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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The World's Great Sermons, Volume 7: Hale
+to Farrar, by Various
+
+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: The World's Great Sermons, Volume 7: Hale to Farrar
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: December 16, 2013 [EBook #44441]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORLD'S GREAT SERMONS, VOLUME 7 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Júlio Reis, Moisés S. Gomes, Julia Neufeld and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
+
+Small capital text has been replaced with all capitals.
+
+Text enclosed by equal signs is in bold face (=bold=).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration: coverpage]
+
+[Illustration: titlepage]
+
+
+
+
+  _The World's Great Sermons_
+
+  VOLUME VII
+
+  HALE TO FARRAR
+
+
+
+
+  THE
+  WORLD'S
+  GREAT
+  SERMONS
+
+  COMPILED BY
+  GRENVILLE KLEISER
+
+  Formerly of Yale Divinity School Faculty;
+  Author of "How to Speak
+  in Public," Etc.
+
+  With Assistance from Many of the Foremost
+  Living Preachers and Other Theologians
+
+  INTRODUCTION BY
+  LEWIS O. BRASTOW, D.D.
+
+  Professor Emeritus of Practical Theology
+  in Yale University
+
+  IN TEN VOLUMES
+
+  VOLUME VII--HALE TO FARRAR
+
+  FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
+  NEW YORK and LONDON
+
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY
+
+  FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
+
+  _Printed in the United States of America_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+VOLUME VII.
+
+
+  HALE (Born in 1822).                             _Page_
+  The Colonization of the Desert                        1
+
+  MAGEE (1821-1891).
+  The Miraculous Stilling of the Storm                 19
+
+  SEISS (1823-1904).
+  The Wonderful Testimonies                            39
+
+  MACLAREN (Born in 1826).
+  The Pattern of Service                               63
+
+  CROSBY (1826-1891).
+  The Prepared Worm                                    87
+
+  DALE (1829-1895).
+  The Argument from Experience                        103
+
+  LIDDON (1829-1890).
+  Influences of the Holy Spirit                       121
+
+  W. M. TAYLOR (1829-1895).
+  Christ before Pilate--Pilate before
+  Christ                                               143
+
+  JOHN HALL (1829-1899).
+  Liberty Only in Truth                                163
+
+  BACON (Born in 1830).
+  God Indwelling                                       179
+
+  JOSEPH PARKER (1830-1902).
+  A Word to the Weary                                  197
+
+  MCKENZIE (Born in 1830).
+  The Royal Bounty                                     209
+
+  FARRAR (1831-1903).
+  Work in the Groaning Creation                        227
+
+
+
+
+HALE
+
+THE COLONIZATION OF THE DESERT
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+
+Edward Everett Hale, Congregationalist divine and author, was born
+in Boston in 1822. He was graduated at Harvard in 1839 and became
+a Unitarian preacher in 1846 at Worcester. In 1850 he removed to
+Boston, where his most important life's work was accomplished as a
+preacher and writer. A collected edition of his writings, in ten
+volumes, was published in 1901. His varied literary enterprises
+and undertakings have been too many to be enumerated here. His
+most famous work is "The Man Without a Country." He is at present
+chaplain to the United States Senate.
+
+
+
+
+HALE
+
+BORN IN 1822
+
+THE COLONIZATION OF THE DESERT
+
+     _God saw everything that he had made. And behold, it was very
+     good._--Gen. i., 31.
+
+
+This simplest expression of the earliest religion comes back to us
+with new force in the midst of all the wonderful revelations of our
+modern life.
+
+In ten weeks' time I have crossed from one ocean to the other; I
+have crossed backward and forward over the Allegheny and the Rocky
+Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, with the valleys between them, and
+the slopes which rise from the ocean on either side. This means a
+journey through twelve of the old thirteen States and fifteen of the
+new States and Territories. It means intercourse with people of the
+North and the South, the Gulf and the West, the Pacific coast and
+the mountains. It means intercourse with the white race, the black
+race, the red race, and the Chinaman. The variety of climate is such
+that I have welcomed the shade of palm-trees, and that I have walked
+over snow where it had drifted twenty feet beneath me. I have picked
+oranges from the tree, and camellias from the twig in the open air,
+and within three hours of good-by to the camellia I was in a driving
+snow-storm, where the engine drivers were nervous because they had
+no snow plow. In all this variety I have a thousand times recalled
+the simplest expression of the oldest words of the Bible: "God saw
+everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good."
+
+The solid recognition of this truth--not, indeed, in any small
+sense; but in that sense which is general and comprehensive--is at
+the bottom of all true religious philosophy. It is not true in any
+smaller sense. For I cannot say that it is good to be bitten by
+a mosquito or worried by a fly, if I can escape fly or mosquito.
+No, that is not true. And I do not suppose that the simple author
+of this text meant any such extravagance. But this is true, that
+the world is so made and ordered that man, who is himself a
+creator--man, who shares the wishes, instincts, and plans of the
+Power who directs the world--man can take the world in his hands and
+compel it to serve his nobler purposes.
+
+God saw the world, and he said: "Yes, this is what I want for My
+home and the home of children who love Me. It is a world very good
+to them, and they shall subdue it to My purposes." To recognize
+this, to feel the fitness of the world for man and man's fitness for
+the world, this is the basis of consistent optimism. Nobody says
+that the top of the Rocky Mountains is a good place for whales,
+or that the Ojai Valley is a good place for polar bears; but a
+consistent optimism says that the world is a good place for man; and
+it says that man is so closely allied to the God who is the life of
+the world that he can take the world for his own, and make it his
+home and his heaven. This consistent optimism is the basis of all
+sound theology.
+
+It is to be observed, however, that man gains no such control of
+the world, and the world does not prove fit for man, unless he has
+found out that he is akin to God and can enter into His work. There
+is no such victory to the savage, who is afraid of God. So long as
+he thinks the powers of nature are his enemies, he makes them his
+enemies. I do not believe the old cave-dwellers, fighting hyenas
+with clubs, and often finding that they were second-best in the
+encounter, thought this world the best of worlds. I do not believe
+that the Digger Indian, who spent his tedious day in rummaging for
+ants and beetles to eat, and was very happy if he caught a lizard--I
+do not believe that he said that the world was very good. True,
+I think both of them had visions and hopes of a better time; but
+while they were in the abject misery of cold and starvation, that
+better time had not dawned. It did not dawn because they had not
+taken on them the dignity and duty of children of God. They were not
+about their Father's business. They did not see Him nor hear Him,
+nor in any wise know Him. They did not conceive that they were on
+His side nor He on theirs. And it is not till man comes up to some
+comprehension that God has sent him here on an infinite business;
+that he and the Author of this world are at one in this affair of
+managing it; it is not till man knows God as his friend and not his
+enemy, that man with any courage and success takes the business of
+managing into his own hands. Then is it that he finds what pleasure,
+nay what dignity, there is in taming the lightning and riding on the
+storm. And then he knows enough of the divine Being, His purpose and
+His power, to see that the world is good, and that God should call
+it good in its creation.
+
+All this forces itself on one's thought as he sees how it is that
+nature has been pursued and caught and tamed in these mountains
+and these valleys. For nature is the nymph so wittily described by
+Virgil. She
+
+  "Flies to her woods; but hopes her flight is seen."
+
+Man, so long as he is savage, hates her and fears her. If he
+worships, it is the abject worship of those who bring sacrifices
+to buy her favor. And it may be said in passing that the last
+visible form of pure barbarism or savagery is any theology which
+supposes that God's favor must be bought by any price paid by man
+in exchange. When man finds, by any revelation, the conditions of
+absolute religion, which are simply faith, hope and love, all this
+is changed. When he looks up to God gladly, looks forward to the
+future cheerfully, and looks round on the world kindly, he finds,
+possibly to his surprize, that he is working on the lines God works
+on, and means to have him work on. Now he is on "his Father's
+business." While he rows the boat, the tide sweeps the right way.
+While he stretches the wire, the lightning is waiting and eager
+to do his errand. And so soon as man the divine appears upon the
+scene--man the child of God, who knows he shares God's nature--why,
+easily and quickly the valleys are exalted and the mountains and
+the hills made low; the deserts blossom as the rose, and even the
+passing traveler sees that this world was made for man and man for
+this world. And he understands as he has never understood before
+what this is, that he himself is of the nature of the God at whose
+present will this world comes into order. He understands better what
+the old text means, which says that God is satisfied with the world
+which He has made.
+
+I crossed the continent westward and eastward on this journey,
+fresh from recent reading of the history of the first Spanish
+occupation. What did the Spaniards find there? They found in what
+we call New Mexico the Zuni cities which, in a sad decline, exist
+to-day. From those cities Casteneda led a party of Spanish horsemen
+eastward in search of a certain mythical king who was supposed to
+have much gold and many jewels. Those adventurous men rode for a
+whole summer across the prairies and plains which are now Colorado,
+and Kansas, and Missouri, and struck the Missouri, or perhaps the
+Mississippi. You know that much of the country is now fertile
+beyond praise. Mile after mile you can see corn, wheat; wheat,
+corn; corn, wheat; wheat, corn; and the production to the acre
+increases year by year. The States through which Casteneda's line
+of travel passed now number four or five millions of people; and
+they feed, from their agriculture, say twenty millions more. Now
+when Casteneda and his people passed and repassed over this region
+they did not meet a single man, woman or child. They were opprest by
+the horrible loneliness of their journey. They felt, as Magellan's
+people felt when they were crossing the Pacific Ocean, with that
+horrible east wind, with a calm sea before and never a sight of an
+island or a man. When Casteneda came at last to the Mississippi--or
+Missouri--they had no heart to build a raft to cross it and incur
+more such solitude; and they went back the way they came. And the
+fame of its loneliness was such that no man attempted the adventure
+for more than a hundred years.
+
+When, in 1682--say a hundred and thirty years after--the great La
+Salle discovered the Mississippi River, and sailed south upon it,
+leaving Chicago, crossing Illinois, and so striking the Father of
+Waters, his experience of this utter loneliness was the same. He
+touched every night on one shore or the other. He is, therefore, the
+discoverer of seven of the Western States--States which now feed
+fifty million people and number seven or eight million of their
+own. Only twice, I think, did he meet any great body of men. Not
+five times did he find traces of the hand of man or the foot of
+man. Through the same solitude he returned; and his report was of a
+virgin world of elk, and deer, and buffalo; of shrubs and trees, of
+fish and fowl; but a world without men.
+
+The inference was drawn, hastily, but not unnaturally, that these
+regions could not sustain men. On the Atlas given me as a boy, the
+"Great American Desert" covered the greater part of the region west
+of the Mississippi. It is now the home of the millions I have been
+enumerating. And in the last map I have seen, the Great American
+Desert appears as hardly a "speck on the surface of the earth."
+
+The change which I have described has been wrought in the lifetime
+of people of my age. It is wrought simply and wholly by the passion
+for emigration which belongs to our own race. In Mr. Hoar's happy
+phrase, people of our blood "thirst for the horizon."
+
+In the year 1833 De Tocqueville, observing the steadiness of this
+wave, calculated its average flow as seventeen miles westward every
+year. That was the rate at which it had moved since the Federal
+Constitution made it possible. Speaking roughly, there were then two
+thousand miles of desert between the Missouri River and the Pacific.
+At De Tocqueville's rate, the wave would have been one hundred and
+twenty years in reaching that ocean. But it happened that in 1849
+the Western coast was settled in the gold discovery. An Eastern wave
+began which has now met the Western. The two together have founded
+the great cities--for we must call them so--of the Rocky Mountains.
+
+Now, in the face of that contrast between the last century and this
+century, one asks why that half of our continent is any more fit for
+men than it was then. The answer is, that it was not fit for the
+kind of men on it then; and that the kind of men that have tamed it
+are the kind of men who were fit for it, and whom it was fit for.
+
+The study of history and of physical geography becomes a study of
+what we mean by man and man's capacities. California, for instance,
+was the same country in 1650 that it was in 1850. The south wind
+blew from the sea, and that, in the north temperate zone, is the
+great physical requisite. There was as much gold, and quicksilver,
+and copper, and tin in the mountains as there is now. There was the
+same soil and the same water on the hillsides. But the men, and
+women, and children were afraid of their gods; they were afraid
+of nature; they had neither faith, nor hope, nor love. They had
+none of the elements of eternal power except as an acorn has the
+possibilities of an oak.
+
+To these people there came, sooner or later--with the best motives,
+but still without the essentials of life--fifty families of
+Franciscan monks. They came, observe, without wives or children.
+They defied thus the first law of human life, or the life God
+intends His children to live in. The primitive trinity, from which
+all false trinities have grown, is the father, the mother and the
+child. The Franciscan communities were false to all Divine law, if
+it were only in their failure here.
+
+They gathered around them, by the higher civilization which they
+brought, great communities of starving Indians. They taught them
+to feed themselves as they had never been fed before. So far they
+improved the race, and lifted its civilization above that ant-eating
+and lizard-chasing of the Digger Indian. But then the Catholic
+Church, by the necessary subordination of man to the organized
+Church, takes man's life out of him.
+
+                                              "The day
+    That makes a man a slave, takes all his life away."
+
+The words are as true to-day as they were in Homer's time. Nor is
+there any sadder instance of it than is the powerlessness of the
+tribes of amiable slaves who were collected under the protection
+of the Franciscan missions in California, or Jesuit missions in
+Paraguay.
+
+The native races between the Pacific and the Atlantic were dying
+faster than their children were born. They were dying of the
+diseases named laziness, ignorance, and war. They were not subduing
+the continent. They were not fit for it, nor it for them. What is
+the distinction of the race to which we belong, that it succeeds
+where these have failed? The history of the country accentuates that
+distinction.
+
+It would be absurd to pretend that the average frontiersman was a
+man of what are called saintly habits. Often he was not conscious
+that he had any divine errand. But the frontiersman, to whose
+courage and perseverance is due that forward wave we study, was a
+man. He did not take his opinion or instruction from any priest.
+There was no one between him and the good God. Often he sought Him.
+So far so good. And often he did not seek Him. That one admits.
+But he never sought any one else's advice or direction. He was no
+slave, as the Indian of California was. He was not commissioned by
+a superior, as the Franciscan priest of the mission was. He was a
+man. He was independent and he was brave. If he did the right thing,
+therefore, he succeeded; if he did the wrong thing, why, he failed.
+And no one else tried just the same experiment. In this first trait
+of absolute independence he showed the infinite characteristic of a
+child of God.
+
+Second, and perhaps more important, he took with him his wife and
+his children. Here is the great distinction of American emigration,
+which contrasts against the plans of Spaniards or Frenchmen, and of
+the earlier Englishmen. Historically it begins with the Pilgrims,
+of whom there were as many Pilgrim mothers as there were Pilgrim
+fathers. It is of them that Emerson says that "they builded better
+than they knew."
+
+The frontiersman is independent. He lives with and for his family.
+And, once more, he is an enthusiast in determining that to-morrow
+shall be better than to-day. The Indian had no such notion. The
+Franciscan had not. But this profane, ignorant pioneer had. He
+believed implicitly in the country behind him and in the future
+before him. "I tell you, sir, that in ten years you will see in this
+valley such a city as the world never saw." Profane he may be,
+ignorant he may be, cruel he may be; but he believes in the idea; he
+is quickened and goaded forward by an infinite and majestic hope.
+
+Given such conditions, the historical steps are easy. All this is
+impossible till you have a nation, to give peace and compel peace,
+so that the separate settler shall know that the whole majesty of
+the world is behind him. There shall be no abiding quarrel between
+man and man as to the line of a claim or the title of a mine.
+The nation shall decide, and its whole majesty shall enforce the
+decision. Or, if there is any massacre by an Apache or a Blackfoot,
+the country behind, tho a thousand miles behind, shall stretch forth
+her arm to avenge that lonely family. This means peace instead of
+war. All this had to wait, therefore, until the formation of the
+nation called the United States--the greatest peace society the sun
+ever shone upon, and the model for societies yet larger. With the
+birth of that nation, the real Western wave begins.
+
+I do not claim for every pioneer that he thought he went as an
+apostle of God. But in the emigrant wave from the very beginning,
+the best blood, the best faith, the best training of the parent
+stocks have gone. Science has sent her best. The determination
+for thorough education has planted better school houses in the
+wilderness than the emigrant left at home. And on Sunday, in a
+church, one is proud to say that the organized Church of Christ,
+in the liberty of a thousand communions, has covered with her egis
+the settler most in advance. He could not keep in advance of the
+missionary and of his Bible; and, to his credit be it said, he did
+not want to.
+
+So much for the personnel. Now, speaking roughly, what has been the
+motive for the great Western wave, which is making this garden out
+of that desert?
+
+First, there is the passion for adventure, the thirst for the
+horizon, which drives old Leatherstocking and the men like him away
+from the haunts of men. This in itself produces nothing. Next and
+chiefly, the desire to make homes--the noblest desire given to man,
+and the desire in which he follows the will of God most distinctly
+and completely. Miners want to strike metals; farmers want to find
+good soils; fruit men try for climate and irrigation; all with the
+direct wish to make homes more happy than they have been before.
+
+Again, young men go that they may get forward faster than in old
+communities--and who can wonder? Men of sense give up the unequal
+contest with nature in a northern and eastern climate to find a
+country where nature is on their side. People in delicate health go
+where they find softer air, more spring and less winter. But no man
+goes to get rich alone. No man wants to eat gold or to drink it.
+The wish and hope is to make homes where father, mother and children
+can live the life which God ordained. These are no Franciscan
+friars, these are no Apache bandits, to whom has been given the
+subjugation of a continent. Side by side with the pioneer is the
+surveyor, marking the lines of future homesteads. Hard behind him
+are father, mother, boys and girls, to whom the nation gives this
+homestead thus designated. If the man is sick the woman nurses him.
+The children grow up to know the world they live in. The boundary of
+the nation is not a mere chain of garrisons nor the scattered posts
+of missions; it is a line of homes, founded with all that the word
+home involves.
+
+All these lessons of three centuries point one way. They show
+that the world is not very good for wandering Apaches or Digger
+Indians, freezing and starving under hard winters when harvests
+have failed. To their point of view it was a world hard and cruel.
+To Franciscan friars, ruling a little empire which yielded none
+but physical harvests, where the garden, and orchard, and vineyard
+were only so many specks in the midst of an unbounded desert, the
+world can not have seemed a better world--a world made for wild
+horses, and further East for wild buffaloes, but not for men--"the
+great American Desert." It is not till man asserts the courage and
+freedom of a son of God, it is not till man appears with wife and
+child and proposes to establish his heaven here; it is not till then
+that he masters nature, and she gladly obeys him. Nay, then he has
+no success unless he appears as the vicegerent of God Himself, and
+establishes over this vast domain the empire of law, and speaks as
+God might speak, with "Thou shalt do this," and "Thou shalt not do
+that" in this empire.
+
+The Old-World writers are fond of telling us that we owe the
+prosperity of this nation to its physical resources. It is not so.
+The physical resources have existed for centuries. It is only in
+the moral force of sons and daughters of God; it is such working
+power as takes the names of law, courage, independence, and family
+affection; it is only in these that our victory is won. The drunken
+swaggerer of the advance only checks the triumph. The miser, who
+would carry off his silver to use elsewhere, only hinders the
+advance. The victory comes from the hand of God to the children of
+God, who establish His empire in the magic spell of three great
+names. As always these names are: Faith, which gives courage; Hope,
+which determines to succeed; and Love, which builds up homes.
+
+It is impossible to see the steps of such a victory without owning
+the infinite Power behind it all. You cannot use magnetic ore and
+coal for its smelting and the silicates for its fusion, all flung
+in together side by side, without asking if the Power who threw
+these priceless gifts together where each was needed for each
+did not know what He was doing. But the buffalo passes over it,
+and the gopher mines under it, and it might be so much gravel of
+the sea. Savages pass over it, with no future, no heaven, and one
+would say no God. It is worthless desert still, but one day a man
+comes who deserves his name. He is a child of God. He is determined
+that to-morrow shall be better than to-day. He knows he is lord of
+nature, and he bids her serve him. The coal burns, the iron melts,
+the silicate fuses. It is impossible to see that miracle and not
+feel that for this man the world was created, and for this world
+this man was born. He is in his place. He did not have to seek it;
+it was made for him. With him it is a garden. Without him it is
+a desert. He can hew down these mountains. He can fill up these
+valleys. And where he has filled, and where he has hewed, lo, the
+present heaven of happy homes! It is thus that prophecy accomplishes
+itself, and
+
+  "The car of the Lord rolls gloriously on."
+
+
+
+
+MAGEE
+
+THE MIRACULOUS STILLING OF THE STORM
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+
+William Connor Magee, Archbishop of York, was born at Cork in 1821.
+Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, he was ordained in 1844. His
+first important charge was the Octagon Chapel at Bath in 1850. In
+1864 he was made dean of Cork, and in 1868, Bishop of Peterborough.
+In 1891 he was appointed to succeed Dr. William Thomson, as
+Archbishop of York.
+
+Dr. Magee was pronounced by Canon Liddon the greatest preacher of
+his day. His speech in the House of Lords in 1869 against Irish
+Disestablishment was said by the highest authorities, as quoted
+by Lord Salisbury, to be the finest speech ever delivered, in
+either house of Parliament, by any man then living. His oratory was
+characterized by clearness and terseness of expression, while his
+full-toned voice was capable of sounding every gradation of feeling.
+He died in 1891, three months after his enthronization in York
+Minster.
+
+
+
+
+MAGEE
+
+1821-1891
+
+THE MIRACULOUS STILLING OF THE STORM
+
+     _Lord, save us: we perish.... Then he arose, and rebuked the
+     winds and the sea; and there was a great calm_.--Matt. viii.,
+     25, 26.
+
+
+The story of this miracle reveals to us Christ entering into peril
+together with His Church. It records for us her faith and her
+prayer. It reveals to us His presence and His power. That faith has
+been her faith, that prayer has been her prayer, from that hour
+until now. In all the long perilous voyage of the Church from that
+hour, never has she unlearned yet her first prayer; never has she
+become entirely unconscious of her Lord. Sometimes with a great and
+a fearless faith that defied the most terrible tempests, sometimes
+with a little and a timid faith, that shrank from the first ripple
+upon the deep, but ever with her real faith have Christ's Church and
+Christ's disciples turned in the hour of their tribulation to seek
+their Lord. And never has that prayer been said in vain. Never from
+the Church at large, or from the solitary disciple in his terror,
+has that prayer gone up without an answer. Never has the eye of
+faith sought, and sought in vain, the Savior. Ever has the praying
+Church or the praying disciple found the still present Christ; and
+we believe that it is so now. We believe that Christ our Lord is
+here in the midst of us now, and that our eye of faith may see Him,
+and our prayer of faith may reach Him. And if this be so now--if
+Christ's presence be a real fact amongst us now, and our prayer have
+really a might to reveal that presence--then, above all things, it
+concerns us, that we understand the nature of that prayer, and the
+manner of that presence, that we understand what it is we mean, and
+what will come of it when we say: "Lord, save us, or we perish."
+
+We ask you, then, to-night, brethren, to consider these two things:
+the meaning of the Church's prayer; the manner of her Lord's
+presence. Now, when we use these words: "Lord, save: we perish,"
+we are really rehearsing two articles of our belief. We are
+declaring, first of all, that we believe there is a Lord--that in
+the visible world there is an invisible God with His overruling,
+and controlling, and appointing will; and, in the next place, we
+believe that this God is our Lord Jesus Christ. In the first of
+these, we Christians agree with every religion that ever has been.
+In the second, we differ from all other religions. When we say that
+above nature there is a will and a personality, we say what every
+religion says. Religion is nothing else than the belief in the
+supernatural, in something above nature, in a person, in a will; and
+prayer is nothing but the speech of our spirit to that will, and the
+submission of our will to it. Prayer is the effort of the spirit
+of man to rise above the visible up to the region of the invisible
+and the personal, there to speak out his care or his need. There
+can, therefore, be no prayer without this element of religion; and
+there can be no religion without this fact of prayer. Without it,
+you have philosophy, you may have sentiment; but you cannot have a
+real, practical, every-day religion. And, therefore, all religions
+have believed in a God or gods, a Lord or lords. Turk, Jew, heathen,
+in like case, would have said to some lord or other: "Save, or we
+perish." But the Christian believes something more. He believes that
+his Lord has come down amongst men; that He has taken to Him human
+flesh, and lived a human life, and died, and risen again, for his
+salvation. He worships not only a lord, but the incarnate Lord; and
+so the Church speaks her twofold faith in her great hymn from the
+first to Christ as God: "We praise Thee, O God; we acknowledge Thee
+to be the Lord"--Thee, and none other, to be the God, and Thee to
+be the Lord, and Ruler, and Master of all things. You see, then,
+that there is something different in Christian prayer from all other
+prayer and worship, and that the difference consists in this: that
+it is distinctively and avowedly the prayer to an incarnate Christ.
+
+Now, if there be this difference between this prayer and all other
+prayer, then there must be a corresponding difference in the
+feelings and in the practical results of such a religion; and I am
+about to ask you now to follow me while I endeavor to trace for you
+this difference between Christian prayer and all other prayer. It
+seems as if the story in the gospel of this miracle exactly sets
+out this difference--exactly shows us the distinctive nature of
+Christian prayer. The story, you observe, divides itself, naturally,
+into three parts. There is, first of all, the voyage before the
+storm; there is, then, the storm; and there is, then, the miraculous
+stilling of the storm. Now, you observe that in each of these three
+parts, we have one thing in common. We have man, in some way or
+other, encountering, or encountered by, the outward and visible
+world. The third of these--the stilling of the storm--differs from
+the other two in this, that it is miraculous and supernatural. Now,
+let us, for a moment, leave out this third part. There are some, you
+know, who say, that we should always leave it out, and be better
+without it. Let us leave out, then, this third or miraculous part of
+the story; and let us contrast the first and the second parts. And
+what have we got? We have got a most remarkable contrast between
+the two scenes. What is it we see in the first scene? We see a man
+subduing nature. It was by the knowledge of the elements and the
+laws of nature, that man learned thus to sail upon the deep; and in
+that one fact you have represented for you the whole of the material
+progress of humanity--all the triumphs of science, all the glory and
+the beauty of art, all that marvelous mastery that man obtains by
+his inventive and creative will over the secret powers of nature, as
+he unlocks them one by one, and compels her to tell him her deepest
+mysteries--all that man has done as he has advanced from horizon to
+horizon of discovery, finding still new worlds to conquer, until
+we stand amazed at our own progress and the infinity of it, and we
+say of man: "What manner of being is this, that even the winds and
+the sea obey him?" Yes, there is the man the lord of nature. There
+is nothing supernatural there. All is natural, all is orderly. Man
+is lord and master. Nature is man's servant; and, therefore, there
+seems no room, there seems no need for prayer. There is nothing,
+seemingly, there to be had for the asking; there is everything,
+seemingly, there to be had for working. Man is to be seen walking in
+the garden of his own planting and his own fencing; and he reaches
+out hands to unforbidden fruits of knowledge; and he believes that
+at last he shall gather even of the tree of life. He is a god unto
+himself, and he sees no need for prayer.
+
+And now we turn to the second scene, and what have we there? We have
+the direct contrast with this scene. We have there, not man subduing
+nature, but nature subduing man. We have the storm in which the
+elements are man's masters and not his servants; and he that one
+minute before was the boasting lord of nature is its toy and its
+sport. The very foam upon the crest of those billows is not more
+helpless in the grasp of the elements than the lord and the king of
+them; and they toss him to and fro, as the wind drives the stubble
+in the autumn. This is the terrible aspect of nature. This is nature
+in her might, and in her majesty, and in her pitilessness, and in
+her capriciousness--when nature seems everything, and man, in her
+awful presence, dwindles and dwarfs into very nothingness--when
+man, in the presence of the vastness of her solitude, and the
+might of her storms, and the terror of her earthquakes, seems no
+more before her, with his little cares and his sorrows, than the
+wee bubbles upon the head of the cataract. This is nature as she
+masters man. Is it, then, any wonder that, in the early struggles of
+mankind with this terrible visible power of the creature, men came
+to worship the creature--that they ascribed to every one of these
+powers a divinity, that in the voice of the wind, and in the roar
+of the sea, and in the raging of the fire, they saw the signs of
+a divine presence, and they said to these elements: "Spare us," or
+"Save us, or else we perish"? And so all creation became peopled
+with gods--cruel gods, capricious gods, vengeful gods, gods whom
+men bribed with blood, gods whom, even while they bribed them, they
+could not love, and did not believe that they loved them. This is
+the first and most terrible form of creature worship; this was the
+idolatry of the heathen. But mark this, that such a worship as this
+could not continue forever, could not continue long, because it is
+the worship of ignorance; it is the belief in the supernatural,
+only because it confuses the unknown with the supernatural. Ever as
+science advances must this faith melt away. Ever must the domain
+of the known push itself forward into the domain of the unknown.
+Ever does the man of science take one by one the gods of the man
+of superstition and break them upon their pedestals, and tell him
+this: "What you worship is no god. What you worship is no lord. It
+is not your lord. It is a servant of yours; and I class it in this
+or that rank of your servants." So, one by one, like ghosts and
+fantoms in the dawning of the day--one by one, the fantoms of gods
+that haunted the night of the old world vanish before the dawn of
+knowledge. But then it is a terrible daylight that breaks on men--a
+blank, dreary world in which men have no sight of the invisible, no
+sense of the supernatural. It is that last and most terrible aspect
+of nature, when she appears, not as many gods, or many wills, but as
+the great soulless piece of mechanism, of which we are only part--a
+terrible machinery in which we are, somehow or other, involved, and
+in the presence of which the sense of our free-will leaves us. The
+pith, and the manhood, and the vigor of men, and the beauty and the
+freedom of their life die out of them as they stand appalled before
+this passionless, this terrible, this awful face of a soulless
+world. This is the last and the most terrible form of creature
+worship. And mark this, that between these two aspects of nature,
+if you have no assured faith, there is no logical resting-place.
+Without the act of faith, you must take your choice between the
+superstition of ignorance or the atheism of knowledge.
+
+And now we have seen these, we turn to the third portion of our
+story; and what is that we see there? We see, again, in this world
+of men, the miraculous and the supernatural. We hear a prayer,
+and we see a miracle. In the face of the might of nature and the
+terrors of her elements there arises up a Man in answer to man's
+cry--there is heard a Man's voice, which is yet the voice of God;
+and it rebukes the winds and the sea, and the elements of nature own
+their real Lord; and immediately there is a great calm. What is
+it, then, that we see? We see a miracle, and a miracle that answers
+to prayer; we see the living spirits of living men, in the hour of
+their agony and their distress, appealing from nature to the God of
+nature; and we have recorded the answer of God to man's prayer. The
+answer is, that God is Lord both of man and of nature; and we say,
+therefore, that the miracle, and the miracle alone, sufficiently
+justifies the prayer. We say that the reason why men may pray is,
+and can only be, that they know and believe, that there is a will
+which rules the visible. If you have not this belief, then believe
+us that all prayer, whatever men may say about it, is an unreality
+and a miserable mockery. To what am I to pray if I see no living
+God to pray to? Am I to pray to a law? Am I to pray to a system? Am
+I to pray to the winds, or to the waves, as men prayed of old? Am
+I to pray for physical blessings and deliverances? Men tell us we
+are not to pray, or to give thanks, concerning the rain or fruitful
+seasons, for that science has told us that the supernatural has no
+place there. Am I to pray then (for men do tell me that I may pray)
+only for spiritual and for moral gifts? Am I to pray only to be
+made wise, and good, and pure, and true, and holy? Ah! science is
+beginning to meet us there, too; for she is telling us, and telling
+us loudly, and telling us shamelessly, that here, too, there is no
+room, so far as she can tell, for prayer, as our mind is but a part
+of our body, and that our spiritual condition is a necessary result
+of our past history and of our present temperament--that we are what
+we are by virtue of birth and education, and country, and clime,
+and other things over which we have no control. And so the very
+spirit of man, all that is left of the invisible, vanishes before
+the approach of science. The knife of the anatomist lays bare, as
+he tells you, the secrets of man's being; and he finds no soul--he
+finds only the gray matter of the brain and the white threads of
+the nerves; and this is all that is left. Then, if we are not to
+pray, may we at least praise? Men say that if it is a folly to pray,
+at least it is a wisdom to praise; and they tell us this is the
+sentimental theory of the modern gospel. They tell you: "You may
+not pray,--prayer has no place in our system,--but you may praise;
+you may lift up your heart in hymns of joy and gratitude to the
+great Father of your being; you may have festival and flower-crowned
+processions in honor of the Supreme Being; yes, you may in fine
+weather, when you are sailing over summer seas, and the pleasant
+summer wind is filling the sails of your bark, and is wafting sweet
+odors from the flower-crowned shores along which youth, and hope,
+and joy are passing--then you may lift up your hearts in thanks to
+the Father that gave all these, if you do not forget it. But how is
+it in foul weather? How is it when the sky above us darkens, and the
+white crests of the waves beneath us are swelling sharp and fierce,
+and the jagged edges of the rocks are projecting for our shipwreck,
+and the wild waste of the waters is yawning below us, and we tremble
+and shudder at their depths, and the wild wind blows our prayer
+back into our bosoms--is that the time to sing sentimental hymns to
+our great supreme Father and Giver of all good? It is a time (thank
+God, thank Christ, for this) when the Christian, when the disciple
+of Christ, may hold fast his faith and say, "Tho he slay me, yet
+will I trust in him"; but it is not a time when the deist has
+breath to sing his hymns to the supreme Author of his being. No, we
+believe that there is a miracle that justifies, and alone justifies
+prayer. We know that there are those (and they are good and wise
+men, many of them) who contrive nice adjustments and philosophical
+explanations how prayer may be reconciled with universal law. We do
+not greatly care for these. They may be right; they may be wrong.
