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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Addresses, by Phillips Brooks
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Addresses
+
+Author: Phillips Brooks
+
+Release Date: December 28, 2004 [EBook #14497]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADDRESSES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ADDRESSES
+
+BY
+
+THE RIGHT REVEREND
+
+PHILLIPS BROOKS
+
+BISHOP OF MASSACHUSETTS
+
+PHILADELPHIA
+
+HENRY ALTEMUS
+
+1895
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+                                                PAGE
+
+I. THE BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE                9
+
+II. THOUGHT AND ACTION                           34
+
+III. THE DUTY OF THE CHRISTIAN BUSINESS MAN      63
+
+IV. TRUE LIBERTY                                 88
+
+V. THE CHRIST IN WHOM CHRISTIANS BELIEVE        110
+
+VI. ABRAHAM LINCOLN                             140
+
+
+
+
+I. THE BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE.
+
+
+I should like to read to you again the words of Jesus from the 8th
+chapter of the Gospel of St. John:--
+
+     "Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on Him, if ye
+     continue in My word, then are ye My disciples indeed; and ye shall
+     know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. They answered
+     him, We be Abraham's seed, and were never in bondage to any man;
+     how sayest Thou, ye shall be made free? Jesus answered them,
+     Verily, verily, I say unto you, whosoever committeth sin is the
+     servant of sin. And the servant abideth not in the house forever,
+     but the Son abideth ever. If the Son, therefore, shall make you
+     free, ye shall be free indeed."
+
+I want to speak to you to-day about the purpose and the result of the
+freedom which Christ gives to His disciples and the freedom into which
+man enters when he fulfils his life. The purpose and result of freedom
+is service. It sounds to us at first like a contradiction, like a
+paradox. Great truths very often present themselves to us in the first
+place as paradoxes, and it is only when we come to combine the two
+different terms of which they are composed and see how it is only by
+their meeting that the truth does reveal itself to us, that the truth
+does become known. It is by this same truth that God frees our souls,
+not from service, not from duty, but into service and into duty, and he
+who makes mistakes the purpose of his freedom mistakes the character of
+his freedom. He who thinks that he is being released from the work, and
+not set free in order that he may accomplish that work, mistakes the
+Christ from whom the freedom comes, mistakes the condition into which
+his soul is invited to enter. For if I was right in saying what I said
+the other day, that the freedom of a man simply consists in the larger
+opportunity to be and to do all that God makes him in His creation
+capable of being and doing, then certainly if man has been capable of
+service it is only by the entrance into service, by the acceptance of
+that life of service for which God has given man the capacity, that he
+enters into the fulness of his freedom and becomes the liberated child
+of God. You remember what I said with regard to the manifestations of
+freedom and the figures and the illustrations, perhaps some of them
+which we used, of the way in which the bit of iron, taken out of its
+uselessness, its helplessness, and set in the midst of the great
+machine, thereby recognizes the purpose of its existence, and does the
+work for which it was appointed, for it immediately becomes the servant
+of the machine into which it was placed. Every part of its impulse flows
+through all of its substance, and it does the thing which it was made to
+do. When the ice has melted upon the plain it is only when it finds its
+way into the river and flows forth freely to do the work which the live
+water has to do that it really attains to its freedom. Only then is it
+really liberated from the bondage in which it was held while it was
+fastened in the chains of winter. The same freed ice waits until it so
+finds its freedom, and when man is set free simply into the enjoyment of
+his own life, simply into the realization of his own existence, he has
+not attained the purposes of his freedom, he has not come to the
+purposes of his life.
+
+It is one of the signs to me of how human words are constantly becoming
+perverted that it surprises us when we think of freedom as a condition
+in which a man is called upon to do, and is enabled to do, the duty that
+God has laid upon him. Duty has become to us such a hard word, service
+has become to us a word so full of the spirit of bondage, that it
+surprises us at the first moment when we are called upon to realize that
+it is in itself a word of freedom. And yet we constantly are lowering
+the whole thought of our being, we are bringing down the greatness and
+richness of that with which we have to deal, until we recognize that God
+does not call us to our fullest life simply for ourselves. The spirit of
+selfishness is continually creeping in. I think it may almost be said
+that there has been no selfishness in the history of man like that which
+has exhibited itself in man's religious life, showing itself in the way
+in which man has seized upon spiritual privileges and rejoiced in the
+good things that are to come to him in the hereafter, because he had
+made himself the servant of God. The whole subject of selfishness, and
+the way in which it loses itself and finds itself again, is a very
+interesting one, and I wish that we had time to dwell upon it. It comes
+into a sort of general law which we are recognizing everywhere--the way
+in which a man very often, in his pursuit of the higher form of a
+condition in which he has been living, seems to lose that condition for
+a little while and only to reach it a little farther on. He seems to be
+abandoned by that power only that he may meet it by and by and enter
+more deeply into its heart and come more completely into its service. So
+it is, I think, with the self-devotion, consecration, and
+self-forgetfulness in which men realize their life. Very often in the
+lower stages of man's life he forgets himself, with a slightly
+emphasized individual existence, not thinking very much of the purpose
+of his life, till he easily forgets himself among the things that are
+around him and forgets himself simply because there is so little of
+himself for him to forget; but do not you know perfectly well how very
+often when a man's life becomes intensified and earnest, when he becomes
+completely possessed with some great passion and desire, it seems for
+the time to intensify his selfishness? It does intensify his
+selfishness. He is thinking so much in regard to himself that the
+thought of other persons and their interests is shut out of his life.
+And so very often when a man has set before him the great passion of the
+divine life, when he is called by God to live the life of God, and to
+enter into the rewards of God, very often there seems to close around
+his life a certain bondage of selfishness, and he who gave himself
+freely to his fellow-men before now seems, by the very intensity,
+eagerness, and earnestness with which his mind is set upon the prize of
+the new life which is presented to him--it seems as if everything became
+concentrated upon himself, the saving of his soul, the winning of his
+salvation. That seat in heaven seems to burn so before his eyes that he
+cannot be satisfied for a moment with any thought that draws him away
+from it, and he presses forward that he may be saved. But by and by, as
+he enters more deeply into that life, the self-forgetfulness comes to
+him again and as a diviner thing. By and by, as the man walks up the
+mountain, he seems to pass out of the cloud which hangs about the lower
+slopes of the mountain, until at last he stands upon the pinnacle at the
+top, and there is in the perfect light. Is it not exactly like the
+mountain at whose foot there seems to be the open sunshine where men see
+everything, and on whose summit there is the sunshine, but on whose
+sides, and half way up, there seems to linger a long cloud, in which man
+has to struggle until he comes to the full result of his life? So it is
+with self-consecration, with service. You easily do it in some small
+ways in the lower life. Life becomes intensified and earnest with a
+serious purpose, and it seems as if it gathered itself together into
+selfishness. Only then it opens by and by into the largest and noblest
+works of men, in which they most manifest the richness of their human
+nature and appropriate the strength of God. Those are great and
+unselfish acts. We know it at once if we turn to Him who represents the
+fulness of the nature of our humanity.
+
+When I turn to Jesus and think of Him as the manifestation of His own
+Christianity--and if men would only look at the life of Jesus to see
+what Christianity is, and not at the life of the poor representatives of
+Jesus whom they see around them, there would be so much more clearness,
+they would be rid of so many difficulties and doubts. When I look at the
+life of Jesus I see that the purpose of consecration, of emancipation,
+is service of His fellow-men. I cannot think for a moment of Jesus as
+doing that which so many religious people think they are doing when they
+serve Christ, when they give their lives to Him. I cannot think of Him
+as simply saving His own soul, living His own life, and completing His
+own nature in the sight of God. It is a life of service from beginning
+to end. He gives himself to man because He is absolutely the Child of
+God, and He sets up service, and nothing but service, to be the ultimate
+purpose, the one great desire, on which the souls of His followers
+should be set, as His own soul is set, upon it continually.
+
+What is it that Christ has left to be His symbol in the world, that we
+put upon our churches, what we wear upon our hearts, that stands forth
+so perpetually us the symbol of Christ's life? Is it a throne from which
+a ruler utters his decrees? Is it a mountain top upon which some rapt
+seer sits, communing with himself and with the voices around him, and
+gathering great truth into his soul and delighting in it? No, not the
+throne and not the mountain top. It is the cross. Oh, my brethren, that
+the cross should be the great symbol of our highest measure, that that
+which stands for consecration, that that which stands for the divine
+statement that a man does not live for himself and that a man loses
+himself when he does live for himself--that that should be the symbol of
+our religion and the great sign and token of our faith? What sort of
+Christians are we that go about asking for the things of this life
+first, thinking that it shall make us prosperous to be Christians, and
+then a little higher asking for the things that pertain to the eternal
+prosperity, when the Great Master, who leaves us the great law, in whom
+our Christian life is spiritually set forth, has as His great symbol the
+cross, the cross, the sign of consecration and obedience? It is not
+simply suffering too. Christ does not stand primarily for suffering.
+Suffering is an accident. It does not matter whether you and I suffer.
+"Not enjoyment and not sorrow" is our life, not sorrow any more than
+enjoyment, but obedience and duty. If duty brings sorrow, let it bring
+sorrow. It did bring sorrow to the Christ, because it was impossible for
+a man to serve the absolute righteousness in this world and not to
+sorrow. If it had brought joy, and glory, and triumph, if it had been
+greeted at its entrance and applauded on the way, He would have been as
+truly the consecrated soul that He was in the days when, over a road
+that was marked with the blood of His footprints, He found His way up at
+last to the torturing cross. It is not suffering; it is obedience. It is
+not pain; it is consecration of life. It is the joy of service that
+makes the life of Christ, and for us to serve Him, serving fellow-man
+and God--as he served fellow-man and God--whether it bring pain or joy,
+if we can only get out of our souls the thought that it matters not if
+we are happy or sorrowful, if only we are dutiful and faithful, and
+brave and strong, then we should be in the atmosphere, we should be in
+the great company of the Christ.
+
+It surprises me very often when I hear good Christian people talk about
+Christ's entrance into this world, Christ's coming to save this world.
+They say it was so marvellous that Jesus should be willing to come down
+from His throne in heaven and undertake all the strange sorrow and
+distress that belonged to Him when He came to save the world from its
+sins. Wonderful? There was no wonder in it; no wonder if we enter up
+into the region where Jesus lives and think of life as He must have
+thought of life. It is the same wonder that people feel about the
+miracles of Jesus. Is it a wonder that when a divine life is among men,
+nature should have a response to make to Him, and He should do things
+that you and I, in our little humanity, find it impossible to do? No,
+indeed, there is no wonder that God loved the world. There is no wonder
+that Christ, the Son of God, at any sacrifice undertook to save the
+world. The wonder would have been if God, sitting in His heaven, the
+wonder would have been if Jesus, ready to come here to the earth and
+seeing how it was possible to save man from sin by suffering, had not
+suffered. Do you wonder at the mother, when she gives her life without a
+hesitation or a cry, when she gives her life with joy, with
+thankfulness, for her child, counting it her privilege? Do you wonder at
+the patriot, the hero, when he rushes into the battle to do the good
+deed which it is possible for him to do? No; read your own nature deeper
+and you will understand your Christ. It is no wonder that He should have
+died upon the cross; the wonder would have been if, with the inestimable
+privilege of saving man, He had shrunk from that cross and turned away.
+It sets before us that it is not the glories of suffering, it is not the
+necessity of suffering, it is simply the beauty of obedience and the
+fulfilment of a man's life in doing his duty and rendering the service
+which it is possible for him to render to his fellow-man.
+
+I said that a man when he did that left behind him all the thought of
+the life which he was willing to live within himself, even all the
+highest thought. It is not your business and mine to study whether we
+shall get to heaven, even to study whether we shall be good men; it is
+our business to study how we shall come into the midst of the purposes
+of God and have the unspeakable privilege in these few years of doing
+something of His work. And yet so is our life all one, so is the kingdom
+of God which surrounds us and infolds us one bright and blessed unity,
+that when a man has devoted himself to the service of God and his
+fellow-man, immediately he is thrown back upon his own nature, and he
+sees now--it is the right place for him to see--that he must be the
+brave, strong, faithful man, because it is impossible for him to do his
+duty and to render his service, except it is rendered out of a heart
+that is full of faithfulness, that is brave and true. There is one word
+of Jesus that always comes back to me as about the noblest thing that
+human lips have ever said upon our earth, and the most comprehensive
+thing, that seems to sweep into itself all the commonplace experience of
+mankind. Do you remember when He was sitting with His disciples, at the
+last supper, how He lifted up His voice and prayed, and in the midst of
+His prayer there came these wondrous words: "For their sakes I sanctify
+myself, that they also might be sanctified"? The whole of human life is
+there. Shall a man cultivate himself? No, not primarily. Shall a man
+serve the world, strive to increase the kingdom of God in the world?
+Yes, indeed, he shall. How shall he do it? By cultivating himself, and
+instantly he is thrown back upon his own life. "For their sakes I
+sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified." I am my best, not
+simply for myself, but for the world. My brethren, is there anything in
+all the teachings that man has had from his fellow-man, all that has
+come down to him from the lips of God, that is nobler, that is more
+far-reaching than that--to be my best not simply for my own sake, but
+for the sake of the world into which, setting my best, I shall make that
+world more complete, I shall do my little part to renew and to recreate
+it in the image of God? That is the law of my existence. And the man
+that makes that the law of his existence neither neglects himself nor
+his fellow-men, neither becomes the self-absorbed student and cultivator
+of his own life upon the one hand, nor does he become, abandoning
+himself, simply the wasting benefactor of his brethren upon the other.
+You can help your fellow-men: you must help your fellow-men; but the
+only way you can help them is by being the noblest and the best man that
+it is possible for you to be. I watch the workman build upon the
+building which by and by is to soar into the skies, to toss its
+pinnacles up to the heaven, and I see him looking up and wondering where
+those pinnacles are to be, thinking how high they are to be, measuring
+the feet, wondering how they are to be built, and all the time he is
+cramming a rotten stone into the building just where he has set to work.
+Let him forget the pinnacles, if he will, or hold only the floating
+image of them in his imagination for his inspiration; but the thing that
+he must do is to put a brave, strong soul, an honest and substantial
+life into the building just where he is now at work.
+
+It seems to me that that comes home to us all. Men are questioning now
+as they never have questioned before whether Christianity is indeed the
+true religion which is to be the salvation of the world. They are
+feeling how the world needs salvation, how it needs regeneration, how it
+is wrong and bad all through and through, mixed with the good that is in
+it everywhere. Everywhere there is the good and the bad, and the great
+question that is on men's minds to-day, as I believe it has never been
+upon men's minds before, is this: Is this Christian religion, with its
+high pretensions, this Christian life that claims so much for itself, is
+it competent for the task that it has undertaken to do? Can it meet all
+these human problems, and relieve all these human miseries, and fulfil
+all these human hopes? It is the old story over again, when John the
+Baptist, puzzled in his prison, said to Jesus, "Art thou He that should
+come? or look we for another?" It seems to me that the Christian Church
+is hearing that cry in its ears to-day: "Art thou He that should come?"
+Can you do this which the world unmistakably needs to be done?
+
+Christian men, it is for us to give our bit of answer to that question.
+It is for us, in whom the Christian Church is at this moment partially
+embodied, to declare that Christianity, that the Christian faith, the
+Christian manhood, can do that for the world which the world needs. You
+say, "What can I do?" You can furnish one Christian life. You can
+furnish a life so faithful to every duty, so ready for every service, so
+determined not to commit every sin, that the great Christian Church
+shall be the stronger for your living in it, and the problem of the
+world be answered, and a certain great peace come into this poor,
+perplexed phase of our humanity as it sees that new revelation of what
+Christianity is. Yes, Christ can give the world the thing it needs in
+unknown ways and methods that we have not yet begun to suspect.
+Christianity has not yet been tried. My friends, no man dares to condemn
+the Christian faith to-day, because the Christian faith has not been
+tried. Not until men get rid of the thought that it is a poor machine,
+an expedient for saving them from suffering and pain, not until they get
+the grand idea of it as the great power of God present in and through
+the lives of men, not until then does Christianity enter upon its true
+trial and become ready to show what it can do. Therefore we struggle
+against our sin in order that men may be saved around us, and not simply
+that our own souls may be saved.
+
+Tell me you have a sin that you mean to commit this evening that is
+going to make this night black. What can keep you from committing that
+sin? Suppose you look into its consequences. Suppose the wise man tells
+you what will be the physical consequences of that sin. You shudder and
+you shrink, and, perhaps, you are partially deterred. Suppose you see
+the; glory that might come to you, physical, temporal, spiritual, if you
+do not commit that sin. The opposite of it shows itself to you--the
+blessing and the richness in your life. Again there comes a great power
+that shall control your lust and wickedness. Suppose there comes to you
+something even deeper than that, no consequence on consequence at all,
+but simply an abhorrence for the thing, so that your whole nature
+shrinks from it as the nature of God shrinks from a sin that is
+polluting and filthy and corrupt and evil. They are all great powers.
+Let us thank God for them all. He knows that we are weak enough to need
+every power that can possibly be brought to bear upon our feeble lives;
+but if, along with all of them, there could come this other power, if
+along with them there could come the certainty that if you refrain from
+that sin to-night you make the sum of sin that is in the world, and so
+the sum of all temptation that is in the world, and so the sum of future
+evil that is to spring out of temptation in the world, less, shall there
+not be a nobler impulse rise up in your heart, and shall you not say: "I
+will not do it; I will be honest, I will be sober, I will be pure, at
+least, to-night"? I dare to think that there are men here to whom that
+appeal can come, men who, perhaps, will be all dull and deaf if one
+speaks to them about their personal salvation; who, if one dares to
+picture to them, appealing to their better nature, trusting to their
+nobler soul, that there is in them the power to save other men from sin,
+and to help the work of God by the control of their own passions and
+the fulfilment of their own duty, will be stirred to the higher life.
+Men--very often we do not trust them enough--will answer to the higher
+appeal that seems to be beyond them when the poor, lower appeal that
+comes within the region of their selfishness is cast aside, and they
+will have nothing to do with it.
+
+Oh, this marvellous, this awful power that we have over other people's
+lives! Oh! the power of the sin that you have done years and years ago!
+It is awful to think of it. I think there is hardly anything more
+terrible to the human thought than this--the picture of a man who,
+having sinned years and years ago in a way that involved other souls in
+his sin, and then, having repented of his sin and undertaken another
+life, knows certainly that the power, the consequence of that sin is
+going on outside of his reach, beyond even his ken and knowledge. He
+cannot touch it. You wronged a soul ten years ago. You taught a boy how
+to tell his first mercantile lie; you degraded the early standards of
+his youth. What has become of that boy to-day? You may have repented. He
+has passed put of your sight. He has gone years and years ago. Somewhere
+in this great, multitudinous mass of humanity he is sinning and sinning
+and reduplicating and extending the sin that you did. You touched the
+faith of some believing soul years ago with some miserable sneer of
+yours, with some cynical and sceptical disparagement of God and of the
+man who is the utterance of God upon the earth. You taught the soul that
+was enthusiastic to be full of scepticisms and doubts. You wronged a
+woman years ago, and her life has gone out from your life, you cannot
+begin to tell where. You have repented of your sin. You have bowed
+yourself, it may be, in dust and ashes. You have entered upon a new
+life. You are pure to-day. But where is the sceptical soul? Where is the
+ruined woman whom you sent forth into the world out of the shadow of
+your sin years ago? You cannot touch that life. You cannot reach it. You
+do not know where it is. No steps of yours, quickened with all your
+earnestness, can pursue it. No contrition of yours can drawback its
+consequences. Remorse cannot force the bullet back again into the gun
+from which it once has gone forth. It makes life awful to the man who
+has ever sinned, who has ever wronged and hurt another life because of
+this sin, because no sin ever was done that did not hurt another life. I
+know the mercy of our God, that while He has put us into each other's
+power to a fearful extent, He never will let any soul absolutely go to
+everlasting ruin for another's sin; and so I dare to see the love of God
+pursuing that lost soul where you cannot pursue it. But that does not
+for one moment lift the shadow from your heart, or cease to make you
+tremble when you think of how your sin has outgrown itself and is
+running far, far away where you can never follow it.
