"Divers Manners" Hebrews 1:1 For want of knowing this, people are ignorantly charging the evangelists and even modern Christian teachers with inconsistencies and paradoxes, and even high treasons. It is wonderful what ignorance can do. Falsehood can always be more fluent, if not more eloquent, than truth. The liar has no difficulties. He can say what comes uppermost; he has so depleted himself that he has no memory, so that when he is accused he does not burn with shame. We cannot even get Christian congregations to know the same thing under different aspects. Some earnest men have been trying for a long time to get a congregation to know the gospel under twenty different phases; and the congregation does not know it except under one phase. Give me the jingle of words I heard in the nursery, and I will say, This is the gospel; tell me the very selfsame truth under different language, namely, in the words of the current time, the new, fresh, young, audacious words, and because the words have changed I cannot see that the gospel remains. What is to be done under such circumstances is the question of despair. The people cannot be educated: you cannot take them up out of the old ruts and set them upon new courses. But the courses are not new; it stands upon the open page of Holy Writ that the same thing is said "in divers manners." Every man tells the tale in his own way; every narrator sends his own blood through the stirring narrative. Yet having to deal with such an infinite mass of folly the teacher is discredited because the student only knows the truth, as he calls it, under one form, and unless you ring the same peal upon the same bells he says you are not preaching the gospel. Some learned men have been at the pains to collate instances in which there is an apparent difference and yet a real agreement. We are indebted to such searchers into coincidences and contrasts and reconciliations for very much of our Biblical knowledge and our spiritual stimulus. Some of these we may now consider, expressing our indebtedness to those who have done the quarrying work, and have set us thinking upon new lines, and have brought us by their consecrated industry to see how contrasts may indicate similarities, and how similarities may become identities. After nineteen hundred years of teaching Christ's Church will only look at Christ in one way: whereas he could be seen in a thousand aspects: but the Papist has his point of view, and so has the Protestant, who is as big a Papist under another name; and every chapel-guest as well as every cathedral-haunter has his own way, his own rattle; and if he hear not the same things under the same forms he cannot believe that he is hearing about the same Lord. We must sustain great loss before we can have solid gain. The writer to whose researches we are principally indebted for instances of the kind indicated would have us bear in mind first of all that Matthew wrote for Jews. Now, the Jew is always a man by himself; he never mixes with anybody; when he sits down beside a Gentile he is miles and miles away from him. Matthew, therefore, had to write to Jews and for Jews; therefore he must adopt a Jew's manner. Luke did not write to the Jews; Luke wrote for Gentiles and to Gentiles. Luke tells the same story of the kingdom, yet he hardly says one word that Matthew says; he hardly ever comes upon the lines of Matthew's observation. This is intensely interesting; this should excite our souls with holy wonder; into these things we should dig, for along this line we find the inspiration of the narrative,— not in similarities but in dissimilarities, not in coincidences but in contrasts. Still the infinite story moves on with infinite dignity; even when the men are apparently telling the same things in contradictory terms you will find the holy reconciliation at the other end. Matthew has to select an expression under which he will bring all his remarks. What is the expression which Matthew chooses? He chooses the expression "kingdom of heaven." Luke has to choose a formula under which he will set forth the Christian idea, what is the formula chosen by Luke? "Kingdom of God." Even in this choice of terms there is inspired genius. The Hebrew could never have understood the expression "kingdom of God": if he had once seen that expression in connection with the Gospel of Christ, he would have fallen at once into his favourite error, namely, that this kingdom is visible, pompous, magnificent, unrivalled,— the Kingdom of kingdoms, the kingdom swallowing kingdom. This was the habit of his grammar. The Hebrew language, as we have seen, had no superlative; the Hebrew language eked out its superlative expressions by the name of "God": so it was "city of God," "cedars of God," meaning the very finest city, the very noblest trees, cedars of unrivalled beauty. If Matthew had said, "I am coming to tell you that Christ brought the Kingdom of God," the Jews would have said, This is what we have been expecting: now shall the empires of the earth quake, because they shall see a kingdom grander than any other. So Matthew would say, under Divine inspiration, We must keep from the Jew this expression "Kingdom of God," or he will misunderstand it and misapply it, and get into no end of fallacies and sophisms. So Matthew said, "the Kingdom of heaven,"— the spiritual kingdom, the moral kingdom, the empire heavenly, that has no form, magnitude, proportion that you can see and appreciate, but that is a kingdom of the soul. Luke had to address a different audience, and therefore he takes the name "God"; he is a theist, a monotheist, and he pictures this kingdom as the divinest empire. When Matthew would tell the Jews a miracle, what miracle will he choose to begin with? What would be Matthew's first miracle? Not Luke's, and not John's; nor does Luke take John's, nor does John take Matthew's. Now Matthew shall write to his Jew readers, and what will he tell them first of the miracles? Here is inspiration: no sooner does Jesus Christ come down from the mountain where he has been teaching the multitude than, "Behold, there came a leper." How the Jew's eyes round with wonder! This matter of leprosy has been a serious matter to him through all the ages. Matthew therefore instantly brings the new Teacher into contact with a leper. Nor does the inspired genius end there; Matthew proceeds, "And Jesus put forth his hand, and"— mark his ingenuity— "touched him,"— the unheard-of, the impossible miracle! Nothing could have so struck Jewish attention. Christ might have been the prince of necromancers, and have done many wonderful things, and the Jew would not have listened to any one of them: but to tell the Jews that this man came to a leper, and touched the leper, and healed the leper, and sent him away a clean man! Oh, the power of genius, the master-touch, the wisdom of God! Luke had a first miracle, too; what will Luke say? What will Luke give the Gentiles as the first miracle? Something about a leper? No. Gentiles know nothing about lepers in that sense:— "And in the synagogue there was a man, who had a spirit of an unclean devil" (Luke 4:33). Why, this is the very subject of Gentile speculation,— demon worship, demon possession, how to get rid of the demon. Luke says, I will tell you all about that: this Kingdom of God deals with the kingdom of the devil, and shatters it. Luke could have begun at Matthew's point, but did not. Mark the operation of "the divers manners." This religion means to handle the world, and it must know the ways of the world and the speeches of all men. Gentiles were interested in demonology in every aspect, and Luke says he can tell them about their favourite subject. That is the genius of Christianity; it always knows what a man thinks about, what a man likes best, where a man can begin. Christianity says, I can talk your language: you are most interested in lepers, hear this; you are most interested in demons, hear this. John has his first miracle, and like himself, all social affection, tender love, and sympathy, he begins with the wedding and the water made into wine. Each of the men could have begun at the same point; each took his own point to begin with; each was justified in the selection of his starting omen. Turning to another aspect, you see the same thought. Matthew says (Matthew 23:27)— "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness." No Gentile could have said that, If Matthew had written his gospel to the Gentiles they would have left it as an unperused letter. "Whited sepulchres": there is no such word in all Gentile speech. The Jew understood it in a moment. And you must write to men in their mother-tongue. If a Jew crossed a grave he was ceremonially defiled; even if he walked over a grave without knowing it was a grave he contracted ceremonial defilement. How to prevent this, then? The Jews had recourse, we are told by learned inquirers, to this method, that when a grave became so worn on the greensward as to be practically obliterated the place was whitened, a line perpendicular, and a line horizontal were drawn upon that grave; so the Jew knew and kept away from it, and walked at some distance, because if he had crossed that spot he would have been ceremonially defiled; and if the whitewash had been taken off by the rain, and he walked across the grave he would still have been defiled: therefore the Jews instantly knew this metaphor. But Luke could not well pass over such a statement without some observation. How, then, did Luke manage to put his case?— "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are as graves which appear not, and the men that walk over them are not aware of them" (Luke 11:44). What a beautiful Gentile speech! There is nothing here that is local, Jewish, peculiar; the reference is set in a general and universal form: and yet, both Matthew and Luke professedly report the same sermon! What a wonderful contradiction it would be to some minds! How they would trip up the so-called inspired writers, and say, Behold! Luke hears the discourse, and reports it thus: whereas Matthew heard the discourse and reported it otherwise. Is there any contradiction? Not a tittle. There is always a meaning within the words: why do men not get into the interior meaning, the esoteric and eternal thought? Why are they such pedantic purists as to quarrel about the verbiage, the words, the literal, symbolic form? If Matthew had reported in Luke's form it would not have been Jewish; if Luke had reported in Matthew's form it would not have been Gentile: each man reported in his own way because each man had to report to his own people. You write to your readers. We might take another instance. Matthew 23:23— "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise, and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith." The Gentiles would not have understood this; they would not have known what Luke was talking about if he had put it in that form. The law? the Gentiles would say, what saith this babbler? The law— what law? whose law? we know not what he saith. Now let Luke report in his own way:— "But woe unto you Pharisees! for ye tithe mint, and rue, and all manner of herbs, and pass over judgment, and the love of God,"— the law without mentioning it, the substance without the literary reference. Thus the Gentile is smitten squarely. He is not allowed to run off at the tangent of inquiry as to what the man could mean when he refers to the law. Yet he is lifted into the law eternal without passing through the law literal. But my lord the pedant says, Behold, Matthew says one thing, and Luke says another, yet they both profess to be reporting the same discourse. So they are, but not phonographically; they are reporting the soul of things, they are interpreting the heart of Christ. Why will men not come into the larger interpretation, the nobler construction, and see what peddling, and embarrassing things words may be when they are employed to set forth the infinite, the spiritual, the Divine? Other instances could be given in handfuls; these must suffice as indicating a very fruitful course of thought. The New Testament will bear a searching into. From what I can understand there are men associated with the interpretation of the New Testament, who on the whole are not fools. They have examined the documents through and through, and although they may not be millionaires at the bank, they are millionaires in heaven,— in literature, in the higher thought, inspired scholars. Why should such men cling to a document that is full of lies, contradictions, and romances? Yet the document lives, and bears sway over the thought and feeling of men, expanding as necessities increase, illuminating in proportion as the darkness defies its glory. We are taught, then, by these instances and others which learned students have pointed out to us, that we are bound to study our audience. Why write in Hebrew to people who cannot read a word of it? Why write in long words to little children? So with preachers: I say to a man, If you have a congregation of slow-heads, and people who never read a word about anything, then you are bound to be infantile in your style of speech; you must speak to these overgrown babies of yours in a way they can understand. You are right in doing so; it is the Christliest of tempers to make yourself as they are, that you may lift them up into a higher level. To another man, who has an audience of another kind, quick, who can begin with him at the very first sentence, another style is appropriate. There are audiences that start the moment the preacher breathes; they are with him, not a tone do they miss. With such an audience you may be as concise, terse, pointed, as you can. Such men want telegrams, not elaborate details; they can understand the words, for they open all heaven to their eager attention. You must have your own way of addressing your men. Your brother would probably taunt you with being something which he is not: take care that you do not taunt him with being something that you once were. Each man must address his own audience. Blessed be God, Christianity can adapt its facts to every audience. When you go into a nursery the children say, "Do you know any tales?" but if a fullgrown man were to say to you, "Do you know any tales?" you would naturally begin to wonder, and probably your estimate of the man might considerably go down when you reflected upon the meanness of his request. Christianity says in effect, You would like to hear about lepers, hear my statement; or you would like to hear about the dispossession of demons, hear my statement, I will tell you some of the most wonderful things about that subject you ever heard. Christianity says to contemplative, philosophic minds, You would like to hear the beatitudes, the outward miracles turned into spiritual mysteries and wonders, I can tell you what Jesus said on the high hill; he said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God." This man does not care about lepers and demons, but when you touch what I may call the spiritual nerve he is alive all over; he wishes to hear the gracious words that proceeded out of the young Teacher's mouth. In every case there is an audience within an audience. Every congregation is several congregations. The wise teacher therefore may have in the same discourse to tell about lepers and demons, about raising the dead, and uttering the beatitudes; because as a wise teacher he must distribute to each a portion of meat in due season. The difficulty is for the one guest to wait until the other guest has been served. Where is your socialism? where your fine theory of human rights? The man sitting next to you could not understand about the demon, but he is entranced about the leper; therefore he must have his representation, and whilst he is having his you must wait for