The Word In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.—John 1:1. 1. The text seems speculative and hard to understand. But St. John wrote the Fourth Gospel with a practical aim, and in language which he meant to be intelligible. What his aim was he states in the end of the twentieth chapter—the chapter with which his Gospel originally ended (he himself seems to have added the twenty-first at a later time). He says: “These are written, (1) that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and (2) that believing ye may have life in his name.” No doubt his language was more familiar to his Jewish readers than it is to us. But we ought to know the Old Testament, and although the special expression he uses here, Logos or Word, is not found exactly in this way in the Old Testament, the idea is there. For in the Old Testament God constantly makes Himself known and seen. Now, “No man hath seen God at any time.” It is therefore not God the Father; but He whom the Father sanctifies and sends into the world—it is He who appeared to Abraham, to Moses, to Joshua, to Samuel. This Person may well be called God’s Word, since His mission is always to reveal the will of God, to speak for God, to speak as God. By and by this Person, whom the Old Testament writers call the Angel of the Lord, comes into the world to dwell there for a season, taking human flesh, and He is called not the Word or Revealer now, but Jesus the Saviour, for He is come to save His people from their sins. 2. St. John works backwards. He came to know the Word first as Jesus. He knew Him as a Man among men. He went with Him to the marriage feast. He saw Him sit weary on the wayside well. He was near when the cry, “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me,” rent the silent night. He saw Him nailed to the cross. He knew that He remained there till He was dead. But he also at that wedding feast saw Him turn the water into wine. He heard Him say, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.” He caught the prayer, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do,” and the promise, “To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise.” He started thus with a man among men, but a Man who was more than men, and as soon as He had ascended into heaven, John and the rest felt that the first thing for them was to know and to make known who He was. They had the facts of the life of Jesus on the earth. They saw that that human life had passed into the eternal. This, then, was what they learned first, that it had come out of the eternal. It looked before as well as after. The Jesus whom they knew had been before they knew Him. He had been the Revealer of God to men in Old Testament times, the Logos, the Word. He had been the Agent in the creation (which of itself is simply a revelation). He had been with the Father before the creation of the world. “In the beginning was the Word.” 3. St. John started with Jesus of Nazareth, and he has reached this: “In the beginning was the Word.” But he cannot rest in that. Jesus was the Word in Old Testament times and earlier, because He uttered God’s will. He came into the world to utter it. But He did not separate Himself from God by coming into the world. You must not say that the Word is here and God is yonder. If He could thus be separated from God, He could not perfectly reveal God. He must be in closest proximity, in proximity of heart and will. He must rather be God to men than represent God to men. And so the Old Testament writers speak of the Angel of the Lord, and next moment let the Angel of the Lord say, “I am the God of Abraham.” And in like manner St. John says that all the while Jesus was the Word and was coming into the world to reveal God’s will to men, He was “with God.” St. John caught the thought from Jesus, “As thou, Father, art in me and I in thee.” Indeed, St. John caught all these thoughts from Jesus, and we may trace them all from words of Christ he himself has reported. 4. Starting from Jesus of Nazareth, St. John has now reached two thoughts: Jesus is the pre-existent Word, and though He was continually revealing God’s will to the world, He never left the Father’s presence. He was more than in constant communication with God. He did more than come and go between the earth and heaven. He was always with God. He was always, not only doing God’s will, but willing it. And that leads inevitably to a third thought. If the will of the Word and of God is one, then the Word and God are themselves one. There is God the Father, whom no man hath seen or can see. There is also God the Son, who constantly made Himself seen and known from the beginning, and in St. John’s own day had flesh and dwelt among men, so that St. John and the rest could say of Him: “We have heard, we have seen with our eyes, we have looked upon, and our hands have handled.” And these two are one God. It is a long way to go from Jesus of Nazareth, “whose father and mother we know”; but the way was open and unobstructed, and Jesus Himself showed it. St. John, who saw Jesus nailed to the cross on Calvary by rough Roman soldiers, says at last, “In the beginning was (Jesus) the Word, and (Jesus) the Word was with God, and (Jesus) the Word was God.” And he writes these things “that believing ye may have life in his name.” I The Word 1. Let us look in at this writer’s workshop, and watch him choosing his themes and even at times his very language: or rather let us listen to the religious teacher as, with disciples around him, he proceeds to recall, and probably dictate to one of them, his reminiscences of his Lord, and, before doing so, tries to show the central importance of the life which he is going to illustrate. That life, he has come to see more and more, was no accident in history; each saying, each action had grown in meaning as he had watched each prophecy fulfilled, and seen the power of each act repeated in the experience of the Christian Church; the life was of eternal significance; it came from God and told of God in every detail; it was the act of that God who had ever been revealing Himself: it was a link, the most important link, in a chain of continuous revelation. Now Jewish and Greek and Christian thought alike had long been feeling after some means of expressing this method of revelation, some Being who could mediate between the infinite God and the finite creature, who could act as God’s organ in creation and in providence. And the writer had seen Jesus Christ control creation, he had known His care for himself and for the Church; of this, at least, he is sure, that, however that Being is to be defined, He is one with Jesus Christ. What title then shall he choose out of the many descriptions and definitions which had been given of Him? Among these many he has practically a choice of two alternatives, which stood out prominently from among all other titles. Shall he call Him “The Wisdom of God” or shall he call Him “The Word of God”? There was much to be said for either. “The Wisdom” would recall at once the whole Wisdom literature of the Old Testament; and it would have support in our Lord’s own words (Matthew 11:19; Luke 7:35; Luke 11:49). But it would have this drawback; it would suggest primarily the thought of a quality immanent in the mind of God, the wisdom of the Divine architect, the plan in His mind on which all material things were modelled. But our writer’s aim is rather to show how God has been revealed, interpreted to man; his thought is not primarily that the world had been the perfect work of a wise Creator and Jesus Christ the climax of His work, but that ever since creation there had been a revealing of God to man, and that Jesus Christ had been the fullest organ of that Revelation. The Word, then, will be the better title for his purpose. 2. This title will have many advantages. It will lead up naturally to the stress which the writer wants to lay on the words of Jesus as being spirit and life, and on His discourses as being the utterances of Him who claimed to be the Truth: they will be sayings of One who had already been described as “the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God.” And “the Word” also has its roots in the Old Testament; it recalls each “God said” of creation: it recalls the Psalmist’s summary of creation, and his use and that of the Apocryphal writers of “God’s Word” as the agent of His Providence in healing and delivering His chosen people: above all, it will take up the Rabbinic reverence, which when speaking of God’s manifestation of Himself to man substituted for God the title “the Word of God,” “the memra.” In using it, he will be speaking of the same Being of whom the Jewish Rabbis thought when they spoke of God protecting Noah by “his Word,” making a covenant between Abraham and “his Word,” of Moses bringing forth the people to meet “the Word of God” at Mount Sinai. There was one further reason why the title would help his purpose; for through Philo its Greek philosophical meaning had become current throughout the eastern religious world, and even in Christian circles; much of the language associated with it had been adopted by St. Paul and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews; and yet there were striking points in which the Philonian doctrine might mislead Christian disciples: he would be able to guard against this, while he stated shortly, clearly, authoritatively, what “the Word” really was.1 [Note: W. Lock, The Bible and Christian Life, 25. A word is the true expression of him who utters it. We have various ways of communicating with one another, but the chief of all these ways is by speech. Within this intricate apparatus, which we call the body, sits a tenant who is wholly distinct from the body. This tenant thinks, wills, feels—lives a life separate from the senses—a life sacred and invisible. How shall this tenant communicate with the outer world? By speech: alphabets and words come to his help; the lip is taught their use, and then the sacred tenant within the body can utter itself to the world. So St. John conceives God as cut off from man by many barriers; “no man hath seen God at any time, nor can see him.” How shall God communicate with the creature He has made? He does so by Christ who is His Word. Christ is the very mind of God translating itself into symbols which man can comprehend. As your word is yourself uttered, so Christ is God uttered. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”2 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Reproach of Christ, 23. II The Nature of the Word 1. In the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel we have a principle by which we may harmonize the facts of Christ’s life. St. John gives us a key which proves itself by fitting into all the wards of the lock. What Christ did and said becomes explicable only by knowing what Christ is. 2. The first sentence of the Gospel offers a perfect example of the stately symmetry by which the whole narrative is marked. The three clauses of which it consists are set side by side (… and … and …); the Subject (the Word) is three times repeated; and the substantive verb three times occupies the same relative position. The symmetry of form corresponds with the exhaustiveness of the thought. The three clauses contain all that it is possible for man to realize as to the essential nature of the Word in relation to time, and mode of being, and character: He was (1) in the beginning: He was (2) with God: He was (3) God. At the same time these three clauses answer to the three great moments of the Incarnation of the Word declared in John 1:14. He who “was God,” became flesh: He who “was with God,” tabernacled among us (cf. 1 John 1:2): He who “was in the beginning,” became (in time).1 [Note: Westcott.] 3. The three propositions are brief, having a deeply marked character like oracles. The first indicates the eternity of the Logos; the second expresses profoundly the idea of His personality; the third His divinity. i. His Eternity “In the beginning was the Word.” 1. The phrase “in the beginning” carries us back to Genesis 1:1, which necessarily fixes the sense of the beginning. Here, as there, “the beginning” is the initial moment of time and creation; but with this difference, that Moses dwells on that which starts from the point, and traces the record of Divine action from the beginning (cf. 1 John 1:1; 1 John 2:13), while St. John lifts our thoughts beyond the beginning and dwells on that which “was” when time, and with time finite being, began its course. Already when “God created the heaven and the earth,” “the Word was.” The “being” of the Word is thus necessarily carried beyond the limits of time, though the pre-existence of the Word is not definitely stated. The simple affirmation of existence in this connection suggests a loftier conception than that of pre-existence; which is embarrassed by the idea of time. 2. The Lord Himself had spoken of His life with the Father “before the world was” (John 17:5; John 17:24): so the Evangelist must trace it back as far as creation. But his actual phrase recalls the Jewish description of Wisdom created “in the beginning” (Proverbs 8:22); and the words are thrown in the forefront of the sentence that they may recall the opening words of the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth.” The life which he is going to describe affects all creation. 3. The “beginning” described by St. John in the Prologue to his Gospel is manifestly the absolute beginning, the origination of all being or existence in the universe in which we find ourselves. It is a logical rather than a chronological conception; the “all things” included in it, in their successive “becomings,” may have had no actual beginning at all in time; we cannot conceive of them as without beginning in thought, or without causal beginning. In whatever sense “being” is eternal, it is not without principium, without some “principle” of being. The “beginning” is causative and constitutive, and not merely initiative. ii. His Personality “And the Word was with God.” 1. The Word, already said to have been “in the beginning,” is now stated to have been “with God.” That is, not “with,” in the sense of together with, or besides; but “with” in the sense of abiding with, as when we say, “I have it with me,” or “He is abiding with us”—“with God,” so as to be in that place (if we may so speak) where God especially was present; so as to be at home with Him and inseparable from Him. Our Evangelist elsewhere expresses this in other words: “The only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father”: in His closest counsels, delighting in Him, and in being the acting expression of His must holy will. 2. To this has ever been referred by the Church that sublime description in the Book of Proverbs, chap. 8, where Wisdom says, “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: while as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: when he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep: when he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth. Then I was by him as one brought up with him; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men.” 3. Clearly, no interpretation of these words fathoms their depth, or makes worthy sense, which does not recognize that the Word is a person. If there had been no distinct personality the Apostle might still have said, “The Word was God,” but he could not have said, “The Word was with God.” “The Word was God,” says Dr. Owen, “in the unity of the Divine essence, and the Word was with God in the distinct personal subsistence.” Jesus did not claim to be the Father, but He did claim to be one with the Father—“I and my Father are one” (John 10:30). We are encouraged to pray to the Father in the name of the Son (John 15:16), but there could be no reason for this if there were no distinction of personality between the Father and the Son. 4. The expression, “The Word was with God,” has been rendered, “The Word was towards God.” This is a very suggestive rendering. It is significant of delight in God. The Being of the Son was attracted by the Being of the Father, as some flowers are attracted by the sun. Thus it is with those who are in Christ. Sin separates men from God, but Christ brings them back to Him. In Christ they are reconciled to God (2 Corinthians 5:18), and those who are reconciled enjoy the privilege of fellowship with God (1 John 1:3). The passage has also been rendered, “The Word was at home with God.” “No restraint,” says Jones, “No reserve, no shyness, but open, free, confidential fellowship for ever” (see Proverbs 8:22-31). How different it was with Adam when he sinned! He was afraid of the presence of God, and sought to get away from it (Genesis 3:10). God could be known in nature, in conscience, in history; but if He was to be thoroughly known, He must be known in a person. So Christ stands the central fount of personality, who explains, not my gifts, my attainments, my knowledge, my capacities, but me, that which lies beyond these, uses them and gives them meaning and coherence.1 [Note: The Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, ii. 212. iii. His Divinity “And the Word was God.” 1. The distinction of persons, so strongly emphasized by the second proposition, is in this third resolved into a community of essence: “And the Word was God.” And this community of essence is not inconsistent with distinction of persons, but makes the communion of active Love possible; for none could, in the depths of eternity, dwell with and perfectly love and be loved by God, except one who Himself was God. 2. It is now apparent why St. John chooses this title to designate Christ in His pre-existent life. No other title brings out so clearly the identification of Christ with God, and the function of Christ to reveal God. It was a term which made the transition easy from Jewish Monotheism to Christian Trinitarianism. Being already used by the strictest Monotheists to denote a spiritual intermediary between God and the world, it is chosen by St. John as the appropriate title of Him through whom all revelation of God in the past had been mediated, and who has at length finished revelation in the person of Jesus Christ. The experience of David Nitschmann, the Moravian, is related in Wesley’s Journal, as follows:— I then fell into doubts of another kind. I believed in God; but not in Christ. I opened my heart to Martin Dober, who used many arguments with me, but in vain. For above four years I found no rest by reason of this unbelief; till one day, as I was sitting in my house, despairing of any relief, those words shot into me, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.” I thought, “Then God and Christ are one.” Immediately my heart was filled with joy; and much more at the remembrance of these words which I now felt I did believe: “The Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”1 [Note: John Wesley’s Journal (Standard edition), ii. 38. III The Worth of the Word The Apostle’s words are practical. What practical use can we make of them? There are three ways in which they bring us strength. 1. The first way in which this passage helps us is that it assures us that there is communication between God and His creatures in Christ. We can choose between two theories of the universe and only two. The first is that it is all dumb, blind matter in a process of unconscious evolution. There is no God, for none is needed. All the morality that man has, he has created for himself in his own protection. It is vain to assault those far-reaching shining heavens with prayer—they are empty. Of this theory we are ready to say, with Wordsworth, better all the childish allegory of Greek mythology than this— Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. If that theory fails there is but one other, it is that God exists, that God has shrined Himself in man, and that God has some means of communicating with man. That is credible—for it explains the grandeur of human life. But if God really speaks with man, is it not just to suppose that it will be with unmistakable clearness and certainty? Will He not find means to make us aware of what His mind is? And when we find in Jesus, not only thoughts so high and perfect that none else are comparable with them, but a life so lofty and sublime that even the most sceptical of men see in it something Divinely beautiful—may we not say, behold this is God’s communication with us; this is His true Word; behold the very mind of the Highest is incarnated in Jesus Christ? “I can only comprehend God, as God is seen in Christ,” was the confession of Dr. Arnold and Charles Kingsley. “The acknowledgment of God in Christ, accepted by thy reason, solves in thee all questions in the earth and out of it,” said Browning; but if there had been no Christ, then the assurance that God had communicated His mind to us would be wholly vain. What has been the greatest dread of man since he entered on conscious intelligent life? It has been the dread of God’s dumbness. The famous question put by Bonaparte to his atheistic Generals in Egypt, “Sirs, who made all that?” as he pointed to the starry splendour of the midnight sky over the Pyramids, has been a question always weighing heavily upon the heart of man. Man has never yet been wholly able to accommodate himself to a purely animal existence. He has gazed upon the solid universe with curious eyes, has felt the mystery of depth opening over depth in the blue abyss above and around him; has gone softly, haunted by the suspicion of a God hidden in stream and wood; has realized that life is an enigma for which there must needs be some answer. I look upon the ruined temples of Egypt, and inscriptions meet me eloquent of man’s search for God; I enter the tombs of the old Etruscans, and over the funeral urn is the rising sun—mute witness to a hope which survives death. That strange altar to the unknown God, which St. Paul found at Athens, is discoverable in every land, among all peoples, through all time. “Sirs, who made all this?” man asks ever and again in painful astonishment. Can it be that the Maker is dumb? Can it be that He has created children whom He disowns? Is there no voice or language in all that starry immensity, all these vague, unending fields of splendour? That God should be dumb—that He should sit far from us, He who has made us, silent as a stone amid the rush of worlds—that is the most intolerable of thoughts, that is man’s greatest dread, that is the terror which has cast its shadow on his heart from the beginning of the ages.1 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Reproach of Christ, 25. At length he came, of lowly birth, despised And by the world rejected; but a band Of humble men observed and felt the power Of kindling love and faith with which he taught. For in him thou, the eternal Word of truth, Who once didst grave thy precepts upon stone, Hadst become flesh; and they beheld with awe God’s glory in a human face expressed. There justice sat revealed, and holiness, And rapt devotion, as of one who felt God’s presence everywhere, within, around. But all in one expression were combined, A yearning love, which came in ceaseless stream From heaven’s exhaustless fount, and poured itself Forth on the world, to heal and bless mankind. There grace and truth shone star-like from the eye, And trembled on the lips; and longing hearts, Oppressed with sin, or hardened by the world, Beheld and wept, and rested in that love. And so his face in every line expressed The Son of God, the eternal Thought for man; And whosoe’er beheld the Son beheld The Father who had sent him, and whose love Had come in him to seek and save, and dwell In manifested form in this sad world.1 [Note: James Drummond, Johannine Thoughts, 12. (1) The Word of God is God’s power, intelligence, and will in expression; not dormant and potential only, but in active exercise. God’s Word is His will going forth with creative energy, and communicating life from God, the Source of life and being. “Without him was not any thing made that was made.” He was prior to all created things and Himself “with God,” and “God.” He is God coming into relation with other things, revealing Himself, manifesting Himself, communicating Himself. The world is not itself God; things created are not God, but the intelligence and will which brought them into being, and which now sustain and regulate them, these are God. And between the works we see and the God who is past finding out there is the Word, One who from eternity has been with God, the medium of the first utterance of God’s mind and the first forthputting of His power; as close to the inmost nature of God, and as truly uttering that nature, as our word is close to and utters our thought, capable of being used by no one besides, but by ourselves only. Where the bud has never blown Who for scent is debtor? Where the spirit rests unknown Fatal is the letter. In Thee, Jesus, Godhead-stored, All things we inherit, For Thou art the very Word And the very Spirit! (2) Nature is never silent, but is always uttering her secrets. On the stillest night the heart would break, the mind would reel, for brain would be injured, if no sound were. In that comparative stillness which we miscall silence, we catch the sounds unheeded amid the noises of the busy day. We detect how multitudinous are the instruments which make up the quiet concert of the world, the music of the universe so harmoniously set that we perceive not its parts. Silent Nature would be Nature dead—nay, non-existent, which is an absurdity. Nature is ever revealing, giving expression to life; and is known only by that expression. And if it be so with Nature, because in Nature, we believe, God dwells, how much more clearly must it be so with God Himself? A God silent to the sorrows, the needs, the yearnings, the mere curiosity of men, would not be God. Man thinks of God simply by the fact that God has thought of him. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” For us to hold this Catholic doctrine of Christ’s Divinity is not merely to tax or strain our credence for the acceptance of a mystery as such, or of a belief bound up with primitive Christian traditions, as well as with ecclesiastical authority in councils or the like. It is to get hold of a final decisive assurance that the Infinite God does infinitely care for man. It is after we have recited, in our Eucharistic confession of faith, the epithets belonging to Jesus as a Son of God in the fullest sense, God begotten of God, and of one substance with the Father, that we are so well able to say with thankfulness, “Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate.” Look at Bethlehem in the light of this belief, and think what a God the Father of Christ must be. The Holiest, the Mightiest, the Highest is for those who thus believe no longer a God far off. He has really come near to us, and continues to be near to us in the person of One who, being uncreate, is what no angel, not Michael himself, could be, the “adequate image” and “interpreter of the Father.” The names of Jesus and Emmanuel might in other cases only record the fact that the Lord was willing to save His people, that God was and would be with them: in this one case, as belonging to a Divine Christ, they expand from affirmations of such grounds of confidence into titles by personal right His own.1 [Note: W. Bright, The Law of Faith, 118. 2. Next, this passage tells us that the character of Christ is the character of God. We cannot read the Gospels without a sense of the infinite piety, tenderness, holiness, and magnanimity of Jesus. Were the Gospels but a pure human idyll, still the picture they present of the character of Christ would be the loveliest known to man. The character of Christ is the character of God. He who told the stories of the Lost Sheep and the Prodigal Son, is God speaking out of the infinite tenderness of the Divine heart. He who healed the leper, blessed the Magdalene, forgave the thief, is God in His relation to human frailty, folly, and sin. The way in which Christ thought and acted is the precise measure of the way in which God thinks and acts. All theologies must come to that test. All that our faith in the Incarnation warrants us in asserting is, that in Jesus Christ we have “authentic tidings of invisible things,”—that in Him the Divine and human are so united and blent that we can draw certain and reliable conclusions as to the nature of God, so far as that nature can and need be known by us. Think what this means! Think what the difference is between saying, “Jesus is only a man seeking God,—adding one more to the many guesses as to the nature of God”; and saying, “In Jesus we see God seeking man, and seeking him out of pure love in order to save him”; “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners”; “The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.” True: there may, there must be, mysteries in the Divine Nature far beyond what even the Incarnation can tell us. The Incarnation tells us all that we need to know. When we “have told its isles of light, and fancied all beyond,” there must yet be heights and depths, in that High and Lofty One who inhabiteth eternity, which no fancy, however soaring, can penetrate.1 [Note: D. J. Vaughan, The Present Trial of Faith, 47. If preachers still speak as though the Jehovah of a barbarous people were the true God whom Jesus called the Father in heaven, reject their message, for they know not what they say. If from this or that isolated saying of Christ or His Apostles visions of future torture have been evolved which revolt the human heart, and outrage its sense of pity, apply to them this simple test—Would Jesus have done this even to the most sinful of men? And if you know that Jesus would not have done it, you may be sure that God will not do it either. “I and my Father are One,” said Christ; between God and Christ there is perfect moral accord, absolute spiritual identity. “The Word was with God, and the Word was God.”2 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Reproach of Christ, 33. Henry Ward Beecher put before the Church the doctrine of the Deity of Jesus Christ which to me seems absolutely irrefutable. He did not merely gather texts strewn here and there over the Bible page, and piece them together and say, “This Book tells me that He was God, and I must believe it because the Book says it.” No; he went back into his own experience, into the experience of the Christian Church. And what did he find? He found there, unmistakably, a great yearning after God, a yearning so deep and persistent that only one thing could be concluded—that God put it there, and put it there as a ground of expectation that He would answer the craving which He had created. And out of that came clearly and necessarily the conclusion that the God who made man thus to need and yearn after Himself must answer him, must come to him, or must cease to be God. Thus it was that, arguing from Christian experience, Beecher learned that it was reasonable and obligatory for the God who made man to come to him, and speak to him, and work for him, and die for him. Then bringing these observations and reasonings to the light of the Scriptural revelation, and looking at the historic Christ from the standpoint of human cravings and needs, Beecher could not escape the conclusion that the Christ portrayed in the Gospels was God’s answer to man’s necessity. And in grateful surprise he cried, “Why, this is God! There is not a single thing I would have in God but I find in Christ. There is not a single thing in Christ I would not like to have in God. Why, this is, this must be, God! I worship and I adore.”3 [Note: Charles A. Berry, 159. In Christ I feel the heart of God Throbbing from heaven through earth; Life stirs again within the clod, Renewed in beauteous birth; The soul springs up, a flower of prayer, Breathing His breath out on the air. In Christ I touch the hand of God, From His pure height reached down, By blessed ways before untrod, To lift us to our crown; Victory that only perfect is Through loving sacrifice, like His. Holding His hand, my steadied feet May walk the air, the seas; On life and death His smile falls sweet, Lights up all mysteries: Stranger nor exile can I be In new worlds where He leadeth me. Not my Christ only; He is ours; Humanity’s close bond; Key to its vast, unopened powers, Dream of our dreams beyond. What yet we shall be none can tell: Now are we His, and all is well.1 [Note: Lucy Larcom.] 3. Lastly, in this truth we have the guarantee of authority and permanence in the Christian religion. If religion is a need of the soul, and a primal fact in human life, we must have a centre of authority in religion which is immovable and immutable amid the impermanent elements of human thought. We demand that the truth which involves the most solemn of all issues shall be permanent; that its evolution shall be complete; that it shall be the sure word of prophecy, changeless and steadfast amid all the change of time and thought. And in Christ that Word is spoken. He speaks with authority, and not as the scribes. He is “the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.” No man ever yet took the Word as his guide without finding in that Word a complete code of directions for life and death; and something more than a code of directions—an inner light by which the spirit lived and walked in the light, as God is in the light. He, who in sundry times and divers manners, spake to us by the Prophets, has at last spoken to us by His Son. God’s last Word is Christ. Rest here: “He who hath known me hath known the Father also.” If Jesus was not God, Christianity is not a religion, but a contribution to moral philosophy. It is in this latter way that it appeals to you. But mankind wants a religion: and it is as a religion that Christianity works in the world.1 [Note: Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, ii. 256. (1) How impermanent human thought is, we all know. Men are continually shedding their beliefs and opinions as trees shed their bark, and snakes their skins, in the process of growth. In the rapid march of human knowledge mankind is like a great army which casts its baggage away that it may move unencumbered towards the battles of the future. No man thinks in mid-life what he thought in youth. The great teachers of the world themselves have no abiding word, and often their latest teaching is a direct recantation of their earliest. But we all feel that in a true Divine religion no such process of change could be tolerated. We cannot have one religion for youth and another for age; a truth that may be true to-day and false to-morrow; a voice that contradicts itself, a revelation that varies in its message with the varying tastes of men. No; we ask, and justly ask, for religion a changeless, abiding, authoritative voice that will speak through all our perplexities the sure Word by which the soul may live. Listen, then, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” Here is the true authoritative voice. Across the sea, along the shore, In numbers more and ever more, From lonely hut and busy town, The valley through, the mountain down, was it ye went out to see, Ye silly folk of Galilee? The reed that in the wind doth shake? The weed that washes in the lake? The reeds that waver, the weeds that float?— A young man preaching in a boat. What was it ye went out to hear, By sea and land, from far and near? A teacher? Rather seek the feet Of those who sit in Moses’ seat. Go humbly seek, and bow to them, Far off in great Jerusalem. From them that in her courts ye saw, Her perfect doctors of the law, What is it ye came here to note?— A young man preaching in a boat. A prophet! Boys and women weak! Declare, or cease to rave; Whence is it he hath learned to speak? Say, who his doctrine gave? A prophet? Prophet wherefore he Of all in Israel tribes? He teacheth with authority, And not as do the scribes.1 [Note: Clough, Poems, 46. (2) This Word of God has indeed illumined and quickened all men and all races in their several degrees, Buddha and Confucius and Zoroaster, Zeno and Pythagoras, Indians and Persians, Babylonians and Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. He has been present in universal history, as He has been present in every individual soul of man. But nevertheless He has specially visited one family, one race. There was a prerogative tribe selected in due time from the rest, a first-fruits of the nations of the earth, a peculiar people consecrated to God. Though there be many tributaries, the main stream of religious history runs in this channel. To this nation the Word of God came as to His own inheritance, spake as to His own household—spake by lawgivers and prophets, by priests and kings, spake in divers stages and divers manners, spake with an intensity and a power and a directness, with a continuity and a fulness, with which He spake to no other nation besides. In neither case was the response equal to the appeal. Among the nations at large “the light” shone “in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not”: to the descendants of Abraham “he came as to his own” vineyard; yet “his own received him not.” Nevertheless among both—among the nations whom He approached through the avenues of the natural conscience, and among the Israelites to whom He spoke in the piercing tones of inspiration, there were those who did feel His presence, did hear His voice; and these were rescued from their grovelling, material, earthly life, were born anew in Him, were made sons of God through God the Word. There is no broken reed so poor and base, No rush, the bending tilt of swamp-fly blue, But He therewith the ravening wolf can chase, And guide His flock to springs and pastures new; Through ways unlooked for, and through many lands, Far from the rich folds built with human hands, The gracious footprints of His love I trace.1 [Note: Lowell, Poems, 112. (3) We have no need to question any value that can be claimed for writings held as sacred by others outside the Christian world. All truth is of God, and is profitable according to its degree, and its adaptedness to the genius and growth of the people who receive it. To judge and condemn other scriptures, such as the Koran, as wholly worthless and evil, is measurably to judge and condemn Him, by whose Providence the book and its religion exists, until its believers are prepared for clearer and fuller light. Yet in every such revelation, professing to come directly from heaven, even the human element is relatively most imperfect, and comparatively powerless. Such scriptures appeal authoritatively only to the devotional or emotional element in man; never to his intellect and heart. They demand reception under pain of condemnation, independent of rational perception of their truth; and they promise, as a reward of faith, a sensuous paradise to the faithful. In their words is no potency of progress beyond a certain point. On the other hand, in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures there is a clear revelation of human development, through the growth of the spiritual or Christ nature in man throughout the ages. No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint always has a very sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The medieval saint’s body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.1 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.] In these days of the religion of this and that,—briefly let us say, the religion of Stocks and Posts—in order to say a clear word of the Campo Santo, one must first say a firm word concerning Christianity itself. I find numbers, even of the most intelligent and amiable people, not knowing what the word means; because they are always asking how much is true, and how much they like, and never ask, first, what was the total meaning of it, whether they like it or not. The total meaning was, and is, that the God who made earth and its creatures, took at a certain time upon the earth, the flesh and form of man; in that flesh sustained the pain and died the death of the creature He had made; rose again after death into glorious human life, and when the date of the human race is ended, will return in visible human form, and render to every man according to his work. Christianity is the belief in, and love of, God thus manifested. Anything less than this, the mere acceptance of the sayings of Christ, or assertion of any less than Divine power in His Being, may be, for aught I know, enough for virtue, peace, and safety; but they do not make people Christians, or enable them to understand the heart of the simplest believer in the old doctrine. Two verses of George Herbert will put the height of that doctrine into less debateable, though figurative, picture than any longer talk of mine— Hast thou not heard that my Lord Jesus died? Then let me tell thee a strange story. The God of Power, as he did ride In his majestic robes of glory, Resolved to light; and so, one day He did descend, undressing all the way. The stars his tire of light, and rings, obtained, The cloud his bow, the fire his spear, The heavens his azure mantle gained, And when they asked what he would wear, He smiled, and said as he did go, “He had new clothes a-making, here, below.” I write from memory; the lines have been my lesson, ever since 1845, of the noblesse of thought which makes the simplest word best.1 [Note: Ruskin, Præterita, ii. 208. The Word Literature Abbott (E. A.), Oxford Sermons, 46. Alexander (W.), Leading Ideas of the Gospel, 181. Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, vi. 1. Barton (G. A.), The Roots of Christian Teaching, 25. Bickersteth (C.), The Gospel of Incarnate Love, 127. Bright (W.), The Law of Faith, 111. Dale (R. W.), Christian Doctrine, 170. Dawson (W. J.), The Reproach of Christ, 23. DuBose (W. P.), The Reason of Life, 12. Farquhar (J. W.), The Gospel of Divine Humanity, 15. Kingsley (C.), Village, Town, and Country Sermons, 176. Lock (W.), The Bible and Christian Life, 20. Macintosh (W.), Rabbi Jesus, 151. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John i.–viii. 1. Martineau (J.), Endeavours after the Christian Life, 498. Ragg (L.), Christ and our Ideals, 25. Swan (F. R.), The Immanence of Christ in Modern Life, 121. Westcott (B. F.), The Historic Faith, 43. Cambridge Review, iii. Supplement No. 73 (Quarry). Christian World Pulpit, xlviii. 125 (Gasquoine); lxvi. 357 (Eland); lxxii. 138 (Whitman), 374 (Gibbon). Churchman’s Pulpit: Christmas Day: ii. 164 (Clements), 166 (Hutton), 168 (Bright), 169 (Bagot). Homiletic Review, l. 463 (Metcalf). The Incarnation of the Word And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father), full of grace and truth.—John 1:14. 1. “The Word.” Thrice elsewhere (John 1:1; 1 John 1:1; Revelation 19:13) is this term used to designate the same Person. It is used in the first verse of this Gospel without apology, and without definition, as if the readers were acquainted with it, as indeed they were, for it had a large circulation among both Greek and Jewish thinkers. It is one of the most pregnant words used in the New Testament. In John 1:18 we are told why the term is so used—“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” As thus used the term is one of great significance. By our words we make our wills known to others. By our words we issue our prohibitions or commands, and give effect to our intentions. Our words, then, give expression to our will. And, similarly, the Word of God is God’s will expressing itself. It is the God of Heaven coming into relation with created things and revealing Himself. 2. Who is this Word? He is one who existed in the beginning, and is in perfect union with God, being the expression of God’s thought and purpose and energy. He is Himself the Creator of all things, of bird and flower, of mountain and sea, of sun and star. He is the Creator of man; and all the light of truth and goodness that has ever arisen in man’s heart came only from Him. Who, then, is this mysterious Person, this Eternal Word of God? We must turn to this fourteenth verse. “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father), full of grace and truth.” The “Word became flesh, and dwelt among us! This august and mysterious Word of God, Himself became a man. Then we know who He is. He must be Jesus, that Jesus of Nazareth who was born in Bethlehem. 3. Far away down the years, at the close of the first century, an old man sits brooding over the things that he had seen and heard in the cities of Judah and in the fields of Galilee. Forty, fifty, sixty years, and more perhaps, now lie between him and the scenes which he records. Sixty years—and such years!—years of revolution—years of judgment—years in which the old order perished in doom, and the New World rose into victory under the breath of the Spirit of God. He had himself, long ago, it may be, laid up in the Book of the Revelation the visions in which the tremendous drama of those momentous years moved towards its final and critical act. Yet, now, his look is not forward into the silences that delay the trumpet-blasts of Divine action. His eyes turn ever back, overleaping the crowded interval; back to those wonderful days when he walked behind the feet of the Master—the days when he saw, and heard, and handled. Still his whole being hangs upon those sealed memories. Still he ponders, and weighs, and wonders, and broods. For we are listening, in these first verses of St. John, to an old man’s broodings. No one can mistake their tone, or be insensible to their atmosphere, as the verses fall on the ear with their solemn weight of measured monotony, serious as a winter’s eve, in which the stars silently offer themselves to our eyes, one by one, in seemly order and in noiseless ease. So the great words detach themselves from his lips, single, slow, deliberate, unhasting. Round and round the story his spirit has searched and laboured, and waited, until word could set itself to word, and phrase to phrase. No time could be too long in which to collect into one brief passage the sum and substance of all that revelation which was made known to him in the Name of Jesus Christ.1 [Note: H. Scott Holland, Creed and Character, 3. The belief in the Divinity of Christ is waning among us. They who hold it have petrified it into a theological dogma without life or warmth, and thoughtful men are more and more beginning to put it aside. How are we then to get back this belief in the Son of God—by authority or by the old way of persecution? The time for these has passed. The other way is to begin at the beginning. Begin as the Bible begins, with Christ the Son of Man. Begin with Him as God’s character revealed under the limitations of humanity. Lay the foundations of a higher faith deeply in a belief of His Humanity. See Him as He was. Breathe His spirit. After that, try to comprehend His Life. Enter into His Childhood. Feel with Him when He looked round about Him in anger, when He vindicated the crushed woman from the powerless venom of her ferocious accusers;—when He stood alone in the solitary Majesty of Truth in Pilate’s judgment-hall; when the light of the Roman soldiers’ torches flashed on Kedron in the dark night, and He knew that watching was too late; when His heart-strings gave way upon the Cross. Walk with Him through the Marriage Feast. See how the sick and weary came to Him instinctively; how men, when they saw Him, felt their sin, they knew not why, and fell at His feet; how guilt unconsciously revealed itself, and all that was good in men was drawn out, and they became higher than themselves in His presence. Realize this. Live with Him till He becomes a living thought—ever present—and you will find a reverence growing up which compares with nothing else in human feeling. You will feel that a slighting word spoken of Him wounds with a dart more sharp than personal insult. You will feel that to bow at the name of Jesus is no form at will of others, but a relief and welcome. And if it should ever chance that, finding yourself thrown upon your own self, and cut off from sects—suspected, in quest of a truth which no man gives,—then that wondrous sense of strength and friendship comes, the being alone with Christ, with the strength of a manlier independence. Slowly then, this almost insensibly merges into adoration. For what is it to adore Christ? To call Him God; to say Lord, Lord? No. Adoration is the mightiest love the soul can give—call it by what name you will.1 [Note: F. W. Robertson, in Life and Letters, 417. 4. The one supremely significant fact in the universe is, to quote Dr. Peabody’s fine paraphrase, “the transformation of language into life.” We see this transformation in three different moments. There was the creation at the beginning, when great vitalizing words of God took form in created beings. Again there is the same transformation in all human work and morality to the end, when man is hearing words of God within him and is transforming them into deeds and finished products. But between these two there stands the stupendous fact of Christ, interpreting the first and inspiring the second. (1) Creation.—It is matter of general consent that the universe as we know it had a beginning. As thought travels backward into the great silence before that beginning, it must needs discover a moment when the eternal thought found expression, and the universe began. The word became flesh. God spoke, and the thing spoken stood out as a created fact. “The universe is God’s language.” The unspoken word is all that might be; the spoken word is all that is. This is the meaning of those wonderful stories of Genesis, in which we see all things coming forth in their mighty evolution in answer to the words of God. That is the Christian view of nature and the universe. It is not an eternally grinding machine, nor is it a dream-picture woven of mist. It is a real universe, in which God’s language is transformed into life. The great words were spoken, and there are the mountains and the fields and the seas, and the ships upon the seas and the cities of men. It makes all the difference in the world whether as we stand in the midst of all these things we hear only a jangle of meaningless sounds, or whether we hear the word of the Lord. Listen to that word in the summer fields and sunshine, in the winter storms and the voice of the tossing seas. Listen, too, in the crowded streets, the throb of machinery and traffic, the bustle and the gentle speech of homes. In new thought and adventurous policy, in great loyalties to ancient institutions; in the voices of teachers in schools, of preachers in pulpits, of business men in offices, of shopkeepers in shops; in the heart-beatings of the lonely and the sobs of the penitent—everywhere creation is the word become flesh. (2) Jesus Christ.—The word had been spoken in an unknown tongue. We heard it, and saw its incarnate forms, but we did not understand. Science was patiently deciphering it, retranslating it back from life to language; endeavouring from the manifest facts of the universe to spell out the meaning of the Word of God. But science finds it difficult, and conscience and love find it far more difficult to understand. The Divine Word has seemed to change and suffer in the process of becoming flesh. Its meaning is obscure, and it seems to have been mingled with much other speech that is not Divine. Many had tried to interpret it into human speech. Psalmists, prophets, philosophers had tried; but their words died away, leaving fainter and fainter echoes in man’s conscience. They had written their interpretation, but God’s word can never find full expression in a book. Language must be transformed into life—and not, this time, the general life of the universe, but our human life—that we may understand. So “the Word became flesh.” The meaning of life, the purpose of God in creation, became intelligible in Jesus Christ. His whole speech and conduct and being interpreted the world. When men saw Him they said, Life ought to be like that: God is like that. Take three of the words of God, and let us see their transformation into life in Christ:— (a) Holiness.—The word was familiar, for there was abundance of ethical speculation and of conscience too. But holiness was dead and buried in formal rules of conduct, paralysed by man’s universal failure, and hopelessly unattainable. But here was holiness splendidly alive, spontaneous, free, and natural. Here it was not merely attainable but actually attained. Jesus Christ—that was what God had meant by conscience, what conscience had tried to say; that was what ethical science had seen afar off, but never reached. (b) Love—the most fascinating and yet the most elusive word of God. Men heard it in their own hearts and homes, but it was uncertain or sinister, and always precarious, being threatened both by life and by death. That was human love, and the Divine love was but a remote and dim whisper of possible goodwill, if things turned out to be as one sometimes almost dared to hope. But here was love at once stronger than death and simple as the laughter of a child. Men saw its patience, its responsiveness, its facility. They felt its tenderness, its understanding, its healing power. Here is God’s heart, seen in the heart of a man. Here is what all true love actually means. The word Love had become flesh. (c) Death—that last sad word. Every death before had been recognized as a Word of God, but how unfriendly and how harsh! Since Jesus died, men have known what God means by His great word Death, for the death of Jesus has interpreted the whole of life. In the light of its love and sacrifice we look with new eyes upon sin, despair, forgiveness, restoration. And that death has reinterpreted death itself, giving to it surprisingly rich and blessed meaning. All the wonder of the eternal life—its rest, its renewal, its reward, its higher service—all these were included in the meaning of the word death, when in Christ language was translated into life. Truly man may say to the spectre, at the grave of Jesus— Thou hast stolen a jewel, Death, Shall light thy dark up like a star. All this, and far more than this, is included in the meaning of “the word became flesh.” Flesh, the tempted and tempting thing, weak and suffering, subject to all contingencies and liable to all risks—flesh was used to express adequately and for ever the meaning of God’s word of creation. (3) The third stage of this incarnation has yet to be considered. The text is a command that the word shall become flesh again in every Christian life. The translation of language into life is the great act of religion. We are familiar with the idea of the incarnation being perpetuated in the Bible, the Church, and the Sacraments. But besides these, each life around us is a Word of God, a special purpose and design realized in flesh in its degree. This thought surely gives new meaning to our intercourse with those who do business with us or live beside us. “There is but one temple in the world,” says Novalis, “and that temple is the Body of Man.… We touch heaven when we lay our hands on a human body.” Another has said: “The body of a child is as the body of the Lord; I am not worthy of either.” How reverently, gently, purely, should we treat one another if this is indeed so. But most especially in ourselves must language be transformed into life. We all hear many words of God. The worship of the Church, its songs and prayers, its readings and thoughts, and the inward response to these is desire, aspiration, and resolve; these words are to become flesh in us when we return from our worship to our daily life. And also there are other words which our spirits hear from day to day. What has life been saying to you? What has your experience meant? What lessons has God been trying to make you understand? Some of it we cannot understand, and all that is required of us is that we shall walk among these unknown voices of life, erect and brave and self-respecting and gentle. But there is much that we understand quite well. It is the Word of God, spoken clearly and in familiar language by the voice of life. But that Word has yet to become flesh. There are countless words of God in the knowledge and conviction of us all which are as yet no more than words. These are waiting for their incarnation in our character and influence, in our daily work and service of man and God. The works of our hands are God’s word fulfilled in us. We who can work are born that certain great words we have heard in our secret souls may become flesh in deeds. Rise then and do the work that thy hands find to do. In this living fashion speak out what is in thee. So shalt thou also be a Word of God incarnate, an expression of His mind in living flesh.1 [Note: J. Kelman.] The Incarnation of God in the terms of the Christ is not finished yet. Still as “the Christ within” He has to be born again in the hearts of men, and not only yesterday, but to-day and for ever, has Jesus to be received by His own. If the redemption of the world is to be wrought out and completed, that spirit which dwelt in Jesus, that grace and truth, that complete merging of the individual will in the Divine, that passionate love of men, that reverence for all things as belonging to the Father, that consciousness of unity with Him—all these have to become our common inheritance and possession. The Christian is not called upon to go out of his ordinary world to find his God, but by his very loyalty to Christ he must look first of all for his God in terms of the human life he knows so well. Having once God in Christ he must go on to look for and to find “the Christ as every man.” The Incarnation must not be for him historical, a past phenomenon merely, but a continually recurring process and experience. The Christ who was born once in Jewry has to be born again in the hearts of all who would attain their true manhood. Not in nothingness and non-entity, then, but in living, breathing, feeling power does the God who is Spirit still reveal Himself and carry forward His purpose. To every generation He manifests Himself afresh, Love making for itself new channels to meet the new needs. Still the God of Love clothes Himself in the garment of form, and still He becomes flesh and dwells among men.2 [Note: M. C. Albright, The Common Heritage, 144. Lo! this one preached with fervent tongue; The world went forth to hear; Upon his burning words they hung, Intent, with ravished ear. Like other lives the life he led, Men spake no word of blame; And yet, unblest, unprofited, The world went on the same. Another came, and lived, and wrought, His heart all drawn above; By deeds, and not by words, he taught Self-sacrificing love. No eager crowds his preaching drew; Yet one by one they came; The secret of his power they knew, And caught the sacred flame. And all around, as morning light Steals on with silent wing, The world became more pure and bright And life a holier thing. Ah! Pastor, is thy heart full sore At all this sin and strife? Feed with the Word, but ah! far more Feed with a holy life.1 [Note: W. Walsham How.] 5. There is a difficulty in the construction of this passage, which our English Versions endeavour to clear up by putting the middle portion of the verse in a parenthesis. Some of the best commentators give their sanction to the course which our translators have adopted; and we may therefore, perhaps, safely regard the Evangelist as in the text announcing the doctrine that “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth,” and throwing in at the same time the parenthetical remark, “We beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father.” Thus we have— I. The Divine Life entering upon a Human Life. “And the Word became flesh.” II. The Character of the Human Life. “And dwelt among us—full of grace and truth.” III. The Divine discovered in the Human. “And we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father.” I The Divine entering the Human “And the Word became flesh.” This is called the Incarnation. What does the word “Incarnation” mean? We know that carnal means fleshly, and carnivorous means flesh-eating, and carnation means a flesh-coloured flower. Incarnate, then, means to clothe in flesh; and the Incarnation is the “becoming clothed in flesh,” or the “assumption of flesh.” So that when we speak of the Incarnation we are using an abbreviated phrase; it must mean the Incarnation of something; and when it stands in this way, alone with the definite article, it refers to the Incarnation of the Son of God. The subject before us, then, is the clothing of the Son of God in flesh, or the Son of God assuming human nature. Two things therefore have to be understood: First, that before assuming human nature He previously existed as Son of God; Second, that when He assumed human nature He really and truly became a man. When these two things are understood we must consider why the Son of God became Son of man. i. His Pre-existence 1. Who is it of whom St. John says that He became flesh? The Word, he says. And who was the Word? Was it some prophet, a voice from God, bringing His word to man? It was more than that. Was it some Being, more than man, created on purpose to be the messenger of God to His creatures, and to declare His will with more authority than any human being could declare it? If we believe anything at all about Him, it was more than that. Was it some great angel, a dweller in the secret place where thought of man never approaches, seated near God’s throne, ever beholding the face of God?—was it such a one, who was sent to clothe himself with man’s form and flesh? Was it Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God? Was it Michael, the Prince of Angels? Was it one of the Seraphim, who day and night cry aloud, “Holy, holy, holy”? It was more than that—more, infinitely more than that—one to whom highest angels were but messengers and servants. Was it some heavenly Person, greater, higher, more ancient than the archangels, created almost from all eternity, to be the companion of the solitude of the Godhead on the eternal throne, to be His minister in all creation, the revealer and utterer of the mind of God, the sharer with Him in the worship of heaven and earth—all but God? Again, if we hold the faith of St. Paul and St. James, if we believe Him of whom we are speaking, it was more than this. The gulf is infinite, the gulf is impassable, between such a supposed being and the reality declared in Scripture—between God and the highest of His creatures. Who was the Word? St. John tells us, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that hath been made.” “The Word was God.” This is He of whom it is said, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” This is that Jesus Christ, of whom it is written, that “She brought forth her firstborn son; and she wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.” The Son of God, only begotten, equal to the Father, ever with the Father, by whom also He made the worlds; “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God”; “the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power.” “The firstborn of every creature, for by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: and he is before all things, and by him all things consist”;—not to be named with the angels, for the angels were made by Him, and Him do the angels worship—“Far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come.” Only He knew the secret of God, for He was one with God. Only He had seen God, for He was the Son of God, “in glory with God before the world was.” “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son (himself God), which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” And from the “glory” and “bosom” of the Father He came, to be a little child, born in Bethlehem of Judæa, the city of David; and He who came, was God. Such a relation as we believe our Saviour now bears to the Father could not have arisen at a point of time. It could not have been created by His earthly life. The power to exercise God’s prerogative of forgiveness, judgment, and redemption could never have been acquired by the moral excellence or religious achievement of any created being, however endowed by the Spirit of God. I confess (if I may descend so far) I had long this difficulty, which lowered the roof of my faith, and arrested the flight of devotion. And I am afraid, from the state of our public worship, I was not alone in that difficulty. I could not get the plenitude of New Testament worship or Catholic faith out of the mere self-sacrifice of the human Christ even unto death. Nor could I rise to it from that level. I was too little moved by His earthly renunciations to rise to the dimensions of the Church’s faith, for I am not speaking of its creed, which was my own. The cross of such a Christ, who was the mere martyr of His revelation, or the paragon of self-sacrifice, was not adequate to produce the absolute devotion which made a proud Pharisee, yea a proud Apostle, glory in being Christ’s entire slave, and which drove the whole Church to call Christ Lord and God, in a devotion the most magnificent the soul has ever known. Such worship seemed too large a response to anything which Jesus, with all His unique greatness, did or determined in the course of His earthly life alone. The Synoptic record alone would not account for the Christian religion, nor produce the plerophory of Christian faith. Christ’s earthly humiliation had to have its foundation laid in Heaven, and to be viewed but as the working out of a renunciation before the world was.1 [Note: P. T. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 269. Among geographers there have sometimes been disputes as to the identity of a river. They have debated, for instance, whether the Quorra were the same as the Niger; but when a boat, launched on the Niger, after a few weeks made its appearance floating on the Quorra, there was an end of the argument: the names might be two, but the streams were demonstrably the one the continuation of the other. And sometimes a critic, indignant at an anonymous author, has shown how much better a well-known writer would have handled the self-same subject—when it turns out that the nameless and the well-known personages are in this instance identical. In the 102nd Psalm, eternity and unchangeableness are ascribed to the Great Creator; and there is no opponent of the Saviour’s divinity who would not sing that psalm as a fitting ascription to the Most High God: when behold! the Epistle to the Hebrews informs us that it is a hymn of praise to Jesus Christ!1 [Note: James Hamilton, Works, iii. 257. 2. The doctrine of the Incarnation involves the pre-existence of Christ, not in an ideal, mystic sense, but as a personal Being. The preposition “with” in the second clause of Joh 1:1—“the Word was with God”—is one which implies mutual association in a striking way. It suggests the intercourse of those who are standing face to face—“The Word was directed to God, moving toward God.” The same idea appears in a more tender form in John 1:18—“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” Christ asserts His personal pre-existence in the majestic words of Joh 8:58 : “Then said the Jews unto him, Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham? Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I AM.” It is implied in the saying so frequently upon His lips about His coming into the world, coming with a purpose which it was His constant effort to fulfil. It has its loftiest expression in His solemn words of prayer, “I have glorified thee on the earth; I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.” In ordinary biographies, a birth is the beginning. It was in the year 1483 that the mind to which we owe the Reformation commenced its existence; for it was then that Martin Luther was born. It was in London that the career began to which England is indebted for its great epic poem, and that other from which science received its mightiest modern impulse; for it was there that Milton and Bacon first saw the light of life. Having told us this, the biographer feels that he has begun at the beginning; and with this statement coincides the consciousness of the individual himself. For, whatever the old philosophy may have dreamed about the pre-existence of spirit and the transmigration of souls, no man could ever seriously say that he had led another life before he was born; no man could ever tell incidents and experiences which had occurred to him in a state of existence anterior to the present. With us, to all intents, our birth is our beginning. In the whole history of our species there has been only one exception.1 [Note: James Hamilton, Works, iii. 249. 3. The Apostle Paul draws practical appeals from the same truth. When he would urge the Corinthians to “prove the sincerity of their love,” he gives them this touching reminder—“For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might become rich.” The sacrifice which ended in the Cross began when Jesus left “the bosom of the Father.” “Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, counted not the being equal with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, then he humbled himself, becoming obedient as far as unto death, even the death of the cross.” The doctrine of the pre-existence of Jesus is not confined to St. John. Writing to the Corinthian Church St. Paul reminds them in one passage of the history of Israel of old, and then he adds the remarkable words, “They drank of a spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ”—that is, Christ was with God’s ancient people in their wanderings in the wilderness some fourteen or fifteen hundred years before He was born (1 Corinthians 10:4). So, too, in the great passage on the resurrection of the dead in the same Epistle, he says, “The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is of heaven” (1 Corinthians 15:47); and in the Second Epistle to the same Church at Corinth he reminds them of “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might become rich”—words which have no possible meaning unless Jesus had lived a heavenly life before His incarnation. Perhaps the strongest assertion of the pre-incarnate Being of Christ in all the writings of St. Paul is the following passage in the Epistle to the Philippians (John 2:6-7): “Who, being in the form of God, counted it not a prize to be on an equality with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, yea, the death of the cross.” So, too, St. Peter declares that long before Jesus came into the world, the Spirit of Jesus was moving and working in the prophets of the Hebrew people: “Concerning which salvation the prophets sought and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you: searching what time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did point unto, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glories that should follow them” (1 Peter 1:10-11).1 [Note: G. S. Barrett, The Earliest Christian Hymn, 32. ii. His Humanity 1. Very early in the history of the Christian Church, and even before all the original Apostles had passed away, there were persons who had received Christian baptism and professed to be Christians to whom it seemed incredible that our Lord was really man—that according to the vigorous statement of St. John in the text, He “became flesh.” The form in which St. John affirms the truth was, no doubt, suggested by the heresies which denied it. There was a very common belief in the ancient world that human sin has its origin and roots in the flesh and blood of the body, and that all matter is necessarily evil; to disengage and separate the higher and spiritual life of man from his physical nature was therefore supposed to be the true discipline of moral and spiritual perfection. There were teachers in the Church, claiming to speak in the power of the Spirit of God, who taught this doctrine, and to whom it was inconceivable that our Lord could have had a body like our own. St. John was thinking of these teachers when he said in his Epistle, “Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God; and every spirit which confesseth not Jesus is not of God: and this is the spirit of the antichrist.” Earnest belief in Christ’s divinity has a difficulty in allowing His real humanity. The idea, for example, of Christ’s growing, as a man, in wisdom as well as in stature, is repugnant to some minds; and, despite the teaching of Scripture, there are those who refuse to think of His being subject to any ordinary human limitations, whether of power or of knowledge. This idea of Christ, too common among believers in His divinity, finds expression in Shelley’s fine but misleading figure— A mortal shape to him Was like the vapour dim, Which the orient planet animates with light. The same poet makes Him tread the thorns of death and shame, like a triumphal path, of which He never truly felt the sharpness. One of our hymns falls into this heresy when it speaks of the “seeming infant of a day.” This is exactly to reduce His humanity to a mere appearance. He was not the “seeming infant,” but the real “infant of a day.” I have myself met people to whom Christ’s patience and suffering, for example, could offer no consolation, because they said, “He was God all the time, and it was easy for Him.”1 [Note: A. Halliday Douglas.] “I believe,” cries Irving with the deepest emotion, “that my Lord did come down and toil, and sweat, and travail, in exceeding great sorrow, in this mass of temptation, with which I and every sinful man am oppressed; did bring His Divine presence into death-possessed humanity, into the one substance of manhood created in Adam, and by the Fall brought into a state of resistance and alienation from God, of condemnation and proclivity to evil, of subjection to the devil; and bearing it all upon His shoulders in that very state into which God put it after Adam had sinned, did suffer its sorrows and pains, and swimming anguish, its darkness, wasteness, disconsolateness, and hiddenness from the countenance of God; and by His faith and patience did win for Himself the name of the Man of Sorrows and the author and finisher of our faith.” This was the very essence of his belief. And when from unexpected quarters, everywhere round him, he discovered that other men, that his fathers and brethren in his own Church, disowned this central truth which gave life and reality to the gospel, it went to his heart like a personal affliction. It was not that they differed with him on a controverted subject; the matter was different to his grieved and wondering perception. To him it appeared that they denied the Lord. The deepest heart of Divine grace and pity, the real unspeakable redemption, seemed to Irving overlooked and despised when this wonderful identity of nature was disputed. He stood wondering and sorrowful, always in the midst of his argument turning back again to simple statement, as if, like his Lord, he would have asked, “Do ye now believe?”1 [Note: Mrs. Oliphant, Life of Edward Irving, ii. 109. 2. The faith of the Church in our Lord’s humanity rests primarily on experience—the experience of those who knew Him during His earthly life. And their experience must also determine our whole conception of the Incarnation. Our theory must be governed by the facts; we shall go far astray if we attempt first to construct a theory and then to force the facts into agreement with it. What, then, are the facts? Mary, His mother, was the friend of the original apostles and disciples of our Lord, and after His crucifixion, she lived with the Apostle John. She would tell our Lord’s friends how He grew from infancy to childhood, and childhood to youth, increasing in wisdom as well as in height and strength with His increasing years,—a child and a youth to attract the favour of both God and man. Nor was it Mary alone who could tell them of our Lord’s childhood, youth, and manhood. James and Jude, to whom two Epistles, bearing their names, are attributed in the New Testament, but who do not appear to have become His disciples till after His resurrection, were His “brothers.” Salome, the wife of Zebedee, was, in all probability, the sister of Mary His mother, and was therefore His aunt. Her sons, the two Apostles James and John, were His cousins; and it was this relationship, as well as the special confidence with which our Lord had treated them, that, perhaps, suggested the request that they might sit, one on His right hand and one on His left hand, in His Kingdom. All these relatives of His, who were well known to the first generation of Christians, could recall our Lord’s life in Nazareth before His public ministry began; and it is certain that they never doubted that He was really man. Nor were there any signs during His public ministry that our Lord had lost any of the characteristics of humanity or had been liberated from any of its limitations. Man has always found it easier to see a Divine element in the strange and awful and supernatural, and to picture his Deity as living above him in the high mountains, or the unknown depth of sky, than to find Him in the near and the accustomed. Now in the fulness of time he has been called upon to see Him in the “Word made flesh,” dwelling among men “in fashion as a man,” not taking upon Him the nature of angels, but the nature of suffering humanity. The Greeks might indeed conceive of their gods, their Apollo or Athena, taking some part in the affairs of men, and jealously watching the interests of their worshippers; the Egyptian might picture Horus or Osiris, experiencing like men the triumph of victory or the ignominy of defeat; but the Christian has a more difficult, but a far more glorious, conception to which he may rise. He may see his God as manifested in terms of his own life, becoming his Comrade in temptation, and his Example in humility. Here is one who undertook, not to govern the world from afar, but to overcome it from within, who calls Himself not high and lifted up, but meek and lowly, the servant of all. As a shepherd He goes before His sheep to make the crooked paths straight, and the rough places smooth, and in His own experience He conquers death and triumphs over the grave.1 [Note: M. C. Albright, The Common Heritage, 113. In deep spiritual temptations nothing has helped me better, with nothing have I heartened myself and driven away the devil better, than with this, that Christ, the true Eternal Son of God, is “bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh”; and that He sits on the right hand of God, and pleads for us. When I can grasp this shield of faith, I have already chased away the evil one with his fiery darts.2 [Note: Luther.] 3. Why do we insist upon the humanity of Christ? (1) First, there is the sense of our loss should the doctrine be obscured. Such comfortable words as these—“Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered; and being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him”: “We have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin”—would lose their meaning. (2) And, secondly, we should fall back into the old error about the character of God. It was because men thought it degrading to the Son of God to have become flesh that they denied it. St. John knew that humiliation is not degradation; pride degrades. The imperfect soars or stands aloof. “The blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings, and Lord of lords,” can only reveal Himself by stooping. We shall never know by our experience the glory and the bliss of immeasurable condescension, for He came to lift us into participation with Himself. But we can adore the man Christ Jesus, and the Father whom He reveals, as we could not have adored a God shrouded from us in His own perfections. Save through the flesh Thou wouldst not come to me— The flesh, wherein Thy strength my weakness found, A weight to bow Thy Godhead to the ground, And lift to heaven a lost humanity.1 [Note: John Bannister Tabb.] 4. Christ was not only truly man, with body, soul, and spirit, in each of which He suffered, by hunger and weariness and pain, by grief and anger, by desolation: He also was and is perfectly man, and He was and is representatively man. (1) Christ was and is perfectly man.