+In some future state and higher condition of our being we may know
+how far they are true, how far they are false; but, meanwhile, we
+need not be too nervously anxious to make room for almighty God to
+work His own will in His own world. We believe in the miracle of
+creation; we believe that there was once a voice that said, "Let
+there be light, and there was light"; we believe that at the sound
+of that voice the universe leapt into life; and we believe in the
+miracle of the Incarnation, when God took human flesh and dwelt
+amongst men; we believe in the miracle of the descent of the Spirit
+of God, when, with the miraculous sound of the rushing wind and
+the miraculous gleam of the fire, God once more came down to dwell
+amongst men; we believe in the miracles that are written for us in
+this Book, were they ten times as many as they are; we believe that
+the sea has stood on one side like a wall, and that the waters have
+gushed forth from the rock; we believe that bread has been rained
+from heaven; we believe that a touch has awakened the dead--we
+believe all this; and, because we believe it, we believe the voice
+when it says to us, "Pray"; and because we hear that voice still
+amongst us, and because we know it to be the same voice, we say, as
+we hear it, "Lord, save, or we perish."
+
+But still, in the last place, it may be said to us: If you do
+believe that there is this power of miracle amongst you still, and
+that it will answer to your prayer, why is it that we do not see
+more miracles than we do? Why is not the world filled with strange
+miracles every day, considering the infinite number of men's needs,
+and the infinite number of human prayers? My brethren, it does seem
+to me that if we were merely deists, and did not believe in Christ,
+it would be difficult for us to answer this objection. The spirit
+of man has, however (thanks be to God for it), in all ages been
+deeper and truer in its instincts than his mere logical power. Even
+the deist (and we thankfully acknowledge it), tho inconsistently
+and illogically, yet really and truly prays. For us Christians
+there is not any difficulty. There is that difference in our prayer
+of which I spoke. To whom is it that we pray? Not merely to the
+invisible Lord or Creator of the past, but to the incarnate Lord of
+the present. We believe that Christ our Lord, to whom we pray, took
+flesh and dwelt amongst us, and we believe that He did so that He
+might work the greatest of all miracles--the salvation of the souls
+of men; and we believe that He wrought it by dying and by living
+again. We believe that He established in the world this great and
+miraculous law, that it is possible out of death to bring life--nay,
+that death is the way to life. If this be so, that by His death
+life was purchased for us, then He teaches us that there is another
+life than this, and that there is another death and a deeper death
+than that we fear; and He tells us, it may be, that even by dying
+we shall be saved, that He will not always save us from death--nay,
+that He may save us by death. And so it comes to pass that we
+understand how, by losing life, we may miraculously save it; and
+yet, on the other hand, by trying to save life, we may naturally
+lose it. So we come to understand this fact, how the beginning of
+His kingdom was full of miracles, and how, in the history of His
+kingdom, miracles have since ceased. The kingdom began with miracles
+that He might teach us that He was able to save; the miracles ceased
+in order that He might work a greater miracle. The lesser miracle
+of ruling nature ceased in order that the greatest of all miracles
+might perpetually be wrought--the regeneration, the redemption, and
+the glorification of the nature of man. And so we understand that
+Christ our Lord, because He is our Lord, may save us, even while
+we seem to perish, and to perish in His presence. He saved us of
+old by His agony and bloody sweat, by His cross and passion; and
+He will save us now, and He does save every child of His. Through
+agony and sweating, through cross and passion--through the agony of
+our long nights of spiritual darkness, through the sweat of long
+days of sore trouble and labor, beneath the weight of sharp and
+heavy crosses and sorrow, and through the bitterness of spiritual
+or bodily passion, does Christ our Lord still save those who cry
+to Him, even while He seems to sleep and not to hear them, as, in
+the bitterness of their souls, thinking themselves Christ-forsaken,
+they cry, "Our Christ, our Christ, why hast Thou forsaken us? Dost
+Thou sleep, Lord? Save us, or we perish." And so you understand
+the peculiarity, the blest and the glorious peculiarity, of our
+Christian prayer. You understand the meaning of those deep words
+of Scripture--patience and the faith of the saints. You understand
+how the Christian man may pray and wait, and wait and pray still.
+If prayer were always followed by a miraculous answer, then prayer
+would be easy enough; or, on the other hand, if there were no
+thought of an answer, then it might be possible, tho not easy, to
+submit ourselves to the inevitable. But to pray and not to receive
+an answer, and yet to believe that the very not receiving is an
+answer; to cry, "Save, or we perish," and to seem about to perish;
+to believe that in what seems perishing is really salvation; to look
+for the living and watchful Christ, and to see what seems only the
+living and regardless Christ, and yet to believe that the time will
+come when, at His word, there shall be a great calm--this is the
+patience, this is the faith of those who worship an incarnate Lord.
+And so we trace the history of Christ's Church, and so we strive
+to trace the history of our own lives. Comparatively easy it is to
+trace the Church's history along her voyage. The Church gives time
+for comparing events and testing faith; and so, believing still in
+the presence of her living Lord, the litanies of His Church ring
+out, as they have ever rung, clearly and loudly, and high above the
+roar of the tempest and the rushing of the waters, still the prayer
+is heard, "Good Lord, deliver us"; and still, again and again, as
+the storm sweeps by, and the Church passes out into calmer waters,
+still comes the voice of thanksgiving: "He hath delivered us."
+Even in our shorter voyage, are there none of us who can remember
+times when we have knelt in agony and wrestled in prayer with the
+Savior, who seemed to have forgotten us, when the mighty storm of
+temptation and the billows of calamity seemed about to destroy us,
+and when we have cried (oh, how men do cry in those storms of the
+soul, in those tempests and terrors of the heart), "Lord, save us,
+or we perish!" to Him to save us, and He has seemed to sleep and to
+refuse to save? But at the last we can remember how He did reveal
+Himself, not stilling the raging storm when we would have had Him
+still the terrible tempest, not sparing, it may be, the precious
+bark that we had rigged, and manned, and launched ourselves with
+trembling hopes and loving prayers, and watched with eyes tearless
+with agony, as we saw it about to sink before us; and we have
+been led to see and believe that the living and the loving Lord
+was answering even then our prayer, for the bark has, at length,
+entered that haven where we would be, and where the vexed waters of
+our voyage never awake a ripple on the calm depths of its eternal
+peace. This has been the experience of more than one of this great
+multitude that I see. And there is another experience that each one
+of you may have: it is when, in the troubles of your own spirit,
+when in the agonies of your own grief-stricken heart, when in the
+depths of your own repentance, when in the storms of your own fear
+and your own doubt, you cry to Christ the Savior--when you bring
+your sins as some men bring their sorrows, as anxious to have them
+removed as the others--when you cry to Christ your Savior: "Lord,
+save me! Save me, a sinner! Save me, an unprayerful man hitherto!
+Save me, an unbelieving man hitherto! Save me, not merely from the
+hell hereafter, but the present storm and depth of my own sins that
+threaten to destroy me! Save me, or I perish!" For, brethren, be
+sure of this, sooner or later this will be the experience of every
+such vexed and terrified soul--that, after he shall have endured, so
+long as his Lord sees good, the terrifying storm and the threatening
+deep that drive him in closer and closer search and seeking after
+his Lord, then, at last, there will appear the form of the Son of
+man, the form of Him who hung upon the cross, that He might for
+ever in the world's history work this great and, to Him, dearest
+of all miracles; and, at last, He will rebuke the winds and the
+waves in that troubled soul, and there will be a great calm--a calm
+that may not last for ever, a calm that will not last for ever, for
+we have not yet reached the haven of perfect rest, but a calm that
+is a foretaste of the eternal rest. And so, praying with all our
+hearts to Christ our Lord, setting our will in submission to His
+will, pouring out our spirit in prayer to His Spirit, laying bare
+our hearts before His pure and loving eyes, through calm and through
+storm, praying still that we suffer not death in either, that we
+neither rot in the calm nor founder in the storm, praying still for
+His presence, praying still for grace to realize that presence,
+crying still for that deeper and yet deeper faith which is the
+result of more and more constant experience, crying still, "Lord,
+save, or we perish," wait in patience and in faith until He shall
+send His last messenger in this world, His angel of death, and bid
+him for us and in His name rebuke for the last time the winds that
+have vexed us, and the waves that have terrified us, and then with
+Him for ever there shall be a great calm.
+
+
+
+
+SEISS
+
+THE WONDERFUL TESTIMONIES
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+
+Joseph A. Seiss, Lutheran divine, was born in 1823, at Graceham, Md.
+He received his theological education as a private pupil of several
+clergymen and was first settled over churches at Martinsburg and
+Shepherdstown, Va. In 1843 he was transferred to Cumberland, then
+to Baltimore, Md., and finally became pastor of St. John's Church,
+Philadelphia, and for twelve years was editor of "The Lutheran." He
+died in 1904.
+
+
+
+
+SEISS
+
+1823-1904
+
+THE WONDERFUL TESTIMONIES[1]
+
+  [1] Reprinted by permission of the Literary Trustees of the Dr.
+  Seiss' Estate.
+
+     _Thy testimonies are wonderful._--Psalms, cxix., 129.
+
+
+The Psalmist here addresses himself to God. The testimonies of
+which he speaks are God's testimonies. As collected and arranged in
+one book, they are known to us as the Bible. For the contents of
+these holy oracles the royal singer expresses his admiration. He
+pronounces them "wonderful."
+
+It was not an unworthy theme with which he was occupied at the
+time, neither was it an extravagant opinion which he uttered. It is
+impossible that there should be for man a more important subject
+than the communications made to him from his God. And if ever there
+was a marvelous thing submitted to human inspection, it is this
+book, the holy Bible. It lies before us like an ocean, boundless
+and unfathomable,--like a Himalayan mountain, whose summit no foot
+of man has trod, and whose foundation is in the undiscovered heart
+of the world. To make a full survey of it is not possible in the
+present condition of the human faculties. Even the inspired Paul,
+when he came to look into it, found himself gazing into profundities
+at which he could do no more than exclaim, "Oh, the depth of the
+riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!" And yet
+there are many beautiful shells and pebbles lying on the shore of
+this sea, and as many precious flowers blooming on this mountain
+side, which any one may gather, and which, whosoever attentively
+contemplates, must feel himself impelled to join the admiring
+exclamation, "The testimonies of the Lord are wonderful."
+
+Let us look briefly at a few particulars by which to verify this
+declaration, praying that God may open our eyes to behold wondrous
+things out of His law.
+
+
+I. The testimonies of the Lord are wonderful in age and preservation.
+
+The Bible is the oldest of books. Some portions of it are much more
+recent than others, but a large part of it has come down from the
+remotest antiquity and antedates all other writings in the world.
+It contains a journal of events which transpired centuries before
+the building of the Pyramids. The book of Job existed before Cadmus
+carried letters into Greece. The five books of Moses were read
+in holy assemblies two hundred years before Sanchoniathon wrote.
+David and Solomon had uttered their sacred songs and prophecies
+half a century before Homer enraptured the Greeks with his verses
+or Lycurgus had given laws to Lacedćmon. Dozens of the books of
+Scripture were complete a hundred years before the first public
+library was founded at Athens; and the last of the prophets had
+ended his message before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle had
+propounded their philosophies. When the elements of society were but
+forming in the womb of the far-distant past, the Bible was there.
+When the foundations of earth's present greatness were laid, it was
+there. And when we go back to the very beginnings of history, even
+there does its hand lead us and its right hand uphold us.
+
+Nor is it as a mere lifeless fossil that this book has come down
+to us from such remote antiquity. Tho hoary with age, its youthful
+vigor remains, and its natural force is not abated. It has only
+grown fresher with age, and strengthened with every new trial. It
+has been at the births and deaths of a hundred mighty nations,
+and seen empires rise, flourish, and fall, and coexisted with the
+longest lines of earthly kings, and beheld some of the sublimest
+monuments of human effort come forth and disappear, and passed a
+hundred generations in reaching us; but, withal, it still lives, in
+all nations, in all languages, the most precious legacy of departed
+ages, and the only thing that remains to us from some of them.
+Tho it has encountered many a fierce conflict with the hate of
+men and the spite of devils,--tho the object of many a concerted
+scheme to blot it from the earth,--tho often held up to ridicule,
+with "gigantic apes like Voltaire chattering at it, men of genius
+turned by some Circean spell into swine, like Mirabeau and Paine,
+casting filth at it, demoniacs whom it had half rescued and half
+inspired, like Rousseau, making mouths in its face," and all the
+varied passions of unsanctified men continually arrayed against
+it,--it still holds its place as the most uncorrupt and authentic
+of histories, the most august and controlling of records, the most
+universal, venerable, and potent of books, imagining in its very
+history the stupendous majesty of the God whom it reveals.
+
+
+II. The testimonies of the Lord are wonderful in their authorship.
+
+They are not of man, but of God. We can not now refer to the varied
+and multitudinous considerations which enter into the proofs of
+this. It is capable, however, of being established by the very
+highest moral evidences. The wisest and best men of every age have
+concurred in receiving the Scriptures as from God. And it is not
+possible to give a rational account of their origin, and the source
+of their contents, without ascribing them to the divine authorship
+which they claim.
+
+It may seem strange that the infinite God should condescend to
+put His great thoughts into the poor language of mortals, to
+communicate with creatures so dull and stupid as the sons of men;
+but this He has done. Portions of the Scriptures are made up of
+the very words of God, articulated by Himself in the hearing of
+men commissioned to declare them. One chapter, which embodies the
+moral essence of all the rest, was engraven by His own finger upon
+tables of rock, and delivered to Moses all ready formed and set
+in the alphabetic signs employed by men. Other parts consist of
+communications of celestial messengers sent directly from heaven's
+throne to declare God's will and purposes to the dwellers upon
+earth. A still larger portion was taken down as it fell from the
+lips of One in whom God had incarnated Himself, and whose every
+word and act in this world was a revelation from the unknown
+Deity. Even those parts which were written by men were produced
+by mysterious motion and illumination of the Holy Ghost,--by
+inspiration of God. Indeed, the whole book is a literary aerolite,
+all the characteristics of which are unearthly, and whose own
+superior attributes are so many demonstrations of its superhuman
+source. Its very address is so far above that of man, that no
+mortal, unprompted, could ever have risen to it. Its subjects are
+all treated after an unearthly manner. Every leaf of it bears the
+sunlight of some higher sphere. Every page has on it the imprimatur
+of God. And all its words are instinct with divine fires, flashing
+the admonition upon every reader, "Put off thy shoes from off thy
+feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground." They
+that look upon it look upon expressions of the eternal Spirit.
+They that rightly take its lessons drink in living emanations from
+unsearchable Godhead. It is the abiding miracle of _rapport_ with
+the Mind which projected, upholds, and governs the universe. It is
+the Word of God.
+
+
+III. The testimonies of the Lord are wonderful in their originality
+and instructiveness.
+
+The Bible depends upon no discoveries of man, and leans upon no
+other books. If it says some things which may be learned elsewhere,
+its utterances are always independent and peculiarly its own.
+The world through which it ranges is much wider than that of
+man's thoughts. It goes back to a remoter antiquity; it takes in
+a broader space; it extends to a vaster future; it introduces
+to sublimer spheres and forms of being; and it exhibits a much
+profounder wisdom. It opens arcana of which no earthly powers ever
+dreamed, and is at home in regions where the sublimest imaginings
+of man had hardly extended a guess. On all the great questions of
+theology, life, death, and futurity, it speaks with a familiarity,
+comprehensiveness, and propriety which at once command our
+confidence and satisfy our hearts. What it touches, it touches with
+a master's hand. It never speaks without pregnant meaning in all its
+words. And there is nothing in human science, poetry, or tradition
+which it does not exceed in knowledge, wisdom, and real value.
+
+In its account of the creation, and the origin of things, there is
+nothing to compare with it. In all the historians, philosophers,
+and secular authors,-the books of Zoroaster, the records of
+Phoenicia and Egypt, the Dialogues of Plato and Lucian, the annals
+of China, the treatises of Plutarch, the Shastras of India, the
+Edda of Scandinavia, and all the schemes that have ever been given
+in explanation of the earth's primal history,--there is nothing so
+natural, so magnificent, so simple, so appropriate, so reliable,
+so satisfactory, as the first chapter of Genesis. Nor have all the
+discoveries of modern geology brought forward anything to convict
+Moses of a false cosmogony. If it is a truth that the history of
+the earth's formation runs back through uncounted ages, he leaves
+an interval for it, between "the beginning" and the period when
+God caused light to appear upon its dark and misty surface. If it
+is true that vast eras have been traversed by each separate order
+of living things, one after the other, we find precisely the same
+succession in the Mosaic account which is found preserved in the
+different layers of the earth's crust. And if it be true that there
+was life upon our world ages and cycles of ages before the period
+noted in Genesis as that in which man was created, it is also true
+that no traces of human existence are found except in the most
+recent deposits. A certain stonemason of the village of Cromartie,
+with sledge and chisel, himself delved through every formation, from
+the surface-mold down through the old red sandstone to the Silurian,
+gneiss, and granite, and, having mastered all that is known
+concerning each, has written it down as the result of his marvelous
+explorations, that the truthfulness of the Mosaic record is engraven
+upon the rocks forever.
+
+And so in every department of science the Bible is always true
+to nature, and has invariably been in advance of all human
+investigations and discoveries. How many thousands of years have
+metaphysicians and psychologists been at work to map out, classify,
+and gauge the various capacities and powers of the human mind
+and soul! But they have found no way of approach to the heart so
+masterly and effective as that taken by the Scriptures; and the more
+that is known of the nature of the man, the more clearly is it seen
+that the Bible comprehended it from the commencement. It has been
+but a few years since Newton laid open the laws of gravitation; and
+yet the Scriptures spoke of the earth being hung "upon nothing,"
+as if familiar with the whole subject, before human science had
+begun to form even its feeblest guesses in the case. It has only
+been since the invention of the telescope enabled men to search
+through the starry spaces that Sir John Herschel has discovered in
+the northern sky a peculiar barrenness; but more than three thousand
+years ago Job told Bildad the Shuhite that "God stretched out the
+north over the empty place." It has been but a few years since
+science discovered "that the sun is not the dead center of motion,
+around which comets sweep and planets whirl," but that "the earth
+and sun, with their splendid retinue of comets, satellites, and
+planets, are all in motion around some point or center of attraction
+inconceivably remote, and that that point is in the direction of
+the star Alcyone, one of the Pleiades"; which would hence seem to
+be "the midnight throne" in which the whole system of gravitation
+has its central seat and from which all material orbs are governed.
+But the Bible asked the question, more than thirty centuries ago,
+"Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades?" as if the
+speaker knew all about the facts in the case. How long has it been
+since the doctrine of the rotundity of the earth has been settled
+by scientific men? yet the Psalmist spoke of "the round world"; and
+Solomon described in brief the true theory of wind-currents, and
+strongly hinted the circulation of the blood, at least twenty-five
+hundred years ago. And, with all the advances of knowledge which
+have so wonderfully marked the last three hundred years, in which
+the spirit of philosophic inquiry has ranged the universe, searched
+heaven, earth, and sea, knocked at every door, peered into every
+recess, consulted every oracle of nature, and gathered trophies
+of power and treasures of wisdom and sublimities of knowledge at
+which the world has been amazed,--in all the motions which the
+experimentist has traced, in all the principles of power which the
+master of physics has discovered, in all the combinations which the
+chemist has detected, in all the forms which the naturalist has
+recorded, in all the spiritual phenomena which the metaphysician
+has described, and in all the conditions and relations of mind or
+matter, past or present, which human research has found out,--there
+has not come to light one truth to contradict these holy records, or
+to require the relinquishment or change of one word in all the great
+volume of Scripture.
+
+
+IV. The testimonies of the Lord are wonderful in beauty and literary
+excellence.
+
+The Bible is a casket of jewelry of the richest hues and the most
+exquisite workmanship. Sir William Jones, that great Orientalist
+and scholar, has said, "I have regularly and attentively perused
+these Holy Scriptures, and am of the opinion that this volume,
+independently of its divine origin, contains more true sublimity,
+more exquisite beauty, more pure morality, more important history,
+and finer strains of poetry and eloquence, than can be collected
+from all other books, in whatever age or language they may have
+been written." Even Rousseau wrote, "The majesty of the Scriptures
+strikes me with admiration. The works of our philosophers, with all
+their pomp of diction, how mean, how contemptible, in comparison
+with them!"
+
+Nor does it matter much what part of the Scriptures we take, or in
+what department of rhetoric we test them. Whether it be history or
+prophecy, the Old Testament or the New, narrative or description,
+poetry or prose, the same characteristics are to be seen. Moses
+is as pure and simple as Adam and Eve in Paradise, and yet as
+majestic and grand as that great creation which he describes. Job
+contains a drama which is without a parallel,--a drama of facts
+in which heaven and earth, visible and invisible, with all their
+wonderful interpenetrations, are set out in their connection with
+a suffering saint upon his couch, and in which the spirit of
+earnest inquiry urges itself forward until everything comes forth
+to declare the majesty of God, and all the might and goodness of
+man lies prostrate before Him who "bringeth forth Mazzaroth in his
+season" and speaketh comfortably to them that trust in Him. Under
+the leadership of David's muse, we pass through varied scenes of
+beauty and grandeur,--pastures and glens, still waters and roaring
+floods, dismal swamps and silent wildernesses, forests crashing
+with the lightnings of God and tempests that convulse the seas,
+the smoke and fury of battle and the shoutings of glad multitudes,
+by dells of lonely sorrow and along the starry archways of the
+sky,--until at length we take our places in a temple high as
+heaven and wide as space, with all objects of creation as living
+worshipers around us, each with its separate hymn of grateful joy,
+blending in one almighty adoration. Isaiah rises upon us like some
+"mighty orb of song," whose rays are streaming minstrelsies, that
+have thrilled upon the hearts of men for seventy generations, and
+which must needs thrill on, unrivaled in their kind, while earth
+and time endure. Ezekiel is a very comet of fire, flaming his
+impetuous way across the heavens, and, like the living spirits in
+his own first vision, going and returning as a flash of lightning.
+And throughout,--the Evangelists with their simple story of Jesus,
+and Paul in his epistles and orations, and John in his loving
+letters and apocalyptic visions,--from the first words, "In the
+beginning," onward to the last "amen," we find variety, beauty,
+pathos, dignity, sweetness, magnificence, and glory, such as are
+contained in no other composition. Here are the sublimest heights
+and the profoundest depths, and all the gradations from the one
+to the other. From the worm that grovels in the dust, to the
+leviathan in the foaming deep, and the supreme archangel, and the
+eternal God; from the hyssop on the wall, to the cedars of Lebanon,
+and the healing trees which shade life's eternal river; from the
+pearl-drops which trickle from the mountain rock, to the noise
+of dashing torrents, and the wide waters of the deluge; from the
+glowworm under the thorn, to the sun in the heavens, and the great
+Father of Lights; from the lone pilgrim to the triumphing host, and
+the gathering multitude which no man can number; from the deepest
+sorrows of the lost, to the probation scenes of earth and the
+seraphic visions of the blest,--there is nothing known to mortals
+which God hath not brought into requisition to intensify and adorn
+the precious book which He has given to men. As an eloquent preacher
+beyond the sea remarks, "He has filled it with marvelous incident
+and engaging history, with sunny pictures from Old-World scenery
+and affecting anecdotes from patriarchal times. He has replenished
+it with stately argument and thrilling verse, and sprinkled it
+over with sententious wisdom and proverbial pungency. It has the
+gracefulness of high utility; it has the majesty of intrinsic
+power; it has the charm of its own sanctity: it never labors, never
+strives, but, instinct with great realities and bent on blessed
+ends, has all the translucent beauty and unstudied power which you
+might expect from its lofty object and all-wise Author."
+
+Some call these Scriptures dull and uninviting; but there is no
+book in being with so many real attractions. There is no classic
+equal to it,--no historian like Moses, no poet like Job or Isaiah,
+no singer like David, no orator like Paul, no character like Jesus,
+and no revelation of God or nature like that which these venerable
+pages give. Not without reason has Sir Thomas Browne said, "Were
+it of man, I could not choose but say it was the singularest and
+superlative piece that hath been extant since the creation. Were
+I a pagan, I should not refrain the lecture of it, and can not
+but commend the judgment of Ptolemy, that thought not his library
+complete without it."
+
+
+V. The testimonies of the Lord are wonderful in their influences and
+effects.
+
+The Bible has been, for three thousand years, one of the greatest
+potencies on earth. It has been, and is to this moment, a greater
+power than Rome, or Greece, or Babylon ever was. Though it has
+not conquered the world, it has advanced further towards it than
+Alexander ever did. It has done more to govern and renew the human
+heart than all the laws enacted by legislators, and all the maxims
+devised by uninspired sages, and all the lessons, apart from itself,
+that were ever given to the race. It is the chief stay of a society
+which for a thousand years has been the most widespread, the most
+important, and the most powerful association on the earth. It has
+controlled the religious opinions of a large part of mankind for
+nearly forty centuries. It has molded characters and directed the
+efforts of men whose lives and labors introduced new eras and shaped
+the destinies of nations and turned the course of the world's
+entire history. It has begotten and fostered the purest virtue, the
+sublimest manhood, the noblest beneficence, the sincerest charity,
+the tenderest kindness, and all the blessed saintship, that have
+ever been upon earth.
+
+Its vast influence upon the welfare of nations may be estimated in
+part from the bloody codes, and infamous administrations, and social
+degradations, and far-reaching wretchedness, of those countries
+where it is rejected or unknown, contrasted with the blessedness
+and peace of those who have received it. It was the great Milton
+who said, "There are no politics like those which the Scriptures
+teach"; and in proof we need only look at Judea when it knew no laws
+but those which this book contains. How smooth and steady were the
+wheels of public justice, and how beautiful was the flow of national
+peace, in those golden days of the old Hebrew commonwealth! How did
+the joyous vines, and fields of waving ears, and gold of Ophir,
+and flocks and cattle abiding on a thousand hills, and cities full
+of peace and plenty, proclaim abroad the wealth and blessedness of
+that goodly land! How did the voice of singing and the fragrance of
+virtue linger round each habitation, and the sacrifices of praise
+crowd all the temple's courts from tribes rejoicing in the smiles of
+God!
+
+In the sphere of learning and thought-creations, also, the influence
+of the Bible is equally marked and wonderful. It is to the world of
+letters what the sun is to the solar system, the fountain of the
+purest light and brightest wisdom. It has produced more books than
+any other one thing in existence. It has fostered learning when
+there was no other stimulation to its cultivation felt. Even the
+heathen classics owe their preservation to it. As a book written in
+other times, places, and languages, it has called forth the most
+laboriously compiled lexicons, grammars, and works on archeology by
+which the world of the present communes with the world of the past.
+As a book claiming the faith and obedience of men, it has created a
+world of learned apology, comment, and exposition, and some of the
+noblest specimens of argument, eloquence, and appeal which are known
+to man. And, simply as a book among books, it has wrought wondrously
+upon the thoughts and productions of authors of all classes. The
+Visions of Dante are largely drawn from it. Every canto of the
+Faerie Queene bears the impress of its influence. Milton's matchless
+songs of Paradise are from an inspiration which the Bible alone
+could give. From the same source came the immortal dream of Bunyan,
+the Pauline reasonings of Barrow, the flaming zeal of Richard
+Baxter, the "molten wealth" and "lava of gold and gems" which poured
+down "the russet steep of Puritan theology," the songs of Cowper,
+and "Thoughts" of Young, and visions of Pollok, and mighty eloquence
+of the Luthers, the Knoxes, the Massillons, the Whitefields, and the
+Halls. Addison, and Thomson, and Burke, and Dryden, and Wordsworth,
+and Coleridge, and Southey, and Campbell, and Goethe, all are vastly
+indebted to the Scriptures for whatever excellences are found in
+their works. Shakespeare drew largely from this same precious mine,
+and also even Hobbes, and Shelley, and Byron. That prince of modern
+orators, Daniel Webster, once said, "If there be anything in my
+style or thoughts to be commended, the credit is due to my kind
+parents in instilling into my mind an early love of the Scriptures."
+Indeed, if we were to destroy the Bible, and take from the world
+of literature and thought all that it has contributed directly or
+indirectly, half the history of the race would be swept out of mind,
+the noblest ideas that have swelled man's heart would be gone,
+some of the proudest monuments of human genius would be buried
+in oblivion, and thick darkness would settle down upon the world
+forever.
+
+
+VI. The testimonies of the Lord are wonderful as a fountain of
+consolation, hope and salvation.
+
+The Bible to all its other excellences adds this, that it is the
+Book of Life. It is not only a basket of silver network, but it
+contains apples of gold. It is the record of glad tidings to a
+perishing world, a message of joy to all people. In it, Wisdom
+hath mingled her wine, and slain her fatlings, and furnished her
+table, and calls all the hungry and needy to come and partake. The
+entrance of its words giveth light and imparteth understanding
+to the simple, and maketh wise unto salvation. It is a balm from
+Gilead for the sick, oil for the bruises of the wounded, reprieve
+for the prison-bound, and bread for them that are ready to perish.
+Its different books are but so many angels of mercy, carrying
+contentment into the abodes of poverty, enabling even the children
+of want to lift up their eyes to God who ordereth all things well,
+and to eat their scanty meals in peace; staying the hearts of the
+persecuted and opprest, causing them to rejoice and sing under the
+yoke, at the stake, and in the hottest of the fires, as on their
+passage-way to crowns immortal in the world to come; calming the
+minds of the fevered, mollifying where all earthly medicines fail,
+and kindling glad hopes of recompense yet to be revealed; lighting
+up comforts in the breasts of those that mourn for their dead, and
+assuring them of blessed reunions in a better life; and kindling
+even the dying eye and inspiring the dying heart with thoughts of
+speedy triumph, causing lips already closed for death to open once
+more in utterances of victory.