yours, because, you know, you are a Socialist, a fine human-brotherhood man: show it, and talk less about it! Omission may not be denial. The preacher may want to say many things, but for want of time he may not say them; he has not therefore neglected or denied them. A ministry is not an affair of one little hour: a ministry stretches across the breadth of a lifetime, and must be judged in its variety, and in its totality, and not in its isolation. We do not want an inflexible method, we want an unchangeable Christ. This is the lesson, to revert to the opening of the discourse, which the Church needs most to learn. Matthew spake of the same Christ that Luke magnified. When John related his miracles they were different miracles, not a different Lord. There was variety, yet there was unity. Every man saw the aspect that pleased him most, or struck him most, and yet all the men are talking about the same sweet, dear Lord. That is the secret of preaching; that should be the mystery of the power of the Church. If it were so we should get rid of endless foolish criticism. When we see the learned canon going forth with his elaborate essay to read to a prepared audience, we would say, God bless thee, thou man of God: go and tell all these glittering things to an excited intellectual audience, and receive thy reward of grateful applause. When we see the Salvationist going out with his drum and trumpet, we should say, God bless thee, ardent comrade: go and work miracles in the name of thy Lord. Thus there would be great community of feeling, true sociality of sympathy amongst the hosts of heaven; no man would be attempting to do another man's work, every man in his own way would be doing the work of Jesus Christ; and thus unity would express itself in variety, variety would reconcile itself in unity; and when all comes to be told it shall be found that in a thousand voices men have been uttering the same music. Conditions of Renewal Hebrews 6:4-61 Co 11:27, 1 Corinthians 11:29 There are some few passages of Scripture which have caused a great deal of difficulty and heartache. There are others which have kept away from the altar, yea, from the Cross itself, many a young, timid, reverent spirit. The question is whether there is any need for this? I think not. I do not know of any passage of Scripture that ought to keep any soul from God, from God's house, from God's ordinances. We are so differently constituted that some of us can only be nursed for heaven. We want continual encouragement; we are soon made afraid by shadow, by unexplained and sudden sound, by incidents uncalculated and unforeseen. We must take care of that section of society; they must be encouraged, consoled, stimulated, comforted; whatever lies in their way of progress towards the Kingdom of heaven must be resolutely removed. Others are very courageous by nature: are extremely robust, words of encouragement are misspent upon them; they have a fountain of encouragement within their own hearts. Whether they are physically so strong, or intellectually so robust, or spiritually so complete, we need not stay to inquire; suffice it to say that they have no shadows, no spectres, no doubts, no difficulties. There are two passages of Scripture which seem to have kept a good many men in a state of fear and in a state of apparent alienation from the Church. It may be profitable to look at these passages. If the difficulty can be taken out of them by fair reasoning, and by established laws of grammar, and the philosophy of language, a great point will have been gained. One of them is that remarkable passage already quoted in the text— "It is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame." This has been a great battleground; innumerable Calvinists have slain innumerable Arminians within the four corners of this most solemn declaration. There was no need for the fray. All the energy was misspent All the high debate about election, reprobation, apostasy, was utterly in vain, so far as this particular text is concerned. There is nothing here to cast down the heart of any man who wants to come back again. One version of the Bible has put in the word "difficult" instead of the word "impossible." This little contribution of clemency we have received from the sternest of all languages, the Latin. We do not need the contribution. The word "impossible" is better than the word "difficult" in this connection. It is clearer, more to the point: it comprehends the case more entirely; let it therefore stand in all its tremendous import. There can be no doubt as to the characters represented by Apollos or Paul, whoever the writer may have been. He is urging the great doctrine and duty of progress; he wants the Church to get on— "Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection; not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works, and of faith towards God," and many other things. The Apostle was a man of progress. Speaking thus of baptism, he says, "It is impossible for those who were once enlightened"— literally, for those who were really baptised: we say really baptised, because he is not referring to water-baptism, he is referring to the inner, the spiritual baptism, the chrism of fire, the visitation of the Holy Ghost upon the soul. It is impossible for those who have been baptised by the Holy Ghost, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and who were not only baptised by the Holy Ghost, but have been made partakers of the Holy Ghost,— it is impossible for them if they fall away, to renew them again unto repentance. What construction can we put upon these words but that if we once leave Christ for one moment we can never get back again? If having been in Christ we do wrong, we commit one sin, we must commit a thousand more, for we are on the downward road, and we cannot be arrested in the infinite descent. There is no such reading in the text. We cannot stop the text at a given point, and say, "That is the doctrine, and certainly it would appear to be such." But the text proceeds to give a reason why it is impossible to renew certain persons again to repentance, and that reason is this— "Seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame." Is not that a final reason? Yes, it is: but it is not a correct representation of the Apostle's reasoning. The English is to blame for the ruin it has brought. Over this false grammar have men fallen into despair. The Revisers were timid, because they were conservative. I blame them distinctly for want of courage. They had learning enough, prestige enough; they could have encountered momentary prejudices in a dignified and successful manner: but who ever got twelve or twenty Christian scholars together without their devouring one another, so courteously as sometimes perhaps in some degree to fall short of the point of courage? The tense changes in the latter part of the statement. "Seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame" should read thus:— "It is impossible for those who"— then read the description— "If they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance, whilst they are crucifying the Son of God afresh, and putting him to an open shame." The latter tense is present, it indicates an immediate and continuous action, something that is going on now, at this very moment; and the Apostle says, Brethren, if you continue to crucify the Son of God afresh, you can never get back again to your original state of acceptance, you can never recover your sense of adoption; the very act you are doing is fatal. Why then, should you be discouraged, if you really want to come back to Christ, and if you are endeavouring to lead a good life? If you are bethinking yourself, and trying to say the old sweet prayer, and if it be really your heart's desire to be recovered from your backslidings, there is nothing in this passage to hinder you coming home now. The passage thus rendered is supported by all the experience of life. It is impossible for any man who has fallen from sobriety to be renewed again to temperance, so long as he is debauching himself night and day with the drink which overcame him; if he will set it down, and retire from it, he shall yet be a sober man, but if he mean to recover his sobriety by drinking more deeply, then manifestly he is perpetrating an irony that is ridiculous and shameful. It any man have fallen from honesty it is impossible to recover him so long as he continues to steal. He must drop the action, he must feel burning shame on account of what he has done, and when his felonious hands would go forth to repeat the nefarious deed, he must draw them back and say, No: I will cry mightily unto God if haply I may yet be an honest man. Thus talking there shall be no doubt about his honesty. The Apostle's reasoning then is simply this: that if we continue to sin we cannot repent; whilst we are in the very act of crucifying the Son of God afresh, and putting him to an open shame, it is impossible for us to repent, to pray, to return. This is the noble teaching of the Apostle, this ought to be a comfort to us all. We sin every day, and yet it we do not want to sin, and if the sin be followed by heartache, confession, contrition, and mighty prayer at the Cross, we shall be renewed again unto repentance every eventide; but if we think we can, by simply confessing the sin, gain a new licence to recommit it, then our confession is a lie, and the very act of contrition is a trick which aggravates our guilt. The action must be bonâ-fide, the soul must mean what it says, the reality must be equal to the profession. We have therefore to declare this sweet gospel— would God we could declare it in adequate music! There is no soul that has gone so far away from God to be unable to repent: and we have to declare this solemn truth, that any man who talks of repentance, and is at the same time crucifying the Son of God afresh, continuing to love his sins and to wallow in them, is a liar in the sanctuary. Return, O wanderer, to thy home: come back, poor soul, made afraid by backsliding. We have all been guilty of backsliding; the oaths are lying round about us like a million withered leaves: but if we really do not want to crucify the Son of God afresh, if we are really earnest about desiring to return, we can return. "Return, ye backsliders, and I will heal your backsliding!" is the cry of the Old Testament, is the gospel of the Cross. Now, nearly immediately connected with this passage is one which the Apostle has written in connection with the administration of the Lord's Supper. The two passages may fairly be said to have a distinct and almost vital relation. How many people have been kept back from the Lord's table by these words:— "Whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.... For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord's body." Timid souls by the hundred have been kept away from the Lord's Supper by these words. Yet there is nothing in them to keep away any soul. We have been frightened by shadows. We cannot but admire the timidity which says, I am so conscious of unworthiness that I dare not touch the sacramental bread, and sacramental cup. But such unworthiness is not referred to in this particular passage; therefore this passage must never be quoted when that sense of unworthiness is felt. When that sense of unworthiness is most deeply upon us, then should we come most reverently and hopefully to the Lord's table. What were the circumstances under which this declaration was made? Everything depends upon understanding the circumstances of the case. We must penetrate the atmosphere, if we would understand the admonition. Everything was debased in the Church at Corinth. That early Christian Church seemed to have a genius for deprivation and perversion and all manner of wrong. The Lord's Supper was instituted there as in other churches; the people came together to partake of the Lord's Supper, and instead of making a distinctly religious festival of it, they turned it into a carnival, holiday-making, feasting, rioting; so much that the Apostle says, "Have ye not houses to eat and drink in?"— why should you come to the Lord's table to have a saturnalia, to feast yourselves in this way, and to debase yourselves in this riotous manner? Understand, therefore, that the Corinthians were not recognising the Lord's body in this matter but were simply feasting together and rioting together, eating bread and drinking wine together, until the religious consciousness was lost, and the whole ceremony became one of simple social festivity. Addressing himself to such circumstances, the Apostle said, Beware: you are contracting a guilt you ill suspect: if the light that is in you be darkness, how great is that darkness!— the Lord's Supper was meant to be a religious festival, a time of solemnity, a time of heart-inquest, a time of memory, so that all the pages of the Lord's earthly story might be recalled and felt in ever-deepening emotion; instead of this, you are making that holy feast a riot: whoever eateth this bread, and drinketh this cup, unworthily, irreverently, debasing the whole action into its very lowest forms, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself. And that is right. Then will you not come to the Lord's table? Shall there not be a great inrush upon the holy scene? Men have been afraid lest their unworthiness would keep them back. The unworthiness was not in reference to the individuals but in relation to their want of discernment as to the meaning of the feast. No longer was the Lord's body present amongst them, but a mere ceremony of eating and drinking. Will you then stand back any longer? Will you not come in, it may be timidly, and say, I, too, would like to touch this bread and this cup of memorial? Thus two classes are addressed, the backslider who says, "I once could pray, but I do not pray now"— if he can add, "but I want to pray," then the first passage need not stand in his way; secondly, the timid, self-distrustful, and self-renouncing, the passage in the Corinthians has no reference whatever to you. If you say, "This feast is holy," and wish to observe it with becoming reverence, the doors are thrown wide open, and God's welcome is as broad as God's love. Why stand ye then outside? Come in! Come now! See me, or your own minister or friends in your own locality immediately, and say you wish to come to the Lord's table. That means making a profession without ostentation, doing a deed the sanctifying effect of which ought to flow through the whole life. Will you not say Yes? Then this will be your birthday if you will. PrayerAlmighty God, we bless thee for the uplifted Cross, whose light fills creation. We see a Cross everywhere; its great shadow makes the night and the morning of the world; without that Cross there is no security. It is in everything; where anything lives something else has died. We found this in the garden, and in the nest of the birds, and in the jungle of the wild beasts, and in our family life, and in our spiritual and educational life; that some may live some must die. Thou hast put death upon thy table, and made thy sacrament and oath and immortality even in the grave and in the presence of death. God forbid that we should glory save in the Cross! If men would lead us to the throne may we go to it by the Cross. Inasmuch as we have been called by thy love to see the Cross and know somewhat of its holiest meaning, if we be risen with Christ may we prove our resurrection by the heavenliness of our love, by the heavenliness of our citizenship, by the heavenliness of our service. O Christ, the Living One, thou didst come to take us to the Father. Show us the Father: may we know that he is close at hand, though we cannot see him; that if we could but open our soul's eyes we should see the Father in every little child, in every