—For us humanity is broken up into fragments by sex, by race, by time, by circumstance. From the beginning its endowments were not unequally divided between man and woman, whose differences are essential to the true idea of the whole. And we can see that countless nations and ages have not yet exhausted the manifold capacities of manhood and womanhood under the varied disciplines and inspirations of life. Again and again even in our own experience some new flash of courage or wisdom or patience or tenderness goes to brighten the picture of man’s completed and real self. But in Christ there are no broken or imperfect lights. In Him everything which is shown to us of right and good and lovely in the history of the whole world is gathered up once for all. Nothing limits His humanity, but the limits proper to humanity itself. Whatever there is in man of strength, of justice, of wisdom: whatever there is in woman of sensibility, of purity, of insight, is in Christ without the conditions which hinder among us the development of contrasted virtues in one person. Christ belongs peculiarly to no one people, to no one time. And conversely, if there be aught that is noble in the achievements or in the aspirations of any people or of any time, it finds a place in His sympathy, and strength from His example. (2) Christ was and is also representatively man.—Seeing that He unites in Himself all that is truly manly and truly womanly, stripped of the accidental forms which belong to some one country, or to some one period, every one therefore can find in Him for his own work union with the eternal. He is, in the language of St. Paul, “the last Adam,” “a life-giving spirit.” For Him, consciously or unconsciously, all men were looking: to Him all history tended: in Him a higher life had its beginning and its pledge. “Ye shall see,” He said Himself in answer to the first confession of faith, “the heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.” And for us the promise has found accomplishment. In Him we are enabled to perceive that the broken unity of earth and heaven has been restored; in Him we are enabled to recognize that the earlier intercourse between the seen and the unseen worlds has been brought to an absolute fulfilment. Christ the Son of man has bestowed on all men the gifts which belonged to Him as the Son of God. iii. Why did He become flesh? The purpose of the Incarnation has been abundantly discussed in the history of Christendom, from the Alexandrine Fathers onward. Anselm, in his “Cur Deus Homo,” asks and answers the question by saying that God became incarnate to provide a remedy for human sin; and two great mediæval schools, the Thomists and Scotists, took opposite sides on this point. The controversy is not even yet over; some maintain that God would have become incarnate whether man had sinned or not, and others assert that human sin is the predisposing cause of the humiliation of Deity. Perhaps a reconciliation might be effected between both extremes if it were recognized that moral evil is here by the good purpose of God, and hence that one main and necessary object of the Incarnation must, in the foreknowledge of God, have been the salvation of men from their sins and sorrows. It is not to the purpose to discuss whether Christ would have been born into the world had man never sinned, for in creating man God must have foreknown that he would sin. On the other hand, however, we may say that it was fitting that in the fulness of time God should send forth His Son, so that men might recognize and obey the very Self of God. God being what He is, it is clear that as soon as humanity was able to receive a revelation so complete as the fact of the Incarnation provides, such a revelation was just what we might expect. Had there been no Christ of history men to-day would have been wistfully longing for just such an expression of God as Christ brought into the world. We may therefore say that God became man for three reasons: (1) in order that He might realize Himself; (2) in order that He might give to the world a fuller revelation of God; and (3) in order that He might make atonement for sin. 1. He became man in order that He might realize Himself. This point we must touch reverently, yet firmly. It has a certain significance. God shares in every experience of the race and lives His life in every individual. The Hegelian philosophy declares that creation is the result of a process in which the Deity realizes Himself. To say less would be to affirm that man purchases in the school of pain an experience of which God is in possession without pain. A nobler thought is that which represents humanity as living its life with God, in God, and for God; and God as living His life in company with men, through men, and by men. That God has a deeper life than humanity can ever touch is certainly the case, but that the life of humanity has immediate value for the life of God is also an indispensable truth. God is the Universal Consciousness within whom are many separate centres of consciousness. God is immediately conscious of all that enters into our individual consciousness; He is, indeed, more conscious of us than we are of ourselves. Yet something more is needed even for Deity than this general consciousness of the flux of creation. God knows being in general; He needs to know human nature in particular. Here, perhaps, is a key to the purpose of the Incarnation. It was fitting that the Captain of our salvation should be made perfect through sufferings. God thus knows Himself through incarnation in a human life, and returns to Himself through humanity. Previous to His Incarnation, Christ knew, as a Divine person, what was the condition of man on earth—not only knew it, but regarded it with tender interest. The sad music of humanity entered His ear and touched His compassion. It was because of the pitying love He felt for us, that He visited and redeemed us. But it is one thing to look on suffering, and another thing to suffer; and when Christ not only pitied the miserable, but came down and took up His abode among them, clothed Himself with their nature, lived among them, felt with them, wept with them, suffered with them, was made in all points like them, sin excepted, He acquired a new experience, which suffused the infinite compassion of His Godhead with the glow of a human tenderness. Then He knew the state of man as a sinner by making it His own, and through this personal acquaintance with evil He qualified Himself to be a merciful and faithful High Priest. Thus, instead of jarring against our idea of God, the Incarnation seems not only natural but delightful to conceive. How often have we ourselves, when affection for the lower creation has been kindled in us, desired in idea to enter into their life for a time, and then to return into ourselves again with a new consciousness of a lower life than our own, and with increased ability and desire to help. And if we have felt this towards a nature not kindred to our own, how much more may God have felt it towards a nature in direct kinship with Himself? It is a noble thought: it ought to commend itself to all who have ever loved purely and passionately, and desired to become at one with the being of those they loved. Macaulay never wrote more truly than when he said, “It was before Deity embodied in a human form, walking among men, partaking of their infirmities, leaning on their bosoms, weeping over their graves, slumbering in the manger, bleeding on the cross, that the prejudices of the synagogue, and the doubts of the academy, and the fasces of the lictor, and the swords of thirty legions were humbled in the dust.” By His very gentleness the incarnate Son does make men great, and he who seeks for purest sympathy and richest solace must betake himself to Christ.1 [Note: W. M. Taylor, The Limitations of Life, 28. There was once a chaplain to a prison who thought that the prisoners were treated cruelly—more severely than their judges intended them to be; so he determined to live as they lived, to be punished as they were punished, although he had not committed any crime. This is almost exactly what our Lord Jesus Christ did.2 [Note: J. Robinson Gregory.] 2. He became man in order that He might give to the world a fuller revelation of God. Nature has in all ages and in all lands spoken of God and taught men to worship Him, but nature has never been able to get beyond a mere declaration of the existence of a Supreme Being, and her disciples must, perforce, erect their altars to the Unknown God, and worship Him in ignorance and through the medium of symbols. Nature is powerless to expound the attributes of Deity. She cannot even, in the face of so much sorrow and suffering on every hand, go so far as to assert His unchanging and unchangeable goodness. She proclaims to us, with her ten thousand voices echoing through earth and sea and sky, that there is a God, but she can tell us no more. Here, then, is the province of revelation. From a world sitting in darkness there is borne upwards a cry whose burden is, “More light! more light!” And the cry is heard, the petition is granted, and through the deep gloom of the shadow-wrapped land a voice resounds, “Arise, shine, for thy light is come!” When Christ came, He, and He first, taught us that we, with our sin-stained lips, might call upon God as “Our Father which art in heaven.” Thus a new relationship altogether was (not established but) revealed between the Creator and the creature, and that connection which David faintly foreshadowed when he said, “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him,” was shown by our Saviour to be not a semblance but a reality. If a friend visits you, you like to show him your most valued possessions. If you are a gardener you take him to see the loveliest flower in your conservatory. If you are an artist you lead him to your studio and show him your best picture. If you are an author you place your favourite volume in his hand. Now God wishes man to know what He glories in, what He deems His best possession, what affords Him more joy than anything else. He wishes to give us the knowledge of His glory. What does He glory in? What does He wish us to know above everything else? Does He wish us to know His power? Certainly not. That might impress some. But He placed our first parents in the Garden of Eden. Great loveliness was there, but no special manifestation of power. I notice that when kings and other potentates visit one another they are taken to see the arsenal, or the army, or the fleet. The host is very anxious to give the guests a great idea of his power. This is one of the many particulars in which the King of kings is essentially different from all other kings. He put our first parents in the Garden of Eden where there was no great display of power. He might have placed them on some solitary island, around which great oceans leaped and rolled. But He has never gone out of His way to impress men with His power. Neither has He ever sought to overwhelm them with His wisdom. It is only lately that He has begun to unfold to us, on a large scale, the marvels of His knowledge. The physical sciences are exceedingly modern. It is only in our own lifetime that God has permitted us, by the use of such modern inventions as the microscope, the telescope, and the spectroscope, to find out the wonders of His skill. He was in no hurry to impress us with that. Nothing can be more absurd, or wicked, or degraded, than the idolatrous worship of mere cleverness. We may be as clever or as powerful as Satan himself, and yet as odious and degraded. God does not glory either in power or in wisdom. But what God does glory in, what He has been trying to reveal to us from the beginning, what He wishes us to know more than anything else, is that His nature is love! He wishes to persuade us that He attaches an immeasurably higher value to love than to power or to wisdom. Where shall we find words to describe the rapture of man when he discovers that “God is love”? One of the most delightful passages in human biography is in the life of Henry Ward Beecher. He was brought up in a narrow, hard, Calvinistic school. For a long time he groped in darkness and misery. The name of God was to him a name of terror. But with glowing eloquence and delight he tells us how on one memorable day it dawned upon him that God is love. At once the whole universe was radiant with new beauty. Everything was changed. He was changed. He passed from hell to heaven, and the light of that rapturous moment never passed away. But neither to him nor to us could that vivid and full knowledge of the love of God ever have come except in the face of Jesus Christ. All previous revelations are summed up, supplemented, and completed in Christ. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). There is “life for a look” at that face.1 [Note: H. Price Hughes, Essential Christianity, 50. 3. But the grand reason why God became man in Christ, the New Testament tells us, was that He might make propitiation or atonement for sin. This is the great reason which Anselm discusses in his own way in his book. The law had something to say in Court, as it were, with regard to the bestowment of an absolutely gratuitous pardon, and the right to claim that its principles and requirements should be duly conserved and satisfied. Now the Incarnation of the Son of God and His perfect obedience to the law, thus “magnifying the law and maintaining its honour,” fully met the case. He fully met all the requirements which the law might put forth with a view to securing a free pardon, and He did it as man’s Head and Representative. Accordingly, when the penitent sinner accepts Christ in His incarnate fulness—His law-satisfying life and death—Christ’s law-satisfying life and death practically and substantially become the sinner’s own, and count for his salvation. Thus it follows that while pardon is freely given, the law is duly honoured, maintained, and even fulfilled. Christ Himself declares that He came “to give his life a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28). As St. John puts it, God “loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). And this brings new life into the world. Christ is the propitiation for His people through whom they recover their lost place in the Divine favour. But besides this, He is their life, and is made to them a quickening spirit. To Him they are indebted for their new existence; in His likeness they are renewed; on Him they depend; and in Him they find their unity. His own favourite image of the relation is that of a tree: “I am the vine; ye are the branches.” The branches spring from the tree; they are nourished by it; they are in union with it; and so believers have their being from Christ; they live in Him; they are one with Him. The Incarnation of the Son of God has not left human nature where it was, but imported into it a new Divine splendour. Wonderful as man was in his created likeness to God, the entrance of the Son of God into the vital body of humanity has raised human nature to a higher point than it ever attained before. This, like the Incarnation itself, is as difficult to define as it is clearly a fact. When “the Word became flesh, and dwelt among men,” the measurements of humanity had to be taken from a new height, even from the glory of the Son of Man 1:1 [Note: J. Thomas, The Mysteries of Grace, 24. So the Lord of all things, Caring for His own, Even for the small things Left His golden throne. Down the mystic stairway, To the bourne of earth, Of the womb of Mary, By a human birth, Came the Sun of Healing Above human ken, All His might concealing From the sons of men. That He might precede them, Out of pain and strife, Head them, join them, teach them, lead them Into fuller life. For the life diurnal Waxeth old and dim; Love and life eternal Rest alone in Him! All is in the story How the Christ brought good In a costly crimson glory Of His Brotherhood.1 [Note: John W. Taylor, The Doorkeeper, 5. II The Human Life “And dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” The Nativity was but the beginning of a long work. The Son of God not only came as man, but He grew as man grows. He passed through the stages of human development, “tempted in all points” even as we are. He consecrated not our nature only, but our life. “He dwelt among us.” He shared the transitory joys and griefs—the spirit of righteous anger and the spirit of thankful exultation—which belong to us. “He tabernacled among us,”—to preserve the idea of the original, which carries us back to the time when the people of Israel wandered as pilgrims in the wilderness, and the visible glory of the Lord rested when they should rest and guided their forward path, the sign and type of God’s abiding presence. Even so it was with Christ. He tabernacled with us, and the faithful beheld His glory. He marked out the path of life. He hallowed each resting-place upon the way. The material splendour of the fiery pillar was changed into a spiritual beacon; but it was still clear with the light of heaven—clear to the loving. But even here, as of old time, that which is the light of the Christian is the thick gloom which enwraps the unbelieving—the thick gloom or even the consuming fire. We know, we feel, we value all that He gave up. We know how He passed through that life of man on earth, which He accepted from its beginning to its close. We know that there is nothing so pinched and hard and trying in man’s condition that it was not His will to go through. We know that there is nothing so mean and scorned, so rough and dangerous in what the poor of this world have to put up with that did not fall to His lot when He came among men. That we might not feel Him to be in lot and condition above any of us, He chose to be below most of us—on a level with the meanest and the most helpless. He asked for no privilege as the Son of God; He refused nothing appointed to man to go through; He desired not to be spared any burden of our mortal state. As each thing came in the course of years, He accepted it. He hurried nothing; He waited till the years should change the babe into the child, and the child into the boy, and the boy into the man. For He came to be among us, not a passing vision, or a strange spectacle, but actually and in earnest to be man with men, to be “flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone,” to bind us to Himself in life, and in death, and in resurrection. He came that we might see and know that, being what He was, He had made Himself one of ourselves, living our very life, feeling, suffering, buffeted, tempted like man, but without man’s sin. What must it be, only to be a man, when you think what He did to save and to bless mankind? What must it be, only to be a man, when you think that it is to be what Jesus Christ was once—and is now at the Father’s right hand? Let it be enough, to be of that nature which God cared for so wonderfully, for which He has opened such a road to perfection, for which He has provided such wondrous hopes. It cannot be a small thing to be a man—to be what our God and Maker was pleased to become, that He might be more closely joined to us. It cannot be a small thing to be man, with man’s destiny; to be man, with the honour put on man by God.1 [Note: Dean Church, The Message of Peace, 170. 1. The Word “dwelt among us.” There can be little doubt that the author had in mind the Shekinah of the temple of the old dispensation. Biblical history tells us that after the erection of the tabernacle in the wilderness, the glory of God descended with the pillar of cloud and took possession of the Holy of Holies, and abode there upon the cherubic throne. So in the temple, the God of Israel was enthroned in theophanic glory in the Holy of Holies, on the outstretched wings of the cherubim. The tabernacle and the temple, its historic successor, continued, until the destruction of Jerusalem at the Babylonian exile, to be the dwelling-place of God enthroned upon the cherubim. Just as the temple was the abiding presence of the theophanic God in the old dispensation, just so the Word of God tabernacled in the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth. All that was glorious in the conception of the Shekinah and the temple of the old dispensation became still more glorious in Jesus Christ; only that glory was veiled and hidden in His flesh, as the Shekinah had been hidden in the innermost throne-room of the temple. But this veiling of the glory of the Word was only a temporary veiling, during His earthly life; when the veil of the temple of Jerusalem was rent by an earthquake, the veil of the flesh of the Son of God was also rent, and when His body arose from the tomb, the body of the risen Lord no longer veiled the glory, but transmitted it in Christophanies to His disciples. The process of the Incarnation St. John describes very simply. The Jews were familiar with the idea of God dwelling with His people. By the word St. John here uses he links the body of Christ to the ancient dwelling of God round which the tents of Israel had clustered. God now dwelt among men in the humanity of Jesus Christ. The tabernacle was human, the indwelling Person was Divine. In Christ is realized the actual presence of God among His people, the actual entrance into and personal participation in human history which was hinted at in the tabernacle and the temple.2 [Note: M. Dods, Footsteps in the Path of Life, 19. 2. “Full of grace and truth.” St. John had a special form of the manifestation of grace and truth before his mind when he wrote these words. He was thinking of the covenant God, who proclaimed Himself to Moses on the mount when He descended in the cloud as “Jehovah, Jehovah, a God full of compassion, and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy and truth.” He was thinking of David’s prayer, “O prepare loving-kindness and truth”; and his heart burned within him as he saw them now prepared. It was the thought of Christ’s redeeming work that filled his mind, and that led him to sum up the revelation of the Incarnation in the revelation of grace and truth. Therefore he says, not “love,” but “grace”—undeserved love to sinners. And in “truth” he is thinking chiefly of Christ’s “faithfulness.” The Divine glory that rested as a nimbus on the Lord’s head was compounded before all else of His ineffable love for the unlovely, of His changeless faithfulness to the unfaithful. For in Christ, God commended His love to us in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Nevertheless, it would be a serious error to confine the words as here used to this single reference. This is rather the culmination and climax of their meaning than the whole extent and meaning of it. Christ is not only love as manifested in grace, but as the God of love manifest in the flesh He is love itself in all its height and breadth. Not only the loftiest reaches of love, love for the undeserving, find their model in Him, but all the love that is in the world finds its source and must seek its support in Him. His was the love that wept at the grave of a friend and over the earthly sorrows of Jerusalem, that yearned with the bereaved mother at Nain, and took the little children into His arms to bless them; as well as the love that availed to offer Himself a sacrifice for sin. In like manner, that St. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/greattexts/ The Lamb of God On the morrow he seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!—John 1:29. 1. The importance of the Baptist’s ministry becomes fully intelligible only when his teaching is placed over against the characteristics of the religious thought of his day. It is no far-fetched analogy to liken his work, in one respect, to that of the Reformers of the sixteenth century. He made a great attempt to go back from the accretions of a later age to the purer doctrine of the Scriptures. Pharisaism had, both directly and indirectly, done vast damage to the spiritual life of Palestine. It had “bound” upon men’s aching backs “heavy burdens and grievous to be borne.” Righteousness had been made to consist in the punctilious discharge of a multitude of ceremonial obligations. The conception of God as a loving and gracious Father had to no small extent been thrust into the background, while in the forefront of Pharisaic teaching was the idea of “a servile relationship”—God as the Master, man as the servant who was required to perform certain duties, and had a right, in return, to the Divine favour. A free, healthy spiritual life was thus made impossible, while encouragement was given, on the one hand to religious self-complacency and self-confidence, and on the other to hypocrisy, and equivocation, and subterfuge. The effect of such encouragement was only too plain in connection with the popular anticipations of the Divine Kingdom. These anticipations always included the triumph of Israel and the overthrow of the heathen; but they took little or no account of Israel’s own unworthiness, of Israel’s own moral and spiritual failure, of Israel’s own utter need of reconciliation and regeneration. The Judaism of that day failed to realize what sin must mean for God’s chosen people. Controlled to a great extent by the Pharisees, it insisted with wearisome urgency upon offering, ablution, fast, or tithe, but it “left undone the weightier matters of the law.” It refused to contemplate the possibility of a day of wrath coming for Israel. At a critical hour in the fortunes of the nation John the Baptist sought to create a stricter, juster, healthier sense of the requirements of real religion. His teaching was the strong and uncompromising corrective of the prevailing fallacies and errors. He attacked with all his might the fabric of belief in privilege which confronted him like some enemy’s stronghold. He told his auditors that their Abrahamic descent would afford them no refuge from the judgment which was impending. A new life! A new mind! Purity of heart and conscience! Self-separation from the guilty past!—herein lay the hope of salvation. It was the teaching of the Old Testament at its highest and best. The prophets had ever laid stress upon the renewal of the inner life through the operation of the Divine grace; and it was this idea that animated all the ministry of the appointed Forerunner of the Lord. Thine, Baptist, was the cry, In ages long gone by, Heard in clear accents by the Prophet’s ear; As if ’twere thine to wait, And with imperial state Herald some Eastern monarch’s proud career; Who thus might march his host in full array, And speed through trackless wilds his unresisted way. But other task hadst thou Than lofty hills to bow, Make straight the crooked, the rough places plain: Thine was the harder part To smooth the human heart, The wilderness where sin had fixed his reign; To make deceit his mazy wiles forego, Bring down high vaulting pride, and lay ambition low. Such, Baptist, was thy care, That no objection there, Might check the progress of the King of kings; But that a clear highway Might welcome the array Of Heavenly graces which His Presence brings; And where Repentance had prepared the road, There Faith might enter in, and Love to man and God.1 [Note: Richard Mant.] 2. Two utterances mark the flood-tide of St. John’s prophetic inspiration; for when he says of his greater successor, “He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire,” the very term “baptize” connects his thought with “the divers washings” under the old dispensation, while the words “with the Holy Ghost and with fire” fore-herald that ministration of the Spirit which was ushered in on the day of Pentecost. So, again, when he exclaimed, “Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!” the phraseology in which he describes the great propitiation of Christ is seen at once to be derived from the typical sacrifices with which as the son of a priest he was perfectly familiar; while the mention of “the world” gives a wider range to the efficacy of the Atonement than the common Jew would have assigned to it, and is the prelude of the great commission, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” In the former instance it would almost seem that he had received a vision of the Upper Room at the moment when, to the disciples assembled in it, there appeared “cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.” In the latter he appears to have had a revelation of the uplifted Christ on Calvary drawing all men unto Him. The text is “Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away [margin “beareth”] the sin of the world!” Let us consider it in this way— The Sin of the World. The Lamb of God. The Lamb and the Sin. I The Sin of the World 1. Sin.—Sin, the choice of evil instead of good, the perversion of the desires, the slavery of the will, the darkening of the mind, the deadly sickness of the whole heart—this is the fountain of all trouble, the cause of all disorder and wretchedness. This is the wall which makes the world seem sometimes like a prison and sometimes like a madhouse. This is the curse which destroys life’s harmony and beauty. This is the obstacle which separates the soul, in darkness and sorrow, from God. The forms of every religion, the voice of unceasing prayers, the smoke of endless burnt-offerings, the blood of bulls and goats, the oblations of all that is most precious, cruel altars drenched with human gore, and flames consuming the offspring of man’s body,—gifts, propitiations, pleadings, sacrifices, without stint and without number,—bear witness to the deep and awful sense of sin which rests upon the heart of the world. What do we really think about sin—as we see it in others, as we find it in ourselves? And side by side with such a question as that goes another: What is our conception of repentance? We are all acquainted with its philological significance; but what is its actual significance to our inmost conscience? What is our attitude towards those sins which come to us again and again till we know their faces well enough, till they possess for us a degrading—or even, it may be, a fatal—familiarity? What is our attitude towards that one type of sin which is, as it were, our constant companion—which we sometimes seriously try to shake off, but which appears to keep pace with us like the very shadow of ourselves? What is our attitude towards that one particular piece of iniquity which, perhaps in the fierce heat of sudden temptation, or perhaps after cool and deliberate calculation, we committed in past years, and which stands out with such hideous prominence from the midst of a life that often has been far enough from being pure and innocent and unselfish and upright? As we have grown older, we have become clearer and clearer sighted, and we now see that what we at one time thought little or nothing of was really altogether unworthy of any Christian man or woman. Do not let us be afraid of this truer vision of the past; neither let us dread any sudden opening of the eyes, at some future moment, to what we are now, or to what we have been in the days that are beyond recall. Of course, we may let such a realization overwhelm us, but it is our own fault and folly if we do. Man, what is this, and why art thou despairing? God shall forgive thee all but thy despair. We may awake and see the sins which we have committed thronging about us, just as Robespierre—in the drama that was played some years ago in London—saw in the Conciergerie the ghosts of those whom he had sent to the guillotine. Those spectres may press upon us both on the right hand and on the left; they may come from the days of youth, when we were weak and easily led; or from early manhood or womanhood, when we were wild and reckless, without self-restraint and self-discipline; or from later years, when our conscience had become hardened, and we had made ourselves capable of actions from which aforetime we should have shrunk. Yes; they may come to threaten and appal us. But there is deliverance from them. (1) The sense of sin is not found everywhere. The Egyptians and Babylonians had their catalogues of sins, but their sinfulness never troubled them as the sinfulness of the Hebrews troubled them. We may almost say that the ancient Greeks had no real conception of sin. The Greeks recognized the existence of vice, certain actions were to them unlovely, disagreeable, mischievous; but the Greek people never felt the burden of their sinfulness. The countrymen of Homer and of Pericles were the lightest hearted of all the peoples of the earth, as joyous and as sunny as the sea which broke into laughter on the shores of their lovely islands. The Romans were far more earnest than the Greeks, but they had no deep consciousness of sin. We can hardly think of Julius Cæsar shedding tears over his transgressions. Rome had her priests and her sacrifices, but her conception of sin had slight influence on either the personal or the national life. Christianity is pre-eminently the religion which develops in its adherents a sense of sin. Buddhism, and Brahminism, and Confucianism, and Zoroastrianism all recognize the existence of evil, and attempt to deal with it in different ways; but in none of these religions is there a recognition of sin in the sense in which Christians use that word. A genial sense of “camaraderie” was inspired and maintained by sacred dance, song, and simple prayer, and especially by the sacrificial banquet at which the deity and his tribe were imagined as feasting together. And whatever ritual was in vogue for the purging of the people’s sins was external and mechanical merely, accompanied by no call to real repentance, no appeal to the individual conscience.1 [Note: L. R. Farnell, The Higher Aspects of Greek Religion, 132. Nor, when the dying Indian had been induced at last to express a desire for Paradise, was it an easy matter to bring him to a due contrition for his sins; for he would deny with indignation that he had ever committed any.2 [Note: Parkman, The Jesuits in North America, i. 178. A sense of darkness and ignorance made the Greek sorrow, a sense of sin and evil the Hebrew sorrow. The Hebrew sorrow expressed itself in three ways—in a passion for forgiveness, in a passion for redemption, and in a passion for life; and these three passions are pointed out by the Baptist in this new phrase which he has coined for the new age, “Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!”3 [Note: W. W. Peyton.] Dale’s sense of sin was deep and vivid. Sin—not merely as revealed in speech and conduct, but as that principle of evil within us by which the very springs of life are corrupted; sin, whether ours by inheritance, or through our own defect, or by our mysterious community in the moral life of the race—sin, in all its forms and degrees, he felt to be the most terrible of realities. No one who knew him intimately could fail to perceive it. He sometimes referred, half wonderingly, half sadly, to the experience of a friend of his who once asked him what theologians meant by “original sin”:—“I cannot understand what they mean,” he said, “I have never been conscious of any inclination to do what I knew to be wrong.” The fact of original sin presented no difficulty to Dale. He knew only too well the unremitting energy of moral evil, and the incessant struggle against its malignant power. Altogether apart from any special incentive, he would never have dealt lightly with the baser elements in human character and conduct; and anxiety to avert any moral degeneracy in those who had accepted the new doctrine intensified his natural antipathy to evil. At times his denunciation of sin was overwhelming in its force. He never stormed; but his wrath, as it grew, glowed with passion at a white heat. It swept on in waves of living fire. It seemed to scorch, to shrivel, to consume. And if it was not often that he let indignation break into flame, there was always a certain austerity—it might even be called harshness—in his moral judgment, which strongly contrasted with his charitable temper in dealing with individual offenders; though even with them his sternness, when provoked, could be terrible.1 [Note: The Life of R. W. Dale, 314. (2) It is impossible to have any adequate sense of sin without a great conception of God. It was because the Hebrew prophets saw God to be high and lifted up that they felt themselves to be sinners. I “am but dust and ashes,” says Abraham. “Behold, I am vile; I will lay my hand upon my mouth,” says Job. “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips,” says Isaiah. All the great Hebrews, from Abraham to John the Baptist, lie with their faces in the dust, crying, “God be merciful to me a sinner!” Where in any literature will you find a poem like the Fifty-first Psalm? “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight.” “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me.” The man who wrote that is a Shakespeare in the realm of spiritual expression.2 [Note: C. E. Jefferson, Things Fundamental, 234. (3) The world thinks that the Church makes much ado about little. Men of the world cannot see that sin is terrible, or that it needs to be shunned or feared. Men sometimes confess in a jocose tone that they are sinners; they confess their sinfulness between loud bursts of laughter. One would think from their behaviour that sinning is a joke. Every generation has brought forth its host of writers who have endeavoured to persuade the world that sin is nothing but a trifle, a straw that some happy wind will some day blow away. Or they make it out a form of immaturity, an imperfection, a crudity, a greenness, a rawness, a pardonable ignorance which will certainly be outgrown. “You do not blame the apple tree in the early spring because the blossoms are not full blown. Give the tree sufficient time, and the apples will be forthcoming.” All depends on our maintaining the inviolability of the will; and for finite beings a will is no will which cannot choose evil. If —— admits that, but says that the continued rebellion of any is irreconcilable with the triumph of God’s will and love, then I say that the present rebellion of any is likewise inconsistent with the same. While that awful fact of sin is staring you in the face, you cannot weave theories for the future that will hold water, except by the German dodge of refining sin into a lesser kind of necessary good, which is the very devil.1 [Note: Life and Letters of Fenton J. A. Hort, i. 326. One night some years ago in a University town there was a meeting of the White Cross Society. The meeting was over, one of the members had argued that sin was not natural, and at the close one of the medical professors, gathering a group of students around him, said, “That’s gammon! The sin you have heard of to-night is natural,” and the students to a man hissed him out of the room.2 [Note: George Adam Smith, The Life of Henry Drummond, 471. I said to Heart, “How goes it?” Heart replied: “Right as a Ribstone Pippin!” But it lied.3 [Note: H. Belloc, Verses, 81. (4) According to Jesus, there is nothing terrible in the world but sin. It is the thing to be shunned, feared, hated. If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out; it is better to lose an eye than to do wrong. If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off; it is better to have no right hand than to do wrong. Beware how you tempt others to sin; it were better that a millstone should be hanged about a man’s neck, and that the man should be cast into the midst of the sea, than that he should cause a human being to do wrong. That is not the language which we are apt to use, nor is it the feeling which is in our hearts. Many of us would commit a score of sins, rather than lose an eye or a hand. But to the mind of Jesus no loss which may come to the body is to be compared with the loss which comes to the soul by breaking the law of God. “Joy,” He said, “shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth.” This feeling of Jesus was communicated to His disciples. His Apostles go to work with unflagging earnestness to root out the sins of men. Whenever St. Paul writes of sin, his language becomes terribly earnest and intense. Sin to him is no shadow, it is an awful reality. He speaks to his converts in words which sound like the blast of a bugle. “Put on the whole armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” It could not have been a trifle that started the great drops of blood from the body of Jesus Christ in Gethsemane, or that caused Him His exceeding sorrow on the tree. Great natures cannot weep blood but on great occasions. There must, then, have been something terrible about this moral putrescence which is called sin. It was no speck on the surface; it was poison in the blood. The tones heard at Golgotha are not the harsh tones of vengeance; there is no scream of fury; no thunder of cursing; there is a wail of sorrow, deep, loud, long, as if the very heart of God had broken. It is the agony of love; it is the paroxysm of a lacerated and dying spirit. It was love that had failed in life, determined to succeed in death. It was dying innocence struggling with dead guilt.1 [Note: J. Parker.] 