the
reward of the past, and it is a step that shall lead you to a higher
throne. Nay, more; work is indispensable to the enjoyment of a Church's
good. No Church can heartily enjoy what we call religious privileges
unless it is working hard; and no individual member of that Church will
get the good of it unless he is taking a part in the Church's work. He
does not need to be an office-bearer or anything of that sort; his work
may be just friendliness to others in the house of God, showing a kind
spirit to them or taking an interest in them, showing neighbourliness by
his Church character. Do not think that it is a high array of talents
that is required; no, it is the Church's function of being "all of one
mind," and knit together and helping one another, and sympathising with
one another, being bound up in the common lot of disasters and trials. I
say that no individual member, unless he is taking his part, is a living
member of that Church. If people are very fastidious about the doctrines
which are preached, if people are searching into the sense of every hymn
or prayer, if people are finding fault with the way in which everything
is done, then it may be that the Church is to blame; but if the Church
is doing its work as well as any poor human Church can do it, I advise
such a one to say to himself, "May not I be to blame?" If you think that
the daily food which is provided for you is not properly cooked, and it
is not of the proper sort, and does not taste well, is it not your
doctor you want to go to, to ask him to cure you of dyspepsia? And in
all probability he will recommend to you exercise and hard work. A
hard-working man does not complain even of dry bread; he is not
particular; he has an appetite. I have known, in the Church to which I
belonged before I began to preach, how pleased I was even with sermons
which had no originality in them if I saw that they were part of the
common work. It was my home, and you do not criticise your own home; and
you do not criticise your father and mother; you believe in the power
which you get from your father, because he is yours. Throw yourself into
the Church, become a part of it, take an interest in everything, and it
is wonderful how little you will have of criticism about you. Take
plenty of spiritual exercise, and you may be sure that even a bare and
poor spiritual diet will agree wonderfully with you.

Christ reckons with Churches—Christ at God's right hand, what is He
about? When He was down here on earth He went hither and thither,
seeking the lost; He forgave the woman that wept at His feet; He saved
the dying thief. Oh, gentle, loving Saviour Jesus, "the same yesterday,
and to-day, and for ever"! And at God's right hand He is loving, and
pitying, and forgiving my sins, and pleased with my tears of
repentance—forbearing, tender, saving Jesus! We preach that; we should
not be men, we should not be Christians, if we did not preach that; we
could not live without that thought of Jesus. But let us be true; do not
let us hide facts. That same Jesus stands at God's right hand, judging
the Churches, reckoning with them. Oh, to a penitent sinner He is all
heart, but to a slothful servant He is a faithful Master! He reckons
with Churches; He reckons with individuals. It would not be kind if He
did not reckon with you. Would you wish Him not to reckon? Would you
like to say, "I do not care whether He does anything with me or not"?
Ah, I should begin to think that Christ did not love you at all if He
did not reckon with you, if he were not grieved and angry when you did
not do your duty to Him and to your neighbour! Where would be the
dignity of life if we did not believe in a great last judgment, with a
stern reckoning with sin? We should sink to the level of the animals if
there were no judgment. It proves that man has an immortal spirit. What
does it matter, with the animals, what they do? But God must reckon with
man, and He would not be reigning if man had not to reckon on an awful
judgment-day for every spirit. It is a proof to me that I am of moment,
and that my human spirit has dignity; it makes clear to me my place in
the universe, and my claim to immortality; it shows me that I am of
sufficient importance to necessitate God's reckoning with me. Churches,
too, must be reckoned with. It would argue that they were mere
nurseries, were hospitals for people to be convalescent in, mere
nonentities, counting for nothing in the great work of the world and the
mighty purpose of God, if we did not know that Christ was to reckon with
them. They have great powers given to them, they have great
capabilities, they have tremendous responsibilities; they can fulfil
God's purposes in the world, and nothing but their supineness and
listlessness hinders them; and God and Christ must reckon with Churches.
I would not have it different. Let Them reckon with them, and let me
remember that They will reckon with me and my Church; and let me be full
of good works. Christ must reckon with it, for the Church's sake. How
could He but care? Oh, if we did but believe what we preach and what we
read in our Gospels! It is that Jesus lost all things which men look
for; that He turned aside from every joy of life; that He gathered
sorrows around Him; that His great heart was broken upon the cross; that
He spent all His life—for what? That He might save men from eternal
banishment from God; that He might put happiness instead of misery into
every house where there are unholiness and evil; that He might make men
brighter and better. His great heart was all warm and eager for it. Oh,
what He has sacrificed! He is a disappointed, lost man if He fails, and
if He succeeds it must be done through His congregations, through His
Churches, through men and women here. How can He but care? how can He
but watch? As all the Church's activity goes by before God's throne, the
recording angel takes it down. Does He see a Church whose members have
taught the little children on the Sunday afternoon to love Him better; a
Church which has made men whose faith in Him was nearly crushed out by
sinful practices think again of Christ and heaven; a Church which has
put a man once more on his feet, and given him to his wife and children,
and they have been glad because the father and husband has loved them
again? How can it but be that those who fight for Him should rejoice
when a Church is thus acting for God, as compared with a Church that
does nothing? Oh, if we could but believe and feel, when we come into
church on a Sunday morning, that Jesus is watching all that is going
on—watching to see if our hearts are made more soft and tender, more
reverent and gentle, more full of kind thoughts to those who sit round
about us—watching to see if we speak a kind word—watching to see if we
resolve to do more for Him—watching to see if we can give liberally to
help in what is being done for Him, and to support those who have
special gifts for special work! The Lord Jesus has His eyes upon us in
this spiritual Church framework. It does bind us together, and, thank
God! I will say of ourselves has bound us together for much good work,
and I believe will bind us more closely together. If every Sunday
morning we only felt and believed it, and came and knelt and praised,
and listened with light in our hearts, we should do our work well and
have the reward of very faithful servants.



V.

_A LESSON IN CHRISTIAN HELP._

"Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the [en]feeble[d]
knees; and make straight [smooth] paths for [with] your feet, lest that
which is lame be turned out of the way; but let it rather be healed [or,
in order that that which is lame may not be caused to go astray, but may
rather be healed]."—HEB. xii. 12, 13.


Subjected to severe and harassing persecution on account of their
Christian faith, and plied by subtle arguments and doubts, which had all
the more seductive powers from the immunity from suffering which would
be gained by yielding to them, the members of the Church to whom this
letter was addressed had become discouraged, depressed, perplexed, and
some, staggered and tempted, were even in danger of renouncing their
allegiance to Jesus of Nazareth. After warning them of the doom and
misery of deserting the cross of Christ, inciting them to endurance by
the long and shining roll of patriarchs, prophets, martyrs, and by the
example of the dying Saviour, the Apostle explains to them how all this
trial and suffering is the chastening of Fatherly love, destined to
bring forth the peaceable fruit of righteousness, and finally exhorts
them to rise above their despondency and enfeeblement, to advance with
strong, unwavering faith in the right path, in order that thereby those
who were crippled by doubt or temptation might be saved from straying
quite away, helped over their difficulties, and in the end restored to
firm and abiding faith.

The command in the text assumes the existence of two classes in the
Church—those that need help, that must lean on others, and those who are
able and ought to give help and support. Just as in a flock of sheep, so
in the Church, there will be some strong, vigorous, active, and others
weak, feeble-kneed, lame. Let us recognise this fact honestly, and be
prepared to face it. Differences and degrees of faith, assurance,
consistency, there are and must be. When the Church of Christ is
oppressed by persecution, seduced by temptation, assailed by unbelief,
do not be amazed to find that some spirits will be crippled, drawn away
into wrong, just on the very point of being altogether perverted, and
remember that there ought to be others who, by their indomitable
perseverance, their immovable faith, the unbroken solidarity and
persistence of their march, shall support and carry forward in safety
those who, but for such environment and protection, if left to combat
solitary and unaided, had stumbled and fallen in the storm of
persecution and seduction, or been clean swept away by the waves of
doubt and unbelief.

There are ever these two classes among the followers of Jesus—the
strong, the brave, the helpful, the steadfast; the weak, the timorous,
the dependent, the wavering. Brother, to which of these do you belong?
Answer that question honestly, and then think what you should reply to
this other question: To which class ought you to belong?

I am confident if Christian men and women would but enrol themselves not
according to their meaner and unworthier inclinations, but in accordance
with the voice of duty and the promptings of all that is most noble and
generous in them, we should not have (as we do now) in the army of
Christ the vast majority ranking as incapable and non-efficient, while
only a small minority do the fighting and defending. Clearly my text
supposes that the mass will be strong and helpful, with only one or two
feeble, incompetent; just as in a flock of sheep the greater number are
healthy, whole, and able-bodied, while only a few are disabled and
lamed. It should be so in all our congregations. Perhaps in some the
ideal is fairly realised. But looking at the Church as a whole, do I
exaggerate in thinking that there are many, very many, who ought to be
able-bodied and aidful, but who regard themselves as exonerated from
active service, as incompetent to take part in any way in the warfare of
the Cross, as persons to be defended, not to help in the defence?

How is it with each of you? What is your habitual attitude when
goodness, truth, righteousness, Christ are assailed? In some social or
intellectual company where the followers of Christ are in the minority,
or it may be where you stand quite alone, you hear virtue or purity
sneered at, condemned; or justice and mercy ridiculed, discredited; or
the faith in things unseen rudely mocked and denied. Do you then always
bravely speak out for the glory and majesty of purity and goodness, for
the reality and grandeur of God and Christ? or do you yield to the
craven cowardice that lurks even in regenerate men, and, saying it is
for ministers, or apologists, or the strong and clever to defend Christ,
meanly hold your peace? So far from dreaming that you are bound to
defend the truth, you perhaps pity yourself for being subjected to such
trial, and admire your own fidelity, that can survive such assaults.
Instead of feeling yourself a coward, you rather regard yourself as a
martyr, a person much to be commiserated and admired, and wonder how the
Lord should so heartlessly expose your faith to such trials, while all
the time you are in reality a weak, ignoble recreant. But you may say,
"What! am I to speak when I know that I should only be ridiculed,
laughed at, beaten in argument, when I am certain my effort would be
defeated, rejected with ignominy?" But there is no necessity you should
argue; nay, if your arguments will be foolish or weak it is your duty to
keep them to yourself. But you are not bidden to argue, prove,
demonstrate anything; only you are to confess, to protest against evil,
and loyally side with the truth. And if you are not to do that except
when you know you will be applauded and triumphant, what of your
Master's conduct? He was laughed at, scorned, despised, rejected,
defeated, and He knew it all from the first. Brother, you are to "follow
Him" in all He did, and so you are to stand by the truth even when you
know it will only bring scorn, scoffs, defeat, failure on you.
Nevertheless be sure in such a defeat and failure only you shall suffer.
As in Christ's death, though He dies, the truth triumphs, and the crown
of thorns becomes a crown of glory.

This sin of selfish indolence, of weak-minded inaction, carries its own
penalty with it. Who of us has not learned the terrible retribution by
bitter experience? If you who ought to have been strong, who ought to
have defended your Lord, were guilty of timidly shirking your duty, of
feebly failing to declare your faith, then your faith will seem to you a
poor, weakly thing, and Christianity itself feeble and infirm. In these
days of outspoken unbelief, of staggering attack, and of widespread
defection, if you think only of yourself, feel no obligation of defence,
yield aggrievedly to terror and alarm, regarding yourself as wronged in
being exposed thus, and reproaching others who, you think, ought to have
been able to silence such foes and quite shelter you from seduction,
then your faith will be shaken, your hands hang down, and your knees
tremble. But if you felt yourself bound to be considerate of others, to
be one of the strong, not one of the feeble, to defend the infirm and
the timid, how different it would be with yourself! you would have
courage, faith, strength; in this fashion doing the will of God, you
would learn that the doctrine was of God.

In the case of Christianity men act as they would be ashamed to act in
other situations. You who are so given over to alarms, so hopeless of
the faith, suppose you were in a ship that has sprung a leak, how should
you act? Should we find you among the timid and the hysterical, who lose
head and heart, refuse to help at the pumps, fling themselves in despair
on the deck, and do their best to dishearten and impede the brave men
who, keeping their misgivings to themselves, toil on with bravery to try
and save the lives of all? There are some constituted with such
despondent, enfeebled nerves as to be excusable for such conduct, but in
the Christian Church there are many with no such justification, who
shake their heads gloomily, cry despairingly that the Church is in
danger, the faith abandoned, do their utmost to weaken and dispirit
their brethren, all the time never dreaming how weak and cowardly is
their conduct, or that they ought rather to be comforters, helpers,
defenders.

The cause of this ignoble conduct seems to me to consist in the fact
that many Christians have got to see only one side of Christianity, and
that the selfish or personal side. They have learned that by becoming
Christ's He undertakes to save them, but they have failed to apprehend
that, on the other hand, this relation involves that they are to serve
Him. Again, their notion of what is implied in entering the membership
of the Church is quite as one-sided. They consider that the purpose of
this tie is that you may be cared for, guarded, developed by the
Church—all which is true; but then they quite fail to see that also you
are bound to aid, defend, and protect the Church. How many Christians
are there who never dream of owing any duty to the Church, but consider
it to be simply constructed for the purpose of doing everything for them
needful for salvation. Within it they are to be surrounded by
sanctifying influences, fed by ordinances, guarded in its holy
atmosphere from the world's miasma; in a word, they are to be fostered,
preached to, prayed for, visited, tended, and all the time they have
nothing whatever to do for the Church. But while all this is done by the
Church, that is not the only nor the cardinal conception of either the
Church or its members. Brethren, the Church of Christ is a great army of
valiant and able-bodied soldiers, sent out to battle with evil, led on
by officers who ought indeed to encourage and care for the men, but
whose main duty, nevertheless, is to lead them to conflict and conquest.
According to this modern notion, that Church members are to do nothing
but be cared for and protected, the Church is made to be more a sort of
great nursery or convalescent hospital, provided with a staff of
doctors, nurses, and visitors, and the Church members are not soldiers,
but rather a sect of weaklings, invalids, and infirm, who are just kept
in life by ceaseless care and nursing.

From this mistaken and perverted notion of what it means to belong to
Jesus Christ, from the miserable failure to recognise the public and
primary obligations resting on all the Lord's followers, from forgetting
that the kingdom of God is founded not merely to foster and ripen those
in it for heaven, but that they may extend its conquering boundaries
over all the world; from these unhappy errors spring the impotency, the
half-heartedness, the dispirited timidity of so large a part of the
Church in the present day. This is the origin of that general sort of
notion as if we should be thankful if Christians just survived; as if it
were natural and changeless that the Church should be despised and
scorned; as if against unbelief Christianity should not venture to raise
her voice very assuredly, but stand on the defensive, and be thankful if
she can just hold her own; as if it were natural and normal that
Christians should find their faith hard pressed, hardly able to stand
its ground, and they themselves feel weak, timid, alarmed, and helpless.

But perchance you may be inclined to defend this state of mind and this
selfish notion of Christianity; nay, you may think that you have
Scripture on your side. In opposition to the assertion that in place of
being merely cared for, you are to fight, and in place of being timid,
you are to be brave, you may recall the fact that Christ compares His
people to sheep whom He shelters safely and tends in a snug fold, free
from struggle and terror; and urge that sheep are not suggestive of
combativeness, and that it is natural for them to tremble when a lion
roars outside, and to count on the shepherd driving the evil beast away,
while nobody expects them to face the ravager. But do you not see that
our Lord meant that comparison to illustrate only His relationship to
them and His treatment of them? while if you are to infer from it also
that He meant them, in their attitude to the world and unbelief, to be
timid and helpless as sheep, then how do you explain that elsewhere they
are compared to soldiers, commanded to be valiant, fearless, daring? If
they are to do no fighting, then why are they told to put on the whole
armour of God, to be faithful unto death, to endure hardness as good
soldiers of Jesus Christ? Ah, we are very fond of these pleasant,
comfortable comparisons, and are constantly perverting them by
misapplying them to positions they have nothing to do with. But you may
reply, "Did not our Lord say Himself, to His disciples, that He sent
them out as sheep among wolves?" Yes, indeed, but only to inform them of
what treatment they might expect from the world, not surely with the
intention of indicating that they were to meet the world's hostility as
a sheep meets a wolf's, cowering, trembling, fleeing. If He meant that
they were to be timid, helpless, sheeplike, why did He say also, "I give
you power to tread on serpents and scorpions and over all the power of
the enemy"? why did He send them out to conquer the world? How was it
that the disciples so thoroughly misunderstood the command? When Peter,
facing the hostile judges, avowed that he would obey God, and not them,
that was not timid, that was not sheeplike. When Paul fought with wild
beasts at Ephesus, that, too, was not at all in the manner of a sheep
among its foes. When the Apostle, in the same Epistle, bids the readers
resist unto blood, when you remember how so many of our Lord's followers
have indeed sealed their witness with their lives, surely it is plain
that we have forgotten one side of our Christian duty. We ought to be
"wise as serpents" in dealing with the foe, "harmless as doves" to our
brethren and friends; but that is very much inverted now, and the chief
characteristic of many a soldier of the Cross is just his perfect
harmlessness in the combat. Brethren, you look for the crown of
righteousness that sparkled before Paul's closing eyes, bright amid the
gathering shades of his martyr death. But that crown was not gained
without hazard, not won by slothful ease, but earned on many a bloody,
painful field, while he "fought the good fight." Believe me, there shall
be no crown for you unless, like Paul, you too have fought that fight,
and kept that faith, for which he bravely lived and bravely died.

Nevertheless there will always be among Christ's disciples those that
are weak-handed, feeble-kneed, and lame; some permanently and
constitutionally affected with feebleness and infirmity; and now and
again a strong one maimed, injured by extreme and undue exposure, or
crippled by some untoward accident. It was so among these Hebrew
Christians. Intimidated by persecution, disheartened by the spoiling of
their goods, shaken by the arguments of unbelief, several grew less
steadfast in their confession of Christ, others were perplexed and
confused, and some were just on the verge of deserting and abandoning
the faith. Among us there is no more imprisoning, goods spoiling and
persecution to stagger our faith in Christ, but there are instead a
whole world of seductions, of discouragements, of mockeries, and of
unbelieving sneers. Still, too, there are with us the weak, the maimed,
the misled; many who never have attained to much spirituality or
consistency; others who for a time went well, but became entangled in
the mazes of the world's sinful attractions, or were overtaken by sudden
temptation, enfeebled by persistent opposition and ridicule, paralysed
by difficulties, disappointments, doubts, or unbelief.

I wish we did more fully realise and constantly remember that there are
to be among Christ's own ones really such as these, weaklings, cripples,
tempted, fallen; brethren overtaken by snares, seductions, unbelief,
whom we ought to pity, whom we ought to help. Only it is needful to bear
in mind that we are not to conclude that every one who gives himself out
as such is really a wounded brother, to be sympathised with and aided.
For there are many who only imagine themselves distressed, who give
themselves out as greatly tried and buffeted, more from a kind of mental
hypochondriasis or foolish fondness for being talked of and fussed over.
This is especially so in the matter of doubt and religious difficulty.
For just as it happens that in the fashionable world it is sometimes
proper to have a lisp or limp, in imitation of some dignitary, so,
unfortunately, at the present day it has become fashionable to go halt
of one foot in faith; and there are persons, thoroughly excellent and
orthodox in reality, who are impelled to let all their acquaintances
know what dark struggles of soul they pass through, and of how much it
costs them to face the unbelieving spectres of their minds. Brethren,
when a man has a real skeleton in his closet he does not go round the
circle of his friends, flaunting that unpleasant fact in their faces.
When a man tells you, with a smile of complacent superiority on his
face, of his conflicts with doubt, you need not expend much sympathy or
anxiety on him; like all other affectations, this one may be left to die
a natural death. No, the man to whom doubt is a real spectre, a
veritable agony, does not blazon his pain abroad; like Jacob's wrestle
with his dread midnight foe, the real soul-struggles are fought out in
darkness and alone. It is these who are truly stricken, wounded,
well-nigh carried away—these, and these alone, whom you are asked to
pity and to help.

But as a matter of fact, how do we Christian men and women who have not
fallen treat such weaker brethren, I mean persons who have really been
crippled, really erred? The text very plainly implies that we are not to
cast them off, but to compassionate them and seek to recover them. Nay,
mere human kindness would require the same. As soldiers seek to rescue,
not to slay, a comrade well-nigh carried off by the foe, so surely we
Christians should not attack, but strive to regain a brother captured in
the meshes of temptation or unbelief. And no doubt to a very large
extent true Christians do act so, though I fear not with that unvarying
pitifulness that ought to extend the same charity to all. Do we not make
unrighteous differences, leaving room for restoration to some of the
erring, and closing heart and door against others? Partly from
thoughtlessness, partly from prejudice, partly from contempt of what is
weakness or cowardice, there are some falling, straying souls whom we
treat too much like those evil animals that whenever one of the herd is
wounded or crippled fall upon the victim and tear him in pieces. When we
hear of a brother falling, doubting, denying, have we not all sometimes
felt only anger, reprobation—nay, uttered sharp, cruel, merciless words
of final condemnation and irretrievable doom? Do we not often treat
erring ones so? It is very natural, for these feeble-handed, weak-kneed,
crippled ones are an eye-sore, unpleasant to have to do with, a
discredit to the Church and the most convenient plan is to cast them
off. Nevertheless, it is most inhuman, most unchristian, and can only
spring from one of two errors. Either you do not have that fraternal
love for all your brethren in Christ which you ought to have. When your
brother after the flesh, or your son, catches a deadly complaint (it may
be through his own recklessness and disobedience), or is wounded by some
hostile assault, you do not in anger cast him out to die, for you love
him. Would God we had more love among Christians! Or it may be the
reason of your harsh treatment is that you mistake your straying,
doubting brother for an enemy, and fail to see that he is a victim. Of
course there is a great distinction between one of Christ's little ones
swept into doubt, and a hostile, malignant unbeliever, seeking to harm
the flock. This last you must indeed oppose, and seek to drive out of
the fold, though even then you will feel for him as our Lord did when He
wept over Jerusalem, and on the cross prayed, "Father, forgive them."
But it is not of such we speak now, only of those who are themselves not
wolves, but wounded, wandered sheep. Remember, therefore, that they are
your brethren, and pity and help them.

Perhaps you say, "What! can it be right to feel pity, kindness,
compassion, love for men who have gone astray from Christ, rebelled
against the Master, forsaken and denied the Saviour?" Remember how Jesus
treated the eleven, who deserted Him, Peter, who denied Him, Thomas, who
would not believe. Nay, more, can you for one moment doubt the
rightfulness of feeling so to sinning brethren, be they as bad as they
may, and of treating them so, you who do believe that from all eternity
God set His love, compassion, saving purpose on sinners—rebellious,
hateful sinners—without one spark of merit or goodness in them to
deserve it? Brethren, it is not wrong, it is not weak, it is noble,
Christlike, Godlike to pity, to love, to tenderly seek and save the
lost, the sinning, the erring, the fallen.

       *       *       *       *       *

Finally, remark how the text suggests that you are to render them
assistance and support. Suppose it is a brother becoming involved in
worldly or dangerous entanglements, lapsing into doubtful courses, or
yielding to the freezing influence of ungodly or sceptical companions.
Now, direct interference, immediate intervention, is not always
possible, is often difficult, sometimes impossible. Besides, often the
mischief is already done ere you perceive it. Or again, it is
intellectual difficulty or doubt that you have to deal with. To meet the
objections, to remove the doubts, would be well, but perchance you are
not skilled, competent to do that; or it may be they are such as cannot
be removed. Here, again, direct remedies may be impracticable. Are you,
then, powerless, helpless to aid? Far from it. A method better than all
immediate and special action lies open for you, for all Christian men
and women. "Make straight, smooth paths with your feet." It may be you
cannot personally do anything to support the maimed or arrest the
erring, but you can nevertheless render most important service. As a
flock of sheep, by all moving on regularly in one united mass, with
their feet smooth down the roughnesses and entanglements of the way,
breaking down the entrapping brambles, clearing away the furze and
tripping briers, leaving behind them a plain and open track, trodden
down and freed of obstructions, stones, and stumbling-blocks, so that
the weak and crippled are not turned aside or overthrown; so if the
strong and whole body of Christian men and women will but move
steadfastly on amid the mazes of temptation and over the
stumbling-stones of evil, the feeble, tempted, erring will be helped
forward, and, borne along in the united, combined advance, will not fall
behind or be baffled, overthrown, or led astray by difficulties and
impediments. Yes, infinitely more powerful than any isolated rebuke, or
warning, or intervention, is the force of united Christian example and
protecting aid, to keep in the right path the halt, the maimed, the
blind. What the tempted, the world-seduced, the doubting, the
unbelieving need is not rebukes, cautions, exhortations, refutations of
objections, but it is to be drawn out of the cold, freezing world of
evil and doubt into the warm, living, breathing atmosphere of loving,
real Christian fellowship; to be surrounded by the resistless
progression in rectitude, in faith and love, of Christlike, God-fearing
souls. With blows of reprimand and logical argument you may pound and
break the ice of sin and unbelief, but though broken, it remains cold,
winter ice, freezing still. Bring it into the summer radiance, the
golden sunshine of warm Christian life; then it will be melted away, and
the hard heart grow soft and tender in the breath of the all-quickening
Spirit.

Brethren, it is for this that the Master has gathered us into families
and homes, friendly circles and fellowships, congregations and churches.
It is because some of His own will be very weak, timid, facile to fall,
lukewarm, tempted, erring, doubting. Have you settled it with yourself,
strong, high-principled, undoubting Christian, that the Church is not a
club of stainless, perfect souls, but that there are to be in it such
foolish, feeble, ignoble ones, real doubters, backsliders, wanderers,
and that yet they are your brethren, little ones of the common Lord? And
it is just for their sake, that they may be saved, that He has caused us
to be knit together into one flock, that they may be kept from falling,
restored when they err, strengthened, cheered, loved, and helped. Ah, we
know not for the most part how much there is of strength and comfort for
us in this! For all of us there is, for even the very strong, they that
have comforted most, sometimes will be very weak themselves, and long
for sympathy and support. Once even the blessed Master Himself in
broken-hearted agony besought that help, and prayed His followers,
"Tarry ye here, and watch with Me." My brother, if you can remember a
time when you were enabled to endure, to conquer, because Christian
friends stood around you and watched with you, then be pitiful to your
tempted brother now. It may be that his limping, stumbling gait is very
unpleasant to you, and you do not care to be known as of his company;
his halt, ungainly walk does not look well beside your high, triumphal
march. Perchance in heaven there is more good pleasure over his paltry
pace than over your proud progress. Ah, friends, we see too little now
to judge, who know not one another's hurts and trials! We who have the
sunshine on our path, and bounding vigour in our tread, forget, I fear,
how to many struggling souls the path is very flinty, rough, and hard,
swept by wild storms of passion and rushing floods of fierce temptation;
while the thick darkness and awful solitude, haunted by mocking spectres
of death-like doubts and fears, wrap them round with a chill, paralysing
shroud of despair. You who have never been so tempted, give God thanks
and be humble, very humble, and lowly, and merciful. Have infinite
forbearance and compassion. Remember that one harsh word, one hopeless
look from you may numb a last feeble grasp on goodness, and sink a
brother despairing in the black abyss; while a kindly look, a helping
hand, a loving, free, generous pardon and word of hope from you may be
to him the voice of eternal forgiveness in heaven, and power of
restoration even now.

Brethren, when, against some brother who has fallen, sinned or gone
astray, quick anger flames in your heart, and to your lips sharp,
cutting words of reprobation leap, let this word of Christ ring in your
ears: "Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in Me,
it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and
that he were drowned in the depth of the sea." And as that word of
dreadful condemnation awes each lurid spark of hasty anger from your
soul, let these words of endless peace, and joy, and mercy steal in, and
soften all your spirit into gentlest pity, tenderness, and love:
"Brethren, if any of you do err from the truth, and one convert him; let
him know, that he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way
shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins."
"Wherefore let us lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble
knees; and let us make straight paths with our feet, lest that which is
lame be turned out of the way; but let it rather be healed."



VI.

_JOSEPH'S FAITH._[1]

"By faith Joseph, when he died, made mention of the departing of the
children of Israel; and gave commandment concerning his bones."—HEB. xi.
22.


Faith is a word that we hear a great deal of in theological exposition
and in religious teaching. It is a good thing constantly to remind
ourselves of what its actual meaning is. The 11th chapter of this
Epistle begins with a definition of faith, and then gives examples of
it. The definition is a little hard to understand; nobody can
misunderstand the illustrations. According to the inspired writer, faith
is recognising the will of God, taking it and doing it; that is faith,
and nothing else is—no theories about God, no rules, and laws, and
definitions about God's government of the world, no intellectual
adherence to any explanation of theology. Faith, real and living, means
that the God who comes into contact with you in your life and your world
has a will, and shows it to you. If you bow down before that actual will
of God, that it may save you from your real sins, and that He may use
you in saving the dead around you; if you adore it, and worship it, and
account it the best thing in your life, and give yourself up to it, as
the one thing worth doing, though there be many a forsaking and many a
return to God, if you hold on through your life, doing the will of God,
then you are a man of faith.

Joseph was a man of faith, in the olden times, all his life long. From
his very boyhood he had possessed faith. In the dreams that came to him
as a lad he welcomed God's face, not quite understanding all He meant,
and a little misusing the high vocation that came to him, accepting it
in the pride of his heart. In his trials and his prosperity, in his
public career, in his private home life, on his death-bed, he lived with
God, reckoned with God, and loved God, and tried to do God's will on the
earth. One deed stands out supreme and stupendous. Joseph on his dying
bed looked forward into the future, and there, amidst the mists,
discerned the promise of the world's redemption, forecast the coming of
God's kingdom on earth, and chose what to him was the greatest and
grandest thing in his dying, and so gave commandment for the burying of
his bones away in distant Canaan.

I am going to ask you to follow me as I rapidly sketch the great
outstanding elements of struggle and triumph in Joseph's career, in
order that I may show you the splendid feature of faith, and that in
dying he was still loyal to the dreams of his youth. Joseph was a
younger son. He had the misfortune to be his father's favourite; he was
exempted from hard toil; he was kept near his old father; his brethren
hated him for it; probably he misbehaved himself; he was no saint, else
there would be no good in my preaching about him. He had the misfortune
to be spoiled by his father. He had intelligence, and he was wide awake;
but there was nothing in the early years of the lad to give evidence of
any extraordinary ability, or to forecast any splendid career for him,
with the exception of one thing: Joseph was a great dreamer in his
sleep; and as a boy he woke up from his sleep, and saw visions, glorious
castles in the air; and they were not all floating away in cloudland,
high up above him, but he saw _himself_ in them; they had an intense
personal interest for him. Perhaps he was very injudicious, and probably
disagreeable, in the tone and fashion of telling these dreams to his
brothers. Their sheaves in the harvest gathered round and made obeisance
to his sheaf; the meaning plainly being that he was to rise to great
power, that he would hold them in his hand, and be lord and master over
them. They might not have much interest for us; but Joseph belonged to a
family that believed that they held a unique position in the world's
history, and that they were to bring a great blessing into this world.
They had not grasped exactly what it was, nor understood the
significance of the spiritual kingdom of heaven; but none the less they
heard God's voice around them, so that this world became to them a place
in which He lived and moved: thus they rose to the grandeur of the
conception that they were to have a master hand in carving the fortunes
of the world. Out of many of his brethren, God had selected Joseph to be
an inheritor and administrator of the Divine purpose of blessing to the
world, and to do unique deeds of valour for the kingdom of God.

Now I have said that the one remarkable thing about Joseph's boyhood,
the one thing that might excite your expectation about his future, was
that he dreamt dreams; he was a great dreamer in his youth. I can
understand many a shrewd, practical man saying that that was not much to
his credit: "A lad that is always dreaming dreams will not do much."
Quite true, if the one, the only purpose of life is to eat and drink and
to gather all the dirt together with the muck-rake; but if man has a
Divine destiny in him, if man lives in two worlds—a world that you see
with your eyes, a world where money is current, and another world where
your sovereigns are worth nothing, a world of truth and honour,
generosity, love, goodness, self-denial, moral achievement and victory,
then it comes to a great deal; it means very much for a boy's future if
he has dreams that are not of earth, but of heaven. There are dreams and
dreams. There are dreams that come of laziness, idleness, selfishness,
and over-feeding, gross nightmares, fit for swine; dreams coming of
self-indulgence and worldliness, poor grovelling things; a man's mind is
not much better for _them_. There are dreams that are born of a
back-boneless sentimentality, of sweet mock chivalry, that loves to
represent itself in pretty pictures; not much good comes of them. But
there are other dreams, that come out of a man's wide-awake activity;
dreams that are the vapours rising from a fervent spirit, from the
cooling of the machinery. They work out the character that God is
weaving in that lad or in that young girl. These dreams are prophetic;
they have something of heaven in them; they are something higher than
the common: from God they come; they are the threads and fibres by which
He would lead us on to do great deeds on earth, and at last receive us
as faithful and good servants of our Master. I do believe in the dreams
of youth, that come in at that window which is open heavenward in every
young soul, until the dust and dirt of earth cloud it over; the dreams
of romance, that stupid old people try to crush and drive out, and that
the world puts its heel upon; those dreams of friendship and honour, of
truth and purity, to be chosen rather than worldly gain; those dreams of
love, generous and tender, that shall make two lives knit together into
one of exceptional tenderness and goodness. There is the breath of
heaven here; these are the golden glows in the mists of life's morning,
that come from God, and are the guarantees of a splendid sunset on
earth, and beyond, a brighter dawn in heaven. Would to God that all of
us, when we are old men and women, may be able to think without shame
and remorse about the dreams of our youth; that the woman has been true
to her dreams, and has fulfilled the sweet, unselfish ideals of her
girlhood, and been a noble, loving wife and mother; that the lad has
come through this world, at least comparatively unspotted, with a heart
fresh and tender, not eaten up by selfishness and greed, with a clean
conscience, with the benediction in his old age of having made other men
happy and good. Oh, the worst enemies of your dying bed, that will come
to mock you, will be the dreams of your youth, of your boyhood and
girlhood, should they be unfulfilled! But if you can only in part
realise them in your life they will be angels that will come to comfort
you.