broken heart, in every budding flower. Oh, for eyes to see, heart-eyes, soul-eyes, the vision of the inner life, penetrating all cloud and darkness, and seeing the Shining Glory. Then should our life be rid of its burdens, its pains and its sorrow and its fear, and we should live the life of liberty. If any man is foolish enough to be making his own gospel, do thou chastise him with many disappointments day by day, until he shall begin to pray at the right altar. Thou hast sent thy Son to save us, to seek and to save the lost, to call sinners to repentance: help us to hear the music of his inviting voice, and to answer it because our sin is exceeding great. Oh, hear thou in heaven thy dwelling-place the prayer thy servant prayeth, and when thou hearest, Lord, forgive! Amen. Things That Accompany Salvation Hebrews 6:9IT is quite right to be interested in a salvation that is central; that is essential, but salvation is not solitude. Salvation represents a great sociality. Salvation is the heart of a noble fellowship. Many writers and preachers have, no doubt, set forth the text as conveying the idea of a procession; salvation red as blood, bright as light, tuneful as embodied music, at the head, and then all the retinue, a thousand or ten thousand strong, following, their very march music, their very look an expectation and a prophecy. It is a beautiful picture. Every man's life is to be such. If we have regarded salvation as monasticism, loneliness, one little or great idea dissociated from other thoughts, and especially dissociated from active and expressive character, we have done injustice to its first, midst, and last idea and purpose. There may be too much said about salvation when that term is too narrowly interpreted. No selfishness is so selfish as pious selfishness. No cruelty is so cruel as Christian cruelty. The bite of the wolf is nothing to the lie of the soul. What if your salvation and mine are of infinitely less consequence than we have supposed? If we have been looking on that term as simply expressive of that comfort, individual certainty of going higher and higher, and doing less and less, and enjoying the indolence of doing nothing, some strong man may one day arise who will tear that idea of salvation to rags and tatters. It is not true, therefore it is not healthy, therefore it ought to be put down. "Are you saved?" may be a wicked inquiry. Some will not understand how this can be, because some are only at the alphabet, and some have not begun to study their letters. There are children in the world who have never heard of the existence of the alphabet. We do not consult them upon higher statesmanship or the higher mathematics. In another sense there is no greater question than, "Are you saved? are you a new creature, a liberated soul, a mind on which there shines the whole heaven of God's light? Are you a soldier, a servant, a helper of the helpless, a leader of the blind? Are you akin to the soul of Christ?" It is impossible for us to get at Christ in any sense of acceptance, assurance, and identification, except through one gate. Can we not climb up, pierce the roof, and enter by a way of our own making? No. What is the name of the only gate that opens upon the presence-chamber of the Saviour? The name is the Cross. Have you ever heard it? That you have heard it as a name, we know, but there is hearing and hearing. The Cross may be a word, or it may be a sacrifice; a literal fact, or a suggestion infinite in its resources as the heart of God. It is in the latter larger, truer sense that the Cross is a gate, the one gate and the only gate to the presence and favour of the King. Many men are saved who do not know it. I have known so-called bad men whose disposition I have coveted. I have known them more largely than they have known themselves, though their breath is burned with unholy suggestion. I have known that their souls have been fruitful in noble and kindly thoughts. Let God say who is saved. "Lord, are there few that be saved?" No answer. Christ takes the statistics, but he does not publish them. He says in reply, rather than in answer, "Strive to enter in at the strait gate; do not be inquiring so much whether there be few or whether there may be many that be saved. Strive ye yourselves to enter in at the strait gate." We may be asking questions about others when we should be executing duties on our own behalf. There is nothing meaner in all God's universe, so far as we know it, than a pious miser, a miser by self-thought, self-condolence, self-flattery, self-regard, as though he should shut himself into his own garden and his own banqueting-hall, and should say, "What a wicked world it is, and how few that attend to religious ordinance and ceremony, and how much men are to blame themselves for the evil they are in and for the suffering they endure!" Talk of a man so, he is the devil's hired servant. What are the things that accompany salvation? To the youngest, let me say, to accompany is to go with— as we should say, "Are you walking to-day in the field? if so, I will go with you." Things that accompany salvation are things that go with salvation, keep it company, belong to it, have a right by kindred and by quality to be there. But what things can accompany salvation when salvation is interpreted in its higher and deepest sense? Is it a virgin beautiful with ineffable loveliness? Oh! were it not better she should walk in her fine linen alone on the green hills, in the flowering gardens, in the laden orchards? No. She will have with her a thousand little children, multiplied by ten thousand more, and cubed up into an unimaginable number. That virgin is social, friendly, a great housekeeper, and she goes forth, not in vanity, but in a natural expression of kindliness accompanied by others akin to her own soul. Sometimes you see a procession and not the head of it. Did that sight ever deceive you? Never. Beholding the retinue, the procession, you say, Who is this? Not, Who are these? but, What is this? as if it were a single and not a plural explanation. Who is it? One soul. What is it? One event, yet not a soul alone, not an event dissociated from a common history. Are you satisfied to look upon the procession, upon the retinue, to see nothing besides? You know you are not. You want to see the leading figure, the main idea, the life of which these are the lives. Is the child satisfied to see the tail of the kite? The dear little child rounds his eyes and looks for the kite itself, and with joy he points it out, saying, "There, I see it." Dear little child, was it not enough to see the floating tail of the kite? No! the child will see the chief image itself. In that little figure, homely enough, and therefore all the better, we see the whole idea of this conception of a procession, a retinue. "Things that accompany salvation." That word "accompany" might be made much larger and much more vital. Sometimes the procession is abreast of the king. It so happens that in this march sometimes the things do not accompany in the sense of following behind, but in the better and the excellent sense of going along with, as if arm in arm, placed so that it shall be difficult to say who leads so far as the mere stepping is concerned, and yet not difficult to say who leads so far as the larger life and regnacy of will are concerned. Some men make places for themselves. You say there is no room, these men soon find room enough. They do not claim it, it is conceded to them. There may be momentary opposition or envious interpretation, but all things give way before sovereign power, before supreme and noble character. At the last, confidence is promoted, integrity is crowned, but who has the deepest, clearest, largest, best ideas will always lead the empire and make republics into sovereignties. What are the "things that accompany salvation"? There are some things that would not accompany it. There are some things that through the very force of shame would decline to be in the retinue. Can a poor, tattered, ragged, dishonoured, self-discredited vagrant join the procession of the king? He says, "No, it is not my place, put me out of sight, let me die in darkness." Among the "things that accompany salvation," we find first of all purity of character. But does purity of character mean perfection? It does not. There is no perfect man. This cold space, this cage of time, could not hold him. Perfect man can only bloom in heaven, where the climate is pure and where the day has no night. By purity of character let us mean a real, honest motive, a just and noble desire, a wish to be, not in heaven, but heavenly in mind, thought, life, speech. This definition enables me to include a great number of persons in the Church who do not include themselves. It is sad to see how things are always placed in the Christian kingdom. There are some pedants who will not come in, and therefore ought always to be outside. Pedantry has no status in the New Jerusalem. There are some conceited persons who think they have attained all that is desirable; they do not come in, and in very deed they ought to be kept out. Self-complacency is not a virtue anywhere; in the New Jerusalem it is a blasphemy. There, are, however, men who are getting wrong seven times a day who ought to be in the Church. They are Christlike and do not realise the fact. I have seen in their eyes tears which must have travelled to their eyes by way of the heart. Yet they blunder; I know it well; they fall flat down in the devil's mire. I have seen them many times; they are inflammable, passionate, wanting in self-control. Surely. But they are pressed and driven by five hundred ancestors who were worse than they are. The five hundred ancestors are smiting them as with scorpions. Blessed be God, it is not ours to judge. Christ will shut out no one that he can bring in, and he must be a son of perdition whom Christ cannot bring into his own feast of love and eternal fellowship. Among the "things that accompany salvation" I give a foremost place to unselfishness of service; the service that never looks at itself in the Church mirror; that never dresses itself to go out to be seen ostentatiously in public; the service that is crowned with self-unconsciousness; that does good things by stealth and blushes to find them fame; the service that does things as a monarch does them, not knowing that they are being done, without any sense of taxation, and sacrifice, and painfulness. There is a doing that would rather do than not do. There is an action that must take place because the suppression would be not only unreasonable but intolerable. Love must serve. Many are working in that way who have no earthly fame. The Apostle recognised all such in the very text in which we find the words on which we are discoursing, for he says, "God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love." Here is one of the things, therefore, which accompany salvation. Doing, always doing; doing simply, doing kindly, doing lovingly, doing in the Christly spirit. There are some actions that are oppressive to the very individuals for whom they are performed. Why? Because the manner of doing them is burdensome, aggressive, oppressive. Some people help you and therefore hinder you. Some people do for you things little or great with such self-effusiveness and self-display and with such an unreasoning expectation of gratitude, that the receiver of such services would gladly dispense with them. There is an action subtle as the atmosphere, silent as the night, always operating, never displaying, or demonstrating, or self-magnifying. What shall we say of charity of heart? Does not that also accompany salvation? That is the larger love, that great mother-love which says, "If the house will not hold you, we must add another wing to it." Great love never takes out a two-foot rule and says, "There will only be room at this table for thirty," but love says, "You must find another table." But the room will not hold it. "Then take down the wall, and go into the garden." Love keeps pace with necessity. When the great feast was spread those who went out to call in the unfamiliar guests said, "Lord, it is done as thou hast said, and yet there is room." It was Christ who spoke that parable. He is great in finding room, but never was prevented from doing anything because there was nothing, or because there was little to begin with. "Five loaves" would do to begin with. The prodigal said, "There is bread enough in my father's house and to spare." All the evangelists who went out to call the hungry people to the supper said, "Lord, we have searched everywhere, and brought in everybody we can find from hedge and ditch and hole and rock, and still there is room." Who ever exhausted God? Who ever overthronged his heaven? This must be the spirit of the individual Christian also. But here is a poor heretic who does not see his way clear to several of the dogmas of the Church. Oh! tell him to speak nonsense no longer, but to come in at once. Here is a soul greatly troubled because his experience is different from other experience that he has heard of. Tell him to come in this very instant, for there is a chair set on purpose for him at the corner of the table. Here is a man who rather revels in his infidelity, and gets drunk on his unbelief. Then keep him out. If a man is proud of his scepticism, we do not want him inside the Church, or out of it. He is not wanted anywhere. But if a poor soul should come in and say, "Oh, sirs, it is so dark; which is the way? Will a little child take hold of my hand; and if any wise man is here, will he kindly tell me where I ought to begin, what I ought to do, and how I ought to begin?" make room for him. You need not make room for him; the King, in drawing up his list of wedding guests, set a chair for him next himself. Where there is this charity, Christ is. Where, then, charity does not exist, there is no Church. Unutterably do I hate a man and the disposition that would keep out of the Church any poor, maimed, bruised soul that wants to be in it. "But he does not think as we do." And who are we that should do the superior thinking and set up a standard theology? I will not be one of the number. I was born yesterday; to-day I am groping and struggling and wandering and stumbling in prayer; and tomorrow I shall not be here. Does the poor soul want to love Christ? If so, here is a seat for him at the Lord's table. "Is not the Lord's table set up for perfect people?" By no means. For then would it be a banquet in a wilderness far from any human heart. There is another accompaniment to salvation which must not be forgotten; let it be named as final in the list, but only as initial in its suggestions. And it is evangelistic zeal. What is the meaning of evangelistic? It means that some soul has a truth, a gospel, which he says he must go and tell everybody all over the world. That is the meaning of evangelistic. The truth burns him until he tells it. The gospel that fills his soul is the gospel for every creature. And he must talk about it; propagate it, publish it, circulate it. He must breathe it on every wind, and send it to every sea to be carried to every golden shore. What did the Apostle mean when he said he was a debtor to the barbarians? This has often been misinterpreted, and the Apostle Paul has been represented as a very humble person, because he confessed his obligations to everybody, to the Jew, to the Gentile, to the Greek, to the barbarian, to the bond, and to the free. And the favourite pulpit idea has been that Paul was so willing to acknowledge that everybody had been favourable to him, and kindly disposed towards his life, and had contributed something towards his service. Nothing of the kind. Paul's idea was the evangelistic idea. What I hold, said Paul, belongs to the very first man I meet, and the man beside me, and the man behind me, and all the world, Jew, Gentile, Greek, barbarian, bond, free. Wherever there is a man, I am his debtor. "Oh, sir, come, I know this truth, and therefore I owe it to you"— that is the Cross of Christ in eloquent action. Not, "I have received something from you, poor barbarian, and therefore I must give something back." "I never received a thing from you in my life, but I know a truth that would make a man of you, I know a gospel that would serve you, therefore I am your debtor. Come, and I will pay it. This truth I do not hold as mine only, but as yours also." Fly abroad, thou mighty gospel, go forth, thou queen of truth and love, and be thy retinue more in number than the sands upon the seashore, brighter than the stars that beam in the diadem of night! PrayerAlmighty God, we have heard that thy mercy endureth for ever. All the great houses of history have said this. We know it of a truth; we take up the great song and sing it with our whole heart; for we have tasted and seen and handled of the Word of life. Thou hast saved us. Thy mercy has been near us all the day and all the night; thou hast come to us in the darkness of our despair and in the humiliation of our weakness, and thou hast breathed great gospels into our sinking hearts. Oh, how loving is thy voice, how majestic and tender in music! Behold, thou canst speak a word in season to him that is weary, and thou canst order the armies of heaven. We rejoice in thy love; we draw near to thy pity; because there are tears in thine eyes and thou didst look upon sinful men, we dare come quite close to thee and say, Have mercy upon me! Thy mercy endureth for ever; this we will say in the morning and in the evening; when we awake in the night-watches we will say, Thy mercy endureth for ever. Teach us that we live in thy mercy; because thy love faileth not, our life is permitted to add to its days. We do not live because of thy greatness or thy justice, thy power or thy majesty, but because of thy tenderness and love, and pity and gentleness, and fatherly-motherly care. What are these great, sweet words thou hast sent unto us to live upon, to hide in our hearts, and turn into daily life?