+
+Thank God the other thing is true as well. Thank God that when a man
+does a bit of service, however little it may be, of that too he can
+never trace the consequences. Thank God that that which in some better
+moment, in some nobler inspiration, you did ten years ago to make your
+brother's faith a little more strong, to let your shop boy confirm and
+not doubt the confidence in man which he had brought into his business,
+to establish the purity of a soul instead of staining it and shaking it,
+thank God, in this quick, electric atmosphere in which we live, that,
+too, runs forth. Do not say in your terror, "I will do nothing." You
+must do something. Only let Christ tell you--let Christ tell you that
+there is nothing that a man rests upon in the moment, that he thinks of,
+as he looks back upon it when it has sunk into the past, with any
+satisfaction, except some service to his fellow-man, some strengthening
+and helping of a human soul.
+
+Two men are walking down the street together and talking away. See what
+different conditions those two men are in. One of them has his soul
+absolutely full of the desire to help his fellow-man. He peers into
+those faces as he goes, and sees the divine possibility that is in them,
+and he sees the divine nature everywhere. They are talking about the
+idlest trifles, about the last bit of local Boston politics. But in
+their souls one of those men has consecrated himself, with the new
+morning, to the glorious service of God, and the other of them is asking
+how he may be a little richer in his miserable wealth when the day
+sinks. Oh, we look into the other world and read the great words and
+hear it said, Between me and thee, this and that, there is a great gulf
+fixed; and we think of something that is to come in the eternal life. Is
+there any gulf in eternity, is there any gulf between heaven and hell
+that is wider, and deeper, and blacker, that is more impassable than
+that gulf which lies between these two men going upon their daily way?
+Oh, friends, it is not that God is going to judge us some day. That is
+not the awful thing. It is that God knows us now. If I stop an instant
+and know that God knows me through all these misconceptions and blunders
+of my brethren, that God knows me--that is the awful thing. The future
+judgment shall but tell it. It is here, here upon my conscience, now. It
+is awful to think how the commonplace things that men can do, the
+commonplace thoughts that men can think, the commonplace lives that men
+can live, are but in the bosom of the future. The thing that impresses
+me more and more is this--that we only need to have extended to the
+multitude that which is at this moment present in the few, and the world
+really would be saved. There is but the need of the extension into a
+multitude of souls of that which a few souls have already attained in
+their consecration of themselves to human good, and to the service of
+God, and I will not say the millennium would have come, I don't know
+much about the millennium, but heaven would have come, the new Jerusalem
+would be here. There are men enough in this church this morning, there
+are men enough sitting here within the sound of my voice to-day, if they
+were inspired by the spirit of God and counted it the great privilege of
+their life, to do the work of God--there are men enough here to save
+this city, and to make this a glowing city of our Lord, to relieve its
+poverty, to lighten its darkness, to lift up the cloud that is upon
+hearts, to turn it into a great, I will not say psalm-singing city, but
+God-serving, God-abiding city, to touch all the difficult problems of
+how society and government ought to be organized then with a power with
+which they should yield their difficulty and open gradually. The light
+to measure would be clear enough, if only the spirit is there. Give me
+five hundred men, nay, give me one hundred men of the spirit that I know
+to-day in three men that I well understand, and I will answer for it
+that the city shall be saved. And you, my friend, are one of the five
+hundred--you are one of the one hundred.
+
+"Oh, but," you say, "is not this slavery over again? You have talked
+about freedom, and here I am once more a slave. I had about got free
+from the bondage of my fellow-men, and here I am right in the midst of
+it again. What has become of my personality, of my independence, if I am
+to live thus?" Ay, you have got to learn what every noblest man has
+always learned, that no man becomes independent of his fellow-men
+excepting in serving his fellow-men. You have got to learn that
+Christianity comes to us not simply as a luxury but as a force, and no
+man who values Christianity simply as a luxury which he possesses really
+gets the Christianity which he tries to value. Only when Christianity is
+a force, only when I seek independence of men in serving men, do I cease
+to be a slave to their whims. I must dress as they think I ought to
+dress; I must walk in the streets as they think I ought to walk; I must
+do business just after their fashion; I must accept their standards; but
+when Christ has taken possession of me and I am a total man, I am more
+or less independent of these men. Shall I care about their little whims
+and oddities? Shall I care about how they criticise the outside of my
+life? Shall I peer into their faces as I meet them in the street, to see
+whether they approve of me or not? And yet am I not their servant? There
+is nothing now I will not do to serve them, there is nothing now I will
+not do to save them. If the cross comes, I welcome the cross, and look
+upon it with joy, if, by my death upon the cross in any way, I may echo
+the salvation of my Lord and save them. Independent of them? Surely. And
+yet their servant? Perfectly. Was ever man so independent in Jerusalem
+as Jesus was? What cared He for the sneer of the Pharisee, for the
+learned scorn of the Sadducee, for the taunt of the people and the
+little boys that had been taught to jeer at Him as He went down the
+street, and yet the very servant of all their life? He says there are
+two kinds of men--they who sit upon a throne and eat, and they who
+serve. "I am among you as he that serveth." Oh, seek independence.
+Insist upon independence. Insist that you will not be the slave of the
+poor, petty standards of your fellow-men. But insist upon it only in the
+way in which it can be insisted upon, by becoming absolutely the servant
+of their needs. So only shall you be independent of their whims. There
+is one great figure, and it has taken in all Christian consciousness,
+that again and again this work with Christ has been asserted to be the
+true service in the army of a great master, of a great captain, who goes
+before us to his victory, that it is asserted that in that captain, in
+the entrance into his army, every power is set free. Do you remember the
+words that a good many of us read or heard yesterday in our churches,
+where Jesus was doing one of His miracles, and it is said that a devil
+was cast out, the dumb spake? Every power becomes the man's possession,
+and he uses it in his freedom, and he fights with it with all his force,
+just as soon as the devil is cast out of him.
+
+I have tried to tell you the noblest motive in which you should be a
+pure, an upright, a faithful, and a strong man. It is not for the
+salvation of your life, it is not for the salvation of yourself. It is
+not for the satisfaction of your tastes. It is that you may take your
+place in the great army of God and go forward having something to do
+with the work that He is doing in the world. You remember the days of
+the war, and how ashamed of himself a man felt who never touched with
+his finger the great struggle in which the nation was engaged. Oh, to go
+through this life and never touch with my finger the vast work that
+Christ is doing, and when the cry of triumph arises at the end to stand
+there, not having done one little, unknown, unnoticed thing to bring
+about that which is the true life of the man and of the world, that is
+awful. And I dare to believe that there are young men in this church
+this morning who, failing to be touched by every promise of their own
+salvation and every threatening of their own damnation, will still lift
+themselves up and take upon them the duty of men, and be soldiers of
+Jesus Christ, and have a part in the battle, and have a part somewhere
+in the victory that is sure to come. Don't be selfish anywhere. Don't be
+selfish, most of all, in your religion. Let yourselves free into your
+religion, and be utterly unselfish. Claim your freedom in service.
+
+
+
+
+II. THOUGHT AND ACTION.
+
+
+I want once more to read to you these words from the eighth chapter of
+the Gospel of St. John:
+
+     "As He spake these words, many believed on Him. Then said Jesus to
+     those Jews which believed on Him, If ye continue in My word, then
+     are ye My disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the
+     truth shall make you free. They answered Him, We be Abraham's seed,
+     and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest Thou, Ye shall be
+     made free? Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you,
+     Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the servant
+     abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever. If the
+     Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed."
+
+There are two great regions in which the life of every true man resides.
+They are the region of action and the region of thought. It is
+impossible to separate these two regions from one another and to bid
+one man live in one of them alone and the other man live only in the
+other of them. It is impossible to say to the business man that he shall
+live only in the region of action, it is impossible to say to the
+scholar that he shall live only in the region of thought, for thought
+and action make one complete and single life. Thought is not simply the
+sea upon which the world of action rests, but, like the air which
+pervades the whole solid substance of our globe, it permeates and fills
+it in every part. It is thought which gives to it its life. It is
+thought which makes the manifestation of itself in every different
+action of man. I hope we are not so deluded as men have been sometimes,
+as some men are to-day, that we shall try to separate these two lives
+from one another, and one man say, "Everything depends upon my action,
+and I care not what I think," or, as men have said, at least, in other
+times, "If I think right, it matters not how I act." But the right
+thought and the right action make one complete and single man.
+
+Now we have been speaking, upon these Monday noons, with regard to the
+freedom of that highest life which is lived under the inspiration of
+Jesus Christ and which we call the Christian life. We have claimed that
+it is the highest of all lives because it is the freest of all lives,
+that it is the freest of all lives because it is the highest, and it
+may be that we have thought that it was true with regard to the active
+life in which men live, it may be that we have somehow persuaded
+ourselves, that it has seemed to us as if there were evidence that a man
+who lived his life in the following of Jesus Christ was a free man in
+regard to his activity. But now there comes to us the other thought, and
+it is impossible for us to meet together as we have met together again
+and again here without asking with regard to the other region of man's
+life and how it is with man there, for there are a great many people, I
+believe, who think that while the Christian faith offers to man a noble
+sphere of action and sets free powers that would otherwise remain
+unchanged, yet when we come to the region of thought or belief, there it
+is inevitable that man should know himself, when he accepts the faith of
+Jesus Christ, it is inevitable that there the man should become less
+free than it has been thought that he was before the blessed Saviour
+was accepted as the Master and the ruler of his life. Men say to
+themselves and to one another, "Yes, I shall be freer to act, I shall be
+nobler in my action, but I shall certainly enchain mind and spirit, I
+shall certainty bind myself to think, away from the rich freedom of
+thought in which I have been inclined to live." We make very much of
+free thought in these days. Let us always remember that free thought
+means the opportunity to think, and not the opportunity not to think. We
+rejoice in the way in which our fathers came to this country and in
+their children perpetuated the purpose of their coming, in order that
+they might have freedom to worship God. Do we worship God? Simply to
+have attained freedom and not to use freedom for its true purpose, not
+to live within the world of freedom according to the life which is given
+to us there--that is to do dishonor to the freedom, to disown the
+purpose for which the freedom has been given to us. I want to speak to
+you then, while I may speak to-day, with regard to the freedom of the
+Christian thought.
+
+I want to claim, that which I believe with all my soul, that he who
+lives in the faith of Jesus Christ lives in the freest action of his
+mental powers, and there sees before him and makes himself a part of the
+large world into which man shall enter, in which he has perfect liberty
+and can exercise his powers as he could never have exercised them
+without. It is not very strange to think that men should have sometimes
+come to think that the religion of Jesus Christ was a slavery that was
+laid upon the mind of man, because very often those who have been the
+disciples of that religion, those who have been the preachers and
+exponents of that religion, have claimed just exactly that thing. They
+have seemed to say to themselves and to one another, to the world to
+which they speak, that man does give up the powers of his reason when he
+enters into the powers of his faith, when he enters into the great realm
+of faith. Led by some sort of influence, led by some heresy with regard
+to the capacity of man, or with regard to the dealing of God with man,
+or with regard to the purposes of man's life upon the earth, they have
+been content to say that man must give up the power of thought in order
+that he might enter into the Christian life and attain to all the
+purposes of the Christian discipline, they have been content to say that
+man must give up the noblest power of his nature in order to enter upon
+the highest life. Well might a man hesitate, hesitate whatever the
+blessings that were offered to him in the fulness of the Christian
+experience, if he were called upon to give up that which made the very
+centre and glory of his life, that which linked him most immediately to
+the God from whom he sprang. It would be as if in the storm the ship
+should cast over its engine in order to save its own life. The ship
+might be saved a little while from going down in the depths of despair,
+but it never would reach the port to which it had been bound; it never
+would accomplish the purpose of the voyage upon which it had set forth.
+Let us put absolutely away from, us all such thoughts. Let us come under
+the inspiration of Jesus Christ Himself, who says to us, in these words
+which we have repeatedly read to one another, that it is the truth that
+is to make us free, and that the entrance of the man therefore into that
+freedom is the largest freedom, of every region of man's life.
+
+I want to speak to you of the way in which my Master, Jesus Christ,
+appeals to the intelligence of man, of the way in which He comes to us
+in the noblest part of our nature, and claims us there for our true life
+within Himself. I would feel altogether wrong if I let you depart, if I
+allowed you to meet here with me week after week and say these words
+which I am privileged to speak to you unless I did thus claim that the
+Christian life is the largest life of the human intellect, that in it
+the noblest and central powers of man shall attain to their true
+liberty. It is given for us perhaps to ask ourselves for one moment why
+it is that man thinks, is ready to think, that he must give up the very
+noblest part of his life, his powers of thinking, in order that he may
+enter into Christianity. It seems to me that there are certain reasons
+for it which we can see; but how fallacious those reasons are! Is it not
+partly because man, when he is called upon to live Jesus' life, when he
+is called upon to be a spiritual creature, immediately sees that he is
+entering into a new and different region from that in which his reason
+has always been exercised. He has been dealing with those things that
+belong to this earth, with the different duties and opportunities and
+pleasures that present themselves to him every day, and that higher and
+loftier region into which he has entered seems to have no capacity to
+call forth those powers which he has been using in this lower region.
+And then I think again there is upon the souls of men who deal with
+Christianity one great conviction which is very deep and strong. It is
+that the Christian religion cannot be absolutely that which it presents
+itself to human mankind as being, because it is so rich in the blessings
+that it offers, because it comes with such a large enjoyment to our
+human life, and opens such great opportunities for human living. Is it
+not because it seems to us too good to be true that we sometimes turn
+away from Christianity, and think that if we enter it at all we must
+enter it in the dark, that it cannot possibly appeal to these human
+natures and make them understand its truth, and let them take it into
+their intelligence that thence it may issue into the soul and become the
+guiding power of the life? Sometimes it seems as if Christianity were
+so high that it was impossible that man should attain to it, as if it
+were something altogether beyond our human powers. Do you want me, a
+creature with this human body and this human relationship, with this
+body and with these perpetual bindings and connections with my
+fellow-men, do you want me to mount up and live among the stars and hold
+communion with the God of all? And if you want me to, is there any
+possibility of my doing it? Such a life is glorious, but not for me. It
+goes beyond any capacity that I possess. Ask yourselves, my friends, if
+something like this which I have tried to describe is not very often in
+your minds as you hear the magnificent invitations which Christ gives to
+the human soul to live its fullest life, to man to be his fullest being.
+There are, no doubt, other reasons which present themselves to men, and
+of those I do not speak. I will not think that the men who are listening
+here to me now, in a base and low way shrink from the evidence of
+Christianity and from the life of Christ because they do not want to
+enter into that religion because it would make too great demands upon
+them in the sacrifices that they would be called upon to make. It is
+said sometimes, and I doubt not that it is sometimes true, that men will
+not see the power and truth of Christianity because they do not want to
+see it. It seems to me that the other is also often true, and it is
+that upon which we would much rather dwell. Men sometimes hesitate at
+Christianity and tremble, and will not enter into the great region that
+is open to them, because they do not want it so intimately. The
+critical, the sceptical disposition is very often born just of man's
+perception of the glory of the life that is offered to him, and of the
+intense desire that is at the bottom of his soul to enter into that
+life. Who is the man that criticises the ship most carefully as she lies
+at the wharf, that will see what capacity she has for the great voyage
+that she has set before her? Is he the man who means to linger
+carelessly upon the bank and never sail away, or the man who is obliged,
+if she can sail across the ocean, to go with her? Just in proportion to
+the depth of interest with which we look upon all Christian truth we
+must be deep questioners with regard to the truth of that truth. We must
+search into all its evidence. We must try to understand how it commends
+itself to all our minds. But first of all we want to know certainly what
+Christianity is, if it is able to deal with the thing with which we are
+puzzling or never to give an intelligent definition of it.
+
+How is it now? I go to a certain man and ask him, "Why do you not
+believe in Christianity?" and he says, "It is incredible. I cannot
+believe in it." "What is it that you cannot believe in?" and then he
+takes forsooth some little point of Christian doctrine, some speculation
+of some Christian teacher, some dogma of some Christian church, and
+says, "That is incredible," as if that were Christianity. Over and over
+again men are telling that they do not believe in Christianity, when the
+real thing that they do not believe in is something that is no essential
+part of Christian faith whatsoever. They never have given to themselves
+a real definition of what the Christ and the Christianity in which they
+are called upon to believe, into which they are invited to enter, really
+is. The lecturer goes up and down the land and in the face of mighty
+audiences he denounces Christianity. He declares it to be unintelligible
+and absurd, to be monstrous and brutal. And when you ask what it is that
+he is thus denouncing, what it is that he is thus convicting over and
+over again, you find that it is something not simply which makes no part
+of Christianity, but which is absolutely hostile to the spirit of
+Christianity itself. Many and many a sceptical lecturer is denouncing
+that which Christian men would, with all their hearts, denounce; is
+declaring that to be untrue which no true Christian thinker really
+believes, that which is no real part of the great Christian faith, which
+is our glory. Do not think when I speak thus, when I say that there are
+things attached to Christianity which men do not believe, that they do
+not believe in the great truth of Jesus, without them, which men
+denouncing think that they are denouncing the religion which is saving
+the world. Do not think that I am simply paring away our great Christian
+faith, and making it mean just as little as possible in order that men
+may accept it into their lives. I am coming to the heart and soul of it.
+I want to know, if my life is all bound up with this religion of Jesus
+Christ, I want to know intrinsically what that religion is. I will
+scatter a thousand things which in the devout thought of men have
+fastened themselves to it. It is but clearing the ship for action, the
+making it ready that it may do its work, the binding everything tight
+just before the storm comes on, for that is just the moment when nothing
+essential to the ship itself must be cast away, when I make sure, if I
+can, that every plank and timber, that every iron and brass is in its
+true place and ready for the strain that may be put upon it.
+
+But what, then, is the Christian religion? It is the simple following of
+the divine person, Jesus Christ, who, entering into our humanity, has
+made evident two things--the love of God for that humanity, and the
+power of that humanity to answer to the love of God. The one thing that
+the eye of the Christian sees and never can lose is that majestic,
+simple figure, great in its simplicity, in its innocence, in its purity
+and in its unworldliness, that walked once on this earth and that walks
+forever through the lives of men, showing Himself to human kind,
+manifest in human kind. The power to receive it, the divine life wakened
+in every child of man by the divine life manifested in Jesus Christ.
+That is the great Christian faith, and the man becomes a Christian in
+his belief when he assures himself that that manifestation of the divine
+life has been made and is perpetually being made, and he answers to that
+appeal of the Christ. He manifests his belief in action when he gives
+himself to the education and the guiding of that Christ, that in him
+there may be awakened the life of divinity, which is his true human
+life. Is it not glorious, this absolute simplicity of the Christian
+faith? It is not primarily a truth; it is a person, it is He who walked
+in Galilee and Judea, who sat in the houses of mankind, who hung upon
+the cross, in order that He might perfectly manifest how God could live
+and how man could suffer in the obedience to the life of God, and then
+sent forth out of that inspiration and said, "Lo, I am with you always,
+doing this very thing, being this very Saviour, even to the end of the
+world." That which the Christian man believes to-day as a Christian,
+whatever else he may believe in his private speculation, in his personal
+opinion, is this: The life of God manifest in Jesus of Nazareth and
+thenceforth going out into the world wakening the divine capacity in
+every man.
+
+You say, "How can a man believe that? What evidence is there of it?" The
+personal evidence of Jesus Christ himself. It is the self testimony of
+Christ that makes the assurance of the Christian faith. Does that sound
+to you all unreasonable? Do you turn here in your pew or in your aisle
+and say, "After all, it is the old story which I have tested and know to
+be untrue."