+
+We may talk of the venerable age of the Bible, and its scientific
+accuracy, and its literary beauty and sublimity, and its wonderful
+influences upon the ideas, laws, governments, and general order of
+society and mankind; but it is all nothing in comparison with the
+spiritual good and immortal hopes and consolations which it begets
+in those who receive it as a message from their God. Are we voyagers
+upon a troubled and a dangerous sea? Here is a chart by which to
+steer in safety to the happy shores. Are we soldiers, beset with
+foes and required to endure the shocks of battle? This is an armory
+from which all needed weapons may be drawn at will, and by the right
+use of which we may hew our way to immortal triumph. Are we pilgrims
+and strangers, worn and weary in our search for the home from which
+we are exiles? In this book gush out the pure, fresh waters of
+life, the cooling shades from the Rock of salvation appear, and
+the guiding word is heard from pilgrims in advance, to cheer and
+encourage us till we reach the mansion of our Father. Indeed, it is
+beyond the power of language to express the excellency and richness
+of spiritual treasure which we have in this holy Book. It is the
+miraculous cruse of the Shunamitess which never exhausts. It is the
+wand of Moses which swallows the serpents of life, and parts the sea
+of trouble, and brings forth waters in the thirsty wilderness. It
+is the ladder of Jacob on which our spirits ascend to commune with
+God and angels. It is the telescope of faith by which we look on
+things invisible, survey even the third heavens, and have present to
+our view what is to be in after-ages. It is the chariot of Elijah
+in which to ride up the starry way to immortality unhurt of death.
+It is the channel of the almighty Spirit as it goes forth for the
+sanctification of the race,--the very gulf-stream of eternal life as
+it pours out for the resuscitation of our wilted and decaying world.
+
+Allusion has been made to the dreadful eclipse it would be to the
+world of letters and thought, for the Bible, and what it has done
+for man, to be blotted out. But that were nothing to the moral and
+spiritual night that would go along with such a calamity. Besides
+carrying away with it a vast proportion of the intellectual and
+moral life of the last eighteen centuries, it would silence every
+preacher of salvation, and abolish at once his office and his text.
+It would stop every work of mercy and plan of philanthropy in the
+world.
+
+It would transmute into a lie all our fond anticipations of the
+return of Jesus to renew the world, restore our dead, complete our
+salvation, and bring us to an eternal heaven. It would hush forever
+the glad tidings with which men have comforted themselves for these
+many weary ages. It would put out the mother's hopes of her dead
+babes, quench the wife's fond desires for her husband's everlasting
+peace, destroy the widow's consolation as she lingers by the grave
+of her buried love, and extinguish the matron's last comfort as she
+trembles on the verge of eternity.
+
+It would take with it all the reliefs and blessedness which prayer
+in the name of Jesus gives, and leave the sinner without pardon
+in the extremities of life. It would take away the last appeal of
+the slave against his oppressor, remove the last check of tyranny,
+and lift from the wicked hearts of men the last restraints,
+giving carnival to every lust and play to every passion, without
+correction, without limit, and without end!
+
+We stagger, and are horrified, at the mere idea of the loss that
+would be inflicted. Chills run down our pulses at the contemplation
+of the despair and wretchedness which would ensue.
+
+Let us, then, learn to value the possession of such a precious
+book. Let us bind it to our hearts as our chief treasure in this
+sin-darkened world. And, whilst we admire its beauty and revere its
+mysteries, let us abide by its precepts, and, as far as in us lies,
+practise its sacred mandates.
+
+
+
+
+MACLAREN
+
+THE PATTERN OF SERVICE
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+
+ALEXANDER MACLAREN was born in 1826, educated at Glasgow University,
+for twelve years preached at Southampton, and afterwards for many
+years in Manchester. Besides an impressive face and figure he
+brought to the pulpit a ripe scholarship, an almost perfect English
+style, and an uncommonly vigorous personality. The keynote of
+his life and character is disclosed in his own words, uttered in
+Manchester:
+
+"I have been so convinced that I was best serving all the varied
+social, economical, and political interests that are dear to me
+by preaching what I conceived to be the gospel of Jesus Christ,
+that I have limited myself to that work. I am sure, with a growing
+conviction day by day, that so we Christian ministers best serve our
+generation. My work, whatever yours may be, is, and has been for
+thirty-eight years, and I hope will be for a little while longer
+yet, to preach Jesus Christ as the King of England and the Lord of
+all our communities, and the Savior and friend of the individual
+soul."
+
+
+
+
+MACLAREN
+
+BORN IN 1826
+
+THE PATTERN OF SERVICE[2]
+
+  [2] From "The Secret of Power, and Other Sermons," published by Funk
+  & Wagnalls Company.
+
+     _He touched his tongue; and looking up to heaven, He sighed, and
+     saith, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened._--Mark vii., 33, 34.
+
+
+For what reason was there this unwonted slowness in Christ's healing
+works? For what reason was there this unusual emotion ere He spoke
+the word which cleansed?
+
+As to the former question, a partial answer may perhaps be that our
+Lord is here on half-heathen ground, where aids to faith were much
+needed, and His power had to be veiled that it might be beheld.
+Hence the miracle is a process rather than an act; and, advancing
+as it does by distinct stages, is conformed in appearance to men's
+works of mercy, which have to adapt means to ends, and creep to
+their goal by persevering toil. As to the latter, we know not why
+the sight of this one poor sufferer should have struck so strongly
+on the ever-tremulous chords of Christ's pitying heart; but we do
+know that it was the vision brought before His spirit by this
+single instance of the world's griefs and sicknesses, in which mass,
+however, the special case before Him was by no means lost, that
+raised His eyes to heaven in mute appeal, and forced the groan from
+His breast.
+
+The missionary spirit is but one aspect of the Christian spirit.
+We shall only strengthen the former as we invigorate the latter.
+Harm has been done, both to ourselves and to this great cause, by
+seeking to stimulate compassion and efforts for heathen lands by
+the use of other excitements, which have tended to vitiate even the
+emotions they have aroused, and are apt to fail us when we need
+them most. It may therefore be profitable if we turn to Christ's
+own manner of working, and His own emotions in His merciful deeds,
+set forth in this remarkable narrative, as containing lessons for
+us in our missionary and evangelistic work. I must necessarily omit
+more than a passing reference to the slow process of healing which
+this miracle exhibits. But that, too, has its teaching for us, who
+are so often tempted to think ourselves badly used, unless the
+fruit of our toil grows up, like Jonah's gourd, before our eyes. If
+our Lord was content to reach His end of blessing step by step, we
+may well accept patient continuance in well-doing as the condition
+indispensable to reaping in due season.
+
+But there are other thoughts still more needful which suggest
+themselves. Those minute details which this evangelist ever delights
+to give of our Lord's gestures, words, looks, and emotions, not only
+add graphic force to the narrative, but are precious glimpses of the
+very heart of Christ. That fixed gaze into heaven, that groan which
+neither the glories seen above nor the conscious power to heal could
+stifle, that most gentle touch, as if removing material obstacles
+from the deaf ears, and moistening the stiff tongue that it might
+move more freely in the parched mouth, that word of authority
+which could not be wanting even when His working seemed likest a
+servant's, do surely carry large lessons for us. The condition of
+all service, the cost of feeling at which our work must be done, the
+need that the helpers should identify themselves with the sufferers,
+and the victorious power of Christ's word over all deaf ears--these
+are the thoughts which I desire to connect with our text, and to
+commend to your meditation to-day.
+
+We have here set forth the foundation and condition of all true work
+for God in the Lord's heavenward look.
+
+The profound questions which are involved in the fact that, as
+man, Christ held communion with God in the exercise of faith and
+aspiration, the same in kind as ours, do not concern us here. I
+speak to those who believe that Jesus is for us the perfect example
+of complete manhood, and who therefore believe that He is "the
+leader of faith," the head of the long procession of those who in
+every age have trusted in God and been lightened. But, perhaps, tho
+that conviction holds its place in our creeds, it has not been as
+completely incorporated with our thoughts as it should have been.
+There has, no doubt, been a tendency, operating in much of our
+evangelical teaching, and in the common stream of orthodox opinion,
+to except, half unconsciously, the exercises of the religious life
+from the sphere of Christ's example, and we need to be reminded
+that Scripture presents His vow, "I will put my trust in Him," as
+the crowning proof of His brotherhood, and that the prints of His
+kneeling limbs have left their impressions where we kneel before
+the throne. True, the relation of the Son to the Father involves
+more than communion--namely, unity. But if we follow the teaching
+of the Bible, we shall not presume that the latter excludes the
+former, but understand that the unity is the foundation of perfect
+communion, and the communion the manifestation, so far as it can be
+manifested, of the unspeakable unity. The solemn words which shine
+like stars--starlike in that their height above us shrinks their
+magnitude and dims their brightness, and in that they are points
+of radiance partially disclosing, and separated by, abysses of
+unlighted infinitude--tell us that in the order of eternity, before
+creatures were, there was communion, for "the Word was with God,"
+and there was unity, for "the Word was God." And in the records of
+the life manifested on earth the consciousness of unity loftily
+utters itself in the unfathomable declaration, "I and my Father are
+one"; whilst the consciousness of communion, dependent like ours
+on harmony of will and true obedience, breathes peacefully in the
+witness which He leaves to Himself: "The Father has not left me
+alone for I do always the things that please him."
+
+We are fully warranted in supposing that that wistful gaze to heaven
+means, and may be taken to symbolize, our Lord's conscious direction
+of thought and spirit to God as He wrought His work of mercy. There
+are two distinctions to be noted between His communion with God and
+ours before we can apply the lesson to ourselves. His heavenward
+look was not the renewal of interrupted fellowship, but rather, as a
+man standing firmly on firm rock may yet lift his foot to plant it
+again where it was before, and settle himself in his attitude before
+he strikes with all his might; so we may say Christ fixes Himself
+where He always stood, and grasps anew the hand that He always held,
+before He does the deed of power. The communion that had never been
+broken was renewed; how much more the need that in our work for God
+the renewal of the--alas! too sadly sundered--fellowship should
+ever precede and always accompany our efforts! And again, Christ's
+fellowship was with the Father. Ours must be with the Father through
+the Son. The communion to which we are called is with Jesus Christ,
+in whom we find God.
+
+The manner of that intercourse, and the various discipline of
+ourselves with a view to its perfecting, which Christian prudence
+prescribes, need not concern us here. As for the latter, let us not
+forget that a wholesome and wide-reaching self-denial cannot be
+dispensed with. Hands that are full of gilded toys and glass beads
+cannot grasp durable riches, and eyes that have been accustomed to
+glaring lights see only darkness when they look up to the violet
+heaven with all its stars. As to the former, every part of our
+nature above the simply animal is capable of God, and the communion
+ought to include our whole being.
+
+Christ is truth for the understanding, authority for the will, love
+for the heart, certainty for the hope, fruition for all the desires,
+and for the conscience at once cleansing and law. Fellowship with
+Him is no indolent passiveness, nor the luxurious exercise of
+certain emotions, but the contact of the whole nature with its sole
+adequate object and rightful Lord.
+
+Such intercourse, brethren, lies at the foundation of all work for
+God. It is the condition of all our power. It is the measure of all
+our success. Without it we may seem to realize the externals of
+prosperity, but it will be all illusion. With it we may perchance
+seem to spend our strength for naught; but heaven has its surprizes;
+and those who toiled, nor left their hold of their Lord in all their
+work, will have to say at last with wonder, as they see the results
+of their poor efforts, "Who hath begotten me these? behold, I was
+left alone; these, where had they been?"
+
+Consider in few words the manifold ways in which the indispensable
+prerequisite of all right effort for Christ may be shown to be
+communion with Christ.
+
+The heavenward look is the renewal of our own vision of the calm
+verities in which we trust, the recourse for ourselves to the
+realities which we desire that others should see. And what is equal
+in persuasive power to the simple utterance of your own intense
+conviction? He only will infuse his own religion into other minds,
+whose religion is not a set of hard dogmas, but is fused by the heat
+of personal experience into a river of living fire. It will flow
+then, not otherwise. The only claim which the hearts of men will
+listen to, in those who would win them to spiritual beliefs, is that
+ancient one: "That which we have seen with our eyes, which we have
+looked upon, declare we unto you." Mightier than all arguments,
+than all "proofs of the truth of the Christian religion," and
+penetrating into a sphere deeper than that of the understanding,
+is the simple proclamation, "We have found the Messias." If we
+would give sight to the blind, we must ourselves be gazing into
+heaven. Only when we testify of that which we see, as one might who,
+standing in a beleaguered city, discerned on the horizon the filmy
+dust-cloud through which the spear-heads of the deliverers flashed
+at intervals, shall we win any to gaze with us till they too behold
+and know themselves set free.
+
+Christ has set us the example. Let our prayers ascend as His did,
+and in our measure the answers which came to Him will not fail us.
+For us, too, "praying, the heavens" shall be "opened," and the
+peace-bringing spirit fall dove-like on our meek hearts. For us,
+too, when the shadow of our cross lies black and gaunt upon our
+paths, and our souls are troubled, communion with heaven will bring
+the assurance, audible to our ears at least, that God will glorify
+Himself even in us. If, after many a weary day, we seek to hold
+fellowship with God as He sought it on the Mount of Olives, or among
+the solitudes of the midnight hills, or out in the morning freshness
+of the silent wilderness, like Him we shall have men gathering
+around us to hear us speak when we come forth from the secret place
+of the Most High. If our prayer, like His, goes before our mighty
+deeds, the voice that first pierced the skies will penetrate the
+tomb, and make the dead stir in their grave-clothes. If our longing,
+trustful look is turned to the heavens, we shall not speak in vain
+on earth when we say, "Be opened."
+
+Brethren, we cannot do without the communion which our Master
+needed. Do we delight in what strengthened Him? Does our work rest
+upon the basis of inward fellowship with God which underlay His?
+Alas! that our pattern should be our rebuke, and the readiest way to
+force home our faults on our consciences should be the contemplation
+of the life which we say that we try to copy!
+
+We have here pity for the evils we would remove set forth by the
+Lord's sigh.
+
+What was it that drew that sigh from the heart of Jesus? One poor
+man stood before Him, by no means the most sorely afflicted of the
+many wretched ones whom He healed. But He saw in him more than a
+solitary instance of physical infirmities. Did there not roll darkly
+before His thoughts that whole weltering sea of sorrow that moans
+round the world, of which here is but one drop that He could dry
+up? Did there not rise black and solid against the clear blue, to
+which He had been looking, the mass of man's sin, of which these
+bodily infirmities were but a poor symbol as well as a consequence?
+He saw as none but He could bear to see, the miserable realities
+of human life. His knowledge of all that man might be, of all that
+the most of men were becoming, His power of contemplating in one
+awful aggregate the entire sum of sorrows and sins, laid upon His
+heart a burden which none but He has ever endured. His communion
+with Heaven deepened the dark shadow on earth, and the eyes that
+looked up to God and saw Him could not but see foulness where others
+suspected none, and murderous messengers of hell walking in darkness
+unpenetrated by mortal sight. And all that pain of clearer knowledge
+of the sorrowfulness of sorrow, and the sinfulness of sin, was laid
+upon a heart in which was no selfishness to blunt the sharp edge
+of the pain nor any sin to stagnate the pity that flowed from the
+wound. To Jesus Christ, life was a daily martyrdom before death had
+"made the sacrifice complete," and He bore our griefs, and carried
+our sorrows through many a weary hour before He "bare them in his
+own body on the tree." Therefore, "Bear ye one another's burden, and
+so fulfil the law" which Christ obeyed, becomes a command for all
+who would draw men to Him. And true sorrow, a sharp and real sense
+of pain, becomes indispensable as preparation for, and accompaniment
+to, our work.
+
+Mark how in us, as in our Lord, the sigh of compassion is connected
+with the look to heaven. It follows upon that gaze. The evils are
+more real, more terrible, by their startling contrast with the
+unshadowed light which lives above cloudracks and mists. It is
+a sharp shock to turn from the free sweep of the heavens, starry
+and radiant, to the sights that meet us in "this dim spot which
+men call earth." Thus habitual communion with God is the root of
+the truest and purest compassion. It does not withdraw us from our
+fellow feeling with our brethren, it cultivates no isolation for
+undisturbed beholding of God. It at once supplies a standard by
+which to measure the greatness of man's godlessness, and therefore
+of his gloom, and a motive for laying the pain of these upon our
+hearts, as if they were our own. He has looked into the heavens to
+little purpose who has not learned how bad and how sad the world now
+is, and how God bends over it in pitying love.
+
+And that same fellowship, which will clear our eyes and soften
+our hearts, is also the one consolation which we have when our
+sense of all the ills that flesh is heir to becomes deep, near
+to despair. When one thinks of the real facts of human life, and
+tries to conceive of the frightful meanness and passion and hate
+and wretchedness, that has been howling and shrieking and gibbering
+and groaning through dreary millenniums, one's brain reels, and
+hope seems to be absurdity, and joy a sin against our fellows, as
+a feast would be in a house next door to where was a funeral. I do
+not wonder at settled sorrow falling upon men of vivid imagination,
+keen moral sense, and ordinary sensitiveness, when they brood long
+on the world as it is. But I do wonder at the superficial optimism
+which goes on with its little prophecies about human progress, and
+its rose-colored pictures of human life, and sees nothing to strike
+it dumb for ever in men's writhing miseries, blank failures, and
+hopeless end. Ah! brethren, if it were not for the heavenward look,
+how could we bear the sight of earth! "We see not yet all things put
+under him." No, God knows, far enough off from that. Man's folly,
+man's submission to the creatures he should rule, man's agonies, and
+man's transgression, are a grim contrast to the psalmist's vision.
+If we had only earth to look to, despair of the race, exprest in
+settled melancholy apathy, or in fierce cynicism, were the wisest
+attitude. But there is more within our view than earth; "we see
+Jesus"; we look to the heaven, and as we behold the true man, we see
+more than ever, indeed, how far from that pattern we all are; but we
+can bear the thought of what men as yet have been, when we see that
+perfect example of what men shall be. The root and the consolation
+of our sorrow for man's evils is communion with God.
+
+We have here loving contact with those whom we would help, set forth
+in the Lord's touch.
+
+The reasons for the variety observable in Christ's method of
+communicating supernatural blessing were, probably, too closely
+connected with unrecorded differences in the spiritual conditions of
+the recipients to be distinctly traceable by us. But tho we cannot
+tell why a particular method was employed in a given case, why now a
+word, and now a symbolic action, now the touch of His hand, and now
+the hem of His garment, appeared to be the vehicles of His power, we
+can discern the significance of these divers ways, and learn great
+lessons from them all.
+
+His touch was sometimes obviously the result of what one may venture
+to call instinctive tenderness, as when He lifted the little
+children in His arms and laid His hands upon their heads. It was, I
+suppose, always the spontaneous expression of love and compassion,
+even when it was something more.
+
+The touch of His hand on the ghastly glossiness of the leper's skin
+was, no doubt, His assertion of priestly functions, and of elevation
+above all laws of defilement; but what was it to the poor outcast,
+who for years had never felt the warm contact of flesh and blood? It
+always indicated that He Himself was the source of healing and life.
+It always exprest His identification of Himself with sorrow and
+sickness. So that it is in principle analogous to, and may be taken
+as illustrative of, that transcendent act whereby He became flesh,
+and dwelt among us. Indeed, the very word by which our Lord's taking
+the blind man by the hand is described in the chapter following our
+text is that employed in the Epistle to the Hebrews when, dealing
+with the true brotherhood of Jesus, the writer says, "He took not
+hold of angels, but of the seed of Abraham he taketh hold." Christ's
+touch is His willing contact with man's infirmities and sins, that
+He may strengthen and hallow.
+
+And the lesson is one of universal application. Wherever men would
+help their fellows, this is a prime requisite, that the would-be
+helper should come down to the level of those whom he desires to
+aid. If we wish to teach, we must stoop to think the scholar's
+thoughts. The master who has forgotten his boyhood will have poor
+success. If we would lead to purer emotions, we must try to enter
+into the lower feelings which we labor to elevate. It is of no use
+to stand at the mouth of the alleys we wish to cleanse, with our
+skirts daintily gathered about us, and smelling-bottle in hand, to
+preach homilies on the virtue of cleanliness. We must go in among
+the filth, and handle it, if we want to have it cleared away. The
+degraded must feel that we do not shrink from them, or we shall do
+them no good. The leper, shunned by all, and ashamed of himself
+because everybody loathes him, hungers in his hovel for the grasp of
+a hand that does not care for defilement, if it can bring cleansing.
+Even in regard to common material helps the principle holds good.
+We are too apt to cast our doles to the poor like the bones to
+a dog, and then to wonder at what we are pleased to think men's
+ingratitude. A benefit may be so conferred as to hurt more than a
+blow; and we cannot be surprized if so-called charity which is given
+with contempt and a sense of superiority, should be received with
+a scowl, and chafe a man's spirit like a fetter. Such gifts bless
+neither him who gives nor him who takes. We must put our hearts
+into them, if we would win hearts by them. We must be ready, like
+our Master, to take blind beggars by the hand, if we would bless or
+help them. The despair and opprobrium of our modern civilization,
+the gulf growing wider and deeper between Dives and Lazarus, between
+Belgravia and Whitechapel, the mournful failure of legalized help,
+and of delegated efforts to bridge it over, the darkening ignorance,
+the animal sensuousness, the utter heathenism that lives in every
+town of England, within a stone's throw of Christian houses, and
+near enough to hear the sound of public worship, will yield to
+nothing but that sadly forgotten law which enjoins personal contact
+with the sinful and the suffering, as one chief condition of raising
+them from the black mire in which they welter.
+
+The effect of much well-meant Christian effort is simply to
+irritate. People are very quick to catch delicate intonations which
+reveal a secret sense, "how much better, wiser, more devout I am
+than these people!" and wherever a trace of that appears in our
+work, the good of it is apt to be marred. We all know how hackneyed
+the charge of spiritual pride and Pharisaic self-complacency is,
+and, thank God, how unjust it often is. But averse as men may be to
+the truths which humble, and willing as they may be to assume that
+the very effort to present these to others on our parts implies a
+claim which mortifies, we may at least learn from the threadbare
+calumny, what strikes men about our position, and what rouses their
+antaganism to us. It is allowable to be taught by our enemies,
+especially when it is such a lesson as this, that we must carefully
+divest our evangelistic work of apparent pretensions to superiority,
+and take our stand by the side of those to whom we speak. We cannot
+lecture men into the love of Christ. We can but win them to it by
+showing Christ's love to them; and not the least important element
+in that process is the exhibition of our own love. We have a gospel
+to speak of which the very heart is, that the Son of God stooped
+to become one with the lowliest and most sinful; and how can that
+gospel be spoken with power unless we, too, stoop like Him?
+
+We have to echo the invitation, "Learn of me, for I am lowly in
+heart"; and how can such divine words flow from lips into which like
+grace has not been poured? Our theme is a Savior who shrunk from no
+sinner, who gladly consorted with publicans and harlots, who laid
+His hand on pollution, and His heart, full of God and of love, on
+hearts reeking with sin; and how can our message correspond with our
+theme if, even in delivering it, we are saying to ourselves, "The
+temple of the Lord are we: this people which knoweth not the law is
+curst"? Let us beware of the very real danger which besets us in
+this matter, and earnestly seek to make ourselves one with those
+whom we would gather into Christ, by actual familiarity with their
+condition, and by identification of ourselves in feeling with them,
+after the example of that greatest of Christian teachers who became
+"all things to all men, that by all means he might gain some";
+after the higher example, which Paul followed, of that dear Lord
+who, being highest, descended to the lowest, and in the days of His
+humiliation was not content with speaking words of power from afar,
+nor abhorred the contact of mortality and disease and loathsome
+corruption; but laid His hands upon death, and it lived; upon
+sickness, and it was whole; on rotting leprosy, and it was sweet as
+the flesh of a little child.
+
+The same principle might be further applied to our Christian work,
+as affecting the form in which we should present the truth. The
+sympathetic identification of ourselves with those to whom we try to
+carry the gospel will certainly make us wise to know how to shape
+our message. Seeing with their eyes, we shall be able to graduate
+the light. Thinking their thoughts, and having in some measure
+succeeded, by force of sheer community of feeling, in having as it
+were got inside their minds, we shall unconsciously, and without
+effort, be led to such aspects of Christ's all-comprehensive truth
+as they most need. There will be no shooting over people's heads,
+if we love them well enough to understand them. There will be no
+toothless generalities, when our interest in men keeps their actual
+condition and temptations clear before us. There will be no flinging
+fossil doctrines at them from a height, as if Christ's blest gospel
+were, in another than the literal sense, "a stone of offense," if
+we have taken our place on their level. And without such sympathy,
+these and a thousand other weaknesses and faults will certainly
+vitiate much of our Christian effort.
+
+We have here the true healing power and the consciousness of
+wielding it set forth in the Lord's authoritative word.
+
+All the rest of His action was either the spontaneous expression of
+His true participation in human sorrow, or a merciful veiling of His
+glory that sense-bound eyes might see it the better. But the word
+was the utterance of His will, and that was omnipotent. The hand
+laid on the sick, the blind or the deaf was not even the channel of
+His power. The bare putting forth of His energy was all-sufficient.
+In these we see the loving, pitying man. In this blazes forth, yet
+more loving, yet more compassionate, the effulgence of manifest God.
+Therefore so often do we read the very syllables with which His
+"voice then shook the earth," vibrating through all the framework of
+the material universe. Therefore do the gospels bid us listen when
+He rebukes the fever, and it departs; when He says to the demons,
+"Go," and they go; when one word louder in its human articulation
+than the howling wind hushes the surges; when "Talitha cumi" brings
+back the fair young spirit from dreary wanderings among the shades
+of death. Therefore was it a height of faith not found in Israel
+when the Gentile soldier, whose training had taught him the power of
+absolute authority, as heathenism had driven him to long for a man
+who would speak with the imperial sway of a god, recognized in His
+voice an all-commanding power. From of old, the very signature of
+divinity has been declared to be "He spake, and it was done"; and
+He, the breath of whose lips could set in motion material changes,
+is that eternal Word, by whom all things were made.
+
+What unlimited consciousness of sovereign dominion sounds in that
+imperative from His autocratic lips! It is spoken in deaf ears, but
+He knows that it will be heard. He speaks as the fontal source,
+not as the recipient channel of healing. He anticipates no delay,
+no resistance. There is neither effort nor uncertainty in the curt
+command. He is sure that He has power, and He is sure that the power
+is His own.
+
+There is no analogy here between us and Him. Alone, fronting the
+whole race of man, He stands--utterer of a word which none can say
+after Him, possessor of unshared might, and of His fulness do we all
+receive. But even from that divine authority and solitary sovereign
+consciousness we may gather lessons not altogether aside from the
+purpose of our meeting here to-day. Of His fulness we have received,
+and the power of the word on His lips may teach us that of His
+word, even on ours, as the victorious certainty with which He spake
+His will of healing may remind us of the confidence with which it
+becomes us to proclaim His name.
+
+His will was almighty then. Is it less mighty or less loving now?
+Does it not gather all the world in the sweep of its mighty purpose
+of mercy? His voice pierced then into the dull cold ear of death,
+and has it become weaker since? His word spoken by Him was enough
+to banish the foul spirits that run riot, swine-like, in the garden
+of God in man's soul, trampling down and eating up its flowers and
+fruitage; is the word spoken of Him less potent to cast them out?
+Were not all the mighty deeds which He wrought by the breath of
+His lips on men's bodies prophecies of the yet mightier which His
+Will of love, and the utterance of that Will by stammering lips,
+may work on men's souls. Let us not in our faint-heartedness number
+up our failures, the deaf that will not hear, the dumb that will
+not speak, His praise; nor unbelievingly say Christ's own word was
+mighty, but the word concerning Christ is weak on our lips. Not so;
+our lips are unclean, and our words are weak, but His word--the
+utterance of His loving will that men should be saved--is what it
+always was and always will be. We have it, brethren, to proclaim.
+Did our Master countenance the faithless contrast between the living
+force of His word when He dwelt on earth, and the feebleness of it
+as He speaks through His servant? If He did, what did He mean when
+He said, "He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do
+also, and greater works than these shall he do, because I go unto
+the Father"?
+
+
+
+
+CROSBY
+
+THE PREPARED WORM
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+
+Howard Crosby, Presbyterian divine, was born in New York City in
+1826, educated at New York University, graduating in 1851, was
+professor of Greek at that institution until 1859, when he was
+elected to the same chair in Rutgers College. He was pastor of the
+First Presbyterian Church of New Brunswick, N. J., for the two
+years ending in 1863, when he assumed charge of the Fourth Avenue
+Presbyterian Church, New York. From 1870 to 1881 he was chancellor
+of the University of New York. His activities in the cause of
+social reform were conspicuous and he exercized his influence in
+organizing the Society for the Prevention of Crime over which he
+presided for some years. His energies were also directed against
+the illegal liquor trade. As a scholar he was prominent among the
+American revisers of the New Testament and edited a new edition of
+the "_Oedipus Tyrannus_" of Sophocles. He died in 1891.
+
+
+
+
+CROSBY
+
+1826-1891
+
+THE PREPARED WORM[3]
+
+  [3] Copyright, 1884, _The Homiletic Review_, New York.
+
+     _But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and
+     it smote the gourd that it withered._--Jonah iv., 7.
+
+
+Just when Jonah had felt the delight of the shadowing foliage and
+had begun to promise himself a most comfortable retreat against
+an Assyrian sun, the broad-leaved gourd withered. The morning had
+arrived and the heat was becoming more intense, when the glad
+shelter was removed, and the prophet's head was smitten with the
+scorching rays. "It is better for me to die than live," exclaimed
+the fainting Jonah. And what caused this calamity? A worm. And is
+that all? No! God prepared the worm. The worm was under orders
+from heaven, and while he, doubtless, ate into the gourd, with a
+good appetite, following the bent of his natural constitution,
+nevertheless he was acting in direct obedience to God. God prepared
+the worm. And yet in the sixth verse we read that God prepared the
+gourd. This is the record. "And the Lord God prepared a gourd and
+made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his
+head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceedingly glad
+of the gourd." And then follows immediately: "But God prepared a
+worm, when the morning rose the next day, and he smote the gourd
+that it withered." Does God, then, build up in order to destroy?
+And does He give comfort to His creatures in order to torment them
+by its removal? So reasons the carnal heart, ready to complain,
+and looking on all God's conduct in its superficial aspect, its
+own selfish and sensuous advantage being the criterion of all its
+judgments. It is an easy counsel of Satan, when we are fainting
+by a withered gourd. "Curse God and die," the selfish soul is all
+ripe for such advice,--desperation is more inviting than faith. And
+there are but few Jobs who can resist the appeal to discontent and
+anger, in the face of Satan and wife combined, for when the natural
+depravity of our own hearts is supported by the entreaties of our
+nearest and dearest friends, hell's heaviest engine is brought
+against us. "I do well to be angry, even unto death," is the usual
+style in which we greet the afflictive providence of God. But a
+faith like Job's, that learns the lesson which the sorrow teaches,
+is rewarded, as was Job's, by the presence and communion of God, and
+by a satisfaction with His holy and righteous will.
+
+Let us endeavor to understand some of the facts connected with our
+afflictions, as disclosed by the Word of God, in order that we may
+be prepared to follow Job rather than Jonah.
+
+I. In the first place, God is the author of affliction. "Affliction
+cometh not forth out of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out
+of the ground." God asserts most positively in His Word, that all
+the losses in the world are sent by Him. He calls them chastisements
+from His fatherly hand. "I make peace and create evil," saith the
+Lord. This is not evil in the sense of wickedness. God does not
+create wickedness--but it is evil in the sense of affliction and
+trouble, the opposite of peace in the contrasted clause, "I make
+peace and create evil." That is, God is the author equally of
+prosperity and adversity to His creatures. If it were not so, we
+should have to imagine certain powers in God's universe not subject
+to His almighty control, which would be an absurdity. "Shall there
+be evil in a city and the Lord hath not done it?" It is in this
+sense of God's hand in adversity that the psalmist cries, "Thou, O
+God, hast proved us: thou hast tried us as silver is tried; thou
+broughtest us into the net, thou laidest affliction upon our loins";
+and again, "Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast afflicted me
+with all thy waves." God may send affliction by permitting Satan to
+afflict, but still God is the author of the affliction. He could
+prevent it, but He permits it. Indeed, it is, perhaps, true that all
+our losses and injuries in this world are Satan's inflictions, that
+this ever-active spirit of evil is constantly using the agencies of
+the natural world for our harm and destruction, and we are preserved
+simply by the interposing and restraining providence of God. When
+Satan wished to afflict Job, he sought and gained permission of
+the Lord. Job's calamities were clearly Satan's blows, and yet Job
+addresses God, "Why hast thou set me as a mark against thee, so
+that I am a burden to myself?" So, again, the diseased woman, who
+heard our Savior's healing words on the Sabbath day and was cured,
+is described by the same divine Physician (whose diagnosis cannot
+be questioned) as one whom Satan had bound for eighteen years.