— Like as a father pitieth his children;— casting all your care upon him, for he careth for you; last of all he sent his Son;— God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son:— these are thy words; we cannot mistake them; these voices are not earthborn; behold these great utterances fall from heaven, and bring all heaven with them. Help us to answer their grand appeal, that we may be broken in heart, humble in spirit, meek of disposition, obedient in will, and abounding alway in the fruits of the Spirit. Amen. Types of the Unseen Hebrews 11:3 Then they were made of things which do not appear, and if they were made of things which do not appear they must be in some way types of things unseen; that is to say, the thing moulded must be like the mould out of which it came. From this view of the case let us try to find our way at once to the truth, that the things which are seen may help us in some degree to understand the things which are not seen; it we pay attention to what is visible, we may get at least a dim hint of the things that are not visible; time may help to give some hint of eternity; earth may be a dim symbol of heaven; man may be the figure through which we may see something of God. This will be found to be a truth of very wide application. As children need toys, so men need helps to get at things unseen. The whole realm of the invisible must come to us by type and symbol. "The kingdom of heaven is like unto------." The kingdom of heaven is not that, as a mere matter of literal fact, but it is like it, and yet unlike it: for the finite cannot be wholly like the infinite. The danger is that we mistake the literal for the spiritual, or that we force parables and signs into exaggerated uses. Our object should be to seize the spiritual intent and meaning of the parable, and to leave all that is of the nature of drapery or accessory quite in a secondary place. Let children take it in this way: The other day a very small bird heard me talking about Westminster Abbey, and the little creature asked me what the Abbey was like. So I said to the bird, "I think I cannot tell you better what it is like than by asking you to look at your own cage; now think that the roof of your little house is about fifty thousand times bigger than itself-----," but the little bird stopped me, and said it was too much for its tiny head to do. That is just the way with ourselves, We try to multiply thousands of billions of ages by thousands of billions of millenniums to get an idea of eternity, and we become lost amongst the endless and bewildering figures. Yet the truth symbolically lies along that line, but oh, how far along! In another sense it does not lie along that line at all, for arithmetic utterly perishes in its attempts to convey any idea of the Eternal. Still, that is the only help which we have at present. Our arithmetic is in that regard a Bible. If we had no arithmetical figures we could do nothing in the way of computation, and yet when we have done all that is permitted by arithmetical figures we leave eternity untouched. Let children a little older take the truth in this way: A young man whose sight was nearly lost asked me to describe heaven to him as a place. He was nearly blind. On a very bright day he could distinguish a bed of flowers from a plot of grass, and dimly see the outlines of the trees. I took him one summer morning to see a lovely garden, with soft green meadows stretching far away beyond; and I said, "Think of this emerald being spread all over the world, and over a world millions of times larger than ours, and think of all these colours never fading, this bloom never perishing, this odour never lessening, this sky never clouding, these bird-songs never ceasing,"— but he stopped me, and said, "How can I?" He was lost in amazement He exaggerated the poor little fact before him until it became an impossibility, and fell to pieces under the torture of his imagination. Yet this is the only way in which God can, so to say, get access to our minds. We have no adequate powers with which to take hold of spiritual realities; we need help; and the best help is poor; so we see but parts of things, and the parts we do see are upside down and discoloured. The danger is that we mistake the type for the thing typified; that we seize the letter and miss the spirit, and that thus we stand amidst forms and shadows, and do not enter into the inner and hidden sanctuary, where the sacred Truth sits in infinite beauty and infinite calm. Let a still older class of students take the matter in this way: we can only think of God through our own individuality as men. The very idea of God brings with it at once the human form as its only possible expression. It is, too, the greatest help we can have: for man was made in the image and likeness of God. Yet God protests against the abuse of this help again and again, asking if he is a man that he should do this or that; he is not a man that he should lie, he is not the Son of Man that he should repent. But try to think of God as a conscious, merciful, righteous, holy Being, and you must, by some necessity, hardly to be explained in words, think of him as an infinite man, an almighty man, an effulgent and magnificent man. What is his form? You think of it as human. You speak of his eyes and mouth, his hands and feet; he rises, he sits; he walks, he rides, he comes down, he calls, he grieves, he rejoices;— all these are human expressions, and are limited by human uses, and they bring with them subtle and tremendous dangers. God is a Spirit; there is no similitude with which he may be worthily compared; no image represents him; no imagination can encompass the fulness of his might and glory: yet he says he is a father, a king, a shepherd, and a man of war. With the poor illustrations and terms accessible to us we have to work; they are blurred and misty lenses through which we have to look at the sun. We could better think of Lebanon through a withered leaf, of the sea through a drop of putrid water, of landscapes inexpressibly beautiful through one handful of barren soil. Yet we have no other image and likeness of God; through this, or through nothing external, we must see our Creator and Lord. So with heaven. We want to know what it is, and we cannot be fully told. We think of fair lands gleaming in everlasting light, of angelic hosts, throng upon throng beyond computing, of the friends we have parted from waiting for us on a golden shore, clothed in pure linen whiter than snow, of trumpets and harps, of anthems and peans of victory, of crystal streams, of gates lustrous with precious stones, of crowns that vie in splendour with all that we have ever seen or imagined; and when we have thought of all this we have but seen a landscape with the light of a candle, or looked upon the sea when hidden under an impenetrable cloud. We know nothing. We are thrown back upon an inextinguishable hope, and we must die to see what heaven is. The practical lessons which come out of these reflections are clear and simple: for example, that the movement of life is from the less to the greater. We are moving towards something that is exaggerated by symbols, but towards something which is imperfectly expressed by them. "The half hath not been told us." "To die is gain." "It doth not yet appear what we shall be." "Hereafter ye shall see." We are thus called upon to live a life of hope. We thank the flower for its beauty, and tell it how nearly it sets forth the better flowers not seen just now. We err vitally in supposing that the earth shows us the end of anything. What is the earth but as a board on which diagrams are drawn by an invisible hand, giving us some rude outline of things that are yet to be shown to us in all their sweep and grandeur? All nature is a parable. Blessed are they who have the seeing eye and the hearing ear, that all the beauty and poesy of the parable may be secured. The four seasons are four gospels to the man who can read them with spiritual intelligence. Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, what God hath prepared for them that love him. Whatever may be the spiritual meaning of this, and however much it may have been revealed to us by the indwelling Spirit, yet in relation to all the great disclosures which God has to make, the words are to be taken as showing that here and now we know nothing in its reality and in its completeness. Here we have no continuing city, yet the city in which we dwell gives us some hint of law, order, security, and the harmonious operation of all manner of ministries and agencies. Here we cannot see the celestial paradise, but every cluster of flowers that we do see may be taken as the beginning of a line which continues itself throughout infinity. In the best sense of the term, tomorrow shall be as this day, and more abundant— more abundant in visions, in light, in music, in opportunity of service, and in opportunity of study. All the longest days have yet to come. We are moving towards them through tunnel and cloud and difficult pathway, but beyond— how little beyond, who can tell?— lies the land which knows no winter, shines the day which knows no night. Our motto is, Excelsior; or our motto is, Beyond— always beyond— farther and farther beyond. What has been seen is as nothing compared with what has yet to be revealed. Then the second lesson is that we must allow for different ways of expressing our ideas of invisible things. We do not express ourselves alike about things visible: how then should we use the same words about things that are not seen? The vital thing is to believe in the invisible, to endure as seeing the invisible, to clothe the invisible with such features and attractions as shall commend it with supreme fascination to our hope and our loyalty. "If in this life only we have hope, we are of all men most miserable." The Kingdom of Heaven does not reveal itself to all men in the same aspect or in the same degree; con. sequently we have endless differences of expression in words, regarding the nature, extent, and obligations of that Kingdom. Out of this difference of conception and expression comes all that we mean by Christian denominationalism. That denominationalism is urged to mischievous uses when it is set up as being the only orthodoxy; but it may be used with great advantage when the truth is recognised that every man sees God for himself— that is, in a way in which no other man sees him; that no one man is the whole Church of God, but that all sections and communions must be brought together in their totality in order to represent the revelation of the divine kingdom as it has been apprehended by the human mind. If we cannot agree as to a form of words regarding the substance of nature, the operation of law, the uses and bearings of facts, events, and circumstances, which make up what we call the story of daily life, how can we be expected to speak the same words, in the same number, and with the same emphasis, and with the same accent, regarding things invisible, spiritual, and eternal? Here we must have room for variety of expression, and here we must hail every man's utterance as a distinct contribution to the sum-total of God's revelation. Another lesson is that we shall know that we are making a right use of the invisible by the effect it produces upon our use of things visible. Are they diminished in importance? Does the invisible make our sorrows seem as light afflictions which art but for a moment? Does it bless us with a spirit of glad solemnity? Does it enable us calmly to remit all present tumults and controversies to a grand arbitrament, that shall be merciful and just? Does it spread itself over us, over our yearning and expectant souls, like a firmament full of stars— stars that may be homes of the good and true, washed in the infinitely sufficient and precious blood of God the Son? Does it encompass us like a sky, star-rich, with hospitality written over its immeasurable expanse? Does the grave look like but a black speck when seen in its glory? If this be our view of the Invisible, truly it is to us a tender and blissful revelation of Heaven. PrayerAlmighty God, we have offended thee with manifold offences; we have been cruel to thee, as if with malignant determination to wound thy gentle heart. We have been cowardly in our Christian testimony, poor in our Christian service, selfish even in our religious considerations. But for thy mercy, broader than the earth, higher than the heavens, more enduring than our own life, we should surely die; but the blood of Jesus Christ, thy Son, cleanseth from all sin. That we may now feel its cleansing power is our heart's desire unto God. Thou wilt do exceeding abundantly above pardoning us; thou wilt even make us holy after thine own perfection; thou wilt take our sins away as if they had never been, and cast them for ever into the depth of the sea. This is our joy and this our triumph over sin. Thou wilt make us without spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing, so that the signature of the devil shall not be found upon us at all; our sins will be forgotten, and thy great mercy will shine in our imperishable holiness. Sanctify us then, O Holy Spirit, and we shall be holy. Teach us the mystery of holiness; we know nothing of it; we have but heard of holiness. Do thou lead us into understanding what is meant by the purity of God. Help us to hate sin with infinite and unquenchable hatred; may we abhor that which is evil, and may all evil men find our presence a judgment upon them, and feel that we torment them whilst we are in their sight. Help us to torment with infinite