+
+Suppose yourself back there in Jerusalem. Suppose the self testimony
+came to you from the very person of Jesus Christ. Suppose the words that
+He absolutely said and the deeds that He absolutely did bore to you a
+testimony that some greater than a human life was there, and that then,
+as you pressed close to Him and became a part of His life, you found
+your own life awakened and became a nobler man, ashamed to sin, aspiring
+after holiness, thinking noble thoughts, lifting yourself not above the
+earth, but lifting yourself with the whole great earth, which then is
+taken up into the presence of God and made sacred through and through. I
+know no man in whom I trust except by the personal evidence that he
+bears to me of himself. I know no man's nature finally but by that
+testimony which the nature gives me of him. Bring me all evidence that
+the man is trustworthy, and then when I am convinced I will go and stand
+in the presence of that man himself, and he shall tell me. So the world
+stood, so the world stands to-day in the presence of Jesus Christ. His
+presence on earth is an historic fact. The words that He spoke are
+written down in a true record. The deeds that He did are the history of
+the manifestations of His character, and the story of His christendom is
+the continued manifestation of His life, the divine life in the life of
+man, made divine through Him. Now, a question that comes in the
+Christian's mind is "Why don't people believe this?" Why should they
+not? Is it not written in the historical record? Has it not manifested
+itself in the experience of mankind? If it has, surely then it appeals
+to man's reason, and is not merely the act of the blind, stupid thing
+which we call faith, but it is the noblest action of that hour in which
+I believe, in the heavens above me and in the earth under my feet, in
+the brother with whom I have to do in the long course of history, in the
+total humanity which has grandly lived. The reason that men do not
+believe it is that of course there seems to be to them some strange and
+previous presumption with regard to it, something which makes the story
+incredible. They say it is the supernatural in it, that it goes beyond
+the ordinary experience of man. Ah! it seems also strange to me, the
+ordinary experience of man. Who dares to dream that human life has lived
+its completest and shown the noblest power of receiving God into itself?
+Who dares to think that these few thousand years have exhausted this
+majestic and mysterious being that we call man? Who dares to think of
+his own life that, in these few thirty, forty, fifty years that he has
+lived, he has known and shown all that God can do in and for him? Who
+dares to say that it is impossible, that it is improbable, that he who
+is the child of God shall receive some newer and closer access to his
+father, that there shall come some new revelation which shall be written
+not in a book, not upon the skies, not in the history of human kind, not
+on the rocks under our feet, but here in our human flesh, that there
+shall be an incarnation, that the God who is perpetually trying to
+manifest Himself to human kind should find at last, should take at last
+the most exquisite, the most sensitive, the most perfect, the most
+divine of all material on which to write His message, and in that human
+nature show at once what God was and what man is? Until there be some
+exhaustive sight of human nature as that, it is in no wise improbable
+that there would be that which outgoes our observation, that once in the
+long music of our human life the great key-note of humanity shall be
+struck, that once in our great groping after the God who made us He
+shall seem to draw the veil aside, nay, more than that, shall come and
+like the sunlight crowd Himself through every cloud until He takes
+possession of our humanity.
+
+"Ay," but you say, "those miracles in the life of Jesus Christ, how
+strange those are; how strange that He should have touched the water and
+the water become wine; how strange that He should have called to the
+dead man and he should have come forth from the tomb; how strange that
+He should have spoken to the waters and the storm grow still!" Ah, my
+friends, it seems to me that there again we are dishonoring nature as
+just before we did dishonor man. There again we are thinking that we
+have exhausted the capacity of this wondrous world in which we live.
+What is the glory of that world? That it answers to human kind. In the
+mystic tradition of the Book of Genesis it is told how, when God first
+made man, He set him master of this world and all its powers; and, ever
+since, the world has been answering to man, who is its master, and every
+message that comes back to him, every response that the field makes to
+the farmer, or that the rock makes to the scientist, is but an assertion
+and the culmination and the fulfilment of that which God did back there.
+As man has been, so has the world responded to his touch and call.
+Suppose that to-morrow morning the perfect man should come, not the man
+simply of the twentieth century or of the twenty-first, who shall be
+greater in his humanity than we, but suppose the perfect man, the
+perfect man because the divine man, comes. I cannot dream that nature
+shall not have words to say and a response to make to him that it will
+not make to these poor hands of mine. I can do something with the rock
+and field, I can do something with the sea and sky. What shall he do who
+is to my humanity what the perfect is to the absolutely and dreadfully
+imperfect? What shall the divine man do? When Paul speaks in that great
+verse of his and tells us how the whole creation groaneth and travaileth
+waiting for the manifestation of the Son of God, the whole future
+history of human science, of man's knowledge and use of the world, is in
+his words. The world shall know man as fast as man shows himself, and
+when the Son of God shall be manifested, then the groaning and
+travailing creation shall set all its powers free, and with the
+knowledge with which it floods him and with the usages and service with
+which it supplies him, it shall claim at last its glory as the servant,
+the obedient servant of man. The Son of man has come. You may at least
+suppose it if you do not believe it. And if He came to-morrow morning,
+would not this whole world lift itself up and answer Him? Who can say
+what the hills and valleys and trees and oceans and seas would have to
+say to Him who at last manifested that which the world had been waiting
+and groaning for, the manifestation, the complete manifestation, of the
+Son of God? That is the reason why I claim that miracles--I do not know
+that there have not been fastened upon the miraculous power of Jesus
+stories of things, thinking that they were done miraculously, which He
+did by what we choose in our ignorance to call the ordinary powers of
+nature--but I do know that the coming into the world must have been more
+to this world, that it would have been the most unnatural and incredible
+thing if the divine man coming here had been to the world and the world
+had been to him only what it is to us.
+
+And now the question comes to each one of us--for I must hasten on--how
+shall a man get within the region of that which perhaps you recognize,
+which I do not see how you can help believing, how shall a man get
+within the region of that higher power and let it be the rule of his
+life, let it manifest itself through him? How do you get within the
+power of any force, my friends? Here is Christ, a force if He is
+anything, not a spectacle, not a miracle, not a marvel, not wonderful to
+look at, but a force to feel. How do you get within the power of any
+force? You look out of your window, and men say the frost is freezing,
+and you see your neighbors wrapping their cloaks about them and going
+down the street as if they were cold. Men say that a storm is blowing,
+and you see them shelter themselves against the storm that blows. How
+will you make that storm a true thing for yourself? Go out into it. Let
+the frost smite your cheek, let the rain beat into your face, let the
+wind blow upon your back, and then you know by personal experience what
+you had known by your observation before. And so I say that only when a
+man puts himself where he can feel the power of the Christ, where it is
+possible for him, if there be a Christ, if Christ be all that the
+Christian religion claims that He is, only when a man puts himself where
+he needs and must have and must certainly feel that Christ, if there be
+a Christ, only then has he a right to disbelieve if the Christ be not
+there, only then has he a right to believe if the Christ find him there.
+And where is that? When a man takes up the highest duties, when he
+accepts the noblest life, when he lays open his soul to the great
+exactions and obligations which belong to him in his spiritual nature,
+when he tries to be a pure man, a devoted man, a noble man, only then
+has he a chance to know that force which only then comes into its
+activity. Only when a man tries to live the divine life can the divine
+Christ manifest Himself to him. Therefore the true way for you to find
+Christ is not to go groping in a thousand books. It is not for you to
+try evidences about a thousand things that people have believed of Him,
+but it is for you to undertake so great a life, so devoted a life, so
+pure a life, so serviceable a life, that you cannot do it except by
+Christ, and then see whether Christ helps you. See whether there comes
+to you the certainty that you are a child of God, and the manifestation
+of the child of God becomes the most credible, the most certain thing to
+you in all of history.
+
+It may have been that such moments have been in some of your lives.
+Think of the noblest moment that you ever passed, of the time when,
+lifted up to the heights of glory, or bowed down into the very depths of
+sorrow, every power that was in you was called forth to meet the
+exigency or to do the work. Think of the time when you stood upon the
+mountain top or plunged into the gulf. Remember that time--it may have
+been the death of your little child, it may have been your own
+sickness, it may have been your failure in business, it may have been
+the moment of your complete success in business, when you were
+solemnized as the great shower of wealth poured down upon you, and you
+felt that now you really had some work for God to do in the world. Ah,
+look back to that moment and see if then it seemed so strange to you
+that God should come into the presence and person of His universe, of
+His children, and take possession of their life. We grow so easily to
+forget our noblest and most splendid times. It seems to me there is no
+maxim for a noble life like this: Count always your highest moments your
+truest moments. Believe that in the time when you were the greatest and
+most spiritual man, then you were your truest self. Men do just the
+other thing. They say it was "an exception, a derangement of my nature,
+an exultation, a frenzy, it was something that I must not expect again."
+How about the time when they plunged into baseness and made their soul
+like a dog's soul? They shudder at the thought of that because they
+think it would come again. Nay, nay, shudder if you will at the thought
+of that, but believe that the highest you ever have been you may be all
+the time, and vastly higher still if only the power of the Christ can
+occupy you and fill your life all the time.
+
+I said that there were many things that people attached to Christianity
+that did not belong to Christianity. I know there are. It is impossible
+that a great system like the system of Christ, a great person like the
+great person of Christ, should be in the world, and men not have
+speculated and thought in regard to Him. Those are not Christianity. I
+want to-day, if I may do nothing else, to tell you absolutely how simple
+and single the Christian faith, the Christ, really is. It is not the
+inspiration of this book or any theory in regard to its inspiration. It
+is not the election of certain souls and the perdition of other souls.
+It is not the length of man's punishment, whether it is going to be
+forever and ever, or whether man is to go to his restoration. It is not
+even the constitution of the divine life, the great truth of the way in
+which God lives within His own nature. None of these are the essence of
+the Christian faith, but simply this: The testimony of the divine in man
+to the divine in man that lifts the man up and says: "For me to be
+brutal is unmanly; to be divine is to be my only true self." Why do I
+believe in God? If some man asked me, when on the street, I think I
+should have an answer to give him. I could give one great reason--two
+great reasons which are really but one great reason--why I believe in
+God. I believe in God, my friends, I believe in God with all my soul,
+because this world is inexplicable without Him and explicable with Him,
+and because Jesus Christ believed in Him; and it was Jesus Christ that
+showed me that this world demanded God and was inexplicable without Him;
+that made certain every suspicion and dream that I had had before, and
+Jesus Christ believed in Him. Shall I go to the expert about chemistry
+or geology and ask him the truth with regard to the structure of the
+world and the meeting of its atoms and forces? And shall not I go to the
+spiritual expert, to him in whom the spiritual life of man has been
+clearest, and say, "O Christ, tell me what is the centre and source and
+end of all?" When he says, "God," shall I not believe Him?
+
+It is impossible, as I have suggested to you again and again in what I
+have been saying, that a man can have his mind open to the receipt of
+the truth of a person unless he be a certain kind of man himself. I do
+not know but the basest and the wickedest man who lives may believe in
+the Copernican theory, or that two and two make four, yet I cannot help
+believing that if he were a better and truer man he would believe even
+those truths, outside of himself, of science and arithmetic, more fully
+and deeply. Men were not all astray in the first thing that they were
+seeking after, though they were wofully astray in many things that they
+said about it, when they talked about faith and works. Faith enters in
+through the soul that does a noble deed, and in the coming in of that
+faith the higher deed becomes possible to him. Hear the words that Jesus
+said, words that our age must take to itself until it shall be wiser
+than it is to-day: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see
+God." "If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine,
+whether it be of God." Ponder those words, my friends. See how
+reasonable they are. See how important they are. See how they have the
+secret of your own life, of what it is to do, of what it is to be,
+forever and ever sealed up in them. These two things, I am sure, are
+true with regard to the method of belief--that no man can ever go
+forward to a higher belief until he is true to the faith which he
+already holds. Be the noblest man that your present faith, poor and weak
+and imperfect as it is, can make you to be. Live up to your present
+growth, your present faith. So, and so only, as you take the next
+straight step forward, as you stand strong where you are now, so only
+can you think the curtain will draw back and there will be revealed to
+you what lies beyond. And then live in your positives and not in your
+negatives. I am tired of asking man what his religious faith is and
+having him tell me what he don't believe. He tells me that he don't
+believe in baptism or inspiration or in the trinity. If I asked a man
+where he was going and he told me he was not going to Washington, what
+could I know about where he was going? He would not go anywhere so long
+as he simply rested in that mere negative. Be done with saying what you
+don't believe, and find somewhere or other the truest, divinest thing to
+your soul that you do believe to-day, and work that out: work it out in
+all the action and consecration of the soul in the doing of your work.
+This I take to be the real freedom of Christian thought--when the man
+goes forward always into a fuller and fuller belief as he becomes
+obedient to that which he already holds.
+
+But yet I know I have not touched the opinion, the feeling, nay, I will
+say the black prejudice that is upon many, many minds. "Ah, but you have
+bound yourself," you say. "You have given your assent to a certain
+creed, you believe certain dogmas. To put it as simply as you have put
+it to us this morning, you believe a certain person. I, I am free, I
+believe nothing, I can go wandering here and everywhere and disbelieve
+to my heart's content." Yes, I do believe something, and I thank God for
+it. But I deny with all my intelligence and soul the very idea that in
+believing that something I have shut my soul to evidence. I am ready to
+hear any man living, any man living to-day who will prove to me that the
+Christ has never lived and that he is not the Lord of men. I will listen
+to any man who is in earnest and who is sincere. I will not listen to
+any trifler, caviller, who is merely trying to make a point and to get
+ahead of the poor arguments that I can use; but let any fellow-man come
+to me with an earnest face, either of puzzled doubt, or of earnest and
+convinced unbelief, and say to me, "Are you not wrong?" or "I believe
+that you are wrong," and I, of course, will talk to him. Do I want to
+believe anything that cannot be proved to be true, anything that my
+intelligence shall not receive? Why should I believe it? Shall I trust
+myself to the ship merely because I have refused to examine its timbers,
+when men tell me that it is unsound? Shall I throw away my truthfulness
+simply for the sake of holding what I want, what I choose to call the
+truth? It is not because it is safe, it is not because it is pleasant,
+it is because it seems to the Christian man to be true, that the
+Christian man believes in the presence, the life, the power of Jesus
+Christ. Therefore come, let me hear every one of you what you have to
+say. Let me see where that upon which my soul rests for its very life
+breaks down; but, until I hear, I will go forward, strong in the
+assurance of that which takes hold of all my life, convinces my reason,
+lays hold of my affections, enlarges my actions, and opens my whole
+being to the freedom of the child of God.
+
+And why should not you, my friends, why should not you? I honor the
+sceptic, the faithful and devout sceptic, with all my soul. I am no
+scorner of the man who, without scorn, finds it impossible to accept
+that which to my soul seems to be the absolute truth. I will scorn only
+that which God scorns. He scorns the scorner, and only the scorning man
+is worthy of the scorn of human kind. But while I honor the sceptic,
+while I invite him to make manifest his scepticism, not merely for his
+sake but for my own, I will not hold, I cannot hold that he is living a
+larger life than the man whom the Christ invites to every noble duty, to
+every faithful fulfilment of himself. I will feel that he, perhaps by
+the necessity of his nature, perhaps by his circumstances, perhaps by
+something which came down to him from his ancestors, is shut in, is a
+contained and hampered and hindered man, and I will long for the day
+when he, lifting up his eyes, sees that Christ walking in the midst of
+humanity, and yet at the head of humanity, manifesting our human nature,
+but outgoing our human nature, glorifying our streets while He
+interprets our streets for the first time into their full meaning,
+giving to our shops and houses a radiancy which they have expected and
+dreamed of, but never felt, and tempting us always into a deeper belief
+in Him, which, embodying itself in a completer consecration to the right
+and true, shall lead us on into the fulness which he fills. Can I, can
+you, have Christ in human history, Christ in the world, and live as if
+He were not here? Will you not give yourself to that of Him which you
+know to-day? Will you not at least lay hold of the very skirts of His
+garment and say, "I see that Thou art good, I see that Thou art true.
+Lead me into the goodness and truth which by communion and sympathy
+shall know Thee more. Lord, I believe. I believe just a little. Lord, I
+know that that must come which Thou hast said has come in Thee. I would
+enter into Thee, to see whether it has indeed come in Thee, and Thou
+shalt lead me, Thou shalt teach me. Lord, I believe. I have not grasped
+Thee. No man has grasped Thee. The man who says that he has grasped Thee
+proves thereby that he does not know Thee. I know that I have not
+grasped Thee, but I will follow Thee by doing righteousness, by serving
+truth, by knowing and acknowledging Thee until all of that shall become
+clear to me. I will follow Thee, and Thou shalt lead me into the glory
+which Thou Thyself abidest in. Lord, I believe, Lord, I believe, help
+Thou mine unbelief." The story of the present, the hope, the pure,
+certain hope of the future is in those great words: "Lord, I believe,
+help Thou mine unbelief."
+
+
+
+
+III. THE DUTY OF THE CHRISTIAN BUSINESS MAN.
+
+
+I will read to you once again the words which I have read before, the
+words of Jesus in the eighth chapter of the Gospel of St. John:
+
+     "As He spake these words, many believed on Him. Then said Jesus to
+     those Jews which believed on Him, if ye continue in My word, then
+     are ye My disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the
+     truth shall make you free. They answered Him, We be Abraham's seed,
+     and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest Thou, Ye shall be
+     made free? Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you.
+     Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the servant
+     abideth not in the house forever: but the Son abideth ever. If the
+     Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed."
+
+I do not know how any man can stand and plead with his brethren for the
+higher life, that they will enter into and make their own the life of
+Christ and God, unless he is perpetually conscious that around them with
+whom he pleads there is the perpetual pleading and the voice of God
+Himself. Unless a man believes that, everything that he has to say must
+seem, in the first place, impertinent, and, in the second place, almost
+absolutely hopeless. Who is man that he shall plead with his fellow-man
+for the change of a life, for the entrance into a whole new career, for
+the alteration of a spirit, for the surrounding of himself with a new
+region in which he has not lived before? But if it be so, that God is
+pleading with every one of His children to enter into the highest life;
+if it be so, that God is making His application and His appeal to every
+soul to know Him, and in Him to know himself, then one may plead with
+earnestness and plead with great hopefulness before his brethren. And so
+it is. The great truth of Jesus Christ is that, that God is pleading
+with every soul, not merely in the words which we hear from one another,
+not merely in the words which we read from His book, but in every
+influence of life; and, in those unknown influences which are too subtle
+for us to understand or perceive, God is forever seeking after the souls
+of His children.
+
+I cannot stand before you for the last time that I shall stand In these
+meetings, my friends, without reminding myself and without reminding you
+of that; without reminding myself also and without trying to remind you
+of how absolutely conformable it is to everything that man does in this
+world. The great richness of nature, the great richness of life, comes
+when we understand that behind every specific action of man there is
+some one of the more elemental and primary forces of the universe that
+are always trying to express themselves. There is nothing that man does
+that finds its beginning within itself, but everything, every work of
+every trade, of every occupation, is simply the utterance of some one of
+those great forces which lie behind all life, and in the various ways of
+the different generations and of the different men are always trying to
+make their mark upon the world. Behind the power that the man exercises
+there always lies the great power of life, the continual struggle of
+nature to write herself in the life and work of man, the power of beauty
+struggling to manifest itself, the harmony that is always desiring to
+make itself known. To the merchant there are the great laws of trade, of
+which his works are but the immediate expression. To the mechanic there
+are the continual forces of nature, gravitation uttering itself in all
+its majesty, made no less majestic because it simply takes its
+expression for the moment in some particular exercise of his art. To the
+ship that sails upon the sea there are the everlasting winds that come
+out of the treasuries of God and fulfil His purpose in carrying His
+children to their destination. There is no perfection of the universe
+and of the special life of man in the universe until it comes to this.
+The greatest of all forces are ready without condescension, are ready as
+the true expression of their life, to manifest themselves in the
+particular activities which we find everywhere, and which are going on
+everywhere. The little child digs his well in the sea-shore sand, and
+the great Atlantic, miles deep, miles wide, is stirred all through and
+through to fill it for him. Shall it not be so then here to-day, and
+shall it not be the truth, upon which we let our minds especially dwell,
+and which we keep in our souls all the time that I am speaking and you
+are listening, that however He may be hidden from our sight God is the
+ultimate fact and the final purpose and power of the universe, and that
+everything that man tries to do for his fellow-man is but the expression
+of that love of God which is everywhere struggling to utter itself in
+blessing, to give itself away to the soul of every one for whom He
+cares?