+Under such examples, I cannot believe we err in attributing all
+our sicknesses and pains of body to the permitted agency of our
+arch-adversary.
+
+They are tokens of his power over our race, for he is the prince
+of this world, and it is only in God that we find protection from
+his cruel scepter. God suffers us to feel his inflictions in order
+to remove our affections from the world and to place them more
+devotedly upon our Heavenly Father. God is thus most truly the
+author of affliction, whatever may be the agencies He uses in the
+course of His providence.
+
+II. He uses the natural laws of the world as His agents in
+afflicting. These laws may be thus used permissively by Satan in
+other ways than in sickness or not, but the text shows us clearly
+that God so uses them. "God prepared a worm." There is a world of
+instruction in that brief statement. It infinitely transcends the
+science of the naturalist. Bring the most learned explorers of
+nature together to this gourd of Jonah, and show them this little
+worm creeping toward the thick stalk. Let them see it move its many
+feet and flexible body till it reaches the goal of its instinct. Now
+it uses its gnawing jaws upon the woody fibre; deeper and deeper
+it pierces the stem; now it reaches the innermost pith, and again
+returns upon its course. The current of the gourd's life is marred;
+the leaves droop, and its shelter is gone. Now, ye scientific men,
+what made that gourd wither? Hear them philosophize. Yon worm is
+a caterpillar, whose appropriate food is the _ricinus communis_,
+this very gourd with its palmate leaves and red-tinted flower. The
+worm has merely followed the impulses of its nature in seeking that
+tree-like plant, and the equally natural result of its feeding upon
+the stalk has been the failure of the tree's nourishment, and with
+the failure the foliage has, of course, withered. Well, is that
+all science can say? Yes, all. It is little more than that a horse
+is a horse. It explains nothing but the most proximate causes.
+It classifies facts, and then leaves us gaping into the abyss of
+causation as ignorant as ever. Four words from the Bible carry
+us back to the ultimate cause, the first mover in this gourd's
+withering. Science talks of laws, but these four words go behind all
+laws to the Maker of laws, to Him in whose hands are all things.
+"God prepared a worm." What! says science; drag God in to explain
+anything? Nay, God drags all in to effect His plans. He has made all
+things, however great, however small, for Himself. And these things
+which you call laws are only the methods of His activity, and these
+methods He has formed for the very ends which He accomplishes by
+them. The worm which crawls to Jonah's gourd was created by God to
+destroy that plant, and the law of that worm's movement was ordained
+for that destruction, as well as for all else which it accomplishes.
+The mind is satisfied when it finds a mind, a purpose, a plan in
+every event which it observes, and the pious heart is rejoiced to
+know that it is a Father's mind and purpose and plan which directs
+every movement, even to the crawling of a worm. "God prepared a
+gourd--God prepared a worm"; no accident brought the gourd there;
+no accident brought the worm there. God stood in a like relation to
+both. He sent the gourd, through nature, to comfort Jonah. He sent
+the worm, through nature, to trouble Jonah. Nature is a forlorn
+object to study unless we find it a mirror to reflect God. It is
+only as we see it, the result of His handiwork and His instrument
+in governing His creatures, that nature has a glory. Then it is
+ennobled; then it has a meaning that no mere naturalist can fathom,
+but which renders valuable the researches of science with its
+classifications.
+
+III. God is just in afflicting us. If we look at God simply as the
+Maker and Owner of His creatures, we could easily deduce His right
+to afflict. "Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine
+own?" says the Creator; and he must be a daring soul who disputes
+the force of this question. "Shall the thing formed say to him that
+formed it, 'Why hast thou made me thus?'" But we are not left to
+this view of God's right to afflict. God has entered into covenant
+with us. He has said, "Do ye according to my commandments, and ye
+shall live." This was the purport of His very first communication
+to our race in Adam. It treated of obedience and reward, of
+disobedience and punishment. And what is the record of our race
+since? Have we obeyed or have we disobeyed? Is there the slightest
+claim in us for the reward? Is there not the most complete demand
+for the punishment? What sin in the whole catalog of sin has been
+omitted by man? Enmity to man and God, pride, ingratitude, and
+rebellion have marked the history of mankind. And are you and
+I exceptions? Look at our years of worldliness, years of sinful
+affections, years of opposition to the Word and Spirit, years of
+selfishness, and then let us confess our full participation in the
+general depravity. We are unclean in our natures and by practise,
+and so, under the covenant which our Maker was pleased to form for
+us, we can only deserve punishment.
+
+Do we then complain in affliction? Surely, if God would be just in
+casting us down to hell for our rebellion and disobedience, He is
+just in laying upon us our earthly afflictions. Shall the Jonah, who
+ran away from the Lord's commandment, and afterward flung His anger
+in the face of His God, shall such an one feel that God is unjust in
+preparing a worm to destroy his gourd? By what arithmetic is such a
+balance cast? It becomes us, rather, to take up the words of David
+and cry, "I acknowledge my transgression; and my sin is ever before
+me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned and done this evil in thy
+sight, that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be
+clear when thou judgest."
+
+IV. God afflicts us in His love. With all Jonah's sins against
+God, it was not to punish him that God prepared a worm. God is
+long-suffering and withholds punishment in His desire that all men
+may come to repentance. If punishment were God's aim in affliction,
+our afflictions would be infinitely greater than they are, for
+punishment would be apportioned to desert, and our desert is eternal
+condemnation; God's aim in affliction is our restoration, our
+improvement. By it He shakes us off from our dependence upon a world
+which, however it might please us for the moment, would cheat us
+sadly in the end. By it He reminds us of Himself as our source of
+strength and happiness, and then brings us to the unfailing fountain
+of peace, which our earthly prosperity would hide from our eyes. By
+it He teaches us to aspire to higher spiritual attainment, to grow
+in grace, to cultivate a more heavenly disposition of mind and heart.
+
+These are the uses of adversity. Christians who have come through
+scenes of trial, and whose thankful declaration is, "It was good for
+me to be afflicted," certify to these blest results. They tell us
+that they believe nothing else but the severe losses they sustained
+could have freed them from the fascinations of the world--nothing
+else could have made holy things so delightful to their soul. Now,
+such an experience is not the result of God's anger but of God's
+love. However harsh the voice of God may seem to us, it is yet a
+Father's voice, with a Father's heart behind it. It is, therefore,
+meant not to drive us away to seek a hiding corner, but to bring us
+directly to Himself. The same love which sent the affliction will
+receive the afflicted. God prepares gourds, and God prepares worms;
+and He uses each to build up faith and holiness in the human heart.
+In earnest seeking after God, in complete consecration to His holy
+will and service, is to be found the surest avoidance of the worm.
+If we can learn our lesson without the worm, the worm will not
+be sent to gnaw our gourd to ruins. The nearer our life to Jesus
+the more free shall we be from the sting of affliction. Had Jonah
+been an obedient and submissive prophet his gourd would not have
+withered. But alas! Jonah and ourselves need correction to keep our
+faces heavenward. Forgetfulness and indulgence plant their weeds in
+our Lord's garden, and they must be rooted up by force. It is for
+our own good, and it is infinite love which decrees it.
+
+Now note some inferences from the subject under consideration.
+
+First. If God afflicts, how foolish it is to go to the world for
+relief? Is the world greater than God? We may be sure that any
+comfort the world can give, as against God's affliction, must be
+dangerous. It is a contest with God, which God may allow to be
+successful, but only for the greater condemnation thereafter. The
+world's relief is not a cure but an opiate. It stupefies, but does
+not give health and strength. The world's relief is a temporary
+application--a lull before a fiercer storm. The world's relief
+is a determination not to heed the lesson God sends us; it is the
+invention of frivolity, and not the device of wisdom. More slumber,
+more pleasure, and more worldly care are three favorite medicaments
+the world uses in these cases--anodynes which only weaken the system
+and prepare it for more fearful suffering. God wishes to awaken
+the mind by affliction, and man immediately prescribes a narcotic.
+The great Physician brings the affliction for our good; we turn to
+quackery to destroy the effects of the divine medicine. Ah! the
+day is coming when God shall appear as no longer our Savior but
+our Judge, if this be our treatment of His love. "Because I have
+called and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand and no man
+regarded; but ye have set at naught all my counsel, and would none
+of my reproof; I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when
+your fear cometh; when your fear cometh as desolation, and your
+destruction cometh as a whirlwind."
+
+Secondly. If God prepares worms, then worms at once form an
+interesting study for us. We cannot see a caterpillar upon the leaf,
+but we know God has a mission for that worm. He is an ambassador
+of the Most High on his way to perform his Master's will. The
+headache, which unfits us for our ordinary occupation, is more
+than a headache. It is the voice of our God. Let us listen to the
+next headache and hear what God would have us learn. Every bird
+and beast, every raindrop and sunbeam, every breath of wind, and
+every event, however small, are the writings of a heavenly scribe.
+Let us study God's providence. It is all a message of love to us.
+We shall find out infinitely more in this study than in deciphering
+the hieroglyphics of Egypt. We shall find correction, expostulation,
+comfort, encouragement and instruction; and the more we look,
+the more we shall see. We shall become adepts in the high art of
+interpreting the acts of God toward us, and in this, as in prayer,
+hold constant communion with our divine Redeemer.
+
+Thirdly. When our gourds wither it is a proof that God is near.
+We should be ready to say with Jacob, "Surely the Lord is in this
+place." Prayer and humiliation are now our appropriate exercises.
+God has put forth His hand to summon us to these duties. Our gourd
+is gone, but our God is not gone, He can protect far better than a
+gourd. He will more than make up all our losses. Let us go to Him,
+and our dark night will make the day-dawn more brilliant. My dying
+fellow-sinner, do not, I beseech you, grow angry under God's severe
+dispensations. You do not well to be angry. God is near you with a
+blessing in His hand for you. He has a lesson for you to learn which
+will make you wise unto salvation.
+
+Say, will you learn it? If not, God is near you to condemn you. Oh!
+dread the alternative, and be wise to say in your heart, "Blest be
+my God and Father, who prepared the worm to destroy my broad-leaved
+gourd!"
+
+
+
+
+DALE
+
+THE ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+Robert William Dale was born in London, England, in 1829 and died
+in 1895. His long and fruitful ministry was confined to Birmingham,
+where he preached with great power. He believed, as he once said,
+that if a minister had anything from God to say to his fellow men,
+they would gladly come to hear him. He favored extemporaneous
+preaching, was a devoted student of English style, and advocated
+in his Yale lectures a more thorough attention to this important
+subject. He said:
+
+"There is no reason why, when you have at your service the noblest
+language for an orator that was ever spoken by the human race,
+you should be satisfied with the threadbare phrases, the tawdry,
+tarnished finery, the patched and ragged garments, with the smell
+like that of the stock of a second-hand clothes shop, with which
+half-educated and ambitious declaimers are content to cover the
+nakedness of their thought. You can do something better than this,
+and you should resolve to do it."
+
+
+
+
+
+DALE
+
+1829-1895
+
+THE ARGUMENT FROM EXPERIENCE[4]
+
+  [4] Reprinted by permission of Messrs. A. C. Armstrong & Son.
+
+
+There are large numbers of people who suppose that modern science
+and modern criticism have destroyed the foundations of faith, and
+who can not understand how it is possible, in these days, for
+intelligent, open-minded, educated men to believe in the Lord Jesus
+Christ.
+
+There are many persons who are convinced that the ascertained
+conclusions of modern science and of modern criticism are
+destructive of the authority which has been attributed both to the
+Jewish and the Christian Scriptures, that the traditional opinions
+concerning the authorship and the dates of many of the books of the
+Old Testament are false; and that most of the writings contained
+in the New Testament are spurious. Or, if some of the extreme
+conclusions of the destructive criticism are not regarded as finally
+established, it is known that great names can be quoted for, as
+well as against, them. And as it is assumed that the Jewish and the
+Christian Scriptures are the foundations of Christian faith, that
+we must believe in the genuineness and historical trustworthiness
+of these ancient books, and even in their inspiration, before we
+can believe in Christ, they argue that, until these discussions are
+finally closed in favor of the traditional opinions, faith in Christ
+is impossible. The controversies have not, in any large number
+of cases, destroyed faith where faith already existed; but where
+faith does not exist, they appear to very many persons to create an
+insuperable obstacle to faith.
+
+To such persons, if they are serious and well informed, there is
+something perplexing in the persistency of the faith of the great
+majority of Christian believers. Among those who remain Christian
+there are men whose intellectual vigor, patience, and keenness
+are equal to their own; men who are their equals in general
+intellectual culture, and who know as much as they know about the
+currents of modern thought; candid men; men who are incorruptible
+in their loyalty to truth; men who have a due sense of the immense
+importance, in relation to the higher life of the human race, of the
+questions at issue:
+
+How is it that the faith in Christ of such men is unshaken?
+
+The substance of the answer that I make here to the question, why
+it is that those who believe in Christ continue to believe, may be
+given in a single sentence: Whatever may have been the original
+grounds of their faith, their faith has been verified in their own
+personal experience.
+
+They have trusted in Christ for certain great and wonderful things,
+and they have received great and wonderful things. They have not
+perhaps received precisely what they expected when their Christian
+life began, for the kingdom of heaven cannot be really known until
+a man has entered into it; but what they have received assures them
+that Christ is alive, that He is within reach, and that He is the
+Savior and Lord of men.
+
+That they have received these blessings in answer to their faith in
+Christ is a matter of personal consciousness. They know it, as they
+know that fire burns.
+
+Their experience varies. Some of them would say they can recall acts
+of Christ in which His personal volition and His supernatural power
+were as definitely manifested as in any of the miracles recorded
+in the four Gospels. They were struggling unsuccessfully with some
+evil temper--with envy, jealousy, personal ambition--and could not
+subdue it. They hated it; they hated themselves for being under its
+tyranny; but expel it they could not. If it seemed supprest for a
+time, it returned; and returned with its malignant power increased
+rather than diminished. They scourged themselves with scorpions
+for yielding to it; still they yielded. In their despair they
+appealed to Christ; and in a moment the evil fires were quenched,
+and they were never rekindled. These instantaneous deliverances are
+perhaps exceptional; but to those who can recall them they carry an
+irresistible conviction that the living Christ has heard their cry
+and answered them.
+
+The more ordinary experiences of the Christian life, tho less
+striking, are not less conclusive. The proof that Christ has
+heard prayer is not always concentrated into a moment, but is
+more commonly spread over large tracts of time. Prayer is offered
+for an increase of moral strength in resisting temptation, or for
+the disappearance of reluctance in the discharge of duties which
+are distasteful, or for a more gracious and kindly temper, or for
+patience and courage in bearing trouble, or for self-control, or for
+relief from exhausting and fruitless anxiety; and the answer comes.
+It comes gradually, but still it comes. We had lost hope. It seemed
+as if all our moral vigor was dying down, and as if nothing could
+restore it. The tide was slowly ebbing, and we were powerless to
+recall the retreating waters; but after we prayed it ceased to ebb;
+for a time it seemed stationary; then it began to flow; and tho with
+many of us it has never reached the flood, the wholesome waters have
+renewed the energy and the joy of life.
+
+Or we prayed to Christ to liberate us from some evil habit. The
+chains did not fall away at His touch, like the chains of Peter
+at the touch of the angel; but in some mysterious way they were
+loosened, and at the same time we received accessions of strength.
+The old habit continued to trouble us; it still impeded our
+movements: but we could move; we recovered some measure of freedom,
+and were conscious that we were slaves no longer. There still
+remained a mechanical and automatic tendency to the evil ways of
+thinking, speaking, or acting; but we had become vigilant and alert,
+and were prompt to resist the tendency as soon as it began to work;
+and we were strong enough to master it. In the course of time the
+tendency became weaker and weaker, and at last, in some cases, it
+almost disappeared.
+
+Some men have appealed to Christ when they have been seized with
+a great horror through the discovery of their guilt. It was not
+the awful penalty which menaces the impenitent that haunted and
+terrified them. Nor was their distress occasioned chiefly by the
+consciousness of moral evil. They feared the penalty, and they were
+humiliated and shamed by the contrast between ideal goodness and
+their own moral and spiritual life; but what stung and tortured
+them, sunk them into despair, filled heaven and earth with a
+darkness that could be felt, and made life intolerable, was their
+guilt--guilt which they had incurred by their past sins, and which
+they continued to incur by their present sinfulness.
+
+When once this sense of guilt fastens itself on a man, he cannot
+shake it off at will. The keen agony may gradually pass into a dull,
+dead pain; and after a time, the sensibility of the soul may seem to
+be wholly lost; but a man can never be sure that the horror will not
+return.
+
+The real nature of this experience is best seen when it has been
+occasioned by the grosser and more violent forms of crime. Men
+who have committed murder, for example, have been driven almost
+insane by the memory of their evil deed. Their agony may have had
+nothing in it of the nature of repentance; they were not distrest
+because their crime had revealed to them the malignity and the
+fierce strength of their passions; they had no desire to become
+gentle and kindly. They were filled with horror and remorse by
+their awful guilt. They felt that the crime was theirs, and would
+always continue to be theirs; that it would be theirs if it remained
+concealed as truly as if it were known; indeed, it seemed to be in
+some terrible way more truly theirs so long as the secret was kept.
+It was not the fear of punishment that convulsed them; they have
+sometimes brought on themselves public indignation and abhorrence,
+and have condemned themselves to the gallows by confessing their
+crime in order to obtain relief from their agony.
+
+Suppose that a man possest by this great horror discovered that, in
+some wonderful way, the dark and damning stain on his conscience had
+disappeared; that, altho he had done the deed, the iron chain which
+bound him to the criminality of it had been broken; that before
+God and man and his own conscience he was free from the guilt of
+it;--the supposition, in its completeness, is an impossible one; but
+if it were possible, the discovery would lift the man out of the
+darkness of hell into the light of heaven.
+
+But to large numbers of Christian men a discovery which in substance
+is identical with this has actually come in response to their trust
+in Christ. Nothing is more intensely real than the sense of guilt;
+it is as real as the eternal distinction between right and wrong
+in which it is rooted. And nothing is more intensely real than
+the sense of release from guilt which comes from the discovery
+and assurance of the remission of sins. The evil things which a
+man has done cannot be undone; but when they have been forgiven
+through Christ, the iron chain which so bound him to them as to
+make the guilt of them eternally his has been broken; before God
+and his own conscience he is no longer guilty of them. This is the
+Christian mystery of justification, which, according to Paul--and
+his words have been confirmed in the experience of millions of
+Christian men--is "the power of God unto salvation to every one that
+believeth." It changes darkness into light; despair into victorious
+hope; prostration into buoyancy and vigor. It is one of the supreme
+motives to Christian living, and it makes Christian living possible.
+The man who has received this great deliverance is no longer a
+convict, painfully observing all prison rules with the hope of
+shortening his sentence, but a child in the home of God.
+
+There are experiences of another kind by which the faith of
+Christian men is verified. Of these one of the most decisive and
+most wonderful is the consciousness that through Christ he has
+passed into the eternal and divine order. He belongs to two worlds.
+He is just as certain that he is environed by things unseen and
+eternal as that he is environed by things seen and temporal. In the
+power of the life given to him in the new birth he has entered into
+the kingdom of God. He is conscious that that diviner region is
+now the native land of his soul. It is there that he finds perfect
+rest and perfect freedom. It is a relief to escape to its eternal
+peace and glory from the agitations and vicissitudes, the sorrows
+and successes, of this transitory world. It is not always that
+he is vividly conscious of belonging to that eternal order; this
+supreme blessedness is reserved for the great hours of life; but
+he knows that it lies about him always, and that at any moment the
+great Apocalypse may come. And even when it is hidden, its "powers"
+continue to act upon him, as the light and heat of the sun pass
+through the clouds by which the burning splendor is softened and
+concealed.
+
+Further, "in Christ" Christian men know God; they know Him for
+themselves. The mere conception of God is as different from the
+immediate knowledge of Him as the mere conception of the Matterhorn
+from the actual vision of it as an external objective grandeur; and
+it is not the conception of God, but God Himself, that fills them
+with awe and wonder, and with a blessedness which trembles into
+devout fear. Sometimes the "exceeding weight of glory" is too great
+to bear, and human infirmity is relieved when the vision passes. At
+other times God is more than a transcendent glory to be contemplated
+and adored. His infinite love, to use Paul's words, is shed abroad
+in their hearts, like the sun's heat under tropical heavens; it is
+immediately revealed. How, they can not tell, any more than they
+can tell how the material world is revealed to sense; they only
+know that, apart from any self-originated effort, apart from any
+movement of their own towards Him, the eternal Spirit draws near to
+their spirit and reveals God's love to them. It is as if the warm
+streams of the love which have their fountains in the depths of
+His infinite life were flowing round them and into them. They are
+conscious of that love for them of which God is conscious.
+
+And this blessedness is not the prerogative of elect saints, or
+of those who may be said to have a natural genius for spiritual
+thought. It is the common inheritance of all that are "in Christ,"
+altho there is reason to fear that many Christian people rarely
+reach the height of its joy. But among those who reach it are men
+of every degree of intellectual rank and every variety of moral and
+spiritual temperament. It is reached by ignorant men, whose thoughts
+are narrow and whose minds are inert, as well as by men with large
+knowledge and great powers of speculation; by men destitute of
+imagination, as well as by men whose imagination kindles as soon
+as it is touched by the splendors of nature or by the verses of
+poets. Men whose life moves slowly and sluggishly reach it, as well
+as men who are impulsive, ardent, and adventurous. And where this
+experience is known, it becomes an effective force in the moral
+life. Peter, writing to slaves, says, "For this is acceptable,
+if through consciousness of God a man endureth griefs, suffering
+wrongfully."
+
+I have said that "in Christ" men know God--not merely through
+Christ. It is true that during His earthly ministry He revealed
+God; so that, in answer to the prayer of one of His disciples,
+"Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us," He said, "Have I been so
+long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip? he that hath
+seen me hath seen the Father." That revelation has eternal power
+and value; but there are other words spoken by Christ that same
+night which suggest that it is not merely by the revelation of God
+during His earthly ministry that Christ has made it possible for
+men to know the Father. He said: "I am the true vine, and ye are
+the branches.... Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot
+bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; so neither can
+ye, except ye abide in me. He that abideth in me, and I in him,
+the same beareth much fruit: for apart from me ye can do nothing."
+It is not certain that when Paul wrote his Epistle to the Galatian
+Christians he had heard of these words; but what they meant he had
+learnt for himself. He said, "I live: and yet no longer I, but
+Christ liveth in me." In various measures the experience of Paul has
+been the experience of Christian men ever since. Their relationship
+to Christ--their conscious relationship to Christ--has been most
+mysterious, but most intimate and most certain. They have meditated
+on the infinite love which moved Him to descend from the heights
+of God and to become man, upon His graciousness and gentleness,
+His purity, His spontaneous goodness, His pity for suffering, His
+merciful words to the sinful, His patience and His long-suffering,
+and His fiery indignation against hypocrisy; they have meditated
+on His teaching, on all the words of His that have been preserved
+concerning the love and grace of God, concerning the remission of
+sins, the gift of eternal life, the judgment to come, the eternal
+blessedness of the righteous, and the doom of the lost; they have
+felt the spell and the charm of that ideal perfection to which He
+calls them in His precepts, and which He illustrated and transcended
+in His own character: but they have been conscious that it was not
+merely by the power of the great and pathetic story of His earthly
+history, or by the power of His spiritual and ethical teaching, that
+He gives to men the life of God, and constantly renews, sustains,
+and augments it. They shared the very life of their Lord. He lived
+in them. They lived in Him. And it was in the power of this common
+life that they knew God.
+
+Nor is it only the immediate knowledge of God that is rendered
+possible by this union with Christ. Christian men are conscious that
+they do not receive strength from Christ for common duty, as they
+might receive strength from One who, while He conferred the grace,
+stood apart from them, but that in some wonderful way they are
+strong in the strength of Christ Himself. They are too often drawn
+down into the region of baser forces, and then they fall; but their
+very failure verifies the truth of their happier experiences, for it
+brings home to them afresh what they are apart from Christ; and when
+they recover their union with Him--which indeed had not been lost,
+tho for a time it was not realized--they recover their power.
+
+The man who has had, and who still has, such experiences as these
+will listen with great tranquillity to criticisms which are intended
+to shake the historical credit of the four Gospels, altho the story
+they contain may have been the original ground of his faith in
+Christ. The criticism may be vigorous; he may be wholly unable to
+answer it: but what then? Is he to cease to believe in Christ? Why
+should he?
+
+Let me answer these questions by an illustration. Towards the
+close of our Lord's ministry, when He was in the neighborhood of
+Jericho--just leaving the city or just entering it--Bartimeus, a
+blind man, who was begging at the side of the road, heard that Jesus
+of Nazareth was passing by, and He appealed to the great Prophet to
+have mercy upon him. Jesus answered his appeal, and gave him sight.
+Now it is possible that Bartimeus may have been told by some passing
+traveler, of whom he knew nothing, the story of a similar miracle
+which Jesus had worked a few weeks before in Jerusalem, and this
+may have been the ground, and the only ground, of his confidence
+in our Lord's supernatural power. If, after he had received his
+sight, some sagacious friend of his had asked him how it was that he
+came to believe that the Nazarene Teacher could give sight to the
+blind, nothing would have been easier than for his friend to show
+that, whether the story of the Jerusalem miracle was true or not,
+Bartimeus had no trustworthy evidence of its truth. A tale told by
+an unknown stranger! This was no sufficient reason for believing
+that Jesus had given sight to a man born blind. Did the stranger
+who told the tale know the beggar who was said to have been cured?
+Was it certain that the man was blind? Had the stranger examined
+his eyes the very morning of the day on which he received sight?
+Was it certain that the vision was not gradually returning? Was the
+stranger present when Jesus made the clay, and put it on the blind
+man's eyes; close enough to see that no delicate operation was
+performed during the process? The sending of the blind man to wash
+at the Pool of Siloam was suspicious: what could that washing have
+to do with a miracle? Did the stranger go with the man to the pool,
+and keep his eye upon him while he was there? Was it quite certain
+that the blind beggar who was sent to Siloam was the man who came
+back to the city and declared that Jesus had healed him? Might not
+one man have been sent to the pool, and another man have come back
+to Jerusalem? It looked very much as if there were some previous
+understanding between the blind man and the Nazarene Prophet. The
+Prophet had rich friends; they could have made it worth the man's
+while to come into the plot. Had Bartimeus considered all these
+difficulties? Was it not more probable that the stranger's story
+should be false than that the miracle should be true? Would it not
+be well for Bartimeus to suspend his faith in Jesus until he had
+made further inquiries about the miracle?
+
+We can imagine the answer of Bartimeus. I think that he would have
+said: "At first I believed in the power of Jesus of Nazareth,
+because I was told that He had given sight to another blind man;
+now I am sure of His power, because He has given sight to me. It
+is possible, as you say, that the story about the blind man in
+Jerusalem is not true. You have asked me many questions which I
+can not answer. I can not explain why he should have been sent to
+the Pool of Siloam. I acknowledge that the evidence which I have
+for the miracle is not decisive. As Jesus has restored my sight, I
+think that the story is probably true; but whether the story is true
+or not can not disturb my faith in Him, for if He did not heal the
+other man, He has healed me."
+
+And so the faith in the living Christ of those who have had the
+great experiences of His power and grace which I have described
+is not shaken by any assaults on the historical trustworthiness
+of the story of His earthly ministry. Much less can it be shaken
+by discussions concerning the nature and origin of the ancient
+Scriptures of the Jewish people. Their confidence in the books,
+both of the Old Testament and the New, may perhaps have to be
+suspended until the controversies of scholars are closed, or until,
+on historical and critical grounds, they can see their own way to
+firm and definite conclusions about the main questions at issue;
+but not their confidence in Christ. They may be uncertain about
+the books; they are sure about Him. Both Christian scholars and
+the commonalty of Christian people approach the controversies on
+these ancient records with a settled faith in the power and grace
+and glory of Christ. Their faith in Him rests on foundations which
+lie far beyond the reach of scientific and historical criticism.
+They know for themselves that Christ is the Savior of men: for they
+have received through Him the remission of their own sins; He has
+translated them into the divine kingdom; He has given them strength
+for righteousness, and through Him they have found God.
+
+
+
+
+LIDDON
+
+INFLUENCES OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+Henry Parry Liddon was born at North Stoneham, Hampshire, in 1829.
+His intellectual power and fearless and earnest preaching attracted
+immense congregations to St. Paul's Cathedral, London. He sought
+to meet the speculative fallacies of his day by truth clearly and
+boldly proclaimed. Probably his greatest fault in delivery was that
+he tied himself slavishly to a manuscript in all his preaching.
+There was a force and intensity to his delivery, however, that often
+projected his words towards his hearers like great projectiles
+across a battlefield. Dr. Arthur S. Hoyt recommends him for study
+in these words: "Canon Liddon brings the riches of exegesis and
+theology and philosophy to the pulpit, and gives to the sermon the
+distinction of his refined and spiritual personality." He died in
+1890.
+
+
+
+
+LIDDON
+
+1829-1890
+
+INFLUENCES OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
+
+     _The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound
+     thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it
+     goeth._--John iii., 8.
+
+
+Who has not felt the contrast, the almost tragic contrast, between
+the high station of the Jewish doctor, member of the Sanhedrin,
+master in Israel, and the ignorance of elementary religious truth,
+as we Christians must deem it, which he displayed in this interview
+with our blest Lord? At first sight it seems difficult to understand
+how our Lord could have used the simile in the text when conversing
+with an educated and thoughtful man, well conversed in the history
+and literature of God's ancient people; and, indeed, a negative
+criticism has availed itself of this and of some other features in
+the narrative, in the interest of the theory that Nicodemus was
+only a fictitious type of the higher classes in Jewish society,
+as they were pictured to itself by the imagination of the fourth
+Evangelist. Such a supposition, opposed to external facts and to all
+internal probabilities, would hardly have been entertained, if the
+critical ingenuity of its author had been seconded by any spiritual
+experience. Nicodemus is very far from being a caricature; and
+our Lord's method here, as elsewhere, is to lead on from familiar
+phrases and the well-remembered letter to the spirit and realities
+of religion. The Jewish schools were acquainted with the expression
+"a new creature"; but it had long since become a mere shred of
+official rhetoric. As applied to a Jewish proselyte, it scarcely
+meant more than a change in the outward relations of religious
+life. Our Lord told Nicodemus that every man who would see the
+kingdom of God which He was founding must undergo a second birth;
+and Nicodemus, who had been accustomed to the phrase all his life,
+could not understand it if it was to be supposed to mean anything
+real. "How," he asks, "can a man be born when he is old? Can he
+enter a second time into his mother's womb, and be born?" Our Lord
+does not extricate him from this blundering literalism; He repeats
+His own original assertion, but in terms which more fully express
+His meaning: "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born
+of water and of the Spirit, he can not enter into the kingdom of
+God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is
+born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye
+must be born again." Our Lord's reference to water would not have
+been unintelligible to Nicodemus; every one in Judća knew that
+the Baptist had insisted on immersion in water as a symbol of the
+purification of the soul of man. Certainly, in connecting "water"
+with the Spirit and the new birth, our Lord's language, glancing
+at that of the prophet, went very far beyond this. He could only
+be fully understood at a later time, when the sacrament of baptism
+had been instituted, just as the true sense of His early allusions
+to His death could not have been apprehended until after the
+crucifixion. But Nicodemus, it is plain, had not yet advanced beyond
+his original difficulty; he could not conceive how any second birth
+was possible, without altogether violating the course of nature.