There is a great deal more dreaming done in this world than we dull,
prosaic, old people will allow. It is not merely the lads and girls that
dream, for the fact is that we do not know how much we ourselves dream;
both young and old do it, but with a difference: the young folks mostly
dream about themselves, and the old folks are tired of dreaming about
themselves; but there are the wonderful dreams in the hearts of fathers
and mothers, to keep their children pure and good, and to make them
happy. What would the world be without those sweet, loving dreams? Thank
God for them! How much it means for the boy and the girl that their
mother dreamt noble things for them when they were young! There never
was a man yet that came to be a very great or good man in God's world
but his mother dreamt how he was to be brave, true, generous, loving,
helpful to others; and because her dreams came from God, she prayed for
that son that he might be good, and brave, and noble, and the lad grew
great because his mother dreamt great things for him.

There is a sad experience that almost all young folks must come to: the
day which breaks so shiningly, with such sweet promise of goodness,
nearly always clouds over and grows dark and stormy; the dreams get
broken, the dreams that hover over you and seem so easy to reach, recede
farther and farther, like one of those Alpine peaks when you are trying
to climb it. From the village you start from, you see a peak which you
think must be the summit, but when you reach it, it is only to find
yourself separated from a far higher ridge by a valley, which you have
to descend in order to reach it, and you have no sooner climbed up again
than you realise that this, again, is but an intermediate peak. How
toilsome, how weary it is! but in the same way dreams would be worth
nothing if you had not to win them by struggle and battle. It is the
tedium of the contest, I suppose, that disheartens most. It is not easy
for young hearts to wait for the fulfilment of life's promise till it
can be achieved honestly. Joseph is trapped in a pit, betrayed by his
brethren, sold to slave-merchants, settled in an Egyptian house, becomes
the bond-slave of Potiphar, torn from father, from his own country, from
his God, Who had not interfered to protect him, a bond-slave, his
dignity gone, all the pride of life gone! Would it have been wonderful
if all the heart had gone out of him too—if he had said that God had
forgotten him—"My dreams were a delusion; there is nothing worth living
for"? Are there young men and women here whose hearts are aching very
bitterly, and who are tempted to think that there is no outlet to this
slavery of life? How did Joseph look at it? He might have broken down,
and got wild with despair, and said to himself, "I will become
demoralised;" but though he lay down at night tired, yet he was
cheerful, and still dreamt his old dreams, and God was over him. If a
man is true to himself and to his God he will come through anything; if
he will be man enough, if he will not be beaten, if he will make the
best of things, he _must_ conquer. So presently Joseph reached a better
position, things began to look up a little, his master marked his
spirit, and made him his chief slave.

A lad who had dreamt of being a ruler and king of men, so that his
father would bow before him for what he could do for him, how terrible
it must have been for the boy to be sold as a slave! How terribly he
must have been tempted to say, "God has deceived me; He made me to dream
dreams, and here I am left in a dungeon, a slave: I cannot get what I
want honourably; I will get it dishonourably; I will snatch the fruit of
life, even if it be in defiance of what God and good men call right"!
That is the temptation that drives many a lad to dishonesty and
treachery, and many a girl to bitterness and sin. It came to Joseph in
the deadliest form. The mistress of the household made overtures to him
which, had he accepted them, would have meant immediate promotion,
perhaps to the court; for her husband was the chief of Pharaoh's
body-guard. Could there have been devised a deadlier temptation for that
poor, homeless boy, so treacherously treated by those who should have
loved him—who had dreamt such dreams, and had such proud ambitions, and
withal no danger of discovery if he would but take the path that opened
up the way of promotion? I think that was the crisis in Joseph's life;
that was the supreme deed which determined his destiny. Then it was that
he had to stand, and stand for ever, for God and good, or to fall and
sink for ever into ruin. And what saved him? I will tell you what saved
him. When Fortune tells a clerk that he has but to take a little of his
master's money, which he can repay very soon, and she will smile on him,
what he will do all depends upon his past. Those dreams of Joseph's
meant everything to him at that great moment. If his dreams had been of
the flesh, if his dreams had been base, and selfish, and sordid, and of
grasping the world's gains, honourably if possible, but anyway grasping
them, he could not have stood. But that boy had dreamt of being a
prince, a king among men; he had dreamt of a noble, stainless manhood,
of self-respect, and honour, and truth; and he had dreamt of God caring
about him, of God choosing him to be His instrument in this world; he
was a lad in whose soul the whispers of childhood's prayers and of
morning devotions murmured, with sweet echoes of heaven. A lad on whose
head still rests the soft pressure of the blessing of his Father in
heaven is no game for the devil. Joseph turned from that temptation
without a moment's faltering; he said to himself, "Be a traitor and a
knave! stain my soul and my manhood with this foul lust!"—and in the
presence and the sight of God he conquered; he was loyal to the dreams
of his youth, and the result was that he went to prison.

Young men and women, do you sigh? You would fight the battles of life
bravely enough, and resist its temptations, if there were a fair field
and no favour; but treachery and dishonesty are saturating everything.
It is not the best men who get the best wages. The whole city is full of
cheating. I am afraid it is so, for many good men have told me they
could hardly keep their hands clean. When you hear of a lad going to the
bad, for God's sake be just; be not hard on him; it is but the common
immorality tolerated everywhere. But what of that? Are you going to lose
your life, and stain your conscience, because another has injured you?
So long as you do not injure yourself, never mind; be a man in the image
of God.

If you come nearer and nearer to that standard it will be a grander work
to do in your lifetime, if you live in a poor lodging-room till your
death, than to become a millionaire by injustice or cruelty. In prison
Joseph played the man; he was not broken nor dispirited. And remember
what I said about dreams. Those dreams of his did not allow him to lie
down idly in the prison; he wanted to do everybody's work. Joseph was
industrious, and kept working on because of his dreams. The keeper of
the prison was evidently a man who was glad to have things managed for
him; and Joseph got promoted in a wonderful way till he reached the
royal court, and aided by perseverance and intelligence and an
untarnished character, he became the premier, the first prince in the
land. And now followed—what, do you think? Prosperity, peace, ease? No;
immense responsibility, discharged nobly by Joseph, and perilous
temptations. When a man has overcome the temptations of adversity I can
tell him that he has fought a splendid battle, but the deadliest are
those that come in the days of prosperity. The generous deeds that you
thought you would do, when you were a poor clerk, if you were only
wealthy—the help to churches, to missions, to the poor, where are they?
You know the story told in all the collection sermons about a man who
gave liberally when he was poor, but did not give in the same proportion
when he grew rich, and explained it by saying that when he was poor he
had a guinea heart, but now it was a penny heart! But Joseph conquers
once more. He loves his cruel brothers tenderly, and he brings them,
with the old father, to the land of plenty, and tends them. What was his
temptation? It comes out later on, and with it the reason why he
triumphed over it. While the old man lived the brothers that had
betrayed Joseph were safe, because of his love to his father; but when
he dies the brothers are fearful lest Joseph should wreak his vengeance
on them, and so they come with their whining lie to him; the old father
had told them, they say, to implore Joseph to be still generous to them.
Joseph burst into tears to think that his brethren had judged so meanly
of him. But to do these men justice, we must confess that the average
man would act as they did. How came it that Joseph had preserved the
heart of his boyhood amid his Egyptian prosperity? Men and women, do you
want to know the secret of a pure and loving life? Do you want to know
the magic formula that will lift you up and ennoble your character, so
that it will not occur to you to pay off old wrongs when you get the
chance, the formula that will make you a blessing to others? It is to
open your heart wide to the sight, and the touch, and the presence of
God in your life and in your world. When I hear wise men, and men that
mean the world good, telling us that we shall be able to preserve
morality when we have ceased to believe that Jesus had a Father in
heaven, when we believe that we live our little day, and then die and
vanish, and the world goes on as well without us, my heart sickens
within me. Tell men and women that they are the highest race of beasts,
and what motives have they for being generous and doing noble deeds?
Take away the good Jesus, take away the great high heaven with its
sunshine, crush down a low roof over our earth, and you crush out life's
grandeur. Tell men that every human spirit has in it something
mysterious, that death means something awful, that their souls are born
for eternity; then life becomes great and solemn, and the great thought
arises that we are born to be the sons of God.

And now the last thing in Joseph's life. I think that when he died all
men and women in Egypt were talking about him, and I am pretty sure they
talked about him as much in a mistaken fashion and with as many blunders
as people will talk about you and me when we die. There is no man that
ever lived yet that was known to the world; God only knows what we are;
so when we die they are bound to speak of us better or worse than we
deserve, for they will not know you nor me as we are known to God, as we
have lived, and what has been our purpose in life, how earnestly we have
striven for it; these are known to God, and to Him only. Thank God,
there are more merciful judgments up there in heaven about us than the
kindest on earth will deliver. I am pretty sure that the Egyptians all
said that Joseph would be proud to be buried in Egypt. He had lived very
nearly all his life there. Had he not brought his relatives there? Was
he not engrossed, heart and soul, in Egypt, with not a particle of
interest left for the old land, the old home, and the old life? We may
imagine what would have been the exclamations of astonishment if the
Egyptians could have listened at the dying bed of the prince and
statesman, and have heard that while all the time he had been a loyal
servant to his royal master, his heart was nevertheless away in the land
of his boyhood, and that the future he was looking for was not a future
of immortality among the Egyptian dead. "Promise me this one thing," he
says, "that when God takes you back to the sweet dear land, back to make
God's kingdom there, you will take all that is left of me, that you will
take my bones out of this Egypt, where I have been in body, but never in
spirit." Oh, the grandeur of such an utterance! All the Egyptian
greatness, power in one of the mightiest empires the world has ever
seen, is as nothing to him compared with the power that his dreams of
sweetness, and goodness, and the service of God had over him. That is a
life that is not broken in two when death comes.

Men and women here, who have said your prayers when you were young, and
have stopped praying now; who have gone into society and given
yourselves up to the world, stop and look at your poor broken life, and
before it is too late come back to where in your childhood you knelt at
God's throne.

Oh, young men and women that have dreamed Joseph's dreams, pray to God
that you may dream the dreams of your childhood once more, if you have
let the lust and greed of the world into your heart! Old men and women,
for whom this world is not long, go back to your childhood, and end your
life as you began it.

This is the supreme thought (and I like to end with it, for it is a
comforting thought too) in the story of Joseph's life; because I know
that there are so many lives crippled and broken through their own
fault, as well as through the wrongs and injuries of others; lives dark,
and poor, and disappointing; lives that have no triumph in this world,
and find it very hard to keep up heart, to keep true to hope, and faith,
and God. Listen to the lesson of Joseph's life. No true life of goodness
to man and God can ever be a failure. In a pit, in a dungeon in far-off
Egypt, you may seem to be shut out of all splendid achievements; wronged
and smitten by the storms of life, it may seem as if God had left you;
but if you can only keep your heart sweet, and good, and pure; if you
can but keep yourself honourable, and generous, and loving, then, though
God may give you no ties of home life, and all may appear dark and
cheerless; if you can only keep yourself a good, sweet, loving woman, a
brave, true, honourable man, if you can but hold fast to your faith,
there is a great God over you, there is a Christ who came to die to save
you, there is a holiness which God will give you. If you will but hold
fast to the end—to _His_ end,—then your life cannot be a failure; its
roots are in God, and its end shall be with God; from heaven you came,
and to God you shall return.

[Footnote 1: Preached on Sunday evening, October 20th, 1889, in St.
John's Wood Presbyterian Church.]



VII.

_THE BRAZEN SERPENT._

"He [Hezekiah] removed the high places, and brake the images,
and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent
that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did
burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan."—2 KINGS xviii. 4.


In that verse we hear the last of the brazen serpent; this morning I am
going to put before you some practical thoughts that spring from the
whole story. What has the brazen serpent got to do with our modern life?
The children of Israel, with their cattle and sheep, wandering about the
wilderness, get sick of it, complain against God and against Moses, and
are ready to break into active rebellion. They are punished by a sudden
attack of venomous serpents that sting them, and they, in dread of
death, lose that sham courage of theirs and independence, and they
appeal to God to save them. He bids Moses manufacture a mysterious
brazen serpent, put it upon a pole, and then, if any dying Israelite
looks at that serpent it heals him. The brazen image is regarded ever
after as clothed with great sanctity. It was once the supernatural
channel of life direct from God to dying men, and so, in course of time,
men came to it, and in its vicinity offered up their prayers, and
finally burned incense to it, and surrounded it with a false worship.
Then comes a reforming king, who regards that symbol of wonderful old
power Divine and goodness, that has been turned into an idolatrous and
superstitious instrument of human degradation; and, divided between his
respect for it and his consciousness of the mischief it is doing, he
finally decides to break it into pieces, scatters it into the dust, and
there is an end of it. Now, what has all that got to do with your life
and mine? The Hebrew history does not have its meaning lying just on the
face of it. If you take the bare letter you will not get much out of it;
if you stick to the bare letter you will find yourself landed in a great
many difficulties that are puzzling good people and bad people at the
present day, and all the time, whether you attack those difficulties
with a profound faith or with a doubting, critical, sceptical spirit,
you may be missing the very heart of the story. Because Hebrew history
is manifestly history written with a purpose. It was never intended that
it should be taken as an exact reporter's chronicle of external things
that happen. The real interest of the writers is something different; it
is to get down below the surface, in behind the scenes, to come upon the
great hands of God fashioning this world's story. They felt that beneath
all the events, common and secular, that befell them, the battles they
had to fight, the journeys they had to make, the famines that destroyed
their crops, the outbursts of prosperity, the victories that were won by
them, the lives they lived in homes like ours—behind and beneath all
that they felt that God held the reins in His hand, that He Himself was
thinking of them, had designs in them, was shaping and fashioning their
fortunes, controlling all that befell them, and they comprehended that
the greatest thing in this world is to get to know God.

The people at this point in their story had been wandering about in the
wilderness for nearly forty years; at last they had been led by Moses to
the very edge of the territory of Edom. Nothing lay between them and the
land God had promised them except the country belonging to their
kinsmen, the Edomites. You can understand how the hearts and faces of
the people were flushed with eager expectation. Oh! they were so sick of
that restless, weary life in the barren desert, and the pictures were
called up before their eyes in their dreams at night, and in their day
visions through the bright sunny hours, of those smiling vineyards,
those oliveyards, and those waving cornfields in that land flowing with
milk and honey, existing somewhat in fact, but very much in the
imagination of those who were to be its possessors. Nothing lay between
them and the actual possession and enjoyment but the country of Edom, so
they sent an eager message to the king, their kinsman, asking leave to
pass through the territory so that they might get at their enemies and
his. The king of Edom doubted them, or he was churlish, and refused to
give them passage. No doubt every brave young Hebrew warrior went to
Moses at once and said, "Let us force our way through; if they will not
yield us passage we shall make it for ourselves—we are able, we have the
weapons, we have the spirit; let us get at the homes that are waiting
for us." But then that would have been to enter into the land of promise
with a bloodstain on their conscience, with a bitter, bad memory,
spoiling all the joy of it; for those Edomites were their blood
relations, and blood meant a vast deal in those old days—even if your
brother treated you ill you must not stain your hands with his blood. To
have your very living and money-making all corroded with that colour of
blood of a near kinsman shed, was to get what your heart longed for, but
to get it spoiled. So Moses, under Divine guidance, told them, "We must
go back into the wilderness, we must make a big, roundabout march, and
reach the land at some other point." Unwillingly the people agreed; they
packed up all their baggage once again, put their weapons into their
sheaths, turned their backs on the smiling land of Canaan, and their
faces to the arid stretch of the sandy, scorched wilderness, and set
out. But before they had gone very far their spirit ran short—that is
what the old Hebraist says literally—their spirit ran down, they could
not stand it. Man turned to man, and said, "This is too hard; more than
man can endure; the thing is intolerable; Moses is blundering; let us
depose our leader and choose generals of our own, and force our way
across Edom into the Promised Land. What is the use of this God—this
Moses who brought us out of Egypt and kept us in the wilderness all
these weary years—at every new camp leaving a graveyard behind us, dying
man after man, with no prospect before, no progress made, no goal
reached, no land of rest attained?"

Now I wonder how many of my hearers to-day are wandering in the desert
just like these Hebrews, and have been wandering in a wilderness for
years and years. I am pretty sure that that is so with some of you old
folks with white hair on your heads. Ah! it is so very far away in the
Eastern world and in Old Testament times, this story of these wanderers,
never living in a comfortable house, never owning any land, packing up,
and on again, wondering where they are going to die, with nothing much
to look forward to. Yes, but here in London, living in your own house,
in your own workshop, there are men and women wandering in the
wilderness. Ah! what a deal of weary waiting there is for young men and
maidens, in this artificially bad society of ours at the present
day—which has been made by selfishness much more than by the love of God
and the love of man—waiting with divine instincts that God has put into
their hearts; dreaming of a land of promise, a land of rest, a land
flowing with milk and honey.

Ay, it is wandering in a wilderness. Our hearts were not made to live in
a wilderness; our hearts were made to live in homes; we were all meant
to be in a promised land. There is no need to ask who is to blame. There
the wildernesses are, and they have to be got through. It is not easy.
Many a time the bravest heart breaks down. The last straw breaks the
camel's back. Some little extra worry or care adds itself on, and then
the gentle woman or the courageous, uncomplaining man is broken in heart
and spirit—oh! so weary—ay, and if they have a tender conscience,
upbraiding themselves, counting it sin to feel so tired. Why have they
not been doing good? Have they not been following the steps of Jesus?
And there they are worn out in being good as He was. Do you remember how
sometimes He sighed a great sigh? how sometimes He was so sick of men
and their waywardness and selfishness and wilfulness, that for His
soul's sake He fled from them and hurried off to the mountain-top to get
away above the world, up beneath the blue sky into the purer air, up
where God was direct above Him, and He all alone; then came back next
morning all the braver and able to bear the battle once again? No, do
not blame yourself if you are often very weary. Do not try to pretend
that you like your wilderness, that you do not wish anything different.
You may have got so used to your wilderness as to be like those people
in the old Bastille. Some of the prisoners, we are told, were not
willing to go into the world again; they did not know it. So there are
hearts that get so wedded to sorrow that they are almost afraid to have
done with it. Still, as a general rule, hearts do long for joy, for
sunlight, for success. It is human nature, and there is no harm in being
weary when the clouds are always over the heavens. Christ was weary, and
He understands you and your heart.

Now, I have willingly allowed myself to run the risk even of
exaggeration in sympathising with the men and women whose lives are a
wilderness, and who are exposed to these dangers in their weariness, in
the hardness of their battle. But now, precisely because of that danger,
to steel your heart against its temptations, I am bound to speak about
the other side; I am bound to ask you men and women, whose lives are not
so good and rich as they ought to be, "Is not the blame, at least
somewhat, your own?"

Why had these Israelites been wandering forty years in the wilderness?
God had led them to the edge of the Promised Land, and bidden them go in
and take it, and they had not the manhood to do it, they were such
cowards that they trembled, they were craven-hearted; and so they could
not enter because of their unbelief. Ah! it was no good to turn round on
God and blame Him; it was no good to attack the brave-hearted Moses; it
was their own fault that their life was spent in the wilderness. But,
more than that, we must not make too much of the hardship, and the pain,
and the weariness of wilderness wandering. It is human nature to want
always sunshine and to hate storms; to love hours of play and shirk
hours of toil; but, after all, does not the rain do as much for the corn
as the sunshine? Does not darkness do as much on earth as light? Do we
not need hardness as well as lightness in our inner lives if we are to
make ourselves men and women? It was years of wandering in the
wilderness that turned those Egyptian slaves into the dauntless warriors
that carried Canaan by storm. Ah! men and women sitting in the church
to-day with your children round you, do not spoil their lives, but lead
them to live nobly. Was it not when you were kept to your tasks and
toil, when you got your share of the world's burdens and the world's
pain—was it not in the things least agreeable to you that there were
formed within you elements of character that are doing most to make your
joy to-day? Oh, do not grudge them to your children, do not grudge them
to yourself! God gives them. Surely it is supreme wisdom to take our
life in its entirety from God, to sing through the whole gamut of life,
the low wailing note of sorrow as well as the bright, dancing, radiant
notes of joy, rejoicing in God so that the music of our life when it is
done shall be filled with the fulness of that great Heart Divine that
planned and fashioned it.

There was deadly danger in that murmuring of the children of Israel. You
must not imagine that God resented it because of the insult to His
dignity. God is above such a feeling as that, He does not resent the
ignorance, with the mixture of superstition, that goes into the lives,
ay, of good men and women, Protestant or Roman Catholic. He takes men's
hearts and their real life. It was not the insult to Him in their
murmurs that made Him deal with them so strongly. Oh, it was not
sternness at all that dealt with them, it was love unutterable! They
were ready to spoil their lives, to rush away on their own plans to make
their fortunes, and so to bring themselves to ruin. Do you know how God
checked them? They were complaining of the food that they had, and of
their long weary marches, and the heartlessness of their toil in the
wilderness, instead of having comfortable homes and rich farms, and God
cured them by sending among them fiery serpents that bit them, filled
their veins with venom, agony, and death, and as they lay there writhing
in pain with death looking into their eyes they said, "What fools we
were to repine and complain because of the bread that was tasteless and
the life that was void of interest." That was God's way of curing men
who were about to spoil their lives by discontent. Is it not God's way
still? You men sitting there, do you remember that for years you had
been bad-hearted, bitter, discontented, because your life was not great
or famous, till God sent that deadly illness and you lay in bed like to
die, and then you would have given all you had to get back to that life
that you thought so little of? I have seen the father who made the
foolish mistake of harping too much on the faults and failings of those
who dwelt in his home, not acknowledging the large amount of good and
obedience, but ever making misery and bitterness there, and thinking
himself justified in doing it, accounting himself an unappreciated,
unrewarded man, till a day came when God sent a fiery serpent into his
heart, when the blinds were drawn down in that house, and a life lay
still and silent that had had faults, but had been sweet, and loving,
and lovable. Or, a real disgrace has come to a home, and a child has
done a deed that might break a father's heart. Oh, the misery and the
pity of it, to see that man sitting there all alone with his head bent
and his face buried in his hands, thinking of the years that might have
been bright with joy, and love, and cheer, and that he in his madness
had made bad and bitter! Ay, it was a fiery serpent, but it was
effective.

Yet God's heart shrinks from those sharp penalties that come to cure us
of our sins. See, what happened the instant those Israelites returned to
Him, ignominiously crying to the very Moses, and the very God, they had
cast off and grumbled at, to come and save them.

Ay, but God is more eager than they. Make the brazen serpent, lose not a
moment. Set it up on high, and tell them that one look is enough, and
they shall live. That is Godlike; that is how God forgives. Why did God
bid Moses make the brazen serpent and set it up on that pole? God could
have healed these men by telling them to look up even in any way. Why
precisely the brazen serpent should be the instrument of their cure I do
not know; the Bible does not tell me. I can only tell you a thought that
has come to me about it. Perhaps it was for this reason: It would be
surely the thought of every dying Hebrew who looked at that serpent and
felt a new life pulsing through all his veins, and the pain of death
vanishing away, that that serpent came from God, and was a very token
and proof of the warm heart-love of God to him. But it would not be so
easy for the man that had been bitten and lay there dying to think of
that fiery serpent that bit him as a messenger of God's love. He would
be more likely to think that the fiery serpent, that came with death in
his bite, was from the devil. And yet the serpent that bit him to death
came from God, and came from God's love as absolutely as the serpent
that healed. Is not that it? Could they but put two and two together,
would not the thought flash into their heart, "A serpent God gave to
heal; a serpent it was that hurt"? Is it then so, that the serpent that
harmed came from God's love, as much as the serpent that healed? Is not
that just God's way with you? Do not many of you sitting in the church
to-day remember great sorrows or sharp blows of disaster that came into
your life, and at first you writhed against them and were in great pain?
You could not think there was any love of God in them; but they have
lain there and they have made your heart more gentle, they have made
your faith more strong, they have brought God nearer to you, they have
made you kinder in your own home, and you look at them now with the glow
of a goodness that has grown from them, and you say to yourself that not
merely the goodness that has followed since, but the pain that came and
hurt was from God—from God who is love.

How did the healing come to the dying Hebrew who looked at the brazen
serpent? Not from any efficacy in the serpent, not from any magical
virtue in the look; the new life that came to him came direct from God.
Why, then, did God interpose the looking at the serpent? Why did God
make the cure dependent on a gaze at a serpent erected there by Moses? I
will tell you why. It was not the look; it was the change of heart that
was in the look that God wanted. The real mischief that had to be undone
was not the bodily death of those men; there was a worse evil than that,
there was the loss of faith in God, the fracture of a loving dependence
on God. That is the essence of all sin. Sin is disobedience to God. It
means that you snatch your life out of God's hand, that you will not
live according to God's will, that you make yourself your God; you will
be your own master, you will take your own way—you can do better for
yourself than God. Now, mark, you never would choose that sinful course
as long as you trusted God. Loss of faith, that is sin. It is no good
talking of cures, no good talking of salvation, unless you undo the
mischief done by sin. Loss of faith: that is the beginning, the essence,
the end of sin. Ah! that doctrine of salvation through faith that men
mock at and call a legal sophism, it has got the heart of all truth in
it, only I think we are to blame that we have so much talked of faith as
the means of salvation as if it were some external condition attached by
God to salvation. Faith _is_ salvation; Jesus Christ hangs there on the
cross as Moses lifted up the brazen serpent. The moment a man believes
on Him he is saved from sin. How? Through some magical virtue in the
cross, in the Body hanging there, in the blood poured out, or in the
man's mental act of faith? Never, never. That Christ hanging there is
the living embodiment of faith in God: His life, His death, are the
incarnate declaration that all sin is error, that all sin is an outrage,
that men erred and went wrong when they disobeyed God. He condemns all
sin by His life of holiness, by His death of antagonism against sin,
hanging there on the cross, wrestling with sin, seeking to undo it,
offering to God the world's love and obedience that sinful men have
failed to give to God, dying in their stead, obeying in their stead,
making Himself a perfect sacrifice and substitute for this world of
ours. All that still would not be salvation, is not salvation, to you
until the sight of it turns you, regenerates you, makes you see that all
your sin was madness, folly; fills you with hatred of it. When once the
love of God binds you over to follow that Christ in obedience to God, in
trust to God, in love of God, that is faith in Christ, that is salvation.

That serpent became an object of idolatrous and superstitious worship.
It was very natural, and it is very evil. Hezekiah with his reforming
zeal took it, and with real reverence, though with seeming external
irreverence, dashed it in pieces. Has not that also a parallel, hundreds
of parallels in Church history? Hezekiah rightly interpreted the heart
of God; he believed that the great heart of God up there in heaven was
pained every time that a poor ignorant Israelite, man or woman, poured
out on that brazen image the gratitude that should have gone direct to
Him. And so it is that in the Church's story you find that whenever
priests have set up any channel or means of actual grace divine, grace
supernatural, and have attached to it undue reverence, and made it bulk
too largely in the eyes and worship of common men and women, so as to
come between them and God, then God has raised up infidels and
unbelievers to break it and dash it to pieces. Was not that what was
done by the Reformers? At the Reformation, when the Mass had been set
between eager longing hearts of men and women seeking forgiveness and
the great loving heart of God that gives it, it was taken and shattered.
Ay, and when this Bible of ours—this Protestant Bible of ours, or our
great evangelical doctrines, are taken and have given to them a place of
importance in our salvation and in our belief that they ought not to
have, once again be sure of it God will create a true, lawful, and
blessed recoil, and you will have these sacred things even dashed down
to a position of undue depreciation. It is God's ways of leading us to
Himself. Ah! there is a grand thought in that—the unutterable glory
about our God that shines for me through all the tale of that great
battle about belief, and doctrines, and Church institutions that makes
up the Church's story—through it all what I see is the heart of God our
Father longing for the touch of our hands in His hands, the gaze of our
eyes into His, giving us things that shall help us to Him, lesson books
to teach us about Him, steps that shall lead us to His feet. But the
moment we make these a barrier that keeps us far from Him, things sacred
and good are dashed away. What does that mean? It means to you and me
the revelation in all wonder, awe, and comfort of how tender, near, and
true and clinging is the love of God's heart to you and me—of that God
whom we sometimes think so awful and so terrible, but who in His inmost
being through and through is love, wholly, absolutely love.



VIII.

_THE GRADATIONS OF DOUBT._

PSALM lxxiii.


I am going to ask you to study with me this morning the 73rd Psalm.
Before I read the Psalm I had better tell you what it is about; then you
will follow the line of thought in it with greater ease. The central
faith of the Hebrew religion was that God governs this world according
to the principles of morality, that He is on the side of goodness, and
against wickedness. The facts of life clashed with that dogma of Hebrew
faith. Good men in those old times found it as hard to believe in God
and goodness as we do, and they got just as little, or just as much,
supernatural help as we do. Therefore they could nowhere find an
absolute certainty; they nowhere received from heaven a supernatural and
complete explanation of the enigmas of life. God, because He loved them,
deliberately left them to fight their battle for faith with the actual
facts and the actual difficulties. He left them constantly trying to
find a complete intellectual solution of the problem, and failing to do
that, just as we fail; and so He shut them up to discovering a
resting-place for faith in the heart when they could not get it in the
head. A great many psalms have welled out of men's hearts, just like
fountains away among the hills, and valleys, and slopes. This 73rd Psalm
is brimful of human thoughts, and duties, and longings, pains, and
battles, and victories, just like bits of your life when you were all
alive to the real grandeur of your human existence, when your heart
longed to think loftily of life, and to hold fast to God, and precisely
because your heart was all alive you found it was not easy. I am going
to ask you to follow this man's struggle against doubt, to watch the
steps by which he descended into the valley of real questioning of God's
goodness and of God's government of the world, and then to trace the
steps by which he climbed back again to a hill-top of serene and
tranquil certainty.

I have already indicated to you that I do not think that anywhere in the
Old Testament, or in the New Testament, or in all Christian theology or
philosophy, does there exist a complete demonstration of the fact that
God is good, and that He is on the side of goodness. Whether that is
true or not every intelligent believer will admit that this 73rd Psalm
is no complete theodicy. It will not hold its own as a logical
demonstration that the government of this world is moral or just. The
man's certainty that there is a good God, and that God takes sides with
good men, rests not upon sight, but upon faith; it is a solution of the
heart, not of the head. Thank God! that is the universal law of
religious experience. One thing I want to point out to you at the
beginning, especially to those of you who are thinkers, and who study
the various religions of the world. There is a very simple
characteristic about the fashion in which the problem of life is dealt
with in those Psalms, when we compare them, say, with the very finest of
Greek devotion and Greek religion. In all Greek philosophy there is only
one fixed quantity—that is, the world. The problem of Greek thought is
this: Given the world, the clear, solid, certain fact, to find the God
that made it. They took life as it stood, and from its elements and
components they tried to determine what kind of a Maker this world has
had. Now, at the very outset, all through Hebrew religious thought and
philosophy, you find two fixed quantities. There is the world, but over
against it there is God—God, holy, just, righteous; and therefore, while
the Greek problem was always, Given the world, to construct God, the
Hebrew problem is, Given the world as it exists, and given God as He
exists, can those be reconciled? It is a very simple and striking
contrast. I will tell you the picturesque aspect that it gives to the
two literatures. Greek thought is all philosophical, speculative—great
minds rising back to the First Cause, from this actual world; and this
world being what it is, no wonder that at one time they reached iron
Fate, at another time Materialism, at another time Pantheism, at another
time Manichæism. Hebrew thought does not sway about in that fashion; it
is simply concerned with this—the vindication of God's character; and
there is the striking contrast. In Greek poetry, in all Pagan poetry,
you will find warm-hearted, large-minded men contemplating life, with
all its great wrongs, injustices, pains, sorrows, disappointments, and
then breaking into pity and compassion for men. In Hebrew poetry, in
Hebrew religion, you will everywhere find the same dark aspects of life
fearlessly held up, acknowledged, and confronted; but what do you think
is the supreme pain that breaks in upon the hearts of the Hebrew sages
and seers as they contemplate the world's enigmas? It is anxiety for the
character of God. It is not pity for poor men and women, ground under
the wheels of this earth, but a terribly agonising question, "How can we
defend God and God's goodness when the world is so evil and so dark?"
Ah, you want to prove what the Bible is by its own light, to show that
it has a right to be spoken of as a revelation and as inspired! Do not
go to all the trivial Mediæval theories and doctrines about it; go to
the book itself, and go to the world. It can hold its own, without
claiming anything outside to buttress it up. Set the heart-life in it
against the heart-life of any other religion, and you will see that it
has the blue of God's heaven in it—unsullied, splendid, perfect. Now, I
am going to take this one Psalm—to take one glimpse into that long,
painful chemistry of revelation, as God came into human hearts with pain
and perplexity, with struggle, with triumph, with glory, and made those
hearts know Him, not through explanations, but by His indwelling in
them, His life, His love, His holiness, echoing and throbbing into their
heart life.