torture all evil spirits, all devils, all hellish dispositions; may those who have them and suffer from them cry out to us by reason of our holiness, "What have we to do with you, ye sons of God?" Thus make us preachers of the truth, signs and testimonies on behalf of righteousness, and may those who are doing evil fear us, and those who are doing well be made glad in the light of our countenance. We all want blessings; there is hunger in every heart; there is a void in every nature. O thou dear, gentle Christ, who didst carry the fulness of the Godhead bodily, fill us with thy fulness, and we shall be satisfied. Amen. The Euperistatos Hebrews 12:1 This text has often been used for the purpose of cheering discouraged and faint-hearted saints, by the doctrine that we are all watched by the living dead; so to say, they are gathered in infinite circles around our earth, and are watching our conduct in the race of life: and the very fact that we are being looked upon by such a cloud of observers should stir our energy, illumine our hope, confirm our purposes, and turn our very weakness into strength. That animated exhortation is full of truth and wisdom: but it is not the truth or the wisdom of the text What are we to understand by "a cloud of witnesses"? certainly not a cloud of observers. Men say they witnessed such and such an event: that is to say, they looked upon it, they beheld it, they took note of it: but that is not the sense in which the word is used in this verse. The verse has no reference whatever to observance, inspection, or criticism of what other people are doing. The word "witnesses" is a right word, but it must be understood in its right and definite meaning as here employed. The right word would be "martyrs": "wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of martyrs"— that indeed is the literal word: μάρτυρ is the word which designates the witness as in the Epistle it was originally written. The witness therefore, in this case, is one who bears witness, who testifies, who (so to say) stands forward and declares that he is prepared to make declaration concerning certain doctrines, truths, practices, claims, and demands. So the witness is not an observer, but a testifier, and a man so earnest in his testimony that he would die for it rather than contradict it. Time would fail me, saith the Apostle, to tell of all the martyrs, of all the witnesses; nothing could silence them; they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented: they could have changed the whole situation by a word, but they were steadfast in their testimony:— wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of firm men, who made oath and said, and kept to their word with inflexible fidelity. Or we may vary the criticism, and still retain the same point. It would be right to read the text thus:— "Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of Protestants." When you are asked to define the word "Protestants" you instantly think of popery. Protestant, originally, has nothing whatever to do with popery. Men say, We are Protestants, and by that they define a sectarian position. But that is not the original, rich, large meaning of the term Protestant. The word Protestant occurs in the Book of Chronicles, long before pope or popery was ever thought of: and the word is so rendered in the Vulgate translation of the Scriptures, which is acknowledged by the Vatican to be a valid and authoritative translation. There we read of Protestants—quos protestantes— who being Protestants took such and such a course. The word Protestant comes from a word which signifies to bear witness, to protest and say. The word Protestant has an incidental, may be an accidental, but certainly not an essential, relation to popery; in that connection it was invented about the early part of the sixteenth century, when certain men protested against acts that had been done; they were sneeringly called "Protestants." That name has clung to all liberal thinking, to all expressions of mental enlargement, and to all persons who throw off trammels and chains, and claim liberty, and right of private judgment, and right of personal conscience. But though the word was applied in derision it has been turned into an honour. The word "Christian" was so used. The disciples were first called "Christians" at Antioch. The word was pronounced derisively, contemptuously; the people to whom it was applied were designated "Christ's-ones," "Christ-ones," "Christians." The name has been taken up and is now the brightest of all designations. The Church would not part with it. It accepts the contempt of the enemy, and transmutes it into the gold of the sanctuary. Thus the text might read: "Wherefore seeing we also are pressed about with so great a cloud of martyrs, Protestants, men who had conviction, principle, and stood by it: they were men of backbone, they were not gelatinous men; they were vertebrate, upright, massive, powerful men, of whom the world was not worthy; they wandered about in deserts, and in dens and caves of the earth, and found the cold rocks warm, because their hearts were true; they sang in the fissures of the rocks and in temples not made with hands, they feared nothing— nor king, nor priest, nor law— because they had the commendation of God. Wherefore seeing we also at the latter end of history are pressed upon by a great cloud of Protestants, let us------" That is the argument. It is not an abstract appeal, it is not a fine essay in words. Christianity comes down to us in Christians, and Christian argument is a Christian army. Men are called upon to be firm; and the proofs and the confirmations of the appeal are to be found, not in the inventiveness of metaphysical or poetical genius, but in the realities and the conquests of men who were sons of God. "Let us lay aside every weight." The idea was that the racers were enfolded in long, flowing, highly-coloured robes, which attracted much attention, but were liable to interfere with the ease and agility of the racer. Wherefore let us, in order to be worthy of our historic relations, lay aside every weight; strip, that we may run; throw off all coloured things, all decorations, all entanglements, that we may properly execute the race. "And the sin which doth so easily beset us." This has been interpreted as referring to peccadilloes, or small offences. We say of a man that his besetting sin is avarice, censoriousness, selfishness, indolence, the love of physical satisfaction, and we guard men against the sin that seems to have the greatest hold upon them. All that is right; all that is true to spiritual experience, and to actual conduct: but it is not the right criticism of this particular text. In order to represent the word we should have to coin an almost grotesque expression. This is the translation of a word which occurs nowhere else in all Greek literature. Not only does it not occur in the New Testament, a little book you can handle within finger and thumb; but it does not occur in any department of Greek literature. In its negative form it occurs only once, so far as scholars are able to inform us; but in the form in which we find it here it stands alone in this verse. In order to represent it we should have to make some such word as this— the well-stood-arounded sin; the sin that is backed by a million backers, the sin that men delight to own and to proclaim, the popular sin that commands the suffrages of a world. No need to exhort men to keep away from the sins that bite, and that sting instantaneously, and that we are ashamed to mention or name; all these sins may be taken as amongst the drawbacks and offences and inequalities which men would never own. But there are other sins, which, as we have said, are well-stood-arounded,— first the circle of admirers, then a concentric circle, then the circle multiplied by three, by thirty, by three hundred, by thirty thousand; sins that men are proud of, proverbs that they quote when they sit by the fireside, and are in jovial mood; maxims which they write at the head of their letters, and with which they adorn their crests; shallow philosophies that cheat the heavens, and mock the God of eternity, and fritter away all human life. Let us lay aside the well-stood-arounded sin, the popular damning sophism. This being the reading of the text, the light which comes from it falls back on that historical chapter which immediately precedes the text, wherein we read of Abel, and Enoch, and Noah, and Abraham, and Moses, and the illustrious dead: they laid aside the well-stood-arounded sin, the sin that has fame, and the sin that is supposed to bring popularity to the sinner. Thus the whole chapter is lighted up with a new illumination; old meanings are shed off, and the right idea burns and glows before the reverent imagination. Take instances. Is there a better-supported sin than the sophism, "one world is enough for me"? A man would say that in company, and think he was uttering a profoundly wise saying. He would not speak it under his breath, as if he were taking a great liberty with truth and history; but he would boldly utter it, and punctuate it with a laugh that meant defiance to theologues and churches, and altars. That sin will kill him; it will deprive his soul of fresh air, of liberty, of the expanse which is needed for truest, largest culture. It looks harmless enough; it does not look as if it were a poisonous reptile; but it is, notwithstanding all appearances to the contrary. No life can thrive upon it. First of all, it is false, and being false it eats the soul like a canker. Abel stands up, and says, I forsook that at the beginning of history; I laid aside that idea; I offered a sacrifice which meant larger things, a mysterious sacrifice of blood: I studied the colours of things, and I found them stained through and through with living vermilion; I sent up a sacrifice to God, and as I was doing so the earth dwindled into nothing; I had barely a foothold, hardly an altar, so small the world seemed when I got hold of the reality of things. Yet this is a popular and well-stood-arounded sophism. "One world is enough for me." Let us say, So it is: but first of all find the one world. There is your difficulty; there is your impossibility. There is no one world. Where your laugh, where your jibe, where your foolish jest, now? You cannot find the world to play with, to trifle with, to spoil: God's universe is a well-compacted house: world speaks masonically to world; star unto star speaks light; world unto world repeats the password of the universe. Who is entitled so to mutilate the worlds, the continuity of God's building? By what authority do we detach a star, a planet, a little world called Earth, and say, This is enough? First get the world's consent to be detached and mutilated. Where is the one world? You call it the earth. There you are wrong. The earth is a member of a household; it has family relations; it has a place which it could only hold because other worlds are holding places in relation to it. Find the one world, and it will be enough for me, too. Produce it! Where does the one world get its light from? where does the one world get its rain from? where does the one world borrow its summer? How is the one world kept in motion?— not a vibration, but a motion that melts into infinities. There is, believe me, no one world. We may have opportunities in one world with a view to our relation and action in another, but the solitariness of the opportunity is within it, and in no wise involves the relation of the rest, which must of necessity be a relation of continuity and consolidation. Once get rid of this sophism; then you ask what worlds there are; you take some measure of things, you have an idea of the locality where you stand, of the dimensions of the things that are above you and around you; and he who does not proceed upon these fundamental principles will bring his life to a miserable issue. When you study any great question get hold of its boundaries, it you can, its great main lines; do not fret and vex the mind with the immediate detail, but ask for the principal line, for what may be termed the geometric figure: what is it— square, triangular, circular? then begin to come down into detail; but always hold the thing in its entirety, so far as you can secure possession of it So with the worlds: consider that there is no one world, that each world is related to some other world, that all the worlds are strung upon an invisible thread, and so strung they constitute the wealth of God. Another man says he has made this his creed— "A short life and a merry one." Let us lay aside this well-stood-arounded sin. Here Moses stands up and says, I forsook that; I had the temptation offered to me, but I said, No. So Moses is amongst those who laid aside every weight and the well-stood-arounded sin, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season. The very sin has been complimented— "the pleasures of sin for a season." The pleasures perish in the use; when we are about to seize the prize we grasp a bubble. There are pleasures that taste well in the mouth, but when they mix with the life they give it torture, they inflict agony upon it. "The pleasures of sin for a season." Do not be led away by those foolish teachers who would ask you to have a short life and a merry one. That is impossible. There is no short life. He who talks about a short life does not know what he is talking about: for every life is related to all other life; time impinges on eternity; the frailest pulse of man speaks in some whispered tone of the thunders of immortality. "A short life"— to what ignorance are we indebted for the false expression, to what blasphemy? Because God lives we live; and who has taught us that he cuts life into fragments, and lets the fragments drop as if they were of no account to him? Life is his jewel; life constitutes the uniqueness of God:— "I AM"— the eternal verb; the verb out of which all other grammar grows; without which all other conjugation would be impossible. Then there are those who say they have determined their creed in the light of the philosophy that "seeing is believing." Moses says, I got away from that early in life, and I began to see that it were better to endure as seeing the invisible— or him who is invisible— I kept my eye upon the eternal. But let us say that seeing is believing; then we should have to ask, What is seeing? Who sees? Nobody. Seeing is impossible! There is the error of that well-stood-arounded sin. What can the eyes of the body see? If they look up to the sky at night-time they see nothing but spots of amber; they have to assist the eye to catch sight of the largest world that flames in the empyrean. We do not trust the naked eye in things of a comparatively trivial nature; we have our microscope, or our telescope, or our magnifying glass, or assistance of some kind, and we regulate the lights in order that we may see this or that more perfectly. Who is he, then, who with brutal ignorance wishes to drag young minds down to the base and devastating creed that seeing is believing? "Lord, open his eyes, that he may see," said the young prophet. The young man might have said— Open my eyes! My eyes are as open as yours: there should be no difficulty about the situation; I see the hosts of Syria coming round us, coming nearer and nearer, and making escape impossible: why talk about my eyes not being open? the old prophet simply said, "Lord, open his eyes, that he may see." And the Lord opened his eyes, and he saw; then he believed. The larger seeing is the larger believing. True sight is true faith. But at present, in our physical conditions, in our murky atmosphere, in our limitations, no man can see anything beyond mere figure, form, transient colour. We are indebted to revelation for all we know of the innermost