+And our Lord penetrates His thoughts and answers them. He answers
+them by pointing to that invisible agent who could achieve, in the
+sphere of spiritual and mental life, what the Jewish doctor deemed
+so impossible a feat as a second birth. Nature, indeed, contained no
+force that could compass such a result; but nature in this, as in
+other matters, was a shadow of something beyond itself.
+
+It was late at night when our Lord had this interview with the
+Jewish teacher. At the pauses in conversation, we may conjecture,
+they heard the wind without as it moaned along the narrow streets
+of Jerusalem; and our Lord, as was His wont, took His creature into
+His service--the service of spiritual truth. The wind was a figure
+of the Spirit. Our Lord would not have used the same word for both.
+The wind might teach Nicodemus something of the action of Him who is
+the real Author of the new birth of man. And it would do this in two
+ways more especially.
+
+On a first survey of nature, the wind arrests man's attention, as
+an unseen agent which seems to be moving with entire freedom. "The
+wind bloweth where it listeth." It is fettered by none of those
+conditions which confine the swiftest bodies that traverse the
+surface of the earth; it sweeps on as if independent of law, rushing
+hither and thither, as tho obeying its own wayward and momentary
+impulse. Thus it is an apt figure of a self-determining invisible
+force; and of a force which is at times of overmastering power.
+Sometimes, indeed, its breath is so gentle, that only a single
+leaf or blade of grass will at distant intervals seem to give the
+faintest token of its action; yet, even thus, it "bloweth where
+it listeth." Sometimes it bursts upon the earth with destructive
+violence; nothing can resist its onslaught; the most solid buildings
+give way; the stoutest trees bend before it; whatever is frail and
+delicate can only escape by the completeness of its submission.
+Thus, too, it "bloweth where it listeth." Beyond anything else
+that strikes upon the senses of man, it is suggestive of free
+supersensuous power; it is an appropriate symbol of an irruption of
+the invisible into the world of sense, of the action, so tender or
+so imperious, of the divine and eternal Spirit upon the human soul.
+
+But the wind is also an agent about whose proceedings we really
+know almost nothing. "Thou hearest the sound thereof"; such is our
+Lord's concession to man's claim to knowledge. "Thou canst not tell
+whence it cometh, and whither it goeth"; such is the reserve which
+He makes in respect of human ignorance. Certainly we do more than
+hear the sound of the wind; its presence is obvious to three of
+the senses. We feel the chill or the fury of the blast; and, as it
+sweeps across the ocean, or the forest, or the field of corn, we see
+how the blades rise and fall in graceful curves, and the trees bend,
+and the waters sink and swell into waves which are the measure of
+its strength. But our Lord says, "Thou hearest the sound thereof."
+He would have us test it by the most spiritual of the senses. It
+whispers, or it moans, or it roars as it passes us; it has a pathos
+all its own. Yet what do we really know about it? "Thou canst not
+tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth." Does the wind then
+obey no rule; is it a mere symbol of unfettered caprice? Surely
+not. If, as the psalmist sings, "God bringeth the winds out of his
+treasuries," He acts, we may be sure, here as always, whether in
+nature or in grace, by some law, which his own perfections impose
+upon His action. He may have given to us of these later times to
+see a very little deeper beneath the surface of the natural world
+than was the case with our fathers. Perchance we explain the
+immediate antecedents of the phenomenon; but can we explain our own
+explanation? The frontier of our ignorance is removed one stage
+farther back; but "the way of the wind" is as fitting an expression
+for the mysteries now as it was in the days of Solomon. We know that
+there is no cave of Ćolus. We know that the wind is the creature
+of that great Master who works everywhere and incessantly by rule.
+But, as the wind still sweeps by us who call ourselves the children
+of an age of knowledge, and we endeavor to give our fullest answer
+to the question, "Whence it cometh, and whither it goeth?" we
+discover that, as the symbol of a spiritual force, of whose presence
+we are conscious, while we are unable to determine, with moderate
+confidence, either the secret principle or the range of its action,
+the wind is as full of meaning still as in the days of Nicodemus.
+
+When our Lord has thus pointed to the freedom and the mysteriousness
+of the wind, He adds, "So is every one that is born of the Spirit."
+The simile itself would have led us to expect--"So is the Spirit
+of God." The man born of the Spirit would answer not to the wind
+itself, but to the sensible effect of the wind. There is a break of
+correspondence between the simile and its application. The simile
+directs attention to the divine Author of the new birth in man. The
+words which follow direct attention to the human subject upon whom
+the divine agent works. Something similar is observable when our
+Lord compares the kingdom of heaven to a merchantman seeking goodly
+pearls; the kingdom really corresponds not to the merchantman,
+but to the pearl of great price which the merchantman buys. In
+such cases, we may be sure, the natural correspondence between a
+simile and its application is not disturbed without a motive. And
+the reason for this disturbance is presumably that the simile is
+not adequate to the full purpose of the speaker, who is anxious to
+teach some larger truth than its obvious application would suggest.
+In the case before us, we may be allowed to suppose, that by His
+reference to the wind our Lord desired to convey something more
+than the real but mysterious agency of the Holy Spirit in the new
+birth of man. His language seems designed, not merely to correct
+the materialistic narrowness of the Jewish doctor, not merely to
+answer by anticipation the doubts of later days as to the spiritual
+efficacy of His own sacrament of regeneration, but to picture, in
+words which should be read to the end of time, the general work of
+that divine person whose mission of mercy to our race was at once
+the consequence and the completion of His own.
+
+It may be useful to trace the import of our Lord's simile in three
+fields of the action of the holy and eternal Spirit; His creation of
+a sacred literature, His guidance of a divine society, and His work
+upon individual souls.
+
+I. As, then, we turn over the pages of the Bible, must we not
+say, "The wind of heaven bloweth where it listeth"? If we might
+reverently imagine ourselves scheming beforehand what kind of a
+book the Book of God ought to be, how different would it be from
+the actual Bible. There would be as many bibles as there are souls,
+and they would differ as widely. But in one thing, amid all their
+differences, they would probably agree; they would lack the variety,
+both in form and substance, of the holy Book which the Church of
+God places in the hands of her children. The self-assertion, the
+scepticism, and the fastidiousness of our day would meet like the
+men of the second Roman triumvirate on that island in the Reno,
+and would draw up their lists of proscription. One would condemn
+the poetry of Scripture as too inexact; another its history as too
+largely secular; another its metaphysics as too transcendental, or
+as hostile to some fanciful ideal of "simplicity," or as likely
+to quench a purely moral enthusiasm. The archaic history of the
+Pentateuch, or the sterner side of the ethics of the psalter, or
+the supernaturalism of the histories of Elijah or of Daniel, or
+the so-called pessimism of Ecclesiastes, or the alleged secularism
+of Esther, or the literal import of the Song of Solomon, would be
+in turn condemned. Nor could the apostles hope to escape: St. John
+would be too mystical in this estimate; St. James too legal in
+that; St. Paul too dialectical, or too metaphysical, or too easily
+capable of an antinomian interpretation; St. Peter too undecided,
+as if balancing between St. Paul and St. James. Our new Bible would
+probably be uniform, narrow, symmetrical; it would be entirely
+made up of poetry, or of history, or of formal propositions, or of
+philosophical speculation, or of lists of moral maxims; it would be
+modeled after the type of some current writer on English history,
+or some popular poet or metaphysician, or some sentimentalist who
+abjures history and philosophy alike on principle, or some composer
+of well-intentioned religious tracts for general circulation. The
+inspirations of heaven would be taken in hand, and instead of a wind
+blowing where it listeth, we should have a wind, no doubt, of some
+kind, rustling earnestly enough along some very narrow crevices or
+channels, in obedience to the directions of some one form of human
+prejudice, or passion, or fear, or hope.
+
+The Bible is like nature in its immense, its exhaustless variety;
+like nature, it reflects all the higher moods of the human soul,
+because it does much more; because it brings us face to face with
+the infinity of the divine life. In the Bible the wind of heaven
+pays scant heed to our anticipations or our prejudices; it "bloweth
+where it listeth." It breathes not only in the divine charities of
+the gospels, not only in the lyrical sallies of the epistles, not
+only in the great announcements scattered here and there in Holy
+Scripture of the magnificence, or the compassion, or the benevolence
+of God; but also in the stern language of the prophets, in the
+warnings and lessons of the historical books, in the revelations of
+divine justice and of human responsibility which abound in either
+Testament. "Where it listeth." Not only where our sense of literary
+beauty is stimulated, as in St. Paul's picture of charity, by lines
+which have taken captive the imagination of the world, not only
+where feeling and conscience echo the verdict of authority and the
+promptings of reverence, but also where this is not the case; where
+neither precept nor example stimulates us, and we are left face to
+face with historical or ethical material, which appears to us to
+inspire no spiritual enthusiasm, or which is highly suggestive of
+critical difficulty. Let us be patient; we shall understand, if we
+will only wait, how these features of the Bible too are integral
+parts of a living whole; here, as elsewhere, the Spirit breathes;
+in the genealogies of the Chronicles as in the last discourse in
+St. John, though with an admitted difference of manner and degree.
+He "bloweth where He listeth." The apostle's words respecting the
+Old Testament are true of the New: "All Scripture is given by
+inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof,
+for correction, for instruction in righteousness." And, "Whatsoever
+things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we
+through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope."
+
+"But thou hearest the sound thereof, and canst not tell whence
+it cometh, and whither it goeth." The majesty of Scripture is
+recognized by man, wherever there is, I will not say a spiritual
+faculty, but a natural sense of beauty. The "sound" of the wind
+is perceived by the trained ear, by the literary taste, by the
+refinement, by the humanity of every generation of educated men. But
+what beyond? What of its spiritual source, its spiritual drift and
+purpose, its half-concealed but profound unities, its subtle but
+imperious relations to conscience? Of these things, so precious to
+Christians, a purely literary appreciation of Scripture is generally
+ignorant; the sacred Book, like the prophet of the Chebar, is only
+"as a very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and can
+play well on an instrument." Or again, the "sound thereof" is
+heard in the admitted empire of the Bible over millions of hearts
+and consciences; an empire the evidences of which strike upon the
+ear in countless ways, and which is far too wide and too secure
+to be affected by the criticisms that might occasionally seem to
+threaten it. What is the secret of this influence of Scripture? Not
+simply that it is the Book of Revelation; since it contains a great
+deal of matter which lay fairly within the reach of man's natural
+faculties. The Word or eternal Reason of God is the Revealer; but
+Scripture, whether it is a record of divine revelations or of
+naturally observed facts, is, in the belief of the Christian Church,
+throughout "inspired" by the Spirit. Inspiration is the word which
+describes the presence and action of the Holy Spirit everywhere in
+Scripture. We know not how our own spirits, hour by hour, are acted
+upon by the eternal Spirit, though we do not question the fact; we
+content ourselves with recognizing what we can not explain. If we
+believe that Scripture is inspired, we know that it is instinct with
+the presence of Him whose voice we might hear in every utterance,
+but of whom we cannot tell whence He cometh or whither He goeth.
+
+II. The history of the Church of Christ from the days of the
+apostles has been a history of spiritual movements. Doubtless it has
+been a history of much else; the Church has been the scene of human
+passions, human speculations, human errors. But traversing these,
+He by whom the whole body of the Church is governed and sanctified,
+has made His presence felt, not only in the perpetual proclamation
+and elucidation of truth, not only in the silent, never-ceasing
+sanctification of souls, but also in great upheavals of spiritual
+life, by which the conscience of Christians has been quickened,
+or their hold upon the truths of redemption and grace made more
+intelligent and serious, or their lives and practise restored to
+something like the ideal of the Gospels. Even in the apostolic age
+it was necessary to warn Christians that it was high time to awake
+out of sleep; that the night of life was far spent, and the day of
+eternity was at hand. And ever since, from generation to generation,
+there has been a succession of efforts within the Church to realize
+more worthily the truth of the Christian creed, or the ideal of the
+Christian life. These revivals have been inspired or led by devoted
+men who have represented the highest conscience of Christendom in
+their day. They may be traced along the line of Christian history;
+the Spirit living in the Church has by them attested His presence
+and His will; and has recalled lukewarm generations, paralyzed by
+indifference or degraded by indulgence, to the true spirit and level
+of Christian faith and life.
+
+In such movements there is often what seems, at first sight, an
+element of caprice. They appear to contemporaries to be onesided,
+exaggerated, narrow, fanatical. They are often denounced with a
+passionate fervor which is so out of proportion to the reality as to
+border on the grotesque. They are said to exact too much of us, or
+to concede too much. They are too contemplative in their tendency
+to be sufficiently practical, or too energetically practical to do
+justice to religious thought. They are too exclusively literary
+and academical, as being the work of men of books; or they are too
+popular and insensible to philosophical considerations, as being
+the work of men of the people. Or, again, they are so occupied with
+controversy as to forget the claims of devotion, or so engaged
+in leading souls to a devout life as to forget the unwelcome but
+real necessities of controversy. They are intent on particular
+moral improvements so exclusively as to forget what is due to
+reverence and order; or they are so bent upon rescuing the Church
+from chronic slovenliness and indecency in public worship as to
+do less than justice to the paramount interests of moral truth.
+Sometimes these movements are all feeling; sometimes they are all
+thought; sometimes they are, as it seems, all outward energy. In
+one age they produce a literature like that of the fourth and fifth
+centuries; in another they found orders of men devoted to preaching
+or to works of mercy, as in the twelfth; in another they enter the
+lists, as in the thirteenth century, with a hostile philosophy;
+in another they attempt a much-needed reformation of the Church;
+in another they pour upon the heathen world a flood of light and
+warmth from the heart of Christendom. It is easy, as we survey
+them, to say that something else was needed; or that what was done
+could have been done better or more completely; or that, had we
+been there, we should not have been guilty of this onesidedness,
+or of that exaggeration. We forget, perhaps, who really was there,
+and whose work it is, though often overlaid and thwarted by human
+weakness and human passion, that we are really criticizing. If
+it was seemingly onesided, excessive or defective, impulsive or
+sluggish, speculative or practical, esthetic or experimental, may
+not this have been so because in His judgment, who breatheth where
+He listeth, this particular characteristic was needed for the Church
+of that day? All that contemporaries know of such movements is
+"the sound thereof"; the names with which they are associated, the
+controversies which they precipitate, the hostilities which they
+rouse or allay, as the case may be. Such knowledge is superficial
+enough; of the profound spiritual causes which really engender
+them, of the direction in which they are really moving, of the
+influence which they are destined permanently to exert upon souls,
+men know little or nothing. The accidental symptom is mistaken for
+the essential characteristic; the momentary expression of feeling
+for the inalienable conviction of certain truth. The day may come,
+perhaps, when more will be known; when practise and motive, accident
+and substance, the lasting and the transient, will be seen in their
+true relative proportions; but for the time this can hardly be. He
+is passing by, whose way is in the sea, and His paths in the deep
+waters, and His footsteps unknown. The Eternal Spirit is passing;
+and men can only say, "He bloweth where He listeth."
+
+III. Our Lord's words apply especially to Christian character.
+There are some effects of the living power of the Holy Spirit
+which are invariable. When He dwells with a Christian soul, He
+continually speaks in the voice of conscience; He speaks in the
+voice of prayer. He produces with the ease of a natural process,
+without effort, without the taint of self-consciousness, "love,
+joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness,
+temperance." Some of these graces must be found where He makes His
+home. There is no mistaking the atmosphere of His presence: in its
+main features it is the same now as in the days of the apostles.
+Just as in natural morality the main elements of "goodness" do not
+change; so in religious life, spirituality is, amid great varieties
+of detail, yet, in its leading constituent features, the same thing
+from one generation to another. But in the life of the individual
+Christian, or in that of the Church, there is legitimate room for
+irregular and exceptional forms of activity or excellence. Natural
+society is not strengthened by the stern repression of all that is
+peculiar in individual thought or practise; and this is not less
+true of spiritual or religious society. From the first, high forms
+of Christian excellence have often been associated with unconscious
+eccentricity. The eccentricity must be unconscious, because
+consciousness of eccentricity at once reduces it to a form of vanity
+which is entirely inconsistent with Christian excellence. How many
+excellent Christians have been eccentric, deviating more or less
+from the conventional type of goodness which has been recognized
+by contemporary religious opinion. They pass away, and when they
+are gone men do justice to their characters; but while they are
+still with us how hard do many of us find it to remember that there
+may be a higher reason for their peculiarities than we think. We
+know not the full purpose of each saintly life in the designs of
+Providence; we know not much of the depths and heights whence it
+draws its inspirations; we can not tell whence it cometh or whither
+it goeth. Only we know that He whose workmanship it is bloweth where
+He listeth; and this naturally leads us to remark the practical
+interpretation which the Holy Spirit often puts upon our Lord's
+words by selecting as His chosen workmen those who seem to be least
+fitted by nature for such high service. The apostle has told us how
+in the first age He set Himself to defeat human anticipations. "Not
+many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble,
+are called"; learned academies, powerful connections, gentle blood
+did little enough for the gospel in the days when it won its first
+and greatest victories. The Holy Spirit, as Nicodemus knew, passed
+by the varied learning and high station of the Sanhedrin, and
+breathed where He listed on the peasants of Galilee; He breathed
+on them a power which would shake the world. And thus has it been
+again and again in the generations which have followed. When the
+great Aquinas was a student of philosophy under Albertus Magnus at
+Cologne, he was known among his contemporaries as "the dumb Ox"; so
+little did they divine what was to be his place in the theology of
+Western Christendom. And to those of us who can look back upon the
+memories of this University for a quarter of a century or more, few
+things appear more remarkable than the surprizes which the later
+lives of men constantly afford; sometimes it is a failure of early
+natural promise, but more often a rich development of intellectual
+and practical capacity where there had seemed to be no promise at
+all. We can remember, perhaps, some dull quiet man who seemed to
+be without a ray of genius, or, stranger still, without anything
+interesting or marked in character, but who now exerts, and most
+legitimately, the widest influence for good, and whose name is
+repeated by thousands with grateful respect. Or we can call to mind
+another whose whole mind was given to what was frivolous, or even
+degrading, and who now is a leader in everything that elevates and
+improves his fellows. The secret of these transfigurations is ever
+the same. In those days these men did not yet see their way; they
+were like travelers through the woods at night, when the sky is
+hidden and all things seem to be other than they are.
+
+Since then the sun has risen and all has changed. The creed of the
+Church of Christ, in its beauty and its power, has been flashed by
+the Divine Spirit upon their hearts and understandings; and they are
+other men. They have seen that there is something worth living for
+in earnest; that God, the soul, the future, are immense realities,
+compared with which all else is tame and insignificant. They have
+learned something of that personal love of our crucified Lord, which
+is itself a moral and religious force of the highest order, and
+which has carried them forwards without their knowing it. And what
+has been will assuredly repeat itself.
+
+
+
+
+W. M. TAYLOR
+
+CHRIST BEFORE PILATE--PILATE BEFORE CHRIST
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+
+William Mackergo Taylor, Congregational divine, was born at
+Kilmarnock, Scotland, in 1829. He was for many years pastor of the
+Broadway Tabernacle, New York. He had an impressive presence and
+his delivery was marked by a magnetic earnestness. During the first
+ten years of his ministry he spoke memoriter, but subsequently
+wrote out his sermons with detailed care and preached them from
+manuscript, but their delivery was without the freedom and freshness
+of extemporaneous address. He came to regret this, for he said: "If
+I might speak from my own experience I would say, that memoriter
+preaching is the method which has the greatest advantages, with the
+fewest disadvantages." He died in 1895.
+
+
+
+
+W. M. TAYLOR 1829-1895
+
+CHRIST BEFORE PILATE--PILATE BEFORE CHRIST[5]
+
+  [5] Reprinted by permission from "Contrary Winds and other Sermons,"
+  by William M. Taylor, D.D., copyrighted, 1883, by A. C. Armstrong &
+  Son.
+
+     _Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do, then, with Jesus,
+     which is called Christ?_--Matthew xxvii., 22.
+
+
+During my late visit to my native land I had the great enjoyment
+of seeing, and somewhat carefully studying, Munkacsy's famous
+picture of "Christ Before Pilate." Rarely, if ever, had I been so
+much moved by a work of art; and I propose to give, as nearly as I
+can recall it, the sermon which it reached to me as I sat silently
+contemplating the figures, which, even as I looked at them, seemed
+to grow before me into life.
+
+But, first, I must try to describe to you the picture itself. The
+canvas is large, and the figures, all of which are on the line of
+sight, are of life size. The scene is in the pavement or open court
+before the governor's palace, which was called in the Hebrew tongue
+Gabbatha, and in which, after all his efforts to wriggle out of the
+responsibility of dealing with the case, Pilate ultimately gave up
+Jesus to be crucified. At one end of the court, on a raised bench,
+and drest in a white toga, Pilate sits. On either side of him are
+Jews, each of whom has a marked and special individuality. The two
+on his left are gazing with intense eagerness at Christ. They are
+evidently puzzled, and know not well what to make of the mysterious
+prisoner. On his right, standing on one of the seats, and with his
+back against the wall, is a Scribe, whose countenance is expressive
+of uttermost contempt, and just in front of this haughty fellow
+are some Pharisees, one of whom is on his feet, and passionately
+urging that Jesus should be put to death, presumably on the ground
+that, if Pilate should let Him go, he would make it evident that he
+was not Cćsar's friend. Before them again is a usurer, sleek, fat
+and self-satisfied, clearly taking great comfort to himself in the
+assurance that, however the matter may be settled, his well-filled
+money-bags will be undisturbed. Beyond him stands the Christ in a
+robe of seamless white, and with His wrists firmly bound; while
+behind, kept in place by a Roman soldier, standing with his back to
+the spectator, and making a barricade with his spear, which he holds
+horizontally, is a motley group of onlookers, not unlike that which
+we may still see any day in one of our criminal courts. Of these,
+one more furious than the rest is wildly gesticulating, and crying,
+as we may judge from his whole attitude, "Crucify Him! crucify Him!"
+and another, a little to the Savior's left, but in the second row
+behind Him, is leaning forward with mockery in his leering look, and
+making almost as if he would spit upon the saintly one. There is but
+one really compassionate face in the crowd, and that is a face of a
+woman who, with an infant in her arms, most fitly represents those
+gentle daughters of Jerusalem who followed Jesus to Calvary with
+tears. Then, over the heads of the on-lookers, and out of the upper
+part of the doorway into the court, we get a glimpse of the quiet
+light of the morning as it sleeps upon the walls and turrets of the
+adjacent buildings. All these figures are so distinctly seen that
+you feel you could recognize them again if you met them anywhere;
+and a strange sense of reality comes upon you as you look at them,
+so that you forget that they are only painted, and imagine that you
+are gazing on living and breathing men.
+
+But, as you sit awhile and look on, you gradually lose all
+consciousness of the presence of the mere on-lookers and find your
+interest concentrated on these two white-robed ones, as if they
+were the only figures before you. The pose of Christ is admirable.
+It is repose blended with dignity; self-possession rising into
+majesty. There is no agitation or confusion; no fear or misgiving;
+but, instead, the calm nobleness of Him who has just been saying,
+"Thou couldst have no power at all against me, except it were given
+thee from above; therefore he that delivered me unto thee hath the
+greater sin." The face alone disappoints. Perhaps that may be owing
+to the lofty ideal we have of the divine Man, so that no picture
+of our Lord would entirely please. But tho the painter has wisely
+abandoned the halo, and all similar conventionalisms of art, and has
+delineated a real man, for all which he is to be highly commended,
+yet the eyes which look so steadily at Pilate, as if they were
+looking him through, seem to me to be cold, keen, and condemnatory,
+rather than compassionate and sad. It is a conception of the Lord
+of the same sort as that of Doré, in his well-known picture of the
+leaving of the Prćtorium, and the eyes have not in them that deep
+well of tenderness out of which came the tears which He shed over
+Jerusalem, and which we expect to see in them when He is looking at
+the hopeless struggle of a soul which will not accept His aid. It
+is said that the artist, dissatisfied with his first attempt, has
+painted the Christ face twice; but this, also, is a partial failure,
+and here, so at least it seemed to me as I looked upon it, is the
+one defect in his noble work. But if there is this defect, it is one
+which it shares with every other effort that human art has made to
+delineate the Lord. The Pilate, however, is well-nigh faultless.
+Here is a great, strong man, the representative of the mightiest
+empire the world has ever seen, with a head indicating intellectual
+force, and a face, especially in its lower part, suggestive of
+sensual indulgence. There is ordinarily no want of firmness in
+him, as we may see from the general set of his features; but now
+there is in his countenance a marvelous mixture of humiliation and
+irresolution. He cannot lift his eyes to meet the gaze of Christ;
+and while one of his hands is nervously clutching at his robe he
+is looking sadly into the other, whose fingers, even as we look
+at them, almost seem to twitch with perplexed irresolution. He is
+clearly pondering for himself the question which a few moments
+before he had addrest to the multitude, "What shall I do with
+Jesus which is called Christ?" He is annoyed that the case has
+been brought to him at all, and as he feels himself drifting on,
+against his own better judgment, toward yielding to the clamor of
+the multitude, he falls mightily in his own conceit, and begins to
+despise himself. He would, at that moment, give, oh, how much! to
+be rid of the responsibility of dealing with the Christ, but he
+cannot evade it; and so he sits there, drifting on to what he knows
+is a wrong decision, the very incarnation of the feeling which his
+own national poet described when he said, "I see and approve the
+better course; I follow the worse." Thus, as we look at these two,
+we begin to discover that it was not Christ that was before Pilate
+so much as Pilate was before Christ. His was the testing experience.
+His was the trial; his too, alas! was the degradation; and at that
+coming day when the places shall be reversed, when Christ shall be
+on the judgment seat, and Pilate at the bar, there will still be
+that deep self-condemnation which the painter here has fixt upon
+his countenance. It is a marvelous picture, in many respects the
+most remarkable I ever looked upon, and, even from this imperfect
+description of it, you will easily understand how, as I sat intent
+before it, it stirred my soul to the very depths.
+
+But now, with this portrayal of the scene before us let us see if
+we can account, first, for the hesitation of Pilate to give up the
+Lord, and then for his final yielding to the clamor of the people.
+Why all this reluctance on his part to send Jesus to the cross? He
+was not usually so scrupulous. A human life more or less gave him
+generally very little concern. He had all a Roman's indifference
+for the comfort of those who stood in any respect in his way; and
+had no compunction, as we know, in mingling the blood of certain
+turbulent Jews with the very sacrifices which at the moment they
+were offering. Had Christ been a Roman citizen, indeed, he would
+most likely have been very watchful over His safety, for in regard
+to all such the imperial law was peculiarly strict, but the life
+of a mere Jew was a very small thing in his estimation. Wherefore,
+then, this unwonted squeamishness of conscience? It was the result
+of a combination of particulars, each of which had a special force
+of its own, and the aggregate of which so wrought upon his mind that
+he was brought thereby to a stand.
+
+There was, in the first place, the peculiar character of the
+prisoner. A very slight examination had been sufficient to convince
+him that Christ was innocent of the charge which had been brought
+against Him. But in the course of that examination much more than
+the innocence of Christ had come to view. He had manifested a
+dignified patience altogether unlike anything that Pilate had ever
+seen; and His answers to certain questions had been so strangely
+suggestive of something higher and nobler than even the most
+exalted earthly philosophy that he could not look upon Him as a
+common prisoner. He was no mere fanatic; neither was He after the
+pattern of any existing school, whether Jewish, Greek, or Roman.
+There was about Him an "other-worldliness" which brought those
+near Him into close proximity, for the time, with the unseen; and
+an elevation which lifted Him above the tumult that was howling
+for His destruction. Probably Pilate could not have described
+it to himself, but there was something which he felt unusual and
+exceptional in this man, marking Him out from every other he ever
+had before him, and constraining him to take a special interest in
+His case. Add to this that his wife had sent to him that singular
+message--"Have thou nothing to do with that just man, for I have
+suffered many things this day in a dream because of him,"--a message
+which, in those days of mingled scepticism and superstition--for the
+two always go hand in hand--must have produced a deep impression on
+his mind. Moreover, there seemed some fatality about the case. He
+had tried to roll it over upon Herod, but that wily monarch sent the
+prisoner back upon his hands. He had attempted to release Him, as
+the Passover prisoner for the year, but neither was there any outlet
+for him in that, for the people had preferred Barabbas. And so the
+responsibility had come again to his own door, and could not be
+passed on to another. Still again, he saw that the Jews were acting
+most hypocritically in the matter. It was a new thing for them to be
+zealous for the honor of Cćsar, and he could easily see through the
+mask they wore into the envy and malice which were the motives for
+their conduct. The deeper he went into the case he discovered only
+the more reason for resisting their importunity, and, however, he
+looked at it, his plain duty was to set the prisoner free.
+
+Why then, again we ask, was his perplexity? The answer is suggested
+by the taunt of the Jews, "If thou let this man go thou art not
+Cćsar's friend; whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against
+Cćsar." He foresaw that if he resisted the will of the rulers he
+would make them his enemies, and so provoke them to complain of
+him to the emperor, who would then institute an inquiry into the
+administration of his office--and that he was not prepared to face.
+He had done things as a governor which would not bear the light,
+and so at the crisis of his life he was fettered by deeds of the
+past from doing that which he felt to be the duty of the present.
+You may, perhaps, remember that expression of the prophet, which
+thus reads in the margin: "Their doings will not suffer them to turn
+unto their God": and that other, which affirms, concerning Israel:
+"Their own doings have beset them about." Now these descriptions
+most accurately define the cause of Pilate's perplexity here. His
+conduct in the past had been such that he had not the courage to
+take any course which might lead to an investigation of that. If
+he could deliver Christ without provoking that, then he would most
+cheerfully do so; but if by delivering Christ he would provoke that,
+then Christ must be given up to the cross. Hence his perplexity
+at the first, and hence, also, his yielding in the end. His past
+misdeeds had put him virtually into the power of those who were
+now so eager for the condemnation of the Christ. On three several
+occasions his arbitrariness had been such as all but to instigate
+a rebellion among the people, and his cruelty and contempt for
+justice, when he had a personal end to gain, were sure, upon appeal
+to the emperor, to be severely punished; so to save himself from
+banishment and disgrace, if not even death, he delivered over Jesus
+to the will of the Jews. He wished to do right in this case more
+than ever he had wished before; there was something about it which
+in his view made it more important that he should do right now than
+ever before; but through all his past official life he had, by his
+enormities and oppressions, been unconsciously weaving round himself
+a net, in the meshes of which he was now inextricably caught. His
+guilty conscience made him a coward at the very time when most of
+all he wanted to be brave. He had come to his "narrow place," where
+he could turn neither to the right hand nor to the left, but must
+face the naked alternative "yes" or "no"; and he fell because in his
+former life, when he was thinking of no such ordeal, he had sold
+himself by his evil deeds into the power of the enemy.
+
+Now, what a lesson there is in all this for us! Men think that
+they may live for the time being as they please, and that at a
+convenient venient season they can repent and turn to God. But the
+present is conditioning the future, and making it either possible
+or the reverse for us to do right in the future. He who neglects
+the laws of health every day, and lives in intemperance and excess
+of all kinds, is only making it absolutely certain that when fever
+lays him low he will die, for he has eaten out the strength of
+his constitution by his follies. And, in the same way, he who
+sets all morality at defiance in his ordinary conduct only makes
+it inevitable that when his convenient season does come, when his
+time of privilege and testing does arrive, he will fail to rise to
+the occasion, and be swept away into perdition. The tenor of our
+ordinary life determines how we shall pass through exceptional and
+crucial occasions, therefore let us bring that up to the highest
+level by doing everything as unto God, and then we shall be ready
+for any emergency.
+
+Nor let me forget to add here, that in spite of all his efforts
+to keep back investigation, Pilate's day of reckoning with the
+emperor did come. The Jews complained of him after all, in spite of
+his yielding to them now; and as the result he was banished, and
+afterwards, so tradition says, he committed suicide. Thus the ordeal
+and the disgrace came, notwithstanding all he did to avert them,
+and he had not under them the solace which he might have enjoyed
+if only he had stood firm on this great and memorable occasion.