I am now tempted to break off here for a moment, and say to you what
always strikes me when I look at that aspect of this revealed, inspired
Bible—that it does seem just possible that the good Christian Church we
belong to in our time is not in quite the right way of thinking about
religious doubt. I am not talking about doubt of the head, the
intellect, and the schools—intellectual fence, that sort of triviality;
let it alone, it is not worth taking notice of. But the real doubt of
any age, the doubt of any man's heart and head—what are we to think of
that? Are we to stamp it as devilish? Are we to denounce it, and
excommunicate it? Why, we might be fighting against God. If I read my
Bible aright, real, genuine, patient struggle for faith means just the
birth-throes of God's revelation of Himself in men's hearts. Now come to
this point, and see what it reveals to you that is sacred, pathetic,
instructive in the heart of a man dead hundreds of years ago. Look into
his heart, and you may learn a great deal about your own heart. The
problem that confronts him is the fact that has always been very evident
in every age, that honesty is not by any means always the best policy,
if by that you mean that it pays you best. I am putting it in homely
language. It is a big question. Do the world's good things go
predominantly to the good men? or do they go to the clever and
unscrupulous men? In the professions is it your honest, truthful man, of
modest merit, that succeeds best, or your humbug, impostor, flatterer,
self-advertiser? In the State, in politics, is it your honest man, that
speaks truths to the people, that is lauded and flattered? or is it your
skilful adventurer? In the City does strict honour make a man's fortune?
or are profits bigger in proportion as a man can wink at things?
Anywhere on the large scale are the virtuous classes the most
prosperous? Are the powers of this world raised up to their lofty
elevation by goodness, or rather in spite of badness? Is God on the side
of goodness? or does He not care? or is He rather on the side of
violence, and wrong, and wickedness? Now, this point is the real
struggle in the poet's heart, to solve that difficulty of life. I am
going to read it to you, giving you the headings of the various parts of
it, the steps of emotion and of thought through which his heart has
passed.

He begins, first of all, with the point at which he ends. This is the
right result of that struggle of doubt and faith within him; he believes
that God is on the side of goodness. But there is a curious little word,
very difficult to reproduce in English, that expresses how the firm
conviction that he has of goodness having God backing it was reached
through painful conflict. "Surely"—yes, after all—"God is good to His
people, good to such as are pure in heart." Then we come to the history
of doubt, the progress of doubt, in the man's soul. That you have in the
first fourteen verses. The first step of it was his recognition of the
fact of prosperous wickedness. It is a little difficult to divide the
Psalm exactly, and I do not give you the divisions that I am choosing as
certainly the precise, original structure of the poem, but roughly they
bring out the outstanding thoughts. The first division would be verses 2
to 5—the fact of prosperous wickedness: "But as for me, my feet were
almost gone; my steps had well-nigh slipped. For I was envious at bad
men—at successful bad men—when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For
they have no barriers, no entanglements; they are never tripped up on to
the time of their death"—that, I think, is the real translation—"but
their success remains firm. They are not in trouble like other men;
neither are they plagued like other men."

That is the first step of doubt. Then comes the second, the effect upon
themselves: "Therefore pride is like a golden chain round their neck;
violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes stand out with fatness;
they have more than heart could wish. They scoff, and in wickedness
utter oppression, pour forth oppressive taunt; they speak loftily. They
have set their mouth in the heaven, and their tongue stalketh through
the earth."

Then there is a third step of doubt, the effect upon good men:
"Therefore God's people are prevented that way, and the waters of a full
cup are drained by them. They say, How can God know? and is there
knowledge in the Most High? Behold, these are the wicked; and being
always secure, they heap up wealth."

Then there is the effect on the poet himself: "Surely in vain have I
cleansed my heart, and washed my hands in innocency. For all the day
long have I been plagued, and chastened every morning." You see here the
doubt reaching its last full result.

Then we come to the recoil, the restoration of faith. That also is set
in three steps. The first is the perception of the fact of retribution.
Verse 15: "Had I made up my mind, I will speak thus; behold, I should
have dealt treacherously with the generation of Thy children. When I
thought how I might know this—how to read this riddle—it was too hard
for me, until I went into the sanctuary of God, and considered the last
end of them. Surely Thou didst set them in slippery places; Thou hast
hurled them down to destruction. How are they become a desolation in a
moment! They are utterly consumed with terrors. As a nightmare when one
awaketh, so, O Lord, when Thou awakest Thou dost despise [flout] the
presentment of them."

Then there is the next step, the perception of his own stupidity: "My
mind was in a ferment, and I was pricked in my heart. How brutish I was,
and how ignorant! I was no better than a proud beast before Thee; and I
am continually with Thee, held by Thy right hand."

Then there is the last step, the perception of the immeasurable joy, the
intrinsic superiority, of goodness. "Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and
there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee. My flesh and my
heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for
ever. For, lo, they that are far from Thee shall perish; thou hast
destroyed all them that go straying away from Thee. But it is good for
me to draw near to God: I have made the Lord my refuge, that I may tell
all Thy works."

Now, for our own help and instruction, let us follow, step by step, the
struggle of that good man's heart. Is it evident on the face of things
that goodness has the best of it in this world? Now, I am going to say
to you a thing that perhaps many of you will think little of me for
saying, but I cannot help thinking that the poet exaggerated the actual
facts; and I am quite persuaded that a great many people who think
themselves very wise, and are very wise, at the present day, make far
too much of the external material advantage gained by dishonesty. I am
quite prepared to admit that goodness often keeps a man back from
earthly joy. I am quite prepared to admit that the prizes of this world
go far too much to men that possess no real right to them. There are
endless social wrongs and individual wrongs. Things are not rightly
adjusted, either in the Church or in the world, in professions or in
business. All that is true. Nevertheless, I rather think that the amount
of it is exaggerated. I do not think that is the predominant aspect of
life. It is only when a man is morbid, when existence is pressing too
hard on himself, when he is sharply injured and wronged, that he would
take upon him to say that evil out and out, clearly and without
question, has the best of it. I am talking, of course, of our society
nowadays; but I rather think that in all states of society it could
never have been the case that wickedness absolutely had the best of it.
I will tell you why: Because this world cannot stand without a good deal
of love and a good deal of faith, a good deal of honesty, a good deal of
mutual trust. Why, if business were the utter mass of cheating and
unscrupulosity that some men would have us believe, you would have an
end of all credit, of all business. There must be some brotherliness;
there must be a certain trustworthiness; there must be a considerable
amount of honesty. It is the very salt of the world; it maintains it;
the world would come to an end without it. But all the same, I am
willing to admit that that is the superficial aspect of existence, and
that it is a very staggering blow to men's faith, especially faith that
is inherited from one's father, that is not a man's own; it is a thing
to make a young man's heart bitter; it is a thing to make him hesitate
and doubt whether he ought to hold to the pathway of honour. It is not,
I think, the paramount, the predominant aspect of life, looked at calmly
and dispassionately, quite apart from religious faith, but certainly it
is a very prominent aspect—prominent because it is superficial. Well,
then, that fact of successful wrong-doing is the cause of religious
doubt, but not by any means a very dangerous cause.

We come to the second source of doubt and questioning—an infinitely more
subtle and hazardous one. It is the perception that successful ill-doers
do not seem to be miserable. You know how we are all taught that bad men
have such terribly evil consciences, that harpies are always behind
them, that their hearts are gnawed with dread and anxiety, that they
cannot sleep at night, that remorse haunts them. Not a bit of it. You go
into the world and pick out men who have gained their wealth, who have
wrung it out of the heart's blood of their fellow-men—got it by
downright dishonesty; their eyes stand out with fatness, they roll about
in their carriages, they have splendid houses, and everybody bows down
to them and makes much of them; their faces are wreathed with smiles of
self-satisfaction; you sit at their tables, and they tell you how
successful they have been; they expect you to envy them; they are not
humble and miserable. Then the deadly question comes to you, Where,
then, is God? Ah, one can quite understand God letting the external
world run its own course! One might explain in some way that God allows,
to try men, the prizes of wealth and the joys of life to go to men that
do not deserve them. As a good man once said to me, "It is plain that
God does not think much of money—why, look at the kind of people he
gives it to!" That is so; but the one thing you would believe is this,
that in that strange inner world of the human heart, the mind, the
conscience God could not keep still. If He gives them the external gift,
if He sends them the desire of their flesh, He will send leanness into
their soul. Why do you not see their faces haggard? Why can you not
trace the lines of care? Why does not shame and degradation sit upon the
wealthy man's face who gained his wealth by cheating and lying, by
dishonour and meanness? Oh, they seem so happy, so contented, so
pleased, so proud, so arrogant! Why does their tongue reach up to
heaven, in its pride, and haughtiness, and complacency? Well, you would
think that that is a deadly enough doubt to be gnawing at a good lad's
heart; but there is a still deadlier one. Here you have the deadliest
cause of doubt, when a man, pressed hard by the great fact of prosperous
ill-doing, staggered by that blow, does not see the inner, ethical,
moral vengeance of God stamped on it. He looks round for confirmation to
the good men in the Church; he looks at religious Christian society, he
falls back on it, to let it support him, to let it help him; and what
does he discover when his eyes pierce through and penetrate? In the
heart within him he begins to recognise the hearts of others. Everywhere
the Church is secretly doubting too; good men are longing for a share in
the ill-gotten gain—ay, tampering with their consciences, themselves
turning into the same direction, drinking of the waters of the same cup,
and then some of them, more reckless or more honest, speaking straight
out: "Yes, I was brought up, like you, to believe in virtue, in honesty,
in God, and in goodness; but I have seen throughout that this world is
not governed by a good God. If there is a good God, He does not know or
does not care; He does not step in; it is the wicked that have the best
of it in this world; I am going to take that course." Ah, the moral
perversion, the tainted breath of the base, selfish, greedy,
unscrupulous world! that detected in the heart of his own father, the
good elder, the church member; that detected in his own mother, not
valuing or choosing for the society of her home the honourable, the
pure, the good, the true, but the people with money, and tainted
reputations, and all the rest of it; that is the deadliest thing; that
makes the real doubt, the real unbelief; that carries a lad, not to
books of philosophy—he will never take much harm from them, even if he
has head enough to understand them—but carries him clean away from
religion, into shady company too, and takes the virtue and morality out
of him, making him sell himself for money in life's sacredest
relationships: it is that—the perversion of good. Oh, how much we
Christian men and women have to answer for when we denounce sceptics and
worldlings, the ungodly young men who stop going to church, and all
that! Ay, poor souls, they will have to answer for it! but how much
shall we have to answer for it too? The Church, is it not tainted by
worldliness? Do we go and take the bravest, the most patient, the most
loyal, the most prayerful, the most devout Sunday-school teacher, a
working man, and put him in the chair of our Sunday-school assemblies in
Exeter Hall? No, no; it is not pure goodness. I do not know that we can
help it, but it would be worth while trying that system, instead of the
Church, for want of faith, making so very much of the world, of social
position, and of purse power.

But I have rather wandered from my point. Doubt has now run its course,
completed its curriculum. The question is often raised, Does it matter
what a man believes? No, not what he believes about the abstract
theories or explanations either of philosophy or theology—it will not
matter much what he thinks about these abstruse questions; but it
matters infinitely and eternally what he thinks about God, and goodness,
and life. Ah, there a man's heart-faiths make his life-conduct! It was
so with the poet here, when those dark, demon doubts had filled his
soul, when his mind was in a ferment, when his heart was pricked and
bitter within him, when he heard good men—men that were good once—round
him saying, "Does God know?" and when he felt himself in a God-forsaken
world, where there was nothing but each man snatching the best he could
get, where everything was given over to wickedness and evil. Ah, then,
such a man does not stop at theoretical atheism and scepticism! he goes
farther. "Surely in vain have I kept my hands clean; I have been a fool
to deny myself forbidden joys and pleasures; I have been punished, I
have been injured; those that were unscrupulous, and impure, and
dishonest have had the best of it; I have done with being a fool; I am
going to have my share too." Now doubt has reached its most dangerous
point; it is going to hurry into forbidden action.

It was at this moment that the recoil came. I will tell you how. If a
man has got any heart at all, he can go any length in his own head with
his doubts and questions about whether there is a God or a heaven, or
whether it is worth while trying to be holy, and pure, and honest; but
if he has any heart at all, the moment that he says, "I am going to be
pure no longer, but I am going to be foul," then there is something in
him that draws him back. He sees himself, or rather he feels, that he is
not doing harm to any one with those doubts that are in his own
intellect, but the moment he says, "I am going out into the world, in
the train, in the town, in the warehouse, and I am going to tell it,
right and left, that I count it an old wife's fable that there is a God
and heaven, that I count the man an idiot who denies himself any fleshly
joy that he can get without coming within the grasp of the law"—I say,
if he has any heart at all, he suddenly thinks to himself, "If I say
that to my younger brother, if I say that to that innocent maiden, I
shall be doing a cruel wrong to the generation of God's people." Oh,
there is an eternal, immovable fact! Doubt may have all logic on its
side, but doubt and the denial of God and of virtue are the world's
damnation. It may be an advantage to a man to cheat and steal, but it
cannot be an advantage to his neighbours. Take the worst man in the
City, and ask him if he would wish that all goodness, all virtue, all
religion should be so crushed out that every man should become a thief,
a robber, a burglar. No; he does not want that. Even in the case of an
infidel, if he be a man of fine conscience and fine heart—I have known
such—not for his life would he tell his doubts to a child, not for his
life would he say a word to stop that mother teaching her boy to pray. I
have known such men who told me that they were thankful that the mother
of their children kept on doing it. Yes, that Psalm is far away from our
theoretical theologies or intellectual apologies and the rest of it. See
how intensely human it is—that recognition that doubt held within the
intellect is not very harmful, but let it go out into the world, and it
will do unspeakable mischief; it is that that gives the doubter check.
Ay, and there is reason in it, rationality. When a man recognises that
fact he has got to go farther. If doubt manifestly would harm the world,
if the denial of God, and goodness, and the earth's moral government
would damage human society, then there must be something wrong in the
reasoning that leads up to that denial. The facts cannot be as I have
fancied, or else my inferences are wrong; for never, never can it be
evil to know the truth. Therefore that denial of mine that there is a
good God, or that if there be a God He governs this world by goodness,
must be false. Now all things appear to the man in a new light. Why?
Because he has got up to a great elevation. Suddenly it darts upon him,
"Before, I was looking at this world out of my little self; I judged
everything by its effect upon my own personality, my own life. I was
suffering, and therefore all things must be wrong." What a poor little
aspect that is! Now he has risen up to a point where he stands as God
stands; he looks at the big world out of himself, and he sees that the
doubt, the denial, would destroy all that is best in the world. And he
looks farther; he has reached to God's sanctuary. Now his eyes travel
over wider reaches of human story. Before he was like a man down in a
valley where there is a winding river, and just where he stood the river
seemed to flow in one direction, and he went away and proclaimed to men
that the river ran north. Now he has travelled away up the mountain, and
he is able to look over the whole extent, and he sees that there was a
winding and twisting in the stream, but observes that its great ultimate
course is to the southern seas. The man stands up above this world of
ours, he looks over the great spread of its course and history, and what
is the absolute conclusion? That everywhere in the end immorality has
death in it; that violence, wickedness, selfishness ruin themselves;
that oppressive dynasties have fallen, and corrupt peoples have been
struck down; that sin everywhere has God's vengeance set in it, and ends
in death. Everywhere in the end virtue does triumph and survive,
goodness proves superior. That is a fact which the evolutionist tells
us. This world seeks and reaches the moral, the good, the true, the
noble in intellect, heart, and soul. It was made, the religious man
says, by a good God, and it is making for goodness. Yes; but there comes
another revelation. For the good man says to himself, "Now, how came it
that I could not see that before?" and suddenly an overwhelming shame
falls upon him. "How could I not see that before? Oh, because I was such
a little soul, because I lived in such a despicable, little world! I
failed to see the truth because I was as base as those bad men. What
makes them forsake God and goodness? Because they count earthly gain the
supreme thing. Why was I so bitter against their getting the earthly
gain? Because I counted it the supreme thing. I, a man made in God's
image, a man held by God's hand, a man whose will was being
overshadowed, and led, and guided by God's Spirit, through all was so
ignorant and so brutish that I thought God's best gift that He had to
give to His children was money, or fleshly pleasure, or earthly
adulation. I was no better than a brute beast. To the brute beast God
can give nothing more than meat, and drink, and fleshly sensual delight;
but that a man held in God's hand, loved by God, should have great joy
about these things! Ah, my doubt grew not out of the world's enigmas
alone! it grew out of my own low morals." Now he stands in a new
position. He sees as God sees, and he says to himself, "Ah, let this
world grow as ill as it may; even if it were the case that money, power,
social ambition, earthly rewards did go predominantly to wickedness,
what then? Here am I, a man loving honour, truth, justice, mercy,
purity, God; shall I hesitate for one moment if I must lose all the
world? Can I hesitate for one moment? No; goodness alone, with no
earthly reward, is heaven, and far more precious than all worldly gain."
Why? Because goodness has in it the very breath of God, the throb of His
Spirit, the echo of His heart. The good man has God in him, loving him,
continually with him, he continually with God; and this world lies
beneath him, and death beneath his feet. Ah, the best this world can
give trembles before death and the grave, and breaks and is gone! but in
goodness the human heart clasps God, and doubt is at an end.

Oh, how much our world to-day wants that supreme daring faith in
goodness just for itself, and that close fellowship with God, that
defies all questionings, all doubts, that would stand if all the
evidences about our Gospels and Epistles were swept away, still sure
that God is up there, that God loves men, and that God draws them to
Himself to make them holy, as their Father in heaven is holy!



IX.

_THE STORY OF QUEEN ESTHER._

ESTHER iv. 13-17.


The subject to which I invite your attention to-night is the Story of
Queen Esther. The kernel of it has been read to you in the fourth
chapter. I shall read the closing verses, so as to give you the key-note
to the meaning of the narrative. After Esther had refused to go and
plead for the Hebrews with the King of Persia, "Mordecai commanded to
answer Esther, Think not with thyself that thou shalt escape in the
king's house, more than all the Jews. For if thou altogether holdest thy
peace at this time, then shall there enlargement and deliverance arise
to the Jews from another place; but thou and thy father's house shall be
destroyed: and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such
a time as this? Then Esther bade them return Mordecai this answer, Go,
gather together all the Jews that are present in Shushan, and fast ye
for me, and neither eat nor drink three days, night or day: I also and
my maidens will fast likewise; and so will I go in unto the king, which
is not according to the law: and if I perish, I perish. So Mordecai went
his way, and did according to all that Esther had commanded him."

It is a very difficult task to calculate how much religion there is in
the world—true religion, that God accepts. Elijah once tried to
calculate, and concluded there was nobody true to God but himself; blind
to the seven thousand that had not bowed the knee to Baal. It is quite
possible to take superficial, indulgent, optimistic views of the
progress made by mankind, but God knows there are as deadly and wicked
and more blasphemous errors committed by good men, who talk of this
world as if it were given over to the devil to reign and rule in it, as
if things were growing worse and worse, as if the number of men and
women whose hearts are God's were few. I think the blunder comes from
looking for goodness often in the wrong place, from a mistaken idea of
what true religion is. It won't do to reckon up our church members; they
are not all genuine. It won't do to count our acts of worship, our
prayer-meetings, our praises. These are often mere sound, breath, empty
air. If you want to know how much of Christ there is in this world, you
must go outside the churches, into the workshops, into the homes of the
people. Ay, you must go to lands where Christ's name is not often heard,
and you have got to listen with a sympathetic ear, and whenever you hear
the accents of Christ's human voice ringing out in any way of genuine
love and tenderness, whenever you see duty done patiently, and loyally,
and uncomplainingly, whenever you see a heart or a soul follow the
light, however dim and glimmering, understand that there you are
touching Christ, and stand on a bit of the kingdom of heaven. The
eleventh chapter of Hebrews is the golden roll of the Old Testament
heroes, men of God, stamped by God Himself as genuine; and the deeds
recited, too, as having been done by them, that gave them their degree
and title as heroes, and nobles, and princes in heaven's kingdom, are
not the preaching of sermons, or the writing of books of theology, or
the fighting about petty little trivialities of doctrinal explanation,
or the performance of rites and ceremonies and acts of worship, but
brave deeds of battle, noble, dauntless generalship, heroism, and
courage, and self-sacrifice, loyalty to the cause of truth and
righteousness in this world. These are the deeds that were done,
following the guidance of God, under the inspiration of Heaven, and the
men who did them are recited in one long unbroken chain, and linked on
in line direct with Jesus Christ, whose death and redemption are
presented as the crown and consummation of that long series of priests,
and kings, and prophets, and warriors, and heroes, true-hearted men and
women who lived for God and fought for God in the olden time. It is
sometimes said that Christ was not present in the Old Testament times.
True, the human Jesus of Nazareth was not there, but oh, the spirit of
Him was! He was the very heart-beat, and pulse, and inspiration of all
that long, continuous struggle to bring heaven down into earth, for that
is what the Old Testament story presents to us. In every brave deed, in
every true word, in every pure and righteous life, it was not the heart
of man that glowed, but the very spirit of Christ—Christ coming to full
birth and maturity in this world's story.

Some people are puzzled to discover how the Book of Esther comes to be
in the Old Testament. It is said to be a romance of history. It contains
no religious teaching. The name of God is not once mentioned in it, from
the first verse to the last. How comes it in the Bible?

Now, it is quite true that there is no direct dogmatic teaching of
religious truth. It is absolutely true that the name of God is not to be
found in its pages. But what of that? what of that, if the book is one
of the most powerful presentations of God's providence working among
men, if the book itself has for its very soul and idea the conception of
God overruling events in a marvellous fashion to preserve His kingdom on
earth? Is the great thing to get the name of God, spelt with its three
letters, or to be shown God? Ah! it is the same kind of blunder that
causes us to make so much of mere forms of words in the Church, instead
of looking to see if the Spirit of God animates the man and woman and
the preacher who inhabit the professed house of God on earth. There may
be no teaching of religion, no prophesying of Jesus, no foreshadowing of
the evangelical truths of redemption in the Book of Esther; but what it
does paint for you is a majestic picture of a human heart struggling
against its own weakness, rising to a grandeur that had in it the glory
of Christ's own self-sacrifice. The name is not there, the phrase is not
there; but the core, and kernel, and heart of Christ's love, and faith,
and redemption of men are pulsing and beating in the book.

It is a puzzling book. There is a great deal in it that is revolting.
The background on which Esther's deed of heroism was done is ugly and
repulsive. She lived in a social state that was degraded and base,
containing in it customs and habits that almost sicken us who, through
Christ's mercy, have been lifted into comparative purity and sweetness.

You remember the story. A dissolute Persian monarch, in a drunken
frolic, requires of his queen to do a deed that ran against all that was
womanly within her, and she refused. Mercilessly he deposes her from the
throne, and he sets to to select another queen. The fair maidens of the
land are collected, and in a very disgusting fashion presented to the
tyrant, and from among them he chooses the beautiful young Jewess
Esther, and makes her his queen. One cannot but pity her for having
lived in such a time, for having had to play a part on such a stage of
the world's story. One may even fairly ask the question, if it had not
been nobler if she had not been presented by her guardian in such a
revolting competition? But it is no good for us finding fault with the
actual course of the world's story. If God was not too fine to lead men
in all the bygone days—polygamy and such like practices were tolerated
in the Old Testament time, because of the lowness of men's hearts, as
Christ explains to us—it is a mistake in you and me being too fine to
recognise God where God was numbering Himself among transgressors, that
He might lift mankind to His own level. And then the narrative proceeds;
presents to us a succession of cruel, unscrupulous intrigues, mainly
between Esther's guardian, Mordecai, (a Jew whom one cannot admire and
love, taking the picture of him drawn in this book) and the king's
favourite courtier, Haman. In the course of the rivalry between the two,
the very existence of God's people throughout the Persian empire is
imperilled. Partly through Haman's scheming, but also through dauntless
devotion to what they believed to be the cause of God, and which was the
cause of God, in spite of the earthliness and imperfections attaching to
its soldiers and defenders, partly by evil fixed to them, partly through
nobility and goodness, a drama is presented to us, a struggle of heroism
and bravery, and in the centre of it is that young queen doing a deed
that we cannot but call Christlike.

Now, I want to say this to you: Men's lights in the world are very
diverse. The possibilities of goodness and attainment for one man are
far greater and far higher than for another. Some of you may be so
entangled with evil customs and habits of commercial or of social life
that you feel your very position there is impossible to make quite
consistent with the full requirements of Jesus Christ. Thus things are.
It is no good blinking them. And what are you to do? To despair, to give
up any attempt to be good, and pure, and noble? Never! never! Look at
all that Old Testament story—men far behind in their notions of common
morality, yet on that low, degraded background discerning always a
higher that may be done, a lower that may be avoided. No matter where
you may stand, no matter how difficult the achievements may be, the one
great question is, not what is the framework, but what is the painting
you put in it. Are you living for self? or are you living for God?
living to your own self-will, or striving to do your duty as far as you
can do it?

From a very lowly lot Esther rose to be the first lady in the land, and
I suppose all her sister Jewesses envied her, and thought that there was
nothing that was not happy, and prosperous, and pleasant in her
position. Yes, it was a position of great advantage, of great pomp,
flattering to her pride—rich raiment, jewellery, the adulation of
fawning courtiers, the admiration of the great monarch of the mightiest
kingdom in the world, promoted to the throne as queen, wielding power
over the destinies of man. Ah! it was a very enviable, happy lot, and
yet not altogether so very enviable. I will tell you why—a thing that we
apparently forget. When we all of us enter into our estates, when we
come of age, nearly all good fortune in this world is heavily mortgaged.
It is encumbered estates that we come heir to; and without disloyalty,
without being renegades and dishonourable, we cannot cast off these
encumbrances. The present has always got to pay the purchase price to
the past. You must not kick away the ladder by which you rose to
fortune. Ah! and sometimes into the bright sunshiny present the past
comes with a very long bill to pay—comes with a very stern face and a
demanding hand, and bids you, perhaps, risk all that is making your
heart so warm, and so proud, and so gay.

That was the case with Esther. She was a Jewess. She owed her birth and
her breeding to that despised, exiled people. She had won her proud
position on the emperor's throne through the planning, and toiling, and
sacrifice of her Jewish guardian. And now her people's destiny hangs on
the balance. A deadly conspiracy against them has brought it about that
on a given day, rapidly approaching, there is to be a universal
merciless massacre of these defenceless Jews. And through the mouth of
her old revered guardian the demand comes to her—the one human being
that might have influence with the cruel king to cancel the decree and
save the lives of men, women, and children—at the risk and peril of her
own life in asking it, to go and intercede for them.

Hard! oh, how hard! Don't you judge harshly the poor queen when she
shrank away from it and could not face the stern summons. Think of it,
the young flesh, the soft heart—a woman's heart—within her, and think of
the cruel death by torture that was wont to be inflicted upon any one
that, unbidden, dared to force his way into the king's presence; coming,
too, in the bright noonday of all her good fortune. It would have been
easier to risk life when she was an unknown Jewish maiden; but oh, in
this good luck, this fortune, this love, this adulation, this
admiration, with her right fair beauty all upon her, to take it all and
go and confront grim death! it seemed too much to ask. And so Esther
began arguing within herself: Was she bound to hazard her life for these
Jews? After all, what had they done for her? They were her race, her
kindred, but what of that? Had she not come out from among them? Has not
destiny taken her lot and separated it from theirs? Why cannot she live
her own life apart from them? Why should she come down from the throne
and take her stand among them, exposed to cruel massacre and death? What
is the obligation? Where are the ties that bound her lot to theirs? Ay,
where were the ties of love and the obligations to generosity? They are
too fine and impalpable to be proved by argument. The moment you begin
discussing them or questioning them—ties that bind brother to brother,
sister to sister, child to parent—they vanish like life dissected for.
You destroy them. They have to be felt, not proved, but are more real,
more solemn, more important in determining a man's destinies than all
the legal bonds and moral obligations that bind him in society.

But then, again, the queen would ask herself, What would be the good of
her running such a risk? Is it reasonable that she, a single weak woman,
unskilled in the ways of courts and of cunning courtiers; that she
should be asked to plunge into a whirlpool of race-hatreds and furious
feuds between unscrupulous nobles and potentates about the court; that
she should confront the reckless rage of the royal tyrant—she, so
defenceless, so impotent, so frail? Ah, yes! once again the argument was
good to shirk the path of heroism; but once again, what business had she
to argue? When duty comes to you it is not a thing to reason about. You
have got to just go and do it.

Mother, when your little one was struck down with the deadliest and most
infectious ailment, did you reason for one moment whether you could be
expected to risk your life, whether you were not too delicate to make it
worth while doing it, whether you would not be throwing away your
existence? If any man came and suggested that to you,—"No!" Love, duty,
they do not argue, they command.

The fact of the matter was, the queen was standing in a false position.
She could not see the truth, she could not see the right, where she
stood. I hope I have been able to show you how very plausible, how very
weighty, the grounds were on which she made her refusal to risk her
life. But have not you yourselves felt something about a home atmosphere
in which such reasoning moved that is contemptible and despicable? Have
not you recognised its infinite pettiness and littleness? Oh, what a
narrow, contracted, selfish world that woman's heart is living in! It
has been all a question about Esther—Esther's life, Esther's risks,
Esther's obligations, as if that were the whole. Why not break down
those prison walls of littleness? Look at those thousands of
Jews—fathers, mothers, young maidens, brave lads, little children with
their bright eyes, and with terrible death impending over them. How is
Esther so forgetful of them, with their white faces and their anxious
eyes, and of God's purposes in this world? Ah, no man can ever choose
the path of right, of heroism, of goodness, of duty, till he sees and
feels himself in God's big world, and with God above him up in heaven!

Mordecai recognised the root of the queen's cowardice, and swiftly and
sternly he sent back a reply that shattered those barriers of her
selfishness, and lifted her out of her little self-centred world, and
set her on the pinnacle whence the whole line and way of duty shone out
unmistakably. "Go back," said he—"go back and tell the queen to be
ashamed of her despicable selfishness. Does she imagine that she lives
separate and unconnected in this world of God's, so that she can save
her own life by sacrificing, cowardly, the lives of her kinsmen? Go,
tell the queen that she does not live in a will-less, random world,
where she may pick and choose the best things for herself. Go, tell her
that confronting her, sweeping round her, seizing her in its currents,
the great will of God is moving on down through the centuries. If she
will not save God's people, then God will find another deliverer, and
she herself shall be dashed aside. Go, tell the queen she may refuse the
task, but the deed shall be done. God's purpose in His chosen people
shall not be baulked. Deliverance will come to the Jews, but she, poor
blind queen, may have missed a noble vocation. Go, bid the queen look at
the strange providence that picked her out among her people, that placed
her on the throne, that set her by the side of the despot in whose hands
the fate of her people is held, and then bid her ask whether she thinks
God did that deed out of partial, indulgent favour of her petty self, or
whether it is not clear as noontide that just for this hour of peril,
and of danger, and of death, to be the redeemer and the saviour of the
Jews, God gave her that dignity and set her on the throne."

Ah, what a new world we are in now! what a new light floods everything!
The queen felt it. All that was noble, all that was good in her waked
and gained the upper hand, and crushed down her baseness, and her
meanness, and her selfishness. And yet heroism had a struggle with the
weakness of the flesh. That is nothing strange. Remember Christ in
Gethsemane: "Oh, watch with Me, with your human sympathy and fellowship,
in My dire hour of need!" It was a cry like that that made Esther send
back that message to Mordecai. She wanted to feel the binding force of
the ties of common human brotherhood that connected her with her people
to make her strong. She saw how it was. Away from them, and living
alone, proudly, selfishly, her heart had got hard, and she could not go
out among them; but it would mean a deal for her during those days if
she knew that in every Jewish home men and women, young men and maidens,
and little children, from morning till night, were fasting, and by the
pain and abstinence of fasting kept thinking, from morning till night,
of the deadly danger hanging over them, and Esther steeling herself to
risk her life for love of them. Oh, wrapped round with that sense of
human sympathy, nerved and braved by the thought of all these human
lives hanging on her heroism, the weak woman conquered, and she could go
and do the deed of valour!