+
+It is in this truth that I find the real secret, the deepest meaning,
+of the everlasting dissatisfaction of man that is always ready to be
+stirred. We moralize, we philosophize about the discontent of man. We
+give little reasons for it; but the real reason of it all is this, that
+which everything lying behind it really signifies: that man is greater
+than his circumstances, and that God is always calling to him to come up
+to the fulness of his life. Dreadful will be the day when the world
+becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself
+over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes
+absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts
+that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not
+forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do
+something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do
+because he is the child of God. And there is the real secret of the
+man's struggle with his sins. It is not simply the hatefulness of the
+sin, as we have said again and again, but it is the dim perception, the
+deep suspicion, the real knowledge at the heart of the man, that there
+is a richer and a sinless region in which it is really meant for him to
+dwell. Man stands separated from that life of God, as it were, by a
+great, thick wall, and every effort to put away his sin, to make himself
+a nobler and a purer man, is simply his beating at the inside of that
+door which stands between him and the life of God, which he knows that
+he ought to be living. It is like the prisoner hidden in his cave, who
+feels through all the thick wall that shuts him out from it the sunlight
+and the joyous life that is outside, who knows that his imprisonment is
+not his true condition, and so with every tool that his hands can grasp
+and with his bleeding hands themselves beats on the stone, that he may
+find his way out. And the glory and the beauty of it is that while he is
+beating upon the inside of the wall there is also a noble power praying
+upon the outside of that wall, The life to which he ought to come is
+striving in its turn, upon its side, to break away the hindrance that is
+keeping him from the thing he ought to be, that is keeping him from the
+life he ought to live. God, with His sunshine and lightning, with the
+great majestic manifestations of Himself, and with all the peaceful
+exhibitions of His life, is forever trying, upon His side of the wall,
+to break away the great barrier that separates the sinner's life from
+Him. Great is the power, great is the courage of the sinner, when
+through the thickness of the walls he feels that beating life of God,
+when he knows that he is not working alone, when he is sure that God is
+wanting him just as truly, far more truly, than he wants God. He bears
+himself to a nobler struggle with his enemy and a more determined effort
+to break down the resistance that stands between him and the higher
+life. Our figure is all imperfect, as all our figures are so imperfect,
+because it seems to be the man all by himself, working by himself, until
+he shall come forth into the life of God, as if God waited there to
+receive him when he came forth the freed man, and as if the working of
+the freedom upon the sinner's side had not something also of the purpose
+of God within him. God is not merely in the sunshine; God is in the
+cavern of the man's sin. God is with the sinner wherever he can be.
+There is no soul so black in its sinfulness, so determined in its
+defiant obstinacy, that God has abandoned his throne room at the centre
+of the sinner's life, and every movement is the God movement and every
+effort is the God force, with which man tries to break forth from his
+sin and come forth into the full sunlight of a life with God. Do you not
+think how full of hope it is? Do you not see that when this great
+conception of the universe, which is Christ's conception, which beamed
+in every look that He shed upon the world, which was told in every word
+that He spoke and which was in every movement of His hand--do you not
+see how, when this great conception of the universe takes possession of
+a man, then all his struggle with his sin is changed, it becomes a
+strong struggle, a glorious struggle. He hears perpetually the voice of
+Christ, "Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world. You shall overcome
+it by the same strength which overcame with Me."
+
+And then another thing. When a man comes forth into the fulness of that
+life with God, when at last he has entered God's service and the
+obedience to God's will, and the communion with God's life, then there
+comes this wonderful thing, there comes the revelation of the man's
+past. We dare to tell the man that if he enters into the divine life, if
+he makes himself a servant of God and does God's will out of obedient
+love, he shall then be strong and wise. One great element of his
+strength is going to be this: A marvellous revelation that is to come to
+him of how all his past has been filled with the power of that spirit
+with which he has at last entered into communion, to which he has at
+last submitted himself. Man becomes the child of God, becomes the
+servant of Jesus Christ, and this marvellous revelation amazes him. He
+sees that back through all the years of his most obstinate and careless
+life, through all his wilfulness and resistance, through all his
+profligacy and black sin, God has been with him all the time, beating
+himself upon his life, showing him how He desired to call him to
+Himself, and that the final submission does not win God. It simply
+submits to the God who has been with the soul all the time. Can there be
+anything more winning to the soul than that, anything that brings a
+deeper shame to you, than to have it revealed to you, suddenly or
+slowly, that from the first day that you came into this world, nay,
+before your life was an uttered fact in this world, God has been loving
+you, and seeking you, and planning for you, and making every effort that
+He could make in consistency with the free will with which He endowed
+you from the centre of His own life, that you might become His and
+therefore might become truly yourself? Through all the years in which
+you were obstinate and rebellious, through all the years in which you
+defied Him, nay, through the years in which you denied Him and said that
+He did not exist, He was with you all the time. What shall I say to my
+friend who is an atheist? Shall I believe that until he comes to a
+change of his opinions and recognizes that there is indeed a ruling
+love, a great and fatherly God for all the world, that he has nothing to
+do with that God? Shall I believe that God has nothing to do with him
+until he acknowledges God? God would be no God to me if He were that, if
+He left the man absolutely unhelped until the man beat at the doors of
+His divine helpfulness and said, "I believe in Thee at last. Now help
+me." And to the atheist there appears the light of the God whom he
+denies. Into every soul, just so far and just so fast as it is possible
+for that soul to receive it, God beats His life and gives His help. That
+is what makes a man hopeful of all his fellow-men as he looks around
+upon them and sees them in all the conditions of their life.
+
+And this could only be if that were true, if that is true, which we are
+dwelling upon constantly, the absolute naturalness of the Christian
+life, that it is man's true life, that it is no foreign region into
+which some man may be transported and where he lives an alien to all his
+own essential nature and to all the natural habitudes in which he is
+intending to exist. There are two ideas of religion which always have
+abounded, and our great hope is, our great assurance for the future of
+the world is, that the true and pure idea of religion some day shall
+grow and take possession of the life of man. One idea, held by very
+earnest people, embodied in very faithful and devoted lives, is the
+strangeness of religion to the life of man, as if some morning something
+dropped out of the sky that had had no place upon our earth before, as
+if there came the summons to man to be something entirely different from
+what the conditions of his nature prophesied and intended that he
+should be. The other idea is that religion comet by the utterance of God
+from the heavens, but comes up out of the human life of man; that man is
+essentially and intrinsically religious; that he does not become
+something else than man when he becomes the servant of Jesus Christ, but
+then for the first time he becomes man; that religion is not something
+that is fastened upon the outside of his life, but is the awakening of
+the truth inside of his life; the Church is but the true fulfilment of
+human life and society; heaven is but the New Jerusalem that completes
+all the old Jerusalem and Londons and Bostons that have been here upon
+our earth. Man, in the fulfilment of his nature by Jesus Christ, is
+man--not to be something else, our whole humanity is too dear to us. I
+will cling to this humanity of man, for I do love it, and I will know
+nothing else. But when man is bidden to look back into his humanity and
+see what it means to be a man, that humanity means purity, truthfulness,
+earnestness, and faithfulness to that God of which humanity is a part,
+that God which manifested that humanity was a part of it, when the
+incarnation showed how close the divine and human belonged
+together--when man hears that voice, I do not know how he can resist,
+why he shall not lift himself up and say, "Now I can be a man, and I can
+be man only as I share in and give my obedience to and enter into
+communion with the life of God," and say to Christ, to Christ the
+revealer of all this, "Here I am, fulfil my manhood."
+
+And do not you see how immediately this sweeps aside, as one gush of the
+sunlight sweeps aside the darkness, do not you see how it sweeps aside
+all the foolish and little things that people are saying? I say to my
+friend, "Be a Christian." That means to be a full man. And he says to
+me, "I have not time to be a Christian. I have not room. If my life was
+not so full. You don't know how hard I work from morning to night. What
+time is there for me to be a Christian? What time is there, what room is
+there for Christianity in such a life as mine?" But does not it come to
+seem to us so strange, so absurd, if it was not so melancholy, that man
+should say such a thing as that? It is as if the engine had said it had
+no room for the steam. It is as if the tree had said it had no room for
+the sap. It is as if the ocean had said it had no room for the tide. It
+is as if the man said that he had no room for his soul. It is as if life
+said that it had no time to live, when it is life. It is not something
+that is added to life. It is life. A man is not living without it. And
+for a man to say that "I am so full in life that I have no room for
+life," you see immediately to what absurdity it reduces itself. And how
+a man knows what he is called upon by God's voice, speaking to him every
+hour, speaking to him every moment, speaking to him out of everything,
+that which the man is called upon to do because it is the man's only
+life! Therefore time, room, that is what time, that is what room is
+for--life. Life is the thing we seek, and man finds it in the fulfilment
+of his life by Jesus Christ.
+
+Now, until we understand this and take it in its richness, all religion
+seems, becomes to us such a little thing that it is not religion at all.
+You have got to know that religion, the service of Christ, is not
+something to be taken in in addition to your life; it is your life. It
+is not a ribbon that you shall tie in your hat, and go down the street
+declaring yourself that you have accepted something in addition to the
+life which your fellow-men are living. It is something which, taken into
+your heart, shall glow in every action so that your fellow-men shall
+say, "Lo, how he lives! What new life has come into him?" It is that
+insistence upon the great essentialness of the religious life, it is the
+insistence that religion is not a lot of things that a man does, but is
+a new life that a man lives, uttering itself in new actions because it
+is the new life. "Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom
+of God." So Jesus said to Nicodemus the ruler, Nicodemus the amateur in
+religions, who came and said, "Perhaps this teacher has something else
+that I can bind into my catalogue of truths and hold it." Jesus looked
+him in the face and said: "It is not that, my friend, it is not that; it
+is to be a new man, it is to be born again. It is to have the new life,
+which is the old life, which is the eternal life. So alone does man
+enter into the kingdom of God." I cannot help believing all the time
+that if our young men knew this, religion would lift itself up and have
+a dignity and greatness--not a thing for weak souls, but a thing for the
+manliest soul. Just because of its manliness it is easy. "Is it easy or
+is it hard, this religion of yours?" people say to us. I am sure I do
+not know the easy and the hard things. I cannot tell the difference.
+What is easier than for a man to breathe? And yet, have you never seen a
+breathless man, a man in whom the breathing was almost stopped, a
+drowning man, an exhausted man? have you never seen, when the breath was
+put once more to his nostrils and brought down once more into his empty
+lungs, the struggle with which he came back to it? It was the hardest
+thing for him to do, so much harder for him to live than it was for him
+to die. But by and by see him on his feet, going about his work, helping
+his fellow-men, living his life, rejoicing in his days, guarding
+against his dangers, full of life. Is life a hard thing for him? You
+don't talk about its being hard or easy any more than you talk about
+life itself. The man who lives in God knows no life except the life of
+God. Let men know that it is not mere trifling, it is not a thing to be
+dallied with for an instant, it is not a thing for a man to convince
+himself by an argument, and then keep as it were locked in a shelf: it
+is something that is so deep and serious, so deep and serious that when
+a man has once tested it there is no more chance of his going out of it
+than there is of his going out of the friendship and the love which
+holds him with its perpetual expression, with the continued deeper and
+deeper manifestation of the way in which the living being belongs to him
+who has a right to his life.
+
+Now in the few moments that remain I want to take it for granted most
+seriously, most earnestly, that the men who are listening to me are in
+earnest, and I want to try to tell them as a brother might tell a
+brother, as I might tell to you or try to tell to you if sitting before
+my fireside, I want to try to answer the question which I know is upon
+your hearts. "What shall I do about this?" I know you say; "Is this all
+in the clouds? Is there anything I can do in the right way?" If you are
+in earnest, I shall try to tell you what I should do, if I were in your
+place, that I might enter into that life and be the free man that we
+have tried to describe, of whom we believe certain special and definite
+things. What are they? In the first place I would put away my sin. There
+is not a man listening to me now who has not some trick of life, some
+habit that has possession of him, which he knows is a wrong thing. The
+very first thing for a man to do is absolutely to set himself against
+them. If you are foul, stop being licentious, at least stop doing
+licentious things. If you, in any part of your business, are tricky, and
+unsound, and unjust, cut that off, no matter what it costs you. There is
+something clear and definite enough for every man. It is as clear for
+every man as the sunlight that smites him in his eyes. Stop doing the
+bad thing which you are doing. It is drawing the bolt away to let
+whatever mercy may come in come in. Stop doing your sin. You can do that
+if you will. Stop doing your sin, no matter how mechanical it seems, and
+then take up your duty, whatever you can do to make the world more
+bright and good. Do whatever you can to help every struggling soul, to
+add new strength to any staggering cause, the poor sick man that is by
+you, the poor wronged man whom you with your influence might vindicate,
+the poor boy in your shop that you may set with new hope upon the road
+of life that is beginning already to look dark to him. I cannot tell you
+what it is. But you know your duty. No man ever looked for it and did
+not find it.
+
+And then the third thing--pray. Yes, go to the God whom you but dimly
+see and pray to Him in the darkness, where He seems to sit. Ask Him, as
+if He were, that He will give you that which, if He is, must come from
+Him, can come from Him alone. Pray anxiously. Pray passionately, in the
+simplest of all words, with the simplest of all thoughts. Pray, the
+manliest thing that a man can do, the fastening of his life to the
+eternal, the drinking of his thirsty soul out of the great fountain of
+life. And pray distinctly. Pray upon your knees. One grows tired
+sometimes of the free thought, which is yet perfectly true, that a man
+can pray anywhere and anyhow. But men have found it good to make the
+whole system pray. Kneel down, and the very bending of these obstinate
+and unused knees of yours will make the soul kneel down in the humility
+in which it can be exalted in the sight of God.
+
+And then read your Bible. How cold that sounds! What, read a book to
+save my soul? Read an old story that my life in these new days shall be
+regenerated and saved? Yes, do just that, for out of that book, if you
+read it truly, shall come the divine and human person. If you can read
+it with your soul as well as with your eyes, there shall come the Christ
+there walking in Palestine. You shall see Him so much greater than the
+Palestine in which he walks, that at one word of prayer, as you bend
+over the illuminated page, there shall lift up that body-being of the
+Christ, and come down through the centuries and be your helper at your
+side. So read your Bible.
+
+And then seek the Church--oh, yes, the Church. Do you think, my friends,
+you who stand outside the Church, and blame her for her inconsistencies,
+and tell of her shortcomings, and point out the corruptions that are in
+her history, all that are in her present life to-day--do you really
+believe that there is an earnest man in the Church that does not know
+the Church's weaknesses and faults just as well as you do? Do you
+believe that there is one of us living in the life and heart of the
+Church who don't think with all his conscience, who don't in every day
+in deep distress and sorrow know how the Church fails of the great life
+of the Master, how far she is from being what God meant she should be,
+what she shall be some day? But all the more I will put my life into
+that Church, all the more I will drink the strength that she can give to
+me and make what humble contribution to her I can bring of the
+earnestness and faithfulness of my life. Come into the Church of Jesus
+Christ. There is no other body on the face of the earth that represents
+what she represents--the noble destiny of the human soul, the great
+capacity of human faith, the inexhaustible and unutterable love of God,
+the Christ, who stands to manifest them all.
+
+Now those are the things for a man to do who really cares about all
+this. Those are the things for an earnest man to do. They have no power
+in themselves, but they are the opening of the windows. And if that
+which I believe is true, God is everywhere giving himself to us, the
+opening of the windows is a signal that we want Him and an invitation
+that He will be glad enough to answer, to come. Into every window that
+is open to Him and turned His way, Christ comes, God comes. That is the
+only story. There is put aside everything else. Election,
+predestination, they can go where they please. I am sure that God gives
+Himself to every soul that wants Him and declares its want by the open
+readiness of the signal which He knows. How did the sun rise on our city
+this morning? Starting up in the east, the sun came in its majesty into
+the sky. It smote on the eastward windows, and wherever the window was
+all closed, even if it were turned eastward, on the sacred side of the
+city's life, it could not come in; but wherever any eastward window had
+its curtains drawn, wherever he who slept had left the blinds shut, so
+that the sun when it came might find its way into his sleepiness, there
+the sun came, and with a shout awoke its faithful servant who had
+believed in him even before he had seen him, and said, "Arise, arise
+from the dead, and I will give thee life." This is the simplicity of it
+all, my friends. A multitude of other things you need not trouble
+yourselves about. I amaze myself when I think how men go asking about
+the questions of eternal punishment and the duration of man's torment in
+another life, of what will happen to any man who does not obey Jesus
+Christ. Oh, my friends, the soul is all wrong when it asks that. Not
+until the soul says, "What will come if I do obey Jesus Christ?" and
+opens its glorified vision to see all the great things that are given to
+the soul that enters into the service of the perfect one, the perfect
+love, not until then the perfect love, the perfect life, come in. A man
+may be--I believe it with all my heart--so absolutely wrapped up in the
+glory of obedience, and the higher life, and the service of Christ, that
+he never once asks himself, "What will come to me if I do not obey?" any
+more than your child asks you what you will do to him if he is not
+obedient. Every impulse and desire of his life sets toward obedience.
+And so the soul may have no theory of everlasting or of limited
+punishment, or of the other life.
+
+Simply now, here, he must have that without which he cannot live, that
+without which there is no life. Jesus the soul must have, the one
+yesterday, to-day, and forever; He that is and was and is to be. Men
+dwell upon what He was, upon what He is; I rather think to-day of what
+He is to be. And when I see these young men here before me looking to
+the future and not to the past,--nay, looking to the future and not to
+the present, valuing the present only as it is the seed ground of the
+future, the foundation upon which the structure is to rise whose
+pinnacle shall some day pierce the sky,--I want to tell them of the
+Jesus that shall be. In fuller comprehension of Him, with deeper
+understanding of His life, with a more entire impression of what He is
+and of what He may be to the soul, so men shall understand Him in the
+days to be, and yet He shall be the same Christ still. The future
+belongs to Jesus Christ, yes, the same Christ that I believe in and that
+I call upon you to believe in to-day, but a larger, fuller, more
+completely comprehended Christ, the Christ that is to be, the same
+Christ that was and suffered, the same Christ that is and helps, but
+the same Christ also who, being forever deeper and deeper and more
+deeply received into the souls of men, regenerates their institutions,
+changes their life, opens their capacities, surprises them with
+themselves, makes the world glorious and joyous every day, because it
+has become the new incarnation, the new presence of the divine life in
+the life of man.
+
+Men are talking about the institutions in which you are engaged, my
+friends, about the business from which you have come here to worship for
+this little hour. Men are questioning about what they care to do, what
+they can have to do with Christianity. They are asking everywhere this
+question: "Is it possible for a man to be engaged in the activities of
+our modern life and yet to be a Christian? Is it possible for a man to
+be a broker, a shopkeeper, a lawyer, a mechanic, is it possible for a
+man to be engaged in a business of to-day, and yet love his God and his
+fellow-man as himself?" I do not know. I do not know what
+transformations these dear businesses of yours have got to undergo
+before they shall be true and ideal homes for the child of God; but I do
+know that upon Christian merchants and Christian brokers and Christian
+lawyers and Christian men in business to-day there rests an awful and a
+beautiful responsibility: to prove, if you can prove it, that these
+things are capable of being made divine, to prove that a man can do the
+work that you have been doing this morning and will do this afternoon,
+and yet shall love his God and his fellow-man as himself. If he cannot,
+if he cannot, what business have you to be doing them? If he can, what
+business have you to be doing them so poorly, so carnally, so
+unspiritually, that men look on them and shake their heads with doubt?
+It belongs to Christ in men first to prove that man may be a Christian
+and yet do business; and, in the second place, to show how a man, as he
+becomes a greater Christian, shall purify and lift the business that he
+does and make it the worthy occupation of the Son of God.