+Therefore let us all, and especially the young, take to ourselves,
+as the first lesson from this deeply interesting history, that we
+should be careful not to hamper ourselves for the discharge of duty
+in the future by guilt of the present. By our conduct now we are
+either coiling cords around us which shall hold us fast at the very
+time when we most desire to be free, or we are forming and fostering
+a strength of character which, through God, will triumph over every
+temptation. If "to be weak is to be miserable," it is no less true
+that to be guilty is to be weak. Preserve yourselves, therefore,
+from this danger, and seek above all other things to keep your
+consciences clean; then when you will need all your strength for a
+crisis, you will not sit, like Pilate here, in nervous perplexity
+bemoaning your helplessness even while you yield to the adversary;
+but you will shake the temptation from you with as much ease as the
+eagle shakes the dewdrop from his wing. Keep yourselves pure: so
+shall your youth be full of happiness, and you shall go forth out
+of it with no encumbering past to clog the wheels of your endeavor.
+How happy he whose youth thus leaves him with a smile and sends him
+forth upon the duties of manhood with a benediction! But he, how
+miserable! whose early years heap bitter maledictions on his head,
+and push him forward into active life with a conscience already
+laden with guilt, and a soul as weak before temptation as a reed is
+before the wind.
+
+But while there is thus in this history a lesson for all time, I
+think Munkacsy, by the appearance of his wondrous picture now, has
+made it evident that there is also something in it specially adapted
+to these modern days. It is with artists in the choice of their
+subjects as it is with ministers in the selection of their themes.
+Both alike, consciously and unconsciously, and most frequently
+perhaps unconsciously, are affected by the spirit of their age.
+The atmosphere--literary, moral, political, and religious--which
+is round about them, and which they are daily breathing, does,
+insensibly to themselves, so influence them that their thoughts
+are turned by it into a channel different from that in which those
+of a former generation flowed. Hence, whether the painter would
+admit it or not, I see in this picture, at this juncture, at once a
+mirror of the times and a lesson for them. The question of Pilate,
+"What shall I do, then, with Jesus which is called the Christ?"
+is preeminently the question of the present age. No doubt we may
+say with truth that it has been the question of all the Christian
+centuries, and each one of them has faced it and solved it after its
+own fashion. It has tested the centuries even as it tested Pilate,
+and those in which Christ was rejected have been the darkest in
+the world's history; while those in which He has been hailed as
+the incarnate God have been the brightest which the earth has ever
+seen, because irradiated with truth, and justice, and benevolence
+and purity. But tho we are always prone to exaggerate that in the
+midst of which we are ourselves, it seems to me that in no one age
+since that of the primitive Church has this jesting question been so
+prominent as in our own. All the controversies of our times, social,
+philosophical, and theological, lead up to and find their ultimate
+hinge in the answer to this inquiry, "Who is this Jesus Christ?"
+If He be a mere man, then there is for us nothing but uncertainty
+on any subject, outside of the domain of the exact sciences; and
+we must all become agnostics, holding this one negative article
+of belief, that nothing can be known about anything save that of
+which we can take cognizance with the bodily sense. But if He be
+incarnate God, then He brings with Him from heaven the final word on
+all subjects concerning which He has spoken; and tho in His person
+He is the mystery of mysteries, yet, at once received, He becomes
+forthwith the solution of all mysteries, and faith in Him is at once
+the satisfaction of the intellect and the repose of the heart. It
+is perfectly natural, therefore, that all the controversies of the
+day should turn on Him. The lives of Christ which have been written
+during the last thirty or forty years would make in themselves a
+very respectable library; and the cry even of the sceptic is, "I
+could get on very well with unbelief, if I only knew what to make
+of Christ." Yes, that is just the difficulty. Christ is here in
+the Scriptures a character portrayed in literature; He was in the
+world for thirty-three years, and lived a life exceptional in every
+respect, but most of all in the moral and spiritual departments, so
+that of Him alone perfection can be predicated; He has been ever
+since a most potent factor in history, for through His influence
+all that is pure, and noble, and exalted, and lovely and of good
+report, has come into our civilization. Now, these things have to
+be accounted for. If He was only a man, how shall we explain them?
+And if He was more than a man shall we not take His own testimony
+as to His dignity and mission? If we are to be unbelievers, we must
+account for Christ on natural principles; but if we cannot do that,
+then we must conceive Him as He claims to be conceived. There is no
+alternative. Those in the age who have the spirit and disposition of
+Pilate will anew reject Him! but those who are sincere and earnest
+in their inquiries will come ultimately out into the light, for "if
+any man be willing to do his will, he shall know of the doctrine
+whether it be of God."
+
+And what is true of the age, as a whole, is true also of every
+individual to whom the gospel is proclaimed. For each of us, my
+hearers, this is the question of questions, "What shall I do with
+Jesus which is called Christ?" Shall I reject Him and live precisely
+as if I had never heard His name? or shall I accept Him as the Lord
+from heaven in human nature, trust in Him as my Savior, and obey Him
+as my King? I must do the one or the other; and yet how many are
+seeking, like Pilate, to evade the question? They try to escape the
+responsibility of dealing with it as a direct alternative of yes
+or no. But as one has well said, "necessity is laid upon us. The
+adversaries of Christ press upon us to give our verdict against Him.
+We are troubled and perplexed, for we have long heard about Him,
+and have had each of us his own convictions. We would still remain
+neutral. We try--and try in vain--to escape from the spirit, the
+conversation, the literature, the question of the times. Again and
+again we wash our hands. But neither our silence nor our actions are
+of any avail; and so we are found sitting, conscious of the presence
+and the claims of our Savior, and, like Pilate, not daring to look
+at Him, as we puzzle over the answer which we must give to the
+question that is being forced upon us--Who is this Jesus Christ?"
+Perhaps this description accurately portrays some one here this
+morning.
+
+If so, let me give him one parting word. It is this: You can not
+evade the decision, but be sure that you look at the Christ before
+you give Him up. Nothing is so remarkable in the picture to which
+I have so often this day referred as the evident persistency with
+which Pilate keeps his eyes from Christ; and few things are so
+saddening as to meet with men who profess to have, and really have,
+difficulties about Christ, but who have never read the gospels or
+the New Testament with any attention.
+
+Let me urge you earnestly, therefore, to study these gospels and
+epistles before you give your voice against the Lord, and I am
+very sure that if you ponder them thoroughly you will soon accept
+Him. Give over trying to solve all the difficulties and so-called
+discrepancies in the Scriptures which form the stock-in-trade of
+the infidel lecturer--all these are but as dust which he raises
+that he may blind your eyes to the really important question, "Who
+is Christ?" Settle that, and if you do, all other difficulties
+will vanish. Turn your face to the light, and the shadow will fall
+behind you. Look at the Christ before you give Him up. And remember,
+if you do reject Christ, you have still to account for Him. It
+is unreasonable for you, if you believe only in the natural and
+material, to leave such a phenomenon as Christ unexplained.
+
+Yes, and I must add here that if you reject Him you must yet
+account to Him. Go, then, and ponder this text; yea, may it continue
+sounding in your inmost heart until you have determined to receive
+and rest upon Him as your only Savior, and say to Him, like Thomas,
+"My Lord and my God."
+
+
+
+
+JOHN HALL
+
+LIBERTY ONLY IN TRUTH
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+
+John Hall was born at Market Hill, County Armagh, Ireland, in 1829.
+For many years he was pastor of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian
+Church, New York, where he had a large and devoted following. He was
+of fine physique, and there was a power in face and voice that at
+once commanded his audience. He spoke without manuscript, and his
+style was marked by great sincerity, directness and earnestness. He
+died in 1899.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN HALL
+
+1829-1899
+
+LIBERTY ONLY IN TRUTH
+
+     _And I will walk at liberty, for I seek thy precepts._--Psalms
+     cxix., 45.
+
+
+God is the Governor of this world. Some one may say, that is a
+very elementary truth. Even so; there have been long ages in the
+history of our race when that truth was not accepted and when the
+most intelligent of our race believed something directly opposed.
+There have been multitudes of men, for example, who believed, like
+Aristotle, that matter is eternal. There are multitudes still who
+believe that in some way or other nature governs itself. There is a
+large class of thinkers who, without taking the name to themselves,
+are practically pantheists, and, like Spinoza and Fichte and Hegel,
+persuade themselves that all is God, as they express it, and that
+God is all. You do not need to be told that the earlier portion of
+the Old Testament Scriptures God has given to us that we might have
+these illusions banished, and that we might be made to know that God
+is the Creator and the Ruler of all things, that He is not nature,
+and nature is not God; that He is not to be confounded with the
+works of His hands; that He is a distinct, personal and holy Being,
+who has created all, and who has a right, on the ground of creation,
+even if there were no other, to be the Ruler of all. It took long to
+make men understand this truth, simple and elementary as it seems to
+you and to me.
+
+When we say that God governs the globe, we do not mean the mere
+earthly, solid structure on which we dwell. We mean that He governs
+the inhabitants of it, the communities and the individuals. "The
+Lord reigneth, let the earth rejoice." "The Lord reigneth, let the
+nations tremble." "He raiseth up kings and he putteth them down."
+He calls into being Pharaohs that He may show His power and His
+glory in relation to them. His providence is most holy and wise and
+powerful, and it is not general merely, it is particular, extending
+to all the creatures and to all their actions. These things we have
+to keep in mind in relation to Jehovah.
+
+Now it would seem, surely, that if a man believed this his common
+sense would dictate to him that, living in a world that God had
+made and God rules in every detail, if he wishes to be happy in
+it, he must have respect to the law of Him who has made and who
+rules. Common sense indicates that if we live in a house it is
+desirable to be on good terms with the head of the house if we
+wish to be comfortable. Common sense dictates that if a man is
+in the employment of others, it is wise for him to have a right
+understanding, to stand well with the head of the department in
+which he is engaged. Common sense teaches us that if we are subjects
+in a kingdom and wish to be safe and happy, we must respect the
+laws by which the kingdom is ruled. And we have only to extend this
+principle, and we get to the point that was before the Psalmist's
+mind when he says: "I will walk at liberty, for I seek (or, as it
+is in the revision, without changing the meaning, 'I have sought')
+thy statutes." I am living in Thy world, I am dependent upon Thee,
+I have taken pains to know what Thy will is, that I may do it; and
+so I walk at liberty. That is the idea that is brought to us in the
+text, and it is easy for you to see how good and practical that idea
+is.
+
+But the question may arise, can we know the precepts and the
+statutes that God has given to us? You do not need to be told that
+that is within our reach. God has spoken to us in this revelation,
+as He did speak less articulately in the works of His hands, and
+in the instincts and convictions that He produced in our spirit.
+We have His revelation in our hands. We can seek the knowledge of
+it. In many instances well-meaning and right-minded boys, under
+great difficulties, have sought education that they may get on in
+this world. In many other cases boys have had education at their
+very doors, and have never sought it, and consequently have been
+of little account in the world. Now the difference is not great,
+in this aspect of it, between ordinary secular education and the
+spiritual education of which the text gives us an illustration. Here
+are God's statutes and precepts put within our reach. We can search
+them, seek them, know them and do them, by the grace that God is
+willing to give, or we can push them aside, ignore and disregard
+them, and take our own way, and the result will be absolute and
+everlasting failure in our lives. We can not have this too solemnly
+fixt in our thoughts. God has spoken to us. What shall we do with
+His word? Shall we neglect it and pass it by, or shall we take it,
+study it, seek it, as the verse expresses it, and make it the rule
+of our lives? Jesus Christ has come down from heaven to live among
+us, and has said to our race, "Come unto me and learn of me"; and
+there are millions to whom this message has come and they disregard
+and ignore it; they do not come to Him, they do not learn of Him.
+Can we wonder if the Judge should say to them when they appear at
+His seat, "I never knew you"? If you read the First Epistle to the
+Thessalonians, you will see pictures of an angry God, as an avenging
+fire, in the apostle's description. On whom does the fire fall? On
+whom does the Judge show his indignation? Is it upon the misers and
+the miscreants and the murderers of the race merely? Oh, no. It is
+upon them that "know not God and obey not the gospel of his Son."
+Is it any wonder that the sacred writer should say, "Remember thy
+Creator in the days of thy youth"; not merely remember that there
+is a God--remember thy Creator, who made thee and in whose hand thy
+fortunes are. Remember in the days of thy youth, the formative days,
+the days when character is being shaped. What is well begun is half
+ended. The life that is well begun, in this way has a guaranty of
+usefulness and success. The life that is not begun in this way has
+a dark and gloomy prospect before it. Remember thy Creator. We all
+know well what is meant when some one says to us, on going away from
+our homes, "Don't forget your home, don't forget your mother." We
+know what that means. And God's messenger speaks to us in the same
+tone when he makes this appeal: Remember thy Creator; remember His
+power, remember His will, remember His statutes, seek His precepts,
+and by doing this thou wilt be able to walk at liberty.
+
+You may have mere liberty, and not light and not the liberty of
+God. You may combine liberty with means, with power, and with a
+certain degree of prosperity; you may combine it with equality and
+with fraternity, and yet not have the true enlightenment. True
+enlightenment comes in the way, indicated in the text, by the
+seeking of God's precepts, the knowing of God's statutes, and this
+you and I need to keep in mind. "What is liberty?" once asked Burke.
+"What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? Such liberty
+is the greatest of all possible evils, for it is vice and folly
+and madness, without tuition and without restraint." Mere liberty
+without other forces working in the sphere that it opens up, is
+only another name for license. "Give me liberty or give me death,"
+said Patrick Henry--not because he felt the need of enlightenment.
+He had been enlightened by the teaching of an intelligent Scottish
+father, by the preaching of the splendid sermons of Samuel Davies,
+and especially by the daily study, which he kept up to his dying
+day, of his Bible. He had been enlightened by these things. What
+he craved for himself and for his fellow men was open space in
+which, unhindered, other and mighty influences might tell upon his
+fellow men and make the country what, in the blessing of God, it has
+become. Settle this in your minds: Liberty is simply the freedom
+for other forces to act, and it is for you and me who are free, to
+see what these forces are, and we never can have any so good as
+those which the Psalmist speaks of when he says that he sought God's
+precepts, he studied God's statutes, that he might do them, and so
+walk at liberty. We want to walk at liberty. How can we do it? If
+we do not thus walk at liberty, there is only one alternative--stay
+in bondage and walk in bondage, moving about indeed, and apparently
+free, but with moral chains binding our natures and our whole
+being in bondage to the powers that will rejoice in our misery and
+ultimate ruin. It is to make men understand this that we have such
+institutions as we enjoy to-day. For this end church edifices are
+reared. For this end people are invited to come and be regularly in
+them and under their influence. For this end God has been pleased
+to give us the day of holy rest. For this purpose the ministry has
+been instituted. Our business is to make men seek and know God's
+precepts and statutes, that they may do them and that they may walk
+at liberty. "We ministers are for you; our business is to seek
+your moral and spiritual good, your full and complete liberation.
+Our business is to enlighten you with the truth as God has been
+pleased to reveal it unto us. You do not come to these churches for
+our sakes, to hear us. You do not give your money that we may be
+sustained and upheld. I tell you I would rather sweep the streets,
+I would rather carry bricks on my shoulder to the builder, than be
+a mere official person maintained because he can teach so much and
+get so many people to hear him. Brethren, it is that you may be
+enlightened and saved with the light of life, that God has brought
+us into the position in which we are now together. Keep this in your
+thoughts; and that you may be enlightened and free, look upward and
+not downward, nor around you. In that statue in our harbor, the
+light that will shine is light that comes, I suppose, from the heart
+of the earth; but the light that is to enlighten the world is the
+light of the sun, the Sun of Righteousness. See that you have that
+shining into your souls, that you may walk at liberty.
+
+Having looked at the former part of this text, namely, what the
+Psalmist did with a view to the end, we look at the end at which he
+was aiming. He studied God's Word, not simply that he might have so
+much intellectual knowledge. He studied it for practical uses. He
+studied God's precepts that he might obey them. I do not need to
+remind you that you and I have advantages greater than he had, in
+some important respects. He had the revelation in part; we have it
+in its completeness. He had the preparatory dispensation; we have
+the dispensation that fulfils the promises of the preparatory. He
+had the beginning; we have the complement. We know more than he
+did. He wrote these words, "I have sought thy precepts." He knew of
+the Paschal Lamb and of its typical significance; we know the Lamb
+of God that taketh away the sin of the world. He knew the Hebrew
+priest and the general character of his functions. We know a High
+Priest who has passed into the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God. He
+knew of the altar and the victim, and the blood that made typical
+atonement; we know of the great sacrifice on the cross, bringing in
+a redemption that is complete and eternal. He knew of a Messiah that
+was to come. You, even children in the Sunday-school to-day, know of
+that Messiah risen, risen triumphant, risen a conqueror, risen for
+you, risen because He has finished the work God gave Him to do. If
+the Psalmist studied God's will that he might walk at liberty, how
+much greater is the obligation upon us to do the same, and how much
+greater our facilities and our encouragement. Let us try, then, to
+travel in the Psalmist's steps, and let us see some, not all, of
+the forms of liberty that we can have by compliance with the divine
+precepts.
+
+There is liberty, in the first place, from the world. I use the word
+now in the sense in which it is used so frequently in the Bible--not
+merely this round globe or the hundreds of millions that are upon
+it--not merely these millions in that capacity. The world lieth in
+the wicked one; the mass of men, that is, do not know God. They
+constitute the world of the New Testament; we can be in bondage
+to this world. Natural men are in bondage to it. They are not at
+liberty in relation to that natural world. It is without God; it
+does not ask what His will is. It enquires as to its own will, and
+it tries to enforce it. You sometimes see cliques and coteries and
+collections of men insisting at any cost upon carrying out their own
+will. This is only the spirit of the greater world of which they
+constitute a section. Sometimes men are in bondage to the world
+in this sense, and the mainspring of their life is to stand well
+with it, to do what their set, their society, the world round about
+them, wishes them to do. Sometimes the bondage is aggravated by
+another feature, viz., the effort to rise higher, to get upon a more
+elevated plane, to get into another set; and, oh, how aggravated is
+the bondage under which many thus live and labor! Freedom from that
+is obtained when we walk according to God's statutes. Believers,
+the world is not your master. One is your Master, even Christ, and
+we are brethren in Him, and He is reasonable and kind and just and
+brotherly, and you can walk with Him. His favor is enough for you,
+His smile satisfies you. Fellowship with Him is the best society.
+Let society stigmatize you, let it stamp its enmity upon you, but
+seek God's precepts. If you only have Christ walking with you,
+then you walk at liberty. But as to the life-work in which many
+are busy, or trying to get up a little higher socially, take this
+precept of the Word, "Godliness with contentment is great gain";
+and these things, the godliness with the contentment, will break
+these clanking chains of insane and stupid ambition and will prepare
+you to walk at liberty. "I am in the place where God puts me. I am
+trying to do the work that God gives to me. I am responsible to Him.
+I belong to Him. He is my Father, Christ is my Brother, heaven is my
+home. This I believe on the authority of His word. I will walk at
+liberty." Let me commend that form of true freedom to you.
+
+There is liberty, in the second place, from bad ways. Do I need
+to describe these bad ways to you? You can not live in the city,
+you can not read the newspapers, you can not hear the gossip, you
+can not know what is going on in the circles in which you mingle,
+without knowing some of these bad ways. There is the lover of this
+world's possessions, so strongly denounced in Isaiah's prophecies:
+beginning, perhaps, with necessary saving, but coming slowly but
+steadily to a sordid love of the thing that is saved, till the whole
+spirit is mercenary, and gold is the deity that is practically
+worshiped. There is the drunkard, sipping a little innocently, as he
+thinks, at the beginning, then going a little farther, and secretly,
+until shame is lost and the victim is under the power of the
+drink--degraded, wretched, irresponsible, not ashamed of himself,
+for shame is gone, but an object for which all are ashamed that are
+connected with him. There is the gambler, beginning perhaps with
+what he deemed innocent recreation, and catching the spirit of the
+thing till it masters him, until he flings away all that he has, and
+all that he hopes to have, in the chance of recovering something
+already lost, till life is a burden and fortune is gone, and suicide
+is perhaps the tragical termination. These are specimens of the
+bad ways--marked specimens, I grant, but still simple specimens.
+There is freedom from this when we seek and do God's statutes--real
+freedom. We learn to walk circumspectly; we learn to keep the heart
+with all diligence; we learn to hate evil and to do good; we learn
+to flee from the snares that Satan sets for the feet of men. We walk
+securely, for we have been taught of the Spirit to walk with God.
+Make sure, dear hearers, that you have this liberty.
+
+There is liberty from bad memories--bad, putrid memories. When the
+corrupt imagination contemplates indulgences in sin, it often dwells
+upon these long before the actual execution of them, and as they
+linger in the mind they photograph themselves upon its surface, and
+they stay there. There may be compunction for the sin, there may be
+shame over it, there may be vows against it, there may be honest
+purposes to resist and overcome it, and these purposes to a good
+degree carried out; but the horrid, poisonous memories remain in the
+soul. You know what it is to be in a house where animal matter is
+decaying and poisoning fumes are being scattered up and down. Oh!
+the misery of the human mind that is haunted with the ghosts of bad
+deeds that have been done in the past. It is bondage of the keenest
+and sorest kind. There is liberty from these to those who walk in
+God's statutes, liberty that can be had nowhere else. "A new heart
+will I give you, and a right spirit will I put within you. I will
+take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a
+heart of flesh." Happy are they to whom this word was fulfilled in
+their early youth, and who in consequence were kept from the sins,
+the very recollection of which is sometimes like the beginning of
+hell.
+
+There is bondage to bad associates and bad associations. In how many
+instances, in thoughtlessness, inexperience, under the impulses of
+mere feeling, do men become entangled in connections that mar their
+lives and spoil all their happiness--make happiness practically
+impossible! I speak what I know, when I say that there are too
+many cases in which boys are practically ruined where they go as
+pupils to schools away from their parents' supervision, thrown into
+dependence, in some degree, upon those whom they call friends, and
+these friends bad, initiating them into ways and habits and modes of
+thinking and doing, for which they only want the liberty of later
+years that they may put them into practise, with disgrace, misery
+and ruin. Relief from this bondage, escape from it, these can be had
+when we seek God's statutes, when we walk according to His precepts.
+Wisdom's ways are pleasantness, and her paths are peace. There are
+no bad habits in them; there are no entangling associations in them;
+there are no corrupting and degrading influences in them. There is
+nothing in them that plays upon passion, till passion, once our idol
+and our sport, becomes our ruler and our cruel tyrant. To escape all
+these, this is the way: seek God's statutes, that you may know and
+do them, and you shall walk at liberty.
+
+
+
+
+BACON
+
+GOD INDWELLING
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+
+LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON, Congregational divine, born in New Haven,
+Conn., 1830. He was educated at Yale, from which university he
+graduated in 1850. He has filled the position of pastor in many
+important churches and has done much theological and literary work.
+Among other things he edited Luther's "Deutsche Geistliche Lieder"
+(New York, 1883), and wrote "History of American Christianity" (New
+York, 1897).
+
+
+
+
+BACON
+
+BORN IN 1830
+
+GOD INDWELLING[6]
+
+  [6] From "The Simplicity That Is in Christ," published by Funk &
+  Wagnalls Company.
+
+_Thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose
+name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also
+that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of
+the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones._--Isaiah
+lvii., 15.
+
+
+Inhabiting eternity; yet making His abode within a broken heart! It
+seems as if we might apprehend either of these things singly; but
+both together--how can it be? The distresses, the wants, the fears,
+of life, make us long that indeed it were so. Our soul crieth out
+for God, for the living God.
+
+We cry; but there seems no answer; only an awful silence. We look
+upon the outward facts of life and death, and see the steady,
+unswerving march of law--the unbroken, irrefragable chain of causes
+and effects--never yielding nor bending to all our needs, to all our
+prayers. And God seems so far, so far away! We turn the pages of
+our knowledge from the physical to the metaphysical, and we come
+no nearer. Our philosophical, our theological, yes, our religious
+meditations upon the nature and attributes of the infinite One--the
+omniscient, the eternal, the unchangeable--set Him more and more
+beyond the reach of our fellowship and prayer. But all the time,
+one thing testifies to us of a heavenly Father that hears and loves
+and answers, and that is our ineradicable need. The cravings of our
+nature cannot be rebuked by scientific observation of the constancy
+of law, nor by philosophic meditation of the properties of absolute
+and infinite being. We need, we must have, a Father. Our heart and
+flesh, our soul, crieth out for the living God.
+
+In such a strait, there is true comfort in this word of the Lord
+by His prophet, in which the full measure of the difficulty is set
+forth, and the solution of it is found in faith.
+
+It has seemed to me that we need not seek in vain in the created
+works of God for helps to that faith by which we know that the
+infinite and eternal God can have fellowship with us and can dwell
+within the narrow precincts of a human heart.
+
+That sight in visible nature which gives to us the highest sense
+of vastness,--the aptest suggestion of infinity,--is doubtless the
+aspect of the starry heavens;--to all of us, ignorant or learned,
+poetic or unimaginative. It needs no diagrams nor distances from
+a book of astronomy to tell the lessons of the firmament. "Their
+sound is gone out into all the earth, and their words to the end of
+the world."
+
+And yet it is when we come to study the dimensions of this operation
+in detail, that the sense of its vastness grows upon us and
+overpowers us. David never could have felt, as we can feel, the
+force of his own words:
+
+    When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
+    The moon and the stars which thou hast ordained,
+    What is man that thou art mindful of him,
+    And the son of man that thou visitest him!
+
+They are like the chariot of Ezekiel's vision, "so high that it
+was dreadful." It seems a fearful thing to have to do with such
+magnitudes; and when we hear of scholars in their observatories
+measuring the distances among the stars, it overcomes us with a
+giddy feeling, as when we see men clambering on church spires, or
+crossing the East River on a strand of wire. A row of figures on a
+slate does seem such a frail support on which to go marching through
+the starry spaces! We almost shudder when we see human science
+springing clear of the narrow boundaries of the earth, and on such
+attenuated threads of calculation venturing boldly forth to other
+planets, and thence over chasms of space so vast that it is easiest
+to call them infinite, until he reaches the fixt stars. No longer
+content with numbering and naming the host of heaven, and marshaling
+them in constellations, this tiny creature must take upon himself
+to scrutinize their constitution, must weigh their floating bulk,
+must
+
+    "Speed his flight from star to star,
+     From world to luminous world, as far
+       As the universe rears his flaming wall,"
+
+and, as if bearing in this amazing flight the measuring-rod which
+once the prophet saw in an angel's hand, must measure the paths
+along which the planets travel, and tell in human language the
+distances on the chart of heaven.
+
+And how human language staggers under the burden thus laid upon it!
+We begin with attempting to state the least of these distances in
+numbers of a unit of earthly distance, but, when we speak of some
+of our near neighbors in celestial space as being twenty trillions
+of English miles away, the words will not hold the meaning--they
+carry no conception to the mind. They are good to cipher with,
+but that is all they are good for. We try to invent a new form of
+speech, and for our unit we take the distance which a cannon-ball,
+if retaining the velocity with which it leaves the gun, would travel
+in twenty-four hours, and say that, at this rate of speed, it would
+take so many months, and years, and centuries, to reach such and
+such of the nearer stars. But this, too, is a clumsy failure; and
+we resort, at last, to the heavens themselves for a standard of
+measurement, and find it in the velocity of light. It shoots from
+the sun to the earth, a distance of ninety-two millions of miles,
+in eight minutes and seven seconds. And we attempt to represent the
+distance of certain of the stars by stating how many years, how many
+hundred years, how many thousand years, it takes a ray of their
+light to reach the earth. But it is all in vain. We commonly speak
+of imagination as outstripping, in its speed, the slow-paced reason;
+but here it is the reason that has outrun the imagination. From
+these unspeakable tracts of space, over which the reason of man has
+not hesitated to go,
+
+  "Sounding along its dim and perilous way,"
+
+the imagination shrinks back and refuses to follow. We know things
+which we cannot conceive. In presence of such stupendous magnitudes,
+
+    "Imagination's utmost stretch
+       In wonder dies away."
+
+We can only bow with awe in the presence of things which the
+calmest computations have revealed, and seizing the words kindled on
+the lips of inspiration, sing aloud in worship:
+
+  "O Lord, how great are they works!
+   In wisdom hast thou made them all!"
+
+I have shown you what is wonderful. Come now and I will show you
+what is more wonderful. For I will show you these infinite spaces
+of the sky, and the glory of them, and the innumerable host of
+starry worlds, gathered up in a moment of time, within the tiny
+pupil of a human eye. It is wonderful that the heavens and the host
+of them should be so great; but that, being so great, they should
+be able to become so infinitely little,--this passes all wonder.
+The shepherd stretched upon the ground amid his sheep gazes up into
+the starry depths, and finds them wonderful; but never thinks how
+far more wonderful than the heavens which he beholds is himself
+beholding them. As he lies gazing, long lines of light, from planet
+and star and constellation, come stretching on through the infinite
+void spaces, to center on the lenses of his drowsy eye. Side by
+side, and all at once, yet never twisted or confused, these ten
+thousand rays of different light enter the little aperture in the
+center of the eye which we call the pupil. There they cross, in a
+point which has no dimensions, and separate again, and paint in
+microscopic miniature upon the little surface of the retina, behind
+the eyeball, the inverted facsimile of the visible heavens. There,
+in the ante-chamber of the brain, marches Orion, with his shining
+baldric and his jeweled sword; there glow Arcturus and Sirius, and
+the steadfast North Star; there pass the planets to and fro; and
+the far-off nebulć are painted there with suffused and gentle
+radiance--all the heavens and the glory of them gathered in that
+slender filament of light, threaded through that tiny aperture,
+painted by their own rays upon that little patch of nervous network,
+apprehended, felt, known through and through by that finite human
+mind. How far stranger and sublimer a thing is this than the mere
+bulk of the worlds, or the mere chasms of void space in which they
+hang weltering!
+
+By this sublime fact of God's visible creation, we are led on to
+apprehend and feel the sublimest of the glories of God Himself, set
+forth in the prophet's words,--that He whose lifetime is infinite
+duration, whose dwelling-place is infinite space,--He who before
+the earth and the world were made was no younger, neither will be
+older when they are all consumed,--whose presence reaches out to the
+farthest fixt star that eye or telescope has ever described floating
+upon the far verge of the universe, and occupies beyond in all the
+orbits of worlds yet undiscovered, and still beyond in the regions
+of space where is naught but the possibility of future worlds, and
+fills all this immensity to repletion,--that this "high and lofty
+One that inhabiteth eternity" should enter into some poor, crusht
+and broken spirit, that trembles at the very whisper of His voice,
+and should make the narrow recesses of that heart His abode, His
+home. This is the mystery and glory of the Godhead,--not alone that
+He should be infinite, eternal, immortal, invisible, but that being
+all these, He should yet be apprehended by the little mind of a man,
+and call Himself that man's Friend and Comforter and Father.
+
+For it is not more evident that the tiny pupil of human eye can take
+in the expanses and abysses of the heavens, than it is that the
+little soul of man can receive into itself the infinite God.
+
+I. Man receives God into himself by the intellect. We trifle with
+the facts of our own consciousness, if we suffer the theological
+description of God as incomprehensible to divert us from the fact
+that our minds are made for nothing more expressly than for this,
+that they should receive God. The lowest rudiments of the knowledge
+of the simplest forms of matter are the beginnings of the knowledge
+of God. If we could remember, you and I, now that we are grown, all
+that came to us in infancy--the first struggles of the childish mind
+with the questions that we are not done with yet, we should see how
+soon the knowledge of God comes to the little one. Beyond the cradle
+in which it wakes up to the wonders of a new day is the nursery, and
+beyond the nursery is the house, and beyond the house is the garden,
+and beyond the garden there lies all the world, and beyond the
+world shuts down the sky with its stars, and beyond the sky--what?
+"Tell me, father--tell me, mother, what is there beyond the sky?"