2. The sin of the world.—The word “world” is one of St. John’s words. It appears on almost every page of his writings. It Stands out prominently both in his Gospel and in his Epistles. What, then, was his conception of the world? There are two words in Scripture used to denote the world There is the word “kosmos.” This means the world under the condition of space. There is the word “æon,” which means the world under the condition of time. The latter word is translated sometimes “age” or “epoch” or “dispensation,” and it is this word that is used and never the other when the end of the world is spoken of. But the other word “kosmos” is the word referred to here. What is its meaning? Its first and earliest meaning is the sum total of material things, their order, their beauty, symmetry, law. But this world is never represented as sinful, only as unmoral. Then into this framework of kosmos man is set. It was made for him. It was kept in existence for him, and so the world comes to mean, next, the material universe of which man is the moral centre. Then it comes to be applied to the men themselves, the sum total of humanity who live and move and have their being in this material framework. But man takes the world and uses it without reference to the Giver. He was put into it as a steward, but instead of faithfully recognizing the true owner, he appropriates the proceeds for his own purposes. Hence comes the next idea of the world. It is humanity separated from God. From separation the next step is easy. It is hostility. Thus the last stage of the world is humanity separated, hostile, rebellious against God. That is sin. That is the sin of the world. (1) The view of the Baptist embraces the human race. His words are that the Lamb of God “taketh away the sin of the world”; that is, the whole enormous mass of iniquity which is in the world, which burdens and blights the world; the sin of which original depravity is as it were the root, vicious habits the branches, thoughts, words, and deeds of impiety and injustice the leaves and fruits. John knew very well the sin of the nation. He had seen unreality and formalism in the religious circles of his day, the scandalous life of Herod, and the terrible effect of such examples upon public morality. He had seen the moral indifference of the Herodian, whom nothing could rouse to contend for the principles on which life is based. He had come in close contact with admitted and regretted sin. He had been roused to indignation, to sorrow, moved to pity, knowing that his brother-men had sought for happiness along the paths which end in misery. But from the sin of a nation he rose to a yet more overwhelming thought, which was the sin of the world. All the collective evil of mankind; the burden of inherited evil from which our Lord alone is exempt; the vast innumerable multitude of personal sins from the first rebellion at Eden down to the last evil deed which humanity shall commit: the ghastly retinue of the passions and selfishness of mankind. All holiness and gentleness work for the world’s redemption within their appointed field. A refined and loving soul, though without the gifts that attract the attention of the world, takes away the sin of a home or neighbourhood. But the power over men which we describe as greatness extends the influence more widely. The purity and gentleness of Jesus might have been hidden away in the little town of Nazareth, and have been an unseen ripple in the great ocean of the world’s affairs. He was, however, not only the Lamb of God, but as He is described elsewhere, “the lion of the tribe of Judah.” Like the monarch of the forest, He had strength. He had that power of command over men which, for good or evil, influences the world. His power was acknowledged and proved by the bitterness of His enemies; and when He was lifted up from the earth, He drew the eyes of nations, and became a beacon-light for succeeding centuries. And to this day His holiness and gentleness are the mightiest power that we know for taking away the sin of the world. It may still be long before the brute powers are dethroned and the reign of humanity is established, but never was the rule of Christ’s spirit higher than it is to-day.1 [Note: J. Drummond, Johannine Thoughts, 29. (2) Perhaps what appeals more forcibly to the sensitiveness of the present age is the suffering of the world, the burden of the anguish which rests upon mankind. And indeed in its collective mass it is, if viewed apart from Calvary, a terrible enigma. And yet incomparably more awful to a conscience really enlightened by penitence and faith would be the appalling, the overwhelming idea of “the sin of the world.” That thought has rested with almost intolerable weight upon some of the saintliest of mankind. It rested that day upon St. John. There was laughter in my father’s hall, Mirth in my mothers bower, When One crept silently up by the wall In the dim, dull, twilight hour. How did he pass the faithful guard Who watch both long and late? Did he steal through the window strongly barred, Or slipped he in by the gate? What is the name of this fearful guest, Sorrow or Shame or Sin? I cannot tell, but I know no rest Since his dread form came in.2 [Note: Margaret Blaikie, Songs by the Way, 29. (3) It is not the sins but the sin of the world. The sin of the world, of which the various sins are so many branches and manifestations, is the world’s apostasy and alienation from the living God; the two great evils connected going into one—that, we have forsaken Jehovah, the fountain of living waters, and have hewn out to ourselves broken cisterns that can hold no water. “Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law.” And the law of God is one—multitudes of commandments, but one in its principle, its principle being love to God, and love to all created beings for God’s sake. It is one, as flowing all from the same essential purity, justice, and universal moral good—the Divine nature. In what does the sin of the world essentially consist? It consists in omitting God from its life. It consists in forgetting, ignoring, denying, defying God. Get hold of that truth, and never let it go. The Bible never wavers in representing this as the essence and origin of all sin. We sometimes speak of sin as drunkenness, or lust, or murder, or theft, or covetousness, or lying. These are rather crimes or vices. They are related to sin as the fruit is related to the tree, or the plant is related to the root. They are not so much sin as the last fruitage of sin. Sin itself lies deeper. It lies in “an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God.”1 [Note: R. Waddell, Behold the Lamb of God, 123. Says Drummond: The whole of a man’s nature is built up, I might say, of cells. One after another, good and bad, all things have become part of him. His sins have made sin a part of him. That unkind thing you say or do makes you an unkind character. That selfish thing you do makes you selfish, pure and holy and noble thoughts are turned out, and you become an animal. Paul says, “Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from this dead body?” Chained as they were in those dark dungeons of the East, if one prisoner died he was left chained to the man next him.… “This dead body”—it was Sin. But, gentlemen, we are making dead bodies with our own hands and lives: cell by cell we become dead. Sin is a part of one, and the end of these things is death, and all of a sudden some morning we awake and say, “Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this dead body?”2 [Note: The Life of Henry Drummond, 478. Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin—a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or not man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere Materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.3 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.] I still, to suppose it true, for my part, See reasons and reasons; this, to begin: ’Tis the faith that launched point-blank her dart At the head of a lie—taught Original Sin, The Corruption of Man’s Heart.1 [Note: Browning, Gold Hair.] II The Lamb of God 1. In the conception of Jesus as the Lamb of God, to be offered in expiation of human transgressions, the religious genius of the Baptist reaches (if the expression may be used) its high-water mark. So intense was his appreciation of the real significance of moral evil that he saw that while the utmost a guilty soul can do is to repent, yet more is necessary in the counsels of God if forgiveness is to become a full possibility. There must be the actual removal of human guilt through the self-oblation of the Christ. It was a great venture of thought, even although there was that in the literature of the Old Testament which pointed the way. Here and there in Israel there must have been natures—Simeon’s seems to have been one of them—which were capable of recognizing the justice and force of such an anticipation; but it was very different with the almost universal sentiment of the nation. St. John stood nearly by himself in his realization of the profound truth. Flesh and blood had not revealed it unto him. 2. It has sometimes been asked and debated, To which of the lambs of sacrifice, ordained in the Old Testament, did the Baptist here refer; to which did he liken that immaculate Lamb, who, being without spot and stain, should take away our spots and stains, and bear the collective sin of the world? Did St. John allude to the daily lamb of the morning and evening sacrifice? or was it to the lamb of the passover, commemorating the old deliverance from Egypt? or was it to some other of the many lambs which were prescribed in the law of Moses, as a portion of the ritual of sacrifice appointed there? The question is surely a superfluous one. The reference is not special, but comprehensive. It is to none of these in particular, being indeed to them all. They severally set forth in type and in figure some part of that which He fulfilled in substance and in life; in Him, not now a lamb of men, but the Lamb of God, being at length fulfilled to the uttermost the significant word of Abraham, “God will provide himself a lamb.” (1) One thing that was associated with the lamb in the sacrifices of which it was the centre was innocence. Innocence belongs conceivably to two stages of life. We speak of the innocence of a child. We do not mean, if we understand our words, that he is free from sin. We mean that he has not yet actually done wrong. But in the case of Christ, we mean something more than that. As children emerge into manhood, innocence passes, and it is one of the sore regrets of life that it comes back no more. You remember the beautiful sonnet in which Charles Lamb utters his grief for the loss of innocence— We were two pretty babes; the youngest she— The youngest, and the loveliest far (I ween), And innocence her name. The time has been We two did love each other’s company; Time was we two had wept to have been apart. But when by show of seeming good beguiled, I left the garb and manners of a child, And my first love for man’s society, Defiling with the world my virgin heart— My lov’d companion dropt a tear, and fled, And hid in deepest shades her awful head. Beloved, who shall tell me, where thou art, In what delicious Eden to be found? That I may seek thee, the wide world round. Now, that was the test that Christ never needed. Why? Because He never lost innocence. He went down among the sins and temptations of life, but He came out of them pure and unsoiled. We call tried innocence holiness. Christ was sinless. That is the marvel of this Lamb of God. The animal was innocent, but it was an untried and unmoral innocence. This Lamb is not only innocent, but also perfectly holy. Make no mistake as to what we call by the name of virtue. It is the generous force of life. Virtue is not an innocent. We adore Divine innocence, but it is not of all ages and all conditions; it is not ready for all encounters. It protects itself against the snares of nature and of man. Innocence fears everything, virtue fears nothing. Virtue can, if it be necessary, plunge with a sublime impurity into the depths of misery to console it, into every vice to recover it. It knows what the great human task is, and that it is sometimes necessary to soil one’s hands.1 [Note: Anatole France, On Life and Letters, 291. (2) The second point about the lamb was its gentleness. It is the perfect type of meek, uncomplaining suffering. Christ’s gentleness was wonderful. It was wonderful because it was not the outcome either of necessity or of weakness. A person is sometimes tolerant because he is morally indifferent. He manifests no anger or passion because he does not feel or see wrong But with Christ it was not so. His gentleness was not the outcome of insensibility, of a mere ignorant good-nature. His holiness made it impossible for Him to be ignorant of sin, made it inevitable that He should see sin with clearer eyes than the sinner himself. Neither was it born from necessity. People are sometimes gentle because they must. They endure and suffer in silence because they say, “Well, we cannot help it; it is best to be quiet and resigned.” That was not Christ’s case either. The assumption of the New Testament is that Christ could help it; that He had only to speak, and legions of angels would leap to His command. This beautiful figure reveals the kind of impression which Jesus made by His simple presence. The lamb is an emblem of innocence and gentleness, as Spenser says: And by her in a line a milke-white lamb she led So pure and innocent, as that same lambe, She was in life and every vertuous lore. Innocence in a moral agent is not the mere absence of guilt, but reaches the positive rank of purity, or, higher still, of holiness. This holiness in Himself and gentleness towards others marked Jesus out as God’s own Lamb, a man Divine in purity and love, and therefore the “beloved Son” of God. So much might well be apparent to the searching glance of sympathy and a prophet’s power of reading the heart. But the succeeding words disclose a deeper insight, and give utterance to a grand truth. Holiness and gentleness are the redeeming powers of the world, and these two great powers have wrought in Christendom from that day to this. The men and women who have lifted the burden of the world’s sin have always been the saints who have washed their robes white in the blood of the Lamb, or, in less figurative language, have imbibed His spirit of holiness and gentleness, and with their own peace have lulled the storms of passion, and with their own purity have sweetened the fountains of life. The holiness of Christ awakens the sense of sin, while we see that that is the true life of man, and our own hearts look black against that bright illumination. And then His gentleness saves us from despair. Were there nothing but condemnation and scorn, no sympathy, no tender pity, we could not bear that holiness, and could only abandon ourselves as lost. But when it comes with such soothing and loving accents, we are drawn within its folds, and purified in its purity. “Thy gentleness has made me great.” The maxim of the world, and too often of the Church, has been that violence and revenge take away the sin of the world. But it is not so. These only harden and degrade, whereas love melts the heart, and gives a new and conquering motive in an answering love. In this soul-subduing love we recognize that which is heavenly and eternal. The Lamb of God manifests the holiness and the gentleness of God. And so our fear is cast out; and, lowly and contrite, we draw near, and are folded in the bosom of our Father, and receive the grace of sonship.1 [Note: J. Drummond, Johannine Thoughts, 28. A lamb is innocent and mild And merry on the soft green sod; And Jesus Christ, the Undefiled, Is the Lamb of God: Only spotless He Upon His Mother’s knee; White and ruddy, soon to be Sacrificed for you and me. Nay, lamb is not so sweet a word, Nor lily half so pure a name; Another name our hearts hath stirred, Kindling them to flame: “Jesus” certainly Is music and melody: Heart with heart in harmony Carol we and worship we.2 [Note: C. G. Rossetti, Poems, 158. When the great Father came to unveil Himself in the person of His Son, it was a life of Divine gentleness that came to earth. Jesus was the incarnation of gentleness. When He was reviled He reviled not again. There never was a life so mild and yet so firm and strong. Munkacsy, in his famous picture of “Christ before Pilate,” has thrown this Divine trait into the face and figure of Christ. All around is strife, hatred, unrest, but in the centre stands the King of majesty and love with the gentleness of another world upon Him. They spit upon Him, they taunt Him, they crown Him with thorns, but He is still the “Lamb of God.” Even on the cross this greatness abides, as the Saviour reaches the sublimest and Divinest moment of His passion with the prayer: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”1 [Note: J. I. Vance, Royal Manhood, 53. (3) But what was in St. John’s mind when he uttered these words was not so much the character of the Lamb—innocence, holiness, sinlessness, gentleness—it was death. It is beyond all doubt that he connected Christ with the sacrifices of the old dispensation. Here at last they found their fulfilment. Here at last the type was completed in the antitype. The Lamb is no unwilling victim. That was the weak spot in all preceding sacrifices. The creature went to death reluctantly. It was forced to its doom. Therefore its death in itself had no moral significance. But the remarkable thing about the death of the Lamb of God is that it is purely voluntary. From very early in His career Christ saw where He was going. It was no blind groping that ended accidentally or necessarily in the cross. He carried the cross on His heart long before it was laid on His shoulders. There are various types of death. There is the death of the good, the death when the soul surrenders itself into the hands of God. There is another kind of death. It is the death of Gordon of Khartum, the death of the hero. There is a third. Literature has never forgotten Socrates in the Agora of Athens. It is a beautiful scene. The Grecian sage has been sentenced to death on a false charge. He is to be his own executioner, and the great old man talks calmly to his disciples, settles his earthly affairs, says good-bye to one after another, then takes the cup of poison and drinks it, and all is over. Or yet, once more, yonder in a Chinese town a Chinese Christian sinks beneath the stones of the mob. “Are you sorry?” asks the missionary. “Sorry! Oh no,” he says. “How glad! Only sorry that I have done so little for Jesus.” These are the types of death as the world gives them. They are the deaths of the good, the heroic, the sage, the martyr. Christ’s was not like any of these. Or rather it takes up and comprehends all these. There is one thing common to them all. They had to be. But Christ’s was predicted. Christ’s was foreseen. Christ’s was deliberately accepted. Death did not choose Him. He chose death. He met it at the trysting-place where He and not death determined, and He went to the cross, though legions of angels were waiting to bear Him away from it. That makes His death unique in the world.1 [Note: R. Waddell,] 3. He is the Lamb of God. For He is provided by God. But the Lamb of God does not mean merely a Lamb appointed or ordained by God. The words have reference to an abiding element in God Himself. The Lamb of God belongs as much to the eternal essence of God as His glory, His righteousness, His truth, and His love. And for us, and perhaps for all worlds, this is the most wonderful and entrancing name of all. The highest praise we can offer to God is to sing, “Worthy is the Lamb!” Put emphasis on the words, “of God.” There you strike the distinctive feature of this sacrifice, and of the religion which it created. The difference between Christianity and all other religions lies in these two words. In other religions man provides his sacrifice for his god. In Christianity God provides the sacrifice for man. Christ comes forth out of the heart of God. Shall we not indeed say He is God? Here is where a devastating error has crept in. Men have talked and written as if somehow God and Christ were divided, as if somehow Christ propitiated God, and won Him the mercy. Nowhere in Scripture is there any such statement made. It is a heathen importation. Men are heard saying, “Oh, God will do nothing for us. Our only hope is in Christ.” What a dreadful travesty of the truth! God and Christ are one in this supreme work. The Father sends the Son, and the Son issues forth gladly out of the Father’s heart. The two are an absolute unity in working out man’s salvation. Here is the everlasting proof of the love of God. Men say God is loving, and therefore He does not need to be propitiated. The New Testament says, “God is love,” and therefore He Himself provides a propitiation. III The Lamb and the Sin 1. “Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!” What precisely do these words mean? In the margin of the ordinary version we read, “beareth away” the sin of the world; and in that of the Revised Version it is given simply, “beareth the sin.” But perhaps the full significance of the word is to be had by the union of both the textual and the marginal renderings, for the term in the original is the equivalent of a Hebrew word, which sometimes denotes the bearing of the punishment of sin, and sometimes the making of expiation for sin; and so, as Alford remarks, “it will in our verse bear either of these meanings, or both conjoined, for if the Lamb is to suffer the burden of the sins of the world, and is to take away sin and its guilt by expiation, this result must be accomplished by the offering of himself.” (1) The simplest meaning of the word is to lift, and this is also the simplest consciousness of liberation from sin. Man, unable to free himself from the fatal burden, feels it lifted from heart and conscience by the redeeming hand of God. Trust in God is not the product of profound doctrinal understanding, but the expression of the felt need of casting our infirmity and sin on the strength and grace of God. The beginning of the soul’s redemption is the discovery that we ourselves cannot overcome sin, but that we can safely leave it all with the boundless love and mercy of God. (2) The second phase in the meaning of the word is to bear. The Divine Saviour who “lifts” the sin from our aching hearts bears it on His own. This is the substance of the great act and process of atonement, which is the centre of the Christian faith, and in its inexhaustible import both the joy and the despair of the human understanding. It is related, on the one hand, to the inviolable righteousness and truth and love of God, and, on the other, to the vital union of the Divine life with the life of humanity. It is therefore at one and the same time the fulfilment of the Divine righteousness and the working of redemptive energy in the lives of men. The Cross is not an isolated thing, but the sacrificial life of the Son of God interwoven with the red fibres of the human spirit. (3) The last phase of meaning in the word is to bear away. This ends the succession in the line of grace. The Saviour lifts the sin of the world; He bears the sin of the world; He bears away the sin of the world. The beginning of redemption is liberation from the weight of sin; the completion of redemption is everlasting separation from the power of sin. The Sin-bearer bears away our sin, and we are thrall to it no longer. It can never return to condemn us. He has borne it past all the measureless abysses of death and Hades, and overwhelmed it in the glory of His resurrection. This is the salvation of our God. We are risen with the Risen Christ. Old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. 2. The saving power of the Cross of Christ is no theory; it is a fact. The sign of shame and guilt has become the sign of faith and hope. The instrument of torture and death, defiled and loathed and hated, has been lifted out of the gloom and horror of sin, transfigured, crowned with honour and victory, and planted for ever on the hill of salvation. The eyes of the world turn to the Cross of Christ. Fainting, despairing, dying, bound in the prison-houses of crime, crushed under the load of transgressions, parched and burning with the fever of life, from every place of sorrow and suffering and darkness, the lost children of men are looking to the Cross with speechless longing, and feeling its blessed power with unutterable joy. Do you want to know how it is possible? What if I could not tell? You want to go by the cable cars. Can you explain the force that draws them? Will you wait until you understand the nature of steam and the machinery it uses before you trust yourself to them? You want to use the telegraph to send a message of sympathy or a sum of money to a relative who is in sorrow or want. Do you comprehend the nature of the electric fluid that is waiting to run with your message, and will you delay sending it until you do? You are hungry or thirsty, dying for want of food or drink. Here are both. Will you refuse them till you comprehend the chemical constituents of water, or the means by which the grain from the hillside is turned into the bread that delivers from starvation? Is the experience of others, hundreds of thousands, not enough to assure you in venturing although you do not understand all? “Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!” That is the Gospel. That is the good news from heaven. It comes as an offer, as a gift. It is ours only to put aside prejudice, and unwillingness, and indifference, and embrace the offer and receive the gift. This is what amazed the Son of God, that men dying should refuse the means of life, that men under the guilt and bondage of sin should decline deliverance. Their unbelief filled Him with dismay. Let it not be said of any of us as of those of old, “He marvelled at their unbelief.” For unbelief seals us up in sin, and delivers us to the death eternal, from which the Son of God came to set us free.1 [Note: R. Waddell, Behold the Lamb of God, 134. 3. How the death of Christ upon the Cross is an atonement for the sins of the whole world is a complete mystery to us; but that it is so we know from revelation. All sin, upon repentance, is made as though it had never been by virtue of this sacrifice; it is cancelled, done away with. “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” What an astonishing result! What a miracle of power and mercy! Here is accomplished all that man has yearned for, and so ineffectually striven after—the compensation, the atonement for sin. His wish is accomplished, though he cannot understand how. The atonement, when it has come, is a mystery; but he knows that it is made, that something has been done in heaven by which sin has been cancelled. He knows that there has been a great reconciliation, a great restoration. He does not see this, but he apprehends it by faith. The various aspects of this mysterious atoning sacrifice emerge in constant succession throughout this Gospel, even before the narrative of the Passion begins. To Nathanael, in those earliest days of all, is whispered the mysterious prophecy of a new Bethel vision. The Person of the Son of Man is to be a fresh medium of access, a new ladder of communication between earth and an opened heaven. To Nicodemus the Son of Man is revealed as the antitype of Moses’ brazen serpent, lifted up for the saving of those who will look to Him. Meanwhile a still more mysterious utterance has been given to those scandalized by His fierce cleansing of the Temple courts, an utterance which not even the most intimate understood till long afterwards. But St. John is determined that his readers shall understand it, there, in its place, and shall know that thus early the Master was conscious of that supreme trial through which His body had to pass, and of His own inner power to transform death into victory. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The same thought again underlies His clear consciousness of the murderous intention of the Jews, recorded in the earlier contests from the fifth chapter to the eighth, and is concentrated in the teaching of the sixth chapter and the tenth. The sacrificial language of the Fourth Gospel is matched, as we might expect, by that of the First Epistle, here as elsewhere fulfilling the function of an inspired commentary on the writer’s earlier work. Thus, in the first chapter, it is declared that the blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin those who in communion with Him are walking in the light. In the second, “Jesus Christ the righteous” is set forth as at once Advocate and Propitiation concerning the sins, not merely of a limited circle of privileged ones, but “of the whole world.” Later on in the same chapter, and again in those that follow it, we are told of a mutual indwelling, wherein the believer attains to that mystic union with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which is the ultimate end of all sacrifice—that true and only eternal Life; so that we are prepared for the clear teaching of the final chapter, where, in the uncompromising language of the beloved disciple, it is proclaimed that “He that hath the Son hath the life; he that hath not the Son of God hath not the life.” I have felt that to understand the Passion one must be one’s self, as it were, God infinite, and able to comprehend the love and the agony of an infinite nature. This sight, of all I look upon, alone has power to arrest my heart. It seems foreign to the order in which I am at present moving, yet it is friendly, familiar to some inner instinct, as if it were native to a kingdom in which I had once moved.1 [Note: Dora Greenwell.] 4. There are, however, certain principles which we can hardly mistake, if we listen either to the voice of Scripture, or to the voice of the Church, or to the voice of our own moral reason—voices which speak in true concord more frequently than is sometimes supposed. (1) The first principle which is thus guaranteed to us is that the Death of Christ was not only efficacious by way of example, or because of its influence on the minds of those who think of it, but objectively, in itself, and in relation to the law of righteousness. It is quite true that it is the supremest example of self-sacrifice that the world has witnessed, quite true that the message of the Cross has had power to convince of sin and to lead men to holiness, solely from the pathetic pleading of the love of which it tells. But it is impossible to reconcile the words of Scripture with a theory which goes no farther than this, or to understand the moral necessity for the awful victory of the Cross, if nothing more than this be true. (2) On the other hand, the word “punishment” is not used in the New Testament of the Death of Christ. His Atonement is never there described as a punishment of the innocent instead of the guilty, though it has been so described by careless readers of Scripture. That is a conception which is repugnant to all our notions of justice, and it is foreign to the teaching of the Gospels. Punishment can be justly inflicted only on the offender himself. Certainly it does not follow that only the guilty suffer in consequence of their sin. Every day’s experience convinces us of the contrary. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children; “the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” But that is not to say that the Almighty punishes the children for what was no fault of theirs; it is rather to say that we are all linked together by bonds so close in one great brotherhood that, “if one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.” It may be said that this makes no difference as to the pain entailed upon the innocent; but surely it makes a wide difference in our conception of the justice of the Supreme Orderer of men’s lives, whether we regard Him as the immediate Author of that pain, or whether we look on it as an inevitable consequence of the unity of mankind and of the warfare against good inspired by the wayward wills of men. To ask that it should be otherwise is to ask that man should not be man, should have been created other than he is. The innocent is not punished instead of the guilty; and so it is not said in the New Testament that Christ was punished instead of man. It is said that He suffered because of man, for the sake of man, that the sin which man commits every hour issued in His Passion. Ghastliest of all misconceptions ever put before this city or any other is the assertion that the doctrine of the Atonement implies, first, that an innocent being is made guilty in the sense of being personally blameworthy; and, secondly, that that innocent being is punished in the sense of suffering pain for personal ill-desert. Both these propositions all clear thought discards, all religious science condemns. We have no doctrine of the Atonement which declares that personal demerit is laid upon our Lord, or that, in the strict sense of the word, He suffered punishment—that is, pain inflicted for personal blameworthiness. He had no personal blameworthiness. He was an innocent being, as He always will be; and never did, can, or will suffer punishment, in the strict sense of the word.1 [Note: Joseph Cook, Monday Lectures, i. 151. (3) Once more, the Death of Jesus is not represented in the New Testament as the cause of the love of God. It is its effect, its outcome. It is a parody of the Gospel to speak of Christ’s having, as it were, purchased by His eath God’s love for man. For “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.” I recollect particularly well an answer he gave once in private conversation to the question, “Do you believe that the sacrifice of Christ is the essential and basal thing in the Christian religion?” The interrogator desired an answer, Yes or No. It was at the time when Drummond’s position was being assailed from almost every quarter. I shall not soon forget the slow, deliberate reply: “Then my answer must be No.” The questioner remarked that it was satisfactory to have such a plain answer. But there was in store for him something which probably made matters plainer still: “If I may venture a supplementary remark,” said Drummond, “I would say that in my opinion the sacrifice of Christ is a part of the very essence of Christianity, but the basis of Christianity is the eternal love of God.”2 [Note: George Adam Smith, The Life of Henry Drummond, 335. (4) And, lastly, such a conception as that of a Martyr Prophet suffering in innocence instead of sinners who had to share in his sorrow and his pain would be demoralizing to man himself. It would cut at the root of personal responsibility. But the doctrine of the Incarnation has been only half learnt if we have not understood that Christ claimed to be, not only in word, but in fact, the Representative and the Recapitulation of all men. It was in the name of the race whose nature He assumed that He confessed the guilt of sin, on their behalf that He suffered the inevitable consequence of sin. He “tasted death for every man.” He drank the cup to the dregs. Even alienation from the Divine love was felt by Him at last. “My God,” He cried, “why hast thou forsaken me?” Herein was the law of righteousness fulfilled. Writing to Westcott, Hort says: I entirely agree with what you say on the Atonement, having for many years believed that “the absolute union of the Christian (or rather, of man) with Christ Himself” is the spiritual truth of which the popular doctrine of substitution is an immoral and material counterfeit.1 [Note: Life and Letters of Fenton J. A. Hort, i. 430. The Lamb of God Literature Alexander (J. A.), The Gospel of Jesus Christ, 48. Banks (L. A.), Christ and His Friends, 27. Bernard (J. H.), Via Domini, 124. Bowen (W. E.), Parochial Sermons, 110. Duncan (J.), In the Pulpit and at the Communion Table, 442, 462. Flint (R.), Sermons and Addresses, 197. Jefferson (C. E.), Things Fundamental, 225. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John i.–viii. 40. Mozley (J. B.), Sermons Parochial and Occasional, 130. Newbolt (W. C. E.), The Gospel Message, 51. Perowne (E. H.), The Godhead of Jesus, 83. Ragg (L.), Christ and our Ideals, 131. Simpson (W. J. S.), The Prophet of the Highest, 139. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxxiii. (1887) No. 1, 987; lvi. (1910) No. 3, 222. Taylor (W. M.), The Silence of Jesus, 17. Thomas (J.), The Dynamic of the Cross, 86. Trench (R. C.), Sermons in Westminster Abbey, 163. Van Dyke (H.), The Reality of Religion, 99. Waddell (R.), Behold the Lamb of God, 107, 121. Webb-Peploe (H. W.), Calls to Holiness, 11. Biblical World, xxxvii. 30 (Robinson). Christian World Pulpit, xxxvi. 233 (Symes); xxxix. 75 (Peyton); xli. 251 (Abbott); lxx. 74 (Silvester); lxxviii. 241 (Selbie). Personal Service One of the two that heard John speak, and followed him, was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He findeth first his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, We have found the Messiah (which is, being interpreted, Christ). He brought him unto Jesus.—John 1:40-42. According to St. John’s narrative, Andrew and John (who characteristically does not name himself in the narrative) were the first men who heard and responded to the Master’s call, the first whom He enlisted in His little cohort of disciples. They had previously been followers of John the Baptist; but one day as Christ passed by they heard that prophet speak of Him as the Lamb of God, and they looked into His face and felt some wonderful attraction drawing them to Him, and all uninvited they followed and abode with Him one day. What Christ did with them and what He said on that day we know not, but it removed every doubt from their minds if any doubt had lingered there. It was a day of revelation, a day of grace, the most wonderful and the happiest day that these men had yet known, for they had found the Saviour of the world. And then we have this incident recorded. Andrew had no sooner made his great discovery, than he burned to impart the secret to others. Quickly therefore he sought his own brother Simon and passed on the glad tidings—“We have found the Christ,” and “he brought him to Jesus.” Here, then, we have to deal with (1) a great discovery, (2) a great enthusiasm kindled by that discovery, and (3) a great service accomplished as the result of the enthusiasm. This is one of the famous personal work chapters. There are three “findeths” in it. Andrew findeth his brother Peter. That was a great find. John in his modesty does not speak of it, but in all likelihood he findeth James his brother. Jesus findeth Philip, and Philip in turn findeth Nathanael, the guileless Man 1:1 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Service, 27. I A Great Discovery “We have found the Messiah.” 