But one thing more: the other element, the sense of her own weakness,
her own impotence—for that she needed to fall back on God. Ah, if it
were the case simply of a nation pleading with her to intercede on their
behalf, she could not have done that all alone! But when she herself,
through those two days, lived face to face with God, till this world was
filled with His presence, till all the old stories of the generous
rescues of bygone days were blazing resplendent before her eyes,
guaranteeing that it was a call of God, that God would be behind her and
with her and that His strength would be sufficient for her weakness—so
backed with intimate love and sympathy with her fellow-men, and a strong
faith in God, she could go and do her duty. Look at this striking
contrast. Read that first refusal of hers—selfish, self-centred,
cowardly, prudent. I think you feel all through it a restlessness, a
dissatisfaction, a vacillation, a nervous excitement, a sense of
uneasiness, a hidden doubt whether in saving her life she may not be
losing it. Read that reply now, when she pledges herself to go and dare
the king's deadly rage. How grand, and majestic, and calm it rings out!
solemn, earnest, like the voice of a brave veteran going on a forlorn
hope, but with the tranquillity, the serene certainty, of a brave heart
doing what it knows to be duty. Ah, the man that goes through this world
regardless of right or wrong, not asking what is duty, taking and
choosing what shall be for his own advantage, trimming, and chopping,
and setting his sails to catch every breeze of dishonourable prosperity,
the restless heart that made response hanging upon himself, every step
his own, if wrong then the upbraiding and the remorse all will be his.
Oh, the sweetness, the grandeur, the calmness of the man who has asked
simply, in any circumstances of danger and difficulty, "What is right?
what is duty? what is the will of God? what alone can and ought to be
done?" and then does it, ay, with death hanging over. He can sleep
tranquilly. He is not responsible for the issue, no matter what it be.
Here on earth he has done the right, done his duty, and the
responsibility rests on God.

Esther, by that deed of heroism, delivered God's people from
destruction. In her measure she did the same thing that Christ did
perfectly later. Like Him, too, she laid her own life down on the altar.
That it was not sacrificed does not diminish the value of the offering.
A man does not need to perish in saving another from drowning, if he
plunge into the wild, stormy sea, to deserve an admiration as great as
if he had perished in the task.

She did a deed of Christ. That deed roused the admiration of her day and
generation. That deed of hers was told with kindling eyes and ringing
voice, and pride and triumph, from father to child, generation after
generation. That deed of hers stood out as a pledge, a guarantee, of the
reality of God's purpose for His kingdom on earth. By her deed, in her
own day and generation, she saved God's people from imminent
destruction; by that deed, preserved in history, she lifted up and made
strong the hope and faith of generations after. And so, rightfully, her
story finds its place in that long record of the hearts, noble, and
brave, and true, who, for love of men and faith in God, at the bidding
of Heaven, loved not their own lives to death, but laid them down for
their brethren.

Oh, we men and women have got to learn this lesson from this Bible of
ours—the real service of God, that is real religion, and that does build
God's kingdom on earth, is done not altogether, by a long way, in our
churches, in our religious exercises of worship; but done in purity,
love, and truth, and goodness, out of generous kindliness to one
another, at the bidding of God, through all the common chapters that
make up our daily life.



X.

_THE EXAMPLE OF THE PROPHETS._

"Take, my brethren, the prophets, who have spoken in the name of the
Lord, for an example."—JAMES v. 10.


We possess the books produced in olden times by a number of different
nations. Each national literature has its own peculiarities. The
literature of Israel has various features that are very characteristic
of it. Among them all, one stands out and is unique. All along the
nation had a conviction that they were destined to be the greatest
nation in the world, and they believed that this destiny of theirs lay
in the fact that through their government the world was to be made good,
righteous, holy, and happy. They believed that God had a large plan,
embracing the whole world in its operations; they believed that God was
using all the different races as tools to work out that design of His;
but they held that infinitely beyond all lesser instruments, He had made
up His mind to employ Israel in accomplishing that great purpose of His
high heart; through Israel He was to make the whole world into one
Divine kingdom, ruled by Himself, and reverencing Himself as the one
only God and Lord.

The mass of the people constantly forgot that sense of a lofty destiny;
they constantly tired of that great ideal; they chose to prefer present
gain and advantage; they disregarded that predicted end of their history
in determining their contemporary policy in relation to other nations;
they were dumb, and blind, and deaf to that feeling of God's movement in
history and His purpose for the future. Nevertheless, in every age down
through that nation's story there existed in their midst men who were
possessed by a supreme conviction of this presence, and power, and
purpose of God, men who sacrificed bread, profession, home, happiness,
and life itself, that they might seek to carry out that intention and
desire of God. In every age they declared what God wanted Israel to be
and to do. In every age they recommended a policy founded on that
destiny of Israel and that design of God. The darker the national
history grew, the more decided was their certainty of the fulfilment of
God's purpose. But this singular change took place in the form in which
they conceived that fulfilment: In the earlier times Israel—the whole
nation—was to be the minister of God's intention; but as age after age
exhibited the depravity, the unholiness, and the jealousy of the nation,
the thought of the coming kingdom of promise, and of gladness and
goodness, concentrated itself not so much about the people, but about
the King. More and more, it was not the chosen _people_ of Israel, but
it was the chosen _Son_ of Israel, the chosen Heir of David, the coming
Deliverer, the King, that was to bring it in. It is a strange spectacle
to behold how God, by His external dealings with the people of Israel,
and by the development of their conduct, led His servants the prophets
to see that if ever this grand purpose of God for mankind was to be
accomplished, it could not be done by the whole people, or any number of
them, but must be done by one single individual, who should combine in
his character all the goodness, and all the truth, and all the
knowledge, and all the power of God that were necessary to make a
kingdom of God on earth. So it came to pass that inside the progress of
Israel's history, as a wall down the long march of that history, there
was a line of men first of all foreseeing a grand future, mainly
connected with Israel in the government of the nation, and gradually
defining more brightly the covenant, and the establishment, and the
maintenance of that kingdom as contained in the person, in the
character, in the work, in the heart, in the sufferings, in the triumph
of a great coming Messenger of God, a Man of God, a Son of God, yet so
stamped with Divinity that He gets names which set Him on a level with
God. It is the long procession of prophets, the line of foreseers, who,
in succession to the patriarchs, touch, ages in advance, the coming of
Christ, and make the world expect it, and preserve faith in mankind till
Christ does come.

The history of these men within their own nation is striking. As a rule,
they stood in a small minority, were despised and disbelieved, had to
maintain the truth of their Divine conviction in the face of almost
universal denial, were ill-treated and persecuted, were declared to be
impostors or traitors to the national cause, were cast out, and an
immense number of them were killed. But as time rolled on the
development of events proved that those men had seen the calamities and
vengeances of God which had been foretold as about to fall on Israel,
because of Israel's sin. The people were cast out of their own native
land; they were driven into captivity, and in captivity they remembered
what the prophets had spoken; and then, with humble hearts and penitent
spirits, they said to themselves "Those men were right; they spoke true;
they anticipated what has come to pass; God was with them; they were His
messengers; we were in the wrong; it was a true word from heaven that
they uttered amongst us;" and so the old contempt and disbelief vanished
away, and there came a reverence and a faith for those prophets that
almost reached the verge of superstition; they gathered together their
writings; they treasured them, and made the books of those prophets into
their Bible. It is in that fashion that our own Old Testament of the
prophets was formed. The prophets were first rejected, derided, put to
death, and, then with repentance and humility, accepted as the true
messengers of God, taken as authoritative interpreters of God's mind and
will; their writings were treasured and preserved, and made into the
national Bible.

It is these prophets that the Apostle James bids us take as an example.
He means that every Christian man and every Christian woman is, in a
measure, to be a prophet; He means especially that every Christian man
and every Christian woman in the battle of life stands in some measure
between God and others, and is to be a prophet. He means further that
every father is to do for his children what those prophets did for
Israel—he is to make them know God. He means that every mother is to be
the very channel of making her children come into contact with God's
character, and comprehend God's intentions for them. He means especially
that every Sunday-school teacher is to be just what those old prophets
were in Israel—to make others who are more ignorant than he is sensible
of the presence, and purpose, and progression of God's designs through
life in his own present age and time. He means that every preacher, and
every teacher, and every man who speaks about religion is, in his
conduct and character, and what he teaches and what he preaches, to be a
prophet. And above all, he means that one and all of us of this age
shall, even down to the humblest Christian, who hardly has any
influence, act as a mediator or interpreter between other men and God,
as did many of the prophets, with an unswerving belief of the truth, and
with a patience and perseverance of spirit in every unenlightened time,
and amidst the most adverse circumstances, founded upon the certainty of
the fulfilment of God's promise that Christ should come, and shall come
again.

Now I want to say a few things to you about the character and the office
of those prophets in the world, that we may see some respects in which
we may and certainly ought to imitate them. What was a prophet? I
imagine that many of us are content with a very superficial notion of
the part played in actual life by those men. I imagine, because of the
class of books that has been written in great profusion in our present
century, and is still written, that we are apt to think of a prophet
simply and only as a man who predicted things that were going to
happen—incidents and events that were to fall out in the unfolding of
history. The prophets did a vast deal more than that, and the very
essence, and life, and grandeur of their character and conduct appear
only in a small fragment in that portion of their office. Their real
movement and meaning are in quite another department.

If we wish to know what a prophet is, we may, first of all, take the
names given to the prophets in the Bible. Then, again, we may remember
who were the prophets. And then we may take their writings, the records
of their deeds, the history that tells of their fortunes. What are the
names given to a prophet in the Old Testament? The first and holiest is
"a man of God"—"the man of God." All that that tells us is that in a
peculiar sense the prophet belonged to God. The next name is "the
servant of God." That tells us that he belonged to God in the sense of
serving God, doing things for God. Then he is called "the ambassador, or
the messenger, of God." That tells you that he served God by bringing
messages from God. Then he is called an interpreter. That tells you that
it was to men he took God's message, and that he had to make it
understood by them. The next thing that we come to is a "seer,"
connected with the word "watchman," a spier or seer. It means one who
saw what other men could not see, who saw into God's mind, who saw God,
who saw what God was about. It tells us how he got to know his message,
how he learnt it; it was by insight, seeing into the hidden, underlying
purposes of God. Then the last name of all is what we translate
"prophet," and it literally means a man who bubbles up and runs over,
whose heart gushes out, in the sense of being poured into, that what is
poured in comes out of him. It tells us that he pours out what he has
learnt, to other men; and it adds this shade of meaning (the very form
of the Hebrew word does so), that he is, as it were, spoken through; it
does not end with himself, nor does it take its rise with himself, but
it comes into him like a flood, and it overflows; he cannot help
himself; he is possessed, he is pressed; he is compelled to utter what
his God tells him.

The names of a prophet, therefore, tell us this; this is his function;
he, beyond other men, has to do with God, belongs to God; he belongs to
God in being God's servant; he is God's servant in being God's
messenger; he is God's messenger in bringing things to men that God
wants men to know; he learns what he has to tell men by seeing it
himself, by knowing it, understanding it, feeling it, and then he utters
it by a resistless compulsion and impulse, the fire burning in his
heart, a pressure being put on him to tell what God has taught him.
Already you have got the thought of a man with a grandeur, a greatness,
a significance, and a meaning immensely above what you think of when you
think of a man who can tell you where an axe which has been lost is to
be found, or whether a sick person will die or live, or whether a town
is going to be destroyed or not. What you have is a living, breathing,
warming channel of communication between the great God in heaven and the
human hearts of men on earth.

Then, who were the prophets? Moses was a prophet, the greatest of all
the Old Testament prophets. He was a prophet because of his whole
life work, not because once or twice he predicted a thing which was
going to happen. Because he was Moses, the moulder and the maker of
Israel, and the giver to them of all their knowledge about God which is
contained in God's law, therefore Moses was a prophet. Samuel was a
prophet; Saul the king was a prophet for one night, when he lay on the
ground in an ecstasy, and uttered strange sayings. There were all kinds
of prophets; I cannot deal with them all. Isaiah was a prophet; Daniel
was a prophet supremely. Christ was _the_ Prophet, and the complete
Prophet. How? Because He foretold the doom of Jerusalem? Because He
foretold His own death? Undoubtedly because He did those things; but
that was not why He was called the Prophet. Why was it? A very excellent
book, the Shorter Catechism, puts it better than I can: "Jesus Christ is
a Prophet in making known to us the mind and will of God for our
salvation."

I put this deliberately and very strongly, almost unduly depreciating
the idea of foretelling future events, just because I know from my own
experience, and certainly from the experience of others, that one thinks
that the latter is the whole meaning of the word. It is startling and
intensely interesting when you can pick out a prediction which was
uttered ages before, and which was afterwards fulfilled. By all means
take that; but never forget that, just like Christ's miracles, it was,
as it were, only the accompaniment of the prophet's main work as a
prophet, and that the real work of a prophet is making known unto us the
whole character, and heart, and mind, and will of God, as these are
revealed in working out the world's salvation.

If you turn to the writings of the prophets in the Old Testament you
instantly discover that that is the true idea of a prophet. Take Isaiah,
take Micah, take Jeremiah, take any prophet you please; every here and
there you come upon a prediction—"Babylon shall be destroyed;" "Nineveh
shall be destroyed." Yes, but it is one prediction, as an impassioned
declaration of God's ways to men, showing how He must punish their
wickedness, and must visit the impenitent. But the story of God's
character and dealings for the world's redemption is, after all, the
grand substance of Old Testament prophecy; it is a record of God's pity
for mankind, and His determination to make them holy and happy, and of
the fact that it is all to be done by the great coming Christ, the
world's Sacrifice and the world's Saviour.

And when you are told to take the prophets as your example do not go
away saying, "I cannot predict future events, and astonish people, and
make them feel that I have some supernatural power." No, they could not
be _that_ example to you. A prophet was a man who knew the character of
the true and living God; and because he knew and loved Him, and was
living with Him, he made other men know Him, and feel Him, and
understand Him too.

I have no time to enter into all the questions concerning the precise
manner in which the prophet got to know God's mind and will—by dream, in
ecstasy, in lofty rapt thought, in wonderful insight into the Spirit of
God, and sometimes by a vision like that of Isaiah, where he "saw the
Lord, high and lifted up," on His throne. Or, the prophet got to know
God in a similar way to that which we read of in the case of the child
Samuel, when the voice of God in the lonely Temple struck upon the
child's ear so that there was nothing startling, and he thought it was
his master's voice calling him; but he lived to see the terrible
fulfilment of the first teaching which God gave to the child, in that
which befell the master. I have no time to go into all that, nor to
enter largely into the place and purpose of the prophets in working out
that history which shows, when properly understood, nothing else but the
growth of the Spirit of Jesus Christ through the ages, till that Spirit
came in its completion in Jesus the Son of Mary; for _there_ is the
whole meaning of the prophets in Israel; they were an incarnation of the
very same heart, and mind, and will of the Divine dispensation and of
God for the world's redemption which were in Jesus; it was the Spirit of
Jesus. And do not put away the words as a mere figure unless you put
away the words as a mere figure when you read that Jesus was the
incarnate Son of God. It was the very Spirit of God. The same Spirit as
was consummate in Jesus, the perfect Prophet because the perfect
Revelation of God, in its measure was present in every prophet who made
the people believe God as they had never done before, and recognise His
presence in the history of their time. The prophets taught them to
repent of their sin, to live for God, to take their share in the great
conflicts for righteousness that God was fighting in their age. In a
measure the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour of the
world, was present in every age of it. There is scarcely any occurrence,
any story, any Psalm, in the prophecies of the Old Testament, which has
not an application to Jesus Christ, and a meaning showing that He is in
it. It is made a specimen, as it were, of all that is practically to be
found in Him. The history of Israel in prophecy, which was the rising
and the beginning of the future history of Israel, was just the growing
of Jesus through the ages, till at length He culminated in the Son of
Mary.

I want to-day rather to tell you some of the qualifications of a
prophet—some of the elements of character that a man must have if he is
to play the part of a prophet to the people he lives among, bidding
myself and you take the prophets as an example. One thing is
remarkable—the office of a prophet was not hereditary. The great
departments of God's government, and teaching, and dealings with Israel
were the kingship, the priesthood, and the prophethood—the rule, the
fellowship, and the teaching and guidance. Now, all these culminated in
Jesus; He is Prophet, Priest, and King. In Israel no mere man or body of
men was fit in unity to fill those offices; they were distributed. The
burden was too great, the power was too grand, for any single man,
except the perfect Son of Man, to combine them in their fulness, and so
they were divided in Israel, to be reunited in the perfect embodiment of
Israel, God, Prophet, Priest, and King to the people. God's meaning was
that all Israel in its completeness should be king, and prophet, and
priest, without any active, separated, divided government; that it
should be a theocracy, as God's kingdom, ruling themselves, every one of
them being a king to God, every one of them being a priest, every one of
them being able to come direct to God for himself, and to bring his
prayers to God without any intervention of man; in the same way every
man, as a prophet, hearing God's voice direct to his heart, and being
taught the truth that God revealed. God wanted them all to be prophets;
God wanted them all to be priests; God wanted them all to be kings: but
they were not fit for it, and so among them special men had to be
cultivated to fill those offices. Now, there is this distinction between
those divided offices or faculties of God's rule and guidance in Israel:
the kingship was hereditary; the priesthood was hereditary: the
prophethood was never hereditary. A priest's son was born a priest; a
king's son was born a king: a prophet's son was not born a prophet. The
prophets were selected, not born. Why? Because it was the supreme and
grandest office, the most difficult, the most responsible, the most
sacred. Any man was fit to be a priest, to conduct the ritual and
external ordinances of worship, through which men's hearts were brought
to God. And any man, comparatively, might be a king, so long as he
devoted to his office that amount of thought and time which was
necessary. It needed no special moral qualifications and no special
insight. A man was the better who had these, but he could be a good
enough king without them. But a prophet could not be born a prophet; a
prophet had to be chosen, a prophet had to be made by God. And the
reason was this: the prophethood was a creative office and function.
God's dealings with Israel were not done when He had given the ancient
economy of a religious priesthood and kingdom. God had to reshape, and
remodel, and adopt His laws, and teaching, and meaning, and the outward
ordinances of religion to every age. As the nation both externally and
internally altered, new teaching had to come to it at the hands of the
prophets.

Were the priests the channel by which God could do it? Their duty was
fixed, and in the law, as well as in the form of government, men could
not err; they could follow the Divine precepts exactly in administering
them. But when an addition has to be made, and a remoulding to take
place, it wants a man capable of entering with strange, grand insight
into God's purposes, a man with eyes, with soul; it needs a man lifted
up. And so the prophets' office was never hereditary; they were always
selected; God chose them; why? Why did God choose one man, and not
another? I think that He chose a man, first of all, who had a natural
adaptation, who had rare powers of mind, who had rare genius and
sympathetic feeling, and not a mere presentiment of the movements of the
world and its destiny as it went on round about him. I think that, as a
rule, God selected a man with a natural adaptation, and prepared him for
all that he had to do and tell. It transformed a man's life; it took him
clean out of the common world in which men lived. We presume that it was
so from what is recorded, and from the facts which we know concerning
the prophets' characters and lives. God caused something to happen to a
man that made God appear to him what He was not to common men. An awful
vision was presented to Isaiah of the great, grand God, and thenceforth
all earthly considerations were nothing to Isaiah. He had seen _God_,
and the future was God's making. In the face of empires, however mighty
in name and in armies, it is the will of God that settles the future,
and such a man disregards all earthly advantages; he knows that God
means to do His deed; he says, "It shall be done; and if you set
yourselves against it there is no other end than destruction, which is
sure to fall upon you, for God will do the deed which He means to do."
It was a revelation of _God_ which made the man a prophet; it made him a
man who felt God to be supreme; it made him to be certain of God's
sovereignty, and absoluteness, and the goodness of God's authority; so
that nothing could induce him to swerve from the path that God appointed
for him. He was a man who stood like a rock amidst the earthly, selfish,
planning, scheming men of his time, and declared the future truly,
because he had seen God's meaning, and held men to it; and when they
would not be so held he was content to die, declaring the truth of his
message, and looking forward to the time when the future would manifest
its truth. He was a fit prophet, a living teacher, who spoke of the
future—a grand man, with a grand office and a grand destiny to play in
the world.

The man, the father, the mother, the teacher, the preacher, who takes
the prophets as examples, who will play his destined part in his own
little home, in his own Sunday-school class, in his own congregation, in
his own neighbourhood, in the great world round about him, must be a
prophet; he must be a man who knows God; he must be a man who feels God
to be all about him; he must be a man who is not merely orthodox in
theology, and believes all that is written about God's dealings in the
past; but he must be a man that will make you know that God is living,
and moving, and loving in the events of his own time; he must be a man
who recognises God in the providences of his own life; he must be a man
who does not shape his conduct for earthly gain or for social advantage;
he must be a man despising all these things, and paying heed to his own
high destiny, yet whose character and conduct move on the lines which I
have indicated; who says, "God is making me great, but He bids me live
as He lives—but He bids me sacrifice friends and home; I _must_ do it; I
_must_ tell this truth, though all good men should be against me, for I
have learnt it of God, at my risk of having mistaken its meaning; yet I
must speak it." Ay, even if such a man makes mistakes in learning this
new lesson of God, and does not read it quite right, even if he goes
wrong, nevertheless he has life in him, Divine life; he has honesty; he
is a true man; he is a man who is not of the world; he is a man who is
not a mere ecclesiastic; he is a man who is not a mere self-seeker. That
man does God's work on earth. And I venture to say that in the Church's
story you will find that there has been a succession of men who have
done what was the work of the priest in the old time, and there has been
a succession of men who have done the work of the prophet. You need
both; you need the priest, to keep alive, as it were, the ordinary level
of religion, to preserve some sort of uniformity; and in the Church's
story you will find that God has raised up prophets, men who sometimes
broke loose, who were not always true, who sometimes mistook God's
meaning, who had but little of the character of the old prophets, and
yet who taught truth, and adapted the old ecclesiastical doctrines to
the new necessities, suiting their work to the age; and though
disbelieved and openly denounced in their own day, they have become our
teachers since. What of the Reformers? what of Wesley? what of
Whitefield? what of many another name, much nearer our own time, but
which does not diminish the effect of the general principle? Ay, and
what of men not so good and great as these, but who had life in them;
who broke up the stagnation of ecclesiastical life, and brought new
faith to men; who by their dazzling earnestness, and spiritual insight,
and their teaching brought up the ordinary level of God's presence?
Thank God it is so. It is the lot of the human prophet and priest, and
of similar teachers, in our day, to make men know that there is a God,
and a Christ, and a soul to be saved, and that they are men, and not
mere machines. Thank God for it; but pray God to make you and me true
prophets; pray God to give us the passion of prophets, to give us
sympathy with all the wants of the age, to give us to know that He is
moving, to give us to know what new teachings come from Him; pray God to
give us generosity, and self-sacrifice, and liberality, and largeness of
heart, with our means, with our abilities, with our whole soul, with our
prayers and spirits, and all that we have, to play our part as faithful
prophets in the world's story, showing men God, and winning them to
follow Him.



XI.

_THE MAKING OF A PROPHET._[2]

"In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne,
high and lifted up, and His train overspreading the temple floor.
Seraphs were poised above, each with six wings, with twain veiling his
face, with twain veiling his feet, and with twain hovering. And those on
one side sang in responsive chorus with those on the other side, saying,
'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.' 'The fulness of the whole earth
is His glory.' And the foundations of the threshold trembled at the
sound of that singing, and the house was filled with incense smoke. Then
cried I, 'Woe is me! for I am a dead man; because I am a man of unclean
lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for mine
eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.' Then flew one of the
seraphs unto me, having in his hand a burning ember, which with a tongs
he had taken from off the incense altar; and he touched my mouth with
it, and said, 'Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is
taken away, and thy sin purged.' Thereupon I heard the voice of the
Lord, saying, 'Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?' Then I cried,
'See me; send me.'"—ISAIAH vi. 1-8 (_annotated_).


Isaiah was a prophet. A prophet, we say, was a man who foretold future
events. It is not an apt description. He did that, and much more
besides. He interpreted past, present, and future alike in the light of
eternal truth. But his supreme concern was with the present, and he
cared for the past and the future only as they threw light on the
problems of instant, pressing duty. The prophet was no dealer in
futurities, no dreamer babbling to an age unborn. He was a potent actor
in history, living and working amid the actual sins, and sorrows, and
struggles of his day and generation.

Read the memoirs of Isaiah, and you will see how intense and intimate
was the part he played in the life and movement of his age. One day you
will find him at the Temple, scathing with scornful reprobation the
hypocrisy and hollowness of the established ritual of religion. Another
time he has taken his stand over against the fashionable promenade of
Jerusalem, and as he watches the passing procession of pomp and
opulence, built up on the misery and degradation of defenceless poverty,
his heart grows hot with honest indignation, and he breaks into
impassioned invective against the stream of selfish luxury, as it rolls
by with a smiling face and a cruel heart. Again, he forces his way into
a meeting of the Privy Council, fearlessly confronts the King and his
advisers, denounces the iniquity of a faithless foreign policy and
sternly demands its abandonment. In every department of national life,
in every section of social and religious existence, his voice was heard
and his personality felt. Yet nobody ever mistook him for a mere
politician, philanthropist, or reformer. He was ever, and was ever felt
to be, a prophet. For he did not speak like other men, he did not act
like other men, he did not reason like other men. He spoke not for
himself, but for God. He claimed for his speech, not the persuasiveness
of human probability, but the imperativeness of Divine certainty. He
relied solely on the coercive power of truth. He did not touch the tools
of political partisanship or scheming statecraft. He cared nothing for
the suggestions of expediency; he defied the most certain conclusions of
earthly wisdom, and followed absolutely the bidding of an unseen
guidance. He was a man taken possession of by an irresistible perception
of the will of God, and an all-absorbing passion to have that will done
on earth. He held in the commonwealth the place that is held by that
inexorable voice which, deaf to all balancings of earthly gain or loss,
unflinchingly proclaims the antithesis of right and wrong, and
imperatively demands that right shall be obeyed. The prophet was the
conscience of the nation. Preachers and teachers of religion, that is
what England asks of us. It is a high calling.

The office of a prophet was not an easy one. The man had to hazard or
sacrifice most of those things that men count dear—property, popularity,
home. Every day he had to take his life in his hand, as he risked the
rage of a royal tyrant, or faced the fury of insensate mobs. Still
harder was it to stand alone in his faith and opinion, rejected by the
multitude, by the wealth, by the wisdom of his day, mocked or pitied as
a madman; hardest of all to see his efforts foiled, his country
humiliated, his people depraved, to feel his heart sink within him, to
struggle with dark misgivings, to doubt the reality of the Divine
prompting, and despairingly to ask whether this world were indeed
governed by a righteous Will, or were not rather the sport of blind
caprice or the slave of iron fate! Ah! it was not easy to be a prophet.
Before a man could become a prophet he needed to possess a knowledge of
God of such absolute certainty as nothing could shake. Once at least in
his life he must have come into actual contact with God.

The experience that made Isaiah a prophet took the form of a vision. It
happened in a period of distressing perplexity and gloom. Wrestling
passionately with the darkness, craving wistfully for light, the
yearning to see God in the man's soul became so intense and sensitive
that the great Heart in heaven answered the longing of the heart on
earth, and aspiration leapt into realisation, and faith flashed into
vision. On a throne, high and lifted up, crowning and dominating all
things, fixed on immovable foundations, untouched by the changes of
time, unshaken by the shocks of history, Isaiah beheld, seated in
sovereign supremacy, a Form of ineffable splendour, the power and
presence of the Eternal in awful actuality, beyond all doubt or question
the Lord of the universe and the Arbiter of destiny. Henceforth he could
never doubt the being and the might of God. That is a great experience,
but it leaves the heart unsatisfied. We want to know the nature, the
character of this God, who holds our fortunes in His awful hands. Is He
good, and just, and gentle, or hard, and cold, and cruel? The answer
came to Isaiah in the seraphs' song of adoration, with its ascription of
perfect triune holiness. It told him that in God is light, and no
darkness at all. Through and through, utterly and absolutely, in every
chord and fibre of His being, there is no baseness, no harshness, no
injustice; there is nothing but stainless purity and splendour, nothing
but radiant justice, goodness, and truth. "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord
of hosts." Still, one wistful doubt, one anxious question, lingers in
the human heart. For what were our poor world the better of this holy
God if He be content to sit aloof in the light and glory of heaven,
leaving the web of human story to be woven by the blundering fingers of
sinning, erring men on earth? That fear, too, was laid for ever in
Isaiah's soul by the comforting response of the seraphs' chorus. God
does not sit apart in frigid isolation, but with His own hands He guides
and controls our lost world's course. Into its strange, sad, perplexing
progress He is pouring the goodness, truth, and love of His holy heart;
and so when the record is finished and fulfilled, every page and
syllable shall shine with that hidden holiness come to manifested light
and splendour. "The fulness of the whole earth is His glory!" That sight
of God—the living, holy, loving God—made Isaiah a prophet. Preachers and
teachers of to-day, if we are to be prophets, we need just such a sight
of God.

The vision of God made Isaiah a prophet; but the immediate effect was
something very different. The first effect of contact with God was to
produce in his soul an intolerable sense of sin. "Woe is me! for I am
undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of
a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of
hosts." Was, then, Isaiah an exceptionally wicked man? Hardly, when God
chose him as His ambassador. But if not, is, then, the proper effect on
a good man of an access of nearness to God an overwhelming consciousness
of personal defilement? What else should it be? Had Isaiah been a
Pharisee, he would have seized the opportunity of his sudden vicinity to
the Almighty to direct the Divine attention to his virtues, and
excellence, and superiority over other men. Had he been one of those
philosophers in whom the heart has been overlaid by the intellect, he
would have calmly proceeded to make observations on the Divine for a new
theory of the Absolute and Unconditioned, in sublime insensibility to
the deepest problem of existence, the awful antithesis of human sin and
of Divine holiness. Because Isaiah was a good man, his new proximity to
God woke within him a crushing horror of defilement and undoneness. And
it was so precisely because he had never been so near to God before, and
had never felt himself of so much importance. Away down here, sinning
among his fellow-men, the blots and blemishes of his soul seemed of
little moment. But up there, in the stainless light of heaven, with
God's holy eyes resting on him, every spot of sin within him grew hot
and horrible, every defiling stain an insult and a suffering inflicted
on the sensitive holiness of God. What he does has an effect on God;
what he is, is of consequence to God. Never had Isaiah felt himself so
near to God; never had he felt himself of such importance to his Maker;
and therefore never had he felt his sin so black and so unpardonable.
Believe me, these two things are linked together, and no man can divorce
them—the dignity of humanity and the damnableness of sin. You cannot
tamper with the one without touching the other. Men may, of laxity or of
pitifulness, seek to extenuate the guilt of sin and its infinite
possibilities of woes; but be sure of this, they will be compelled ere
long to attenuate the moral grandeur of our human nature, and to
surrender its majestic birthright of immortality. Two things go hand in
hand through the Bible, from the first chapter to the last, and mark it
out from all other books: the one is its unique and awful sense of the
guiltiness of sin; the other is the quite unapproachable splendour of
its conception of the dignity of man, made in the image of God, and
destined for His service here, and the fellowship of His love for
evermore.

The ethical process by which, in the imagery of the vision, Isaiah's
sense of sinfulness came home to him, is finely natural and simple. It
was at his lips that the consciousness of his impurity caught him. "Woe
is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips." That,
judged by our formulas and standards, might seem a somewhat superficial
conviction of sin. We should have expected him to speak of his unclean
heart, or the total corruption of his whole nature. But conviction of
sin, actual conviction of sin, is very regardless of our theories, and
is as diverse in its manifestations as are the characters and records of
men. Sin finds out one man in one place, and another in a quite
different spot, and perhaps the experience is most real when it is least
theological. Isaiah felt his defilement in his lips, for suddenly he
found himself at heaven's gate, gazing on the glory of God, and
listening to the seraphs' ceaseless song of adoring praise. Isaiah loved
God, and instinctively he prepared to join his voice to the seraphs'
chant, but ere the harmony could pass his lips he caught his breath and
was dumb. A horrible sense of uncleanness had seized him. His breath was
tainted by his sin. He dared not mingle his polluted praise with the
worship of that pure, sinless host of heaven. Oh, the shame and agony of
that disability! for it meant that he has no part or place in that fair
scene. He is an alien and an intruder. Its beauty and its sweetness are
not for him. He belongs to a very different scene and a very different
company. He is no inhabitant of heaven, no servant of God; but a denizen
of earth, and a companion of sinners. Down there, amid its squalor, and
shame, and uncleanness, is his dwelling-place, remote from heaven, and
holiness, and God. "Woe is me! because I am a man of unclean lips, and I
dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips." With that, the horror
of his situation reached its climax. He stands there, on the threshold
of heaven in full sight of God and of His holiness, dumb and praiseless,
while all heaven rings and reverberates with the worship of its adoring
hosts. The awful tremor of that celestial praise passed into Isaiah's
frame, and it seemed like the pangs of instant dissolution. He, a
creature of God's, stands there in his Maker's presence, alone mute,
alone refusing to chant his Creator's glory, a blot and blank in the
holy harmony of heaven, a horrible and foul blemish amid the unsullied
purity of that celestial scene. It seemed to Isaiah as if all the light,
and glory, and holiness of heaven were gathering itself into one fierce
lightning fire of vengeance, to overwhelm and crush him out of
existence. "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean
lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine
eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts."