+
+What shall be our universal law of life? Can we give it as we draw
+toward our last moment? I think we can. I want to live, I want to live,
+if God will give me help, such a life that, if all men in the world were
+living it, this world would be regenerated and saved. I want to live
+such a life that, if that life changed into new personal peculiarities
+as it went to different men, but the same life still, if every man were
+living it, the millennium would be here; nay, heaven would be here, the
+universal presence of God. Are you living that life now? Do you want
+your life multiplied by the thousand million so that all men shall be
+like you, or don't you shudder at the thought, don't you give hope that
+other men are better than you are? Keep that fear, but only that it may
+be the food of a diviner hope, that all the world may see in you the
+thing that man was meant to be, that is, the Christ. Ah, you say, that
+great world, it is too big; how can I stretch my thought and imagination
+and conscience to the poor creatures in Africa and everywhere? Then
+bring it home. Ah, this dear city of ours, this city that we love, this
+city in which many of us were born, in which all of us are finding the
+rich and sweet associations of our life, this city, whose very streets
+we love because they come so close to everything we do and are, cannot
+we do something for it? Cannot we make its life diviner? Cannot we
+contribute something that it has not to-day? Cannot you put in it, some
+little corner of it, a life which others shall see and say, "Ah, that
+our lives may be like that!" And then the good Boston in which we so
+rejoice, which we so love, which we would so fain make a part of the
+kingdom of God, a true city of Jesus Christ, we shall not die without
+having done something for it.
+
+I linger, and yet I must not linger. Oh, my friends, oh, my fellow-men,
+it is not very long that we shall be here. It is not very long. This
+life for which we are so careful--it is not very long; and yet it is so
+long, because, long, long after we have passed away out of men's sight
+and out of men's memory, the world, with something that we have left
+upon it, that we have left within it, will be going on still. It is so
+long because, long after the city and the world have passed away, we
+shall go on somewhere, somehow, the same beings still, carrying into the
+depths of eternity something that this world has done for us that no
+other world could do, something of goodness to get now that will be of
+value to us a million years hence, that we never could get unless we got
+it in the short years of this earthly life. Will you know it? Will you
+let Christ teach it to you? Will you let Christ tell you what is the
+perfect man? Will you let Him set His simplicity and graciousness close
+to your life, and will you feel their power? Oh! be brave, be true, be
+pure, be men, be men in the power of Jesus Christ. May God bless you!
+May God bless you! Let us pray.
+
+
+
+
+IV. TRUE LIBERTY.
+
+
+An earnest appeal to all that enter that Liberty. May I read to you a
+few words from the eighth chapter of St. John? "Then said Jesus to those
+Jews which believed on Him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my
+disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make
+you free."
+
+Let us not think, my friends, that there is anything strange about the
+spectacle which we witnessed this morning. The only strange thing that
+there could be about it is that anybody should think that it is strange
+that men should turn aside for half an hour from their ordinary business
+pursuits, that they should come from the details of life to inquire in
+regard to the principles, the everlasting principles and purposes of
+life; that they should turn aside from those things which are occupying
+them from day to day and make one single hour in the week consecrated to
+the service of those great things which underlie all life--surely there
+is nothing very strange. There is nothing more absolutely natural. Every
+man does it in his own sort of way, in his own choice of time. We have
+chosen to do it together, on one day of the week during these few weeks
+which the Christian Church has so largely set apart for special thought
+and prayer and earnest attempt to approach the God to whom we belong. It
+is simply as if the stream turned back again to its fountain, that it
+might refresh itself and make itself strong for the great work that it
+had to do in watering the fields and turning the wheels of industry. It
+is simply as if men plodding along over the flat routine of their life
+chose once in a while to go up into the mountain top, whence they might
+once in a while look abroad over their life, and understand more fully
+the way in which they ought to work. These are the principles, these are
+the pictures which represent that which we have in mind as we come
+together for a little while each Monday in these few weeks, in order
+that we may think about things of God and try to realize the depth of
+our own human life. The first thing that we ought to understand about it
+is that when we turn aside from life it is only that we go deeper into
+life. This hour does not stand apart from the rest of the hours of the
+week, in that we are dealing with things in which the rest of the week
+has no concern. He who understands life deeply and fully, understands
+life truly; he has forever renewed his life; and if there comes into our
+hearts, in the life which we are living, a perpetual sense that life
+needs renewal, a richening and refreshing, then it is in order that we
+may go down into the depths and see what lies at the root of
+things--things that we are perpetually doing and thinking. It is this
+that brought us together here: it is that we may open to ourselves some
+newer, higher life. It is that we may understand the life that we may
+live, along side of and as a richer development of that life which we
+are living from day to day, which we have been living during the years
+of our life. How that idea has haunted men in every period of their
+existence, how it is haunting you, that there is some higher life which
+it is possible to live! There has never been a religion that has not
+started there, lifted up its eyes and seen, afar off, what it was
+possible for man to do from day to day, in contrast with the things
+which men immediately and presently are. There is not any moment of the
+human soul which has not rested upon some great conception that man was
+a nobler being than he was ordinarily conceiving himself to be; that he
+was not destined to the things which were ordinarily occupying his life;
+that he might be living a greater and nobler life. It is because the
+Christian Scriptures have laid most earnestly hold of this idea, it is
+because it was represented not simply in the words which Christ said,
+but in the very being which Christ was, that we go to them to get the
+inspiration and the indication, the revelation and the enlightenment
+which we need. I have read to you these few words in which Christ
+declares the whole subject, the whole character of which His life is and
+what His work is about to do, because it seems to me that they strike at
+once the key-note of that which we want to understand. They let us enter
+into the full conception of that which the new life which is offered to
+man really is. There are two conceptions which come to every man when he
+is entering upon a new life, changing his present life to something that
+is different from the present life, and being a different sort of
+creature and living in a different sort of a way. The first way in which
+it presents itself to him--almost always at the beginning of every
+religion, perhaps--is in the way of restraint and imprisonment. Man
+thinks of every change that is to come to him as in the nature of denial
+of something that he is at the present doing and being, as the laying
+hold upon himself of some sort of restraint, bringing to him something
+which says: "I must not do the thing which I am doing. I must lay upon
+myself restraints, restrictions, commandments, and prohibitions. I must
+not let myself be the man that I am." You see how the Old Testament
+comes before the New Testament, the law ringing from the mountain top
+with the great denials, the great prohibitions, that come from the mouth
+of God. "Thou shalt not do this, that, or the other--Thou shalt not
+murder. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt
+not covet thy neighbor's goods." That is the first conception which
+comes to a man of the way in which he is to enter upon a new life, of
+the way in which the denial in his experience is to take effect. It is
+as if the hands were stretched out in order that fetters might be placed
+upon them. The man says, "Let some power come that is to hinder me from
+being this thing that I am." And the whole notion is the notion of
+imprisonment, restraint So it is with all civilization. It is perfectly
+possible for us to represent civilization as compared with barbarism, as
+accepted by mankind, as a great mass of restrictions and prohibitions
+that have been laid upon human life, so that the freedom of life has
+been cast aside, and man has entered into restricted, restrained, and
+imprisoned condition. So it is with every fulfilment of life. It is
+possible for a man always to represent it to himself as if it were the
+restriction, restraint, and prohibition of his life. The man passes
+onward into the fuller life which belongs to a man. He merges his
+selfishness into that richer life which is offered to human kind. He
+makes himself, instead of a single, selfish man, a man of family; and it
+is easy enough to consider that marriage and the family life bring
+immediately restraints and prohibitions. The man may not have the
+freedom which he used to have. So all development of education, in the
+first place, offers itself to man, or seems to offer itself to man, as
+prohibition and imprisonment and restraint. There is no doubt truth in
+such an idea. We never lose sight of it. No other richer and fuller idea
+which we come to by and by ever does away with the thought that man's
+advance means prohibition and self-denial, that in order that man shall
+become the greater thing he must cease to be the poorer and smaller
+thing he has been. But yet there is immediately a greater and fuller.
+When we hear those words of Jesus, we see immediately that not the idea
+of imprisonment but the idea of liberty, not the idea of restraint but
+that of setting free, is the idea which is really in His mind when he
+offers the fullest life to human kind. Have you often thought of how the
+whole Bible is a Book of Liberty, of how It rings with liberty from
+beginning to end, of how the great men are the men of liberty, of how
+the Old Testament, the great picture which forever shines, is the
+emancipator, leading forth out of imprisonment the people of God, who
+were to do the great work of God in the very much larger and freer life
+in which they were to live? The prophet, the psalmist, are ever
+preaching and singing about liberty, the enfranchisement of the life of
+man, that man was not imprisoned in order to fulfil himself, but shall
+open his life, and every new progress shall be into a new region of
+existence which lie has not touched as yet. When we turn from the Old
+Testament to the New Testament, how absolutely clear that idea is!
+Christ is the very embodiment of human liberty. In His own personal life
+and in everything that He did and said, He was forever uttering the
+great gospel that man, in order to become his completest, must become
+his freest, that what a man did when he entered into a new life was to
+open a new region in which new powers were to find their exercise, in
+which he was to be able to be and do things which he could not be and do
+in more restricted life. It is the acceptance of that idea, it seems to
+me, that makes us true disciples of Christ and of that great gospel, and
+that transfigures everything. When my friend turns over some new leaf,
+as we say, and begins to live a new life, what shall we think of him? I
+learn that he has become a Christian man, that he is doing something,
+that he is working in a way and living a life which I have not known
+before. What is my impression in regard to him? Is not your impression,
+as you look upon that man, that somehow or other he has entered into a
+slavery or bondage, that he has taken upon his life restrictions and
+imprisonments which he did not have before? And you think of him,
+perhaps, as a man who has done a wise and prudent thing, who has done
+something that is going to be for his benefit some day in some distant
+and half-realized world, but as a man who, for the present, has laid a
+burden and bondage upon his life. That is never the tone of Christ; it
+is never the tone of the Christian gospel. When a man turns away from
+his sins and enters into energetic holiness, when a man sacrifices his
+own self-indulgence and goes forth a pure servant of his God and his
+fellow-men, there is only one cry in the whole gospel of that man, and
+that is the cry of freedom. As soon as he can catch that, as soon as I
+can feel about my friend, who has become a better man, that he has
+become a larger and not a smaller, a freer and not a more imprisoned
+man, as soon as I lift up my voice and say that the man is free, then I
+understand him more fully, and he becomes a revelation to me in the
+higher and richer life which is possible for me to live. But think of
+it for yourselves, for a moment, and ask what freer life really is. Try
+to give a definition of liberty, and I know not what it can be said to
+be except something of this kind: Liberty is the fullest opportunity for
+man to be and do the very best that is possible for him. I know of no
+definition of liberty, that oldest and dearest phrase of men, and
+sometimes the vaguest also, except that. It has been perverted, it has
+been distorted and mystified, but that is what it really means: the
+fullest opportunity for a man to do and be the very best that is in his
+personal nature to do and to be. It immediately follows that everything
+which is necessary for the full realization of a man's life, even though
+it seems to have the character of restraint for a moment, is really a
+part of the process of his enfranchisement, is the bringing forth of him
+to a fuller liberty. You see a man coming forward and offering himself
+as one of the defenders of his country in his country's need. You see
+him standing at the door where men are being received as recruits into
+the army of the country. He wants liberty. He wants to be able to do
+that which he cannot do in his poor, personal isolation here at home. He
+wants the badge which will give him the right to go forth and meet the
+enemies of his country, and he enrolls himself among these men. He makes
+himself subject to obligations, duties, and drill. They are a part of
+his enfranchisement. They are really the breaking of the fetters upon
+his slavery, the sending him forth into freedom. He is like a bit of
+iron or steel that lies upon the ground. It lies neglected and perfectly
+free. You see it is made by the adjustment of the end of it so that it
+can be set into a great machine and become part of a great working
+system. But there it lies. Will you call it free? It is bound to be
+nothing there. It is absolutely separate, and with its own personality
+distinct and individual and all alone. What is to make that bit of iron
+a free bit of iron, to let it go forth and do the thing which it was
+meant to do, but the taking of it and the binding of it at both ends
+into the structure of which it was made to be a part? It seems to me the
+binding of a man,--it seems to me that the binding of the iron is not
+the yielding of its freedom. It is not merely after finding its place
+within the system that it first achieves its freedom and so joins in the
+music and partakes of the courses with which the whole enginery is
+filled. Is not it, then, for the first time a free bit of iron, having
+accomplished all that it was made to do when it came forth from the
+forge of the master, who had this purpose in his mind? This, then, is
+freedom; everything is part of the enfranchisement of a man which helps
+to put him in the place where he can live his best. Therefore every
+duty, every will of God, every commandment of Christ, every
+self-surrender that a man is called upon to obey or to make--do not
+think of it as if it were simply a restraint to liberty, but think of it
+as the very means of freedom, by which we realize the very purpose of
+God and the fulfilment of our life. It is interesting to see how all
+that is true in regard to the matter of belief, doctrine, and opinions
+which we are apt to accept. How strange it very often seems that men go
+to the Church, or to one another, and say: "Must I believe this doctrine
+in order that I can enter into the Church?" "Must I believe this
+doctrine in order that I may be saved?" men say, with a strange sort of
+notion about what salvation is. How strange it seems, when we really
+have got our intelligence about us and know what it is to believe! To
+believe a new truth, if it be really truth and we really believe it, is
+to have entered into a new region, in which our life shall find a new
+expansion and a new youth. Therefore, not "Must we believe?" but "May I
+believe?" is the true cry of the human creature who is seeking for the
+richest fulfilment of his life, who is working that his whole nature may
+find its complete expansion and so its completest exercise. We talk a
+great deal in these days and in this place about a liberal faith. What
+is a liberal faith, my friends? It seems to me that by every true
+meaning of the word, by every true thought of the idea, a liberal faith
+is a faith that believes much, and not a faith that believes little. The
+more a man believes, the more liberally he exercise his capacity of
+faith, the more he sends forth his intelligence into the mysteries of
+God, the more he understands those things which God chooses to reveal to
+his creatures, the more liberally he believes. Let yourselves never
+think that you grow liberal in faith by believing less; always be sure
+that the true liberality of faith can only come by believing more. It is
+true, indeed, that as soon as a man becomes eager for belief, for the
+truth of God and for the mysteries with which God's universe is filled,
+he becomes all the more critical and careful. He will hot any longer, if
+he were before, be simply greedy of things to believe, so that if any
+superstition comes offering itself to him he will not gather it in
+indiscriminately and believe it without evidence, without examination.
+He becomes all the more critical and careful, the more he becomes
+assured that belief, and not unbelief, is the true condition of his
+life. The truth that God has entered into this world in wondrous ways
+and filled its life with Jesus Christ, the truth that man has a soul and
+not simply a body, that he has a spiritual need, that God cares for him
+and he is to care for himself, that there is an immortal life, and that
+that which we call faith is but the opening of a gate, the pushing back
+of a veil,--shall a man believe those things as imprisonments of his
+nature, and shall it not make him larger? Shall it not be the indulgence
+of his life when he enters into the great certainties which so are
+offered to his belief, believing them in his own way? Let us always feel
+that to accept a new belief is no to build a wall beyond which we cannot
+pass, but is to open the door to a great fresh, free region, in which
+our souls are to live. And just so it is when we come to the moral
+things of life. The man puts aside some sinfulness. He breaks down the
+wall that has been shutting his soul out of its highest life. He has
+been a drunkard, and he becomes a sober man. He has been a cheat, and
+becomes a faithful man. He has been a liar, and becomes a truthful man.
+He has been a profligate, and he becomes a pure man. What has happened
+to that man? Shall he simply think of himself as one who has crushed
+this passion, shut down this part of his life? Shall he simply think of
+himself as one who has taken a course of self-denial? Nay. It is
+self-indulgence that a man has really entered upon. It is an indulgence
+of the deepest part of his own nature, not of his unreal nature. He has
+risen and shaken himself like a lion, so that the dust has fallen from
+his mane, and all the great range of that life which God gave him to
+live lies before him. This is the everlasting inspiration. This is the
+illumination. I don't wonder that men refuse to give up evil if it
+simply seems to them to be giving up the evil way, and no vision opens
+before them of the thing that they may be and do. I don't wonder that,
+if the negative, restricting, imprisoning conception of the new life is
+all that a man gets hold of, he lingers again and again in the old life.
+But just as soon as the great world opens before him then it is like a
+prisoner going out of the prison door. Is there no lingering? Does not
+the baser part of him cling to the old prison, to the ease and the
+provision for him, to the absence of anxiety and of energy? I think
+there can hardly be a prisoner who, with any leap of heart, goes out of
+the prison door, when his term is finished, and does not even look into
+that black horror where he has been living, cast some lingering, longing
+look behind. He comes to the exigencies, to the demands of life, to the
+necessity of making himself once more a true man among his fellow-men.
+But does he stop? He comes forth, and if there be the soul of a man in
+him still, he enters into the new life with enthusiasm, and finds the
+new powers springing in him to their work. And if it be so with every
+special duty, then with that great thing which you and I are called upon
+to do--the total acceptance by our nature of the will of God, the total
+acceptance by our nature of the mastery of Jesus Christ. Oh! how this
+world has perverted words and meanings, that the mastery of Jesus Christ
+should seem to be the imprisonment and not the enfranchisement of the
+soul! When I bring a flower out of the darkness and set it in the sun,
+and let the sunlight come streaming down upon it, and the flower knows
+the sunlight for which it was made and opens its fragrance and beauty;
+when I take a dark pebble and put it into the stream and let the silver
+water go coursing down over it and bringing forth the hidden color that
+was in the bit of stone, opening the nature that is in them, the flower
+and stone rejoice. I can almost hear them sing in the field and in the
+stream. What then? Shall not man bring his nature out into the fullest
+illumination, and surprise himself by the things that he might do? Oh!
+the littleness of the lives that we are living! Oh! the way in which we
+fail to comprehend, or when we do comprehend, deny to ourselves the
+bigness of that thing which it is to be a man, to be a child of God!
+Sometimes it dawns upon us that we can see it opening into the vision of
+these men and women in the New Testament. Sometimes there opens to us
+the picture of this thing that we might be, and then there are truly the
+trial moments of our life. Then we lift up ourselves and claim our
+liberty or, dastardly or cowardly, slink back into the sluggish
+imprisonment in which we have been living. How does all this affect that
+which we are continually conscious of, urging upon ourselves and upon
+one another? How does it affect the whole question of a man's sins? Oh!
+these sins, the things we know so well! As we sit here and stand here
+one entire hour, as we talk in this sort of way, everybody knows the
+weaknesses of his own nature, the sins of his own soul. Don't you know
+it? What shall we think about those sins? It seems to me, my friends,
+that all this great picture of the liberty into which Christ sets man,
+in the first place does one thing which we are longing to see done in
+the world. It takes away the glamour and the splendor from sin. It
+breaks that spell by which men think that the evil thing is the glorious
+thing. If the evil thing be that which Christ has told us that the evil
+thing is--which I have no time to tell you now--if every sin that you do
+is not simply a stain upon your soul, but is keeping you out from some
+great and splendid thing which you might do, then is there any sort of
+splendor and glory about sin? How about the sins that you did when you
+were young men? How can you look back upon those sins and think what
+your life might have been if it had been pure from the beginning, think
+what you might have been if from the very beginning you had caught sight
+of what it was to be a man? And then your boy comes along. What are the
+men in this town doing largely in many and many a house, but letting
+their boys believe that the sins of their early life are glorious
+things, except that those things which they did, the base and wretched
+things that they were doing when they were fifteen and twenty and
+twenty-five and thirty years old, are the true career of a human nature,
+are the true entrance into human life? The miserable talk about sowing
+wild oats, about getting through the necessary conditions of life before
+a man comes to solemnity! Shame upon any man who, having passed through
+the sinful conditions and habits and dispositions of his earlier life,
+has not carried out of them an absolute shame for them, that shall let
+him say to his boy, by word and by every utterance of his life within
+the house where he and the boy live together, "Refrain, for they are
+abominable things!" To get rid of the glamour of sin, to get rid of the
+idea that it is a glorious thing to be dissipated instead of being
+concentrated to duty, to get rid of the idea that to be drunken and to
+be lustful are true and noble expressions of our abounding human life,
+to get rid of any idea that sin is aught but imprisonment, is to make
+those who come after us, and to make ourselves in what of life is left
+for us, gloriously ambitious for the freedom of purity, for a full
+entrance into that life over which sin has no dominion. And yet, at the
+same time, don't you see that while sin thus becomes contemptible when
+we think about the great illustration of the will of God and Jesus
+Christ, don't you see how also it puts on a new horror? That which I
+thought I was doing in the halls of my imprisonment I have really been
+doing within the possible world of God in which I might have been free.