1. It was a great day in the life of Andrew when he uttered these words. It was a great day also in the life of the race, for he announced to his brother, Peter, a discovery fraught with importance far beyond his own comprehension. (1) “We have found.” They had been looking for Him. The Jews were the nation of hope. Both Andrew and Peter, we may be sure, had heard of the Messiah, the hope of Israel, all their lives. From the earliest antiquity, down through the centuries of the tragic, chequered, strange career of this extraordinary people, there had presented itself, with varying degrees of distinctness, the hope of a Coming One who would be the source of great, although for many centuries undefined, blessings. They had been taught as children, as young men, to put the precious promises of Scripture together, just as nowadays family treasures are taken out and scanned, and arranged and re-arranged, and put back again, from time to time. These promises were the splendid inheritance of the great Jewish family, carried by it everywhere in its sufferings—carried by it throughout the civilized world; and the Galilean peasants, like all others of the race of Israel, felt that they were ennobled by having a share in this great possession. How much that we cannot even understand, in this age of the world, was gathered into those pregnant words: “We have found the Messiah.” (2) “The Messiah (which is, being interpreted, Christ).” What did Andrew mean when he said “Christ”? In the thought of the best men of that time the word “Christ” set forth a Heaven-commissioned Prince, the Deliverer of the oppressed people, who should lead His followers to dignity, freedom, and happiness, and in whom all the nations of the earth should be blessed. This indeed Christ fulfilled, though not in the way Andrew imagined when he ran to Peter with his great discovery. For to the popular conception of the Christ our Lord added the momentous fact that the Messianic goal was to be reached by suffering, humiliation, and death, and that His supreme duty as the Anointed of God was to give Himself up for the race that rejected Him. (3) How did Andrew find out Jesus to be the Messiah? There is no reason to think that Jesus told him so. The more carefully we study our Lord’s own words about Himself, the more convinced we shall be that He made no such revelation to an inquiring disciple at this early period. He had seen no miracles to convince him, for it is not till the next chapter that we hear of Christ’s first miracle. As far as we can judge, every sign of outward power was wanting; for all he could see, Jesus might be the weakest and the most helpless of mankind. What was it then that led him to speak so confidently to Peter? Surely it must have been, first, the effect of Christ’s unutterable goodness; and, secondly, that of Christ’s inward power, the power of spirit over spirit. Good men, no doubt, as we commonly call men good, he had seen and known before, as almost all of us have done; but here was One whose deep and perfect goodness made Andrew feel as if he were in the presence of God Himself. His own heart was sound and right enough to know the true marks of One come from God. (4) But when Andrew spoke thus, he knew little of the real Christ. During the next three years he was to be continually finding Christ. He found Him anew in the Sermon on the Mount. He grew larger to his thought as he saw Him heal the sick, teach the inquiring, forgive the sinning. He grew still mightier as he watched Him feed the thousands, still the storm, and raise the dead. And the Christ in the upper room, in Gethsemane, and on Calvary, towered still higher above the Christ to whom he introduced his brother, and was in turn surpassed by the Christ of the Resurrection morning and the Ascension Mount. It is a red-letter day in any man’s life when he finds Christ, but that is only the beginning of his religious life. From that point we “follow on to know the Lord.” 2. To-day our Lord is living and working among us, revealing His glory and manifesting His power, to a far greater degree than when He trod the plains of Galilee, or taught in the Temple courts. But of this the majority of men are little conscious. The need of our times is for men and women who can say with the conviction of Andrew, “We have found the Christ.” Amidst the perplexities of our modern life, there is a cry for those who can speak with certainty of Divine things. It was the peerless personality of the Son of God that first attracted Andrew, and made him declare to Peter the discovery he had made. And the same attraction is operating to-day. Men are not won by beliefs about Christ, but by Christ Himself. (1) If we would find Christ, we must be looking for Him, and preparing for Him. God taught His own chosen people for whole generations. He taught them about the Messiah, who He would be, what He would do, preparing by His messengers the way before Him; and the consequence of all that steady, systematic teaching was that, when the fulness of the time was come, and one brother said to another, “We have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write,” they had not to ask who was meant; they took all their old religious knowledge and religious teaching in their hand and went to Jesus, and found Him to be all that they had learnt He would be. And so with our teaching of religious truth; we teach the history of Christ, and His sermons and His parables and His miracles; and we teach, laboriously perhaps, and in the sweat of our brow, the meaning of His Word and of His Sacraments. It is not labour lost. When the fire from heaven descends upon the sacrifice to consume it, it does so all the more readily because the prophet had previously prepared the altar, and set the wood in order, and laid the sacrifice on the wood. (2) But we must not be content to know about Christ. We must come into personal contact with Him. We must be in the house with Him, we must learn to know Him as the Son of God and the Lamb of God—as that One who came from His Father to be our Brother, to share our nature and to bear our sins and to take us back to God as His Father and our Father, His God and our God—a Friend in sickness and sorrow and death, who points us through death to life eternal. This is the one great discovery, compared with which all other inventions are shortlived opiates of an hour—a little ease on the road to death. (3) Having recognized the Master when we are brought face to face with Him, we must trust Him as Andrew did. Possibly these early disciples may have thought that, having “found Christ,” the rest was easy and secure; that the new Kingdom of great David’s greater Son would present no difficulties, either to flesh and blood or to mind or spirit; that, having found and recognized and honoured the King, there was nothing to follow but position and privilege, and glory such as the Kingdom could and would liberally supply. If this was their thought, they were quickly to be undeceived. The King, though personally dearer to them every day, seemed every day to become more mysterious and unintelligible, and His Kingdom more disappointing and more remote. If He began to tell them about His coming Kingdom, He spoke in parables which they could not understand. If He showed evidence of His superhuman power, it seemed to be His policy to restrain the publication of those miraculous proofs as much as possible. When they suggested that an exhibition of His wrath in the way of punishment might be a warning to His opponents, He rebuked their ignorance of the very spirit of His Kingdom. When they expected Him to be telling them of coming triumph, He could speak only of persecution and suffering and death, until the uncontrollable “Be it far from thee” broke from the lips of their scandalized spokesman. What, then, was the charm, what was the bond, which held the Master and followers together? We answer without hesitation, it was their personal love of the Christ whom they had found. This was what made all disappointment at His want of success and all perplexity as to His doctrine equally unable to break up their little society. They did not pretend to understand His methods or His objects, but when He laid before them one of the hardest and most difficult of His doctrines, that which caused many of His disciples to go back, and walk no more with Him, Peter, answering for the Apostles, could neither turn back nor yet pretend to say that he understood the difficult matter in question; but in all the helplessness of a constraining love, with all the confidence of such a plenary devotion as has no other choice and wishes for no other, he put the seal on his former declaration, “We have left all, and followed thee,” by adding to it, “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God.” (4) If we can say “We have found the Messiah,” it is now, as of old, enough. John in the desert, Andrew on the morrow after meeting the Redeemer, did not look like the men who were to initiate nothing less than the spiritual conquest of the world. But one truth, seriously believed and proclaimed with the accents of sincerity, will go a great way with any single soul. If, indeed, we have found the Messiah, not merely in a literature, not merely as an explanation of existing institutions, not merely as the centre of much thought and activity in this our time and day, not merely as an historical personage that must needs be recognized by intelligent men,—if we have found Him for ourselves, found Him as a still living friend, found Him in our prayers, found Him in our Bibles, found Him in our efforts to conquer deep-seated evil within us, found Him in our intercourse with His living servants, found Him in the appointed Sacrament of His love,—if we have found Him as the pardoner of sin and as the conqueror of sin, then we have motives enough and to spare for working for the evangelization of others, for bringing all whom we can to that agreement in the faith and knowledge of God, to such ripeness and perfectness of age in Christ, that there may be no place left either for error in religion or for viciousness in life. 3. Society must find Christ. The conception of Christ as the Saviour of individuals only is insufficient for the fulfilling of prophecy or the solution of historic problems. The institutions of men must be saved as truly as individual souls. The Christian design for the world is not an anarchy of good individuals. And it is as society finds Christ that it rejoices in the exhilarating pulsations of a diviner life than the older dispensations ever dreamed of. Modern civilization, so far as it is virtuous, philanthropic, and high-principled, is the result of Andrew’s discovery. And one of the great needs of our age is to extend the beneficent influence of this discovery. The spirit of Christ claims dominion over all life, and the principle of Christ’s own life must be the principle of the home, the shop, the school, the court, and in the work of every department of our many-sided activities. It is as men realize this, and practise it, that the time is hastened when the new Jerusalem shall descend out of heaven from God, having peace for its walls, righteousness for its foundations, and love for its law. There is a great deal of good talk these days about regenerating society. It used to be that men talked about “reaching the masses.” Now the other putting of it is commoner. It is helpful talk whichever way it is put. The Gospel of Jesus is to affect all society. It has affected all society, and is to do so more and more. But the thing to mark keenly is this, the key to the mass is the man. The way to regenerate society is to start on the individual. The law of influence through personal contact is too tremendous to be grasped. You influence one man and you have influenced a group of men, and then a group around each man of the group, and so on endlessly. Hand-picked fruit gets the first and best market. The keenest marksmen are picked for the sharpshooters’ corps.1 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Service, 29. II A Great Enthusiasm “He first findeth his own brother Simon.” Andrew does not dream of keeping his great discovery to himself. His first thought is to tell it to his brother Simon. He is full of it—can think or talk of nothing else. His eye flashes, his face shines, his voice rings with the music of it. “Simon, we have found Christ.” I like greatly the motto of the Salvation Army. It must have been born for those workers in the warm heart of the mother of the Army, Catherine Booth. That mother explains much of the marvellous power of that organization. Their motto is, “Saved to Serve.”2 [Note: lbid. 141. 1. There is no joy known to human hearts so glorious, so imperative—breaking down all strongholds and through all restraints—as the joy of a heart in its first gladness in finding the Lord and knowing the forgiveness of sins. As Morley Punshon, the famous English preacher, said, there was joy in the breast of the sage of Syracuse when he shouted aloud his glad “Eureka” in the hearing of the people who deemed him mad; there was joy in the soul of Sir Isaac Newton when the first conception of the law of gravitation burst upon his thought as he sat under his orchard tree; there was joy in the heart of Columbus in that moment of triumph over doubt and mutiny, when the tiny land-birds settled upon the sails of his vessel, bearing upon their timid wings the welcomes of the new world; there is joy for the gold-finder, when he sees the precious ore shining in his gold-pan; joy for children when new marvels of the world open on their vision; joy for the poet when he sends through the world a glad thought that stirs the pulse of mankind; but none of these can compare with the joy of the ransomed sinner who can clasp his brother’s hand and say, “Come, brother, we have found the Lord.” I remember well how I used to pray for joy. I was told that a Christian must be joyful. I prayed and prayed, and I must say I did not get it. Why not? Because it does not come by prayer alone. It may come that way, but not alone. I used to think that joy was kept in lumps—packets which were stored up and then doled out—or injected like morphia—and that if I prayed a lump would come. This is a material conception that many hold. They want virtues and graces, and they set-to and pray. They pray for rest, peace, love, joy, and they hope these will drop from heaven and stay with them for ever. But these are Fruits. How can you have Fruits without Branches? Where are your branches to bear fruit, where is your blossom to precede it? What’s the use of a lump of joy if there are no branches? Now, gentlemen, look up in your Bibles and find out how to get joy; find the cause of joy. Work by the law you know of as “cause and effect.” Joy is an effect, find the cause. There is one, just as surely as you have a cause for toothache. Turn to the fifteenth of John, and there you will read the parable of the Vine in the words of Jesus. He tells His disciples about the tree and its branches, and then He tells them the “why” of these things:—“These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.” That is the end of the parable—the cause of joy, something of which the effect is joy. Joy comes of a great law. But what is the condition? Go home and look and see. It is to do good. Abide in Christ and bring forth fruit, then comes the joy, and you can’t help yourself. You don’t make the joy. It simply follows after a certain cause, and I defy any man in this hall to go off and do something for somebody, comfort them, help them, any one whom you may meet—I say, I defy him to do that and not come back happier and full of joy.1 [Note: Drummond, in Smith’s Life of Henry Drummond, 496. 2. Andrew started at once to spread the good tidings. The day after his conversion was the day in which he became a soul-winner. How instinctive and natural the impulse is, when a man has found Jesus Christ, to tell some one else about Him. Nobody said to Andrew, “Go and look for your brother”; and yet, as soon as he had fairly realized the fact that this Man standing before him was the Messiah, though the evening seems to have come, he hurried away to find his brother, and share with him the glad conviction. That is always the case. If a man has any real depth of conviction, he cannot rest till he tries to share it with somebody else. Why, even a dog that has had its leg mended will bring other limping dogs to the man who was kind to it. Whoever really believes anything becomes a propagandist. Look round about us to-day! and hearken to the Babel, the wholesale Babel of noises, where every sort of opinion is trying to make itself heard. It sounds like a country fair where every huckster is shouting his loudest. That shows that the men believe the things they profess. Thank God that there is so much earnestness in the world! And are Christians to be dumb whilst all this vociferous crowd is calling its wares, and quacks are standing on their platforms shouting out their specifics, which are mostly delusions? Have we not a medicine that will cure everything, a real heal-all, a veritable pain-killer? If we believe that we have, certainly we will never rest till we share our boon with our brethren. I am, and have for a long time been, persuaded that if the Christian Church were to claim that fulness of the Holy Spirit which is her birthright, her equipment, the greatest of all her needs, the proportion of what we call evangelists to pastors and teachers would be very much larger than it is at present. Touched with this flame, not only a multitude of ministers, but of the laity, who have hardly tasted the ecstasy of soul-winning, would joyously respond to God’s call with a fervent “Here am I, send me!” Then He could and would send them, and they would come back laden with trophies of victory.1 [Note: T. Waugh, Twenty-three Years a Missioner, 65. 3. Andrew did not wait until the Master had given him full equipment and training. He started with imperfect knowledge. As yet, and for long after, there was an earthly and mistaken element in Andrew’s idea of the Messiah whom he had found. He knew that the Messiah had come, but of the vast consequences to the world, to the soul, of that coming—consequences extending through the sphere of time into the depths of the eternal future, as we find these things developed in the Epistles of St. Paul—of these at such a time he must have had only an indistinct perception. One truth was clearly present to him, whatever else it might involve, and that one truth sufficed to kindle every affection and power of his spirit, to concentrate in its analysis every ray of his understanding,—“We have found the Messiah.” He had seen enough of Jesus in those few hours to be awed, attracted, won,—enough to know instinctively that John was right,—enough to know that here was one whom he could perfectly love and trust,—enough to know that the best thing he could possibly do for those nearest and dearest to himself was to tell them of his own experience. In a list of Indian missionaries of Mohammedanism, published in the journal of a religious and philanthropic society of Lahore, says Arnold in The Preaching of Islam, “We find the names of schoolmasters, government clerks in the Canal and Opium Departments, traders, including a dealer in camel carts, an editor of a newspaper, a bookbinder, and a workman in a printing establishment. These men devote the hours of leisure left them after the completion of the day’s labour to the preaching of their religion in the streets and bazaars of Indian cities, seeking to win converts from among Christians and Hindus, whose religious belief they controvert and attack.” This is what constitutes the power of Islam. With no missionary organization, with no missionary order, the religion yet spread over Western Asia and Northern Africa, and retains still its foothold on the soil of Europe. Where the common man believes his religion and spreads it, other men believe it, too.1 [Note: R. E. Speer, A Young Man’s Questions, 55. III A Great Service “He brought him unto Jesus.” “He brought him unto Jesus”; it was the kindest and best service that any human being could do to any other. 1. Consider the nature of the man who performed this service. (1) Andrew was an ordinary man. He was not a genius. He does not play a conspicuous part in the gospel drama. We know him better than some of the other disciples, better than Bartholomew and Jude, but not nearly so well as Peter and John. He is one of the subordinate characters stepping on the stage here and there to do a bit of modest work, and then vanishing into the background. Men like Andrew are the one-talented men who use their one talent sweetly and nobly, and show us all the way we ought to go and the work which we can do. We often think that if we had that man’s means or that man’s ability or that man’s opportunity, we could do something worth doing; but, as we are, there is no possibility of any great thing. Yet God does not want us to fill any other man’s place, or to do any other man’s work. God wants us to improve our own opportunity with the possessions and the powers that He has given us. It is a very great thing for us to do the very best we can do just where and as we are. God asks no one of us to do more than this, nor has any one of us a right to do less.1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Everyday Living, 19. (2) Andrew had come from communion with Christ. He had spent a night with the Master, and in the sacred, secret converse of those few mysterious hours his whole life was altered. He had seen and had found the Christ. Here we have the secret of success. It is to be found in communion with Christ. This is the indispensable qualification of every Christian worker. It makes of the dwarf a giant, and without it the giant becomes a dwarf. In the Christian realm we can influence others only as we ourselves are influenced. Place a bar of iron, cold and lifeless, by a piece of wood. The wood is not influenced at all, but when the iron is placed in the furnace and left there for a while and afterwards withdrawn, a change is then effected, for the iron seems to have ceased to be iron and to have become a mass of fire. If placed then by the side of the piece of wood how different is the result; as it has been influenced, so it influences, and the wood too becomes a mass of fire.2 [Note: William Arthur, The Tongue of Fire.] (3) This ordinary man, coming from communion with Christ, shows three remarkable qualities—the courage which initiates, the sympathy which communicates with others, the humility which obliterates self. Courage, sympathy, humility—three chief elements in the saintly character. (a) There is first of all the courage of the man, the boldness which takes the first step, the spirit which comes bravely forward while all others are hanging back, timid or irresolute. We have many phrases which bear testimony to the value and the rarity of this courage. We speak of breaking the ice, of shooting Niagara. It is a plunge into an unknown future, where none has gone before, of which none can foretell the consequences. We say that it is the first step which costs. We are lost in admiration of the soldier who steps forward to lead the forlorn hope, to storm the breach, though almost certain death is his destiny. The forlorn hope—does not the very phrase tell its own tale? Yes, it is the first step which costs. Where one—though only one—has gone before, it does not cost half—not a twentieth part—of the bravery, the resolution, for a second to follow. And for a third and a fourth the degree of courage required lessens in a rapidly decreasing scale. The first step was taken by Andrew. He was the leader of the forlorn hope of Christendom, the first to storm the citadel of the Kingdom of heaven, taking it as alone it can be taken—taking it by force. Be not deceived. Only the violent enter therein—only the brave, resolute, unflinching soldiers, who will brook no opposition, who make straight for truth and righteousness and love, come what may, who are ready to lose their lives that they may save them. This unique glory is Andrew’s. Peter may have held a more commanding position in the Church of Christ; Paul may have travelled over a larger area and gathered greater numbers into the fold; but Andrew’s crown has a freshness and a brightness of its own which shall never fade—a glory of which no man can rob it. On Sunday afternoons the boys in his passage would often indulge in pillow fights or games of a somewhat rowdy order. In order to stop this, Hogg, now one of the eldest boys at Joynes’, suggested that they should all club together and have tea in his room, and then read aloud. He collected a large quantity of old Chambers’s Journals, in which he would look out any curious or interesting articles for these Sunday afternoons. After a time he proposed that before separating a chapter of Scripture should be read and a prayer offered. It must have cost any boy a great effort to make such a suggestion, though the fact that a strong religious revival was then moving England, and that the movement had touched even the great public schools, may have made it a slightly less difficult innovation than one would imagine. Yet his contemporaries own they “would not have stood it from any one else”; and he himself spoke of it as a “sore struggle.” As a matter of fact, very little opposition or ridicule was met with. Most of the boys respected him for having the courage of his convictions; the majority responded to the invitation; those who held aloof were by no means antagonistic. Young Hogg used to read the chapter, and usually made some remarks as he did so; occasionally other boys would take an active part, and thus gradually the Chambers’s Journals were dropped, and the gathering became a regular Bible Class.1 [Note: Quintin Hogg, 36. (b) The second quality is wholly different. It is the sympathy which mediates; the temper and character which draws others together; the “conductivity” of the man. It is a remarkable fact that, after this first meeting with Christ, every subsequent notice of Andrew specially brings out this feature in his character. It is not that he does any great thing himself, but that he is the means of getting great things done for or by others. What was his first impulse, what was his first act, after his call? Not the establishment of his own position with Christ, not the proclamation of his discovery on the housetops, nothing of self or self-seeking in any, even in its highest, form; but “he first findeth his own brother Simon”; “and he brought him to Jesus”—brought him who was henceforward to be the leader of the Apostles, the foremost after the Ascension to proclaim his risen Lord to a hostile world, the earliest to gather the first-fruits of the Gentiles into the garner of Christ. Dr. Trumbull was often spoken of as being a man of exceptional “tact.” He practised pretty constantly at individual soul-winning from the time when he first found his Saviour, at twenty-one, until his death more than fifty years later. People who knew him and his ways, and his lifelong habit, have said of him, “Oh, it was ‘second nature’ to Dr. Trumbull to speak to a man about his soul. He simply couldn’t help doing it, it was so easy for him. I never could get his ease in the work.” And in so saying they showed how little they knew of him or of the demands of this work upon every man. The book on Individual Work was written after its author was seventy years of age. Hear what he had to say as to the “ease” which his long practice had brought him: “From nearly half a century of such practice, as I have had opportunity day by day, I can say that I have spoken with thousands upon thousands on the subject of their spiritual welfare. Yet, so far from my becoming accustomed to this matter, so that I can take hold of it as a matter of course, I find it as difficult to speak about it at the end of these years as at the beginning. Never to the present day can I speak to a single soul for Christ without being reminded by Satan that I am in danger of harming the cause by introducing it just now. If there is one thing that Satan is sensitive about, it is the danger of a Christian’s harming the cause he loves by speaking of Christ to a needy soul. He [Satan] has more than once, or twice, or thrice, kept me from speaking on the subject by his sensitive pious caution, and he has tried a thousand times to do so. Therefore my experience leads me to suppose that he is urging other persons to try any method for souls except the best one.”1 [Note: C. G. Trumbull, Taking Men Alive, 53. (c) The third feature in his character is intimately connected with the second. To Andrew was given the humility which obliterates self. He, who brought others forward, was content himself to retire. Just as at a later date Barnabas, the primitive disciple, took Saul by the hand, introduced him to the elder Apostles, and started him on his career as an Evangelist, content that his own light should wane in the greater glory of this new and more able missionary of Christ, so was it now. Andrew was the first called Apostle. Andrew brought Simon Peter to Christ. Yet Andrew is known only as Simon Peter’s brother. We know in what school he had learnt this lesson. Andrew was the Baptist’s disciple, and was not this the lesson of the Baptist’s life? “He must increase, but I must decrease”—obscuration, eclipse, obliteration of self. The personality of Andrew is lost in the personality of Simon. So it is truly said that the world knows nothing of its greatest benefactors. They are lost in their work, or are lost in others. Lord, I read at the transfiguration that Peter, James, and John were admitted to behold Christ; but Andrew was excluded. So again at the reviving of the daughter of the ruler of the synagogue, these three were let in, and Andrew shut out. Lastly, in the agony, the aforesaid three were called to be witnesses thereof, and still Andrew left behind. Yet he was Peter’s brother, and a good man, and an apostle; why did not Christ take the two pair of brothers? was it not a pity to part them? But methinks I seem more offended thereat than Andrew himself was, whom I find to express no discontent, being pleased to be accounted a loyal subject for the general, though he was no favourite in these particulars. Give me to be pleased in myself, and thankful to thee, for what I am, though I be not equal to others in personal perfections. For such peculiar privileges are courtesies from thee when given, and no injuries to us when denied.1 [Note: Thomas Fuller.] 2. Consider the manner of the service. (1) It was service rendered as the result of experience.—No sermon did Andrew preach that day. He simply uttered one sentence, “We have found the Messiah, which is, being interpreted, the Christ.” Who could not have uttered such a sentence, if he had possessed the experience? The man who had experienced the effect of his eyes being opened, the woman who had experienced the opening out of her life before her eyes—both spoke with such power that men believed the words they uttered. So Andrew had found the Messiah, and the words of such a man, though few, had a weight such as those of a Demosthenes could not carry. Eloquence can never make up for the lack of experience. Experience with one sentence can move men as eloquence without it can never do, and Andrew with his one sentence brought Peter to Christ. When the Holy Ghost fell upon the Apostles they went out stating that God had “shed forth this”; so, to-day, the man who has spent the night with the Christ can go forth and, with the light of joy in his life, and the ring of conviction in his tone, can say, “We have found the Christ,” and men will listen to his message. Some of us are influenced by argument and some of us are not. You may pound a man’s mistaken creed to atoms with sledge-hammers of reasoning, and he is not much nearer being a Christian than he was before; just as you may pound ice to pieces and it is pounded ice after all. The mightiest argument that we can use, and the argument that we can all use, if we have got any religion in us at all, is that of Andrew, “We have found the Messiah.”2 [Note: A. Maclaren.] When John Wesley went as a missionary to Georgia, he went, as he writes, “to save his own soul”; but two years later he returned to England a disappointed man, having saved neither his own soul nor those of the colonists and Indians. “I who went to America to convert others,” he says, “was never myself converted.” Then, with a new accession of self-forgetfulness, he turned from his own salvation to the service of others. The words spoken of his Master came home to him: “He saved others; himself he cannot save.” He was no longer Wesley the ritualist, but Wesley the missionary. “He first findeth his own brother Simon,” and soon his own life acquired confidence and peace. “His soul was saved,” says his biographer, “because he had found his work.”1 [Note: F. G. Peabody, Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 59. (2) It was service rendered by the utterance of one sentence.—Andrew was a young convert and had no learning. He could not argue about it, and he could not preach about it—all of which was a great mercy. Because he could do nothing else he had to stick to the point—“We have found the Messiah.” The simple sentence uttered by one man to another is often the way by which men are brought into touch with Christ. We cannot all be preachers to the crowd, nor are we all called to such a work; but we are all qualified and we are all called to pass the message on to any one into whose company we may be thrown. The real powers of the Early Church were not men who could harangue crowds or arouse congregations by their fervid appeals, but men who could talk to a brother, a friend, a companion, a neighbour, about the wonderful love and beauty of Jesus Christ, and out of the fulness of their own joys testify to those nearest them of the new life which they had found. It was in that way chiefly, and not by the orators of the Church, that Christianity was spread in the early days. A man who had realized the blessedness of it passed it on to the one next to him. It went like a forest fire, each tree kindled set fire to another. Each convert was as good as two, for each one made a second. The Christian plant, like every other, propagated itself; the flower of its joy dropped seed as it ripened into fruit. Prisoners whispered the glad secret to their gaolers, soldiers to their comrades, servants to their masters, women to every one who would listen. Each saved soul was eager to save another, eager to pluck a brand from the burning and win a jewel for Christ. So the work went on, so the army of the Lord grew, so the great Roman Empire was slowly subdued under the Cross, and Christianity made the ruling faith of the world.1 [Note: J. G. Greenhough.] I recently read a story in some newspaper or other about a minister who preached a very elaborate course of lectures in refutation of some form of infidelity, for the special benefit of a man who attended his place of worship. Soon after, the man came and declared himself a Christian. The minister said to him, “Which of my discourses was it that removed your doubts?” The reply was, “Oh! it was not any of your sermons that influenced me. The thing that set me thinking was that a poor woman came out of the chapel beside me, and stumbled on the steps, and I stretched out my hand to help her, and she said, ‘Thank you!’ Then she looked at me and said, ‘Do you love Jesus Christ, my blessed Saviour?’ And I did not, and I went home and thought about it; and now I can say I love Jesus.”2 [Note: A. Maclaren.] (3) Andrew did not wait till he could talk to a crowd; he took the message to one.—Have you ever noticed what stress the Scripture lays upon one soul—as if with a tender regard for the hidden workers who deal with the one at a time? There is joy among the angels in the presence of God over one sinner that repenteth. It is the one sheep that the Shepherd seeketh, and bringeth home with rejoicing. It is the one piece of money that the woman makes so much of. It is the one son that has all to himself the loveliest parable that earth—or surely heaven either—has ever listened to. “He brought him to Jesus”—do not wait for them. We are told of a minister in Scotland, who was called to task by some of the Church officers because of his want of success. And he had to confess that during the whole year only one young man had joined the Church, so that his heart was sick within him. But that very night the same young man spoke to his pastor of his intention of becoming a missionary. Then the pastor’s grief was turned into joy, and he thought that the work would be judged by quality rather than by quantity. The young man was Robert Moffat, who afterwards became famous by his mission work in the dark continent. The year of his conversion was not barren in the annals of that country parish after all.3 [Note: H. C. Williams.] In the Introduction to his Lives of Twelve Good Men, Burgon gives a sketch of two or three others whom he knew and who deserved to be called “good.” Among them is Charles Portalés Golightly. He says: The Rev. T. Mozley (who is not promiscuous in his bestowal of praise) “acknowledges the greatest of obligations” to him. “Golightly” (he says) “was the first human being to talk to me, directly and plainly, for my soul’s good; and that is the debt that no time, no distance, no vicissitudes, no differences, can efface; no, not eternity itself.” On which, Dean Goulburn remarks—“But this was what Golightly was always doing; and, for the sake of doing which, he cultivated the acquaintance of all undergraduates who were introduced to him; showed them no end of kindness, walked with them, talked with them, took them with him for a Sunday excursion to his little parish of Toot Baldon.”1 [Note: J. W. Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men, i., xxv.] (4) The closer the tie, the more emphatic the testimony.—It is what brother says to brother, husband to wife, parent to child, friend to friend, far more than what preacher says to hearer, that carries with it irresistible, persuasive power. When the truth of the utterance is vouched for by the obvious gladness and purity of the life; when the finding of the Christ is obviously as real as the finding of a better situation and as satisfying as promotion in life, then conviction will be carried with the announcement. Some who would not hesitate to speak of spiritual things to casual strangers find their tongues tied when they ought to speak for God to a wife, a husband, a brother, or a child. It is perhaps because we have an instinctive feeling that our intimate associates know us too well; they would feel that some inconsistency, not to say insincerity, in our Christian conversation should make us silent. Let the thought of our duty to those we love drive us to commune with our hearts and discover what it is that ties our tongue and hinders us from giving the word of warning or exhortation that is due.2 [Note: C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, 10. 