+And, according to your knowledge or your ignorance, your faith or
+your unbelief, you may tell the little questioner of heaven, or of
+infinities of other worlds, or of infinite waste room and empty
+space, and he will believe you. But attempt to tell him that beyond
+is nothing, and not even room for anything, and will he believe you?
+He may seem to believe you, but it is impossible that he really
+should believe. The infant mind--any mind--rejects it as impossible.
+It cannot live in anything less than infinite space. It stifles. It
+leaps up and beats its wings against any bars with which you would
+cage it in, but that it will break through and take possession of
+its inheritance.
+
+And as with infinite extent, so with infinite duration. How well I
+remember, as a very little child, when men were talking of the end
+of the world, and the great comet stretched amain across the sky,
+and men's hearts were failing them for fear, how the thought of
+infinite duration prest in, inexorably, on my soul! Come judgment
+day, come final conflagration, come end of all material things, come
+cessation and extinction of all angels, all souls, all sentient
+creatures, still this could not be the end. Eternity must needs go
+on and on, tho there were never an event or thought to mark its
+movement. There cannot be an end.
+
+They err, not measuring the import of their own arguments, who
+tell us, in that pride of not-knowing which is so high uplifted
+beyond any pride of knowledge, that the very form of the word
+infinite marks it as the sign of a thing inconceivable, being a mere
+negation. Nay, verily, it is the word end, limit, cessation, that
+is the negative word, having no meaning except as the negation of
+continuance; and infinite is the negation of this negation--a thing
+positive, affirmative, real.
+
+So, then, it is not the idea of infinity to which the human mind is
+unfitted. The mind is so made that it cannot help receiving that.
+The incredible, inconceivable idea is the idea of absolute end. So
+far is the idea of infinity from being inconceivable, that it is
+just impossible to thrust the conception out of the mind. And with
+the conception of eternity, there rushes into the thoughtful spirit
+at once, the awful and lovely conception of "that high and lofty
+One who inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy." By such a wonder
+of creation is it, that He who made the little ball of the human
+eye so that it can take in the heavens and the earth, has made the
+petty intellect of man so that it can take in the knowledge of the
+infinite God.
+
+II. But, secondly, it is even a greater wonder than this, that the
+infinite God, whom the intellect has conceived, draws near for a
+more intimate society with His creature, and enters the heart
+of man through the gateway of his affections. I say a greater
+wonder; for it must be confest that this ideal of the intellect,
+this center in which all infinite attributes inhere, does by
+His very majesty so overawe the heart that we shrink away from
+Him. By every new perfection of His nature, that grows upon our
+apprehension; by His awful power as the Almighty; by His perfect
+knowledge as the All-wise; by His unswerving steadfastness as the
+Faithful and True--the Immutable; by the very infinitude of His
+nature, He is withdrawn farther and farther from the possibility
+of being counted among those humble objects on which the tendrils
+of a human heart are able to lay hold. How, for instance, shall
+this Inhabitant of eternity, whose name is Holy, be well-pleased
+with His petty creature who has dared withstand His perfect law,
+and looks shrinking toward the throne of infinite Majesty, fearing
+and crying, "Unclean! unclean!" How shall any prayer that we can
+frame bring arguments to bear upon the Mind that knows the end
+from the beginning, and to whom there is not a word upon our lips,
+but lo! He knoweth it altogether? How can any pitiful plight into
+which we may fall move the compassion of Him who is immutable, and
+under whose benign government even the pains and severities that
+befall His creatures are wrought into a plan of common beneficence
+to the whole? These are questions which the awe-struck intellect,
+gazing upward at the infinite attributes that adorn the name which
+is holy, puts to the yearning heart, which, with all the craving
+of its love, with all the outstretching of its need, gropes after
+a God to worship, to love, to pray to, if haply it may find Him.
+And the heart cannot answer back the intellect with arguments of
+language. But love contains more reason than many arguments; and the
+strong instincts of affection and devotion with which the humble and
+contrite heart reaches out after the love and personal friendship
+of an infinite Creator are themselves an argument that God will not
+refuse Himself to the affections which He has Himself implanted. The
+hunger and thirst of our hearts for God are a promise from Him that
+they shall be filled. He cannot deny Himself.
+
+The very arguments by which we climb to the knowledge of the
+infinite Spirit are like mountains that separate us from any
+relation with him of childlike prayer and mutual love. But a
+trustful confidence can say to these mountains, "Be ye removed and
+be ye cast into the sea," and it shall be done.
+
+Have you ever pondered that dark mystery of human nature, the origin
+of the frightful idolatries of India? It seems to be proved that
+they had their beginning, not (as the prepossessions of modern
+science would suggest) through development from some form of
+fetishism baser and coarser still, but by degradation from the most
+refined and abstract speculations on the infinity, the spirituality,
+and the immutability of God. No subtler metaphysics is taught to-day
+in the lecture-rooms of Yale and Princeton than was taught long
+centuries ago by Hindoo sages, enthroning their supreme divinity in
+the everlasting, impassive repose of the unconditioned, far beyond
+the reach of affection, sympathy or prayer, until the needy millions
+cried out, stifling, famishing, "Give us a God to love, to worship,
+to pray to!" and, for lack of answer, betook them to the forest or
+the quarry or the mine, to the carver and the smith, and made them
+gods that were no gods. So little can argument and reason hold us
+back in times when the stress of life comes down upon us, and the
+cravings of the soul grow strong!
+
+I am bringing to the altar of God my offering--my poor little
+offering of thankfulness and prayer. Here have I my little bundle
+of anxieties, cares, troubles,--it may be the concerns of a nation
+in fear and perplexity; it may be the distress and terror of
+some sorely afflicted little household; it may be the secret of
+bitterness of some humble and contrite spirit; in any case, a matter
+how infinitely small when measured by the scale of immensity and
+eternity; but oh, how great a thing to me! And there meets me, in
+the way, a philosopher. "And what, forsooth, have you there? Show
+it me, now." And I unroll before Him my little bundle of griefs,
+of cares, of pains, of sickness, of fears, of forebodings,--here
+a handful of myrrh from a troubled heart, and there a sprig of
+frankincense from a grateful spirit. "And this, then, is what you
+would bring to lay before the infinite, the eternal, the omniscient,
+the unchangeable God!" And each great title smites upon my heart
+with discouragement and dismay. "This is what you would bring to
+Him in prayer and deprecation! But do you not know that all this
+is a part of a perfect system?--that it is all fixt by the laws of
+nature, which no prayer can change or suspend without upsetting the
+constitution of the universe. You would lay before God your wretched
+plight to move His pity? Tush! Did He not know it all a hundred
+thousand ages ago, or ever the earth was?" And I cannot gainsay Him,
+and I cannot cease to pray. But by and by the philosopher himself
+comes face to face with some of the overwhelming things in human
+life and human death. He hangs with tears and wringing of hands over
+some cradleful of childish anguish, and shrinks from what the laws
+of nature, the system of the universe, are doing there--so pitiless,
+so deaf to prayer, so blind to agony; and he looks away, and looks
+up, and cries, "My God, my God!" And his reason is not one whit
+the less true, because now, at last, his love and faith are also
+true and strong. The awful wonder of God's unchangeable infinity
+abides; but out of cloud and darkness breaks forth, oh, what light
+of fatherly love! And the bewildered soul sings:--
+
+        And can this mighty King
+          Of glory condescend?
+        And will He write His name
+          My Father, and my Friend?
+    I love His name! I love His word!
+    Join all my powers and praise the Lord!
+
+And now behold a mystery--the mystery of godliness, without
+controversy great, manifest in the flesh! That He may come over
+these mountains of helpless separation, that we may be helped to
+know, to love, to trust that which is far too vast for the reach
+of our clinging affections to clasp, what wonders of condescending
+tenderness will not our Father do! There draweth near to us One
+having the likeness of man, but glorious with an unearthly glory,
+as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. He
+stands beside us in our daily cares, our household joys and griefs,
+our business troubles and anxieties, our national fears and sorrows.
+He shares our temptations. He is touched with the feeling of our
+infirmities. He carries our sorrows. He bears our sickness. He dies
+our death. How easy to love Him, to come near to Him, to trust Him!
+Being lifted up, how doth He draw all men unto Him! And what mean
+those wonderful words of His, telling of His intimacy, His sonship,
+His oneness with the invisible and eternal God? Could it be,
+perhaps, that such an one might bring us nearer to the inaccessible
+Light--might help us to draw nigh as seeing Him who is invisible?
+Oh, Master, show us the Father and it sufficeth us! And hear now
+His gracious words: "He that believeth on me believeth on him that
+sent me." "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father also." Thus the
+high and lofty One, who hath wonderfully entered into our narrow
+understanding, cometh also into our heart, and draweth us to His own
+bosom "with the chords of love, with the bands of a man."
+
+III. Finally, with a true spiritual intercourse and converse, which
+no man can define, which is as the viewless wind that men know altho
+they see it not, and feel its quickening and refreshment, altho they
+cannot tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth, God entereth into
+our spirits, "not to sojourn, but to abide with us," and we become
+the temples of the Holy Ghost.
+
+
+
+
+JOSEPH PARKER
+
+A WORD TO THE WEARY
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+
+JOSEPH PARKER was born at Hexham-on-Tyne, England, in 1830. He
+was a prodigious worker, writer, and preacher. His "The People's
+Bible," in twenty-eight large volumes, a popular commentary on
+the Scriptures, is his greatest work. To a naturally energetic
+personality he added great originality and resourcefulness. He
+gave much time to the preparation of sermons, reading them aloud
+as he wrote in order to test their effect upon the ear. A strong
+personal quality pervaded all his preaching. "If I have not seen Him
+myself," he said, "I cannot preach Him." In lectures to students he
+gave much valuable advice gathered from the storehouse of his own
+varied experience. He gave particular attention to the use of the
+voice. "It is not enough," he said, "that you be heard; you must be
+effective as well as audible; you must lighten and thunder with the
+voice; it must rise and fall like a storm at times; now a whisper,
+now a trumpet, now the sound of many waters. There is an orator's
+voice, and there is a bellman's. The auctioneer talks; the orator
+speaks." Dr. Parker's sermons are published in numerous volumes. He
+died in 1902.
+
+
+
+
+JOSEPH PARKER
+
+1830-1902
+
+A WORD TO THE WEARY[7]
+
+  [7] From "The People's Bible," by Joseph Parker, published by Funk &
+  Wagnalls Company.
+
+_The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should
+know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary._--Isaiah
+1., 4.
+
+
+The power of speaking to the weary is nothing less than a divine
+gift. As we see the divinity in our gifts shall we be careful of
+them, thankful for them: every gift seems to enshrine the giver,
+God. But how extraordinary that this power of speaking to the weary
+should not be taught in the schools. It is not within the ability
+of man to teach other men how to speak to the weary-hearted, the
+wounded in spirit, the sore in the innermost feelings of the being.
+But can we lay down directions about this and offer suggestions?
+Probably so, but we do not touch the core of the matter. There is an
+infinite difference between the scholar and the genius. The scholar
+is made, the genius is inspired. Information can be imparted, but
+the true sense, the sense that feels and sees God, is a gift direct
+from heaven.
+
+It is a common notion that anybody can sing. Why can you sing? Why,
+because I have been taught. That is your mistake. You can sing
+mechanically, exactly, properly, with right time, right tune, but
+really and truly you can not sing. Here is a man with his music and
+with the words; he sings every note, pronounces every word, goes
+through his lesson, finishes his task, and nobody wants to hear him
+any more. Another man takes up the same music, the same words, and
+the same hearers exclaim, "Oh, that he would go on for ever!" How
+is that?--the words exactly the same, the notes identical--how?
+Soul, fire, ever-burning, never consuming, making a bush like a
+planet. The great difficulty in all such cases is the difficulty
+of transferring to paper a proper or adequate conception of the
+power of the men who thus sway the human heart. There are some men
+whose biographies simply belie them, and yet every sentence in the
+biography is true in the letter; but the biography is little else
+than a travesty and a caricature, because the power was personal,
+it was in the face, in the voice, in the presence, in the gait, in
+the touch--an incommunicable power; the hem of the garment trembled
+under it, but no biographer could catch it in his scholarly ink.
+
+Very few ministers can enter a sick chamber with any probability
+of doing real and lasting good. They can read the Bible, and they
+can pray, and yet, when they have gone, the room seems as if they
+had never been there. There is no sense of emptiness or desolation.
+Other men, probably not so much gifted in some other directions,
+will enter the sick room, and there will be a light upon the wall,
+summer will gleam upon the windowpane, and angels will rustle in the
+air, and it will be a scene of gladness and a vision of triumph. How
+is that? The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned that
+I might know how--_how_ to speak a word in season to him that is
+weary. The Lord God hath not only given me a word to say, but hath
+given me learning to teach me how to speak it. Place the emphasis
+upon the how, and then you develop all the mystery, all the tender
+music, all the infinite capacity of manner.
+
+We may say the right word in the wrong tone; we may preach the
+gospel as if it were a curse. The common notion is that anybody can
+go into the Sunday-school and teach the young. We sometimes think
+that it would be well if a great many persons left the Sunday-school
+all over the world. Teach the young--would God I had that great
+gift, to break the bread for the children, and to be able to lure
+and captivate opening minds, and to enter into the spirit of the
+words--
+
+    "Delightful task! to rear the tender thought,
+     To teach the young idea how to shoot."
+
+It requires to be father and mother and sister and nurse and
+genius to speak to the young. They may hear you and not care for
+you: they may understand your words, and be repelled by your spirit.
+You require the tongue of the learned to know how to speak, and
+that tongue of the learned is not to be had at school, college,
+university--it is not included in any curriculum of learning--it is
+a gift divine, breathing an afflatus, an inspiration--the direct
+and distinct creation of God, as is the star, the sun. The speaker,
+then, is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the representative of the
+Father, the incarnate Deity--He it is who is charged with the subtle
+learning; He it is whose lips tremble with the pathos of this
+ineffable music.
+
+Tho the gift itself is divine, we must remember that it is to be
+exercised seasonably. The text is, "that I should know how to speak
+a word in season." There is a time for everything. It is not enough
+to speak the right word, it must be spoken at the right moment. Who
+can know when that is! We can not be taught. We must feel it, see
+it hours beyond: nay, must know when to be silent for the whole
+twenty-four hours and to say, "To-morrow, at such and such a time,
+we will drop that sentence upon the listening ear." "The day after
+to-morrow, he will probably be in circumstances to admit of this
+communication being delivered with sympathy and effect." How few
+persons know the right time--the right time in conversation. Some
+people are never heard in conversation tho they are talking all
+the time. They talk so unseasonably, they talk when other people
+are talking; they can not wait; they do not know how to come in
+along the fine line of silence: they do not understand the German
+expression "Now an angel has passed," and they do not quickly enough
+follow in his wake. Consequently, tho chattering much they are
+saying nothing--tho their words be multitudinous, the impression
+they make is a blank.
+
+I have a ripe seed in my hand. As an agriculturist I am going to sow
+it. Any laborer in the field can tell me that I should be acting
+foolishly in sowing it just now. Why? "It is out of season," the man
+says. "There is a time for the doing of that action: I will tell you
+when the time returns--do it then, and you may expect a profitable
+result of your labor."
+
+Then I will change the character and be a nurse, and I will attend
+to my patient (perhaps I will over attend to him--some patients
+are killed by over nursing), and I will give the patient this
+medicine--it is the right medicine. So it is, but you are going
+to give it at the wrong time, and if you give the medicine at the
+wrong time, tho itself be right, the hour being wrong you will bring
+suffering upon the patient, and you yourself will be involved in
+pains and penalties. Thus we touch that very subtle and sensitive
+line in human life, the line of refined discrimination. You may
+say "I am sure I told him." You are right--you did tell him and
+he did not hear you. You may reply, "I am perfectly confident I
+delivered the message,--I preached the exact words of the gospel."
+So you did, but you never got the hearing heart, your manner was so
+unsympathetic, so ungentle, so cruel (not meant to be--unconsciously
+so), that the man never understood it to be a gospel. You spoilt the
+music in the delivery, in the giving of the message. The Lord God
+giveth the tongue of the learned, that he to whom it is given may
+know how to speak--how to speak the right word--how to speak the
+right word at the right point of time. You want divine teaching in
+all things, in speech not least.
+
+This is a curious word to find in the Bible. Does the Bible care
+about weary people? We have next to no sympathy with them. If a man
+be weary, we give him notice to quit: if he ask us to what place
+he can retire, we tell him that it is his business not ours. Now
+the tenderness of this Book is one of the most telling, convincing
+arguments on behalf of its inspiration, and its divine authority.
+This Book means to help us, wants to help us, it says, "I will try
+to help you, never hinder you: I will wait for you, I will soften
+the wind into a whisper, I will order the thunder to be silent,
+I will quiet the raging sea; I will wait upon you at home, in
+solitude, at midnight, anywhere--fix the place, the time, yourself,
+and when your heart most needs me I will be most to your heart."
+Any book found in den, in gutter, that wants to do this, should be
+received with respect. The purpose is good: if it fail, it fails in
+a noble object.
+
+Everywhere in this Book of God we find a supreme wish to help man.
+When we most need help the words are sweeter than the honeycomb.
+When other books are dumb, this Book speaks most sweetly. It is
+like a star, it shines in the darkness, it waits the going down of
+the superficial sun of our transient prosperity, and then it breaks
+upon us as the shadows thicken. This is the real greatness of God:
+he will not break the bruised reed. Because the reed is bruised,
+therefore the rude man says he may break it. His argument in brief
+is this: "If the reed were strong, I should not touch it, but
+seeing that it is bruised what harm can there be in completing the
+wound under which it is already suffering? I will even snap it and
+throw the sundered parts away." That is the reasoning of the rude
+man--that is the vulgar view of the case. The idea of the healing
+is the idea of a creator. He who creates also heals. Herein we see
+God's estimate of human nature: if He cared only for the great, the
+splendid, the magnificent, the robust, and the everlasting, then
+He would indeed be too like ourselves. The greatness of God and the
+estimate which He places upon human nature are most seen in all
+these ministrations in reference to the weak and the weary and the
+young and the feeble and the sad. Made originally in the image of
+God, man is dear to his Maker, tho ever so broken. Oh, poor prodigal
+soul with the divinity nearly broken out of thee, smashed, bleeding,
+crushed, all but in hell--while there is a shadow of thee outside
+perdition, He would heal thee and save thee. Thou art a ruin, but
+a grand one,--the majestic ruin of a majestic edifice, for knowest
+thou not that thou wast the temple of God?
+
+When we are weary, even in weariness, God sees the possibility of
+greatness that may yet take place and be developed and supervene in
+immortality. How do we talk? Thus: "The survival of the fittest." It
+is amazing with what patience and magnanimity and majestic disregard
+of circumstances we allow people to die off. When we hear that
+thousands have perished, we write this epitaph on their white slate
+tombstones: "The survival of the fittest required the decay of the
+weakest and the poorest." We pick off the fruit which we think will
+not come to perfection. The gardener lays his finger and thumb upon
+the tree, and he says, "This will not come to much"--he wrenches
+the poor unpromising piece of fruit off the twig and throws it down
+as useless. In our march we leave the sick and wounded behind.
+That is the great little, the majestic insignificant, the human
+contradiction. We go in for things that are fittest, strongest,
+most promising, healthy, self-complete, and therein we think we are
+wise. God says, "Not a lamb must be left out--bring it up: not a
+sick man must be omitted: not a poor publican sobbing his 'God be
+merciful to me a sinner' must be omitted from the great host. Bring
+them all in, sick, weary, wounded, feeble, young, illiterate, poor,
+insignificant, without name, fame, station, force--all in: gather up
+the fragments that nothing be lost." Let us go to that Shepherd--He
+will spare us and love us. When our poor strength gives out, He will
+not set His cruel heel upon us and kill us, He will gather us in
+His arms and make the whole flock stand still till He has saved the
+weakest one.
+
+Did we but know the name for our pain we should call it Sin. What
+do we need, then, but Christ the Son of God, the Heart of God, the
+Love of God? He will in very deed give us rest. He will not add to
+the great weight which bows down our poor strength. He will give us
+grace, and in His power all our faintness shall be thought of no
+more. Some of us know how dark it is when the full shadow of our sin
+falls upon our life, and how all the help of earth and time and man
+does but mock the pain it can not reach. Let no man say that Christ
+will not go so low down as to find one so base and vile as he.
+Christ is calling for thee; I heard His sweet voice lift itself up
+in the wild wind and ask whither thou hadst fled, that He might save
+thee from death and bring thee home. There is no wrath in His face
+or voice, no sword is swung by His hand as if in cruel joy, saying,
+"Now at last I have My chance with you." His eyes gleam with love:
+His voice melts in pity: His words are gospels, every one. Let Him
+but see thee sad for sin, full of grief because of the wrong thou
+hast done, and He will raise thee out of the deep pit and set thy
+feet upon the rock.
+
+
+
+
+McKENZIE
+
+THE ROYAL BOUNTY
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+
+ALEXANDER MCKENZIE was born at New Bedford, Mass., in 1830, and
+graduated from Harvard in 1859. Since 1867 he has been pastor of
+the First Congregational Church, Cambridge, Mass. His voice is
+rich, full and sympathetic, and his pulpit style that of one man
+talking earnestly and directly to another, there being no attempt
+at oratorical effect. He is to-day probably the most acceptable
+preacher at Harvard, and the leading Congregational minister in New
+England. The discourse reprinted here is from his volume "A Door
+Opened," and has been noted as one of the greatest sermons of the
+century.
+
+
+
+
+McKENZIE
+
+BORN IN 1830
+
+THE ROYAL BOUNTY[8]
+
+  [8] Reprinted by permission of Dr. Alexander McKenzie and the
+  publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co.
+
+_And King Solomon gave to the Queen of Sheba all her desire,
+whatsoever she asked, besides that which Solomon gave her of his
+royal bounty. So she turned and went to her own land, she and her
+servants._--1 Kings x., 13.
+
+
+The Queen of Sheba came from the uttermost part of the earth to hear
+the wisdom of Solomon. She was amazed at all that she had heard,
+and delighted with all that she saw, and confest that after the
+generous rumors that had reached her in her distant home the half
+had not been told her. She brought her present to him, as was the
+custom of the times; and when she went away she asked a gift of
+him, and history says that the king gave her all that she desired;
+and that, having given her everything of which she had thought,
+he added something more of his own thought. He gave her this, not
+because she had desired it, but because he had desired it; not for
+her heart's seeking, but out of his heart's wishing to bestow. This
+is the simple record: "And King Solomon gave to the Queen of Sheba
+all her desire, whatsoever she asked, besides that which Solomon
+gave her of his royal bounty." These last words describe the added
+gift, and this was doubtless the best of all; that upon which she
+would think with the greatest pleasure, and of which she would speak
+with the greatest pride. The word "royal" is well chosen, for we
+think of something which is great when we apply this term to it, as
+we speak of a royal deed, royal magnificence, royal benevolence,
+royal bounty. We readily approve the action of the king, for it is
+this excess of giving, beyond that which is demanded of us, which
+makes the real generosity. We are in the habit ourselves, so far
+as we are generous at all, of reaching beyond the real necessities
+and requests of our friends, and giving out of the largeness of
+our hearts. It is this excess which commands the high price. It is
+the added, extraordinary beauty of a painting which enhances its
+worth. Some pictures are sold by the square yard, and some by the
+inch. It is that which genius adds which is the royal bounty. It
+marks the difference between genius and talent. To be what we must,
+and to do what we must, is narrow and uninteresting. The man who
+is just, and no more, wins our praise for his integrity, but not
+our regard for his liberality. There are some men who would on no
+account have their measures in the slightest degree too small, but
+would be quite as careful not to have them too large. There is no
+reason why justice should not be combined with charity, and a strict
+regard for the legal demands which are made upon us with the excess
+out of a free heart which will make our justice beautiful. I saw in
+a fine country town a tall, graceful tree which cast its pleasant
+shade upon the path, and I marked that men had fastened upon it an
+iron frame which held a lamp that gave out its light upon the path.
+The tree was not the less a tree that it added the light, and the
+lamp was not less a lamp because it belonged to the tree. I came
+afterward and found that the bark of the tree had grown up around
+the iron where it was fastened to it, till the frame and lamp were
+fairly incorporated in the tree itself. It is easy thus to enlarge
+our life, adding beauty to strength, giving what our heart desires
+to give to that which Sheba asks at our hands. This thought is
+strongly expressed by St. Paul, "Scarcely for a righteous man," the
+man who does exactly what he ought to do, and nothing more, "will
+one die." Yet peradventure, for a good man, who does all he ought
+to do, and adds something because he wants to do it, some would
+even give their life. This man appeals to our heart which is ready
+to respond. The best things are indeed only to be given in this
+way. They can not be bought. They can not be had for the asking;
+such things as confidence, and friendship, and courtesy, which no
+statute can demand, but which the royal heart delights to give; and
+there is a like royalty which is able to receive and prize the gift.
+
+This is God's way, to whom all life is but the expression of his
+heart. We rejoice continually in his bountiful goodness. What is the
+need of flowers? He could have made a strong and honest earth which
+would take in the seed and give it out in harvest, and thus we could
+live; but when He had made the earth substantial, useful as it is,
+He added flowers, because He wished to give them, was delighted to
+look upon them, and knew how happy we should be who saw them blossom
+by the roadside. There is no need of birds. The world would go its
+way, the seasons would follow one another, the sun would rise and
+set, the forest trees would reach up toward the clouds, without
+them. God made all this, and then filled the quiet woods with forms
+of beauty, and changed silence into songs. Even heaven itself has
+more than we should have looked for or asked for. We might have
+had a good delightful heaven, without pain or sorrow or sighing,
+without death, and such a heaven we have. But in the vision of the
+Apocalypse, which only dimly sees the heavenly reality, its streets
+are covered with gold, as it were transparent glass; its gates are
+pearl, and the strong walls, which can not be moved, glisten with
+jewels. So it might have been with the arrangement of this world. We
+might have had men to care for us, women to nurture us, fathers to
+work for us, a society whose process might move on with industry and
+safety from year to year. But God has added the richer delights of
+love and sympathy, of all that we name friend and friendship. It is
+in the same way that He frames His ordinances for us. We could have
+had all days alike, but when He had made six good days He added a
+seventh which should be wearied by no work, wherein the soul should
+be at leisure to live with itself in quietness, and worship God. He
+might have supplied all our wants in the course of nature, bringing
+His gifts to our door with regularity, and we should have lived our
+appointed time; but He does more than this. He lets us thank Him
+when we take our daily bread, and blesses the bread with the love
+which gives it. He even lets us tell Him what we wish, and to our
+wishes He gives patient heed. He might have left us to conscience
+and experience, in the light of nature to frame our character and
+our hope, but to these He has added the thought of other men, the
+revelation of His wisdom by His saints, the gift of His spirit to
+our spirit, to be in us a continual light.
+
+There is a very good expression of God's way of dealing with us
+in a line of the twenty-third Psalm, "My cup runneth over." This
+seems unnecessary. To have the cup full, or a little less than full,
+is enough for us, and more convenient. For us, but not for God,
+who delights in filling it; and when we bid Him stay His hand, He
+keeps on pouring, and the water flows, till, presently, the cup is
+overflowing, but not because we thought to have it so, but because
+of His great delight in giving; until it would seem as if He could
+not stop, or content Himself with that which He has already bestowed
+upon us. Let this stand as a simple expression of His way with us.
+
+When we come upon anything that all good men approve, we may be very
+certain that we have found something which God Himself approves,
+and which is the method of His life. We like, among ourselves, this
+principle of the cup that runneth over. Our liking for it we have
+inherited from God. We might expect, therefore, that when the Son of
+God has His life in the world He will live by this rule, which is of
+heaven and of earth; and it is even so. His first miracle would seem
+unnecessary. There have been people who blindly but honestly wished
+that He had never wrought it. Why did He do it if there was no need
+of it, if it were even possible that it should be wrested from its
+meaning? He had gone as a guest to a wedding, perhaps because the
+bride was his friend, and there came that grave calamity which would
+mar the feast; for presently it was whispered to Him, "They have
+no wine." Surely they could have a wedding without wine. Not that
+wedding. Not in the custom of that time. He knew that the bride,
+if she lived to be old, would never recover from the shame of her
+wedding-day, whose beauty was lost. Here was a necessity, in love,
+in kindness; and that the cheeks of this girl might not redden with
+shame, He reddened the water into wine.
+
+He was at Capernaum. They brought to Him a sick man with the palsy.
+They broke up the roof, and lowered him to the feet of Jesus, who
+knew well what they wanted. He passed over the little thing which
+they sought, and, governed by His own feeling, not by theirs, he
+said, "Son, be of good cheer; thy sins are sent away from thee."
+That was enough. In a few days, the man would be able to walk
+without His help. Death comes to the succor of cripples. The man
+gave no sign of discontent, but Jesus found that the friends were
+unsatisfied, and He thought within Himself, "You brought him here
+that he might be raised up, and be made able to carry his bed home.
+I have done a greater thing for him, but I will add this which
+you want." "Arise," He said, "take up your bed and go your way."
+He did the greater work which made the soul strong, and for the
+lesser work,--well, He threw that in. It was the royal bounty.
+There was a time later than that, after His resurrection, when some
+of His disciples had toiled all the night upon the sea, and had
+taken nothing. He could not have it a fruitless night for them. In
+the morning He was their risen Savior, who might well bestow some
+spiritual gift becoming to the resurrection. This He did, but He
+said, "Cast your net on the right side of the ship, and you will
+find what you have been seeking." They cast it, therefore, and drew
+it in, full of fishes, a hundred and fifty and three. This is the
+record of a fisherman, who wrote that the fish were large; and of an
+old man, who remembered the number of them. They drew their net to
+shore, and there was a fire of coals, and fish laid thereon, another
+fish. When they had enough, one that was better than all was added.
+Have you not sometimes wished that you could have had that hundred
+and fifty-fourth fish? This was Christ's way all the while, and is
+His way still. He fills the net as full as it will hold, that our
+life may be sustained, and then He adds more, that His love may be
+gratified, and that which He adds is the "royal bounty."
+
+The work of our Lord was not merely in meeting the wants of men, but
+in creating the wants; not in gratifying their great desires, but in
+making their desires great. His own work in the world was twofold:
+to teach men how much more there was which they could enjoy, and how
+much more there was which He was eager to impart. The greater the
+desire, the surer it was that it would be met by His desire. Indeed,
+a large desire is necessary to wealth. We must look out toward that
+wherein our riches lie. "He who would bring home the wealth of the
+Indies must send out the wealth of the Indies." To him whose desires
+are allowed liberty there comes the answer of fulfillment from "the
+unsearchable riches of Christ." In all His life and in all His
+teachings we see vastly more than men ever asked, much more than
+they are willing to take even to-day. It has often been, as it was
+at the first, that "he came unto his own, and his own received him
+not"; but to those who received Him He gave all they wished, and
+more than they had thought; He gave the right to become the sons of
+God. They would have been content with a greater prophet, a bolder
+leader, a stronger king, a Messiah who should enthrone Israel and
+bring the nations in homage to its feet. He came bringing God to the
+world, giving an eternal liberty, erecting an everlasting kingdom.
+They wanted manna; He gave the bread of life. They wanted wells of
+water; He gave the well that should be within them, springing up
+for evermore. They wanted a leader; He gave a Savior. They wanted
+man; and He was God. This has continued even to our time. Many
+admire Christ because He was a teacher, neglecting that wherein He
+was infinitely more than teacher. They are glad of an example; He
+was that, but, far beyond it, He was the life whereby righteousness
+became possible. There are those who would be content with His
+beautiful spirit, His blameless life, His deeds of charity, His
+patience, His submission, His consent to a death which He could not
+avoid. He offers to the world the spirit of the Eternal, the life of
+God to be lived upon the earth; He lays down the life which no man
+could take from Him; and, with all the roads leading from Jerusalem
+open before Him, walks with determined step to Calvary and the
+cross. Beyond that which has contented many in the world, He gave
+Himself, the world's Redeemer, the Lamb of God, the Good Shepherd
+giving His life for the sheep.