Isaiah in the presence of God felt within him the pang of that death
which must be the end of unpardoned sin in contact with the Divine
holiness. He felt himself already as good as dead, yet never in all his
life had he so longed to live as now, in sight of God, and heaven, and
holiness. He did not ask to escape. He was too overwhelmed to pray or
hope. But to God's heart that cry of despair was an infinitely
persuasive prayer for mercy. Ah! Heaven needs no lengthy explanation,
nor requires the recital of prescribed forms or theories. The moment a
sinful soul turns loathingly from sin, and longingly to God and
goodness, that instant the Heart above responds, and meets it with pity,
pardon, hope. Ere the piteous echo of Isaiah's cry had died away, one of
the seraphs flew with a burning ember from the incense altar, and laid
it on Isaiah's mouth, and said, "Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and
thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged." The action is of
course symbolic, but the thing symbolised is a great spiritual fact. In
it we have mirrored the very heart of the process of redemption. The
cleansing efficacy of the burning ember resided not in the ember, but in
the Divine fire contained in it. In the imagery of sacrifice the fire is
always conceived as God's method of accepting and taking to Himself the
offering. The sacred flame that comes down from God, licks up the
sacrifice, and in vapour carries it up to heaven; a sweet-smelling
savour represents, therefore, the pitying holiness of God, that stoops
forgivingly to sinful men, and graciously accepts and sanctifies them
and their sacrifices. Contact with that has sin-cleansing power, and
nothing has besides. Pagan sages and Christian saints alike unite in
proclaiming the overmastering strength of sin. Mightier than nature's
most potent forces, stronger than all influences of persuasion, not to
be reversed or uprooted by any resources of earthly origin, is the grasp
of inveterate sin within the sinner's soul. Is there, then, no
possibility of recovery, no way of cleansing, no ray of hope? One there
is, and one alone. If Divine Purity would but stoop in pity to the
sinful one, would but enter, in claiming love, into his polluted soul,
would but come into actual contact and conflict with the sin and
uncleanness in a decisive struggle of triumph or defeat, then which must
prove the stronger, which must conquer—human sinfulness or Divine
holiness? Ay, if only God so loves our sin-stained race as that His
stainless purity enters really into our humanity, and wrestles with our
impurity in a contact that must be suffering to the Divine holiness, and
is sin-cleansing to us, that were salvation surely, that were
redemption. But is it a reality? Brethren, Jesus Christ has lived, and
died, and lives again, and we know that His Holy Spirit dwells in us and
in our world. That, and that alone, is salvation—not any theories, nor
any rites, but God's Holy Spirit given unto us.

It was at Isaiah's lips that the sense of sin had stung him, and it was
there that he received the cleansing. The seraph laid the hot ember on
his lips, and it left about his mouth the fragrance of the celestial
incense. He felt that he breathed the atmosphere and purity of heaven.
He too might now join in heaven's praise and service; no more an alien,
but a member of the celestial choir and a servant of the King. That act
of Divine mercy had transformed him. He was a new creature, and
instantly the change appeared. The voice of God sounds through the
temple, saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" And the
first of all heaven's hosts to offer is Isaiah. A moment before he had
shrunk back, crushed and despairing, from God's presence, feeling as if
the Divine gaze were death to him. Now he springs forward, invokes God's
attention on himself, and before all heaven's tried and trusty
messengers proposes himself as God's ambassador. Was it presumption? was
it self-assertion? I think if ever Isaiah was not thinking of himself at
all, if ever he had utterly forgotten self, and pride, and all things,
and was conscious only of God, and goodness, and gratitude, it was then,
when his heart was running over with wonder, love, and praise for God's
unspeakable mercy to him. It was not presumption; it was a true and
beautiful instinct, that made him yearn with resistless longing to do
something for that God who had shown such grace to him. Oh, the tender
love and irrepressible devotion of a forgiven heart! Nothing can
restrain it, nothing hold it back. Salvation, real salvation, springs
resistlessly onward into service.

[Footnote 2: Preached at Nottingham, before the Congregational Union of
England and Wales, on Monday evening, October 8th, 1888.]



XII.

_FOR AND AGAINST CHRIST._

"He that is not with Me is against Me: and he that gathereth not with Me
scattereth."—LUKE xi. 23.

"He that is not against us is on our part."—MARK ix. 40.


It has never been an easy task to settle with any degree of exactitude
who among men should be reckoned the Saviour's friends, and who His
foes. But perhaps no time has surrounded the problem with such
difficulties as those that arise from the circumstances of our own age.
On every side we see truth and error intertwined in such a perplexing
tangle that we scarce know on which side to rank men and parties. The
Church of Christ is divided into so many divergent sections, within
which good and evil are so strangely combined, that you can hardly tell
if they are for Christ or against. You find men of unexceptionable
profession and ample creed, but with a jarring life and scant morality.
On the other hand, you see men whose creed is erroneous or imperfect,
but whose life and character are instinct with the spirit of Christ. And
amid such anomalies you feel it almost impossible to determine, with
even an approach to certainty, whom you shall count followers, and whom
foes, of the Lord Jesus Christ.

True, we are not called to sit in judgment on the inner state of heart,
the hidden attitude of men's spirits, which is cognisable only by
"larger, other eyes than ours;" yet we must for practical guidance form
a conditional opinion regarding the position and action of our
fellow-men; for so alone can we determine our treatment of them; so
alone can we decide whether it is our duty to oppose or co-operate with
them, to acknowledge them as brethren or deny to them the name of Christ.

Besides, for your own comfort, you must have some standard or test to
determine who are Christ's and who are not, for otherwise how shall you
be able to adjudicate on your own case? You are confronted, it may be,
by large and influential bodies of Christians who declare you to be no
member of Christ's Church at all, because you do not follow after them.
You feel all the weight that attends such a verdict; you are sensible of
the solemn, tragic awfulness of the question; you are humble, diffident,
uncertain yourself of many things, and so, perchance, your heart knows
little rest or peace. You would give much to ascertain some sure test by
which you could settle, once and for ever, whether you are on Christ's
side or against Him.

For our guidance in such matters we can do no better thing than to try
and understand how the Saviour, when He was on earth, estimated the
attitudes of men to Himself. Let us try, then, to determine the
principles that guided Him.

He had come with a very definite aim in view, viz., to establish a
kingdom of heaven on earth; that is to say, to secure the domination of
men's hearts by God's will, so that they should always act in accordance
with the Divine decrees. Or, in other words, He had come to perform this
work of delivering men from sin, of making them pure, and holy, and
Godlike. For this end, He sought to bring them under His immediate
influence, to gather and attach them to His Person, to inspire them with
faith and love for Himself. All who aided in this, all who contributed
to draw men to Him, all who strove to make Christ and His word accepted
and esteemed, all who were at one with Him in His aim, manifestly, were
counted by Him as friends; while, on the contrary, those who exerted
themselves to thwart Him, who endeavoured to alienate men from His
Person and doctrine, all such were His enemies, were against Him.

"But," you may be inclined to say, "while it is true there were some men
who did devote themselves to active support of Christ, and others who
did commit themselves to declared hostility, was there not, between
these two opposing classes, a large number who took sides neither for
nor against Him, but preserved a sort of neutrality? What, then, does
Christ say of these?" The two sayings of our Lord which I have taken for
my text have both been applied to solve this problem. At first sight
they have the appearance of clashing with one another. "He that is not
with Me is against Me" seems to be a declaration that all who were not
positive friends were really enemies, and thus to imply that the Master
classed this whole body of neutrals as foes; and so some use it. But
again, the second saying, "He that is not against us is on our part,"
has the appearance of asserting that all who are not declared foes are
in reality the Saviour's friends, and so, according to this principle,
all neutrals should be counted as allies. The appearance of discrepancy
only lasts when you look at these sayings singly and apart from their
occasions. They speak not of neutrals at all. Taken in conjunction, they
are seen to enunciate, in fact, quite a different principle, viz., that
in regard to Christ, indifferentism, neutrality, is impossible, and that
every man must be either for or against the Saviour. "He that is not a
friend is a foe," while "he that is not a foe is a friend;" consequently
there is no such thing as a position of neither friendship nor enmity.

Let us, then, run cursorily over the incidents that gave rise to these
two sayings, in order that we may see what is the essential character of
the two attitudes of being for or against Christ, and so exhibit how
neutrality is impossible.

One day a man possessed of a dumb devil was brought to Jesus. By His
word of power Jesus cast out the evil spirit, and immediately the man
regained the power of speech. The crowd looking on were filled with
wonder and admiration. They were pleased at the good deed which had been
done. They partook in the dumb man's joy and gratitude, and they
regarded the Saviour with increased reverence and esteem. The influence
of the miracle was to attach men to Himself, and draw them towards the
kingdom of God. But among the spectators there were some who had no
pleasure in the act of healing at all. They were not glad to see their
fellow-man in new possession of speech and soundness of mind. On the
contrary, they wished it had not been done, for they grudged the credit
it brought to the Saviour. His popularity was gall to them. It pained
them to see men revere or trust Him. They did not wish that men should
be drawn to Him. Accordingly, they attempted to turn the people's
admiration into distrust by flinging out a dark suggestion that it was
by the aid, not of God, but of the evil one, that the Lord had been able
to work the cure. The effect designed is manifest. Such a suspicion
would have the effect of turning men away from Christ, of preventing
them from submitting to His guidance. Their purpose was not to draw men
to Him, but rather to alienate from Him any who were attracted. Thus
they were in direct antagonism to Christ's purpose and striving. They
did not like Himself, nor His teaching, nor His aims, so they set
themselves to oppose Him in every way. It was of such men our Lord said,
"He that is not with Me is against Me; and he that gathereth not with Me
scattereth."

Turning to the second story, we find that Christ's disciples had come
upon a man casting out devils in the name of their Master. It is evident
this man had not been much in direct communication with Christ, if at
all, for apparently he was not known previously to the disciples, and
their grievance is that one who did not with them follow Christ should
thus employ the Master's name. It cannot but have been, therefore, that
this man knew very little of Christ's Person or teaching. His knowledge
of Him must have been very much more imperfect than that of the
disciples, and he did not deem it his duty to become an immediate
follower of the Lord. Nevertheless, he had made the discovery that
Christ's name had power to cast out devils, and for this beneficent
purpose he was in the habit of using it. The disciples, perhaps jealous
that another, not of their number, should possess the same power, and
believing that he could not be one of the Lord's privileged servants,
forbade him to make any further use of the Saviour's name. On reporting
this to the Master He countermanded their decision and gave His grounds
for so doing. They were these: Though he did not attach himself to the
personal company of Christ, though he might be very ignorant, etc. etc.,
nevertheless, by performing miracles of healing through Christ's name,
he was bringing new honour and reverence to that name; and again, while
he was thus in deed spreading Christ's fame and arousing belief in Him,
he was not likely to imitate the Pharisees in slandering the Saviour—for
in our Lord's words, "There is no man which shall do a miracle in My
name that shall be able easily to speak evil of Me." That is to say, "By
using My name to perform a miraculous cure, he puts himself out of a
position to say anything that would detract from My credit." Such an one
was certainly not a scatterer, but a gatherer. And "he that is thus not
against us is on our part."

Reverting now to the first narrative see how the active antagonism of
the Pharisees was the inevitable outcome of the fact that inwardly they
were not with Him in heart and aim.

Because they did not like Him, and did not desire Him to gain influence
with the people they would not unite in the general approbation of the
crowd. Such conduct was marked and demanded an explanation. Apparently a
good and wonderful miracle had been wrought. It will not do for them to
merely refrain from approving. They must justify their reticence.
Neutrality is impossible. If they will not adore they must malign. So
they are forced to impugn the character of Christ's act. To justify
their want of sympathy they must disavow its claim to their approbation.
There is no alternative between frank acceptance of the miracle or open
repudiation and disparagement of its character.

Still you must take sides for or against Christ, and you cannot be
neutral. For His claims reach you not as external facts to be passively
gazed at, but as imperative, active demands that lay hold of you, and
insist that you shall take action upon them. You must yield or you must
resist. You must comply or you must oppose. Christ lays His hand on you
and if you will not obey you must shake that hand rudely off. In
countless forms that strange, drawing power lays hold of you, and you
must follow or reject. It may be a call to you to yield your reverence,
your support, your participation to some benevolent or religious
movement. If you will not, while others do accede to this claim, you
must seek to justify your refusal. So you are forced into disparaging
it, depreciating it, slandering it. You cannot own it to be of God and
yet remain a rebel against its demands. So you must, with evil,
malignant tongue, sneer at it as folly, or revile it as delusion—thus
imitating the Pharisees who set down Christ's work to be the doing of
the devil.

Remember, too, what a black-hearted, hateful sin that was they were
guilty of. Try and picture that gentle, beneficent, holy Jesus. Realise
the cruel blow such a thought was to the man just healed. Surely
caution, reserve, would have made men hesitate to speak so. But they
cruelly, malignantly, eagerly cry, "By Beelzebub He casteth out devils."
It was in the face of such light, such considerate helpful words of
Christ, that they did it. Think of the gracious words He spoke, and of
the beauty of all that life, which in our days bring from the hearts of
unbelievers encomiums that sound like adoration. In spite of all that,
they were not made reverent, careful, slow to condemn. Nay, they were
exasperated by it all.

But you may say, "They were zealous, mistaken men, wrongly trained; they
thought Christ a heretic; they were the victims of an erroneous creed.
So many had deceived them, so many false Christs had appeared! Besides,
did not Moses say that they were not to believe a miracle simply, but to
judge it by the teaching of the worker?" It is true, there were many
such. But you do not find them among the number who ascribed Christ's
works of healing to the devil. There were, indeed, honest but timid
souls who were staggered by the pretensions and claims of Christ, but
how did they act? Remember how one such came to Christ and went away
with mingled feelings of attraction and perplexity; but when the body of
Christ lay lone and forsaken Nicodemus came and did honour to the sacred
dead. But these men were not such as he; their error was not of the
intellect, but of the heart. They did not yield to the beauty of
Christ's character, life, and teaching. They were not one with Him in
His longing to establish God's kingdom on the earth. There was an inner
antagonism of spirit, of nature. They were proud, haughty,
self-righteous, and they were hypocrites, evildoers, cruel. They hated
Christ because His pure life shamed and pained them, and they dreaded
the loss of their own prestige and power. The secret and the essence and
seat of their antagonism was not intellectual error, but deep, dark,
moral perversion and evil of heart and conscience. Thus, because they
were not with Christ, even in so far as to have sympathy with the
undeniable good in Him, therefore they were in act and word against Him.

Finally, from the second narrative see what it is to be with Christ and
how those who inwardly are not against are by His own verdict on His
side. And, first of all, note the error into which the disciples fell.
Very like the conduct of the Pharisees is theirs. They find a man doing
good in Christ's name. He is not all he should be, not one of them, and
not a constant pupil of Christ's. But instead of seeking to draw him to
more perfect light, they intolerantly forbid him to do the good he was
doing. So mistaken an action must have come from a wrongness of heart.
They, too, fell before that evil, monopolising tendency that grudges to
another God's gifts which we possess. It was a cruel thing to the man, a
harmful thing, and might have turned him from Christ. Let us take the
lesson to ourselves. Let us beware of refusing to allow good in those
who differ from us; let us beware of rashly judging those who are not
just the same as we. Harm—grave harm—is often done by treating
imperfect, immature followers of our Master as if they had neither part
nor lot with Him. But mark how this man was with Christ; only, remember,
he is not an example of what we should be, rather he is a specimen of
one just over the borderland: but over. It was not intellectual
orthodoxy; not a perfect knowledge of God's mysteries that he possessed.
He was very ignorant about God, about Christ. He did but know a little
of the power of Christ and His majestic character and stupendous work.
Yet so far as his knowledge went of Christ he had received it gladly. He
rejoiced in the power of the Saviour's name to cast out devils, to cure
the troubled ones. He did the good he knew. He acted up to his light. In
his measure he gave glory and reverence and obedience to the Saviour. He
was working for good and mercy and truth and God in the world. Thus he
was not against Christ in these his aims, and so was for the Lord. It is
only of those who are not against Christ in _this_ sense that He says
they are on His side.

Friends, there is warning and comfort in that. Warning there is, for,
mark, that vain dream is dispelled which would read Christ's words as
meaning that if only you do not oppose Him actively you are to be
counted on His side. No! if that is your position, you are not for Him;
you must be against Him: for passivity, neutrality is impossible.

Comfort there is, on the other hand, to you who feel yourselves very
feeble, very imperfect; to you who find it hard to understand; to you
who fear you are mistaken about many things. Ah! men may condemn you;
the disciples may dissuade you from taking His name and counting
yourself His, but do not fear. If you do, as far as you see how, strive
to do the good He has taught you; if you do, it may be afar off, follow
in His footsteps; if you have learned to find in Him in any degree a
power that helps you to cast out the evil spirits in your soul and in
the hearts of men: be sure that though you may not follow with other
disciples, though you may be very deficient, very immature, a very
unworthy servant—be sure that, nevertheless, you are not against, but
for Him, and that in the end of the days He will not forbid you to claim
His name, but will acknowledge you for His own.



XIII.

_THE PROPHECY OF NATURE._

"When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the
stars, which Thou hast ordained; what is man, that Thou art mindful of
him? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him? For Thou hast made him
a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and
honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands;
Thou hast put all things under his feet."—PSALM viii. 3-6.

"But now we see not yet all things put under Him."—HEB. ii. 8.


The Eighth Psalm is a very striking one. It lifts the mind of the reader
to a lofty height where he seems to have soared above sin and sorrow. It
exults in man's greatness and Nature's grandeur. It is not Hebrew and
theocratic, but human and universal. What it says is said of man as man;
of man as he ought to be, was meant to be, may be. The subject is
Humanity.

The New Testament writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews takes what is
said in this psalm to be true of Christ, and he thinks that he has a
right to find in the words a prophecy of Christ's coming. If you read
the psalm without thinking of what is said in the Epistle you would not
immediately apply it to Christ. How, then, is there a real connection
between this old Hebrew utterance and the coming of our Lord?

It is a fact that the patriarchs expected the coming of some great and
wonderful blessing in the future, and it is a fact that in the coming of
Christ a gift came to men in the lines of anticipated blessing; but far
greater than they ever dreamed of.

Reflecting on those predictions and anticipations of future blessing,
might there not be in the very structure of the world, of the material
universe itself, in the course of events as they have fallen out in
history, something to lead men to expect the advent of their Christ? God
makes His plans looking, as a wise man looks, to the end. We should
expect, then, in all the foundation-laying, that that was provided for
and expected which should be the crown of all.

Is there not in creation an aspect of things which makes men think that
there is something great and grand in store for their race? The writer
of this psalm conceived his poem as he stood in the open fields and
looked up into the solemn sky, and watched the unhasting and untiring
motion of the shining stars—worlds upon worlds burning and throbbing in
the abyss of space. Away from the hum and tumult of men, no one can look
at those hosts of silent stars without a subdued and awed sense of the
mystery of being, of the infinite possibilities that the universe
discloses. The star-studded heaven at night makes a man irresistibly
think of God. It makes a man think, too, of himself. The silence, the
shining, the mystery and the solemnity of the starry heavens make a
man's beating, living life, as it were, become heard. A man is intensely
conscious of himself. That is exactly what passed through the heart of
this writer. It was not he who chose to have these thoughts, no more
than it is our wish to have these thoughts. God was playing upon the
strings of this man's heart—more directly, more rigorously in him, but
just as He plays upon the strings of your own when you have had great
solemn thoughts of God on a dark night, beneath the burning stars. The
man's thoughts went up, and then they went down into himself, when he
looked up into heaven, when he saw the moon and the stars, when he
realised all their wondrous being, the regularity, the order, the
vastness, the distance; then he thought of God, and God became great and
grand and majestic, and then he burst out, "O Lord, our Lord, how
excellent is Thy name in all the earth!" That is what he said. Then he
looked into himself, his own conscious life, met its failure, and his
first thought was of his own terrible pettiness. In the face of these
countless worlds revolving in the far heaven, "what is man?" And then
there came another thought to him: "And yet how great is man!" That
mighty moon, millions of times vaster than man, does not know its own
shining, its lustre, its own motions, its majesty. It is blind, and
deaf, and dumb, and insensate, and man sees it and wonders at it,
measures and weighs it, and understands its nature; and so man in all
his meanness, in all his smallness, in all his weakness, in all the
fragility of his life, is greater far than sun and moon and stars, and
all revolving worlds. How little is man—and yet how great, O God! Here
down below on earth man watches the stars, and up in heaven God watches
them too. Man thinks, God thinks; man creates, God creates; man loves,
God loves; so little, so great, and yet so like; Father and child, the
One so grand, the other so insignificant.

Then he turned to the earth on which he stood, and with a grandeur of
soul he recognised man's position on earth sharing the likeness of God,
gifted with God's power of thought and of plan, of will and of love; man
stands lord of all lower things that have been made, king and ruler with
power to control, with mastery to move them, he is lord and master over
all their ways, uncontrolled by aught, undismayed by aught, king, god of
earth: "Thou hast made him ruler over all the works of Thy hands."

Is it not a grand poem, that? If I could read to you the best poems
written in other lands by men of other days, by men of other faiths, if
I could compare the thoughts of this psalm with other thoughts of God's
plan and of man's position, you would understand what I mean when I say
the psalm is grand, the psalm is a revelation of man and of God.

If I had the capacity or the time to try and show you how these thoughts
about God and about Nature and about man, give man all the dignity, all
the elevation of character, all the powers and abilities to shape and
fashion the world he is in, one could not but wonder at the grandeur of
that psalm. The faith about God, and the faith about man's destiny
written down in that psalm—that faith is the Magna Charta of humanity
that has emancipated men from the slavery to sun, moon and stars, and
all the powers of Nature.

The psalm is a true conception of man's relation—upwards to God, and
downwards to Nature. It has been perfectly described by a German
commentator as a poetical echo of creation! A psalm, a poem, such as
this flings a spell about you. You forget actualities. It is so good, it
seems so true, it is so human, it is so living, you yield your soul to
it, you are filled with its glow and joyfulness, you are warmed with its
strength and triumph. You hail it;—and then you begin to think, you look
round, and what do you see? Mankind lord over lower things, yourself
lord over your own body, master of your appetites? Your neighbours
kings? The best of men enslaved! Bound down by the greed of gain! So
that the nobler powers of mind and body, and soul, are degraded and
cramped in them—men and women slaves of superstition, slaves of
prodigies and foolish fancies wrought into their very nature.

"We see not yet all things put under him." If exultation was the mood
made by the picture of the psalm, depression is the mood made by the
picture of mankind; and are we to end with that? No. The writer to the
Hebrews has given us the key by which we can unlock the secret, and have
confidence in the triumph of man's better nature, and hope for a better
future.

Let us look a little deeper into things, let us do men justice. Has man
ever acquiesced in his sinful, sorrowful slavery? Never. It is always
under protest that he regards it. It is always with a sense of fallen
greatness. It is always with discontent. It is always with an
unconquerable conviction that man was made for something better. Proof,
do you want? Why is it when you read a story of heroic generosity, like
that of the captain who gave away his own life for that of a wretched
boy the other day, that you feel life to be worth living? What is the
meaning of that sense of grandeur, of greatness, of triumph, that comes
over you? How is it? What is it? When you see a brave deed of
self-denial; at another time, when we hear of a cruel, mean deed
done—how do we feel towards each? Are we all bad? If that were our
natural lot we should acquiesce in the evil deed, we should have no
shock, no surprise; instead of that there is a sense of surprise, and
revolt. There is an error somewhere—a disaster, a calamity. It is a
sin—sin—a thing that robs us of our heavenly nature. Do we recognise it
as a part of human nature? No. Sin is unnatural, sin is horrible. That
is the meaning of the death scene in Macbeth. A knock at the door
reveals to the murderer the distance his crime has set between him and
the simple ordinary life of man. Sin is something unnatural, it is a
calamity, an intrusion, it ought not to be there. Fellowship with God!
Impossible to us! Why? Because we were never meant to have it? No. If
there be a God at all, if He made this world, if He made men to think,
and feel and understand, then God meant the world to be like a written
book that should speak of Him. Why does not all Nature so speak to man?
Because we have sinned, because we have lost the lineage, because we are
not like Christ, the sinless Son: to Him the lilies had the touch of God
on them, the birds in every song proclaimed His praise.

So, then, while we see that all things are not put under man, we see
plainly that God meant it otherwise, and that God made man to be lord of
creation. What God does not wish is hardly likely to stand. If man has
missed being what he was meant for, there is good possibility that he
may regain it. If God be love, there is certainty. I enter a
master-painter's studio, and I see upon his easel a spoiled picture. I
can see the majesty of the design, the beauty of the ideal, but from
some defect in the pigment or flaw in the canvas, it has gone wrong; it
is blurred and dim and spoiled. But not so to himself; that man will not
allow the disaster to prevent him creating in visible form the vision of
beauty that once charmed his heart. The man would not be a man of will
and determination if he allowed the disaster to hinder him in his
purpose. God is unchangeable. God is God.

Man is not what God made him for; man is not what God made him to be;
and God is God. His purpose may lapse for a little, His designs may be
delayed on the way, but if the beginning points to the grand end, that
end will be reached. God meant it. God means it. God shall do it.

We stand farther on along the track of God's providential dealings with
men. We see more than the writer to the Hebrews saw. He, too, remembered
that psalm when he described man as he ought to be. Why did he still let
it live and exist as a thing that is true? He could wait. What was he
waiting for? And what were the singers thinking of as they chanted that
psalm? They thought of a good time coming, they thought not the less of
the disaster, they thought of God redeeming men, of God causing a Man to
be born who should be a Deliverer, they thought of Him reaching out
hands of help to all who came to Him, and the writer to the Hebrews
writes truly when he says that that is prophesied of Christ. It is a
prediction of His coming. God cannot be foiled. Man is not yet what God
created him to be, the crown of all the earth-creation, but in the
divine heart and mind there has been that vision—man wanting but little
of exaltation to be next to God—man the lord of all—and the writer to
the Hebrews was able to say, "God has achieved it; in Christ, crowned
King and Lord of all creation, the psalm is fulfilled."

What depth of meaning and of wonder, of future joy and triumph, there is
in that feeling he has of Christ as the Flower and Fruit of God's design
in all creation! What depth of meaning there may be I do not dare to
fathom, of good to all mankind; but this I will think,—that in the end
of time when all things have been summed up and restored in Jesus
Christ, when God shall have gathered together in one the broken threads,
when the whole creation that with man groaneth until now, shall be
delivered from its bondage—God will be seen not to have failed. What
future revelation of grandeur, and of Divine goodness, and of redemption
beyond our utmost thoughts, there may be, I do not think we were meant
to know. I do not think we should dare to dogmatise; but we were meant
to have our eyes drawn away to that glorious, radiant, splendrous
future, and we are bidden there to see all God's loving pity and wise
provision for us. Ah! God is working; He is creating, loving; He is
providing, planning; He is redeeming creation, gathering together into
one grand whole a restored humanity and a ransomed creation; and all
mysteriously and strangely wrought into a great unity with Christ, and
through Christ, with God.



XIV.

_CHRISTIAN GIVING._

PREACHED IN WILLESDEN PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, SEPTEMBER 24TH, 1882.

"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting
of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to
God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always
abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour
is not in vain in the Lord."—1 COR. xv. 55-8.

"Now concerning the collection for the saints, as I have given order to
the churches of Galatia, even so do ye. Upon the first day of the week
let every one of you lay by him in store, as God hath prospered him,
that there be no gatherings when I come. And when I come, whomsoever ye
shall approve by your letters, them will I send to bring your liberality
unto Jerusalem."—1 COR. xvi. 1-3.


I have read this passage for one single purpose; it is to draw your
attention to the singular way in which St. Paul passes from the doctrine
of the Resurrection to the practical duty of Christian giving. It almost
startles us, who have not quite St. Paul's way of thinking about
collections, to hear him pass from that triumphant apostrophe of death,
"O death, where is thy sting?" to "Now concerning the collection."

This seeming incongruity in the Epistle, and in the Church's work, is
not confined to the Bible or to the Church; it runs all through life.
Man has a poor, fleshly body, needing food, and drink, and sleep, and
nursing; and he has an immortal soul. Say what you will, we cannot deny
that the body is there; and I do not think we shall ever come to deny
that the soul is there too, and will live, so long as goodness,
tenderness, and devotion, and truth, and being last. Life has got into
it; and the material framework which carries that soul-man's life
corresponds to himself. In our homes, in our national life, in our
business life there is the strangest intermingling of tragedy and
comedy, of what is reverent and sacred, and what is most secular, and
common, and mean. You cannot divorce the two. You may dislike the
commonplace, and the mean, and the material; but if you hope to preserve
the region of the spiritual and the sympathy of the good, that you can
only do by preserving the body; they are gone when you forget the body.

What is it that is the brightest, heavenliest thing in the whole earth?
It is love. No amount of mere common propriety, in the humblest action,
will make up for the absence of that which comes out in a sudden tear or
looks out in a sweet smile. We all know it, however earthly and material
we are. But what I have to say is this: Look at that sacred thing, that
love, which is almost too refined to put its hands on the soiling things
of earth; what do you find it doing? Nursing at the sick bed, doing
tasks that are repulsive, planning, with all kinds of material
medicaments, and helps, and reliefs, to ease bodily pain. Now, it is
easily possible for a coarse heart and poor bodily eyes to be in the
midst of all that is sacred, and secular too, and to call it all common,
and poor, and mean. It needs a quick, warm heart, and it needs almost, I
may say, some imagination, some touch of a fine fancy, something of that
Divine power which comes of tender affection and love, to do such acts
for God.

In the life of Christ's spiritual family, which we call "the Church"
(and by calling it "the Church" so often put it clean away out of all
control of common sense and of affection), the very same law holds. The
Church is worth nothing if it is not lit up and warmed with heavenly
devotion to Jesus Christ. It may look solemn at the Communion-table; but
it is not worth having if it does not reach men's hearts with fingers
which squeeze out their hardness, and make them penitent for their sins;
it is not worth having if it has not God, and Christ, and the life of
the soul all throbbing through it. And yet it has a body, and material
buildings, and expenses to maintain its earthly fabric and framework;
and the spiritual life and the spiritual love that will have nought to
do with these "cares of all the Churches," which Paul, the greatest
preacher and Apostle, carried, or with collections and planning for the
maintenance of preachers, thereby destroy themselves. If we try to put
away that, and say, "It is not spiritual," or "It is a low thing," we
are simply committing suicide of the religious life. It cannot live
without that. Christ Himself had to plan how His preachers were to be
maintained; and He spoke a great word when He said that they were to go
and live on those who could not preach; not taking it as
charity—never!—but taking it as a helpful service, which, combined with
their searching of the Divine Word, should make it triumph in the world.
"He that receiveth" into his house—maintaining him, that he may
preach—"a preacher" (that is the meaning of "a prophet"), "in the name
of a preacher"—not because he brings honour to the house, and because he
is a great man, but because he is a man who is converting souls, a man
that takes God at His word, and prays, and preaches unto men—will have
the same "reward" in heaven, Christ providing for the spiritual wants
and for the bodily wants of the preacher, and for his maintenance. And
so, if once we lived in good earnest into that real, loving, great,
broad thought of the actual life of Christ, we should not feel any
surprise when we read how St. Paul passes from the great triumph of the
doctrine of the Resurrection to the enforcement of Christian liberality.

Now I am going to spend the time at my disposal this morning in a very
practical way. I hardly think that it needed that introduction to
justify this use of the time at a Sunday morning's service; still,
possibly, what has been said may be of use, not so much as a
justification, but just as a preparation. I think that these things are
for you. The subject is not a mere question of Church business; it is
not a mere question, either, of interest to the men whose minds have a
little of the statesman in them, and who consider the problems of Church
government and Church management, as well as of national government and
management; but I will say that it is a subject which ought to have a
thorough interest to every one of you. I have been led to take it as my
subject this morning because I was sent, a fortnight ago, by our Synod,
as a deputy to one of our largest Presbyteries in the North, in order
that I might interest congregations there in our Church's financial
system of maintaining the preaching of the Gospel throughout this
country; and I had the feeling, when I was doing it, and I had the
assurance from those whom I visited, that it did them good. I have
thought, therefore, that it might do my people good. Moreover, I had
this feeling about the very strong and plain things that I said to them,
that I should hardly be an honest man if I did not care openly to say
the same things to my own people. Nay, I was led in some things to speak
of my congregation, and what they had done not only for their minister,
but for all the schemes of the Church, as an example; and therefore I
feel my honour somewhat pledged that our congregation should not only do
well, as it has done, but should do better. I say these things that I
may have your sympathy in what I am going on to explain and to say to
you.