secret of things. Wherefore, seeing we also are compassed about with the mighty army of men who protested against these sophisms, who died rather than be bewildered and puzzled by them, let us also lay aside every entangling robe, everything that is of a cumbrous nature, and the well-stood-arounded sin, the popular sophism, the silly, foolish, superficial talk that has reduced itself into proverbs, and let us get hold of the deep, eternal philosophy of things. How can we do so? Christian teaching has a ready answer to that inquiry:— only by acquainting ourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ. He claims to be before all things, and above all things and to hold in his hand the organisation and administration of all things. He is the only begotten Son of the Father, who alone knoweth how eternity throbs and burns. Lord, open our eyes! When we meet thee on the wayside, we say, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on us! And when thou dost say. What will ye? We say, Lord, Lord, that we may see! We meet thee at the point of need. Our pain inspires our prayer. PrayerAlmighty God, we bless thee for all the great men who have spoken to us the words of our Lord Jesus Christ. May we never forget the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ; may we learn all our prayers there; there may we receive pardon, release from the perdition and the torment of sin, inspiration to study deeply and serve well. Glorious Cross! a tree, the leaves of which are for the healing of the nations. May we go back to thy Word for all truth; thou hast revealed all things to us in Christ Jesus: Lord, open our eyes, that we may behold wondrous things in the Son of thy love. He fills the earth, and he fills all heaven, and he is the Head of all things to the Church. If we have forgotten aught of his beauty, bring it now to the recollection of our heart; if for a moment we have forgotten that he is fairest among ten thousand and altogether lovely, may we see him as we have not seen him before, with the vision of our love, and may we ourselves become transfigured into the likeness of his glory. Wonderful is his name, wonderful in might and wisdom and truth and love,— all wonderful. Men heard the gracious words that proceeded out of his mouth, and said they had heard no such music before; men beheld the wonderful works which he did, and gave glory to God in loud, sweet song. May we be worthy of such an ancestry; not caring for the form, may we strive after the power of godliness; may we know that the word of God is with power, may we be assured that we have known Christ by the renewal of every disposition, and the heightening and glorifying of every purpose. We thank thee for good men, as we thank thee for the salt of the earth, and for the light of the world, for the freshness of spring, for the abundance of summer. O Christ, thou wilt always have a generation to call thee blessed; thou shalt see of the travail of thy soul and shalt be satisfied; Calvary shall not stand for nothing, it shall be the very centre of heaven. Help us to live wisely and well during the handful of days allotted upon the earth. We were babes yesterday, we shall be dead and gone tomorrow; oh, may we spend the intervening moments having great care lest we lose one of the jewels of God. Amen. "Sinners Against Themselves" Hebrews 12:3"Consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against him self"; "such gainsaying of sinners against themselves" (R.V.); or, such gainsaying of sinners against each himself— in their totality, against themselves. We are accustomed to talk about sinners against God, and we too frequently lose ourselves in the sublimity of the confession. Here we have it brought before us in another and more direct and simple but not truer form, namely, "sinners against themselves." A man can understand what that means, where he cannot understand what is meant by sinning against God. You must begin with the selfish. Man can hardly ever get beyond himself. This is beneficent as well as embarrassing; all depending upon the circumstances. Self-projection properly conducted becomes an instrument with which we more perfectly understand the mystery of the divine nature. It is difficult to think of God other than as infinite man; it is almost impossible to think of God except under human form. Angels are but glorified human creatures; even their wings do not destroy their human look: and it has pleased God to allow us to climb up the ladder of self-consciousness and self-study, so that we may touch at least the edge of his garments. When men begin to understand that sin hurts themselves, they may begin partially to comprehend what is meant by sin offending, grieving, hurting God. Take the first meaning of the words, to which there is no objection— that there was a gainsaying of sinners against Christ. He was encountered on every hand by obstinate and cruel hostility. That sense of the text is not disputed. It is, however, only part of a larger and truer sense. Whilst the gainsaying was proceeding against Christ, the view which Christ took of the gainsaying was, These poor fools are hurting themselves. We have not only to do with the view taken by outside observers of the action of men, we have to do with the view which Christ himself took of the whole set of circumstances. From our point of view the hostility was against Christ: he was reviled, despised, rejected of men, encountered with fiercest antagonism: he was seized with cruel hands and murdered; the Prince of Life was killed: all that is perfectly and literally true; but it does not interfere with the view which was taken of the occasion by Jesus Christ. Looking down from his Cross he said, "These poor fools are committing suicide; they do not know it: they are crucifying themselves, stabbing themselves, ruining themselves." Nor was this a merely philosophical interpretation of human history: this is one of the most affecting circumstances in the life of the Redeemer:— "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!" and again, "Weep not for me, but weep for yourselves." "Saul, it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks": thou canst not make one little mark upon the eternal throne, but thou canst bruise thine own hands, and breed mortification in thine own flesh. The sinner is not only a criminal, he is a fool. Have we any phrases in our common speech that will throw some light upon this view taken of human hostility by Jesus Christ? When do we most deeply and sincerely pity some people? When we come to the point of saying, "They are blind to their own interest": not only are they annoying other people (as if that were a trifle), but they are "absolutely insensible to their own interest." That is thought to be a very condemnatory accusation: because it reduces the people to a position, not only of hostility which may have some dignity in it, but to a position of absolute stupidity and folly and madness. Let us take care what admissions we make along this line; because some keen-minded preacher may gather up all these admissions, and hurl them upon us when he comes to make his final indictment. What do we say of some young men? Speaking of their immorality, speaking of what we foolishly term their minor immorality, such as their want of punctuality, their want of scrupulousness in statement or in personal habit, we say, Such young men are "injuring their own prospects." Or, when young expectants are not sufficiently dutiful to relatives or friends, we seem to sum up all the pith and range of our compassion when we say, They are so foolish, because they are "standing in their own light." Take care! All these admissions are profoundly theological. They are not little maxims which apply only to the transient occasion and the immediate figures; they are Bibles not fully opened, and they contain judgment and wrath and hell. It is impossible to be other than theological. The term has now become a term of derision; there is a limited sense in which perhaps the derision may be well expended. Wherever we are we are touching eternity. We could not drink the draught of time except out of the goblet of eternity. Wherever we are and whatever we are doing, if we be other than the veriest fools, we are touching God, and we shall awake to say, Lo, God is here, and I knew it not: this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven, and a little trifling admission I made in the market-place is magnified into a canon by which I may be condemned. Thou wicked and slothful servant! out of thine own mouth will I judge thee. Man cannot open his mouth without condemning himself. His cleverest admissions are but the most craftily drawn impeachments of his integrity. Man has not a little maxim in the market-place that may not stab him through and through, and will not do it in the final make-up and settlement of things. The preacher need go no farther than the maxims of the market-place to find a Bible. If you took away the written book from the preacher, you would not take away his texts: his texts are in the life of men, they are in the moralities of society, his texts are in the little canons by which conduct is partially regulated. All these grow on the edges of the Bible proper. They may not grow right in the very middle of this revelation, down where the Tree of life stands heaven-high, but all these little floral maxims grow on the edges of God's revelation garden. The point, however, to be held steadfastly in view is this, that we do admit that we often simply pity men who are so blind to their own interest, who stand in their own light, who bligh their own prospects, who foolishly, madly strike the rock from under their own feet. That we take to be the very supremacy of madness. Jesus Christ, looking upon all the gainsaying of sinners, said, This is meant to be against me, and it is against me; it has a distinct bearing upon my personal feeling: but if these people could see the thing in its reality, they would see that every time a man strikes God he puts a sword into his own heart. Sinners are sinners against themselves; they stand in their own light, blight their own prospects, and cut the ground from under their own feet. To sin is not simply to break some outward law. It is to injure ourselves. For example, a man sins against the outward law of health: what happens? His own health goes down; in his own illness he writes his own condemnation. Health is not a figure outside a man issuing decrees and fiats, man saying, "I will read these and see what they are; if I like them I will obey them, and if I dislike them I will throw them aside," and having read them says, "I will none of you." Can that man live as if he had not resented the appeals of the spirit of health? Certainly not; he is playing a losing game, he is fighting a losing battle: no man can fight the angel of health and win. He may abstain from food, he may abstain from the cleansing bath, he may decline to take renovating and stimulating exercise, he may take himself into his own hands and say to the genius of health, I will not take my legislation from your court. What happens? Nothing to the genius of health; that radiant figure still lives, rules, and dictates the true rθgime of physical development. What happens to the fool that ran away in a spirit of disobedience? This happens to him— ruin. And the spirit of health says, The poor soul is a sinner against himself. Suppose a man should say he will not submit to intellectual discipline: he will not read, he will not open a book, he will have no subjects assigned for study; he will simply live upon himself, and as for consulting other minds and following an educational programme, he will do nothing of the kind: what happens? Narrowness, mental feebleness, want of a large, round, all-inclusive sympathy; sectarianism happens, bigotry happens, little miserable prejudices are bred in the heart that is so ill-treated: and the genius of mind says pensively, The man is hurting himself: he might live in the sunlight, and he has locked himself up in the darkness; he might have read many books and have seen how difficult it is to pronounce an opinion upon everything, because in every question there are numerous considerations that require balancing, shading, colouring, weighing, and he might have learned to be modest. But hear him how he chatters, what little maxims he has, what small, paltry pedantry: where is freshness of thought, clearness of judgment, massiveness of understanding, geniality and charitableness of criticism? The man has killed his soul. Suppose a man should say he will not use his right arm any more, he will bind it to his side, he will do what he can with the hand on the left side. He has a kind of liberty to do so; this he might practise for a long time: what becomes of the right hand? Paralysis, loss of strength, feebleness, or some other calamity. Unbind the limb at the end of seven years; now stretch it out. It cannot be done; the man is a sinner against himself. Christianity is the subblimest protest against selfishness, and the sublimest inspiration in the direction of true, large, complete self-culture. To oppose Jesus Christ is not simply to be on the wrong side of an argument. There are those who talk as if Christianity were simply argumentative, and as if one man has as much right to his opinion as any other man. That is perfectly true, but Christianity is not an argument only; health is not an argument, mental cultivation is not an argument, the proper discipline of the limbs is not an argument, only: there is an argumentative side; in Christianity there is an argumentative side, large and sublime: but Christianity is not an argument merely, only, or exclusively. That is where men get so far wrong. Hence we have this wonderful little Vanity Fair, on the base as large as a fourpenny piece, that one man should get up and say he has as perfect a right to his opinion as any preacher in the world. So he has, perhaps; that depends upon a number of considerations which he has not mind enough to take in: but even if he could establish his right to his opinion he would not touch the real measure of this sublime inquiry. Christianity is not only an argument, it is a morality, it is a science of conduct, it is a philosophy of spiritual training, it is a sublime endeavour to bring errant minds into harmonic line, to lift up that which is bulging into perpendicularity, and to put that which is off colour into the right music of shade. Christianity is not an argument, it is a redemption. You admit this in all the lower levels of life, why do you hesitate about it in the sanctuary? Suppose a man should rise and say, With regard to health and cleanliness, I have as much right to my opinion as you. We say, Very good: what is your opinion? My opinion is that a man has only to let his body alone, and it will take care of itself. If we had a whole eternity to debate in, we might contradict him. Some persons must be allowed to utter their inquiries and pronounce their judgments, and there the matter must be left. To oppose Christ is to injure one's own soul: the soul is no longer what it was. Contact with Christ gives sweetness to the soul, fineness of temper, nobleness of charity; contact with Christ makes men simple, sincere, modest, kind-hearted; contact with Christ lifts the life to a higher level. To sin against Christ is to sin against the innermost philosophy, the divinest science, the first thought of the eternal impulse, the essential fire of the universe. Whoever sins against Christ bears no more fruit; he is as a withered fig tree, and hungering men passing by and seeing leaves thereon will say, Let us appease our hunger here, and lo, the fig tree is without figs: men curse it, hunger curses it, just expectation curses it, and it withers away. To