+
+It is very, very sad to mark how ready we are to measure Christ's
+gifts to us by our narrow wants and limited desires; not by the
+greatness of His love, not by His exhaustless riches, not by the
+fulness of the grace of the Eternal, who is the Father and friend of
+all men. If ever we shall pass beyond the gratifying of ourselves,
+and allow Christ to gratify Himself in blessing us, we shall find
+in a glad experience what the simple words mean, "I am come that
+they might have life"--oh, friends, do not stop there, finish the
+sentence,--"I am come that they might have life, and that they might
+have it more abundantly." We ask life of Him, and He gives us life,
+and offers length of days forever and forever. We pray that we may
+live; and we set up a goal at seventy or ninety years, when He draws
+no line across our path. "I give eternal life," He says. We pray for
+help that we may live; He offers more than that in the unrivaled
+sentence, "Because I live, ye shall live also." We think of life as
+being, and are content. We use existence as a synonym of living, but
+He said, "This is eternal life, to know God, and me."
+
+So for ourselves; we are to live as His disciples. We wish to be
+true, useful, and generous. We wish to do in small measure such
+things as He did,--in His name to give the cup of water, and the
+healing of the sick. He grants all that we desire, then speaks out
+of His own heart, and His desire, "The works that I do shall ye do,
+and greater works than these"; for the miracles which attract us or
+baffle us, which draw us to His love, or possibly turn us from His
+word, which are only miracles because they are strange to us, are to
+be exceeded in the things which we do, when by our teaching we open
+the eyes of men that they may see God, and lift them up to the ways
+of holy living, and raise them from being into life. Our visions of
+heaven in our reverent imagination, even in the exultant words of
+the Revelation, are not equal to the simple truths which He taught,
+and men learned to repeat after Him. For what are golden streets
+and jeweled walls beside that which He meant, "In my Father's house
+are many mansions." "I go to prepare a place for you." "Ye shall
+behold my glory." "Ye shall be loved as I am loved." The thought of
+Christ far outruns the aspiration of the world, as it comes to us
+from the lips of that disciple whom Jesus loved, "We shall be like
+him, for we shall see him even as he is."
+
+What do we need, then? To enlarge our desires! Yes, but to consent
+to God's desires. To wish for more, but to consent to be blest as
+Christ longs to bless us. We must know the methods of God, whose
+will to give is greater and more constant than our will to receive.
+We must adjust our life to God's desire. Faith is the compact of the
+soul with God, rather than with itself. "Open thy mouth wide, and I
+will fill it," is a promise ever old and ever new. We must be firm
+enough and aspiring enough to hold the cup after it has begun to
+overflow, and to let God's hand pour the water of life as long as He
+will, for this world and all the worlds that are to be. If we could
+desire more, if we could ascend to God's desire for us, life would
+be transfigured.
+
+    "The balsam, the wine, of predestinate wills
+     Is a jubilant longing and pining for God."
+
+    "God loves to be longed for, He loves to be sought,
+     For He sought us Himself, with such longing and love."
+
+We wish now to take this method for our own in all our dealing
+with God. Our sense of what is right, the voice of conscience, the
+commands of Scripture, call us to our duty. Let us do what they
+require till conscience is satisfied; but let us add to this more
+than a rigid obedience asks for, all that a loving heart, grateful
+and generous, wishes to bestow. The little questions of life, small
+matters of casuistry, minute affairs of conduct, would be quite
+readily determined if we would live by this rule, wherewith God
+blesses us. That question which with unusual urgency now presses
+upon us, how we shall regard the Sabbath day, would not be difficult
+if it were our delight to remember it, and to keep it holy because
+it is our delight to please Him who has given to us its sacredness
+and blessedness. It is pitiful when we find ourselves questioning
+how much of the day should be holy; how much of it should be given
+to the thought of God and the divine life; how much of it we should
+yield to the holy spirit of truth; how many of the hours we should
+keep in the remembrance of Him whose resurrection gives to the
+Sabbath its greater meaning. We should keep the Sabbath holy as if
+we desired to keep it holy. All its hours should be sacred. They
+need not be less joyous, less friendly, for being holy; and we can
+not be gratified with the spirit in which we find ourselves trying
+to divide the time. Keep twenty-four hours for God, and if by any
+means you can make the time overflow add a twenty-fifth hour.
+
+We question again about money. What proportion of our property
+should we devote to God? The Jews said one-tenth. Can we do no
+better, after so long a time? Let us give the whole, and if by any
+means we can compass it, let us add another tenth, simply to show
+what a delight it is to give all things to Him, and to let Him make
+the allotment in His care for us, and for our household, and for the
+Church, and for the wide world that we are living in. There are many
+who do this, and they learn how true is that word of Christ that is
+called to mind among the Acts of the Apostles, "It is more blessed
+to give than to receive."
+
+Thus, in all things let us make the way of God our own, become His
+children entirely, receive the love of Christ in its fulness, make
+up our own life in His name, according to the largeness of His
+thought. If we will consent to it, we can be great and rich and
+strong. It seems strange to say that we are not ready to be blest,
+but of many it is true. They are not willing to be greatly blest, to
+have the cup run over. They are willing to be useful, but not very
+useful. They ask to be set in His service, but when He takes their
+word and breathes His own desire into it, they shrink back. It is a
+very serious thing, if we are able to perceive it, to consent that
+God should bless us as He pleases, should have His own estimate of
+our character, His own measure of our powers, His own vision of our
+accomplishment, and should call us to greater service, to diviner
+employment, than we have ever dreamed of. It was a wise woman who
+said, "I have had to face my own prayers." We face our prayers when
+God gives His own wish to our words, and makes them large enough
+to hold His thoughts. It is one of the hardest things to believe,
+but one to which, in humbleness of mind and in a faith which will
+not falter, we should consent,--that high word of calling and
+consecration which Christ gave more than once,--"As the Father hath
+sent me into the world, even so send I you." Not our thought but His
+thought makes our calling, and the thought of God is the summons and
+the guidance of our life. Even so, even according to Thy greatness,
+and Thy gentleness which makes men great; Thine infinite purposes,
+and Thine eternal grace; even so, O Lord of mercy and of truth, send
+us into the world!
+
+As we close these thoughts, let us remember that promise which comes
+at the close of the Old Testament, which almost seems to reverse
+the promise at the beginning of the Old Testament, "I will never
+open the windows of heaven and pour out a flood again"; for the last
+of the prophets brings to us the word of God, that He will open
+the windows of heaven, and pour out a flood again. It shall not
+come to destroy, but to preserve; it shall create life; it shall
+enlarge life, but it shall be after the measure of His will, not
+ours. "Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, and prove me now
+herewith, if I will not open the windows of heaven, and pour out a
+blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it." Not
+drops here and there, but showers of blessing. Not running brooks,
+but broad rivers. Not pools of water, but a shoreless sea; deep,
+deep waters, when, looking up into the infinite Love, and consenting
+to be blest of God as God would bless us, we bring all the tithes
+into the storehouse and the remainder of the tithes, if any have
+been left. "I will pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be
+room enough to receive it." Not room enough to receive it; that is
+the royal bounty.
+
+
+
+
+FARRAR
+
+WORK IN THE GROANING CREATION
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+
+FREDERICK WILLIAM FARRAR was born in Bombay, India, in 1831. He
+was educated at King's College, London, and at Trinity College,
+Cambridge. He became dean of Canterbury in 1895, and died in 1903.
+His Life of Christ, the most widely read of his many religious
+works, has been translated into many languages--even into Japanese.
+The following illustrates his power of emphasis.
+
+"There, amid those voluptuous splendors, Pilate, already interested,
+already feeling in this prisoner before him some nobleness which
+touched his Roman nature, asking Him in pitying wonder, 'Art thou
+the King of the Jews?'--Thou poor, worn, tear-stained outcast, in
+this hour of Thy bitter need--O pale, lonely, friendless, wasted
+man, in Thy poor peasant garments, with Thy tied hands and the
+foul traces of the insults of Thine enemies on Thy face and on
+Thy robes--Thou, so unlike the fierce, magnificent Herod, whom
+this multitude which thirsts for Thy blood acknowledged as their
+sovereign--art Thou the King of the Jews?"
+
+
+
+
+FARRAR
+
+1831-1903
+
+WORK IN THE GROANING CREATION[9]
+
+  [9] Reprinted by permission of Messrs. E. P. Dutton & Co.
+
+_And God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very
+good._--Gen. i., 31.
+
+_For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain
+together until now._--Rom. viii., 22.
+
+_And there shall be no more curse._--Rev. xxii., 3.
+
+
+In those three texts you have the past, the present, the future of
+our earth; what was, what is, what shall be; the perfectness which
+man has marred, the punishment which he is enduring, the hope to
+which he looks. What share we may have in the marring or the mending
+of this our transitory dwelling, that is our main subject to-day.
+
+We see some glimpses at least of the truth that actively by
+sympathy, by thoughtfulness, by charity, by unselfishness, by loving
+one another;--that even passively by abstaining from the fashionable
+and universal vice of biting and devouring one another;--we see
+that by honesty, by self-reverence, by reverence for others, by
+obeying the golden rule of "doing unto others as we would they
+should do unto us," we may do very much to limit the realm of
+sorrow, and to substitute a golden for an iron scepter in its sway
+over human hearts. We see, too, that our own inevitable trials and
+humiliations,--all the neglect, all the insult, all the weariness,
+all the disappointment, all the ingratitude, which may befall
+us,--can be better borne if we be cheerful and active in doing good.
+Labor for God is the best cure for sorrow, and the best occupation
+of life.
+
+Can we to-day push the inquiry yet further, and learn whether it is
+in our power in any way to mend the flaw which runs for us through
+the material world; or in any way to diminish for ourselves and for
+mankind the pressure of that vast weight of laws which exercises
+over us, undoubtedly, a sway of awful potency? The whole creation
+groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now; can we--not by
+any strength of ours, but because God permits and desires it, can we
+do anything to hasten that blest hour for which we wait--the hour
+of the new creation; of the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our
+body; of the restitution of all things; of the _palingenesia_ of the
+world?
+
+I think we can. I know that the supposed helplessness of man is
+a favorite topic of modern materialism, which makes of man the
+irresponsible tool of forces which he can not resist, the sport
+and prey of dumb powers which are alike inexorable and passionless.
+This philosophy--if we may call it a philosophy--laughs to scorn the
+notion of a miracle, and makes virtue and vice not the conscious
+choice of free beings, but the inevitable result of material causes
+and hereditary impulses, of which in all but semblance, we are the
+mere automata and slaves. My brethren, into all these speculations
+of a baseless atheism, I need not enter. To us, nature means nothing
+but the sum total of phenomena which God has created; and since in
+the idea of nature is included the idea of God, a miracle becomes as
+natural and as easily conceivable as the most ordinary occurrence.
+And we know that we are free, that God does not mock us, that we
+can abhor that which is evil, and cleave to that which is good. The
+laws of nature are nothing, then, for us but observed sequences, and
+we do not admit that there is anything fearful in their uniformity.
+It is true that nature drives her plowshare straight onwards, and
+heeds not what may be lying in the furrow; it is true that therefore
+she shows an apparent indifference to human agony; it is true that
+if the fairest and sweetest child which earth ever saw be left at
+play in the face of the advancing tide, the tide will still advance
+and drown the little life; it is true that the fire in its ruthless
+vividness will roll over the loveliest maiden whose rich dress
+should catch its flame. It is a law that resistance must be equal
+to force, and that if there be a certain amount of pressure of
+vibration, whatever comes of it, a structure will give way, even
+though, alas, it hurl nearly a hundred human beings, with one flash
+of horror, into the gulf of death. But is this any reason for a
+fierce arraignment of nature, as tho she were execrably ruthless,
+and execrably indifferent? Not so, my brethren. Death whenever it
+comes is but death. None of us has any promise of this or that
+amount of life. It needs no railway accident, no sinking ship, or
+breaking ice, or burning town, or flame from heaven, or arrow in the
+darkness, or smiting of the sun by day, or the moon by night, to
+cut short our days. An invisible sporule in the air may do it, or a
+lesion no bigger than a pin's point.
+
+    "He ate, drank, laughed, loved, lived, and liked life well;
+     Then came--who knows?--some gust of jungle wind,
+     A stumble on the path; a taint i' the tank;
+     A snake's nip; half a span of angry steel;
+     A chill; a fishbone; or a falling tile,--
+     And life is over, and the man is dead."
+
+But is this any reason why we should look on ourselves as victims
+of dead irresponsible forces? Why so? Death is but death, and if we
+live faithfully, death is our richest birthright. "Were you ready to
+die that you jumped into the stormy sea to save that child's life?"
+said a gentleman to an English sailor. "Should I have been better
+prepared, sir," the sailor answered, "if I had shirked my duty?" A
+sudden death is often, and in many respects, the most merciful form
+of death; and the apparently terrible death of a few may save the
+lives of many hundreds. The uniformity of nature may sometimes wear
+the aspect of passionless cruelty; but as we learn more and more to
+observe and to obey her laws, we find more and more that they work
+for countless ends of beneficence and beauty, that out of seeming
+evil she works real good, out of transient evil enduring good. The
+fires which rend the earthquake and burst from the volcano, are the
+quickening forces of the world; her storms lash the lazy atmosphere
+which otherwise would stagnate into pestilence, and it is for man's
+blessing, not for his destruction, that her waters roll and her
+great winds blow.
+
+But are we, after all, so very helpless before the aggregate of
+these mighty forces, as materialism loves to represent? Not so!
+"Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands," said
+the Psalmist, "Thou hast put all things under his feet." "Replenish
+the earth, and subdue, and have dominion," said the first utterance
+of God to man. And what is this but an equivalent of the latest
+utterances of science, that "the order of nature is ascertainable
+by our faculties to an extent which is practically unlimited, and
+that our volition counts for something in the course of events"?
+Man has done much to make the world in all senses a worse place for
+himself, but he has also, thank God, done much to make it better,
+and he may, to an almost unspeakable extent, remedy for himself and
+for his race the throes and agonies of the groaning universe. God
+meant His earth to be a more blest place for us than it is, and in
+every instance men have made it more blest when they have read the
+open secrets, by virtue of which, for our excitement, if not for our
+reward, "herbs have their healing, stones their preciousness, and
+stars their times." Ancient nations have shuddered at the awfulness
+of the sea. It drowns ship and sailor; but "trim your sail, and the
+same wave which drowns the bark is cleft by it, and bears it along
+like its own foam, a plume and a power." The lightning shatters
+tower and temple; but once learn that it is nothing but the luminous
+all-pervading fluid which you may evolve by rubbing a piece of
+amber, and brush out of a child's fair hair, and then with no more
+potent instrument than a boy's kite you may dash harmless to the
+earth the all-shattering brand which was the terror of antiquity;
+nay, you may seize it by its wing of fire, and bid it carry your
+messages around the girdled globe. Zymotic diseases smite down the
+aged and young, but, when you have learnt that they are caused by
+myriads of invisible germs which float in the water or the air, you
+have but to observe the commonest rules of sanitary science, to
+filter and boil the dangerous water, to insure free currents of air,
+to breathe as nature meant you to breathe, through the nostrils, and
+not through the throat, and you rob them of half their deadliness.
+Why has smallpox been stayed in its loathly ravages, and deprived
+of its hideous power? Why does the Black Death rage no longer,
+as it raged among the monks of this Abbey four centuries ago?
+Why do we not have pestilence, like that great plague of London,
+which destroyed 7,165 persons in a single week? Why has jail fever
+disappeared? Why are the cities of Europe horrified no longer by the
+hideousness of medieval leprosy? Because men live amid cleaner and
+purer surroundings. Because rushes are no longer strewn over floors
+which had been suffered to be saturated with the organic refuse of
+years. Because the simplest laws of nature are better understood.
+Because, in these respects, men have remedied by God's aid, some of
+those miseries for which the Savior sighed.
+
+And this amelioration of man's miseries is a great, and noble, and
+Christlike work. Would that there were no other side to the picture!
+Man, alas! also has done, and may do, infinite mischief to the
+world he lives in. He may cut down the forests on the hills, and
+so diminish the necessary rain. He may pluck up the grasses on the
+shore, and so lay waste whole acres to the devastating sands. He may
+poison the sweet, pure rivers of his native soil, till their crystal
+freshness is corrupted into deathful and putrescent slime. He may
+herd together, as we suffer our poor to do, in filthy tenements
+which shall breed every species of disease and vice. He may indulge
+or acquiesce in senseless fashions and pernicious vanities which
+shall mean not only wasteful ugliness and grotesque extravagance,
+but leave shattered health and ruined lives, to the mothers of his
+race. He may in greed of competition extirpate the game of the
+forest, the fishes of the sea. He may destroy the exquisite balance
+of nature, by shooting down or entrapping the sweet birds of the
+air, till his vines and his harvests are devastated by the insects
+on which they feed. He may suffer the chimneys of his manufactories
+to poison the atmosphere with black smoke and sulphurous acid, till
+his proudest cities are stifled at noonday, as we all have seen in
+London for these many weeks, with the unclean mirk of midnight fogs.
+He may suffer noxious gases to be vomited upon the breeze, till
+the most glorious buildings in his cities corrode and crumble--as
+the stones of this Abbey are doing--under their influence,--till
+the green woods blacken into leafless wastes, and life is lived
+at miserable levels of vitality under the filthy reek. There is
+hardly any limit to the evil, no less than to the good, which man
+may do to this his earthly environment. Nor is it less deplorable
+that he may go out of his way to do endless mischief to himself by
+his misuse or abuse of the properties of things. From the dried
+capsules of the white poppy he extracts opium, and he grows acres of
+poppies that with thousands of chests of that opium he may degrade
+into decrepitude and wretchedness the most populous nations upon
+earth. Nature gives him the purple grape and the golden grain,
+and he mashes them and lets them rot and seethe, and assists, and
+superintends, and retards their decomposition, till he has educed
+from them a fermented intoxicating liquor; and not content with
+this luxury, he pours it into Circean cups of degrading excess;
+not content with even fermentation, he further, by distillation,
+extracts a transparent, mobile, colorless fluid, which is the
+distinctive element in ardent spirits, and these, whatever may
+be their legitimate use in manufacture or in medicine, he has so
+horribly abused that they have become to mankind, the _spiritus
+ardentes_ indeed, but not of heaven--fiery spirits of the abyss,
+which have decimated nations, ruined continents, shortened millions
+of lives, and turned for millions of God's children, and millions
+of Christ's little ones, life into an anguish, and earth into a
+hell. Do not say we can do nothing to soften for man the deadly
+agencies which are working in the world,--for all this mischief, and
+incalculably more than this, is man's own doing.
+
+But let me ask you to glance for a moment at one of the beneficent
+secrets which nature has yielded up to man. Have you ever realized,
+with heartfelt gratitude to God, the priceless boon which He has
+granted to this generation in the diminution of pain? One of our
+best surgeons has just told us the strange yet simple story of this
+discovery, from the first dim intimation of the possibility in
+1789, till in 1846 it might almost be said that in Europe we could
+name the month, before which all operative surgery was agonizing,
+and after which it was painless. But what an immense, what an
+enormous boon is this application of anodynes! "Past all counting
+is the sum of happiness enjoyed by the millions who have, in the
+last thirty-three years, escaped the pain that was inevitable in
+surgical operations; pain made more terrible by apprehension;
+more keen by close attention; sometimes awful in a swift agony;
+sometimes prolonged beyond even the most patient endurance, and then
+renewed in memory, and terrible in dreams. This will never be felt
+again." And besides this abolition of pain, it would take long to
+tell how chloroform and ether "have enlarged the field of useful
+surgery, making many things easy which were difficult, many safe
+which were perilous, many practical which were nearly impossible."
+But another lesson this eminent man of science draws, which bears
+directly on our subject, is that while we are profanely decrying
+nature, discoveries the most blest, boons the most priceless, may
+lie close to us and yet God leave us to discover them; and that we
+may endure many needless miseries, falsely accusing nature and even
+God, only because we have neither hope enough to excite intense
+desire, nor desire enough to encourage hope. We wonder that for
+forty years the discovery of anesthetics was not pursued, tho, after
+the pregnant hint of Sir H. Davy, it lay but half hidden under
+so thin a veil. Our successors will wonder at us, as we at those
+before us, that we were as blind to who can tell how many great
+truths, which, they will say, were all around us, within reach of
+any clear and earnest mind. They will wonder at the quietude with
+which we stupidly acquiesce in, or immorally defend, the causes
+which perpetuate and intensify our habitual miseries. Our fathers
+needlessly put up with these miseries "as we now put up with typhoid
+fever and sea-sickness; with local floods and droughts; with waste
+of health and wealth in pollutions of rivers; with hideous noises,
+and foul smells"; with the curse of alcoholic poisoning, and many
+other miseries. Our successors, when they have remedied or prevented
+these, will look back on them with horror, and on us with wonder
+and contempt, for what they will call our idleness or blindness, or
+indifference to suffering. Alas! in the physical as in the moral
+world, we murmur at the evils which surround us, and we do not
+remove them. We multiply those evils, and make life wretched, and
+then curse nature because it is wretched, and neglect or fling away
+the precious gifts and easy remedies which would make it blest. And
+is it not so in the spiritual world? Nine-tenths of our miseries
+are due to our sins. Yet the remedy of our sins is close at hand.
+We have a Savior; we have been commemorating His birth, but we live
+and act as tho He were dead; in our own lives and those of others we
+suffer those miseries to run riot which He came to cure; we talk and
+live as tho those remedies were undiscoverable, while from day to
+day His Word is very nigh us, even in our mouths and in our hearts!
+
+For one sermon you hear about work for the secular amelioration of
+the suffering world for which Christ sighed, you may (I suppose)
+hear fifty on passing ecclesiastical controversies and five thousand
+about individual efforts for personal salvation. And yet one pure,
+self-sacrificing deed, one word of generosity to an opponent, one
+kindly act to aid another, may have been better for you in God's
+sight and far harder for you to do, than to attend in the year
+the 730 daily services which this Abbey provides. Yes, I am glad
+that I have preached to you to-day the duty of what some would call
+secular work--as tho secular work were not often the most profoundly
+religious work!--for the amelioration of the world. And I say, it
+were better for you to have made but two blades of grass grow where
+one grew before, than if, with the hollow, hateful, slanderous heart
+of some false prophets of modern religionism, you were every morning
+to do whatever modern thing may be analogous to binding your fringes
+with blue, and broadening your phylacteries,--to making the hilltops
+blaze with your sacrificial fires, building here seven altars, and
+offering a bullock and a ram on every altar. And so, my brethren,
+let us leave this Abbey to-day with conceptions of duty larger and
+more hopeful; with more yearning both after the sympathy of Christ
+and after His activity; with more faith to see that the world would
+not be so utter a ruin but for our perversity; with more hope to be
+convinced that even we can help to redeem its disorders, and restore
+its pristine perfectness. Let us obey the command, "Ephphatha, Be
+opened!" Let us lift up our eyes to see that, tho the air around us
+is colorless, the far-off heaven is blue. Let us see and be thankful
+for the beauty of the world, the sweet air, the sunshine, the sea,
+the splendid ornaments of heaven, the ever-recurring circles of
+the divine beneficence. Let us learn the secrets of the mighty
+laws which only crush us when we disobey them, and which teach
+us, with divine inflexibility, that as we sow we reap. Let us not
+hinder the students of science in their patient toil and marvelous
+discovery by the crude infallibilities of our ignorant dogmatism.
+Let us believe--for we were saved in hope--that "Utopia itself
+is but another word for time"; and that, if our own work seems
+but infinitesimal, yet "there are mites in science, as well as in
+charity, and the ultimate results of each are alike important and
+beneficial." And so the more we share in the sigh and in the toil of
+the Savior, the more shall we share in His redeeming gladness.
+
+
+
+
+     "Dr. Burrell always sounds a bugle-call to high emprise. This
+     one will stir whatever of knighthood is active or latent in the
+     heart of the young man who reads it."--JOHN BANCROFT DEVINS,
+     _Editor New York_ "_Observer_."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE LURE OF THE CITY
+
+By DAVID JAMES BURRELL, D.D., LL.D.
+
+_Pastor of the Marble Collegiate Church, New York City_
+
+Addrest to "the youth whose lot is cast in the city or whose heart
+is turned that way; who knows himself a man, and with eyes aloft,
+means to make himself a better one; who plans a full equipment, that
+he may win splendidly."--_From the Preface._
+
+     "I have seldom had more pleasure than I have found in reading
+     Dr. Burrell's strong and suggestive book. It is a book for the
+     present hour and the present age. In a style singularly lucid
+     and wonderfully attractive, Dr. Burrell sets forth the dangers
+     of the city on the one hand and its advantages on the other.
+     Each of the twenty-two chapters might stand by itself as a word
+     of cheer, a bugle-call or a warning. The epithet most suitable
+     to the book, as a whole, is 'sane.' Nothing is overstrained.
+     Everything is practical, and the book is thoroughly manly,
+     and is infused throughout with the author's vigorous and
+     winning personality. It is emphatically a book for the young
+     man."--MARGARET E. SANGSTER, _Editor of the St. Nicholas
+     Magazine_, New York.
+
+_12mo, Cloth. $1.00, net; by mail, $1.08_
+
+  FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, Pubs.
+  NEW YORK AND LONDON
+
+
+
+
+A JUNIOR CONGREGATION
+
+A CHILDREN'S SERMON APPROPRIATE TO EVERY SUNDAY OF THE YEAR,
+TOGETHER WITH HINTS FOR FORMING A JUNIOR CONGREGATION
+
+By JAMES M. FARRAR, D.D.
+
+_Pastor of the First Reformed Church, Brooklyn, and Minister of the
+First Organized Junior Congregation_
+
+The church-going men and women of to-day were the church-going
+children of their youth. But theirs, most likely, was a _compulsory_
+attendance. This, however, is the _Children's Age_. More time, more
+thought, more energy are, in this generation, given to the study,
+development, and discipline of children than has ever been attempted
+in any past century. _The Children's Church_ is being organized in
+congregations where the children's welfare and the church's future
+are close at heart. Children in such a church love to attend, for
+theirs is _A Junior Congregation_ worshiping with the regular
+congregation, thus forming habits of church-going in their best
+habit-forming years, and acquiring a familiarity with the church's
+services and ordinances that will help them grow into sturdy church
+workers.
+
+_12mo, Cloth. $1.20, net; by mail, $1.28_
+
+
+FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, Pubs.
+
+NEW YORK AND LONDON
+
+
+
+
+=Rev. T. De Witt Talmage, D.D.=: "I heartily commend his book. He
+has rendered invaluable service."
+
+                { _OF THE VOICE_
+  _PERFECTION_  {    _GESTURE_
+                {    _BEARING_
+
+=THE DRILL-BOOK OF VOCAL CULTURE=
+
+By Prof. EDWARD P. THWING.
+
+A Comprehensive Study of the Fundamental Constituents of Effective,
+Graceful Speaking. Heartily Commended by the Highest Authorities.
+
+[Illustration: decoration]
+
+OUTLINE OF CONTENTS.
+
+What Elocution Really Is--Outline of Preparatory Physical Training
+by Respiratory Exercises and Gymnastics--The Production of
+Tone--Cultivating the Articulation Along the Lines of Pitch, Melody,
+and Force--Rate of Movement--Personation or Picturing--Gesture and
+Extemporaneous Speech--Facial Expression.
+
+=Prof. J. W. Churchill=, Andover: "It is an invaluable treatise."
+
+=The Independent=, New York: "Compact and inexpensive, but it omits
+nothing essential."
+
+=_16mo, 111 pp., Illustrated, Paper Covers, 25 cents. Post-free._=
+
+
+=FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, Publishers,=
+
+=NEW YORK and LONDON=
+
+
+
+
+=Profit and Loss=
+=in Man=
+
+By ALPHONSO A. HOPKINS, Ph.D.
+
+
+The New Gospel of Patriotic, Economic, and Political Common Sense on
+the Temperance Question. The most up-to-date and powerful plea for
+Prohibition upon purely economic grounds that has been written in
+years. It is calm and dispassionate, and discusses the problem from
+the cold matter-of-fact standard of dollars and cents.
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+    I. The Cost of a Boy.          VIII. Moral Facts and Political Factors.
+   II. Boy and Bar.                  IX. Dictionary Politics.
+  III. Manhood and Law.               X. A Curse, a Crime, and the Cure.
+   IV. Labor, Liquor, and Law.       XI. Publicans and Republicans.
+    V. Christian Loyalty.           XII. Democrats and Drink.
+   VI. Barabbas.                   XIII. Methods of Settlement.
+  VII. Moral and Political Force.
+
+     "The unique idea of placing temperance on a commercial basis,
+     of considering the difference between the actual cash value
+     of a man who drinks and the man who abstains, is intensely
+     interesting and profitable. Prof. Hopkins claims that each young
+     man twenty-one years of age represents a cost to society of two
+     thousand dollars ($2,000). Will he pay--will he 'make good'--on
+     the investment if he becomes a drinker? That's the question! In
+     the United States are one and a half millions of drunkards--a
+     stupendous loss of an investment aggregating over five billions
+     of dollars ($5,000,000,000)."--_Cumberland Presbyterian,
+     Nashville, Tenn._
+
+_12mo, Cloth, 376 pp. $1.20, net; by mail, $1.32_
+
+  FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, Pubs.
+  NEW YORK AND LONDON
+
+
+
+
+A WORKING GRAMMAR
+
+OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
+
+By JAMES C. FERNALD, L.H.D.
+
+     _Editor of the "Students' Standard Dictionary." Author of
+     "English Synonyms, Antonyms, and Prepositions," "Connectives of
+     English Speech," Etc., Etc._
+
+
+In this book Dr. Fernald has covered the field of English grammar
+in an immensely practical and entirely new and popular manner.
+Recognizing the large number of persons who have not the time to
+study ponderous definitions and arguments, he has prepared what is,
+in every sense, a very concise and useful "working grammar." Herein
+the business man, stenographer, clerk, lawyer, physician, clergyman,
+teacher--everyone who would refresh and enrich his knowledge
+of English--will find, in simple statement, a clear and lucid
+explanation of the principles of English grammar. All that makes
+the study of grammar a mystery is eliminated, and the whole book is
+constructed so as to enable any intelligent person to find his own
+way, by its teachings, to a correct working knowledge of English.
+
+_Price, $1.50, net; post-paid, $1.64_
+
+  FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, Pubs.
+  NEW YORK AND LONDON
+
+
+
+
+THE PREPARATION OF MANUSCRIPTS FOR THE PRINTER
+
+By FRANK H. VIZETELLY, F.S.A.
+
+_Associate Editor of the_ "_Standard Dictionary_," _etc._
+
+
+This book is designed for the guidance of all who have any concern
+with printing, and will prove of permanent value to all persons
+engaged in writing or in copying manuscripts. Typographical marks
+are exemplified and explained; the different sizes of type with
+their names and uses are presented, with aids in the computing
+of space which manuscripts will occupy in printed form; the book
+also shows authors how they can effectively reduce the cost of
+corrections in type, and tells them when, where, and how to make
+such corrections and how to dispose of manuscripts.
+
+     "Is at once the most exhaustive and most succinct of the many
+     books at the service of the young author."--_Evening Mail_, New
+     York.
+
+     "A thoroughly practical little book which will prove
+     invaluable to all who are interested in the preparation of
+     manuscript."--_Times_, Brooklyn, N. Y.
+
+_12mo, Cloth, 153 pages. 75 cents_
+
+FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, Pubs. NEW YORK AND LONDON
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.
+Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as
+printed.
+
+Missing page numbers are page numbers that were not shown in the
+original text.
+
+Mismatched quotes are not fixed if it's not sufficiently clear where
+the missing quote should be placed.
+
+Page 36: ... have cried (oh, how men do cry in those storms of the
+soul, in those tempests and terrors of the heart), "Lord, save us
+... The transcriber has supplied the closing parenthesis.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The World's Great Sermons, Volume 7:
+Hale to Farrar, by Various
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORLD'S GREAT SERMONS, VOLUME 7 ***
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+***** This file should be named 44441-8.txt or 44441-8.zip *****
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