+The moment I see what life might have been to me, then any sin becomes
+dreadful to me. Have you ever thought of how the world has stood in
+glory and honor before the sinless humanity of Jesus Christ? If any life
+could prove, if any argument could show on investigation to-day that
+Jesus did one sin in all his life, that the perfect liberty which was
+his perfect purity was not absolutely perfect, do you realize what a
+horror would seem to fall down from the heavens, what a constraint and
+burden would be laid upon the lives of men, how the gates of men's
+possibilities would seem to close in upon them? It is because there has
+been that one life which, because absolutely pure from sin, was
+absolutely free; it is because man may look up and see in that life the
+revelation and possibility of his own; it is because that life, echoing
+the great cry throughout the world that man everywhere is the son of
+God, offers the same purity--and so the same freedom--to all mankind; it
+is for that reason that a man rejoices to cling to, to believe in,
+however impure his life is, the perfect purity, the sinlessness of the
+life of Jesus. When you sin, my friends, it is a man that sins, and a
+man is a child of God; and for a child of God to sin is an awful thing,
+not simply for the stain that he brings into the divine nature that is
+in him, but for the life from which it shuts him out, for the liberty
+which he abandons, for the inthrallment which it lays upon the soul.
+There is one thing that people say very carelessly that always seems to
+me to be a dreadful thing for a man to say. They say it when they talk
+about their lives to one another, and think about their lives to
+themselves, and by and by very often say it upon their death-bed with
+the last gasp, as though their entrance into the eternal world had
+brought them no deeper enlightenment. One wonders what is the revelation
+that comes to them when they stand upon the borders of the other side
+and are in the full life and eternity of God. The thing men say is, "I
+have done the very best I can." It is an awful thing for a man to say.
+The man never lived, save he who perfected our humanity, who ever did
+the very best he could. You dishonor your life, you not simply shut your
+eyes to certain facts, you not simply say an infinitely absurd and
+foolish thing, but you dishonor your human life if you say that you have
+done in any day of your life or in all the days of your life put
+together, the very best that you could, or been the very best man that
+you could be. You! what are you? Again I say, The child of God, and this
+which you have been, what is it? Look over it, see how selfish it has
+been, see how material it has been, how it has lived in the depths when
+it might have lived on the heights, see how it has lived in the little
+narrow range of selfishness when it might have been as broad as all
+humanity, nay, when it might have been as the God of humanity. Don't
+dare to say that in any day of your life, or in all your life together,
+you have done the best that you could. The Pharisee said it when he went
+up into the temple, and all the world has looked on with mingled pity
+and scorn at the blindness of the man who stood there and paraded his
+faithfulness; while all the world has bent with a pity that was near to
+love, a pity that was full of sympathy because man recognized his
+condition and experience, for the poor creature grovelling upon the
+pavement, unwilling and unable even to look upon the altar, but who,
+standing afar off, said, "God be merciful to me a sinner!" Whatever else
+you say, don't say, "I have been the very best I could." That means that
+you have not merely lived in the rooms of your imprisonment, but that
+you have been satisfied to count them the only possible rooms of your
+life, and that the great halls of your liberty have never opened
+themselves before you. Shall not they open themselves somehow to us
+to-day, my friends? Shall we not turn away from this hour and go back
+into our business, into our offices, into the shops, into the crowded
+streets, bearing new thoughts of the lives that we might live, feeling
+the fetters on our hands and feet, feeling many things as fetters which
+we have thought of as the ornament and glory of our life, determined to
+be unsatisfied forever until these fetters shall be stricken off and we
+have entered into the full liberty which comes to those alone who are
+dedicated to the service of God, to the completion of their own nature,
+to the acceptance of the grace of Christ, and to the attainment of the
+eternal glory of the spiritual life, first here and then hereafter,
+never hereafter, it may be, except here and now, certainly here and now,
+as the immediate, pressing privilege and duty of our lives? So let us
+stand up on our feet and know ourselves in all the richness and in all
+the awfulness of our human life. Let us know ourselves children of God,
+and claim the liberty which God has given to every one of his children
+who will take it. God bless you and give some of you, help some of us,
+to claim, as we have never claimed before, that freedom with which the
+Son makes free!
+
+
+
+
+V. THE CHRIST IN WHOM CHRISTIANS BELIEVE.
+
+
+I want to read to you again the words of Jesus in the eighth chapter of
+the Gospel of St. John: "Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on
+Him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye
+shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. They answered
+him, We be Abraham's seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how
+sayest thou, Ye shall be made free? Jesus answered them, Verily, verily,
+I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the
+servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever. If
+the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." The
+service of God is not self-restraint, but self-indulgence. That is the
+first truth of all religion. That is the truth which we found uttered in
+those words of Jesus when we were thinking of them the other day. That
+is the truth to which we return as we come back again to think of those
+words and all that they mean and all that the speaker of them means to
+us and to our lives. When we remember that truth, when we recognize that
+no man is ever to be saved except by the fulfilment of his own nature,
+and not by the restraint of his nature, when we recognize that no man,
+no personal, individual man, is ever to be ransomed from his sins except
+by having opened to him a larger and fuller life into which he has
+entered, we seem to have displayed to us a large region, into which we
+are tempted to enter, and which is so rich and inviting to us that we
+immediately begin to ask ourselves if it is possible that there should
+be such a region. It is simply a great dream that we set before us. It
+is something that we imagine, something that comes out of the
+imaginations and anticipations of our own hearts, simply stimulated by
+the possibilities of the life in which we are living. It would be very
+much indeed, if it were only that. It would bear a certain testimony of
+itself, if it simply came out of the perpetual dissatisfaction of men's
+souls, even if there were no distinct manifestation of that life and no
+possibility of entering into it at once with our own personal
+consecration, with the resolution of our own wills. But if it were
+simply a dream, ultimately it must fade away out of the thoughts of
+men. It is impossible that men should keep on, year after year, age
+after age, this simple dream of something which does not exist. It would
+be like those pictures which the poet has drawn, something which appeals
+to nothing in our human nature and stands only as a parable of something
+that is a great deal lower than itself. The poet pictures to us in his
+imagination those things which do not appeal to our life, because they
+find nothing to correspond to their high portraits, to show those
+transformations of nature into something that is entirely different and
+foreign to itself. If religion be simply the dream that some men hold it
+to be, if it simply be the cheating of man's soul with that which has no
+reality to correspond to it, then it will be no more than this. Is there
+any assurance that is given to us, that is before the soul of man, of
+some great new life which it is given for man to seek, without which it
+is given for no man to be satisfied? I do not know where any man could
+find that assurance absolutely and entirely, unless there had stood
+forth before us the person of Him who spoke these words and who
+manifested them in His life. And therefore it is that, having pictured
+to you the richness of the life which is open to every man, his own true
+life, the large freedom into which he may go if, giving up his sins he
+enters into the fulness of the life of God, I cannot help now calling
+you to think about Him who gives, not merely by His words, but by the
+whole of His own person and life, that manifestation of the reality of
+the divine existence and tempts us to follow after Him. In other words,
+we come to-day to think of Christ, Christ who claims to be the master of
+the world, Christ from whom the revelation of that higher life has come,
+not in its first instance in the manifestation of the words which he
+spoke, for it had been the dream of human hearts through all the ages,
+but who made it so distinct and clear that ever since the time of Christ
+men have been able to cease to seek after it, men have never been able
+to give up the hope and dream that it was there. It is our Christ in
+whom we Christians believe. It is the Christ in whom a great many of you
+listening to me now claim to believe--I do myself--in whom many of you
+do believe, whom many of you have followed into that newer life. I would
+to God that I could so set Him before you to-day, could so make you feel
+his actual presence in the life which we are living, which we may be
+living, that there should be no question in any man of the power that is
+open before him to enter into the higher life and to fulfil his soul to
+God. What I want to do, in the few moments which I may speak to you this
+morning, is--laying aside all the theological conceptions regarding
+Him, laying aside everything that attaches to the complications and
+mysteries in which His nature has been involved in men's dreams of Him,
+laying aside everything which the churches are holding as the special
+doctrine of their especial creed--to go back to the very beginning and
+see if we can understand anything of what it is--this personal Christ,
+who lives here in the world and manifests the power of God and opens the
+possibility of every man. Surely it is good that we should know
+something about Him of whom we speak so much, that there should be some
+clear and directest conception of one whose name has been upon the lips
+of men for eighteen hundred years; and it is possible for us, in the
+simplest way, to understand how His power has come into the world and to
+see where it is possible that it should come and enrich our lives and
+make us different men. We go back, then, to the very beginning of the
+aspiration after God, which is in the heart of man everywhere. There has
+never been a race that has been without it. There has never been a
+generation that has not reached forward and thought there was a higher
+life, a fuller liberty, to which it could come. It has been in all the
+religions which have been not simply fears, but which have been the
+highest utterances of all the different races in all the different
+generations of mankind and all the different countries of the world; and
+there was one especial race in one especial part of the world in whom
+that aspiration was especially strong. We will not ask how it came to be
+there. There it was in this strange people living on the eastern shore
+of the Mediterranean Sea, and in all its history marked out by the
+strange peculiarity that it was a spiritual people, that in the midst of
+all its sins, blunders, and weaknesses it was forever lifting up its
+soul to God and striving to find Him out. Very often it blundered
+strangely and sadly. Very often it failed to get that for which it was
+seeking, by the very impetuousness, rashness, and earnestness of search.
+But it was always seeking after Him. And the years rolled by, and by and
+by in the midst of that great nation there was a little company of men
+who, accompanying one another from the beginning of their lives, had
+been searching after this God and trying everywhere if they could find
+Him. And one day they heard that down by the river which ran through
+their country, which was sacred to them from the multitude of old
+national associations, there was a great teacher come, who was declaring
+that for which the human soul was forever reaching after, the need of
+escaping from sin and entering upon and leading a higher life. This
+little company went down and met two disciples of John the Baptist, and
+learned from them everything that they had to teach them. Their souls
+were stirred by that which he had to say. But one day, while he was
+teaching them, it seemed as if they had come to an end of that which he
+could teach them. He looked up, and there upon the hill just above the
+river there was passing one upon whom the gaze of the fishermen by the
+river immediately kindled, and he lifted his hand and said, "He is the
+one who is to teach you now. You must go after him. Behold the Lamb of
+God, which taketh away the sin of the world." Great and mysterious
+words, that filled in that which men had believed in all the records
+they had read and the thinking they had done before! And they turned
+away from John and went after this new teacher and, following to His
+house, there they abode with Him during that day and the days that
+followed after. Little by little, as we read the story of their being
+with him, we can see them taken into His power, we can see how there was
+a certain fascination in His presence which laid hold upon them. It
+seemed at first to be purely human, to be the way in which one strong
+man takes possession of his fellow-man and compels him to rely upon him.
+It was upon purely human ground. It was in the manifestation of the
+excellence of this human nature of ours that they believed in Jesus and
+gradually became His disciples. Little by little it so commanded them
+that at last the moment came when it was impossible for them to separate
+themselves from Him; and one day, when the people were turning away from
+Him when He was preaching and saying things that it was hard for them to
+understand, He looked around upon them and said, "Are you going also,
+will you leave me now?" And then there burst forth from the lips of one
+of them, the most strong and characteristic act of the little company,
+those great words that declared how He had become necessary to them:
+"Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life." You
+see the power that Jesus had acquired over these men. You see the way in
+which He had taken them absolutely into His dominion, simply because of
+the manifestation of character and life, simply because He had shown
+them what man might be and opened the springs of the better life in
+themselves by the words He had spoken to them. And then they lived on
+with Him still, and by and by they had become so convinced by His truth
+and wisdom, His character had so taken possession of them, that they
+were ready to believe anything that He said. One day He lifted up His
+voice and declared that which had gradually been dawning upon them all
+the time, that He was more than they were, that He had brought in some
+mysterious way a divine life into this world and had much to communicate
+to them. He told them that He was the Father from whom His life and
+their life had come. He told them that He and the Father were one. He
+told them, not in theological statement, not as men have worked out
+since in their desire to know it fully, but in the simple statement of
+the truth that could be the inspiration of their life, that in His
+presence there was here the very presence of God among them. It was not
+strange to them, though human creatures, though men, that the highest
+aspiration of their humanity had never thought God so far from this
+world that it seemed to them strange that there should be in very human
+presence the divine life here with them. They could not explain it and
+did not try to explain it. Here it was, that which they had seen
+shadowed in the divinest men whom they had known, that which they had
+recognized. Here it was before them in this being who had won such a
+power over them that they were ready to accept His testimony with regard
+to Himself. Oh! my friends, let us not feel that the evidence of our
+Christian faith fails when it is seen to rest upon the word of Christ
+Himself. My neighbor knows more of himself than I know of him. I know
+more of myself than any man can know of me, if only I be earnest and
+sincere. And that the greatest of men who ever trod this earth should
+not know more of His nature than any other man should know, and that
+therefore His word should not be the richest revelation of that which is
+in His life and makes His power over mankind, that is incredible.
+Therefore the men were right when they believed Jesus' own word and
+looked to Him for the divinity which He said was present with Him upon
+the earth. Then His life went on, and by and by fulfilled itself in the
+one great action in which He declared those two things which He longed
+to know, the life and newness of God and the power of their human
+nature. He gave His life for them, indeed, in the awful suffering that
+preceded and that culminated upon the cross. He gave His life in
+crucifixion for them, and in that crucifixion opened the divinest doors
+of His life, when opening a sanctuary of sorrow; and He bade them enter
+in and know there the absolute life of God and the great capacity of
+human nature to sacrifice itself for God. And before He died, and
+afterward, He again appeared to them. He spoke great words which said
+that this was not the end of things, that after they had ceased to see
+Him and touch Him and hear His voice He still was to be present in the
+world. He said that the mysterious presence of those who had passed
+away, which all had known, was to culminate and be fulfilled in Him. "I
+am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." Wherever you "are
+together in my name, there am I." Words and words and words again like
+those He spoke, in which He declared that He was to be an everlasting
+presence among mankind, and therefore that which had taken place in the
+life of those disciples might forever take place; that that which Jesus
+had done in the days when He was present upon the earth should be
+continually repeated, in that He was forever to do that which He had
+been doing, giving Himself to human kind for their inspiration, for
+their elevation, for their correction, for their reproof, as He had been
+doing, their salvation, as He had been doing in those days in which He
+was here among them. Men have believed that simply. They have recognized
+that word of Christ, and found the fulfilment of it in their own lives;
+and that has been the Christian religion,--just exactly what it was in
+the old days when Jesus was present in Jerusalem and Galilee. Just
+exactly what men did then men have been doing in all the generations
+that have come since. Just exactly what was possible then is possible
+for them now--that we may become the followers of that same Christ and
+the receivers through Him of the divine life, by which alone the human
+life is perfected and fulfilled.
+
+That is the Christian religion. That is the Christian faith. Is it not
+clear and simple, whether it be true or not? My friends, you may believe
+it or you may disbelieve it, but the Christian faith is clear and simple
+enough surely in this statement, stripped of a thousand difficulties,
+perplexities, and bewilderments. That is it, that there is in the world
+to-day the same Christ who was in the world eighteen hundred and more
+years ago, and that men may go to Him and receive His life and the
+inspiration of His presence and the guidance of His wisdom just exactly
+as they did then. If you and I had been in Jerusalem in those old days,
+what would we have done, if we were more than mere creatures of others,
+more than men merely absorbed in our business, if there were any
+stirring in our souls after the deeper and diviner desires, could we,
+would we have been satisfied until we had gone wherever He might be,--in
+the temple, in the courts, or on the country road,--and found that
+Jesus, and entered into some sympathy with His life, that He might give
+to us what revelation of life and what guidance of will it might be
+possible should come from Him to men who trusted Him, until we had
+entered into sympathy with Him and the fascinations of His character?
+That is the Christian life, my friends, the thing we make so vague and
+mysterious and difficult. That is the Christian life, the following of
+Jesus Christ.
+
+What is the Christian? Everywhere the man who, so far as he comprehends
+Jesus Christ, so far as he can get any knowledge of Him, is His servant,
+the man who makes Christ a teacher of his intelligence and the guide of
+his soul, the man who obeys Christ as far as he has been able to
+understand Him. What, you say, the man who imperfectly understands
+Christ, who don't know anything about His divinity, who denies the great
+doctrines of the Church in regard to Him, is he a Christian? Certainly
+he is, my friends. There is no other test than this, the following of
+Jesus Christ. So far as any soul deeply consecrated to Him, and wanting
+the influence that it feels that He has to give, follows Christ, enters
+into His obedience and His company, and receives His blessings, just so
+far He is able to bestow it. I cannot sympathize with any feeling that
+desires to make the name of Christian a narrower name. I would spread it
+just as wide as it can be possibly made to spread. I would know any man
+as a Christian, rejoice to know any man as a Christian, whom Jesus would
+recognize as a Christian, and Jesus Christ, I am sure, in those old days
+recognized His followers even if they came after Him with the blindest
+sight, with the most imperfect recognition and acknowledgment of what
+He was and of what He could do.
+
+And then, again, is it not very strange, certainly, that there should
+be, in these later days, in all these centuries that have passed between
+the day of Jesus Christ and us, that there should have come a vast
+accumulation of speculation and conjecture, of theorizing and thought
+with regard to Christ and what He was, and that a great deal of it
+should have been very strange and should seem to us to-day to have been
+very silly, a great part of it should have seemed to be but a work of
+intelligences that were half dulled and blinded, full of prejudice, and
+shrinking from the error and the danger in which they stood? What does
+it mean--all these complicated theologies that we say are keeping us
+away from the simple following of the grandest figure that has ever
+presented Himself before human kind? I know not how else it can be when
+I see what has been the power of Jesus over thoughts and homes and
+hearts of men through all these years. It seems to be a previous
+necessity that He who most fastens the heart and life of man, who seems
+to be most necessary to the soul of men, shall so attract their thought,
+shall so draw them all to Himself that their crudest speculations, that
+their most erroneous conceptions, shall fasten upon him, and they shall
+be in some true way a testimony of the way in which He has always held
+the human heart. This is the way in which all crudities of theology, all
+the weaknesses of speculation, all even of the most strange and foul
+thoughts in regard to the life of Jesus and His manifestation in the
+world, have accumulated around that gracious figure, so simple and
+strong, which walks through our human life and manifests to us the God.
+Surely it is in one conception of it, and the true conception of it, the
+great perpetual testimony of how men have cared about Jesus, that they
+have speculated about Him in such strange perplexing ways. But He about
+whom the world does not care walks through the world and bears His
+simple being. There is nothing that fastens upon Him, that perplexes His
+life, that makes mysterious and strange the life He lives. But where is
+the great man in all the history of human kind that has not gathered
+about his person and work the speculations of those whom we find, with
+their crude and unguided minds, have formed their theories in regard to
+Him? It is the very abundance of the strange speculations with regard to
+Christ, it is the very strangeness of the theories that have been formed
+with regard to Him, that has shown me how He has drawn the hearts of
+men, how He has not let them go, but compelled them to fasten themselves
+to Him, to think about Him and try to follow Him in such poor, blind
+ways as they were able to give themselves to Him in. This, then, is the
+Christian faith. This is the way in which the larger life opens before
+mankind, by the following of a person, by the giving of the life into
+the dominion and the guidance and the obedience of one who goes forward
+into that life, himself thoroughly believing in it--for Jesus believed
+in it with all His human soul.