The special subject, in our Church's government and economy, of which I
want to make you understand a little is what is called the "Sustentation
Fund." I wish to be short and to be simple. Let me begin in this
fashion: We believe that wherever there are Christian congregations who
have the love of their Master in them, and some spiritual life, all
these are blessed spots and centres, wherever they stand. We know how
sorrows are soothed away by that Christian brotherhood and friendship,
by those common prayers and praises, and by those words of truth which
are read out of the Bible and often spoken by preachers. We believe
that, or we do not believe in Christ at all. That is how Christ comes to
men and women, and boys and girls, and little children, on earth. Oh, He
does nothing for them like that! Well, now, it is a very practical
question, that comes to all Christian men and women who are gathered
together into any section of Christ's Church, how they can make their
ministers, and their managers, and their elders, and their deacons, and
their office-bearers (by whatever name you call them), and all their
members, most useful and effective for good. It is the first question
that their Master puts to them. He says, "Do your best." It is the duty
of every Church in England just now to do everything in its power, by
business methods as well as by spiritual methods, to make every
congregation have a happy, harmonious, earnest, liberal, joyful,
successful Christian life.

Now I will say this: It seems to me that the good which will be done by
any denomination in England just now depends, of course first of all on
its possession of the living Spirit and heart of Jesus Christ in its
members; but that is not my subject to-day; I am talking of the material
side, the body surrounding the soul; I say, the good which will be done
by any Church in England will depend upon three things: first of all,
that it shall have devised a government which will exercise
power—superior control—over individual members, office-bearers,
ministers, congregations; which will preserve a harmonious, law-abiding,
just, and generous spirit and conduct between them all; not leaving it
to two individuals in the Church, or some individual member, to fight
the thing out, if a disagreement arises, without asking, before an
impartial tribunal, which party is right, and each of them being willing
to take the right. I say that a government which, without the evils of
undue centralization, without crushing individual freedom, and liberty,
and enterprise, will combine all congregations into one strong, united
body, powerful to do Foreign Mission work and Home Mission work,
cemented together so that the strong carry the weak when they are
overtaken by sickness or disaster—and the strong get the blessing when
doing work like that—a government the likest to that is a government
which will make the most useful and the most spiritual and successful
Church in our England. I say that I have watched the progress of things
in these times of profound interest, and it seems to me that men are
looking at one another in the Churches for what is good and desirable.
That I believe to be our attitude in watching other Churches, and to be
the attitude of other Churches in watching us. I look forward to a
powerful, happy future in consequence.

The second thing which seems to me to be a great spring of a Church's
usefulness in this modern England is the earnestness and success with
which it devises methods of instructing its young people; not merely
winning their affections for Christ, but giving them a reason for the
faith that is in them; not merely teaching them that there is a Saviour
to protect them at the Judgment, but giving them the life and thoughts
of Christ, and that knowledge which shall cause them to grow into the
perfect manhood of Christ. I say, the Church that most successfully and
thoroughly, from the children in the Sunday-school and in the
Bible-classes to those under higher systems of instruction, carries
forward a knowledge of the Bible, and of God's ways with man, and of
human nature in its religious aspects, to its young people, will be the
greatest blessing in England; and once again I see that all the Churches
are awake to it.

And the third thing is this (not by any means that there are not other
things, which are perhaps just as important, but these three stand out
prominent on account of the state of men's minds in England just now):
the Church that can devise a method which will fill its pulpits with men
who are not merely earnest converted men, loyal to Jesus Christ, but men
abreast of the intelligence and thought of the times, men who have a
calm reliance in their own faith by having looked all difficulties in
the face, men who have something of the self-control and the large
thoughts that come with culture; men who will be, not despised, but
respected by the people that come to listen to them, and with whom they
come in contact in the sorrows and trials of life—the Church that can
best fill its pulpits with such preachers, and put such pastors into its
congregations, will do the best work in England. And, mark you, it is
not merely a question of denominational success; God forbid that I
should care for that; but that Church is best fulfilling its Master's
command, best doing its Master's work, most contributing to the
realisation of that time when Christ shall be King of men.

I now come to the particular part of our Church's method of government
and order which I have chosen for explanation to you to-day. We aim at
having all our ministers men who, with great differences of original
natural ability, have at least had all the thorough discipline and
culture that training can give them. Our ministers have all passed
through a high school course, a University course, and a course of study
at a theological hall. Now, all that means a period of education of
something like at least twelve years. We aim at having men who have
ability, men who will be able to bear themselves, in all the relations
of life, with dignity. We aim at having men worthy to speak in Christ's
name. It is a worthy aim. Well, now, how are you to have such men? By
praying for them; by planning thoroughly disciplined study for them; by
seeking them out in families, and persuading and inducing them to give
themselves to the work of preaching Christ's Gospel, and keeping alive
spiritual love and truth in people's hearts. It is a worthy object. But
I will be very plain: the Church's hands are largely tied by a very
mean, material fact; it is the question of the salary which is attached
to that office. If it be a wretched pittance, then it is a simple matter
of fact that you will not get men who are capable of taking a position
in the Christian world with dignity and efficiency to devote themselves
to the work of preachers. Why should they? You say, "Why should a
mercenary motive act?" Very good; why should it? But it does. But why
should it not? Sometimes it is said, "You must not make the ministry a
bribe by the largeness of its emoluments." Does it cease to be a bribe
when its emoluments are a pittance? You only lower the level of
temptation to an inferior grade of men, as well as where nothing is paid
at all. God meant that men should be tempted, and you cannot get rid of
it; they must battle with it and withstand it. But how does the thing
work? I do not think that many men of much ability will be tempted, at
least till the Millennium comes, by the emoluments of preaching, however
good they come to be. I, for my part, should regret if it ever became a
temptation to the highest ability—a money temptation, I mean. But what I
have to say is this: I am talking of a thoroughly adequate
maintenance—not of _payment_. The kind of service that is done by a man
who saves a human being from sin and hell is a service which cannot be
_paid_. That man can only be maintained to do that work; there is no
money equivalent to such a service. Partly the same thing is true of a
medical man's service; he saves a life. Why, if you paid him the
commercial value of his service you must give him your fortune; he saves
your _life_. There are some things which cannot be paid for. You cannot
pay for the love of wife and children. The sweetest things cannot be
paid for; you can only show your appreciation of them by a worthy
maintenance; it would be a pity to talk of paying for them.

Now, suppose that the maintenance awarded to ministers, to preachers, be
so small that they cannot live and bring up their children as men of
such culture and such ability are made by God to require that they
should be able to do; what is the effect of it? You often break that
man's heart; you embitter it; he would be more than human if you did
not. To go about begging for wife and child! That is the result; and it
is not the result of mere disaster, but of stinginess and meanness in
Christian England. I will tell you how it works. Where shall we get
young men with brains, with talent, with ability, that they may give
themselves to a life which is not thought to be worth a decent
maintenance by Christian people? Look at it. Here is a young man, a
member of some country Church; God has moved his heart, and made him
wish to do all the good he can in the world. He has a feeling that he
could do more if he were a minister. He would like to be one. He knows
himself to possess powers to rise in the world and take a position of
eminence, a position of dignity, and to do good in that fashion. Here is
this youth with a warm heart, who wishes to be a minister. But I will
suppose that the minister of his congregation has had some wretched
pittance to live on, has been worn out with the cares of just making
ends meet, has often been behindhand, has been talked of as such, and
more than talked of, even by kind-hearted Christian men and women, with
something of pity, and something of concern; and this youth says to
himself, "That is the life of a preacher." He would be more than human
if he thought it right and wise to choose it. And what of his father and
mother—will they encourage him to do so? They would not be parents if
they did. They will tell him, "Do not you suppose that there is anything
so excellent, or dignified, or worthy, in a minister's work." Ah, you
may say that it is a mercenary thing! True; but where does the
mercenariness begin? who brings it in? After all, men will go by reason,
and they will estimate what are the worth and dignity of the career of a
preacher of the Gospel by what Christian men and women set them down at
in pounds, shillings, and pence. That is reason.

I have said these things strongly; I have said them very strongly here,
because, though I dislike to speak of things concerning ourselves, I am
bound to say frankly that you to your minister have always acted with
rare liberality and generosity, beyond what sometimes I have thought was
proportionate. You will perfectly understand, then, that in what I speak
it is not to reproach you; far from it; it is to interest you, and make
you feel the importance of this question.

Since I came to be myself a teacher of theological students, and to take
a pride in my students, and to seek that they should be able ministers,
I have come to feel how my hands are hampered and crippled, and that the
best men are kept out by such poor, mean drawbacks as these. You will
understand me.

I now come to explain more fully the working of the particular method
adopted by our Church to maintain an honourable, able, dignified
Christian ministry: We call it the "Sustentation Fund." The immediate
aim is this, to gather together the strength and liberality of rich
congregations, and distribute them in districts where they are poorer.
In that way the poorer congregations are able to give a more handsome
maintenance to their ministers. In that way, instead of the Church
having men of parts, and culture, and dignity in the wealthier charges
only, it has men of at least fair eminence, and dignity, and ability in
all its branches; and that is an immense advantage. If it is a bane to
society to have too great extremes of wealth and poverty, it is the same
with the Church. If any Church is bound to avoid it, it is _our_ Church;
for one of the central principles of our Church is that its ministers
and office-bearers should all sit as equals in a deliberative assembly,
and that none should be able to make their will press upon others. If
you have one set of ministers begging for doles from other and richer
ministers, what have you? You have destroyed the Church as a
brotherhood, as a family. Now I have given you in that a reason why we
endeavour to distribute the generous strength of the richer among the
poorer congregations by the Sustentation Fund. Another method would be
by an Augmentation Fund, by which wealthier congregations would dole out
money to poorer congregations. That is not our system; our system is
this: Every congregation is asked to give, "as God has prospered them,"
to a fund which we prefer to call by our old Scotch term, a
"Sustentation" Fund; they have to give all that it is in their hearts to
give to that fund, and they send it up to a central committee, charged
with the duty of distributing it. The whole amount is divided by the
number of the ministers, and an equal share is sent to each. Note how
that works. It does not preclude the wealthier congregations from adding
a supplement, as it is called—adding as much as they like to the income
of their own minister. It would be unreasonable that a man should not
give more to the minister to whose ministrations he has attached
himself, and who has drawn out his sympathies; and therefore no such
liberality is asked to this fund, which goes among all the ministers.

Again, the weaker congregations are urged to contribute a sum which is
equal to their common share; but if they come short the deficiency is
made up by the surplus from the other Churches. For instance, suppose
the distributed sum is £200, and one congregation sends £230. Of that
sum £200 comes back, £30 remains, and goes probably to some congregation
in Northumberland who have only sent up £170.

Now, I have no time to go into details, or to talk about objections,
technical objections, and so on; but just let me show you very briefly
some of the advantages of this way of working. I have spoken about the
sentiment of the thing. Ministers, like men, have feelings. The poorer
ministers prefer to get their larger stipend in that fashion, rather
than getting the money as a dole. That point has to be considered; and
when you remember how great a part feeling plays in all our life you
will not disregard such a thing, even if it is only sentiment. But look
at the thing practically. It may be said, "What is the use of sending up
the whole amount? What good is there in a congregation sending up £230,
and getting £200 back? What good is there in a congregation sending up
£170, and getting £200 instead? Cannot you just as well send the £30?"
If you did that it would become a Dole Fund; it would not be a
Sustentation Fund. Then is it a mere difference of arrangement or
sentiment? Not a bit of it. I will show you how the thing works
practically. It is one of those secondary sorts of advantage which
generally go, more than anything else, to prove a principal good. I
suppose that, if you have ever thought of it, you are not surprised to
find that Church business is constantly done in a most slovenly way. I
suppose you are aware that even down in the City there are many offices
where things are done in a slovenly, hap-hazard fashion. If that is so
in business, and parish matters too, it is worse in Church matters; for
even Church people seem to think that Church business need not be done
with the same method and regularity as that with which secular matters
should be done. Now, that is especially the case in country
congregations, and the bearing of it upon finances is that moneys are
not collected as they should be; they are not asked for, and are lying
out when they ought to come in. A man who can give a shilling a month
cannot get up twelve shillings at the end of the twelve months. All of
you who are business men know what an immense advantage it is to
business to have the whole of the book-keeping, and everything, done in
an efficient manner. I saw, in this visitation of mine, congregations
that had not connected themselves with this Sustentation Fund whose
business affairs were in a shameful condition. It meant that the
minister did not get his salary; it did not come in at the time; not
that the money would not be given the moment it was applied for, but the
treasurer was careless about it, and never thought of it. You can see
the foolishness of such a position, and what a bad thing it is for the
Church. What do they care about giving, when the thing is done in that
careless fashion? Now, the Sustentation Fund means that the whole money
collected for the minister's maintenance goes up to London; and the
country people down in Northumberland try not to disgrace themselves in
the eyes of the central officers in London, and the central officers in
London have no hesitation in giving them a reminder. The advantage is
the same as it is to a business house every year to have all its books
and business pass through the hands of an accountant. It makes a man
careful; things do not fall behind. This mode of working brings
regularity and punctuality, not merely into the Sustentation Fund, but
into the whole of the funds of all our charges. Well, but you may say,
"What is the use of aid-giving congregations sending up their £200?"
They do it, who do not need it, to get the others, who do need it, to do
it too.

I have shown you what a very practical thing the Sustentation Fund is. I
am now going to mention an advantage which requires little more of
Church statesmanship to appreciate it. It is not the minister, but the
congregation, who gets the greatest benefit; I will tell you how.
Ministers do not like to go to congregations where they are kept in
arrears, and where they do not get that proper maintenance which they
should, just through carelessness, or where they have to ask the
treasurer for money. To revert to the commercial illustration, you would
not go as partner into a firm where all the books were carelessly kept,
and everything was in a slovenly, negligent condition. And the
congregation that has its whole business arrangements and financial
affairs completely regular and punctual stands in a much better position
when it has to seek a minister than one that has not; it will get a
better man. That is a very real consideration.

Once more, the system of the Sustentation Fund acts in such a fashion
that does not allow congregations to impose on it. The Committee of the
Sustentation Fund say this: "We fix with the poorer congregation how
much of the money it shall send up, and we undertake that it shall share
with the richer congregations so long as it does its duty." If they find
that it is imposing on them, then they act very sharply; but if there is
some local disaster, the loss of a wealthy member, or some sweeping
misfortune, the Sustentation Fund will do what a family does for a sick
child; it will nurse the sick child till it is strong again, and will
not let it die out.

Once again, look how this system improves the position of the
congregation (to use a commercial phrase) in the ministerial market. See
what the Sustentation Fund amounts to. You know how the credit of a weak
State is improved when a powerful State backs it up; it can borrow at a
lower rate of interest. Any man, or any firm, whose business is
punctually done, and whose books are properly kept, can get money from a
banker much more readily than one who has the reputation of being
slovenly. And the system of the Sustentation Fund improves the character
of a congregation; it gives the shield of the whole Church to an
individual congregation; it says that disaster shall not depress it; it
carries such a congregation through a time of difficulty. A minister has
more heart to go to a weak charge, to a congregation exposed to such
disasters, when that congregation has its credit backed by the general
credit of the whole Church. That is a businesslike and statesmanlike
consideration, and it is a very real one.

There are a great many other things which I could tell you. Let me
mention one fact to show what our Sustentation Fund has already done. It
has always been weak hitherto, and there has been a great deal of
opposition to it, and there have been a great many difficulties in
introducing it. It has not been able to do what it would do if it were
strong; but I will tell you what it has done already. In Northumberland,
where our Churches get the best members and Church officers—young men
brought up properly—young women brought up with prayers morning and
evening—Churches with full light in them, but very poor—in these
Northumberland Churches the annual ministerial stipend has in many cases
been nearly doubled. Of course you may say that many ministers are not
worth even £200 a year. That is true; but if they are not worth £200 a
year they are not worth anything; it is better to have them out. It is
not a question of degree or amount, but the question is, Is the man
doing a minister's work in an honest way? If he is, it is not fair that
he should have to struggle on upon such a pittance as many of the
ministers have been receiving. Well, now, I will tell you what the
Sustentation Fund has done. With the exception of two or three charges
that have to be nursed by the Home Mission Fund, and put, as it were, on
the child platform, this Sustentation Fund has given to every one of our
ministers an annual income of £200; and what has it proved? That our
giving it has brought before the congregations the duty of supporting
their ministers as has never been done before. It has taught them to be
more liberal in maintaining their ministers; it has induced them in that
way to be more generous and liberal themselves.

Now I have left myself no time for some more spiritual thoughts with
which I wanted to end. I do not think that it much matters, if you
remember how the spiritual lives on the practical material working of
Church organisation; but I just want to say this (I wish I could feel it
for myself, and I do wish that our members could feel it), that there is
a great risk of well-to-do congregations unconsciously growing very
selfish, and being shut up in themselves. That position brings a curse
with it if it brings a blight in the heart, and if we come to Christ
just to get our souls saved, and then selfishly congratulate ourselves
upon that. Christ wants a great, loving heart, panting to do good to
every one, and to save him from sin. He says, "Do not be satisfied with
just coming to say your own prayers, and sing your praises, and get your
sorrows comforted, and have your joys brightened, by belonging to a
congregation; but think of all the great Church everywhere, and whether
you might not do something for it." I think that God gathers us into
congregations just for the same reason that He gathers us into families.
Our love is too weak to be left spread out—it would die altogether; it
would be chill and cold as the world—and so he shuts it in, and bids a
man love wife and child with family affection; and so he nurses that
love, and makes it profound. What is it that causes the love of father
and mother to be so strong and tender? Is it not that there are such
endless demands upon them for giving their money, and time, and prayers?
It is God's greatest gift. But sometimes I see men and women misuse it,
and make gigantic walls, and turn them into prison walls, and they do
not care for any human being outside their little circle. It becomes a
blight and a curse to them. Our Church is strong now in England under
the Presbyterian system, while others are isolated. There is a real
danger that our hearts will be dried up and narrowed; and I put it to
you that here is one means of counteracting it, by giving with a warm
heart, thinking of the manses away in the North, and the ministers'
homes, that will be made happier and better by the liberality of those
whom God has prospered. The Church that shows most liberality and
loyalty to others is the Church that will have most love and loyalty to
the Master.



XV.

_OUR LORD'S TREATMENT OF ERRING FRIENDS._

SUNDAY READINGS.


I.

Read Ps. cxxxviii., and John xiii. 1-17.

THE SELF-ASSERTING.—John xiii. 4, 5.

On the evening before He died, Jesus washed the disciples' feet. This
touching action of our Lord is constantly taken and turned into a
picture of spiritual truths, and it is a very fair use to make of the
story. No wonder if there is ever an overflowing surplus of meaning in
all the things that Jesus said and did. But we must not forget that
their symbolic use is a matter of secondary moment, and we must take
care, first and chiefly, to recognise in our Lord's words and deeds that
simple, direct meaning which He intended them to have. In the present
case He has Himself told us why He did this strange and beautiful act of
self-abasement to His faulty followers, and what effect the memory of
His great humility ought to have on our hearts and characters, if we
would be like Him, divinely wise and good in our treatment of erring
friends.

In the country where Jesus lived the roads were hot and dusty, and the
people wore sandals that left the upper part of the foot exposed. In the
course of even a short journey the skin became covered with an
irritating kind of sand. Therefore, on the arrival of a visitor, it was
the first duty of hospitality to offer water to wash and cool the weary
feet. When a feast was made the guests, as they entered, would lay aside
their sandals, and take their places on the couches that surrounded the
table. Then the humblest servant of the house was wont to come with
basin, towel, and pitcher of water, to kneel behind each couch, to pour
the water over the projecting feet, to wash them clean and free from
stain, and to wipe them gently dry. It was a comfortable and kindly
custom, and we know, from the anecdote of Simon the Pharisee, that our
Lord missed it when it was omitted, and gratefully welcomed it when it
was observed.

This night Jesus and His disciples are gathered for supper in the upper
room of a strange house in Jerusalem. The room has been lent for the
occasion, and so there is no servant in attendance on them. In such
circumstances it had been customary among the little company for one of
their number, ere the meal began, to do this needful service for the
rest. In a corner of the room stood the pitcher and basin, with the
towel folded by their side. They had all taken their places round the
table, and the time to commence supper had come (so read verse 2). But
this night—the last of their Master's life on earth—none rose to wash
their feet, none stirred to perform that friendly office. One and all,
they kept their places in painful and embarrassed silence. Their refusal
of the lowly but accustomed task was due to an unwonted access of pride
and self-assertion in their hearts. That very day, in the way, there had
been a fierce contention among the disciples as to which of them was
greatest. The dispute reached the Master's ear, and he firmly rebuked
their rivalry and quelled the quarrel. The storm of passion was silenced
on their lips, but the sullen surge of anger had not quite died out of
their hearts. Not yet would it be easy for any one of them to forget his
dignity, and do a humbling service to the rest. And so it came to pass
on that solemn evening, when their Master's heart was so soft and
tender, their hearts were hard with pride and anger, and though they
felt the painfulness of the pause and the wrongfulness of their
obstinacy, not one of them had the manliness to rise and end it, and by
humbling himself make peace and harmony in their hearts.

The consciousness of discord entered the holy heart of Jesus and pierced
it. His soul was filled that night with love unspeakable, and He longed
to pour out to His friends the joy and the pain of His mighty purpose.
But that could not be while their breasts were possessed by petty
rivalries, and mean thoughts, and angry feelings. He must first shame
away their pride, and melt their hardness, and make them gentle, lowly,
and loving. How can He do this most quickly and completely? "He riseth
from supper, and laid aside His garments; and took a towel, and girded
Himself. After that He poureth water into a basin, and began to wash the
disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith He was
girded." Who is not able to picture the scene—the faces of John, and
James, and Peter; the intense silence, in which each movement of Jesus
was painfully audible; the furtive watching of Him, as He rose, to see
what He would do; the sudden pang of self-reproach as they perceived
what it meant; the bitter humiliation and the burning shame! The way
John recites each detail tells how that scene had scorched itself on his
soul and become an indelible memory. Truly his Master had "given him an
example." To his dying day John could see that sight, and many a time in
the hour of temptation it crossed his path and made him a better man.
May that same vision of our Lord's great humility rise before our eyes,
when life is full of pride and rivalry, and our hearts are hot and
angry; and may its sweet influence come on our spirits like cool, pure
water, to wash these evil passions out, and to make us good and gentle,
like Jesus!


II.

Read Job xvi., and Matt. xxvi. 31-46.

THE UNSYMPATHETIC.—John xiii. 1-3.

The preface to the narrative of the feet-washing is long and involved.
The ideas move in a lofty sphere, seemingly very remote from the simple
scene they prelude. At first sight the reader is tempted to count the
introduction cumbrous, and to question the relevancy. A more profound
appreciation of its contents and connection changes questioning into
admiration, and transforms perplexity into wondering delight. We
perceive how the thoughts of the prelude light up the whole scene with a
golden glow of human tenderness and Divine grandeur, so that, like a
picture set in its true light, we now discern in it a depth of meaning
and a wealth of beauty previously unsuspected. The perplexing preface
proves to be the vestibule that leads into the innermost shrine of the
temple.

The Gospel of St. John was not written till half a century later than
the events it records; yet it is written as though it were but yesterday
the Apostle had witnessed the scenes he describes. Those recollections
had not been casual visitants, but constant inmates of his mind and
heart. There was hardly ever a day he had not thought about them. At
night when he lay awake and could not sleep he had thought about them.
He conned them over in memory, he pored over them in his mind, he
cherished them in his heart lovingly. And the promise his Lord had given
came true to him, for the Holy Spirit took of these things of Christ,
and showed them unto him, so that they grew to his eyes better and
better, and more beautiful, and more full of meaning, till their inmost
heart of Divine goodness was revealed to him. Ah! when we first get to
know Christ it is but His face, His eyes, His outer form we see. That is
a great sight! But to see and know all the heart of God that was in
Him—that takes a very long time; it takes half a century; it takes
eternity to get at that! John lived in that high quest almost all his
life, gazing at the Master, worshipping and adoring, laying his heart on
the Master's heart; and the result was that he got to know Jesus far
better than he did when he lived with Him. Hence it is that the fourth
Gospel is so different from the other three. They just tell us what
Jesus said and what Jesus did. But John's Gospel mixes up the acts and
words of Jesus with John's own thoughts and explanations, so that it is
sometimes hardly possible to tell whether we are reading what Jesus said
or what John thought about it. He is ever passing behind the loveliness
of the human life, to trace its explanation in the inner heavenly
nature. He paints for us the tree with its beauteous branches, leaves,
and blossoms, and then he bids us behold the great root in God's earth
out of which it grew; that wonderful root, which is Divine, and which is
the source of all the sweetness that is brightening the upper air. The
Jesus of John's Gospel has more of God in the look of face and eyes, and
in the ring of His voice, than the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It
is the Jesus that lived and grew on in John's loving memory, year by
year becoming greater, holier, Diviner in the illumination of the Holy
Spirit, that was brooding over that home of Christ in the heart of John.
It is, indeed, Jesus coloured by John's thoughts and John's feelings;
but then they are true thoughts and true feelings. And so it is that
sometimes, in the evangel of the Beloved Disciple, we almost lose sight
of the outer form and familiar features of our Lord, but only that we
may see more clearly the glory of His inner nature and the beauty of His
heart Divine.

It is to this loving industry of John's mind that we owe the preface of
our story, so laden with great thoughts. It bids us, before we scan the
picture of our Lord's humility, gaze into His heart, and see how that
night it was filled with contending emotions of exaltation and agony, of
tenderest devotion and unrequited love, and then, in the light of His
inner grandeur, grief, and forlornness, measure the marvel of this
wondrous act of self-abasement. He who washed the feet of those sinful
men was the Son of God and the world's Saviour. He made Himself their
servant! He washed their feet! But more than that, He was a dying man
that night, and He knew it. His hour was come. Already the presaging
pangs of the bloody sweat, of the scourging and the spitting, of the
anguish and forsakeness of the cross, had broken like stormy waves of a
troubled sea on Christ's sensitive spirit. The pain, and the parting,
and the solemn awe of death had fallen upon His soul. He was going to
bid good-bye to the faces He had loved, to the things that were so
beautiful in His eyes, to the lilies and the birds, to those He had
clung to on earth, to mother, and brother, and friend, to all that was
sweet and dear to His human heart. His thoughts were preoccupied that
night. He was preparing Himself for death. His heart was already getting
detached from earth. Oh, if ever there was an hour when He might have
been forgiven, if He had had no thought but of Himself, it was that
night! If ever He might have held Himself exempt from thinking of
others, and expected them to think of Him, it was that night. If ever
there was an hour when He might have counted selfishness unforgivable,
and bitterly resented want of sympathy, it was that night, when His
grief was so great and His love so warm and tender. And yet, says John,
it was on that night that amongst us all, engrossed in our petty,
selfish rivalry, He was the one that could forget Himself, could lay
pride aside, and humble His heart, and do the lowly act that made peace
amongst us, and melted all our pride away, and made us good, and loving,
and fit to hear the wondrous thoughts of grace and love that were
glowing in His heart for us and for all mankind.

The lesson is one for good men and women. They are too apt to think,
because they have set out on some great enterprise of goodness, that
therefore they are exempt from the little courtesies and forbearances of
lowlier service. They mean to do good, but they must do it with a high
hand and in a masterful fashion. They cannot stoop to conciliate the
lukewarm and to win the unsympathetic. And so too often their cherished
purpose ends in failure, and we see that saddest sight in Christ's
Church—beautiful lives marred and noble service spoiled, because the
sacrifice is not complete enough, because pride lingers in the heart,
and self-assertion and selfishness. We cannot be faithful in that which
is greatest unless we are willing to be faithful also that in which is
least.


III.

Read 2 Sam. xxiv., and John xxi. 15-23.

THE WILFUL.—John xiii. 6-10.

The character of Peter stands clear cut in the Gospels. He had a warm
heart, an eager mind, an impulsive will, a quick initiative, and a
native aptitude for pre-eminence. He took the lead almost unconsciously
and without premeditation, but none the less he was conscious of a keen
pleasure in being first. Prominence with him was not a choice of
calculation, but rather an innate instinct and necessity of nature.
Alike by what was best and by what was worst in him, it was natural for
Peter to stand out from the rest, and whether right or wrong, to be
their spokesman, champion, and chief.

As Jesus went round, washing the disciples' feet, there was perfect
stillness in the room. None ventured to speak in explanation or
remonstrance till He came to Peter. But as He prepared to kneel down
behind him, Peter stopped Him with a protest: "Lord, dost thou wash my
feet?" It looks on the face of it altogether good, and pure, and manly.
But then Christ was no narrow-hearted pedant, eager to find fault, and
imagining offence where none existed. Yet Peter's protest, instead of
being approved, is gently but firmly refused. "What I do thou dost not
understand now, but thou shalt understand presently." Beneath the fair
surface of the remonstrance there must have been some unlovely thing
that had to be rebuked away. What was the jarring chord? Had Peter's
motive been contrition, and contrition only, would he have waited till
it came to his turn? Would he not have leapt to his feet at once, and
insisted on taking the Master's place, and washing the feet of them all?
Did he sit still, ashamed for himself and them, but angrily ashamed,
resolving first that he would not basely allow his Lord to demean
Himself, then thinking hard things of the others, who suffered it
without protest? And so, when it came to his turn, was his heart full of
censorious thoughts, and a proud resolve that he would come out of the
humiliation better than the rest? If, without breach of charity, we may
take this to have been his mood, then we can understand Christ's kindly
deprecation of his words and act. He fancied his impulse all good and
noble. He did not know the treachery of his own heart. He did not fathom
the necessity for the humbling experience of having to be washed by his
Master. With the cleansing of his feet in simple obedience, his heart
would be cleansed also of pride and of anger. Then he would understand
what his Master was doing, and how He had to do it to put right so much
that was wrong in the heart of His wayward follower.

It is not easy to obey without understanding. What was noble in Peter,
and what was base, combined to hold him back from yielding. Peter's love
recoiled from the humbling of his Master. Peter's pride shrank from the
humbling of himself. "Thou shalt never wash my feet." Truly a noble,
proud refusal! There was in it a strange mixture of good and evil. Peter
wanted to come back to right, but he wished to come in his own way.
Christ's way was painful, and the disciple would fain choose another
that did not lead through the Valley of Humiliation. But then, if you
have gone wrong through pride you cannot get right again and yet keep
your pride. If you would be good you must abase yourself. Peter's
refusal meant that his spirit still was not quite subdued, his heart not
quite humble and contrite. In that mood he could not enter into the
sacred communion of his Master's dying love. With that spirit cherished
and maintained he could not belong to His fellowship. "If I wash thee
not, thou hast no part with Me."

Christ knew Peter's heart. The man loved his Master with a passionate
personal attachment. These words fell on his spirit with a sudden chill.
To have no part with Christ—that was more than he could bear. "Lord, not
my feet only, but also my hands and my head." It is as though he would
say, "A great part in Thee!" And we might readily count the request
blameless, and the mood that uttered it commendable only. But Jesus
declines it, and in refusing suggests that it has in it something of
unreality and excess. So then, without his knowing it, there must have
lurked in the thought Peter's love of pre-eminence. First of all, he had
wished to differ from the others in not being washed at all. Now that he
must be washed, he would be the most washed of all. Ah, the subtle
danger of wanting to be first, even in goodness! We cannot safely try to
be good for the sake of being foremost. We must be good just for
goodness' sake, with no thought of self at all. And surely silent
submission had become Peter better than any speech. When a man knows he
has gone wrong again and again, and Christ has undertaken to set him
right, his wisdom is to offer no resistance, nor make any suggestion, as
if he knew better than Jesus what had best be done.

Self-will in choosing the way in which we are to be saved and sanctified
is a blunder from which few are quite free. We cannot leave our souls
simply in God's care and teaching. We catch at Christ's hands, and
distrust the simplicity of His grace, and dictate to the Holy Spirit the
experience and discipline we deem best. Surely it is not becoming and it
is not wise. When a man has been taken into God's hands, and has been
forgiven his sins, and is being taught by God, he should just keep very
still and very humble, and let God make of him what He will.


IV.

Read 1 Sam. xxiv., and Luke xxii. 47-62.

THE FAITHLESS.—John xiii. 11.

Jesus enjoined us to love our enemies. We count it a hard saying. An
enemy is not lovable. The sight of him wakes instinctively not
affection, but antagonism. It is not easy to wish him well, to do him
good. We find it difficult to endure his presence without show of
repugnance. Still harder is it to pity him, to help him, to do him a
service. But there is something worse than an enemy, something more
repulsive, more unforgivable. That is a traitor—the faithless friend,
who pretends affection with malice in his breast, who receives our love
while he is plotting our ruin, and under cover of a caress stabs us to
the heart. Open hostility may be met, resented, and forgotten, but
cold-blooded treachery our human nature stamps as the all but
unpardonable sin. Its presence is revolting, and its touch loathsome. An
honest heart sickens at the sight of it.

Among the guests gathered around the table, that night before our Lord's
death, was Judas, who betrayed Him. He had sold his Master for thirty
pieces of silver, and was watching his opportunity to complete the
covenant of blood. He sat there while Jesus washed their feet. Jesus
knew all his falseness, all his heartlessness, all his treachery. He
knew it, and He washed the traitor's feet.