3. Consider the success of the service. Andrew gained his brother. Simon yielded and went, and the first interview must have gladdened Andrew’s heart. When Jesus beheld him He said: “Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A Stone.” We cannot now tell all that Peter did; how his boldness and open confession of Christ confirmed the hearts of Andrew and his fellow-disciples; how, though he fell, he received this charge: “Strengthen thy brethren”; how thousands were converted in a day by his preaching; and how, in the Epistles he has left, he has been made such an instrument for comforting and building up the people of God in all ages. We hear very little afterwards of Andrew; no doubt he continued to work in the spirit of his first mission effort, and no doubt also he had his continued success; yet he had not the ability and energy of Peter, and he retires into the shade. But we cannot forget that it is to Andrew we owe Simon Peter, and all that he did. Often afterwards, we may well believe, when Andrew saw Peter’s character unfolding, when he beheld him opening the door of faith on the Day of Pentecost, and standing forth as one of the pillars of the Christian Church, he must have thanked Christ that He not only touched his own heart, but put it into his heart to bring his brother. God often uses minnows to catch salmon. It may be the consolation that He gives to the ungifted, that they should be the means of bringing to Jesus the eminently useful. There is Ananias leading the blind Saul to the Saviour; and little Bilney leading sturdy Hugh Latimer; and John Bunyan drawn by the godly gossip of the old women at Bedford; and John Wesley led by the simple Moravians. In our own time instances are plentiful enough. We think of Spurgeon going burdened to the Primitive Methodists, and hearing from some plain man who murdered the Queen’s English the way of life everlasting. We think of Thomas Binney, led by the simple workman to the Methodist Class-meeting, and there having the good seed sown. Andrew did a good day’s work when he brought Simon to Jesus. It is a sign of genius when you can turn to good account the gifts of other people. Let us be geniuses of that sort if we cannot be of any other. And the best way to turn any man’s gifts to good account is to bring him to Jesus. Consider the untold capacities for high saintliness which lie buried in the mass of men who, as yet, know nothing of grace and truth. Our cities—these great hives of agglomerated human beings—abound with men and women who are, in the eye of society—who are, it may be, in the eye of the law—among the worst and the vilest, but who have bright and clear understandings; who have warm and generous hearts; who need but the illumination of truth, and the invigorating touch of grace, to become great in the true sense of that much misused word. “I have much people in this city,” was the motto traced by Christ Himself over one of the most vicious towns of ancient heathendom. Humanity is like a mine wherein flints and diamonds lie side by side in an indistinguishable disorder until the light of Divine knowledge is poured in upon the buried mass, and the hidden beauties of lives outwardly degraded are revealed. How often does it happen that the found are greater, far greater, than the finder; that Peter, in the event, takes precedence altogether of Andrew; that those who enter last into the Kingdom of heaven are bidden, in the eternal presence-chamber, to stand among the first.1 [Note: Canon Liddon.] Personal Service Literature Assheton (R. O.), The Kingdom and the Empire, 51. Banks (L. A.), Christ and His Friends, 56. Bickersteth (C.), The Gospel of Incarnate Love, 1. Boyd (A. K. H.), Changed Aspects of Unchanged Truths, 54. Broughton (L. G.), The Soul-Winning Church, 62. Burrell (D. J.), Christ and Men, 40. Chapman (J. W.), Bells of Gold, 56. Darlow (T. H.), The Upward Calling, 90. Greenhough (J. G.), in Men of the New Testament, 83. Hall (W. A. N.), “Do Out the Duty,” 67. Horne (C. S.), The Relationships of Life, 31. Hort (F. J. A.), Village Sermons, i. 117. Ker (J.), Sermons, ii. 100. Liddon (H. P.), Sermons (Contemporary Pulpit Library), iv. 109. Lightfoot (J. B.), Sermons on Special Occasions, 160. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John i.–viii. 62. Matheson (G.), Rests by the River, 246. Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 58. Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, i. 337. Punshon (W. M.), Sermons, i. 1. Raleigh (A.), From Dawn to the Perfect Day, 250. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, x. (1864) No. 570; xv. (1869) No. 855. Stuart (J. G.), Talks about Soul Winning, 63. Virgin (S. H.), Spiritual Sanity, 61. Watts-Ditchfield (J. E.), Here and Hereafter, 105. Wells (J.), Christ in the Present Age, 61. Wheeler (W. C.), Sermons and Addresses, 9. Williams (H. C.), Christ the Centre, 114. Christian World Pulpit, xxxvii. 177 (Sloan); lxiv. 139 (Gregg). Churchman’s Pulpit: Mission Work: xvii. 223 (Maguire). Examiner, Feb. 2, 1905, p. 100 (Jowett). The First Sign This beginning of his signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested his glory; and his disciples believed on him.—John 2:11. 1. Having recorded the testimony borne to Jesus by the Baptist, and having cited instances in which the overmastering personality of Jesus elicited from simple-hearted and godly men the acknowledgment of His majesty, St. John now proceeds to relate the homely incident which gave occasion to the first public act in which His greatness was exhibited. 2. The keynote of this Gospel was struck in the earlier verses of the first chapter in the great words, “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, full of grace and truth.” To these words there is an evident reference in the language of the text. The Evangelist regards Christ’s first miracle as the first ray of that forth-flashing glory of the Incarnate Word. 3. Again, in the text the prediction of Jesus to Nathanael finds its first fulfilment. Something of the significance of the name “Son of man” is made clear. Heaven opens itself in grace and kindness and sympathy towards men; and He who refused to convert stones into bread to gratify Himself, does not refuse to convert water into wine to assist others—a speaking symbol of His whole ministry. The threefold comment of the Evangelist is of the utmost importance: (1) This was a sign, and Christ’s first sign; (2) in it He manifested His glory; (3) His disciples believed on Him. I The Sign “This beginning of his signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee.” 1. Let us recall the circumstances in which the miracle was wrought. (1) The exact dating of this first miracle indicates an eye-witness. St. John says that it took place three days after the first calling of Nathanael and Philip; and, therefore, four days after that of Andrew and Peter, of John himself, and, in all probability, of James. (2) With this band of newly chosen disciples, our Lord had walked from the valley of the Jordan—the scene of His baptism—into Galilee; and He had halted at Cana, the native village of Nathanael. Modern topography inclines to identify this Cana, not, as formerly, with Kefr Kenna, but with Kânat el-Jelil, some six miles N.E. of Nazareth. It is called Cana of Galilee to distinguish it from Cana in Asher, S.E. from Tyre. (3) A wedding feast was being kept by a poor family of Cana; the members of which were, it is clearly implied, on terms of intimacy with our Lord’s virgin-mother, who had lived for so many years at the neighbouring village of Nazareth. Mary was present; and, as was natural, our Lord and His disciples were invited, probably when the feast, which generally lasted some seven days, had already been continued for three or four. (4) The supply of wine was running short; and Mary, who, as is clear from her own Magnificat, had inferred from the terms of the Annunciation the unique dignity and the miraculous powers of her Divine Son, applied to Him for help in the emergency. Whether she wished Him to work a miracle, or merely stated the case to Him, leaving it in His hands to act as He saw best, is not clear from the narrative. But our Lord acts as He acted when twelve years old; as He acted at a later date, when His mother and His brethren wished to speak with Him, in the midst of a crowd of persons whom He was addressing. He will not allow that the tenderest of earthly ties can be permitted to affect the solemn and predestined sequence of actions in the establishment of His Kingdom. Even Mary may not hasten His resolves. “Woman, what common interest have we in this matter?” (such is the real force of the original). “Mine hour for action is not yet come.” Mary does not reply; she merely bids the servants attend strictly to her Son’s orders, whatever they might be, in the confident expectation that He will certainly act, though she knows not how. Behind the couches on which the guests were seated, were six vessels for holding water, placed there with a view to that ceremonial washing of hands and vessels before and after meals which was a matter of strict custom among the Jews. Our Lord desired that these vessels should be filled; the amount of water poured into them would have been, speaking roughly, about one hundred and twenty English gallons. St. John, who was an eye-witness, gives these details with great particularity; and his silence implies that our Lord did not mark, either by raising His hand, or uttering any word of command or blessing, the moment of the miraculous change. But it must have taken place immediately on the filling of the vessels, since our Lord, without any pause, desired the servants to draw from the vessels and ask the president of the feast to taste. Then it was that what had taken place was discovered; the president complimented the bridegroom on the excellence of the wine, which, contrary to the usual practice, he had reserved for a late hour in the entertainment. The president did not know the source of the supply, as did those servants who had poured water into and were now drawing wine from the vessels of purification. But that the water of purification had become wine must have been gradually whispered among the company from guest to guest. 2. The manner in which the miracle was performed deserves attention. (1) Our Lord began His service in the little world of the Galilean and Judæan ministrations, by being on that small stage what God is in the universe—an anonymous, or unknown, or hardly known Being. He came to Cana, perhaps as a stranger, possibly as a poor relation; for it was an occasion when poor relations are in order. It does not appear that He was asked to repeat even a holy word over the feast, for another was appointed master of the feast. The bridegroom and the bride wore their festal crowns; as for Him, while He was in this world, He discarded His aureole, or wore it only on rare days and in retreat, as at the Transfiguration. You might have come to the feast, and marked all the notables, from near and far; He would not be of them: this one is the bridegroom of the day, and this the bride; this the bride’s father or mother; and this the ruler of the feast: and this an anonymous Stranger, one of the Nazareth party; we have not seen Him in these parts before. (2) All unobtrusively did He proceed. No stir was made in the water. No outflashing of golden splendour startled the guests. No curious eyes were bidden watch the strange phenomenon. No word from Christ announced the accomplishment of a wonder. “Draw out now, and bear unto the governor,” were the simple words addressed to the servants by the Almighty Worker. In the briefest space of time the feat was done. So calmly, so suddenly does Christ work. So does He present the result without revealing the process. The great God hideth Himself and yet worketh most gloriously in nature and in man. (3) In working the miracle, Christ made use of common things. “There were six waterpots of stone set there.” Christ used what was set there. He observed the greatest economy in the use of the miraculous. He did not create either the waterpots or the water; the miracle was in the act of conversion only. (4) The miracle required the co-operation of the servants and a signal exercise of the obedience of faith. The waterpots had to be filled with water, and on an occasion when to offer water to guests instead of wine would seem a serious insult and a bad omen, these servants had to pour out what they believed to be water, as if it were wine. We are not told when the change was wrought, at what precise moment “the conscious water saw its God and blushed.” Probably not all the water in the waterpots became wine, but only that which in the obedience of faith the servants poured out into the glasses of the guests. The practical lesson, however, is obvious; it is this: Fill the waterpots to the brim, leave the miracle to Him. He will not fail in His part if we do ours. The water will be turned into wine, prayer will become communion; faith will become vision; duty will become delight, and even pain a sacrament of blessing. But we must fill the waterpots to the brim. We must give to God full measure. It is our part to obey God in simplicity; what is commanded we are to do, and while we work He Himself will also work. He may do so in no visible way, as Christ here did nothing visibly, but He will be with us, effectually working. As the will of Christ pervaded the water so that it was endowed with new qualities, so can His will pervade our souls, with every other part of His creation, and make them conformable to His purpose. “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it”; this is the secret of miracle-working. Do it, though you seem to be but wasting your strength and laying yourself open to the scorn of onlookers; do it, though in yourself there is no ability to effect what you are aiming at; do it wholly, up to the brim, as if you were the only worker, as if there were no God to come after you and supply your deficiencies, but as if any shortcoming on your part would be fatal; do not stand waiting for God to work, for it is only in you and by you that He performs His work among men.1 [Note: Marcus Dods.] (5) It was a surprise to the guests. The ruler of the feast, on tasting the wine, unaware of any miracle, complimented the bridegroom on having acted contrary to general usage. “Every man,” said he, “at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now.” One of the surprises that God treats us to in the course of our life, which will no doubt be also the overwhelming surprise of our first review of this life from the vantage-ground of a larger and better, consists in the disclosure of the way in which our anonymous Lover has been besetting us behind and before, and laying His hand upon us. How many constraints that make for salvation have never been registered in the consciousness or printed off on the memory! how many times there are when qualification for duty is given concerning which we shall by and by hear the voice saying, “I girded thee, though thou hast not known me!”2 [Note: J. Rendel Hurris, Union with God, 12. Readers of Cowper’s Memoirs will remember the way in which Theodora, his cousin, pursued him through life with gift and remembrance and token that came he knew not from whence. At one time it was a snuff-box of tortoise-shell with a familiar landscape on the lid, and the portrait of his three hares; at another it was a seasonable gift of money; and tradition tells that upon one occasion, when these nameless tokens reached him, he remarked, “Dear Anonymous is come again; God bless him.” It is difficult to understand how a poet could have been so blind as not to know that such nameless and appropriate gifts never come except from God, and from good women. But even when we lay the charge of want of insight at the poet’s door, we are checked by One who says, “Have I been so long time with you, and hast thou not known me? Have I never looked in at thy window, or left gift at thy door?” Yet oftentimes the expression of the conscious heart has never been raised so high as even to the “Dear Anonymous” of the poet. It is a part of God’s loving way with us that His criticism of our blindness towards Him is a gradual revelation; He can always make us ashamed when He wants to.1 [Note: J. Rendel Harris.] 3. Now consider the significance of this incident. It was a sign. There are four chief names given to our Lord’s miracles. One of these is wonders. In it their marvellous character is recognized. But it is very remarkable that this word is never applied to a miracle without one of the others to qualify and explain it. It seems as if, to the sacred writers, the marvel was the aspect of the miracle on which they thought it least important to dwell. Another name is works. This is one often used by our Lord Himself, and specially recorded by St. John. To the Master and the beloved disciple the miracles were works of mercy. They were part of that great mission for which our Lord had come to earth—the removal of sorrow and suffering, and so the leading of all to Himself for salvation. Another of these titles is a word meaning power. It is often applied to our Lord’s miracles, and is once or twice translated “miracle” in our English Version, but more often “mighty work.” It exhibits the miracles as acts of power, thus showing them to be the apparent suspension by God of the ordinary laws of nature. The fourth name given to them is signs. This is the word used in the text, and generally by St. John, where “miracle” occurs in the Authorized Version. It is perhaps the most significant and spiritual of all these designations. For it shows the miracles to be the signs of something else, to have something behind them to which they are intended to point. It is hardly necessary to ask what that is. It is the Divinity of Him who wrought them. (1) This is the day of evasions and attempted explanations regarding all the supernatural events of the Bible. The trend of much of the so-called religious teaching of to-day is toward the removal of the miraculous, both in character and in action, from the Gospel, and the relegation of both the Gospel and its Founder to a place, the highest indeed, but still a place among the religious teachers and systems of the ages. The miracles of healing, and of restoration of bodily function are, in this view, explained as simply the result of superior knowledge of the laws of life, of which it is said contemporary vital science is even now gaining great insight. But here is a miracle inexplicable upon such a supposition; a miracle entering into the domain, as nearly absolute as anything earthly can be, of natural law, where, as in the kindred miracle of the stilling of the tempest, the Power that created, simply controls, and the Infinite masters the finite. (2) What is a miracle? Bishop Gore, in his Bampton Lectures, has defined a miracle as “an event in physical nature, which makes unmistakably plain the presence and direct action of God working for a moral end.” God, we know, is always present and working in Nature, and man was meant to recognize and praise Him in the ordinary course of events; but, in fact, man’s sin has blinded his spiritual eye, he has lost the power of seeing behind physical order. The prevalence of law in nature, which is its glory and perfection, has even led men to forget God and deny His presence. Now in a miracle God so works that man is forced to notice a presence which is no mere blind force, but a loving personal will; God breaks into the common order of events, that He may manifest the real meaning of nature. Hence miracles are God’s protests against man’s blindness; protests in which He violates a superficial uniformity in the interests of deeper law. (3) On the Christian hypothesis, Christ is a new nature. “The Word was made flesh,” and as a new nature it is surely to be expected that He will exhibit new phenomena; a new vital energy will radiate from Him, for the very springs of universal life are in Him. So in Christ we naturally expect the material body to exhibit a far higher degree of subservience to spirit than was ever known before. For be it remembered, Christ’s miracles were not meaningless portents; they were redemptive acts, object-lessons teaching the same lessons of love and mercy as His words conveyed. Given the perfect man, who is Lord of Nature, surely the wonder lies in the limitation of His power, and not in any manifestation of it. Given the required conditions of spiritual life, nothing which does not involve contradiction is impossible. To Him who could work, not merely on nature, but on that substance—spirit and life—which underlies and makes nature, changing water into wine, and stilling a storm, were works as surely according to unvarying law as the natural growth of the vine and the calming of the tempest. We have often to attain results laboriously and painfully, because we work, not on substance, but merely on surface appearances or phenomena, while the Spiritual Man worked directly. The more we contemplate the personality of Jesus Christ and His moral authority and purpose, the more we shall find that His miracles were according to the law of His being; or, to use an expression of Athanasius, they were “in rational sequence.” And if, as Dr. Sanday says, we thus take the personality of our Lord as the true rationale of miracle, “many things will be clear to us that would not be clear otherwise.” I say, that miracle was duly wrought When, save for it, no faith was possible. Whether a change were wrought i’ the shows o’ the world, Whether the change came from our minds which see Of the shows o’ the world so much as and no more Than God wills for His purpose,—(what do I See now, suppose you, there where you see rock Round us?)—I know not; such was the effect, So faith grew, making void more miracles Because too much: they would compel, not help. I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee All questions in the earth and out of it, And has so far advanced thee to be wise.1 [Note: Browning, A Death in the Desert.] 4. It was the beginning of His signs. “This beginning of his signs did Jesus.” Here at this wedding-feast He felt Himself impelled to take the step which altered the whole character of His life. For from a private person He became by His first miracle a public and marked character with a definite career. “To live henceforth in the vortex of a whirlwind; to have no leisure so much as to eat, no time to pray save when others slept, to be the gazing-stock of every eye, the common talk of every tongue; to be followed about, to be thronged and jostled, to be gaped upon, to be hunted up and down by curious vulgar crowds; to be hated, and detested, and defamed, and blasphemed; to be regarded as a public enemy; to be watched and spied upon and trapped and taken as a notorious criminal”—is it possible to suppose that Christ was indifferent to all this, and that without shrinking He stepped across the line which marked the threshold of His public career? The glory that here shed a single ray into the rustic home of Cana must grow to that dazzling and perfect noon which shone from the Cross to the remotest corner of earth. The same capacity and willingness to bless mankind which here in a small and domestic affair brought relief to His embarrassed friends, must be adapted to all the needs of men, and must undauntedly go forward to the utmost of sacrifice. He who is true King of men must flinch from no responsibility, from no pain, from no utter self-abandonment to which the needs of men may call Him. And Jesus knew this. In those quiet hours and long, untroubled days at Nazareth He had taken the measure of this world’s actual state, and of what would be required to lift men out of selfishness and give them reliance upon God. “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me”—this was even now present to His mind. His glory was the glory of absolute self-sacrifice, and He knew what that involved. His kingship was the rendering of service no other could render. All beginnings have a wonderful interest for us. There is a peculiar pleasure in tracing a broad deep river, that bears upon its bosom the commerce of a nation, to its source far up among the mountains, in a little well whose overflowing waters a child’s hand could stop; or in going back to the origin of a mighty nation like the Roman, in the drifting ashore, at the foot of the Palatine Hill, of the ark that contained the infant founders. Institutions, social or benevolent, that have been established for ages, derive a fresh charm from the consideration of their first feeble commencement, and the contrast between what they were then and what they are now. There is a mystery about a cloud coming all at once into the blue sky, a star appearing suddenly amid the twilight shades, a spring welling up in the midst of a sandy plain. It seems as if something new were being created before our eyes. A sense of awe comes over us, as if brought into contact with another world. The miracle of Cana comes into the midst of the previous natural life of Jesus like a star out of the blue profound, like a well out of the dry mountain-side, like a rare, unknown flower appearing among the common indigenous plants of a spot. It brings us out of the narrow wall that hems us round, to the verge of God’s infinity, where we can look over into the fathomless gulf. It is the base of that wonderful miracle structure of the gospel, of which the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the pinnacle.1 [Note: H. Macmillan, The Marriage in Cana, 218. 5. What special propriety was there in the selection of this particular work to introduce and inaugurate the whole train? It is evident from St. John’s impressive words that he finds a strong significance and a profound fitness in the form His Master chose for the beginning of His signs. He can recall many other signs in which Christ manifested forth His glory; but he seems to see a special reason why this, and no other in that wondrous series, came first. He recognized that it was in harmony with the whole tenor of the revelation of the Incarnate Word that this should be His first miracle. For it gives us the key to all the miracles of our Lord. (1) No other miracle has so much prophecy in it, no other would have inaugurated so fitly the whole work of the Son of God, which was characterized throughout as an ennobling of the common, a turning of the water of earth into the wine of heaven. We recall the first miracle of Moses, the turning of water into blood, symbolic of that law which, as St. Paul said, was “a ministration of death.” Here the Saviour’s first miracle, a ministration of life, symbolized the turning of the thin and watery elements of Jewish faith into that richer and nobler Christianity which makes saints out of sinners, and a new Paradise of God out of the wilderness of earth. (2) The turning of water into wine was a sign of the character of all the works of goodness and wisdom under the Christian dispensation, by which humanity, suffering from the effects of sin, was to be raised into higher states of truth and righteousness. It combines in itself all the elements of Christ’s miracles. It is a work of mercy; it is an emblem of a higher spiritual blessing; and it is a prophecy and a specimen of that new genesis, under which all things shall be restored to the primeval goodness and blessedness. Like an illuminated initial letter, which contains in itself an illustrated epitome of the contents of the whole chronicle, it appropriately begins the series of Christ’s beneficent works by a beautiful picture of the nature and design of them all. (3) In this first miracle we can see what was the motive always of Christ’s miracles. He did not work miracles to win men’s belief in His mission. On the contrary, we are told that it was one of His temptations, a temptation constantly resisted by Him, to use His power for this object without any other motive. It was the reproach He cast upon the people that except they saw signs and wonders they would not believe. He would never work a miracle merely for the sake of manifesting His glory. Whenever the unsympathetic, ignorant crowd clamoured for a sign; whenever with ill-concealed dislike they cried, “How long dost thou make us to doubt? Show us a sign from heaven, that we may believe,” He was silent. To create a mere compulsory consent in minds which had no sympathy with Him was never a sufficient motive. Was there a sick child tossing in fever, was there a blind beggar by the roadside, was there a hungry crowd, was there even the joy of a feast interrupted: in these He could find a worthy occasion for a miracle; but never did He work a miracle merely for the sake of removing the doubts of reluctant men. His miracles were His kingly acts, by which He suggested what man’s true life in God’s Kingdom should be and will be. They were the utterance of what was in Him, the manifestation of His glory, the glory of One who came to utter the Father’s heart to His strayed children. Dear Friend! whose presence in the house, Whose gracious word benign, Could once, at Cana’s wedding-feast, Change water into wine,— Come, visit us, and when dull work Grows weary, line on line, Revive our souls, and make us see Life’s water glow as wine. Gay mirth shall deepen into joy, Earth’s hopes shall grow divine, When Jesus visits us, to turn Life’s water into wine. The social talk, the evening fire, The homely household shrine, Shall glow with angel-visits when The Lord pours out the wine. For when self-seeking turns to love, Which knows not mine and thine, The miracle again is wrought, And water changed to wine.1 [Note: James Freeman Clarke.] II The Glory Manifested “And manifested his glory.” This word glory, whether in its Greek or its Roman shape, had a very definite meaning in the days of the Apostles. It meant the admiration of men. The Greek word is derived from a root signifying to seem, and expresses that which a man seems or appears to his fellow-men. The Latin word for glory is expressly defined by Cicero to mean the love, trust, and admiration of the multitude; and a consequent opinion that the man is worthy of honour. Glory, in fact, is a relative word, and can be used only of any being in relation to other rational beings, and their opinion of him. What the Romans thought glorious in their days is notorious enough. No one can look upon the picture of a Roman triumph without seeing that their idea of glory was force, power, brute force, self-willed dominion, selfish aggrandizement. But this was not the glory which St. John saw in Christ, for His glory was full of grace, which is incompatible with self-will and selfishness. The Greek’s meaning of glory is equally notorious. He called it wisdom. We call it craft—the glory of the sophist, who could prove or disprove anything for gain or display; the glory of the successful adventurer, whose shrewdness made its market out of the stupidity and vice of the barbarian. But this is not the glory of Christ, for St. John saw that it was full of truth. Therefore, neither strength nor craft is the glory of Christ. For the glory of Christ is the glory of God, and none other, because He is very God, of very God begotten. In Christ, man sees the unseen, and absolute, and eternal God as He is, was, and ever will be. And the true glory of God is that God is good. He was always in possession of glory, but He did not always manifest it. Generally it was veiled. It was only on rare occasions that He withdrew the veil and allowed it to flash forth. The sun always has glory, but not always do we see it; but it is made manifest when the gate of day is opened, when nature is sunned into one beauteous picture. The musician always has glory, but he manifests it when he elicits from his instrument the most delicious harmonies. Jesus had glory when His power was silent and inoperative, but He manifested it when He changed water into wine. He then showed that He was Lord of nature, that nature was His servant and subject to His commands. He believed that all things were one big Miracle, and when a man knows that much he knows something to go upon. He knew for a certainty that there was nothing great and nothing little in this world; and day and night he strove to think out his way into the heart of things, back to the place whence his soul had come.1 [Note: Rudyard Kipling.] To the wise man, the lightning only manifests the electric force which is everywhere, and which for one moment has become visible. As often as he sees it, it reminds him that the lightning slumbers invisibly in the dewdrop, and in the mist, and in the cloud, and binds together every atom of the water that he uses in daily life. But to the vulgar mind the lightning is something unique, a something which has no existence except when it appears. There is a fearful glory in the lightning because he sees it. But there is no startling glory and nothing fearful in the drop of dew, because he does not know, what the thinker knows, that the flash is there in all its terrors. So, in the same way, to the half-believer a miracle is the one solitary evidence of God. Without it he could have no certainty of God’s existence.2 [Note: F. W. Robertson.] We are more sure that God was in Christ when He said, “Rise up, and walk,” than when He said, with absolving love, “Son, thy sins be forgiven thee”: more certain when He furnished wine for wedding guests, than when He said, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” O, a strange, and low, and vulgar appreciation this of the true glory of the Son of God, the same false conception that runs through all our life, appearing in every form—God in the storm, and the earthquake, and the fire, no God in the still small voice; glory in the lightning-flash, no glory and no God in the lowliness of the dewdrop; glory to intellect and genius, no glory to gentleness and patience; glory to every kind of power, none to the inward, invisible strength of the life of God in the soul of Man 1:1 [Note: F. W. Robertson.] In what respects, then, did this first miracle manifest the glory of Christ? What was there in it to stir the thought and attract the adoration and trust of the disciples? Was it worthy to be the medium of conveying to their minds the first ideas of His glory they were to cherish? And what ideas must these have been? 1. It was the glory of creative power.—In this first miracle, Christ enters physical nature as its King, who can use it for His high ends. Never before has He wrought a miracle, but in this first command to nature there is no hesitation, no experimenting, no anxiety, but the easy confidence of a Master. He is either Himself the Creator of the world He comes to restore to worth and peace, or He is the Delegate of the Creator. We see in this first miracle that Christ is not an alien or a usurper, but One who has already the closest connection with us and with all things. We receive assurance that in Him God is present. The growth of every seed is a work of creation.2 [Note: Luther.] In every grape that hangs upon the vine, water is changed into wine, as the sap ripens into rich juice. Christ had been doing that all along, in every vineyard and orchard; and that was His glory. Now He has come to prove that; to draw back the veil of custom and carnal sense, and manifest Himself. Men had seen the grapes ripen on the tree; and they were tempted to say, as every one of us is tempted now, “It is the sun, and the air, the nature of the vine and the nature of the climate, that make the wine.” Jesus comes and answers, “Not so; I make the wine; I have been making it all along. The vines, the sun, the weather, are only My tools, wherewith I worked, turning rain and sap into wine; and I am greater than they. I made them; I do not depend on them; I can make wine from water without vines, or sunshine. Behold, and drink, and see my glory without the vineyard, since you had forgotten to see it in the vineyard!”1 [Note: A. A. Brockington, The Seven Signs, 28. An Eastern fable says that a boy challenged his teacher to prove the existence of God by working a miracle. The teacher, who was a Brahmin, procured a large vessel filled with earth, in which he deposited a kernel. In the place where the kernel was put a green shoot soon appeared; the stem put forth leaves and branches, which soon spread over the whole apartment. It then budded with blossoms which, dropping off, left rich ripe fruits in their place. In the space of an hour the little seed had grown into a noble tree. The youth, overcome with amazement, exclaimed: “Now I know there is a God, for I have seen His power.” The priest smiled, and said, “Simple child! that which you have seen is going on every day around you, only by a slower process. Every cocoanut, every pineapple, every banana, every mango, every guava, is a manifestation of Divine power, and would be considered by us miraculous if not so common. If the stars appeared only once in a thousand years, how we should wonder and adore! The thinking brain, the beating heart, the vibrating nerve, the forests, fields and flowers, the earth and sea teeming with living organisms, ranging from the jelly-fish up to man, the vast universe, with its starry worlds, its glorious constellations, its planetary systems all moving to the motions of the Divine will, are one great miracle. He who created still sustains. The hand that made all things still holds all things up. In God we live and move and have our being.”2 [Note: L. Crookall, Topics in the Tropics, 41. Sick of myself and all that keeps the light Of the blue skies away from me and mine, I climb this ledge, and by this wind-swept pine Lingering, watch the coming of the night. ’Tis ever a new wonder to my sight: Men look to God for some mysterious sign, For other stars than those that nightly shine, For some unnatural symbol of His might:— Would’st see a miracle as graud as those The Prophets wrought of old in Palestine? Come watch with me the shaft of fire that glows In yonder west; the fair, frail palaces, The fading alps and archipelagoes, And great cloud-continents of sunset seas.3 [Note: Thomas Bailey Aldrich.] 2. It was the glory of spiritual truth.—To see this is harder than to discern the presence of creative power; it requires higher faculties in the soul. Yet most assuredly Christ’s first miracle meant something more than a natural wonder brought about by, and indicating the presence of, superhuman power. It was, besides this, a parable and a prophecy; it was a discovery of laws whereby the King of the new spiritual empire would govern His subjects. (1) In Christ’s Kingdom, as at Cana, nature is ever being silently changed into something higher and better than it was when He came to visit it. Its poor materials are being gradually transfigured. Christ sits down at the board at which mankind feasts on the good things provided by the Creator; and when nature fails, as, if unassisted, she must fail, to satisfy man’s deeper wants, grace does the rest. The water of man’s natural character is constantly made wine by grace. Easy good-nature becomes charity towards God and man; well-exercised reason or far-sighted judgment is heightened into a lively faith which deals with the unseen as with a reality. The natural virtues, without losing their original strength, are transformed into their spiritual counterparts; and religion bestows a grace, an intelligence, an interest in life, a consistency and loftiness of aim, which are recognized by those who do not comprehend its secret. When a man who has been aimless, selfish, discontented, ill at ease with his work, and with all around him, suddenly becomes light-hearted, cheerful, active, ready and rejoicing to spend himself for others; full of the qualities which are as welcome to man as they are approved by God; of love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, meekness, temperance—how is this to be accounted for, but by His Presence who proclaims, “Behold, I make all things new!” He does not destroy what was good in the old, but He enriches it by His invigorating and transforming power, turning the water of nature into the wine of grace. Now, as at Cana of Galilee, men see the result; they do not see the process by which it is reached. (2) At Cana of Galilee, too, we note not merely the secret transforming power of Christ in His Kingdom, but the law of continuous improvement which marks His work. The words which the president of the feast addressed to the bridegroom were an unconscious utterance of high spiritual truth. “Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse.” That is the way of the world; that is the history of the life of animal pleasure, and even of the life of mental pleasure, when a man’s horizon does not extend beyond the grave. A time comes when the keenest enjoyments of the past pall upon the taste; when the finest faculties are sensibly giving out, and everything heralds decay. “But thou hast kept the good wine until now.” That is the rule of Christ in His Kingdom; a rule of continuous progress from good to better, from better to best, if man will only will to have it so. Whenever we make a grateful review, let it mean instant commitment to a better future. If the mercies of God have blessedly beset us, let us not build “Three Tabernacles,” that we may abide; but rather, like Paul, call the places where our mercies meet us “Three Taverns,” then push on, thank God, and take courage. Every attainment is to be a footing for new attempts, and every goal a point of departure. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 15. 3. It was the glory of sanctifying all things natural.