+
+But then, we ask ourselves, is it possible that we can gather from such
+a life as Jesus lived so long ago, a life that was lived back in the
+very dust of history and that has come down to us in records which seem
+sometimes to be flecked with tradition and obscured with the distance in
+which they lived, is it possible that I should get from him a guidance
+of my daily life here? Am I, a man of the nineteenth century, when
+everything has changed, in Boston, in this modern civilization,--can
+Jesus really be my teacher, my guide, in the actual duties and
+perplexities of my daily life and lead me into the larger land in which
+I know he lives? Ah! the man knows very little about the everlasting
+identity of human nature, little of how the world in all these
+changeless ages is the same, who asks that; very little, also, of how in
+every largest truth there are all particulars and details of human life
+involved; little of how everything that a man is to-day, upon every
+moment, rests upon some eternal foundation and may be within the power
+of some everlasting law. The wonder of the life of Jesus is this--and
+you will find it so and you have found it so if you have ever taken your
+New Testament and tried to make it the rule of your daily life--that
+there is not a single action that you are called upon to do of which you
+need be, of which you will be, in any serious doubt for ten minutes as
+to what Jesus Christ, if He were here, Jesus Christ being here, would
+have you do under those circumstances and with the material upon which
+you are called to act. Men have tried to go back and imitate the very
+activities of the life of Jesus Christ, to do the very things that He
+did. Souls have fled across the sea and tried upon the hills and in the
+plains where Jesus lived to reproduce the life that has so fascinated
+them. They were poor and unphilosophic souls. The soul that takes in
+Jesus' word, the soul that through the words of Jesus enters into the
+very person of Jesus, the soul that knows Him as its daily presence and
+its daily law--it never hesitates. Do I doubt--I, who see myself called
+upon to be the slave of these conditions which are around me--to do this
+thing? Because it is the custom of the business in which I am engaged,
+do I doubt fora moment if I turn aside and open this New Testament,
+which is Jesus' law with regard to that thing? I, with my passion
+boiling in my veins, leading me to do some foul act of outrageous lust,
+have I a single moment's doubt what Jesus would have me do if He were
+here--what Jesus, being here, really wants me to do? There is no single
+act of your life, my friend, there is no single dilemma in which you
+find yourself placed, in which the answer is not in Jesus Christ. I do
+not say that you will find some words in Jesus' teachings in the Gospel
+of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John that will detail exactly the condition
+in which you find yourself placed; but I do say that if, with your human
+sympathies and your devoted love, you can feel the presence of that
+Jesus behind the words that He said, the personal perfectness, the
+divine life manifested in the human life, there is not a single sin or
+temptation to sin that will not be convicted.
+
+There is where we rest when we claim that Jesus Christ is the master of
+the world, that He opens the great richness and infinite distances of
+the human life, that He shows us what it is to be men. It would be
+little if He did that simply with the painting of some glorious vision
+upon the skies beyond; but that He comes into your life and mine, into
+our homes and our shops, into our offices and on our streets, and there
+makes known in the actual circumstances of our daily life what we ought
+to do and what we ought not to do--that is the wonder of his revelation;
+that is what proclaims him to be the Son of God and the Son of man.
+Think, as you sit here, of anything that you are doing that is wrong, of
+any habit of your life, of your self-indulgence, or of that great,
+pervasive habit of your life which makes you a creature of the present
+instead of the eternities, a creature of the material earth instead of
+the glorious skies. Ask of yourself of any habit that belongs to your
+own personal life, and bring it face to face with Jesus Christ and see
+if it is not judged. A judgment day that is far away, that is off in the
+dim distance when this world is done--it shall come, no doubt. I know
+none of us can know much with regard to it, except that it is sure. But
+the judgment day that is here now is Christ; the judgment day that is
+right close to your life and rebukes you, if you will let Him rebuke you
+every time you sin, the judgment day that is here and praises you and
+bids you be of good courage, when you do a thing that men disown and
+despise, is Christ. Therefore it is no figure of speech, it is no mere
+ecstasy of the imagination of the preacher, when we say that in the
+midst of these streets of ours, more real than the men that walk in
+them, more real than the sidewalks that are under our feet, and the
+buildings that tower over us, there walks an unseen presence. An unseen
+presence? Yes. Are you and I going to be such creatures of our senses
+that we shall not believe that there are powers that touch us that we
+cannot see? Am I going to be so bound down to these poor fingers and to
+these poor eyes that I shall know myself in no larger connection with
+the great, unseen world? I will not. No great man, no manly man, has
+ever allowed such a limitation of himself. There is the unseen presence
+in the midst of our life, and he who will feel it may feel it, and that
+unseen presence speaks to him continually. It knows every one of us. It
+knows the rich man and knows what his wealth has made of him. It knows
+whether it has made him selfish. Shall I say it? He, the Christ, the
+present Christ, knows whether the rich man's riches have made him
+selfish and base and mean, covetous and poor and little-souled, or
+whether he has been glad to rise to the greatness of his privilege, and
+be the very utterance of the beneficence of God upon the earth. He knows
+the poor man and his struggles, he knows the poor man and his
+self-respect. He speaks to the poor man's soul, who has been kept poor
+because he will not enter into the baser methods and motives of our
+modern life, and is despised, and says to him, "Be of good courage, for
+I know what you are." He speaks to the poor in distress and poverty. He
+speaks to the wretched in their disappointment and their pain. He is
+their comforter. He knows every sin. He knows every sorrow of our life.
+He goes, unseen on earth, into the chambers where the dead lie dead, and
+where the sick lie dying, and He speaks His words of consolation, He
+opens up the glory of the perfect life. He lays his hand upon the
+mourner whose soul is bowed down to the earth and says, "Look up," and
+points into eternity and heaven. All these things Christ can do not
+merely, but Christ is doing. He is the inspiring power of this life,
+that keeps it from rotting in its corruption and degradation. We dwell
+too much, I think, upon some of these things; we cannot dwell too much,
+perhaps, but we dwell out of proportion, it may be, to the thought of
+Jesus Christ, the comforter of sorrow. He is the comforter of sorrow,
+for he knew and he knows what sorrow is. In His own crucifixion, in that
+which came before His crucifixion, He knew the suffering of this earthly
+life. There is no human being who ever has known the misery of man as
+Jesus knows it, and so He comes to all sorrows with tender consolation.
+God grant, God grant He may come to any of you who have come into these
+doors to-day with a sorrow, with a fear, with a dread upon your hearts,
+with souls that are wrung, with bodies that are suffering! God grant
+that the Christ may comfort you, may comfort you! But not only that.
+Shall there be no Christ for those who for the moment seem to need no
+comfort?
+
+Shall there be no Christ for the strong men who have before them the
+duties of their life, and who want the strength with which to do them?
+Shall there be no Christ for the young men, the young men standing in
+danger, but also standing in such magnificent and splendid chances? It
+is great to think of Christ standing by the sorrowing and comforting
+them. It is great,--we will not say it is greater,--it is very great,
+when by the side of the young man just entering into life there stands
+the Christ, saying to his soul, with the voice that he cannot fail to
+hear: "Be pure, be strong, be wise, be independent; rejoice in Me and My
+appreciation. Let the world go, if it is necessary that the world should
+go. Serve the world, but do not be the servant of the world. Make the
+world your servant by helping the world in every way in which you can
+minister to its life. Be brave, be strong, be manly by My strength." Oh!
+young man, if you can hear the Christ speak to you like that behind all
+the traditions of the street, behind the teachings of the books, behind
+all that the wise and successful men say to you, behind all the cynics
+and sneerers say to you, the great, strong, healthy voice of Jesus
+Christ, who believes in man because He has known man filled with
+divinity, and believes in you because He knows that which has been set
+before you by your Father in the sending out of your life, and who longs
+and prays and waits to strengthen you, that you may do your work, that
+you may escape from sin, that you may live your life, this great figure
+of the present Christ that Christianity can produce--it is not the
+memory of something that is away back in the past, it is not the
+anticipation of something to come in the future. We talk about Christ
+the Saviour, and think about Calvary long ago. We talk about the Christ
+the Judge, and think of a great white throne set in some mystic valley
+of Jehoshaphat, where some day the world is to be judged. We do not so
+get hold of Christ. The Christ who is in the past is not our Christ
+unless His power holds forth, the power of His spirit, which is the
+whole knowledge of the life in which we live. We think of the Christ of
+the future, for whom all the world is waiting. He will never enter into
+us and lead us unless we know that He is here and now. It does seem to
+me sometimes that if men would only take religion as a real and present
+thing, and if, instead of worshipping it in the past and expecting it
+with fear and dread and vain hope in the future, it could be a real
+thing with them here and now, something in which they are to live, not
+to which they are to flee in moments of doubt, not of which they should
+make rescue, but in which they should do all their work and live, then
+religion would be to the soul of man so that it could not be cast aside,
+so that they must enter into it and take it into themselves and make it
+their own. Religion is not the simple fire-escape that you build, in
+anticipation of a possible danger, upon the outside of your dwelling and
+leave there until danger comes. You go to it some morning when a fire
+breaks out in your house, and the poor old thing that you built up
+there, and thought you could use some day, is so rusty and broken, and
+the weather has so beaten upon it, and the sun so turned its hinges,
+that it will not work. That is the condition of a man who has built
+himself what seems to be a creed of faith, a trust in God in
+anticipation of the day when danger is to overtake him, and has said to
+himself, I am safe, for I will take refuge in it then. But religion is
+the house in which we live, it is the table at which we sit, it is the
+fireside to which we draw near, the room that arches its graceful and
+familiar presence over us; it is the bed on which we lie and think of
+the past and anticipate the future and gather our refreshment. There is
+no Christ except the present Christ for every man, unto whom all the
+power of the historic Christ is always appearing, and who is great with
+all the sweet solemnity that comes from the knowledge of what in the
+future He is to be to the world and to the soul. I am anxious to-day to
+impress this upon you: that the Christian faith is not a dogma, it is
+not primarily a law, but is a personal presence and an immediate life
+that is right here and now. I am anxious to have you know that to be a
+Christian does not mean primarily to believe this or that. It does not
+mean primarily, although it means necessarily afterward, to do this or
+that. But it means to know the presence of a true personal Christ among
+us and to follow. Here is the only true power by which a religion can
+become perpetual. Men outgrow many dogmas which they hold. The lines in
+which they try to live change their application to their lives. But I
+know a person with a deep, true life; I enter into a friendship with one
+who is worthy I should be his friend, and he is mine always. What is the
+meaning of this sort of talk that we hear about a faith that they held
+once, but they have outgrown? What is the reason of this expectation
+that seems to have spread itself abroad, of necessity that the boy who
+had a religion should lose his religion some time or other, and that by
+and by he should take up a man's religion somewhere upon the other side
+of the gulf of infidelity and godlessness, through which he has passed
+in the mean while? You expect your boy of ten years old to be religious
+with a child's sweet, trusting faith; and you hope that your man of
+forty and fifty, beaten by the world, is to have found a God who can be
+his salvation. But the years between? What do you think of your young
+men of fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, and thirty years old? To have
+outgrown the boy's faith, and not to have come to the man's faith? That
+seems almost to be an awful fate and destiny which you expect for them.
+But if our faith be this, then there shall be no need, no chance that a
+man shall outgrow it. Know Christ with the first conceptions, imperfect
+and crude, of his boy's life, and he shall go on knowing more and more
+of that Christ. That friend, the Christ he knows at twenty-five, shall
+be different from the Christ he knew at ten, just exactly as the friend
+I know at fifty is different from the friend I knew at thirty, twenty
+years ago; and yet He is the same friend still, forever opening the
+richness of an ever richer life, filling it with new experiences, with
+new manifestations of Himself. Let him drop something which seemed to
+him to be a part of the religion, but was only a temporary phase or
+condition of it, going forward with the soul all through the opening
+stages of life, and at last going forward with the soul into the life
+where it shall see as all along it has been seen, and know as it has
+been known. The old legend was that the clothes of the Israelites, which
+the Bible said waxed not old upon them in the desert during those forty
+years, not merely waxed not old those forty years, but grew with their
+growth, so that the little Hebrew who crossed the Red Sea in his boy's
+clothes wore the same clothes when he entered into the Promised Land. It
+is the parable of that which comes to the man who has a true Christian
+faith, a faith which comes in the personal friendship of Christ, a faith
+which comes not in the belief of certain things about Him, not in the
+doing slavishly of certain things which it seemed as if it had been said
+by Him that we must do, but in the personal entrance into His nature in
+a life for Him, in which He is able to send His life down into us.
+
+Then there is another thing that people are always thinking, that I hear
+very often from men, and that I have no doubt that I should hear from
+many of you, one by one. You talk about your earlier religion as if it
+had been some sort of a bondage from which you had escaped. How common
+it is to hear men, especially in this region, say: "I would be, perhaps,
+religious, except that there was so much religion forced upon me in my
+earliest days. I was driven to church when I was a boy, in those old
+Puritan days. I went to school, where they forced prayers upon me all
+the time. I was made to be religious, so now I cannot be religious." Was
+there ever a more dreadful thing than for a soul to say that, because,
+it may be, of the unwisdom, or the imprudence, the overzeal and the
+mistaken zeal of other men, we have not got the full blessing of that
+rich, open, free life with Christ which the youth may have, and
+therefore we will abandon the privileges of our higher life which is
+given to us in our manlier years? It all comes of this awful way of
+talking as if religion were the duty and not the inestimable privilege
+of human kind. The Christ stands before us and says, "Come to me." You
+say, "Must I?" And He answers, "You may." He will not even say, "You
+must." You may. And duty loses itself in privilege, and the soul enters
+into independence and escapes from its sins, fulfils its life, lays hold
+of its salvation, becomes eternal, begins to live an eternal life in the
+accepted and loving service of Christ.
+
+Now just one word, my friends. If this be so, whether you to-day are
+ready to make Christ your master and your friend or not, do not, I beg
+you, let yourself say that it is a silly or unreasonable belief, thus to
+know of a spiritual presence which is here among us, in which God is
+really in humanity. Do not let yourselves say, my friends, that the man
+who gives himself to Jesus Christ and earnestly tries to enter in deeper
+and deeper into his life and tries to do his will, that he may know the
+Christ and know himself in the Christ more and more--dare not call that
+brother a fool, as you have sometimes called your Christian man who
+watched scrupulously over his life and prayed, yes, prayed, the thing
+you think perhaps the foolishest thing that man can do, the thing that
+is the most reasonable act that any man does upon God's earth. If man is
+man and God is God, to live without prayer is not merely an awful thing:
+it is an infinitely foolish thing. When a man for the first time bows
+down upon his knees and prays, "Oh! Christ, come unto me, reveal Thyself
+to me, make me to know Thee, that I may receive Thee, make me to be
+obedient that I may take Thee into my life," then that man has claimed
+his manhood. I beg you, I implore you, I adjure you that, if you be not
+ready to be Christian, you at least will know that the Christian life is
+the only true human life, and that the man who becomes thoroughly a
+Christian sets his face toward the fulfilment of his humanity, and so
+for the first time truly is a man. "As many as received Him,"--so the
+great Scripture word runs of this Christ of whom we have been
+talking,--"As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the
+sons of God."
+
+Just think of it!--the sons of God! The power to become that to as many
+as will receive the present Christ.
+
+
+
+
+VI. ABRAHAM LINCOLN.[1]
+
+"He chose David also His servant, and took him away from the sheepfolds;
+that he might feed Jacob His people, and Israel His inheritance. So he
+fed them with a faithful and true heart, and ruled them prudently with
+all his power."--PSALM lxxviii. 71, 72, 73.
+
+
+While I speak to you to-day, the body of the President who ruled this
+people, is lying, honored and loved, in our city. It is impossible with
+that sacred presence in our midst for me to stand and speak of ordinary
+topics which occupy the pulpit. I must speak of him to-day; and I
+therefore undertake to do what I had intended to do at some future time,
+to invite you to study with me the character of Abraham Lincoln, the
+impulses of his life and the causes of his death. I know how hard it is
+to do it rightly, how impossible it is to do it worthily. But I shall
+speak with confidence, because I speak to those who love him, and whose
+ready love will fill out the deficiencies in a picture which my words
+will weakly try to draw.
+
+We take it for granted, first of all, that there is an essential
+connection between Mr. Lincoln's character and his violent and bloody
+death. It is no accident, no arbitrary decree of Providence. He lived as
+he did, and he died as he did, because he was what he was. The more we
+see of events, the less we come to believe in any fate or destiny except
+the destiny of character. It will be our duty, then, to see what there
+was in the character of our great President that created the history of
+his life, and at last produced the catastrophe of his cruel death. After
+the first trembling horror, the first outburst of indignant sorrow, has
+grown calm, these are the questions which we are bound to ask and
+answer.
+
+It is not necessary for me even to sketch the biography of Mr. Lincoln.
+He was born in Kentucky fifty-six years ago, when Kentucky was a pioneer
+State. He lived, as boy and man, the hard and needy life of a
+backwoodsman, a farmer, a river boatman, and, finally, by his own
+efforts at self-education, of an active, respected, influential citizen,
+in the half-organized and manifold interests of a new and energetic
+community. From his boyhood up he lived in direct and vigorous contact
+with men and things, not as in older States and easier conditions with
+words and theories; and both his moral convictions and his intellectual
+pinions gathered from that contact a supreme degree of that character by
+which men knew him, that character which is the most distinctive
+possession of the best American nature, that almost indescribable
+quality which we call in general clearness or truth, and which appears
+in the physical structure as health, in the moral constitution as
+honesty, in the mental structure as sagacity, and in the region of
+active life as practicalness. This one character, with many sides, all
+shaped by the same essential force and testifying to the same inner
+influences, was what was powerful in him and decreed for him the life he
+was to live and the death he was to die. We must take no smaller view
+than this of what he was. Even his physical conditions are not to be
+forgotten in making up his character. We make too little always of the
+physical; certainly we make too little of it here if we lose out of
+sight the strength and muscular activity, the power of doing and
+enduring, which the backwoods-boy inherited from generations of
+hard-living ancestors, and appropriated for his own by a long discipline
+of bodily toil. He brought to the solution of the question of labor in
+this country not merely a mind, but a body thoroughly in sympathy with
+labor, full of the culture of labor, bearing witness to the dignity and
+excellence of work in every muscle that work had toughened and every
+sense that work had made clear and true. He could not have brought the
+mind for his task so perfectly, unless he had first brought the body
+whose rugged and stubborn health was always contradicting to him the
+false theories of labor, and always asserting the true.
+
+As to the moral and mental powers which distinguished him, all
+embraceable under this general description of clearness of truth, the
+most remarkable thing is the way in which they blend with one another,
+so that it is next to impossible to examine them in separation. A great
+many people have discussed very crudely whether Abraham Lincoln was an
+intellectual man or not; as if intellect were a thing always of the same
+sort, which you could precipitate from the other constituents of a man's
+nature and weigh by itself, and compare by pounds and ounces in this man
+with another. The fact is, that in all the simplest characters that line
+between the mental and moral natures is always vague and indistinct.
+They run together, and in their best combinations you are unable to
+discriminate, in the wisdom which is their result, how much is moral and
+how much is intellectual. You are unable to tell whether in the wise
+acts and words which issue from such a life there is more of the
+righteousness that comes of a clear conscience, or of the sagacity that
+comes of a clear brain. In more complex characters and under more
+complex conditions, the moral and the mental lives come to be less
+healthily combined. They co-operate, they help each other less. They
+come even to stand over against each other as antagonists; till we have
+that vague but most melancholy notion which pervades the life of all
+elaborate civilization, that goodness and greatness, as we call them,
+are not to be looked for together, till we expect to see and so do see a
+feeble and narrow conscientiousness on the one hand, and a bad,
+unprincipled intelligence on the other, dividing the suffrages of men.
+
+It is the great boon of such characters as Mr. Lincoln's, that they
+reunite what God has joined together and man has put asunder. In him was
+vindicated the greatness of real goodness and the goodness of real
+greatness. The twain were one flesh. Not one of all the multitudes who
+stood and looked up to him for direction with such a loving and implicit
+trust can tell you to-day whether the wise judgments that he gave came
+most from a strong head or a sound heart. If you ask them, they are
+puzzled. There are men as good as he, but they do bad things. There are
+men as intelligent as he, but they do foolish things. In him goodness
+and intelligence combined and made their best result of wisdom. For
+perfect truth consists not merely in the right constituents of
+character, but in their right and intimate conjunction. This union of
+the mental and moral into a life of admirable simplicity is what we most
+admire in children; but in them it is unsettled and unpractical. But
+when it is preserved into manhood, deepened into reliability and
+maturity, it is that glorified childlikeness, that high and reverend
+simplicity, which shames and baffles the most accomplished astuteness,
+and is chosen by God to fill his purposes when he needs a ruler for his
+people, of faithful and true heart, such as he had who was our
+President.
+
+Another evident quality of such a character as this will be its
+freshness or newness; if we may so speak. Its freshness or
+readiness--call it what you will--its ability to take up new duties and
+do them in a new way, will result of necessity from its truth and
+clearness. The simple natures and forces will always be the most pliant
+ones. Water bends and shapes itself to any channel. Air folds and adapts
+itself to each new figure. They are the simplest and the most infinitely
+active things in nature. So this nature, in very virtue of its
+simplicity, must be also free, always fitting itself to each new need.