sin against Christ is to go down in the highest regions of the soul; to sin against Christ is to lose quality of mind and heart and thought and purpose. This is not always incidentally evident. Yet such decadence in fine quality is observable, if we look at the person implicated at sufficiently wide intervals of time; so we say about some men, He is not somehow what he used to be: what is the difference in that man? The difference is subtle, and yet it is all but palpable; it hardly admits being stated in words, and yet it stands before us like a wall of adamant. If you can trace that man's inner history you have the explanation: he has ceased to pray; once he prayed always, now he prays seven times a day only; once he prayed seven times a day, now he prays but twice; once he prayed but twice, now he does not pray at all. Can he keep up the fine bloom of the soul? No. A man cannot cut himself off from God, and be as good, and great, and wise, and kind as he was during a period of intercommunion. Let experience answer, let the facts of the market-place and the fireside testify: where prayer dies the soul withers, where love of religious communion ceases to animate the man the soul soon takes up with minor engagements, and quickly tells in its loss of bloom and radiance and pith the tragedy of its fall. This is the view which Christ himself took. He said, They are plotting their own ruin. This deeply affected him; this was one of his keenest agonies— that men do not see the reality of their conduct. They will live such a little life, they will take in so little field, they will build walls around themselves instead of living in the enlarged liberty of God's horizon. When the nation goes down in its best religious feeling, it goes down politically, commercially; every enterprise is a new phase of gambling, and every promise is a new form of investment. The view which Christ took of the condition of society is that all wrong doers are hurting themselves. When this view is taken we shall get rid of a good deal of narrow selfishness; we may become less metaphysical, but we shall become more human, and therefore more sympathetic. Can any enlightened man look upon a youth who never reads a book, and feel that he may be after all a very good and a very capable young man? It is impossible. We live on books. There is a temptation to live without such aids, but it is a temptation to live on stones instead of bread. If you could see that youth in the proper light you would say, Poor soul, how he dawdles away his time! how he fritters away his opportunities! how he might be strengthening, enlarging, and equipping himself! There are young men who to-day boast that they never open a book: what becomes of those young men? That is one of the unanswered questions of history. They can come to nothing really useful, and they can do nothing really good; unless indeed they make up for want of consultation of books by some other kind of equal or superior study: but study there must be; otherwise the mind goes down, the soul languishes. How we cry out against the man who starves his body! we sometimes indeed threaten men with mechanical appliances if they do not sufficiently partake of food to recruit their animal strength: it would be a crime against the state for any man to starve his body. How anxious we are to keep the flesh, the bone, and the sinew in good condition. But if we were true to our own argument, and saw it in all its last and just issues, we should say, If it is a crime against the state to deplete and ruin the body, what must it be but high treason against the universe to starve a soul? But this is the continual difficulty of all intellectual teachers, all day-school teachers, all Sunday-school teachers, all pulpit teachers, and all men who undertake to assist the development of the human mind, that men will instantly acknowledge the argument as bearing upon the body, but when it is lifted to its higher applications they fall away from the monition, and go on feeding the flesh and depleting the mind. What can be God's feeling about sinners but that they are self-lost, self-ruined, self-condemned? O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself. There is a suicide other than that of the body. A man may never have made "his own quietus" "with a bare bodkin," and yet his soul may be lying within him a blanched corpse: he may be a living sepulchre, a walking grave, the completest, the saddest, the most humiliating of ironies. God pities the sinner because the sinner hurts himself. God's hell is not a fire kindled by mere anger, it is a fire kindled by sin. Do not blame God for having dug a hell in his universe, he did not dig one inch of it: sin dug it, sin lighted it, sin filled it with its fire and brimstone. It is so in the matter of health, of intellectual cultivation, of social relationship, and it must be so in its highest spiritual and theological applications. Suppose a man should shut out the sun from his dwelling: does he hurt the sun? He hurts himself, and the sun might say as it gazes upon the barred shutters, O poor fool, dwelling in that darkness, I am here with a gospel of light; I am here to make thee a gardener; I am here to show thee new mysteries and apocalypses of colour; I am here, representing the music and the harmony of the universe: why wilt thou not open these shutters, and let me work for thee all the miracles of light? I pity thee: thou hurtest thyself. Suppose a little flower should say, I will not live outside any longer, I will not have anything to do with what is called the course of nature, I will live wholly by myself, I will have nothing to do with the sun, or with the dews of night or morning, or with the former or the latter rain, or with the breezes roaring like a whirlwind, or whispering like a zephyr: I am going to live altogether by my little self,— does the flower hurt the sun, or the dew, or the living breeze? No. Poor hermit, poor cut-throat, it hurts itself. All living roots are in the sun; all colour is the child of the sun; all beauty is an adapted sunbeam. Turn ye, turn ye! Why will ye die, rot away, lose rootage, and be cast out as unprofitable servants? Turn ye, turn ye! As I live, saith the Lord, I have no pleasure in death, I do not want that servant in the household of my universe: but to be men you must have certain liberties, and to have such liberties involves the possibility of suicide. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! I called, but ye refused; ye will not come unto me that ye might have life. This is God's complaint, and it hurts him, not so much that we are rebels against his throne, as that we are rebels against ourselves. PrayerAlmighty God, we pray thee mercifully to direct us in all the way of life; then shall perplexities become means of grace, and our embarrassments shall give us deeper cause for thought, and turn our wonder into reverence and expectancy. Look upon thy servants who have to toil for bread: teach them that there is pleasure in labour, that the heaven of our reward is in the getting of our bread, not in the eating of it; may we know the pleasures of the chase; may we know that we are called to the fresh air that comes from the hills of heaven, and to the exercise which warms the blood of the soul. We thank thee for all thy care and love, thy patience. Thou dost sit down with us at the common meal and make it a sacrament; thou dost go out with us on our daily errands, and when we come back we glow with holy fire, for we have touched the Lord. Sanctify our bereavements and losses and cares; show us that every grave we dig is another acre in our heavenly estate; show us that every loss is but an aspect of some great gain. May we be gentle with one another, patient, forbearing; reluctant to strike, unwilling to divide and quarrel; may we seek out reasons for reconciliation rather than excuses for continued hostility. Rebuke our selfishness; pity the man who is laying up for himself pile on pile, and then telling lies to God and to man, saying that the claims upon him are so many that he can do nothing more. The Lord forbear to smite the liar, or the earth would be too small for the tombs of those who tell falsehoods. The Lord direct us, keep us, guide us in the way of life: open the doors which open upon liberty and the way of progress; explain to us enough for the cultivation and ennoblement of our faith, and may we in all things glorify the living Father. Let Thy Spirit dwell within us— mighty Spirit, holy Spirit, loving Spirit, that every evil power may be cast out of us, and every vain imagination may be destroyed, and our whole soul become as an immortal temple inhabited by the King of eternity. May our heart be pure, and our voice eloquent in all speech of wisdom and charity; may we open our lips for the dumb, may we plead for others as we cannot plead for ourselves, in all faithfulness, nobleness, and trustfulness; and when the end shall come may we find that it is but the beginning, that in Thy universe there is no end: the suns sets to rise again. Thou art moving all things by a law of revolution: we ascend as we revolve. May we enter into all the double motion of Thy great dominion, and feel whilst we are upon the earth we are in heaven, whilst apparently making no progress we are surely though imperceptibly ascending. When heaven opens, and we see the first glimpse of the garden-land, the summer-country, where the flowers bloom for ever and the music never ceases, we shall forget the burden, the pain, the toil, the fear of life: so shall we ever be with the Lord. Amen. The Price of Birthrights Hebrews 12:16 You pity Esau. You think that he was driven by necessity to make this poor bargain. You say that, if he had been less hungry and weary, he would have stood for higher figures. That is the common mistake of men. There is only one price that can be had for a birthright, and that is "one morsel of meat." There are no higher figures; there are no better bargains. If he had received ten thousand worlds they would have constituted but one morsel of meat, when in the other hand there was a birthright. Now what becomes of your clever compromise, your sharp sight in trade, your keen sagacity? If you have been so foolish as to sell your birthright, I know what you got for it— you got "one morsel of meat," and nothing more. It is very desirable to impress this upon young minds, who may not yet have fully completed the momentous transaction. The devil has no more on his counter; the enemy has no more at the bank; he pays you all he can pay you when you sell your birthright,— one gulp, one morsel, one flash of pleasure, and then hell! Nothing more is possible. Then why haggle with the old serpent, the devil? Why ask for three-half-pence more for your soul? The whole transaction totals up to one morsel of meat. That is all he gave to the mother of the world. She and he struck the first bargain about birthrights. When she saw that the tree was good for food, pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took fruit— how much can a woman hold in her hand?— and she did eat: and then she knew that she was naked. So it comes and goes, age after age, the same temptation, the same bargain, the same price, the same perdition! See if these things be not true in experience, in every degree of the circle of life's tragedy. You will have pleasure, you will gratify a passion: do it; having done it, what have you got in your hand, in your mouth? In the very indulgence of the passion you consume the compensation; when all is over there is nothing left but fire, shame, reproach, the sting of hell. This is inevitable; this is the law of providence, the law of experience, the law of justice. Never gratify a passion, for thus you would take the pleasure out it; never gratify an ambition, otherwise you will be delivered over to the misery of reaction. Never take the poor man's one little bit of garden; whilst you do not get it you may have some little pleasure in considering how you may obtain it, but the moment you lay hold of the deeds, the sunshine dies on the hill, the landscape is gone. This is the gospel that needs to be preached through all the market-places, and through all the sanctuaries of unbaptised and unholy commerce. You must feel this, or we cannot go profitably one step farther. You have made your fortune: now what of it? You cannot enjoy it if you bargained for it with the wrong party; if you gave your birthright for it, if you gave anything for it more than honest labour and a fair proportion of your time, I defy you to enjoy it. If you tried to enjoy it, it would reduce itself to one morsel, and you would swallow it in one act, and it would be forgotten for ever. You are not the clever man that you were thought to be. God hath no greater fool of your inches in all his universe. You are rich, and you have so many horses that you never can get a ride, and so many coachmen that not one of them is ever well enough to take you out. I know you have both hands quite full; now lift them to your mouth! You cannot. Oh that men were wise, that they understood these things! that they would conduct commerce and bargain-making on the right lines, and that they would never sell a birthright for one morsel of meat, which, I repeat, is all they can ever get back in that unhallowed transaction. Or you may be serving a bad cause, giving up to it all your energy and thought, all your solicitude and emotion, and you may have won the cause; now let us join you in the feast you are going to make in celebration of the victory; spread the table; what have you by way of banquet? The cause was a rotten one; it meant oppression, corruption, selfishness, sharp practice; it meant falsehood, it meant the surrender of your manhood, which is the surrender of your soul: now spread your feast! Where is the feast? Blessed be God, the bad man has no banquet; he does not know what it is to be content, quiet in soul, joyous and filial in aspiration and reverence. The man who has paid his birthright for his victory has no feast, no joy, nothing to show for his folly: and this is true the world over, and the ages through; and until we drive this into the heads and the hearts of the people our metaphysical preaching amounts to nothing, and our pity may but help men to gild their lies. The highest rights can be parted with. A man can get rid of his birthright. A man can deplete his soul of itself. One would think it would be impossible to part with anything but that which is material, commercial, arithmetical; but history— and may we not add personal consciousness?