The perfection of our Lord's holiness is apt to mislead us into the idea
that because it was faultless, it was therefore easy. We conceive His
goodness as spontaneous, His sinlessness as without effort. But in truth
He was a man tempted in all points like as we are. He was obedient unto
death, but His obedience He learned by the things which He suffered. He
was perfect in purity, meekness, self-denial, but only by humbling
Himself and crucifying the flesh. His self-control was absolute, but it
cost Him as much as it does us—perchance more. His sinless, holy heart
shrank from sin's foulness, and suffered in its loathsome contact as our
stained souls cannot. The base presence and false fellowship of a Judas
must have been a perpetual pain to His pure spirit. But He endured his
meanness with a heavenly self-restraint that curbed each sign of
repugnance, and to the last He maintained for the traitor a Divine
compassion that would have saved him from himself, and that in Jesus's
nature compelled the very instincts of loathing to transform themselves
into quite marvellous ministries of superhuman loving. It was no empty
show of humility and kindness, it was pity and love incarnate, when
Jesus knelt at Judas's back, and washed the feet of His betrayer.

That seems to me one of the most wondrous, most tragic scenes in this
world's story. Could we but have seen it—Jesus kneeling behind Judas,
laving his feet with water, touching them with His hands, wiping them
gently dry, and the traitor keeping still through it all! What a theme
for the genius of a painter—the face of Jesus and the face of Judas—the
emotions of grandeur looking out of the one, of good and evil contending
in the other! If anything could have broken the traitor's heart, and
made him throw himself in penitent abasement on the Saviour's pity, it
was when he felt on his feet his Master's warm breath and gentle touch,
and divined all the forgiving love that was in His lowly heart.

This was our Lord's treatment of a faithless friend. On the night of His
betrayal He washed the feet of His bitterest enemy, of the man who had
sold Him to death. He rises from that act, and speaks to you and me, and
says, "I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to
you." If you have a friend that has deceived you, do not hate him; if
you have an enemy, forgive him; if you can do him a humble kindness, do
it; if you can soften and save him by lowly forbearance, be pitiful and
long-suffering to the uttermost. It is the law of Christ. If you call it
too hard for flesh and blood, remember how your Master, that night He
was betrayed, washed the feet of the man that betrayed Him.


V.

Read Isa. xl., and 1 Cor. xiii.

THE SECRET OF MAGNANIMITY.—John xiii. 12-17.

There is a contagious quality in greatness. Young hearts, generous
souls, dwelling in the vicinity of a hero, are apt to catch his
thoughts, and words, and ways. Christ's greatness is His goodness, and
that is absolute. Men look at Jesus, behold His perfection, grow to love
Him, and hardly knowing how, become like Him. We see His tranquillity,
whose minds are so perturbed by life's worries and men's wrongs. We
wonder at His infinite peace, whose hearts are so hot and restless with
the world's rivalries and ambitions. Our spirits, tired, and hurt, and
fevered, gaze wistfully at the great serenity of His gentle life, and
ere we know it a strange longing steals into our breast to learn His
secret and find rest unto our souls. Plainly the panacea does not
consist in any change outside us, for, do what we will, still in every
lot there will be crooks and crosses that cannot be haughtily brushed
aside, that can only be robbed of their sting by being humbly borne and
patiently endured. Moreover, the world was not least, but most unkind to
Him, yet could not mar His peace, nor poison the sweetness of His soul.
Within Himself lay the talisman of His charmed life, the hidden spring
of His unchanging goodness. It was the spell of a lowly, loving, and
loyal heart. This is the key to the enigma of His perfect patience. He
loved us, and He gave Himself for us. And so, whether His friends were
gentle and obedient or wayward and rebellious, whether they were kind
and sympathetic or cold, and hard, and selfish, whether they were good
or evil, He remained unchanged and unchangeable. "Having loved His own
which were in the world, He loved them unto the end."

The machinery of life is not simple, but complex and intricate. In its
working there cannot but be much friction. If the strains and jars of
social existence are to be borne without irritation and ill-will, there
must be between us and our neighbours a plentiful supply of the oil of
human kindness. The pressure and constraint that from a stranger would
be irksome or unendurable become tolerable or even gladsome when borne
for one we love. Did we, as God meant us to do, love our neighbour as
ourself, life's burdens would seem light, for love makes all things
easy. But then the difficulty just is to love our neighbour as ourself.
Here, as elsewhere, it is the first step that costs. For too often our
neighbour is not lovable, but hateful, and our own self is so much
nearer to us than any neighbour can be. Its imperious demands silence
his claims on our kindness, and drown the calls of duty. Its exuberant
growth overshadows his, and robs him of the sunshine. Its intense
acquisitiveness absorbs all our care and interest, all our sympathy and
affection, so that we have no time or heart to spare for his
exactions—no, not even for his necessities. Clearly in this inordinate
love of self is the root of the wrong and unrest of our life. Because we
love our own self too much, we love others too little to be able to be
generous and good like Christ. Wrapped up unduly in selfish anxiety for
our own happiness and dignity, we become too sensitive to the injuries
of foes, the slights of friends, the cuts and wounds of fortune. The
reason why we lack the lowliness of Jesus, and miss the blessedness of
His heavenly peace, is our refusal to take up the cross and follow Him
in the pathway of self-sacrifice. It was His detachment from self that
made Him invulnerable to wounds, imperturbable amid wrongs, good and
kind to the evil and to the froward. Because He cared much for others
and little for Himself, He was lifted above the strife and restless
emulation of our self-seeking lives. The charm that changed for Him the
storm of life into a great calm was the simple but potent spell of
self-renunciation.

The thought is one that captivates fresh hearts and noble souls with the
fascination of a revelation. It seems to unlock all doors, to break all
bars, and to lift from life its mysterious burden of perplexity and
pain. The pathway of renunciation opens before their eyes with an
indefinable charm, unfolding boundless vistas of lofty achievement,
haunted by sweet whispers of a joy and content, dreamt of many a time,
but never before attained. It is a fond delusion, that experience soon
dispels. At the outset the way glows with the rosy light of a new dawn,
and our footsteps are light with the bounding life of a fresh
springtide; but ere many miles are traversed the road becomes hard and
rough, and we, with heavy hearts, drag hot and dusty feet along a weary
way. For the way of the Cross has indeed blessedness at the end of it,
but easy it cannot be till it is ended. To curb our pride, to crush our
self-seeking, to conquer passion, to quell ambition, to crucify the
flesh—these things are not easy. They have the stern stress and strain
of battle in them. To be patient under injuries, to suffer slights and
wrongs, to take the lowest place without a murmur, are conquests that
demand a strong heart and a great mind. Where shall we learn a serenity
that can be disturbed by no trouble, where find a peace that
disappointment cannot break, where reach a goodness that no wrong can
ruffle? What is the secret of magnanimity?

The answer comes to us from John's picture of his Lord's humility. In
the forefront we behold Jesus kneeling on the ground and washing His
disciples' feet, and we wonder at such lowliness. But now John's finger
points, and our eyes rest on the heart of this lowly Saviour, and
reverently we read His thoughts. "Jesus, knowing that the Father had
given all things into His hands, and that He was come from God and went
to God," washed the disciples' feet. There is at once the marvel of His
condescension and its explanation. He was so great He could afford to
abase himself. His followers stood on their dignity, and jealously
guarded their rank. He was sure of His position. Nothing could affect
His Divine dignity. He came from God; He was going to God. What mattered
it what happened to Him, what place He held, what humiliation He
endured, in the brief snatch of earthly life between? And we, if we
would be great-minded like Him, must have the same high faith, the same
heavenly consciousness. We must know that this world, with its wrongs
and disappointments, is not all; that this life, with its pride and
pomps, is but a passing show. We must remember ever the grander world
beyond, the infinite life within, and even now, amid the glare and din
of time, live in and for eternity. Then we should no longer fret for a
thousand trifles that vex us, we should not trouble for all the wrongs
that pain and grieve us. What dignity, what grandeur, what Divine
nobility there would be in every thought, in every word, in every deed
of all our life on earth, were the consciousness ever glowing in our
hearts that we too came from God and are going back to God!



XVI.

_A HYMN OF HEART'S EASE._

SUNDAY READINGS FOR THE MONTH.

  "Lord, my heart is not haughty,
  Nor mine eyes lofty:
  Neither do I exercise myself in great matters,
  Or in things too high for me.
  Surely I have behaved
  And quieted myself;
  As a child that is weaned of its mother,
  My soul is even as a weaned child.
  Let Israel hope in the Lord
  From henceforth and for ever."—Ps. cxxxi.


I.

Read Job xxvi., and 1 Cor. xiii.

THE SOURCE OF UNREST.

"Things too high for me."

We are apt to think and speak as if difficulty of faith were an
experience peculiar to our age. It is indeed true that at particular
periods speculative uncertainty has been more widely diffused than at
others, and our own age may be one of them. But the real causes of
perplexity in things religious are permanent and unchanging, having
their roots deep-seated in the essential nature of man's relation to the
world and to God. There has never been a time when men have not had to
fight hard battles for their faith against the dark mysteries and
terrors of existence, that pressed in upon their souls and threatened to
enslave them. What is this brief Psalm, echoing like a sea-shell in its
tiny circle the heart-beat of a vanished world, but the pathetic record
of a soul's dread struggle with doubt and darkness, telling in its
simple rhythm and quiet cadences the story how through the breakers of
unbelief it fought its way to the firm shores of faith, and peace, and
hope? It reads like a tale of yesterday. It is just what we are seeking,
suffering, achieving. Yet more than two thousand years have come and
gone since the brain that thought and the hand that wrote have mouldered
into dust.

The poem must have been penned at a time when the poet's own
misfortunes, or the general disorders of the age, were such as seemed to
clash irreconcilably with his preconceived notions of God's goodness,
character, and purposes. The shock of this collision between fact and
theory shook to its foundations the structure of his inherited creed,
and opened great fissures of questioning in the fabric of his personal
faith. He was tempted to abandon the believing habits of a religious
training and the confiding instincts of a naturally devout heart, and
either to doubt the being and power of the Almighty, or to deny His
wisdom and beneficence. For a long time he was tossed hither and thither
on the alternate ebb and flow of questioning denial and believing
affirmation, finding nowhere any firm foothold amid the unstable tumult
of conflicting evidence and inconclusive reasoning. At last out of the
confusion there dawned on his mind a growing persuasion of something
clear and certain. He perceived that not only was the balance of
evidence indecisive, but also that the issue never could but be
indeterminate. For he saw that the method itself was impotent, and could
never reach or unravel the themes of his agonised questioning. A settled
conviction forced itself upon his mind that there are in life problems
no human ingenuity can solve, questions that baffle man's intellect to
comprehend, "great matters, and things too high" for him. It was a
discovery startling, strange, and painful. But at least it was something
solid and certain; it was firm land, on which one's feet might be
planted. Moreover, it was not an ending, but a beginning, a
starting-point that led somewhere. Perchance it might prove to be the
first step in a rocky pathway, that should guide his footsteps to
heights of clearer light and wider vision, where the heart, if not the
intellect, might reach a solution of its questioning and enter into
rest. The quest he had commenced had turned out a quest of the
unattainable, but it had brought him to a real and profitable discovery.
He had recognised and accepted once and for ever the fact of the fixed
and final limitation of human knowledge.

It is an experience all men have to make, an experience that grows with
age and deepens with wisdom, as we more and more encounter the mysteries
of existence, and fathom the shallowness of our fancied knowledge. What
do we know of God, the world, ourselves? How much, and how little! How
much about them, how little of them! Who of us, for instance, has any
actual conception of God in His absolute being? You remember how in
dreamy childhood you would vainly strive to arrest and fasten in some
definite image the vague vision of dazzling glory you had learned to
call God, which floated before your soul, awing you with its majesty and
immeasurable beauty, but evading every effort to grasp it. With
gathering years and widening horizon you watched the world's changeful
aspects and ceaseless movements, till nature seemed the transparent
vesture of its mighty Maker, but it was all in vain that you tried to
pierce the thin veil and behold the invisible Worker within. You took
counsel with science, and it told you much concerning the properties of
matter and the sequences of force, but the ultimate cause, that which is
beneath, that which worketh all in all, it could not reveal. You turned
to philosophy, and you traced the soaring thoughts of the sages, that
rushed upward like blazing rockets, as if they would pierce and
illuminate the remotest heaven; but you saw how, ere they reached that
far goal, their fire went out, their light was quenched, and they fell
back through the darkness, baffled and spent. You betook yourself to
revelation, counting that at last you were entering the inner shrine,
and you did indeed learn much that was new and precious; but soon came
the discovery that here also we do but see through a glass darkly, and
that our best knowledge of God is no more than a knowledge in part. "Lo,
these are but the outskirts of His ways; and how small a portion we know
of them! But the thunder of His power, who can understand?" We are, as
it were, surrounded on every hand by mighty mountain peaks, whose rocky
sides foil every effort to explore the pinnacles that lie hidden in
distant cloud and mist. The achievements of the human intellect are many
and marvellous, but above and beyond its realm remain, and doubtless
ever shall remain, "great matters, and things too high" for us.


II.

Read Ps. xxxvii., and Matt. xi.

THE SECRET OF REST.

"Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty."

There is in the human intellect an insatiable eagerness and an
indomitable energy of acquisitiveness. It carries in its consciousness
an ineradicable instinct of domination, that spurs it to boundless
enterprise and prompts it to spurn defeat. This lordly quality of the
human mind is the natural outcome of its sovereignty over the physical
creation, and the appropriate expression of its kinship with the
Creator. It is part of man's Divine birthright, and the insignia of his
nobility. But it brings with it the peril of all special prerogative,
the inevitable temptation that accompanies the possession of power. It
tends to breed a haughtiness that is restive of restraint, a
self-sufficiency that forgets its own boundaries, and an arrogance that
refuses to wield the sceptre of aught but an unlimited empire. So it
comes to pass, when reason in its restless research is brought to a stop
by the invisible but very actual confines of human knowledge, it resents
the suggestion of limitation, and declines to accept the arrest of its
onward march. The temptation that besets it is twofold. On the one hand,
pride, irritated by the check, but too clear-sighted to ignore it, is
tempted to refuse to admit any truths it cannot fathom or substantiate,
and to deny the real existence of any realm of being beyond its natural
ken. This is the characteristic error of Rationalism and Positivism. On
the other hand, there is in the opposite direction a tendency, born
equally of intellectual pride and self-will, to refuse the restriction,
to ignore reason's incapacity, and so to venture to state and explain
that which is inexplicable. Alike in the spheres of science and of
religion men strive recklessly to remove from God's face the veil which
His own hand has not drawn, and irreverently intrude into mysteries
hopelessly beyond human thought to conceive or human speech to express.
This is the transgression of rash speculation and of arrogant dogmatism,
and it is in itself as sinful, and in its consequences as harmful, as
are the blank negations of scepticism.

Each of these errors the author of our poem was fortunate enough to
escape. Recognising the limitation of all earthly knowledge, he does not
rage against the restrictions and beat himself against the environing
bars. He does not take it on himself, by a foolish fiat of his finite
littleness, to decree the non-existence of everything too subtle for his
dim eyes to perceive, or too fine for his dull ear to hear. Where he
fails to understand the wisdom or goodness of God's ways he does not
intrude and try to alter them, neither does he wildly struggle to
comprehend their meaning, nor madly refuse to submit to them. He adapts
himself to the Divine dealing, and is content to obey without insisting
on knowing the reason why. He curbs in the cravings of his mind, nor
will suffer the swift stream of his thought to rush on like an impetuous
torrent, dashing itself against obstructing rocks, and fretting its
waters into froth and foam. He possesses his soul in patience, and does
not "exercise" himself "in great matters, or in things too high" for him.

This attitude of acquiescence is the position imposed on us by
necessity, and prescribed by wisdom. But, as a matter of fact, its
practical possession depends on the presence of a certain inner mood or
disposition. We have seen that the denials of scepticism and the
excesses of dogmatism are alike the offspring of pride, and spring from
an over-estimation of the potency of reason. Therefore, as we might
expect, the poet's simple acceptance of limitation and contentment with
partial knowledge are due to the fact that he has formed a modest
estimate of himself. "Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes
lofty." His submission to restraint has its root in humility. He does
not exaggerate his capacity. He takes the measure of his mind
accurately. He does not expect to be able to accomplish more than his
abilities are equal to. It seems to him quite natural that men should
not be able to comprehend all God's ways. It is to be expected that
there should be many things in God's operations beyond their knowledge,
and in his thoughts passing their understanding. It is, therefore, no
matter for surprise that men should encounter in God's universe "great
matters," and "things too high" for them. Nay, the wonder and
disappointment would be if there were no mysteries, no infinitudes,
transcending our narrow souls. Would it gladden you if indeed God were
no greater than our thoughts of Him? What if the sun were no brighter
and no vaster than the shrunken, dim, and tarnished image of his
radiance framed in a child's toy mirror? Alas for us if God and the
universe were not immeasurably grander than mankind's most majestic
conceptions of them! Measuring ourselves thus, in truth and lowliness,
over against God, who will not say, with the poet of our Psalm, "Lord,
my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise
myself in great matters, or in things too high for me"?


III.

Read Ps. lxxiii., and Heb. xii.

CALM AFTER STORM.

"Surely I have behaved and quieted myself."

Peace bulks largely in all our dreams of ideal happiness. Without repose
of heart we cannot conceive of perfect contentment. But we must not
forget that the peace of inexperience is a fragile possession, and that
the only lasting rest is the repose that is based upon conquest. We
speak with languid longing and ease-seeking envy of the peace of Jesus,
because we forget that His peace was a peace constituted out of
conflict, maintained in the face of struggle, and made perfect through
suffering. Therefore it was a peace strong and majestic, and the story
of His life is the world's greatest epic. A life that commenced with
effortless attainment, proceeded in easy serenity, and ended in
tranquillity were a life without a history, pleasant but monotonous,
devoid of dramatic interest, and destitute of significance. The young
cadet, in his boyish bloom and unworn beauty, furnishes the painter with
a fairer model, but the grizzled hero of a hundred fights, with his
battered form and furrowed face, makes the greater picture. It means so
much more. And it means more precisely because the tried valour of the
veteran is so much more than the promise of the untested tyro. Innocence
unsullied and untried has a loveliness all its own, but it lacks the
pathos of suggestion, the depth of significance, and the strength of
permanence that make the glory of virtue that has borne the brunt of
battle, and has known the bitterness of defeat, the agony of retrieval,
and the exultation of recovered victory. We talk proudly of the faith
that has never felt a doubt, that has been pierced by no perplexity, and
shows no mark of the sweat and stress of conflict. We look askance on
difficulty of faith, have no mercy on lack of assurance, and reckon them
happy who are convinced without trouble and believe without effort. That
is not quite the Bible estimate. The Psalms echo with the prayers of
hard-pressed faith, and throb with the cries of agonised doubt. The New
Testament speaks of faith as a fight, counts them happy who endure, and
pronounces blessed the man who encounters and overcomes temptation. If
"strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth unto life," how
should faith be easy, since faith is that gate, that way? The truth is
that we invert the Divine standard of values, and put last what God puts
first. We count enviable the land-locked harbours of unthreatened
belief, that are protected from assault by their very shallowness and
narrowness. We are blind to the providential discipline which ordains
that men should wrestle with difficulty, and in overcoming it attain a
tried and tempered faith possible only to those who have passed through
the furnace of temptation. For sinful men there can be no real strength
that is not transmuted weakness, no permanent peace that is not a
triumph over rebellion, no perfect faith that is not a victory over
doubt. The saints that have most reflected the spirit of Christ formed
their fair character, like their Master, in lives of which it may be
said, "Without were fightings, within were fears." The way of the cross
has ever been a way of conflict, and it is they who come out of great
tribulation that enter into the rest that remaineth. The deep lakes that
sleep in the hollows of high mountains, and mirror in their placid
depths the quiet stars, have their homes in the craters of volcanoes,
that have spent their fury, quenched their fires, and are changed into
pools of perpetual peace.

There breathes through our Psalm an atmosphere of infinite repose—a
subdued rest, like the hush of a cradle song. Nevertheless, if we listen
closely enough to its music, we catch under its lullaby the low echo of
a bygone anguish, the lingering sob of a vanished tempest. Nature's most
exquisite embodiment of calm is the sweet fresh air that is left by a
great storm; and the perfection of the Psalm's restfulness is that it
consists of unrest conquered and transmuted. For the poet's peace is the
result of a great struggle, the reward of a supreme act of
self-subjection. "Surely I have behaved and quieted myself;" or,
preserving the imagery of the words, "Surely I have calmed and hushed my
soul." His submissiveness had not been native, but acquired. His
lowliness of heart was not a natural endowment, but a laborious
accomplishment. His acquiescence in God's mysterious ways was a thing
not inborn and habitual, but was rather the calm that follows a storm,
when the tempest has moaned itself into stillness, and the great waves
have rocked themselves into unruffled rest. For his soul had once been
rebellious, like a storm-lashed sea dashing itself against the iron
cliffs that bounded its waves, and impetuous like a tempest rushing
through the empty air, seeking to attain the unattainable, and spending
its force vainly in vacancy. He had longed to flash thought, lightning
like, athwart the thick darkness that surrounded Jehovah's throne, and
to lay bare its hidden secrets. It was all in vain. Hemmed in on every
hand, beaten back in his attempts to pierce the high heaven, baffled in
every effort to read the enigma of God's ways, he had been tempted to
revolt, and either to renounce his trust in the Almighty's goodness or
to refuse to submit to His control. It cost him a hard and weary
struggle to regain his reliance, to restore his allegiance, to calm and
hush his soul.

There was nothing wonderful in this conflict, nor anything exceptional
in the experience. It is the common lot of men. True, there are some
natures for whom the tenure of faith is less arduous than it is for
others. But in almost every life there come crises when this same battle
has to be fought. For it is not always easy to be content to trust
without seeing, and to follow God's leading in the dark, when the way
seems all wrong and mistaken. There are things in life that rudely shake
our faith from its dreamless slumber, and sweep the soul away over the
dreary billows of doubt and darkness. There are times when, to our
timorous hearts, it seems too terrible to be compelled just to trust and
not to understand. Such conflicts come to us all more or less. Painful
and protracted the struggle sometimes is, but not necessarily evil, not
even harmful. For if we do but fight it out honestly and bravely the
fruits will be, as they were with our poet, wholesome, good, and
peaceable.


IV.

Read Ps. xlvi., and Phil. ii.

VICTORY BY SURRENDER.

"As a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned
child."

It is good to cheer men on in a noble strife by speaking of the
certainty of victory, and by the story of heroic deeds to nerve their
arms for battle and stir their hearts to war. But that is not enough.
They want more than that. They want to learn how to wage a winning war,
how to secure the highest triumph, how out of conflict to organise
peace. In the good fight of faith what is the secret of success? Has our
Psalm any light on that point? By what method did the poet still the
turmoil of his doubt and reach his great peace? The process is finely
pictured in a homely but exquisite image: "Like a weaned child on its
mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me." What does that mean?
Torn by an insatiable longing to know the meaning of God's mysterious
ways, he had struggled fiercely to wring an answer from the Almighty.
His heart was long the abode of unrest, and storm, and tempest. At
length peace falls on the fray; there is no more clangour of contention:
all is quietness and rest. How is this? Has he succeeded in solving the
enigmas that pained him? Have his cravings for an answer from God been
gratified? If not, how has he attained this perfect repose? His peace is
the peace of a weaned child. Not, therefore, by obtaining that which he
craved has he found rest; for the rest of a weaned child is not that of
gratification, but of resignation. It is the repose, not of satisfied
desire, but of abnegation and submission. After a period of prolonged
and painful struggle to have its longings answered, the little one gives
over striving any more, and is at peace. That process was a picture to
our poet of what passed in his own heart. Like a weaned child, its tears
over, its cries hushed, reposing on the very bosom that a little ago
excited its most tumultuous desires, his soul, that once passionately
strove to wring from God an answer to its eager questionings, now
wearied, resigned, and submissive, just lays itself to rest in simple
faith on that goodness of God whose purposes it cannot comprehend, and
whose ways often seem to it harsh, and ravelled, and obscure. It is a
picture of infinite repose and of touching beauty—the little one
nestling close in the mother's arms, its head reclining trustfully on
her shoulder, the tears dried from its now quiet face, and the restful
eyes, with just a lingering shadow of bygone sorrow in them still,
peering out with a look of utter peace, contentment, and security. It is
the peace of accepted pain, the victory of self-surrender.

The transition from doubt to belief, from strife to serenity, is
remarkable. We want to know what produced this startling change of mood,
what influences fostered it, what motives urged it, what reasons
justified it. Perhaps a glimpse, a suggestion of the process is hinted
in the simile chosen from child life. The infant takes its rest on the
breast of its mother—of its mother, whose refusal of its longings caused
it all the pain and conflict, whose denial of its instinctive desires
seemed so unnatural and so cruel. How is it, then, that instead of being
alienated, the child turns to her for solace in the sorrow she caused,
and reposes on the very breast that so resolutely declined to supply its
wants? It is because over against this single act of seeming unkindness
stand unnumbered deeds of goodness and acts of fondness, and so this one
cause of doubt and of aversion is swallowed up in a whole atmosphere of
unceasing tenderness and love. Besides, rating the apparent
unmotherliness at the very highest, still there is no other to whom the
child can turn that will better help it and care for it than its mother.
So, since it cannot get all it would like, the little one is content to
take what it may have—the warmth, and shelter, and security of its
mother's breast.

This process of conflict between doubt and trust, rebellion and
resignation, which half-unconsciously takes place in the child, is a
miniature of the strife that had surged to and fro in the poet's soul.
Pained and perplexed by the mystery of God's ways, foiled in his efforts
to fathom them, denied all explanation by the Almighty, he was beset by
the temptation to abandon faith and cast off his allegiance to his
heavenly Friend. But he saw that that would not solve any enigma or
lighten the darkness. Rather it would confront him with still greater
difficulties, and leave the world only more empty, dark, and dreary.
Then, benumbed and tired out, he gave over thinking and arguing, and was
content for a little just to live in the circle of light and sunshine
that ever is within the great darkness. Gradually it dawned upon him
that in the world of men's experience there was much, very much, of
goodness that could only be the doing of the God that moves in the
mystery and in the darkness. The warmth of the thought crept into his
heart, softer feelings woke, love and lowliness asserted themselves, and
at length he became content to just trust God, spite of all
perplexities, partly because there was so much undeniable proof of His
tenderness, and partly because there was more of rest and comfort in
this course than in any other.


V.

Read Gen. xxxii., and Rev. vii.

THE RECOMPENSE OF FAITH.

"Let Israel hope in the Lord from henceforth and for ever."

Who has not wondered why there is so much mystery in the universe, such
perplexity in our life, and in revelation itself why so many doubts are
permitted to assail our souls and make it hard for us to be Christians?
Is this wisely or kindly ordered? Perchance it is necessary, but is it
not evil? Can warfare ever be aught but loss and not gain? The question
is natural, but the answer is not uncertain. The fight of faith is a
good fight. Success means no bare victory, but one crowned with splendid
spoil. We shall be the better for having had to fight. The gain of the
conflict shall out-weigh all the loss, and in the final triumph the
victors shall manifestly appear more than conquerors. This is no
paradox, but the common law of life. The same principle rules in the
homely image of the child. Weaning is not needless pain, is not wasted
suffering. It is a blessing in disguise. The distressing process is in
truth promotion. It is the vestibule of pain that leads to a maturer and
larger life. In like fashion the struggles of doubt are inevitable, if
faith is not to remain feeble and infantile. Only in the furnace of
affliction does it acquire its finest qualities. Were there no clouds
and darkness around God's throne, how should men learn humility and
practise reverence? Human nature is too coarse a thing to be entrusted
with perfect knowledge. A religion of knowledge only were a hard and
soulless thing, devoid of grace, and life, and love; for sight and
reason leave nothing for the imagination, and rob affection of its sweet
prerogative to dream and to adore. Without the discipline of toil and
the developing strain of antagonism, how should faith grow strong, and
broad, and deep? Most of us start in the life religious with an
inherited, fostered, unreasoning belief, which therefore is weak, puny,
and unstable. It is the storms of doubt and difficulty that rouse it to
self-consciousness, stir it to activity, urge it by exertion to growth
and expansion, and compel it to strike deep roots in the soil of
reality. For in such conflict the soul is driven in upon God. It is
forced to make actual proof of its possessions, to realise and employ
properties that hitherto were known to it only through the title-deeds
or as mere assets available in case of necessity. With wonder faith
discovers the rare value of its inheritance, and enters for the first
time into actual enjoyment of its spiritual treasures. It is no longer
faith about God, but is now faith in God. In its agony and helplessness
the soul is compelled to press close up to God, to take tighter hold of
His hand, to fling itself on Him for help and comfort, just as a sick
child clings to its mother. And ever after such a struggle there are a
fresh beauty and sacredness in its relation to God. There is that
pathetic tenderness of affection friends have who by some
misunderstanding were well-nigh sundered, but having overcome it, are
nearer and dearer to each other than ever before. There are a quiet
community of knowledge, and a restful confidentiality of affection, that
were not there before, that come of having had to fight that you might
not be severed from each other. The recoil of joy from the dread of
loss, and the memory of the agony that thought was to you, make God
dearer to you now than ever. Out of the very strife and doubt there is
born a new assurance of your love, in the consciousness you have
acquired of the pain it would be to you to be deprived of your Divine
Friend.

The experience is of general application. It is the secret of serenity
amid the world's mystery and life's pain and perplexity. Therefore, when
at any time the clouds gather around you, and their blackness seems to
darken on the very face of God, do not turn away in terror or anger, but
cling the faster to Him, even if it be by the extreme hem of His
garment. What wonder if your feeble eye fails to read clear and true
each majestic feature of that Divine face which is so infinitely high
above you? What matter if sometimes its radiance is obscured by the
chill fogs and creeping vapours of earth's mingled atmosphere? The
darkness is not on God's face, but beneath it. One day you shall rise
higher, and you shall see Him as He is. Meantime, in your gloomiest
hour, when overwhelming doubts, like hissing waves, wind and coil around
your heart, and seek to pluck it from its hold, then do but let all
other things go, and with your last energy cling to this central,
sovereign certainty, that whatever else is true, this at least is sure,
that God is good, and that He whose doings you cannot comprehend is your
Father. And so, weary of dashing yourself vainly against the bulwarks of
darkness that girdle His throne, be content to lay yourself down humbly
as a tired child on the breast of your heavenly Father. Thus, with your
questionings unanswered, with the darkness not rolled away, with a
thousand problems all unsolved, be quieted, be hushed, be at peace. Lay
down your head, your weary, aching head, on the great heart of God, and
be at rest.

Doing this, you shall reach not merely passive resignation, but joy, and
peace, and trust. For of humble submission hope is born. "Let Israel
hope in the Lord from henceforth and for ever." Perchance all you can do
now is just, in weariness, more out of helpless despair than active
expectancy, to fall back on a faint, broken-hearted trust in God's
goodness. It is an act of faith, poor enough, in truth, but it holds in
it the promise and potency of a better confidence. For it is into the
arms of God that it carries you. Resting there in the lap of His
infinite love, you shall feel the warmth of His great heart penetrating
softly into yours. The weary, throbbing pain will slowly pass away. Deep
rest and quiet peace will steal into your spirit. And at length, out of
a helpless, compelled, and well-nigh hopeless surrender, there shall be
born within you fearless trust and winged reliance, and you shall hope
in the Lord from henceforth and for ever.



XVII.

_THE FIRST CHAPTER OF GENESIS._


There is in many people's minds a painful uneasiness about the relation
of the Bible to modern science and philosophy. The appearance of each
new theory is deprecated by believers with pious timidity, and hailed by
sceptics with unholy hope. On neither side is this a dignified or a
wholesome attitude. Its irksome and intrusive pressure promotes neither
a robust piety nor a sober-minded science. It is worth while inquiring
whether there is any sufficient foundation for either alarm or
expectancy in the actual relations of the Bible to scientific thought.
We shall work out our answer to the question on the historical
battle-field of the 1st chapter of Genesis. Results reached there will
be found to possess a more or less general validity.

There are two records of creation—one is contained in the Bible, which
claims to be God's Word; the other is stamped in the structure of the
world, which is God's work. Both being from the same Author, we should
expect them to agree in their general tenour; but in fact, so far from
being in harmony, they have an appearance of mutual contradiction that
demands explanation.

In studying the problem certain considerations must be borne in mind.
There is a loose way of talking about antagonism between the natural and
the revealed accounts of creation. That is not quite accurate. Conflict
between these there cannot be, for they never actually come into
contact. It is not they, but our theories, that meet and collide. The
discord is not in the original sources, but in our renderings of them.
That is a very different matter, and of quite incommensurate importance.