+It will always start from the most fundamental and eternal conditions,
+and work in the straightest even although they be the newest ways, to
+the present prescribed purpose. In one word, it must be broad and
+independent and radical. So that freedom and radicalness in the
+character of Abraham Lincoln were not separate qualities, but the
+necessary results of his simplicity and childlikeness and truth.
+
+Here then we have some conception of the man. Out of this character came
+the life which we admire and the death which we lament to-day. He was
+called in that character to that life and death. It was just the nature,
+as you see, which a new nation such as ours ought to produce. All the
+conditions of his birth, his youth, his manhood, which made him what he
+was, were not irregular and exceptional, but were the normal conditions
+of a new and simple country. His pioneer home in Indiana was a type of
+the pioneer land in which he lived. If ever there was a man who was a
+part of the time and country he lived in, this was he. The same simple
+respect for labor won in the school of work and incorporated into blood
+and muscle; the same unassuming loyalty to the simple virtues of
+temperance and industry and integrity; the same sagacious judgment
+which had learned to be quick-eyed and quick-brained in the constant
+presence of emergency; the same direct and clear thought about things,
+social, political, and religious, that was in him supremely, was in the
+people he was sent to rule. Surely, with such a type-man for ruler,
+there would seem to be but a smooth and even road over which he might
+lead the people whose character he represented into the new region of
+national happiness and comfort and usefulness, for which that character
+had been designed.
+
+But then we come to the beginning of all trouble. Abraham Lincoln was
+the type-man of the country, but not of the whole country. This
+character which we have been trying to describe was the character of an
+American under the discipline of freedom. There was another American
+character which had been developed under the influence of slavery. There
+was no one American character embracing the land. There were two
+characters, with impulses of irrepressible and deadly conflict. This
+citizen whom we have been honoring and praising represented one. The
+whole great scheme with which he was ultimately brought in conflict, and
+which has finally killed him, represented the other. Beside this nature,
+true and fresh and new, there was another nature, false and effete and
+old. The one nature found itself in a new world, and set itself to
+discover the new ways for the new duties that were given it. The other
+nature, full of the false pride of blood, set itself to reproduce in a
+new world the institutions and the spirit of the old, to build anew the
+structure of the feudalism which had been corrupt in its own day, and
+which had been left far behind by the advancing conscience and needs of
+the progressing race. The one nature magnified labor, the other nature
+depreciated and despised it. The one honored the laborer, and the other
+scorned him. The one was simple and direct; the other, complex, full of
+sophistries and self-excuses. The one was free to look all that claimed
+to be truth in the face, and separate the error from the truth that
+might be in it; the other did not dare to investigate, because its own
+established prides and systems were dearer to it than the truth itself,
+and so even truth went about in it doing the work of error. The one was
+ready to state broad principles, of the brotherhood of man, the
+universal fatherhood and justice of God, however imperfectly it might
+realize them in practice; the other denied even the principles, and so
+dug deep and laid below its special sins the broad foundation of a
+consistent, acknowledged sinfulness. In a word, one nature was full of
+the influences of Freedom, the other nature was full of the influences
+of Slavery.
+
+In general, these two regions of our national life were separated by a
+geographical boundary. One was the spirit of the North, the other was
+the spirit of the South. But the Southern nature was by no means all a
+Southern thing. There it had an organized, established form, a certain
+definite, established institution about which it clustered. Here,
+lacking advantage, it lived in less expressive ways and so lived more
+weakly. There, there was the horrible sacrament of slavery, the outward
+and visible sign round which the inward and spiritual temper gathered
+and kept itself alive. But who doubts that among us the spirit of
+slavery lived and thrived? Its formal existence had been swept away from
+one State after another, partly on conscientious, partly on economical
+grounds, but its spirit was here, in every sympathy that Northern winds
+carried to the listening ear of the Southern slave-holder, and in every
+oppression of the weak by the strong, every proud assumption of idleness
+over labor which echoed the music of Southern life back to us. Here in
+our midst lived that worse and falser nature, side by side with the true
+and better nature which God meant should be the nature of Americans, of
+which he was shaping out the type and champion in his chosen David of
+the sheepfold.
+
+Here then we have the two. The history of our country for many years is
+the history of how these two elements of American life approached
+collision. They wrought their separate reactions on each other. Men
+debate and quarrel even now about the rise of Northern Abolitionism,
+about whether the Northern Abolitionists were right or wrong, whether
+they did harm or good. How vain the quarrel is! It was inevitable. It
+was inevitable in the nature of things that two such natures living here
+together should be set violently against each other. It is inevitable,
+till man be far more unfeeling and untrue to his convictions than he has
+always been, that a great wrong asserting itself vehemently should
+arouse to no less vehement assertion the opposing right. The only wonder
+is that there was not more of it. The only wonder is that so few were
+swept away to take by an impulse they could not resist their stand of
+hatred to the wicked institution. The only wonder is, that only one
+brave, reckless man came forth to cast himself, almost single-handed,
+with a hopeless hope, against the proud power that he hated, and trust
+to the influence of a soul marching on into the history of his
+countrymen to stir them to a vindication of the truth he loved. At any
+rate, whether the Abolitionists were wrong or right, there grew up
+about their violence, as there always will about the extremism of
+extreme reformers, a great mass of feeling, catching their spirit and
+asserting it firmly, though in more moderate degrees and methods. About
+the nucleus of Abolitionism grew up a great American Anti-Slavery
+determination, which at last gathered strength enough to take its stand
+to insist upon the checking and limiting the extension of the power of
+slavery, and to put the type-man, whom God had been preparing for the
+task, before the world, to do the work on which it had resolved. Then
+came discontent, secession, treason. The two American natures, long
+advancing to encounter, met at last, and a whole country, yet trembling
+with the shock, bears witness how terrible the meeting was.
+
+Thus I have tried briefly to trace out the gradual course by which God
+brought the character which He designed to be the controlling character
+of this new world into distinct collision with the hostile character
+which it was to destroy and absorb, and set it in the person of its
+type-man in the seat of highest power. The character formed under the
+discipline of Freedom and the character formed under the discipline of
+Slavery developed all their difference and met in hostile conflict when
+this war began. Notice, it was not only in what he did and was towards
+the slave, it was in all he did and was everywhere that we accept Mr.
+Lincoln's character as the true result of our free life and
+institutions. Nowhere else could have come forth that genuine love of
+the people, which in him no one could suspect of being either the cheap
+flattery of the demagogue or the abstract philanthropy of the
+philosopher, which made our President, while he lived, the centre of a
+great household land, and when he died so cruelly, made every humblest
+household thrill with a sense of personal bereavement which the death of
+rulers is not apt to bring. Nowhere else than out of the life of freedom
+could have come that personal unselfishness and generosity which made so
+gracious a part of this good man's character. How many soldiers feel yet
+the pressure of a strong hand that clasped theirs once as they lay sick
+and weak in the dreary hospital! How many ears will never lose the
+thrill of some kind word he spoke--he who could speak so kindly to
+promise a kindness that always matched his word! How often he surprised
+the land with a clemency which made even those who questioned his policy
+love him the more for what they called his weakness,--seeing how the man
+in whom God had most embodied the discipline of Freedom not only could
+not be a slave, but could not be a tyrant! In the heartiness of his
+mirth and his enjoyment of simple joys; in the directness and shrewdness
+of perception which constituted his wit; in the untired, undiscouraged
+faith in human nature which he always kept; and perhaps above all in the
+plainness and quiet, unostentatious earnestness and independence of his
+religious life, in his humble love and trust of God--in all, it was a
+character such as only Freedom knows how to make.
+
+Now it was in this character, rather than in any mere political
+position, that the fitness of Mr. Lincoln to stand forth in the struggle
+of the two American natures really lay. We are told that he did not come
+to the Presidential chair pledged to the abolition of Slavery. When will
+we learn that with all true men it is not what they intend to do, but it
+is what the qualities of their natures bind them to do, that determines
+their career! The President came to his power full of the blood, strong
+in the strength of Freedom. He came there free, and hating slavery. He
+came there, leaving on record words like these spoken three years before
+and never contradicted. He had said, "A house divided against itself
+cannot stand. I believe this Government cannot endure permanently, half
+slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not
+expect the house to fall; but I expect it will cease to be divided. It
+will become all one thing or all the other." When the question came, he
+knew which thing he meant that it should be. His whole nature settled
+that question for him. Such a man must always live as he used to say he
+lived (and was blamed for saying it) "controlled by events, not
+controlling them." And with a reverent and clear mind, to be controlled
+by events means to be controlled by God. For such a man there was no
+hesitation when God brought him up face to face with Slavery and put the
+sword into his hand and said, "Strike it down dead." He was a willing
+servant then. If ever the face of a man writing solemn words glowed with
+a solemn joy, it must have been the face of Abraham Lincoln, as he bent
+over the page where the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was growing
+into shape, and giving manhood and freedom as he wrote it to hundreds of
+thousands of his fellow-men. Here was a work in which his whole nature
+could rejoice. Here was an act that crowned the whole culture of his
+life. All the past, the free boyhood in the woods, the free youth upon
+the farm, the free manhood in the honorable citizen's employments--all
+his freedom gathered and completed itself in this. And as the swarthy
+multitudes came in, ragged, and tired, and hungry, and ignorant, but
+free forever from anything but the memorial scars of the fetters and the
+whip, singing rude songs in which the new triumph of freedom struggled
+and heaved below the sad melody that had been shaped for bondage; as in
+their camps and hovels there grew up to their half-superstitious eyes
+the image of a great Father almost more than man, to whom they owed
+their freedom,--were they not half right? For it was not to one man,
+driven by stress of policy, or swept off by a whim of pity, that the
+noble act was due. It was to the American nature, long kept by God in
+his own intentions till his time should come, at last emerging into
+sight and power, and bound up and embodied in this best and most
+American of all Americans, to whom we and those poor frightened slaves
+at last might look up together and love to call him, with one voice, our
+Father.
+
+Thus, we have seen something of what the character of Mr. Lincoln was,
+and how it issued in the life he lived. It remains for us to see how it
+resulted also in the terrible death which has laid his murdered body
+here in our town among lamenting multitudes to-day. It is not a hard
+question, though it is sad to answer. We saw the two natures, the nature
+of Slavery and the nature of Freedom, at last set against each other,
+come at last to open war. Both fought, fought long, fought bravely; but
+each, as was perfectly natural, fought with the tools and in the ways
+which its own character had made familiar to it. The character of
+Slavery was brutal, barbarous, and treacherous; and so the whole history
+of the slave power during the war has been full of ways of warfare
+brutal, barbarous, and treacherous, beyond anything that men bred in
+freedom could have been driven to by the most hateful passions. It is
+not to be marvelled at. It is not to be set down as the special sin of
+the war. It goes back beyond that. It is the sin of the system. It is
+the barbarism of Slavery. When Slavery went to war to save its life,
+what wonder if its barbarism grew barbarous a hundred-fold!
+
+One would be attempting a task which once was almost hopeless, but which
+now is only needless, if he set himself to convince a Northern
+congregation that Slavery was a barbarian institution. It would be
+hardly more necessary to try to prove how its barbarism has shown itself
+during this war. The same spirit which was blind to the wickedness of
+breaking sacred ties, of separating man and wife, of beating women till
+they dropped down dead, of organizing licentiousness and sin into
+commercial systems, of forbidding knowledge and protecting itself with
+ignorance, of putting on its arms and riding out to steal a State at the
+beleaguered ballot-box away from freedom--in one word (for its simplest
+definition is its worst dishonor), the spirit that gave man the
+ownership in man in time of peace, has found out yet more terrible
+barbarisms for the time of war. It has hewed and burned the bodies of
+the dead. It has starved and mutilated its helpless prisoners. It has
+dealt by truth, not as men will in a time of excitement, lightly and
+with frequent violations, but with a cool, and deliberate, and
+systematic contempt. It has sent its agents into Northern towns to fire
+peaceful hotels where hundreds of peaceful men and women slept. It has
+undermined the prisons where its victims starved, and made all ready to
+blow with one blast their wretched life away. It has delighted in the
+lowest and basest scurrility even on the highest and most honorable
+lips. It has corrupted the graciousness of women and killed out the
+truth of men.
+
+I do not count up the terrible catalogue because I like to, nor because
+I wish to stir your hearts to passion. Even now, you and I have no right
+to indulge in personal hatred to the men who did these things. But we
+are not doing right by ourselves, by the President that we have lost,
+or by God who had a purpose in our losing him, unless we know thoroughly
+that it was this same spirit which we have seen to be a tyrant in peace
+and a savage in war, that has crowned itself with the working of this
+final woe. It was the conflict of the two American natures, the false
+and the true. It was Slavery and Freedom that met in their two
+representatives, the assassin and the President; and the victim of the
+last desperate struggle of the dying Slavery lies dead to-day in
+Independence Hall.
+
+Solemnly, in the sight of God, I charge this murder where it belongs, on
+Slavery. I dare not stand here in His sight, and before Him or you speak
+doubtful and double-meaning words of vague repentance, as if we had
+killed our President. We have sins enough, but we have not done this
+sin, save as by weak concessions and timid compromises we have let the
+spirit of Slavery grow strong and ripe for such a deed. In the barbarism
+of Slavery the foul act and its foul method had their birth. By all the
+goodness that there was in him; by all the love we had for him (and who
+shall tell how great it was); by all the sorrow that has burdened down
+this desolate and dreadful week,--I charge this murder where it belongs,
+on Slavery. I bid you to remember where the charge belongs, to write it
+on the door-posts of your mourning houses, to teach it to your
+wondering children, to give it to the history of these times, that all
+times to come may hate and dread the sin that killed our noblest
+President.
+
+If ever anything were clear, this is the clearest. Is there the man
+alive who thinks that Abraham Lincoln was shot just for himself; that it
+was that one man for whom the plot was laid? The gentlest, kindest, most
+indulgent man that ever ruled a State! The man who knew not how to speak
+a word of harshness or how to make a foe! Was it he for whom the
+murderer lurked with a mere private hate? It was not he, but what he
+stood for. It was Law and Liberty, it was Government and Freedom,
+against which the hate gathered and the treacherous shot was fired. And
+I know not how the crime of him who shoots at Law and Liberty in the
+crowded glare of a great theatre differs from theirs who have levelled
+their aim at the same great beings from behind a thousand ambuscades and
+on a hundred battle-fields of this long war. Every general in the field,
+and every false citizen in our midst at home, who has plotted and
+labored to destroy the lives of the soldiers of the Republic, is brother
+to him who did this deed. The American nature, the American truths, of
+which our President was the anointed and supreme embodiment, have been
+embodied in multitudes of heroes who marched unknown and fell unnoticed
+in our ranks. For them, just as for him, character decreed a life and a
+death. The blood of all of them I charge on the same head. Slavery armed
+with Treason was their murderer.
+
+Men point out to us the absurdity and folly of this awful crime. Again
+and again we hear men say, "It was the worst thing for themselves they
+could have done. They have shot a representative man, and the cause he
+represented grows stronger and sterner by his death. Can it be that so
+wise a devil was so foolish here? Must it not have been the act of one
+poor madman, born and nursed in his own reckless brain?" My friends, let
+us understand this matter. It was a foolish act. Its folly was only
+equalled by its wickedness. It was a foolish act. But when did sin begin
+to be wise? When did wickedness learn wisdom? When did the fool stop
+saying in his heart, "There is no God," and acting godlessly in the
+absurdity of his impiety? The cause that Abraham Lincoln died for shall
+grow stronger by his death,--stronger and sterner. Stronger to set its
+pillars deep into the structure of our nation's life; sterner to execute
+the justice of the Lord upon his enemies. Stronger to spread its arms
+and grasp our whole land into freedom; sterner to sweep the last poor
+ghost of Slavery out of our haunted homes. But while we feel the folly
+of this act, let not its folly hide its wickedness. It was the
+wickedness of Slavery putting on a foolishness for which its wickedness
+and that alone is responsible, that robbed the nation of a President and
+the people of a father. And remember this, that the folly of the Slave
+power in striking the representative of Freedom, and thinking that
+thereby it killed Freedom itself, is only a folly that we shall echo if
+we dare to think that in punishing the representatives of Slavery who
+did this deed, we are putting Slavery to death. Dispersing armies and
+hanging traitors, imperatively as justice and necessity may demand them
+both, are not killing the spirit out of which they sprang. The traitor
+must die because he has committed treason. The murderer must die because
+he has committed murder. Slavery must die, because out of it, and it
+alone, came forth the treason of the traitor and the murder of the
+murderer. Do not say that it is dead. It is not, while its essential
+spirit lives. While one man counts another man his born inferior for the
+color of his skin, while both in North and South prejudices and
+practices, which the law cannot touch, but which God hates, keep alive
+in our people's hearts the spirit of the old iniquity, it is not dead.
+The new American nature must supplant the old. We must grow like our
+President, in his truth, his independence, his religion, and his wide
+humanity. Then the character by which he died shall be in us, and by it
+we shall live. Then peace shall come that knows no war, and law that
+knows no treason; and full of his spirit a grateful land shall gather
+round his grave, and in the daily psalm of prosperous and righteous
+living, thank God forever for his life and death.
+
+So let him lie here in our midst to-day, and let our people go and bend
+with solemn thoughtfulness and look upon his face and read the lessons
+of his burial. As he paused here on his journey from the Western home
+and told us what by the help of God he meant to do, so let him pause
+upon his way back to his Western grave and tell us with a silence more
+eloquent than words how bravely, how truly, by the strength of God, he
+did it. God brought him up as he brought David up from the sheepfolds to
+feed Jacob, his people, and Israel, his inheritance. He came up in
+earnestness and faith, and he goes back in triumph. As he pauses here
+to-day, and from his cold lips bids us bear witness how he has met the
+duty that was laid on him, what can we say out of our full hearts but
+this--"He fed them with a faithful and true heart, and ruled them
+prudently with all his power." The _Shepherd of the People_! that old
+name that the best rulers ever craved. What ruler ever won it like this
+dead President of ours? He fed us faithfully and truly. He fed us with
+counsel when we were in doubt, with inspiration when we sometimes
+faltered, with caution when we would be rash, with calm, clear, trustful
+cheerfulness through many an hour when our hearts were dark. He fed
+hungry souls all over the country with sympathy and consolation. He
+spread before the whole land feasts of great duty and devotion and
+patriotism, on which the land grew strong. He fed us with solemn, solid
+truths. He taught us the sacredness of government, the wickedness of
+treason. He made our souls glad and vigorous with the love of liberty
+that was in his. He showed us how to love truth and yet be
+charitable--how to hate wrong and all oppression, and yet not treasure
+one personal injury or insult. He fed _all_ his people, from the highest
+to the lowest, from the most privileged down to the most enslaved. Best
+of all, he fed us with a reverent and genuine religion. He spread before
+us the love and fear of God just in that shape in which we need them
+most, and out of his faithful service of a higher Master who of us has
+not taken and eaten and grown strong? "He fed them with a faithful and
+true heart." Yes, till the last. For at the last, behold him standing
+with hand reached out to feed the South with mercy and the North with
+charity, and the whole land with peace, when the Lord who had sent him
+called him and his work was done!
+
+He stood once on the battle-field of our own State, and said of the
+brave men who had saved it words as noble as any countryman of ours ever
+spoke. Let us stand in the country he has saved, and which is to be his
+grave and monument, and say of Abraham Lincoln what he said of the
+soldiers who had died at Gettysburg. He stood there with their graves
+before him, and these are the words he said:--
+
+     "We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this
+     ground. The brave men who struggled here have consecrated it far
+     beyond our power to add or detract. The world will little note nor
+     long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they
+     did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated to the
+     unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly
+     advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great
+     task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take
+     increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full
+     measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead
+     shall not have died in vain; and this nation, under God, shall have
+     a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the
+     people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth."
+
+May God make us worthy of the memory of Abraham Lincoln!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: A sermon preached in Philadelphia, while the body of the
+President was lying in the city.]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Addresses, by Phillips Brooks
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