— testifies to the fact that we sell our souls. Why do we not say so to ourselves plainly and frankly? Why not confess the crime of suicide? This is the intolerable agony of remorse. If we had sold a hand we could make it up again in some form, but when we have sold the brain, the heart, the soul, how can we recover such birthrights? We have often said that God has given to man the power of committing suicide, but never the right to commit it. A man can put, so to say, the instrument of destruction to his own soul; across immortality he can draw the razor of destruction. "In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." That word "die" has never been explained. We have given to it narrow meanings, and therefore have sought to found upon it narrow theologies. Only God knows what it is to die. No traveller has returned to tell us what it is to die. It must be terrible beyond the power of language to express, for God hath no pleasure in it; and if he of the infinite heart cannot make room for death, who shall describe it in words, or figure it in sufficient symbols? There are possessions without which we could not be men, without which we could not begin to live, and without which we could not receive the ministries of nature. Is a man deaf? then he cannot receive the ministry of music: see how he looks; mark the vacancy, mingled with expectancy, in that strange aspect: the face is a note of interrogation,— Is something going on? Is something being said that I ought to hear? You all seem to me to be rapt and transfigured, and yet I cannot understand what it is that is operating upon your souls: Oh, tell me! But you cannot tell a stone. Is a man blind? then he is excluded from the ministry of light and colour and form and all hat peculiarity of distributed magnitude which constitute the very apocalypse and wizardry of form. And you cannot represent to blindness what a beam of light is like. So you may have got rid of your religious sensitiveness, and now you may say about the hymn-book out of which you used to sing that you can find nothing in it. You are right; not for a moment do I dispute the fact that you can find nothing where you used to find so much. The book is not dead, but your spiritual sensitiveness is extinct. So with the divine revelation. You were once accustomed to delight in it, you meditated therein day and night, and now any last critic who is dealing in the vapourings of critics who are already ashamed of their folly can tempt you to leave the Church. Has the Church changed? Not at all. Is the Bible so revised as to have ejected its own wisdom and made room for some man's folly? No. Then, what is the explanation of it? The birthright is gone, the soul's power of vision, the soul's responsiveness to appealing heavens and all the nurturing ministries of nature. You can exhaust yourselves. You have sold your birthright What things are there that may be called birthrights? Carlyle says there are no natural rights. He does not say who told him so; not even in a footnote does he indicate his authorities, and Carlyle seldom indicated any authorities except by footnote, by some awkward vindictive kick. I do not go to a learned dyspeptic, in order to learn whether there are any natural rights. A recent interpreter has declared his acceptance of the doctrine that there are no natural rights. Who told these men so? There are birthrights; they themselves acknowledge that there may be moral right: but all this action on their part may amount to a mere play upon words. We need not discuss what is meant by natural rights, if it be granted that men have certain moral rights; it is enough for the Christian teacher to know that he is dealing with people who have a moral nature, who have moral aspirations, moral aversions, and moral preferences, and who are governed by these moral ministries. That is the basis upon which the Christian teacher proceeds. There are some birthrights that are moral, others that are intellectual, and others that are social. Surely we come into something: surely there is some law of inheritance, and some law and discipline of succession. What the ancients did and left behind them did in some sort suggest that sons would be born to them, who, improving the estate, would hand it on to the generations following. It would be difficult to persuade a child that it has no right in the sun; it would be difficult to persuade the very poorest little girl in the poorest quarter of London that she has no right in music. Hear the Orpheus: how plagued your ear is! but, see, every little girl in the neighbourhood is on tiptoe, is alive; she has found an old anonymous kinsman and they are holding revel together. Let them! If some crabbed philosopher should say to these dancing, pirouetting children there are no natural rights, of course they would cease and stare and wonder and bless the bearded prophet! We cannot get rid of instinct, much older than logic; we cannot get rid of aspirations that have no words, God's own songs in the soul. Let us one and all take care lest we part with our birthright on any terms; and let us especially remember that, whatever the terms may be in figures, they total up into one morsel of meat in reality. It is a morsel, and it is one morsel, and it never can be more under any circumstances. When you in that wicked gambling transaction made ten thousand pounds you only made one morsel of meat, and you are afraid to eat it; you wish somebody else would eat it, you would be glad to get rid of it: the money has an ugly look, the image of the sovereign seems to be in the wrong place, to be humiliated and disgraced so long as it is in your coffers. You know this. When you went out the other night to gratify your evil desire you came home like a whipped hound, afraid because there was something behind you; a leaf stirred and made you feel that all heaven had come down in judgment. You sneaked into the slumber which you did not deserve. Through and through, I repeat, all the ages long, this is true, that Esau parted with his birthright, and never got more than one morsel of meat. What is the relation of Christ to these Esaus? Has Christianity anything to say to such poor merchantmen? Christianity first begins with a revelation of their folly; Christianity shows them that, if a man should gain the whole world and lose his birthright, he has gained nothing, he has profited nothing, he is a loser by the transaction. What is a man profited if he gain the whole world and lose his birthright? Christianity is never afraid to sit down and talk men into shame, talk men into remorse. That is one of the initial elements in the Christian ministry, that it makes men burn with the spirit of self-reproach. If that spirit be permitted to conduct its ministry aright, its action will end in the discipline of contrition, repentance; the eyes will not be steely with defiance, but moist with repentance; the voice will no longer be hard, it will be mellowed into the music of "I am no more worthy to be called thy son." Then Christianity advances from this point of the revelation of folly, and sets up its method of restoring lost rights. In Christ we get more than we lost in Adam, or more than we lost in ourselves; we get our highest selves, our highest manhood, our noblest, saintliest identity; in him we are vitalised, by him we are clothed, and through him we shall be crowned. More than our first parents lost we find in the Second Adam. Have you come to him? Have you thrown yourselves upon him by faith? Have you said, Lord Jesus, I will not let thee go until thou dost give me again the birthright which I squandered: herein prove thy deity: with man this is impossible, with God all things are possible: thou canst recover even my birthright which I sold for one morsel of meat, and now I ask thee with tears in my eyes and conviction in my heart and penitence in my soul, God be merciful to me a sinner, and recover the rights which I have lost? Above all and including all, God the Holy Ghost comes to the soul with— hear it— the new birth, and therefore the new birthright! This is the mystery of the Cross; this is thy miracle, O Calvary, when it is translated into human experience. Men, brethren, and fathers, let the time past more than suffice! We have sold our birthrights with less than Esau's excuse; we have forfeited our standing before God, we have unmanned ourselves; and to me the Cross of Christ has no meaning, unless it mean redemption, recovery, rehabilitation; and the action of God the Holy Ghost is but a dramatic action, if it mean not the regeneration of the soul, the new birth, the new birthright, which held in Christ we should hold for ever. O earth, earth, earth! hear the word of the Lord! Forfeited Blessings Hebrews 12:17 This seems to be hard. Is it possible that a man can cry his heart out, and be no better for it? Has it come to this, that, notwithstanding all the healing and redeeming ministries of life, there is a possibility of a man repenting to the point of tears, many, hot, and bitter, and yet the whole penitential process coming to nothing? We must examine this apparent state of the facts, because, if it is as real as it is apparent, we ought to be filled with sadness. This is a poor account to give of a man's life: first he sold his birthright, and secondly he could not recover his position. Is it possible to condense life into two points? Is it possible that we may say of some man at the last only two things, leaving all other things, many or few, to be included or suggested in the pregnant summary? It is not in all cases a pregnant summary; it is, contrariwise, a barren void summary, and there is nothing in it beyond the first line and the last. Thus men may disembowel life: this miracle of evisceration may be wrought by any man. It rests with us whether our life should be full of glittering points, indicating brightness of mind, fearlessness of spirit, love of intelligence, devotion to progress, and consecration to the service of the world; or whether we shall have for an epitaph, Born— Died— . To be born ought to have tragedy in it; to die ought to be a fact redeemed from contempt by suggested immortality. Yet how nearly possible it is for a man's story to be comprehended in two words— Born: Died;— or, Had his opportunities, lost them; or, Started well, and soon came to a pitiful end. Of Esau we hear but these two things: yet what fresh air there was about the man! How like a living mountain he was! He might have been the flower of the family, yet history, even written by the eloquent pen of Paul or Apollos, says of him, He had a birthright, and he lost it. How unavailable was his repentance. What does crying amount to? Everything depends upon what we are crying for, or crying about. There is a crying that is simple selfishness. A man breaks the law, finds himself in prison, and cries. Why does he cry? Not because he broke the law, but because the law found him out, and is punishing him: crying for punishment is not penitence. Crying because of sin, the hatefulness of sin, its offensiveness to God: that is real contrition, and that penitence avails everywhere and through all time. What did Esau seek? We hear that he sought something "carefully with tears." He did not seek repentance, he sought a blessing. Insert the word "blessing," instead of the word "it," and we read:— Esau found no place of repentance, though he sought the forfeited blessing "carefully with tears." He wanted to have it back again, and he could not secure it. "Place of repentance": what does that mean? Does it mean room to cry in? No; that would be a fatal mistake. "No place for repentance": was he seeking a mountain where he could be alone, and where he could pour out rivers of tears before God, but was unable to find a solitary hill? No; there is no such meaning in the text "Place of repentance" is an expression which does nor refer to locality or to space; its meaning is infinitely larger, both in depth and width. He found no room for repentance, no room to prove his better desire, no sphere or scope in the use of which he could establish before God and man the reality, the sincerity, and the completeness of his contrition. No doubt he was penitent enough in a selfish way. But do not let us mock him; the devil wins all his triumphs in a moment. If he took months we might turn round and smite him on the face, and when we have thrown him down by great violence, we might run away miles before he could recover himself. The devil puts a man into hell in one act. If this were a tragedy in three acts, men might escape from it, but no sooner does the devil come, than the man is gone. Consider the suddenness of temptation, the violence of temptation, and consider how unprepared men are for fatal results. So much depends upon one act, one word, one condition. The fall of man was not a tragedy in ten volumes: it was a word, and then death; it was all over in one morning, in one interview, in one action. Nor are men to be mocked herein, but rather pitied. A man is an hungered: who but one ever refused bread when the wolf of hunger bit him? Consider the hunger, pity the hungerer. We do not know whether a man can make up his mind to a long course of dissoluteness, but we do know that many a man goes out in the morning, fresh in spirit, happy in domestic relation, and at night he is brought back worse than dead. How was it done? By a long, tedious process? No; by a stroke: one whiff from the devil's garden, and self-control was lost; the man was felled to the earth, the man was unmanned. This was the case of Esau: he was cruel, he was supplanted, he was victimised; and yet having done the deed, having lost the blessing, he could not recover that blessing, because he never had opportunity in which to develop and prove his penitence. Nor need this be any mystery to us, because it is written on the first page and the last, and all the intervening pages, of every man's practical experience. A man has neglected his early education: can he ever recover it? Never. He may be veneered, he may be painted and decorated and certificated, but in the soul of him he has no culture, he is no scholar. But did he cry over his want of intellectual capacity, culture, and refinement? Will that not help him to scholarship? Not a whit. A man cannot go back to his youth and repair fully and enduringly the vacancies which marked his opening days. You never can recover your youth; you never can go to school again, in the same sense in which you go when the brain is young, and all the susceptibilities are keenly alive and are responsive to every appeal; you cannot be a boy again. Mark how the man whose early education was neglected halts, how he lacks confidence, how he is devoid of conscious power: he stumbles, hesitates, blurs his words so as to give them helpful ambiguity, that he may have the benefit of a doubt, if there is one, as to how he uttered the word. Why all this trickery of expression? Because the man's soul does not know the secret of the word; he has never been within it, behind it, above it; he is not its master. Will not crying do something towards retrieving the position? We need not answer the inquiry. The man has no opportunity of showing his repentance in any availing sense, because a man cannot live two days at a time; he cannot be living as a man of maturity and as a boy who is acquiring education. He has lost the one period, he has come into the other, and no man can be living two contemporaneous lives— the one young, and the other old; the one in business, and the other at school— with any adequate and blessed effect. Redeem the time, buy up the opportunity: while you are at school take out of that flower all the honey that is in it. A man has neglected seedtime, he awakes to a consciousness of the fact, and he begins to cry: will that bring him an abundant harvest? It will not add one ear of corn to his field. But the man is very sorry. True, but the time has gone by. The man tears his hair, and cries night and day, and says, Oh, fool that I have been! if I had my time to live over again! Exactly: but that is just what you have not. Do you understand that? Life is one journey. Does that fact get into you, stir you, and make you sensible and wise? But a man ought really to get something by repentance— not by the way of harvest, not in the way of neglected opportunity. There comes to every man— shall we personalise it and say— a fair, sweet, hospitable angel, whose name is Opportunity. The angel says, Now is the accepted time; now is the day of salvation: I love you, I have come for you, I want you to go with me; here is the chariot, here is the king's welcome, here is the divine authority: come! We are sullen, obstinate, perverse; if we answer, it is in a negative; we reply surlily or loudly, but in either case repellently, No. The angel has gone: will crying, repentance, bring that angel back again? No, though we seek her carefully with tears: she is gone. A man has been unkind to his parents. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/pb/