—Remember what had gone before this. The life of John the Baptist was the highest form of religious life known in Israel. It was the life ascetic. It was a life of solitariness and penitential austerity. He drank no wine: he ate no pleasant food: he married no wife: he entered into no human relationship. It was the law of that stern and, in its way, sublime life, to cut out every human feeling as a weakness, and to mortify every natural instinct, in order to cultivate an intenser spirituality—a life in its own order grand, but indisputably unnatural. (1) It was Christ’s glory to declare the sacredness of all natural relationships. The first public act of His life was to go with His disciples to a marriage. He consecrated marriage, and the sympathies which lead to marriage. He declared the sacredness of feelings which had been reckoned carnal, and low, and human. He stamped His image on human joys, human connections, human relationships. He pronounced that they are more than human—as it were sacramental: the means whereby God’s presence comes to us; the types and shadows whereby higher and deeper relationships become possible to us. (2) It was His glory to declare the sacredness of all natural enjoyments. It was not a marriage only, but a marriage-feast, to which Christ conducted His disciples. Now we cannot get over this plain fact by saying that it was a religious ceremony; that would be mere sophistry. It was an indulgence in the festivity of life; as plainly as words can describe, here was a banquet of human enjoyment. The very language of the master of the feast about men who had well drunk tells us that there had been, not excess of course, but happiness there and merry-making. Neither can we explain away the lesson by saying that it is no example to us, for Christ was there to do good, and that what was safe for Him might be unsafe for us. For if His life is no pattern for us here in this case of accepting an invitation, in what can we be sure it is a pattern? Besides, He took His disciples there, and His mother was there; they were not shielded, as He was, by immaculate purity. He was there as a guest at first, as Messiah only afterwards: thereby He declared the sacredness of natural enjoyments. He comes, the Man of Sorrows, with the gift of joy in His hand. It is not an unworthy object—not unworthy, I mean, of a Divine sacrifice—to make men glad. It is worth His while to come from Heaven to agonize and to die, in order that He may sprinkle some drops of incorruptible and everlasting joy over the weary and sorrowful hearts of earth. We do not always give its true importance to gladness in the economy of our lives, because we are so accustomed to draw our joys from ignoble sources that in most of our joys there is something not altogether creditable or lofty. But Christ came to bring gladness, and to transform its earthly sources into heavenly fountains; and so to change all the less sweet, satisfying, and potent draughts which we take from earth’s cisterns into the wine of the Kingdom; the new wine, strong and invigorating, “making glad the heart of man.”1 [Note: A. Maclaren.] (3) Christ saves not from, but in, life’s common paths. He shares the joy at Cana, the sorrow at Bethany. Heaven and holiness are not here or there. They are where Jesus is, and Jesus walks the ordinary levels of life. The ascetic life of abstinence, of fasting, austerity, singularity, is the lower and earthlier form of religion. The life of godliness is the glory of Christ. It is a thing far more striking to the vulgar imagination to be religious after the type and pattern of John the Baptist—to fast—to mortify every inclination—to be found at no feast—to wrap ourselves in solitariness, and abstain from all social joys; yes, and far easier so to live, and far easier so to win a character for religiousness. A silent man is easily reputed wise. A man who suffers none to see him in the common jostle and undress of life easily gathers round him a mysterious veil of unknown sanctity, and men honour him for a saint. The unknown is always wonderful. But the life of Him whom men called “a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners,” was a far harder and a far heavenlier religion. To shroud ourselves in no false mist of holiness: to dare to show ourselves as we are, making no solemn affectation of reserve or difference from others; to be found at the marriage-feast; to accept the invitation of the rich Pharisee Simon, and the scorned Publican Zaccheus; to mix with the crowd of men, using no affected singularity, content to be creatures “not too bright or good for human nature’s daily food”; and yet for a man amidst it all to remain a consecrated spirit, his trials and his solitariness known only to his Father—a being set apart, not of this world, alone in the heart’s deeps with God; to put the cup of this world’s gladness to his lips, and yet be unintoxicated; to gaze steadily on all its grandeur, and yet be undazzled, plain and simple in personal desires; to feel its brightness, and yet defy its thrall—this is the difficult, and rare, and glorious life of God in the soul of man. This was the peculiar glory of the life of Christ which was manifested in that first miracle which Jesus wrought at the marriage-feast in Cana of Galilee.1 [Note: F. W. Robertson.] 4. It was the glory of condescending love.—The graciousness which Christ showed at that marriage-feast is neither more nor less than the boundless love of God, who could not live alone in the abyss, but must needs, out of His own Divine Charity, create the universe, that He might have somewhat besides Himself whereon to pour out the ocean of His love, which finds its own happiness in giving happiness to all created things, from the loftiest of rational beings down to the gnat which dances in the sun, and, for aught we know, to the very lichen which nestles in the Alpine rock. (1) We may see in Christ’s condescending love at Cana a ray of that love which redeemed the world. He was present, in all senses, as one of the guests; and His conduct at the feast was marked by the tenderest consideration for the feelings of the poor family, who were making the best of their brief day of festive joy. He saved them from the disappointment of being unable to entertain their friends; He added somewhat, we may well believe, to their household store besides; but He did this in such a manner as to hide His hand, and to lay them at the moment and before the guests under no embarrassing sense of obligation towards Himself. What is this but the glory of God’s own bountiful Providence? Man, when he would assist his brother man, too often parades his benevolence; God gives us all that we have so unobtrusively that most of us altogether forget the Giver. We are the spoiled children of His love; we credit chance, or good fortune, or our own energy or far-sightedness, with the blessings which come only from Him. Yet He does not on that account inflict upon us the perpetual sense of our indebtedness. (2) We have a token of His love in that He supplies the deficiencies of earthly sources. “The mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine.” The world’s banquet runs out, Christ supplies an infinite gift. These great waterpots that stood there, if the whole contents of them were changed, as is possible, contained far more than sufficient for the modest wants of the little company. The water that flowed from each of them in obedience to the touch of the servant’s hand, if the change were effected then, as is possible, would flow on so long as any thirsted or any asked. And Christ gives to each of us, if we choose, a fountain that will spring up unto life eternal. And when the world’s platters are empty, and the world’s cups are all drained dry, He will feed and satisfy the immortal hunger and the blessed thirst of every spirit that longs for Him. (3) The revelation of the glory of the Son is not limited to the knowledge of the fact of His being, and of His presence in the midst; it is a knowledge of the way in which He works, and an imitation of the same. At Cana of Galilee He was pleased to add to the world’s joy; He took compassion upon people whose cups were empty or half empty, and the more compassion, perhaps, because they were acting as if the cups were not empty. He made up that which lacked, and looked into the faces of the guests and said, “Lacked ye anything?” and every one could have answered, “Nothing, Lord, nothing!” Hard by, on a neighbouring hillside, is a second town, little known but for His presence, where He occupied Himself in subtracting from the world’s pain; from Nain to Cana is a very short journey geographically: how far is it in everyday life? When there is a wedding in one street, there is always a funeral in the next. Christ attends both, because to add to the world’s joy and to subtract from its pain are the alternating currents of the Eternal Love; and it is in these ministries, which belong to one sacred Person, who is equally at home in either, because eternally occupied in both, that we see the glory of the Son, who would not tell us by precept to rejoice with them that do rejoice and to weep with them that weep, unless He had furnished the perfect example that corresponds to the perfect precept. Nevertheless, we do not chiefly, and certainly not only, call Him the Man of Sorrows, for His highest title is the Master of the Feast, the Bridegroom. (4) This first miracle is emblematic of the whole redemptive work of Christ. Is it possible that while He first put forth His power to restore the joy of these wedding guests, He should not have seen in the wine a symbol of the blood He was to shed for the refreshment and revival of men? The Baptist, whose mind was nourished with Old Testament ideas, called Christ the Bridegroom, and His people the Bride. Must not Jesus also have thought of those who believed in Him as His bride, and must not the very sight of a marriage have set His thoughts working regarding His whole relation to men? It is to the marriage supper of the Lamb, of Him who was slain, and has redeemed us by His blood, that we are invited. It is the “Lamb’s wife” that St. John saw adorned as a bride for her Husband. And whosoever would sit down at that feast which consummates the experience of this life, terminating all its vacillation of trust and love, and which opens eternal and unlimited joy to the people of Christ, must wash and make white his garments in this blood. He must not shrink from the closest fellowship with the purifying love of Christ. Dr. Johnson, on a famous occasion, pronounced that “this merriment of parsons is mighty offensive,” which is the judgment of Josephus repeated in another age; and Dr. Davidson’s imagination of the child Jesus as “grave, retired and sad” is in the same key. In a half-comic way, that has given the law for men’s behaviour in church, where they sit with such preternatural solemnity of countenance, as if religion were, of all interests, the most depressing. But think of Francis, that troubadour of Christ, with his wealth of sunny inspirations, with song and laughter and flowers woven in with that perpetual ministry to the Lord and His poor; was that unevangelical? Or think of Pascal, when his eyes were opened, elated to such an extent that his sister had to ask what his spiritual director would think of such a gleeful penitent? Or, above all, think of Jesus and the disciples, these children of the bride-chamber, who lived one day at a time, and found each as it came the very flower and glory of days. I suspect that true souls are always hilarious, and that one step towards the restoration of the evangel in the Church would be the breaking of this tradition and the letting in of the sun. Dr. Davidson says of Mohammed that he had that indispensable requisite of a great man, he could laugh with all his might. And in a follower of Jesus something like that is still desirable.1 [Note: W. M. Macgregor, Jesus Christ the Son of God, 115. III The Resulting Faith “And his disciples believed on him.” There is nothing more remarkable in the Gospel of St. John than the clearness with which it brings before us the moral side of miracles. They are emphatically “signs” or “works”—facts which lead us to look deeper into the mysteries of life as samples of the silent, unnoticed action of God. And they are represented not only as signs and works, but also as tests of faith. Christ manifested His glory, “and his disciples believed on him.” 1. “His disciples believed on him.” It is not said that those who were before unbelieving were overpowered by what they saw and forced into faith; it is said only that those who had already followed Christ cast themselves, so to speak, upon Him with an absolute trust when they recognized the workings of His Divine power. The outward event might be disregarded or explained away or cavilled at; the inner meaning was discernible only to the spiritual eye. The wedding guests for the most part, so far as we know, went away unconscious of the meaning of what they had witnessed, but the disciples believed. 2. “His disciples believed.” Those who had welcomed Christ and followed Him now believed on Him. Their “belief” was a response of the soul to Him as one having the glory of God. It was not necessarily a full recognition of Jesus for what He was, but it was the personal trust that makes ever-increasing knowledge possible. And as the disciples’ faith grew, so would their spiritual insight and understanding deepen more and more. (1) This was not the beginning of their faith. Jesus had already cast the unearthly spell of His purity and beauty upon them, and drawn them to His side as the magnet draws the iron. They had forsaken all and followed Him. (2) Nor was it the miracle that first produced their faith. They had already believed, not as the result of any display of supernatural power, but before any miracle had been done. Had it not been for this preparedness as the result of previous belief, the miracle of Cana, wrought as it was, so quietly and naturally, would not have produced such a profound impression upon the disciples. But brought thus into a state of quickened sympathy with Him, they understood the significance of the miracle, and their faith was rewarded and confirmed by it. They knew more perfectly who He was, and confided in Him more implicitly. The miracle was wrought in themselves; the water of their previous weak faith was changed into the wine of a nobler, a more devoted faith, which, working by love, purified their hearts, and enabled them to overcome every obstacle and temptation as they followed Jesus in the way. (3) The disciples did not stop at this rudimentary state of faith, in which they merely believed in Jesus. They continued to believe in Him; but to this they added in later life many and illustrious spiritual attainments. But great as were their attainments in faith, knowledge, righteousness, and grace in after life, they were all rendered possible by this simple faith. Saint Cyran was always dwelling on the difference between bodily and spiritual medicine. A broken leg might heal completely, or a fever be successfully fought; and then, as he says with a stray touch of humour, the doctor would be mucli annoyed if his former patients took to haunting his consulting-room. But in spiritual medicine the patient never got free of his Physician, nor was it fitting that he should.1 [Note: Viscount St. Cyres, Pascal, 230. 3. “His disciples believed on him.” Only in two places does this expression “on him” occur in all the Synoptic Gospels; and the Apostle Paul, whose vocabulary it more closely resembles than that of any other Scripture writer, but very rarely uses it. It denotes the absolute transference of trust from one’s self to another. To believe on or in a man means so much more than simply to believe him. In believing a man we confide in the mere truthfulness of his lips; we believe that he is incapable of telling a falsehood. But in believing on or in a man, we trust the man’s whole being and life, we confide in himself. The disciples of Jesus not only believed the words of Jesus, from whose lips no guile could come; they believed in Himself as the fulfilment of all their hopes and expectations, their highest ideal of the truth. A deeper confidence than they could have in themselves they had in Him. (1) Perhaps there were those present who believed the miracle of whom it could not be said that they believed on Him. The faith of the disciples had passed from a belief in the act to a belief in the Actor. Jesus Himself stood prominently forth in their faith. As yet they knew little of Him and of His future plans; He had not told them who He was; He had given them little, if any, teaching; and thus their faith at this time was not enriched with the larger conceptions of Him which they had at a later period. It was an elementary faith; but it had the most vital and vitalizing element, because it was faith on Him. (2) The ground of their faith was the knowledge they had acquired of Jesus. Faith finds its root in knowledge; credulity in ignorance. Jesus had let a little of His glory shine forth in a beautiful act of power. That act gave a clue to a right knowledge of Him. By it the disciples were able to form some conception of the kind of Being He was. And that knowledge enabled them to have faith in Him. Jesus wrought the faith by the agency of His glory; without this self-revelation the faith would never have come; the faith was thus His gift. And because of what they did know of Him, they believed in Him for what they did not know. That is the way in which we, by understanding something of God, can believe in Him where we do not understand Him. Christ required then, as He requires now, a faith based on reason and not on miracles. Consequently, a miracle does not prove the truth of a doctrine; for the doctrine must first commend itself to the conscience as good, and only then can the miracle seal it as Divine. “Miracula sine doctrinâ nihil valent.” Therefore we must look in every miracle, not only for the Divine power, but also for the Divine wisdom and goodness. A miracle is not a wonder, but a sign, so that the inward meaning is more important than the outward form.1 [Note: G. F. Terry, The Old Theology in the New Age, 179. 4. If the disciples believed on Him when they saw Him furnish these wedding guests with wine, shall we not believe, who know that through all these ages He has furnished the pained and the poor with hope and consolation, the desolate and broken-hearted with restoring sympathy, the outcast with the knowledge of God’s love, the sinner with pardon, with heaven, and with God? Is not the glory He showed at this marriage in Cana precisely what still attracts us to Him with confidence and affection? Can we not wholly trust this Lord who has a perfect sympathy guiding His Divine power, who brings the presence of God into all the details of human life, who enters into all our joys and all our sorrows, and is ever watchful to anticipate our every need, and supply it out of His inexhaustible and all-sufficient fulness? Happy they who know His heart as His mother knew it, and are satisfied to name their want and leave it with Him. All power, properly so called, is wise and benevolent. There may be capacity in a drifting fire-ship to destroy a fleet; there may be venom enough in a dead body to infect a nation:—but which of you, the most ambitious, would desire a drifting kinghood, robed in consuming fire, or a poison-dipped sceptre whose touch was mortal? There is no true potency, remember, but that of help; nor true ambition, but ambition to save.2 [Note: Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive (Works, xviii. 478).] The First Sign Literature Brockington (A. A.), The Seven Signs, 21. Broughton (L. G.), Table Talks of Jesus, 7. Champness (T.), New Coins from Old Gold, 1. Davies (J. Ll.), Sermons on the Manifestation of the Son of God, 109. Green (T. E.), in Sermons on the Gospels: Advent to Trinity, 109. Greenhough (J. G.), in The Miracles of Jesus, 17. Grimley (H. N.), Tremadoc Sermons, 77. Harris (J. R.), Union with God, 3. Kingsley (C.), All-Saints’ Day Sermons, 320. Liddon (H. P.), Christmastide in St. Paul’s, 368. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John i.–viii. 110, 114. Macmillan (H.), The Marriage in Cana of Galilee, 215. Miller (J.), Sermons Literary and Scientific, ii. 156. Mills (B. R. V.), The Marks of the Church, 181. Norton (J. N.), Short Sermons, 315. Paget (F.), Studies in Christian Character, 209. Pearce (J.), The Alabaster Box, 38. Robertson (F. W.), Sermons, ii. 220, 235. Terry (G. F.), The Old Theology in the New Age, 165. Vaughan (J.), Sermons in Christ Church, Brighton, i. 90. Vaughan (R.), Stones from the Quarry, 160. Webster (F. S.), The Beauties of the Saviour, 71. Westcott (B. F.), Peterborough Sermons, 216. Whitworth (W. A.), The Sanctuary of God, 149. Christian World Pulpit, xxv. 17 (Barry); xxxv. 56 (Rowsell); liii. 93 (Jones); lxiii. 106 (Salmond). A New Beginning Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.—John 3:5. 1. It is impossible for any one to read or hear these words without remembering what solemn words they have been to multitudes of our fellow-men. There are hardly any words that Christ ever spoke which have more fascinated and held the hearts of earnest men. In a letter from Whitefield to Benjamin Franklin, dated 1752, occur these words: “As I find you growing more and more famous in the learned world I would recommend to your diligent and unprejudiced study the mystery of the new birth. It is a most important study, and, when mastered, will richly answer all your pains. I bid you, my friend, remember that One at whose bar we shall both presently appear hath solemnly declared that without it we shall in no wise see His Kingdom.” 2. Born again! The new birth! Oh, these old words which so many souls have puzzled over and could not understand, and yet have been fascinated by so that they could not let them go! In silent chambers souls have agonized and wondered, “What is it to be born again?” In silent chambers souls, conscious of a richer and fuller life, have dreamed and questioned timidly: “Is it possible, then, that this is the new birth? Have we come any nearer to an answer to it all to-day? Have we passed from the shallow life to the profound, from the unspiritual to the spiritual, from the first life to the second?”1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Seeking Life, 208. How was it that he, who in 1727 could not move a village, after 1739 could shake three kingdoms? How did it come to pass that the teacher who was driven out of a little colony as a mere human irritant became the teacher, the comforter, the trusted leader of whole generations? The explanation certainly does not lie in any personal gifts of body or brain Wesley possessed. These were exactly the same at both stages of his career. Wesley at Wroote was twenty-five years of age. He had then the scholar’s brain, the zealot’s fire, the orator’s tongue; and he failed—failed consciously and completely. “I preached much,” is his own record, “but saw no fruits of my labour.” Wesley, again, in Charleston, was thirty-two years of age. At no stage of his life did he show a higher passion of zeal, or more methodical and resolute industry; a self-sacrifice so nearly heroic in temper. And yet he failed! But something came into his life by the gate of his conversion, something he never lost, something which transfigured his career. It was a strange gift of power—power that used Wesley’s natural gifts—his tough body, his keen intellect, his resolute will—as instruments, but which was more than these. Who looks on Wesley’s life as a whole, and sees on one side of a particular date doubt, weakness, and defeat, and on the other side certainty, gladness, and matchless power, cannot doubt that the secret of Wesley’s career lies in the spiritual realm. Wesley’s story is simply one embodied, historic, and overwhelming demonstration of the truth of what is called the Evangelical reading of Christianity.1 [Note: W. H. Fitchett Wesleu and his Century 281. 3. Many are perplexed, as Nicodemus was. They understand religion on its educational and tangible side; but the doctrine of regeneration, of conversion, perplexes and offends them. They will consent to the faith of Christ, to the Church of Christ, excepting this one doctrine, which is of its very essence. Yet what of the fact? Only as our interior eyes are enlightened can we see the Kingdom of God; only as our mind, affections, conscience, and will are raised and energized by the Holy Spirit can we enter into that Kingdom and share its righteousness and blessedness. Such is the teaching of the Master, and tens of thousands in all generations testify to the truth of His teaching. They are conscious that they have experienced this very change; they know it as a fact, the most glorious fact of their history. They have been transformed in the spirit of their mind; they henceforth walk in newness of life. These witnesses will vary much as to what brought it all about, as to their recognition of the time and place of awakening, and many features of the experiences through which they passed; but concerning the substantial fact itself, that the Spirit of God has imparted to them a higher life, given them a clean heart, and renewed within them a right spirit, they bear testimony to it as the most indubitable and blessed fact of their life. Let there be no mistake about it; that penitent men are turned from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, is one of the best authenticated facts in the history of the race. There are a great many things that I cannot explain and cannot reason out, and yet that I believe. I heard a commercial traveller say that he had heard that the ministry and religion of Jesus Christ were matters of revelation and not of investigation. “When it pleased God to reveal his Son in me,” says St. Paul (Galatians 1:15-16). There was a party of young men together, going up the country; and on their journey they made up their minds not to believe anything they could not reason out. An old man heard them, and presently he said, “I heard you say you would not believe anything you could not reason out.” “Yes,” they said, “that is so.” “Well,” he said, “coming down on the train to-day, I noticed some geese, some sheep, some swine, and some cattle, all eating grass. Can you tell me by what process that same grass was turned into hair, feathers, bristles, and wool? Do you believe it is a fact?” “Oh yes,” they said, “we cannot help believing that, though we fail to understand it.” “Well,” said the old man, “I cannot help believing in Jesus Christ. And I cannot help believing in the regeneration of man, when I see men who have been reclaimed, when I see men who have been reformed.”1 [Note: D. L. Moody, The Way to God, 45. 4. Let us remember the occasion upon which the words were spoken. Our Lord at the very beginning of His ministry exercised His vital powers to heal those who were sick with all manner of diseases; and this He did in order to manifest His sympathy with human suffering, to win confidence for Himself and His message, to illustrate the operations of grace in renewing the life and vigour of the soul, and to reveal in living form, by prophecy, the coming time when the former things shall have passed away, and no one shall ever again know pain, and cry out, “I am sick!” His works of healing not only touched the people but moved thoughtful men very deeply. One of them, a member of the Great Council, came to Him for more light. He came alone, secretly, in the night. He was no coward. He was not yet convinced, not yet ready to commit himself. He had much to sacrifice should he become a disciple of this young Rabbi. Not until he could be sure that he had more to gain than to lose would he be able to decide. At last, when all had forsaken Him and fled, it was this unknown follower of Jesus who was ready to perform the sacred rites of burial. His words, as he first spoke, were these: “Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God; for no man can do these signs which thou doest, except God be with him.” Jesus immediately replied, not to these words, but to the inmost thought of the man, which had moved him to seek His presence and turn a listening ear to His teachings: “Except a man be born anew, he cannot so much as perceive the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus confessed that he could not understand, and then strove to draw the Master out: “Surely one cannot return to the single, throbbing cell of life, and grow, and be born anew? Thou dost not speak words that have their ordinary meanings; what, then, dost Thou mean by the use of them?” Then Jesus explained: “That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” By the word “flesh” Jesus evidently meant our nature as it comes into the world by the first birth, therefore what the Apostle calls the “natural”; for He sets the flesh over against the spirit as the Apostle sets the natural over against the spiritual. A man, therefore, who comes into the world in the fulness of human nature, made in the image of God, and after His likeness, must pass through a change which is really a birth anew. And this is but the quickening life, the inspiring breath of the Divine Spirit, which, confluent with his own spirit, gives him life abundantly. The growth and progress of man, then, made in God’s image and after His likeness, into His full, complete, glorious, blessed likeness, involves a transition which may be called a birth anew. Now one thing that strikes us about Christ’s conversation with Nicodemus is its representative character. The situation is always recurring wherever the call to higher truth comes face to face with mere traditional teaching or hereditary precept. Nicodemus is always with us in one shape or another. He is the embodiment of religious conventionalism and social respectability. He is always ready with his rationalistic efforts at solving spiritual mysteries; he is always trying to reduce the mysterious to the common-place. He has his dwelling among current traditions and rules and interpretations, and he will not look beyond them. How can a man be born again except by recurrence to some improbable natural method? And Christ’s answer is always the same: You must be born again—not in the lower world, but into a higher world; you must be born again, the Spirit must touch your spirit, and you must leave rule and tradition and interpretations behind you. Morally you must be born again into the Kingdom of the Father, where God is loved and trusted and dealt with at first hand and communed with. Speaking of the writer of the “Eikon Basilike,” Carlyle said that he was the most portentously self-righteous mortal ever extant in this planet; that seemed to say to the Almighty, in place of asking for His grace and mercy, “Oh, Lord, I have attained to such a pitch of heavenly perfection that I fear it is not even in Thy power to make me any better than I am; but if at the time Thou shouldst find an opportunity for adding a little finish and perfectness to my many excellences I should feel obliged to Thee.”1 [Note: Mrs. Brookfield and Her Circle, ii. 436. 5. In religious circles in Jerusalem there was nothing being talked of but the Kingdom of God which John the Baptist had declared to be at hand. And when Jesus told Nicodemus that in order to enter this Kingdom he must be born again, He told him just what John had been telling the whole people. John had assured them that, though the King was in their midst, they must not suppose they were already within His Kingdom by being the children of Abraham. He excommunicated the whole nation, and taught them that it was something different from natural birth that gave admission to God’s Kingdom. And just as they had compelled Gentiles to be baptized, and to submit to other arrangements when they wished to partake of Jewish privileges, so John compelled them to be baptized. The Gentile who wished to become a Jew had to be symbolically born again. He had to be baptized, going down under the cleansing waters, washing away his old and defiled life, being buried by baptism, disappearing from men’s sight as a Gentile, and rising from the water as a new man. He was thus born of water, and this time born, not a Gentile, but a Jew. As the Gentile had to be naturalized and born again that he might rank as a child of Abraham, and enjoy the external privileges of the Jew, so must the Jew himself be born again if he is to rank as a child of God and to belong to the Kingdom of God. He must submit to the double baptism of water and of the Spirit—of water for the pardon and cleansing of past sin and defilement, of the Spirit for the inspiration of a new and holy life. The Jewish doctors, it is said, not uncommonly described the Gentile as one who became a little child, who began his life anew, when he was received by baptism into the privileges of their outer court. If so, Nicodemus must have been familiar with the expression; but it must have been to him, and to most who availed themselves of it, a mere figure of rhetoric—one of those counters which pass among religious people, which have a certain value at first, but which become at length so depreciated that they serve no purpose but to impose on those who take and those who give them. However little Nicodemus might know of Jesus, he did know that He was not resorting to figures of rhetoric—that if He spoke of a birth, He meant a birth; and he must have perceived that what He said did not apply to sinners of the Gentiles, but to him, the religious ruler of the Jews. It was, therefore, a good and healthy sign, a proof of the power of the new Teacher, that he forgot the conventionalisms of the Sanhedrim, and spoke out coarsely and naturally, as a peasant might have done. Our Lord, surely, passed this judgment upon him; for, instead of rebuking him for his question, He meets it in the most direct manner possible: “Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” The object of Nicodemus in coming to ask Him about His kingdom is still kept prominently forward; but there is a noticeable change in our Lord’s words. He had spoken of seeing the Kingdom of God; He now speaks of entering into it. Each expression may, unquestionably does, involve the other; still they are distinct. To see a kingdom is to have an apprehension of its reality and of its nature; to enter into a kingdom is to become a subject of it.1 [Note: F. D. Maurice, The Gospel of John, 90. 6. Our Lord speaks of the second birth as completed by two agencies, water and the Spirit. To make the one of these merely the symbol of the other is to miss His meaning. The Baptist baptized with water for the remission of sins, but he was always careful to disclaim power to baptize with the Holy Ghost. His baptism with water was of course symbolical; that is to say, the water itself exercised no spiritual influence, but merely represented to the eye what was invisibly done in the heart. But that which it symbolized was not the life-giving influence of the Holy Spirit, but the washing away of sin from the soul. Assurance of pardon John was empowered to give. Those who humbly submitted to his baptism with confession of their sins went from it forgiven and cleansed. But more than that was needed to make them new men—and yet, more he could not give. For that which would fill them with new life they must go to a Greater than he, who alone could bestow the Holy Ghost. These, then, are the two great incidents of the second birth—the pardon of sin, which is preparatory, and which cuts our connection with the past; the communication of life by the Spirit of God, which fits us for the future. Both of these are represented by Christian baptism because in Christ we have both; but those who were baptized by John’s baptism were only prepared for receiving Christ’s Spirit by receiving the forgiveness of their sins. This passage brings out the deep truth of which Baptism was afterwards made an outward and visible exponent. Here we are shown the need of an external acceptance of promise and position, and of these being sealed on us, and still further the need of the Spirit dwelling in our hearts to make this outward confession a reality, and give us power for practising it. And so, be it ever remembered, the mere form of baptism, unless the Holy Spirit be actually in the heart, can avail nothing. It is but, as it were, a husk, and can be no more, but the gift of the Holy Spirit is open to all; and as we read this passage, and are perhaps for the moment tempted to think it excludes some, or even ourselves, from the Kingdom, we should put beside it that other glorious passage of promise: “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?” (Luke 11:13).1 [Note: J. H. Rogers, The “Verily, Verilys” of Christ, 28. Imagine not infants, but crowds of grown-up persons already changed in heart and feelings; their “life hidden with Christ in God,” losing their personal consciousness in the laver of regeneration; rising again from its depths into the light of heaven, in communion with God and nature; met as they rose from the bath with the white raiment, which is “the righteousness of the saints,” and ever after looking back on that moment as the instant of their new birth, of the putting off of the old man, and the putting on of Christ. Baptism was to them the figure of death, burial, and resurrection all in one, the most apt expression of the greatest change that can pass upon man, like the sudden change into another life when we leave the body.1 [Note: B. Jowett, The Epistles of St. Paul, i. 291. 7. We now see what our Lord demanded of Nicodemus. It was that he should enter into an entirely new relationship to God. There were two classes of people, “the righteous” and “the sinners.” The difference between them was due to their attitude to the Law. The righteous “knew” the Law, and so counted themselves right with God; the sinners did not “know” it; and the judgment which the righteous pronounced on them was, “This people who knoweth not the law are cursed.” Now when Nicodemus came to Jesus, instead of being confirmed in his righteousness, or perhaps told what omissions he had to make good in order that his obedience to the Law might be perfect, he was informed that the whole framework of his life was wrong. His relation had been to the Law, not to the Person of God. He had obeyed God as a servant; he had not loved Him as a son. The whole structure of righteousness which he had built up laboriously, by rigid observance of the precepts of the Law, had therefore to be taken down. He had to begin at the beginning again; or, to use the inimitable figure of our Lord, he had to be “born anew.” The New Birth, then, is the entrance on a new attitude towards God, the attitude of a loving son to a Father instead of that of an obedient servant to a lawgiver. This new attitude is entered upon by repentance on the part of the sinner (however “righteous” the sinner may have thought himself to be), and the gift of the Spirit on God’s part. It thus involves three things—first and chiefly a new attitude to God; next, and as belonging to that, a new attitude to the past, or Repentance; and, last, a new attitude to the future, or Spiritual Life. I doubt if there is a doctrine of Jesus which modern men so thoroughly disbelieve as that which staggered Nicodemus nineteen centuries ago. I know just how men roast it over the slow fires of their sarcasm. I have watched them score it with the keenest infidel blades. I have seen it pilloried and hung in effigy before an admiring crowd. To all of which there is just this to say—and I believe it can be substantiated with vital truth—that of all the Master’s doctrines none is more self-evident and philosophical than this. There was nothing in it to bewilder Nicodemus or any man of us. Jesus touched the bedrock of common-sense when He insisted that there is no way into His Kingdom except through “a second birth.”1 [Note: G. C. Peck, Ringing Questions, 161. I A New Attitude to God 1. To be “born again” means to get back to our childhood. Who has not cried, “Oh, that I were a child again! If only I could start life over again, free from all the errors and disasters, free from all the stains and soils of the past!” We may, we can. We can get back to childhood again. For Naaman there was the river that washed away the leprosy of the flesh; for us “there is a fountain opened in the house of David for sin and uncleanness,” where the soul may be washed clean. To get back to childhood, to get the weight of sin removed, to start anew—Jesus says we can. Science tells us that all that is wanted to create a new star is a start. There are the vast floating nebulae. If they will only cohere at some little point, then the globe will begin to form, and presently you will have a star. All that we want is the point of contact, the cohering point; then the new life will begin to stir in us, and the new soul begin to grow into the starry image of Christ. 