The Bible story is very old. It is written in an ancient and practically
dead language. The meaning of many of the words cannot be fixed with
precision. The significance of several fundamental phrases is at best
little more than conjecture. Since it was penned men's minds have grown
and changed. The very moulds of human thought have altered. Current
impressions, conceptions, ideas are different. It is hard to determine,
with even probability, what is said, still harder to realise what was
thought. Certainty is impossible. No rendering should be counted
infallible, not even our own. Every interpretation ought to be advanced
with modest diffidence, held tentatively, revised with alacrity, and
adjusted to new facts without timidity and without shame. This has not
been the characteristic attitude of commentators. The exegesis of the
1st chapter of Genesis presents a long array of theories, propounded
with authority, defended dogmatically, and ignominiously discredited and
deserted. Had a more lowly spirit presided over their inception,
maintenance, and abandonment, the list would perhaps not have been
shorter, but the retrospect would have been less humiliating. As it is,
we can hardly complain of the sting of satire that lurks in Kepler's
recital of Theology's successive retreats: "In theology we balance
authorities; in philosophy we weigh reasons. A holy man was Lactantius,
who denied that the earth was round. A holy man was Augustine, who
granted the rotundity, but denied the antipodes. A holy thing to me is
the Inquisition, which allows the smallness of the earth, but denies its
motion. But more holy to me is truth. And hence I prove by philosophy
that the earth is round, inhabited on every side, of small size, and in
motion among the stars. And this I do with no disrespect to the doctors."

The physical record is also very old. Its story is carved in a script
that is often hardly legible, and set forth in symbols that are not easy
to decipher. The testimony of the rocks embodies results of creation,
but does not present the actual operations. Effects suggest processes,
but do not disclose their precise measure, manner, and origination. You
may dissect a great painting into its ultimate lines and elements, and
from the canvas peel off the successive layers of colour, and duly
record their number and order; but when you have done you have not even
touched the essential secret of its creation. In determining the first
origin of things the limitation of science is absolute, and even in
tracing the subsequent development there is room for error, ignorance,
and diversity of explanation. Of certainties in scientific theory there
are few. For the most part, all that can be attained is probability,
especially in speculative matters, such as estimates of time,
explanations of formation, and theories of causation. As in exegesis, so
in geology, all hypotheses ought to be counted merely tentative,
maintained with modesty, and held open at every point to revision and
reconstruction. The necessity of caution and reserve needs no enforcing
for any one who knows the variety and inconsistency of the phases
through which speculative geology has passed in our own generation. In
this destiny of transitoriness it does but share the lot of all
scientific theory. Professor Huxley was once cruel enough to call
attention to the fact that "extinguished theologians lie about the
cradle of every science, as the strangled snakes beside that of
Hercules." The statement is a graphic, if somewhat ferocious, reminder
of a melancholy fact, and the fate of these trespassing divines should
warn their successors—as the Professor means it should—not to stray out
of their proper pastures. But has it fared very differently with the
mighty men of science who have essayed to solve the high problems of
existence and to make all mysteries plain? Take up a history of
philosophy, turn over its pages, study its dreary epitomes of defunct
theories, and as you survey the long array of skeletons tell me, are you
not reminded of the prophet who found himself "set down in the midst of
the valley which was full of dry bones: and, behold, there were very
many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry"?

If it is human to err, theology and geology have alike made full proof
of their humanity. That in itself is not their fault, but their
misfortune. The pity of it is that to the actual fact of fallibility
they have so often added the folly of pretended infallibility. The
resultant duty is an attitude of mutual modesty, of reserve in
suspecting contradiction, of patience in demanding an adjustment, of
perseverance in separate and honest research, of serenity of mind in
view of difficulties, coupled with a quiet expectation of final fitting.
The two accounts are alike trustworthy. They are not necessarily
identical in detail. It is enough that they should correspond in their
essential purport. It may be that the one is the complement of the
other, as soul is to body—unlike, yet vitally allied. Perchance their
harmony is not that of duplicates, but of counterparts. They were made
not to overlap like concentric circles, but to interlock like toothed
wheels. In the end, when partial knowledge has given way to perfect,
they will be seen to correspond, and nothing will be broken but the
premature structures of adjustment with which men have thought to make
them run smoother than they were meant to do.

To attempt anew a task that has proved so disastrous, and is manifestly
so difficult, must be admitted to be bold, if not even foolhardy. But
its very desperateness is its justification. To fall in a forlorn hope
is not ignoble. To miss one's way in threading the labyrinth of the 1st
chapter of Genesis is pardonable, a thing almost to be expected. If in
seeking to escape Scylla the traveller should fall into Charybdis, no
one will be surprised—not even himself. It is in the most undogmatic
spirit that we wish to put forward our reading of the chapter. It is
presented simply as a possible rendering. What can be said for it will
be said as forcibly as may be. It is open to objection from opposite
sides. That may be not altogether against it, since truth is rarely
extreme. Difficulties undoubtedly attach to it, and defects as well. At
best it can but contribute to the ultimate solution. Perchance its share
in the task may be no more than to show by trial that another way of
explanation is impossible. Well, that too is a service. Every fresh
by-way proved impracticable, and closed to passage, brings us a step
nearer the pathway of achievement. For the loyal lover of truth it is
enough even so to have been made tributary to the truth.

The business of a theologian is, in the first instance at least, with
the Scriptural narrative. To estimate its worth, and determine its
relation to science, we must ascertain its design. Criticism of a
church-organ, under the impression that it was meant to do the work of a
steam-engine, would certainly fail to do justice to the instrument, and
the disquisition would not have much value in itself. Before we exact
geology of Genesis we must inquire whether there is any in it. If there
be none, and if there was never meant to be any, the demand is as absurd
as it would be to require thorns of a vine and thistles of the fig-tree.
Should it turn out, for instance, that the order of the narrative is
intentionally not chronological, then every attempt to reconcile it with
the geological order is of necessity a Procrustean cruelty, and the
venerable form of Genesis is fitted to the geological couch at the cost
of its head or its feet. Either the natural sense of the chapter is
sacrificed or the pruned narrative goes on crutches. If we would deal
fairly and rationally with the Bible account of creation, our first duty
is to determine with exactness what it purposes to tell, and what it
does not profess to relate. We must settle with precision, at the outset
of our investigation, what is its subject, method, and intention. The
answer is to be found, not in _à priori_ theories of what the contents
ought to be, but in an accurate and honest analysis of the chapter.

The narrative of creation is marked by an exquisite symmetry of thought
and style. It is partly produced by the regular use of certain rubrical
phrases, which recur with the rhythmical effect of a refrain. There is
the terminal of the days—"and there was evening, and there was morning,
day one," etc.; the embodiment of the Divine creative will in the
eightfold "God said;" the expression of instant fulfilment in the swift
responsive "and it was so;" and the declaration of perfection in the
"God saw that it was good." But the symmetry of the chapter lies deeper
than the wording. It pervades the entire construction of the narrative.
As the story proceeds there is expansion, variety, progression. Yet each
successive paragraph is built up on one and the same type and model.
This uniformity is rooted in the essential structure of the thought, and
is due to the determination with which one grand truth is carried like a
key-note through all the sequences of the theme, and rings out clear and
dominant in every step and stage of the development. Our first duty is
to follow, and find out with certainty, this ruling purpose, and then to
interpret the subordinate elements by its light and guidance.

The narrative distributes the operation of creation over six days, and
divides it into eight distinct acts or deeds. This double divergent
arrangement of the material is made to harmonise by the assignment of a
couple of acts to the third day, and another couple to the sixth—in each
case with a fine and designed effect. We shall take a bird's-eye view of
the contents of these divisions.

The chapter opens with a picture of primeval chaos, out of which God
commands the universe of beauty, life, and order. Nothing is said of its
origin. The story starts with it existent. It is painted as an abyss,
dreary and boundless, wrapped in impenetrable darkness, an inextricable
confusion of fluid matter, destitute of character, structure, or value,
without form and void. It is the raw material of the universe, passive
and powerless in itself, but holding in it the promise and potency of
all existence. For over it nestles, like a brood fowl, the informing,
warming, life-giving Spirit of God, sending through its coldness and
emptiness the heat and parental yearnings of the Divine heart, that
craves for creatures on which to pour out its love and goodness. This
action of the Spirit is, however, no more than preparative, and waits
its completion in the accession of a personal fiat of God's will, in
which the Divine Word gives effect and reality to the Divine Wish. This
is a feature of supreme importance, for in it consists the uniqueness of
the Bible narrative. In the Pagan accounts of creation we find the same
general imagery of dull, dead matter, stirred and warmed into life and
development by the action of an immaterial effluence of "thought,"
"love," or "longing." But in them the operation is cosmic, impersonal,
often hardly conscious; in the Bible it is ethical and intensely
personal. In them the language is metaphysical, materialistic, or
pantheistic; here it is moral, human, personal, to the point of
anthropomorphism. They show us creative forces and processes; the Bible
presents to us, in all His infinite, manifold, and glorious personality,
the thinking, living, loving "God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven
and earth."

The result of the first day and the first Divine decree is the
production of light. The old difficulty about the existence of light
before the sun was made, as it was invented by science, has been by
science dispelled. The theory of light as a mode of motion, which for
the present holds the field, knows no obstacle to the presence of light
in the absence of the sun. But this harmony is not due to any prescience
of modern science in the writer of Genesis. His idea of light is not
undulatory, and not scientific, but just the simple popular notion found
everywhere in the Bible. Light is a fine substance, distinct from all
others, and it appears first in the list of creation, as being the first
and noblest of the elements that go to make up our habitable world. The
emergence of the light is presented as instantaneously following the
Divine decree. That is manifestly the literary effect designed in the
curtness of the sequence, "Let there be light, and there was light." The
light is pronounced good, is permanently established in possession of
its special properties and powers, and is set in its service of the
world and man by having assigned to it its place in the "alternate mercy
of day and night." There is a very fine touch in the position of the
declaration of goodness. It stands here earlier than in the succeeding
sections. Darkness is in the Bible the standing emblem of evil. It would
have been discordant with that imagery to make God pronounce it good,
though as the foil of light it serves beneficent ends. The jarring note
is tacitly and simply avoided by introducing the assertion of the
goodness of light before the mention of its background and negation,
darkness. The picture of the first day of creation is subscribed with
the formula of completeness—"There was evening, and there was morning,
one day," or "day first"—and has for its net result the production of
the element or sphere of light.

The second day and the second Divine decree are devoted to the formation
of the firmament. All through the Old Testament the sky is pictured as a
solid dome or vaulted roof, above which roll the primeval waters of
chaos. The notion is of course popular, a figment of the primitive
imagination, and quite at variance with the modern conception of space
filled by an interastral ether; though it is well to remember that this
same ether is no more ascertained fact than was the old-world firmament,
and is in its turn simply an invention of the scientific imagination. It
is of more moment to note that the real motive and outcome of the day's
work is not the firmament. That is not an end, but a means, precisely as
a sea-wall is not an object in itself, but merely the instrument of the
reclamation of valuable land. What the erection of the firmament does
towards the making of our world is the production of the intervening
aërial space and the lower expanse of terrestrial waters. Since this
last portion of the work is not complete prior to the separation of the
dry land, the declaration of goodness or perfection is, with exquisite
fineness of suggestion, tacitly omitted. The net result of the day is,
therefore, the formation of the realms of air and water as elements or
spheres of existence.

The third day includes two works—the production of the solid ground, and
of vegetation. The dead, inert soil, and its manifold outgrowth of plant
life, are strikingly distinct, and yet most intimately related. Together
they make up the habitable earth. They are therefore presented as
separate works, but conjoined in the framework of one day. Two sections
of the vegetable kingdom are singled out for special mention—the cereals
and the fruit-trees. It is not a complete or a botanical classification,
and manifestly science is not contemplated. Those divisions of the
plant-world that sustain animal and human life, and minister to its
enjoyment, are drawn out into pictorial relief and prominence. The
intention is practical, popular, and religious. The net result of the
day is the production of the habitable dry land.

The fourth day and the fifth decree call into being the celestial
bodies—the sun, moon, and stars. They are called luminaries; that is to
say, not masses or accumulations of light, but managers and distributers
of light, and the value of this function of theirs, for the religious
and secular calendar, for agriculture, navigation, and the daily life of
men, is formally and elaborately detailed. Were this account of the
heavenly bodies intended as a scientific or exhaustive statement of
their Divine destination and place in the universe, it would be
miserably inadequate and erroneous. But if the whole aim of the
narrative be not science, but religion, then it is absolutely
appropriate, exact, and powerful. In the teeth of an all but universal
worship of sun, moon, and stars, it declares them the manufacture of
God, and the ministers and servants of man. For this practical religious
purpose the geocentric description of them is not an accident, but
essential. It is not a blunder, but a merit. It is true piety, not
cosmical astronomy, that is being established. In the words of Calvin,
"Moses, speaking to us by the Holy Spirit, did not treat of the heavenly
luminaries as an astronomer, but as it became a theologian, having
regard to us rather than to the stars." The net result of the fourth day
is the production of the heavenly orbs of light.

The fifth day and the sixth work issue in the production of birds and
fishes, or, more accurately, all creatures that fly or swim. It is
evidently a classification by the eye—the ordinary popular division—and
it makes no attempt at scientific pretension or profundity. As having
conscious life, these new creatures of God's love are blessed by Him,
and have their place and purpose in the order of being defined and
established. The net result of the day is the formation of fowls and
fishes.

The sixth day, like the third, includes two works—the land animals and
man. The representation admirably expresses their intimate relationship,
and yet essential distinction. The animals are graphically divided into
the domestic quadrupeds, the small creatures that creep and crawl, and
the wild beasts of the field. The classification is as little scientific
in intention or substance as is the general arrangement into birds,
fishes, and beasts, which of course traverses radically alike the
historical order of palæontology and the physiological grouping of
zoology. The narrative simply adopts the natural grouping of observation
and popular speech, because that suffices, and best suits its purpose.
With a wonderful simplicity, yet with consummate effect, man is
portrayed as the climax and crown of creation. Made in the image and
likeness of God, he is clothed with sovereign might and dominion over
all the elements and contents of Nature. The personal, conscious
counterpart and child of God, he stands at the other end of the chain of
creation, and with answering intelligence and love looks back adoringly
to his great Father in the heavens. Mention is made of lesser matters,
such as sex and food; but manifestly the supreme interest of the
delineation is ethical and religious. Science is no more contemplated as
an ingredient in the conception than prose is in poetry. With the making
of man the circle of creation is complete, and the finished perfection
of the whole, as well as the parts, is expressed in the superlative
declaration that "God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it
was very good." The net result of the sixth day is the formation of the
land animals and man.

The six days of creative activity are followed by a seventh of Divine
repose. On the seventh day God rested; or, as it is more fully worded in
Exodus (xxxi. 17), God "rested and was refreshed." It is a daring
anthropomorphism, and at the same time a master-stroke of inspired
genius. What a philosophical dissertation hardly could accomplish it
achieves by one simple image. For our thought of God the idea performs
the same service as the institution of the Sabbath does for our souls
and bodies. The weekly day of rest is the salvation of our personality
from enslavement in material toil. During six days the toiler is tied,
bent and bowed, to his post in the vast machinery of the world's work.
On the seventh all is stopped, and he is free to lift himself erect to
the full stature of his manhood, to expand the loftier elements of his
being, to reassert his freedom, and realise his superiority over what is
mechanical, secular, and earthly. What in the progressive portraiture of
creation is the effect of this sudden declaration that the Creator
rested? Why, an intensely powerful reminder of the free, conscious, and
personal nature of His action. And this impression of such unique value
is secured precisely by the anthropomorphism, as no philosophical
disquisition could have done it. The blot and blemish of all
metaphysical delineation is that personalities get obliterated and
swallowed up in general principles and impersonal abstractions. In all
other cosmogonies of any intellectual pretension the process of creation
is presented as passive, or Necessitarian, or Pantheistic, and
invariably the free personality of the Creator becomes entangled in His
work, or entirely vanishes. By this stroke of inspired imagination the
Bible story rescues from all such risks and degradations our thought of
the Creator, and at its close leaves us face to face with our Divine
Maker as free, personal, living, loving, and conscious as we are
ourselves.

We have now got what is, I trust, a fairly accurate and complete summary
of the contents of the narrative. It is not necessary for our purpose to
discuss its relations to the Pagan cosmogonies. From the sameness
everywhere of the human eye, mind, and fancy, certain conceptions are
common property. There is probably a special kinship between the
Biblical and the Babylonian and Phœnician accounts. But with all respect
for enthusiastic decipherers, we make bold to believe, with more
sober-minded critics, that the 1st chapter of Genesis owes very little
to Babylonian mythology, and very much indeed to Hebrew thought and the
revealing Spirit of God. The chapter strikingly lacks the characteristic
marks of myth, and is on the face of it a masterpiece of exquisite
artistic workmanship and profound religious inspiration. Proof of this
has appeared in plenty during our brief study of its structure and
contents. Let us proceed to use the results of our analysis to determine
some more general characteristics of its structure and design.

The process of creation is portrayed in six great steps or stages. Is
this order put forward as corresponding with the physical course of
events? and, further, does it tally with the order stamped in the record
of the rocks? Replying to the second question first, it must be admitted
that, _primâ facie_, the Bible sequence does not appear to be in unison
with the geological. Of attempted reconciliations there is an almost
endless variety, but, unfortunately, among the harmonies themselves
there is no harmony. At the present moment there is none that has gained
general acceptance: a few possess each the allegiance of a handful of
partisans; the greater number command the confidence only of their
respective authors, and some not even that. It is needless to discuss
these reconciliations, because if geology is trustworthy in its main
results, and if our interpretation of the meaning of Genesis is at all
correct, correspondence in order and detail is impossible. If the order
of Genesis was meant as science, then geology and Genesis are at issue;
but, on the other hand, if the sequence in Genesis was never meant to be
physical the wrong lies with ourselves, who have searched for geology
where we should have looked for religion, and have, with the best
intentions, persisted in trying to turn the Bible bread of life into the
arid stone of science. Now, we venture to suggest that in drafting this
chapter the ruling formative thought was not chronology. It must be
remembered that the narrative was under no obligation to follow the
order of actual occurrence, unless that best suited its purpose. Zoology
does not group the animals in the order of their emergence into
existence, but classifies and discusses them in a very different
sequence, adopted to exhibit their structural and functional affinities.
If the design of Genesis was not to inform us about historical geology,
but to reveal and enforce religious truth, it might well be that a
literary or a logical, and not a chronological, arrangement might best
serve its end. As a matter of fact, the order chosen is not primarily
historical. Another quite different and very beautiful idea has
fashioned, and is enshrined in, the arrangement. Looking at our analysis
of their contents, we perceive that the six days fall into two parallel
sets of three, whose members finely correspond. The first set presents
us with three vast empty tenements or habitations, and the second set
furnishes these with occupants. The first day gives us the sphere of
light; the fourth day tenants it with sun, moon, and stars. The second
day presents the realm of air and water; the fifth day supplies the
inhabitants—birds and fishes. The third day produces the habitable dry
land; and the sixth day stocks it with the animals and man. The idea of
this arrangement is, on the face of it, literary and logical. It is
chosen for its comprehensive, all-inclusive completeness. To declare of
every part and atom of Nature that it is the making of God, the author
passes in procession the great elements or spheres which the human mind
everywhere conceives as making up our world, and pronounces them one by
one God's creation. Then he makes an inventory of their entire furniture
and contents, and asserts that all these likewise are the work of God.
For his purpose—which is to declare the universal Creatorship of God and
the uniform creaturehood of all Nature—the order and classification are
unsurpassed and unsurpassable. With a masterly survey, that marks
everything and omits nothing, he sweeps the whole category of created
existence, collects the scattered leaves into six congruous groups,
encloses each in a compact and uniform binding, and then on the back of
the numbered and ordered volumes stamps the great title and declaration
that they are one and all, in every jot, and tittle, and shred, and
fragment, the works of their Almighty Author, and of none beside.

With the figment of a supposed physical order vanishes also the
difficulty of the days. Their use is not literal, but ideal and
pictorial. That the author was not thinking of actual days of
twenty-four hours, with a matter-of-fact dawning of morning and
darkening of evening, is evident from the fact that he does not bring
the sun (the lord of the day) into action till three have already
elapsed, and later on he exhibits the sun as itself the product of one
of them. Neither is it possible that the days stand for geological
epochs, for by no wrenching and racking can they be made to correspond.
Moreover, it is quite certain that the author would have revolted
against the expansion of his timeless acts of creative omnipotence into
long ages of slow evolution, since the key-note of the literary
significance and sublimity of his delineation is its exhibition of the
created result following in instantaneous sequence on the creative fiat.
The actual meaning underlying the use of the days is suggested in the
rubrical character of the refrain, as it appears rounding off and ending
each fresh stage of the narration—"And there was evening, and there was
morning—day one, day two, day three," and so on. The great sections of
Nature are to be made pass in a panorama of pictures, and to be
presented, each for itself, as the distinct act of God. It is desirable
to enclose each of these pictures in a frame, clear-cut and complete.
The natural unit and division of human toil is a day. In the words of
the poet—

  "Each morning sees some task begin;
    Each evening sees it close."

In Old Testament parlance, any great achievement or outstanding event is
spoken of as "a day." A decisive battle is known as "the day of Midian."
God's intervention in human history is "the day of the Lord." When the
author of Genesis i. would present the several elements of Nature as one
and all the outcome of God's creative energy, the successive links of
the chain are depicted as days. Where we should say "End of Part I.," he
says, "And there was evening, and there was morning—day one." Moreover,
it is needless to point out how finely, from this presentation of the
timeless fiats of creation in a framework of days, emerges the majestic
truth that not in the dead order of nature, nor in the mere movement of
the stars, but in the nature and will of God, Who made man in His image,
must be sought the ultimate origin, sanction, and archetype of that
salutary law which divides man's life on earth into fixed periods of
toil, rounded and crowned by a Sabbath of repose.

If this understanding of the structural arrangement of the chapter be
correct, we have reached an important and significant conclusion
regarding the author's method and design. He does not suppose himself to
be giving the matter-of-fact sequence of creation's stages. His interest
does not lie in that direction. His sole concern is to declare that
Nature, in bulk and in detail, is the manufacture of God. His plan does
not include, but _ipso facto_ excludes, conformity with the material
order and process. He writes as a theologian, and not as a scientist or
historian. Starting from this fixed point, let us note the outstanding
features and engrossing interests of his delineation. We shall find them
in the phrases that, like a refrain, run through the narrative and form
its key-notes, and finally in the resultant impression left by its
general tenour and purport.

The recurrent key-notes of the narrative are three—God's naming His
works, His declaration of their goodness, and the swift formula of
achievement—"and it was so." The naming is not a childish triviality,
nor a mere graphic touch or poetical ornament. It does not mean that God
attached to His works the vocables by which in Hebrew they are known.
Its significance appears in the definition of function into which in the
later episodes it is expanded. Name in Hebrew speech is equivalent to
Nature. When the story pictures God as naming His works, it vividly
brings into relief the fixed law and order that pervade the universe.
And by the picturesque—if you will, anthropomorphic—fashion of the
statement, it attains an effect beyond science or metaphysics, inasmuch
as it irresistibly portrays this order of Nature as originating in the
personal act of God, and directly inspired by and informed with His own
effluent love of what is good, and true, and orderly. Thus the great
truth of the fixity of Nature is presented, not as a fact of science or
a quality of matter, but as rooted in and reflecting a majestic
attribute of the character of God. The interest is not scientific, but
religious. In like fashion, the unfailing declaration of goodness,
though it might seem a small detail, is replete with practical and
religious significance. The Pagan doctrines of creation are all more or
less contaminated by dualistic or Manichean conceptions. The good
Creator is baffled, thwarted, and impeded by a brutish or malignant
tendency in matter, which on the one hand mars the perfection of
creation, and on the other hand inserts in the physical order of things
elements of hostility and malevolence to man. It is a thought that at
once degrades the Creator, and denudes Nature, as man's abode, of its
beauty, comfort, and kindliness. How different is it in the Bible
picture of creation! This God has outside Himself no rival, experiences
no resistance nor contradiction, knows no failure nor imperfection in
His handiwork; but what He wishes He wills, and what He commands is
done, and the result answers absolutely to the intention of His wisdom,
love, and power. In its relation to its Maker the work is free from any
flaw. In its relation to man it contains nothing malevolent or
maleficent. It is good. And once again, mark with what skill in the
delineation the light is thrown, not on the work, but on the Worker, and
the goodness of creation becomes but a mirror to drink in and flash
forth the infinite wisdom, might, and goodness of its Divine Maker. Here
also the interest is not metaphysical, but practical and religious. A
third commanding aim of the narrative appears in the significant and
striking use of the formula "and it was so." With absolute uniformity
the Divine fiat is immediately followed by the physical fulfilment.
There is no painting of the process, no delineation of slow and gradual
operations of material forces. Not once is there any mention of
secondary causes, nor the faintest suggestion of intermediate agencies.
The Creator wills; the thing is. In this exclusion from the scene of all
subordinate studies there is artistic design—profound design. The
picture becomes one, not of scenery, but of action. It is not a
landscape, but a portrait. The canvas contains but two solitary objects,
the Creator and His work. The effect is to throw out of sight methods,
materials, processes, and to throw into intense relief the act and the
Actor. And the supreme and ultimate result on the beholder's mind is to
produce a quite overpowering and majestic impression of the glorious
personality of the Creator.

Here we have reached the sovereign theme of the narrative, and have
detected the false note that is struck at the outset of every attempt to
interpret it as in any degree or fashion a physical record of creation.
In very deed and truth the concern of the chapter is not creation, but
the character, being, and glory of the Almighty Maker. If we excerpt
God's speeches and the rubrical formulas, the chapter consists of one
continuous chain of verbs, instinct with life and motion, linked on in
swift succession, and with hardly an exception, the subject of every one
of them is God. It is one long adoring delineation of God loving,
yearning, willing, working in creation. Its interest is not in the work,
but the Worker. Its subject is not creation, but the Creator. What it
gives is not a world, but a God. It is not geology; it is theology.

Why do we so assert, accentuate, and reiterate this to be the central
theme of the chapter? Because through the scientific trend and bias of
modern inquiry the essential design of the chapter has got warped,
cramped, and twisted till its majestic features have been pushed almost
clean out of view, and all attention is concentrated on one trivial,
mean, and unreal point in its physiognomy. Its claim to be accounted an
integral part of a real revelation is made to hinge on its magical
anticipation of, and detailed correspondence with, the changeful
theories of modern geology. The idea is, in our humble but decided
opinion, dangerous, baseless, and indefensible. The chapter may not
forestall one single scientific discovery. It may not tally with one
axiom or dogma of geology. Nevertheless, it remains a unique,
undeniable, and glorious monument of revelation, second only in worth
and splendour to the record of God's incarnation of His whole heart and
being in the person of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Redeemer. Consider
what this chapter has actually accomplished in the world, and set that
against all theories of what it ought to be doing. For our knowledge of
the true God and the realisation of mankind's higher life it has done a
work beside which any question of correspondence or non-correspondence
with science sinks into unmentionable insignificance. Place side by side
with it the chiefest and best of the Pagan cosmogonies, and appreciate
its sweetness, purity, and elevation over against their grotesqueness,
their shallowness, and their degradation alike of the human and the
Divine. Realise the world whose darkness they re-echo, the world into
which emerged this radiant picture of God's glory and man's dignity, and
think what it has done for that poor world. It found heaven filled with
a horde of gods, monstrous, impure, and horrible, gigantic embodiments
of brute force and lust, or at best cold abstractions of cosmical
principles, whom men could fear, but not love, honour, or revere. It
found man in a world dark and unhomelike, bowing down in abject worship
to beasts and birds, and stocks and stones, trembling with craven
cowardice before the elements and forces of Nature, enslaved in a
degrading bondage of physical superstition, fetishism, and polytheism.
With one sweep of inspired might the truth enshrined in this chapter has
changed all that, wherever it has come. It has cleansed the heaven of
those foul gods and monstrous worships, and leaves men on bended knees
in the presence of the one true God, their Father in heaven, who made
the world for their use, and them for Himself, and whose tender mercies
are over all His works. From moral and mental slavery it has emancipated
man, for it has taken the physical objects of his fear and worship, and
dashing them down from their usurped pre-eminence, has put them all
under his feet, to be his ministers and servants in working out on earth
his eternal destiny. These conceptions of God, Man, and Nature have been
the regeneration of humanity; the springs of progress in science,
invention, and civilisation; the charter of the dignity of human life,
and the foundation of liberty, virtue, and religion. The man who, in
view of such a record, can ask with anxious concern whether a revelation
carrying in its bosom such a wealth of heavenly truth does not also have
concealed in its shoe a bird's-eye view of geology must surely be a man
blind to all literary likelihood, destitute of any sense of congruity
and the general fitness of things, and cannot but seem to us as one that
mocks. The chapter's title to be reckoned a revelation rests on no such
magical and recondite quality, but is stamped four-square on the face of
its essential character and contents. Whence could this absolutely
unique conception of God, in His relation to the world and man, have
been derived, except from God Himself? Whence into a world so dark, and
void, and formless did it emerge fair and radiant? There is no answer
but one. God said, "Let there be light; and there was light."

The specific revelation of the 1st chapter of Genesis must be sought in
its moral and spiritual contents. But may there not be, in addition,
worked into its material framework, some anticipation of scientific
truths that have since come to light? What were the good of it, when the
Divine message could be wholly and better expressed by the sole use of
popular language, intelligible in every age and by all classes? Is it
dignified to depict the Spirit of Inspiration standing on tiptoe, and
straining to speak, across the long millenniums and over the head of the
world's childhood, to the wise and learned scientists of the nineteenth
century? It is never the manner of Scripture to anticipate natural
research or to forestall human industry. God means men to discover
physical truth from the great book of Nature. What truth of science,
what mechanical invention, what beneficent discovery in medicine,
agriculture, navigation, or any other art or industry, has ever been
gleaned from study of the Bible? Not one. These things lie outside the
scope of revelation, and God is the God of order. Moreover, in Scripture
itself the framework of the chapter is not counted dogmatic nor
uniformly adhered to. In the 2nd chapter of Genesis, in Job, in the
Psalms, and in Proverbs there are manifold deviations and variations.
The material setting is handled with the freedom applicable to the
pictorial dress of a parable, wherein things transcendental are depicted
in earthly symbols. In truth, this is essentially the character of the
composition. We have seen that the delineation, classification, and
arrangement are not scientific and not philosophical, but popular,
practical, and religious. It is everywhere manifest that the interest is
not in the process of creation, but in the fact of its origination in
God. While science lingers on the physical operation, Genesis designedly
overleaps it, for the same reason that the Gospels do not deign to
suggest the material substratum of Christ's miracles. Creation is a
composite process. It begins in the spiritual world, and terminates in
the material. It is in its first stage supernatural, in its second
natural. It originates in God desiring, decreeing, issuing formative
force; it proceeds in matter moving, cohering, moulding, and shaping.
Revelation and science regard it from opposite ends. The one looks at it
from its beginning, the other from its termination. The Bible shows us
God creating; geology shows us the world being created. Scripture deals
solely with the first stage, science solely with the second. Where
Scripture stops, there science first begins. Contradiction, conflict,
collision are impossible. In the words of the Duke of Argyll, "The 1st
chapter of Genesis stands alone among the traditions of mankind in the
wonderful simplicity and grandeur of its words. Specially
remarkable—miraculous, it really seems to me—is that character of
reserve which leaves open to reason all that reason may be able to
attain. The meaning of these words seems always to be a meaning ahead of
science, not because it anticipates the results of science, but because
it is independent of them, and runs, as it were, round the outer margin
of all possible discovery."

May we not safely extend this finding to the entire Bible, and on these
lines define its relation to modern thought? Its supernatural revelation
is purely and absolutely ethical and spiritual. In questions physical
and metaphysical it has no concern and utters no voice. With the
achievements of science it never competes, nor can it be contradicted by
them. It encourages its researches, ennobles its aspirations, crowns and
completes its discoveries. Into the dead body of physical truth it puts
the living soul of faith in the Divine Author. Like the blue heaven
surrounding and spanning over the green earth, revelation over-arches
and encircles science. Within that infinite embrace, beneath that
spacious dome, drawing from its azure depths light, and life, and
fructifying warmth, science, unhampered and unhindered, works out its
majestic mission of blessing to men and glory to God. Collision there
can be none till the earth strike the sky. The message of the Bible is a
message from God's heart to ours. It cannot be proved by reason, nor can
it be disproved. It appeals, not to sight, but to faith, and belongs to
the realm of spirit, and not to that of sense. Science may have much to
alter in our notions of its earthly embodiment, but its essential
contents it cannot touch.

That is not theory, but reality. It is not philosophy, but life; not
flesh, but spirit. It is the living, breathing, feeling love of God
become articulate. It needs no evidence of sense. In the immutable
instincts of the human heart it has its attestation, and in a life of
responsive love it finds an unfailing verification. It rests on a basis
no sane criticism can undermine nor solid science shake. Happy the man
whose faith has found this fixed foundation, and whose heart possesses
this adamantine certainty: he shall be likened "unto a wise man, which
built his house upon a rock: and the rain descended, and the floods
came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for
it was founded upon a rock."


Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.



 _In 8vo, with Etched Portrait by Manesse. Price 12s._

 JAMES MACDONELL,
 JOURNALIST.

 By W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.


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