2. When a child is born in common life it is born into a sonship; it becomes at once a member of the family; and there and then, before it has done a thing to merit it, the little child has a right to its father’s and mother’s love. It is exactly the same with the new birth of the child of God. Every person born of the Spirit is born into a sonship, and is received at once as a beloved child into the family of God. This is what St. John teaches us (John 1:12): “As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name”; and what St. Paul teaches (Galatians 4:4-5): “When the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.” 3. Now this new attitude to God, which is here called a new birth, is necessary—“Ye must be born again.” It is necessary for the acknowledged sinner, since his attitude is openly and admittedly wrong. But it is necessary also for every person whose highest aim in life has been to do his duty. He must be born anew as a son and begin to live a life of love to God as his Father. The Kingdom of God, as far as man is concerned, is a state in which we are in our right relation to Him. All irrational creatures obey God and do His will: the sun runs his course with an exactness and punctuality we cannot rival; the grace and strength of many of the lower animals, their marvellous instincts and aptitudes, are so superior to anything in ourselves that we cannot even comprehend them. But what we have as our speciality is to render to God a willing service; to understand His purposes and enter sympathetically into them. The lower creatures obey a law impressed upon their nature; they cannot sin; their performance of God’s will is a tribute to the power which made them so skilfully, but it lacks all conscious recognition of His worthiness to be served and all knowledge of His object in creation. It is God serving Himself: He made them so, and therefore they do His will. So it is with men who merely obey their nature: they may do kindly, noble, heroic actions, but they lack all reference to God; and, however excellent these actions are, they give no guarantee that the men who do them would sympathize with God in all things, and do His will gladly. “In the evening I got into a very interesting conversation with Macleod, the blacksmith of the Pioneer. He is a Scot from Campsie, has a true west country twang, and, like most of our countrymen, is far better informed on many subjects of the highest importance than nine-tenths of those among whom he lives. I found him to be a Christian, and the manner of his calling was one of the most singular that has ever been heard of. He was for some time resting on a righteousness of his own, trusting to a moral life and his general goodness, but frequently with misgivings as to the security of his foundations. At times he felt that the sand on which he was resting was moving. When at Johanna on board the Lynx, he was sent along with a party to assist the Enchantress, which had got ashore. In the subsequent destruction of the vessel there was much confusion. Kicking about the deck, he found some of Spurgeon’s sermons. In reading a few sentences casually where the book opened, he met the expression: ‘You need not carry your coals to Newcastle,’ i.e. you need not bring your righteousness to the righteousness of Christ. He saw his mistake, and shortly afterwards found peace and rest on the true foundation.” This blacksmith had made the very discovery that was made by Saul of Tarsus, Luther, Wesley, and Dr. Chalmers.1 [Note: Stewart of Lovedale, 67. (1) This new attitude is not required, of course, of such as are already subjects of the change; and many are so even from their earliest years, having grown up into Christ by the preventing or anticipating grace of their nurture in the Lord, so that they can recollect no time when Christ was not their love, and the currents of their inclination did not run toward His word and His cause. The case, however, of such is no real exception; and, besides this, there is even no semblance of exception. Intelligence, in fact, is not more necessary to our proper humanity than the second birth of this humanity to its salvation. The first years of our existence are simply animal; then the life of a young man is not that of mere instinct, it is a life of passion, with mighty indignations, strong aversions. And then passing on through life we sometimes see a person in whom these things are merged; the instincts are there only for the support of existence; the passions are so ruled that they have become gentleness, and meekness, and love. Between these two extremes there must have been a middle point, when the life of sense, appetite, and passion, which had ruled, ceased to rule, and was ruled over by the life of the spirit; that moment, whether it be long or short, whether it come like the rushing mighty wind, or as the slow, gentle zephyr of the spring—whenever that moment was, then was the moment of spiritual regeneration. My conversion to the Lord Jesus might, with propriety, be compared to a mother rousing an infant with a kiss—a simile answering exactly to my experience in recalling it. Nor can I look back to that blessed epoch in my life without magnifying His tender loving-kindness who spared me the doubts, terrors, and perplexities through which so many souls have passed ere they tasted “joy and peace in believing.”1 [Note: The Life, Labours, and Writings of Cæsar Malan, 37. There is no outwardly marked act of religious decision in Rainy’s youth, except that he was admitted as a communicant in the year 1842 in connection with St. John’s congregation, the minister of which at the time was the Rev. Dr. Thomas Brown. He was a notably regular attendant at public worship. But we have merely these outward facts. No one now survives who could give any report of his religious impressions at this period and he has himself left no indication of them. I venture, however, to recall in this connection a remark he once made to me to the effect that Tolstoi’s way of stating the Christian life lacked something of saneness and even his way of exposing sinful life something of wholesomeness, probably because his conversion unfortunately had had to be so violent a reaction. Robert Rainy’s decisive religious experience, it may be safely said (if one may so far presume as to characterize it), was not so much a reaction as a realization—that equally genuine and equally evangelical type of conversion (though the word conversion seems inappropriate to describe it) which consists in the love and grace of God in Jesus Christ becoming, and that perhaps not at any special time but with the natural development of mind and heart and will, something personal and something vital. A Christian life thus originated is at once supernatural and normal. It is the Christian life of one who not only has been converted but has been converted and become as a little child, with a child’s natural trust in its father, a child’s sheer happiness in goodness, a child’s instinct of recoil from the impure. This was the note of Principal Rainy’s religion to the end, and it seems to have been so from the beginning.2 [Note: P. C. Simpson, The Life of Principal Rainy, i. 25. (2) One reason why the new attitude must be entered on by everybody is that it is the entrance into a new order of being. It is the passage from the natural to the spiritual. That fact gives the figure of the “new birth” peculiar appropriateness, though the figure must not be urged too far, or treated literally. The passage from the natural to the spiritual is beyond a man’s own effort; it is accomplished by co-operation with the Spirit of God. In this world we find a number of creatures which have what is known as animal life. They can work, and feel, and, in a fashion, think. They have wills, and certain dispositions, and distinctive characteristics. Every creature that has animal life has a certain nature according to its kind, and determined by its parentage; and this nature which the animal receives from its parents determines from the first the capabilities and sphere of the animal’s life. The mole cannot soar in the face of the sun like the eagle; neither can the bird that comes out of the eagle’s egg burrow like the mole. No training can possibly make the tortoise as swift as the antelope, or the antelope as strong as the lion. If a mole began to fly and enjoy the sunlight it must be counted a new kind of creature, and no longer a mole. The very fact of its passing certain limitations shows that another nature has somehow been infused into it. Beyond its own nature no animal can act. You might as well attempt to give the eagle the appearance of the serpent as try to teach it to crawl. Each kind of animal is by its birth endowed with its own nature, fitting it to do certain things, and making other things impossible. So is it with us: we are born with certain faculties and endowments, with a certain nature; and just as all animals, without receiving any new, individual, supernatural help from God, can act according to their nature, so can we. We, being human, have a high and richly-endowed animal nature, a nature that leads us not only to eat, drink, sleep, and fight like the lower animals, but also to think and to love, and which, by culture and education, can enjoy a much richer and wider life than the lower creatures. Men need not be in the Kingdom of God in order to do much that is admirable, noble, lovely, because their nature as animals fits them for that. If we were to exist at all as a race of animals superior to all others, then all this is just what must be found in us. Irrespective of any kingdom of God at all, irrespective of any knowledge of God or reference to Him, we have a life in this world, and a nature fitting us for it. And it is this we have by our natural birth, a place among our kind, an animal life. The first man, from whom we all descend, was, as St. Paul profoundly says, “a living soul,” that is to say, an animal, a living human being; but he had not “a quickening spirit,” could not give to his children spiritual life and make them children of God. It is not any doctrine of development or self-culture, no scheme of ethical practice or social reorganization; but it is a salvation—a power moving on fallen humanity from above its level to regenerate, and so to save. The whole fabric is absurd, therefore, unless there was something to be done in man, and for him, that required a supernatural intervention. We can see, too, at a glance, that the style of the transaction is supernatural from the incarnate appearing onward. Were it otherwise—were Christianity a merely natural and earthly product—then it were only a fungus growing out of the world, and, with all its high pretensions, could have nothing more to do for the world than any other fungus for the heap on which it grows. The very name, Jesus, is a false pretence unless He has something to do for the race which the race cannot do for itself—something regenerative and new-creative—something fitly called a salvation.1 [Note: H. Bushnell, The New Life, 60. The difference between the two positions is radical. Translating from the language of Science into that of Religion, the theory of Spontaneous Generation is simply that a man may become gradually better and better until in course of the process he reaches that quality of religious nature known as Spiritual Life. This Life is not something added ab extra to the natural man; it is the normal and appropriate development of the natural man. Biogenesis opposes to this the whole doctrine of Regeneration. The Spiritual Life is the gift of the Living Spirit. The spiritual man is no mere development of the natural man. He is a New Creation born from above. As well expect a hay infusion to become gradually more and more living, until in course of the process it reached Vitality, as expect a man by becoming better and better to attain the Eternal Life.2 [Note: H. Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 65. Truly there is only one way of being born again, regeneration by the power of the Spirit of God, the new heart; but there are many ways of conversion, of outwardly turning to the Lord, of taking the actual first step that shows on whose side we are. Regeneration is the sole work of the Holy Spirit in the human heart and soul, and is in every case one and the same. Conversion, on the other hand, bringing into play the action also of the human will, is never absolutely the same perhaps in even two souls—as like and yet as different as are the faces of men.3 [Note: John G. Paton, ii. 217. II A New Attitude to the Past The new attitude to God involves a new attitude to the past life. The “sinner” repents of his sin and turns to God in Christ; the “righteous” man passes from outward obedience to inward love, with a sense of his sinfulness as keen as that of any acknowledged sinner. When men talk of the abolition of conversion and of the imitation of Jesus Christ, they forget that there is a past which must be atoned for. Look at it this way. Supposing I have run up an account with a tradesman, and I owe him quite a large sum of money. I call at his place of business and I tell him that in future all my transactions with him will be on a strictly cash basis, that I will pay for everything as I order or receive it. I say nothing about the money which I owe him, but I point out that as I intend to pay cash in future we start all square! Do you think you could find a tradesman willing to agree to this? No. “What about the money you already owe?” he would ask. “Payment of cash in the future will never wipe out the debt of the past, and not until that is cleared off can we start square.”1 [Note: A Father’s Letters to his Son, 128. 1. We can verify our Lord’s assertion by honestly searching the depths of our own hearts, and looking at ourselves in the light of God. Think what is meant when we say, “God is light and in him is no darkness at all.” Think of that absolute purity, that, to us, awful aversion from all that is evil, from all that is sinful. Think of what sort of men they must be who can see the Lord. Are we fit to pass that threshold? Are we fit to gaze into that Face? Is it possible that we should have fellowship with Him? If we rightly meditate upon two facts, the holiness of God and our own characters, we shall feel that Jesus Christ has truly stated the case when He says, “Ye must be born again.” Unless we can get ourselves radically changed, there is no Heaven for us; there is no fellowship with God for us. We must stand before Him, and feel that a great gulf is fixed between us and Him. Self-dissatisfaction is with most of us our one necessity. Do you remember Browning’s verses on the pictures in Florence, that tremendous and thrilling contrast which he draws between the great Christian pictures in their manifest incompleteness and the early Greek statues with their manifest completeness of beauty and grace? Many of us have felt the contrast. It would be well for us all if we fought our way with him through the depression to which the thought sometimes gives birth. How vividly he sets forth the truth that a sense of incompleteness is the first condition of completeness! You must ever be born again to higher completeness if you would believe in a life to come, and the very fact that you recognize your imperfection is the best thing about you. It is finiteness in view and purpose that is our besetting sin. It was finiteness of view and purpose that gave to the old classic statues a chance to seem complete, and their very finiteness is the proof of their utter incompleteness; out of that came at once their possibilities and their impossibilities.1 [Note: R. Eyton, The Glory of the Lord, 25. Growth came when, looking your last on them all, You turned your eyes inwardly one fine day And cried with a start—What if we so small Be greater and grander the while than they? Are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature? In both, of such lower types are we Precisely because of our wider nature; For time, theirs—ours, for eternity. To-day’s brief passion limits their range; It seethes with the morrow for us and more. They are perfect—how else? they shall never change: We are faulty—why not? we have time in store. The Artificer’s hand is not arrested With us; we are rough-hewn, nowise polished: They stand for our copy, and, once invested With all they can teach, we shall see them abolished. ’Tis a life-long toil till our lump be leaven— The better! What’s come to perfection perishes. Things learned on earth, we shall practise in heaven. 2. How close and personal are the lessons which we may learn from our Lord’s treatment of Nicodemus! He had lost a great opportunity in resisting the teaching of John. The “way of the Lord” would have been prepared in his heart had he listened to the desert preacher. He would not now have been sitting bewildered and amazed at the teaching of Jesus. Neglect of light and truth is always punished. Every duty we omit obscures some truth we should have known. As one of Browning’s characters says— I see a duty and do it not, therefore I see no higher. We must be faithful to the light which comes to us, if we would be ready for the greater light when it arises. Our deeds still travel with us from afar, And what we have been makes us what we are. We can never tell how much we lose by unfaithfulness to the truths which touch the conscience or to the light which shows the way of duty. The demands from which we shrink or which we refuse are not always done with when we turn away from them. They meet us again. The sin we know, the duty we have neglected, the right which we have disobeyed, present themselves to us again. They have to be confessed, performed, obeyed, before we can enter the kingdom of life and peace. (1) The first evidence of the reality of the new attitude to the past is that the sinner ceases from sin. This is the meaning of the words of St. John (1 John 3:9): “Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.” The passage of which this forms a part is sometimes quoted as proving the sinlessness of all those who are partakers of what is called higher life. The sixth verse especially is thus appealed to. But these passages do not refer to any particular class who have attained this higher life of which they speak, but to all, according to the sixth verse, who have either seen or known Christ, and, according to the ninth verse, to all who have been born again. If the passage teaches the perfect sinlessness in thought, word, and act of any individual, it is of every one that has been born of the Spirit. But that is not the meaning of the passage. The tense employed in the Greek is the tense employed to denote habit, and the word is that made use of by St. John himself to express habitual practice. The word rendered “commit” in 1 John 3:9 is the same word as is rendered “keep” in John 7:19 : “None of you keepeth the law”; and the one verse may explain the other. As none of the Jews kept the law, so those who have been born again do not keep sin. With their whole heart they have given up their wicked ways; their habits are changed; they have abandoned their former ways; they hate the sins they once loved, and they prove by their life and conversation that a real change has taken place in their heart. That this is the true meaning of the passage is proved beyond all doubt by the tenth verse, “In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil; whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother.” A man lying drunk was accosted by Dr. Kidd, who asked him what he was and why he was lying there. “Do you not know me, Doctor? I am ane o’ your converts,” was the reply. “Very like my handiwork,” rejoined the Doctor; “for if God had converted you, you wouldn‘t be where you are.”1 [Note: James Stark, Dr. Kidd of Aberdeen, 277. (2) Another sign of the reality of our new attitude to our past life is that we obtain a clear victory over sin. It is impossible to overestimate the terrific hold that sin has on the natural man. It grips him with such a grasp that he has no better hope of escape than a fly has in a spider’s web. But when a person is reconciled to God through the precious blood of Christ, and born in Him into the family of God, the web is broken, the chains are loosed, the conqueror is conquered, and the captive free. Look at the words in 1 John 5:4-5 : “For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?” The change therefore is not merely one in thought or feeling, nor only an alteration of opinion; it is essentially practical, and the result of it is that the dishonest man becomes honest; the drunkard becomes sober; the rough-tempered man gentle; the corrupt man pure; and the immoral profligate is transformed into the humble, holy, repentant, and God-fearing servant of the Lord. I would not for one minute have you suppose that God’s children are perfect, and without spot or stain or defilement in themselves. Do not go away and say I told you they were pure as angels and never made a slip or stumble. The same St. John in the same Epistle declares: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.… If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” But I do say that in the matter of breaking God’s commandments, every one that is born again is quite a new man. He no longer takes a light and cool and easy view of sin; he no longer judges of it with the world’s judgment; he no longer thinks a little swearing, or a little Sabbath-breaking, or a little fornication, or a little drinking, or a little covetousness, small and trifling matters; but he looks on every sort of sin against God or man as exceeding abominable and damnable in the Lord’s sight, and, as far as in him lies, he hates it and abhors it, and desires to be rid of it root and branch, with his whole heart and mind and soul and strength.1 [Note: J. C. Ryle, The Christian Race, 44. Immediately upon his conversion the conviction came clearly to the scholar’s mind that his opium-habit must at once be broken. There seems to have been no parleying about it. Ever since he first entered the missionary’s household his conscience had troubled him on the subject. Mr. Hill’s kind but sorrowful words would not leave him, and their reproach was burnt into his soul. “Mr. Hsi,” he had said, “you are a distinguished member of a scholarly family. I deeply regret to see you brought to so enfeebled a condition through opium. If you do not cleanse yourself, how can you be an example to others?” But at that time he knew no power that could enable him to cleanse himself from the degrading vice. Now all was different. He belonged to Christ, and there could be no doubt as to the will of his new Master. It was thoroughly in keeping with the character of the man to come to this clear decision at once. Of course, he knew well what leaving off opium-smoking would involve. But there was no shrinking; no attempt at half measures. He saw it must be sacrificed at once, entirely, and for ever. Then came the awful conflict. It was as though the great enemy of souls, seeing his prisoner escaping, fell back upon this opium-habit as an invincible chain with which to bind him. How critical was the struggle, how momentous the issues, Hsi himself hardly realized. Upon its outcome all his future power and usefulness depended. As angels lingered near the Saviour tempted in the wilderness, may we not believe the watchful ones lingered near Hsi in the hour of his great need? By the merciful aid of God he was at last victorious.2 [Note: J. E. Hellier, Life of David Hill, 136. (3) Another sign is that we gain the victory over the world. What is the natural man?—a wretched slave to the opinion of this world. What the world says is right he follows and approves; what the world says is wrong he renounces and condemns also. How shall I do what my neighbours do not do? What will men say of me if I become more strict than they? This is the natural man’s argument. But from all this he that is born again is free. He is no longer led by the praise or the blame, the laughter or the frown, of children of Adam like himself. He no longer thinks that the sort of religion which everybody about him professes must necessarily be right. He no longer considers “What will the world say?” but “What does God command?” I fear that unworldliness is almost conspicuous by its absence from our Church members to-day. The world and the Church are so interlocked in unholy wedlock that it is scarcely possible to say where the Church ends and where the world begins. There was a time when the world and the Church were widely separated, in the days when the early Christians carried their cross for Jesus; but now the world has become religious, or which amounts to the same thing, the Church has become worldly and the power of God has almost left us.1 [Note: G. C. Grubb, Unsearchable Riches, 33. (4) The whole man is changed. “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” There are new sorrows, new joys, new motives, new hopes, and new principles. All things are now seen under a new light, and so appear in a new colour; for “all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ.” That great reconciliation changes everything. It is inevitable that in such a moment there shall come into a man’s mind a disgust for the past life,—the life of selfishness, the life of low ideals, the life of contentment with self and with selfish surroundings. There will come a disgust in the man’s soul, and he will say, Is it possible that I was made for this, that this is the end and object of my life?—to go down town every morning and back again at night, to see more beautiful things year by year in my house, to gather my books about me, to learn a little more, to make myself more comfortable? Is it possible that this is the last expression of life, the outcome of all the Divine power that has been moving in the universe since the fiery clouds first filled the firmament? Is this the outcome of it? An animal, comfortable, respecting himself, respected of his fellow-men? Is this the end? Is there no higher term of existence?1 [Note: L. Parks, The Winning of the Soul, 182. In a former chapter, we followed Father Paul Le Jeune on his winter roamings, with a band of Montagnais, among the forests on the northern boundary of Maine. Now Father Gabriel Druilletes sets forth on a similar excursion, but with one essential difference. Le Jeune’s companions were heathen, who persecuted him day and night with their gibes and sarcasms. Those of Druilletes were all converts, who looked on him as a friend and a father. There were prayers, confessions, masses, and invocations of St. Joseph. They built their bark chapel at every camp, and no festival of the Church passed unobserved. On Good Friday they laid their best robe of beaver-skin on the snow, placed on it a crucifix, and knelt around it in prayer. What was their prayer? It was a petition for the forgiveness and the conversion of their enemies, the Iroquois. Those who know the intensity and tenacity of an Indian’s hatred will see in this something more than a change from one superstition to another. An idea had been presented to the mind of the savage to which he had previously been an utter stranger. This is the most remarkable record of success in the whole body of the Jesuit Relations.2 [Note: Parkman, The Jesuits in North America, ii. 138. That noble old soul, Abraham, stood by me as an angel of God in sickness and in danger; he went at my side wherever I had to go; he helped me willingly to the last inch of strength in all that I had to do; and it was perfectly manifest that he was doing all this, not from mere human love, but for the sake of Jesus. That man had been a Cannibal in his heathen days, but by the grace of God there he stood verily a new creature in Christ Jesus. Any trust, however sacred or valuable, could be absolutely reposed in him; and in trial or danger, I was often refreshed by that old Teacher’s prayers, as I used to be by the prayers of my saintly father in my childhood’s home. No white man could have been a more valuable helper to me in my perilous circumstances, and no person, white or black, could have shown more fearless and chivalrous devotion.3 [Note: John G. Paton, i. 173. III A New Attitude to the Future We have seen that two things are essential to a member of the Kingdom—an outward act of allegiance, signifying repentance and the acceptance of pardon, and an inward infusion of a new nature, which is indicated generally in chap. John 1:12 by the words, “As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.” The Christianity of Clovis does not indeed produce any fruits of the kind usually looked for in a modern convert. We do not hear of his repenting ever so little of any of his sins, nor resolving to lead a new life in any the smallest particular. He had not been impressed with convictions of sin at the battle of Tolbiac; nor, in asking for the help of the God of Clotilde, had he felt or professed the remotest intention of changing his character, or abandoning his projects. What he was, before he believed in his queen’s God, he only more intensely afterwards became, in the confidence of that before unknown God’s supernatural help. His natural gratitude to the Delivering Power, and pride in its protection, added only fierceness to his soldiership, and deepened his political enmities with the rancour of religious indignation. No more dangerous snare is set by the fiends for human frailty than the belief that our own enemies are also the enemies of God; and it is perfectly conceivable to me that the conduct of Clovis might have been the more unscrupulous, precisely in the measure that his faith was more sincere.1 [Note: Ruskin, The Bible of Amiens (Works, xxxiii. 39).] 1. The new birth is the commencement of a new life. When the child is born it begins to live. No one can tell what that mysterious power is that we call life. It is something which all the science of the world is unable either to create or to define. Now as life commences in the child at the moment of its birth, so life commences in the soul when it is born again of the Spirit. The new birth is not merely a change of habit in a living soul, it is the commencement of life where there was none before. Thus the change when a person is born again is of the same character as that which took place in Adam when God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” There is the same difference in a person before the new birth and after it as there is between a beautiful statue and a living man. The statue may be perfect in form, but it is lifeless; the living person may be in some respects less beautiful in figure, but he is alive, and, being alive, can move, and think, and act for God. They tell me that some months ago a young Scotsman, who had been blind all his life, suddenly, by a marvellous operation, received his sight. They say that to that young man the world is another place. He wanders daily up and down in scenes with which you and I are so familiar that we do not even call them beautiful, and he sees a radiance which was hidden from ordinary everyday eyes that have gazed upon them all their lives. “Oh,” he says, “the world is so beautiful! Who would have thought it was so beautiful?” Apt figure of the experience of the man who has found his God through the touch of a quickening Spirit.1 [Note: R. J. Campbell, The Song of Ages, 160. Lord, I was blind: I could not see In Thy marred visage any grace; But now the brightness of Thy face In radiant vision dawns on me. 2. The fundamental difficulty in understanding the truth of the new birth and the new life lies in attempting to grasp it as a whole, and not in its special activities. All life grows vague if you try to understand its central essence. All life is clear, if you look at its special exhibitions. Ask us what life is in the most commonplace of living men, and we utterly fail to tell what it is in its unfound essence, or where it lurks among the hiding-places of the wondrous body; but when he lifts his hand and strikes, when he opens his mouth and talks, then in a moment we know unmistakably the living man. Now, so it is with the spiritual life. It is hard to tell just what the essence of the new Christian life is in any man. Theologians may contend over that, just as the physiologists contend over the essence of life in the body; but the new functions of the new existence, the way in which each separate power works differently, and each separate act is done differently, in the Christian’s experience—this is not hard to trace. (1) One of the features of the new life is self-satisfaction.—There is a bad and a good self-satisfaction. The bad self-satisfaction is only too common. It is what we call self-conceit. A man seems to himself sufficient for everything. There is no task that he will not accept. He does not look outside himself. The strength is in his own arm, which he can make strong as iron to subdue his foes; in his own heart, which he can make hard as a rock to bear his troubles. For doing or enduring he needs nothing but himself. He can do anything. That self-conceit must die, or the man is a failure. Somehow or other, the man must learn that in himself he can do nothing. Then comes humility; and when in his humility he casts himself upon another strength, and expects to do nothing save in the power of God, then he is born again into a new self-satisfaction. To find himself taken by God; to feel that God is giving him His strength; to say, “I can do anything through Christ”; to face the world not in his own power, but in his Master’s—that is the new, the deeper self-satisfaction. “The first effect of conversion,” says Pascal, “is that we see the world and ourselves from a standpoint altogether new.” New also are the feelings of relief after struggle, of peace and harmony, of strength suddenly acquired, that the triumph of unity brings in its train. The convert is caught up into a world of grandeurs hitherto unknown. While shackled to the Moi he was a prisoner in a strange land, cooped up in narrow bounds of space and time. Its chains once broken, he feels heir to immensities beyond all telling.1 [Note: Viscount St. Cyres, Pascal, 227. It is with man’s Soul as it was with Nature: the beginning of Creation is—Light. Till the eye have vision, the whole members are in bonds. Divine moment, when over the tempest-tost Soul, as once over the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: Let there be Light! Ever to the greatest that has felt such moment, is it not miraculous and God-announcing; even as, under simpler figures, to the simplest and least? The mad primeval Discord is hushed; the rudely-jumbled conflicting elements bind themselves into separate Firmaments: deep silent rock-foundations are built beneath; and the skyey vault with its everlasting Luminaries above: instead of a dark wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming, fertile, heaven-encompassed World.2 [Note: Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, bk. ii. ch. ix.] (2) Another feature is Happiness.—It is easy to recognize the two levels of happiness, and the way in which men pass from the upper and lighter into the profounder and more serious one. Is this man happy whom I see in the first flush of youth, just feeling his new powers, the red blood strong and swift in all his veins, the exquisite delight of trying his just-discovered faculties of taste and thought and skill filling each day with interest up to the brim? Is he happy, he with his countless friends, his easy home, the tools and toys of life both lying ready at his hand? Most certainly he is. His days sing as they go, and sparkle with a bright delight that makes the generous observer rejoice for him, and makes the jealous envy him. But then you lose sight of him for a while, and years after you come on him again. The man is changed. All is so altered! Everything is sobered. Is he happy still? As you look into his face you cannot doubt his happiness a moment, but neither can you fail to see that this new happiness is something very different from that which sparkled there before. This is serene and steady, and as you look at it you see that its newness lies in this, that it is a happiness in principles and character, while the other was a happiness in circumstances. The man whom you used to know was happy because everything was right about him, because his self was thoroughly indulged, because the sun shone and he was strong. The man whom you know now is happy because there is goodness in the world, because God is governing it, because in his own character the discipline of God is going on. The first sort of happiness was self-indulgent; the new sort is built on and around self-sacrifice. You hear much of conversion nowadays: but people always seem to think they have got to be made wretched by conversion,—to be converted to long faces. No, friends, you have got to be converted to short ones; you have to repent into childhood, to repent into delight, and delightsomeness.1 [Note: Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive (Works, xviii. 431).] To “the typical Moody convert,” during this mission, the Gospel came as tidings of great joy. “I had seen occasional instances before of instant transition from religious anxiety to the clear and triumphant consciousness of restoration to God; but what struck me in the gallery of Bingley Hall was the fact that this instant transition took place with nearly every person with whom I talked. They had come up into the gallery anxious, restless, feeling after God in the darkness, and when, after a conversation of a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes, they went away, their faces were filled with light, and they left me not only at peace with God but filled with joy. I have seen the sunrise from the top of Helvellyn and the top of the Righi, and there is something very glorious in it; but to see the light of heaven suddenly strike on man after man in the course of one evening is very much more thrilling. These people carried their new joy with them to their homes and their workshops. It could not be hid.”1 [Note: The Life of R. W. Dale of Birmingham, 319. A short time before leaving for China it became my daily duty to dress the foot of a patient suffering from senile gangrene. The disease commenced as usual insidiously, and the patient had little idea that he was a doomed man and probably had not long to live. I was not the first to attend him, but when the case was transferred to me I naturally became very anxious about his soul. The family with whom he lived were Christians, and from them I learned that he was an avowed atheist and very antagonistic to anything religious. They had without asking his consent invited a Scripture reader to visit him, but in great passion he had ordered him from the room. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/greattexts/ Look And Live And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a standard: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he seeth it, shall live. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and set it upon the standard: and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he looked unto the serpent of brass, he lived.—Numbers 21:8-9. [And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth may in him have eternal life.—John 3:14-15. 1. While the children of Israel were roaming homeless through the wilderness, their heart, we read, failed them because of the way, and, as was their wont, they vented their vexation in angry thoughts and rebellious words against God. On this occasion God sent among them judgment in the form of fiery serpents. The bite of these serpents was deadly, so that when a man was once bitten by their venomous fangs his life was forfeited, and, although he did not drop down dead on the instant, in one sense he was a dead man already. What a moment of agony and terror it must have been as all around unfortunate victims were being attacked by these messengers of death! In this terrible emergency the people cried to God, and in doing so confessed, “We have sinned”; and in answer to their prayer Moses was instructed to make a fiery serpent of brass and set it on a pole, and it should come to pass that, if any were bitten by a fiery serpent, on looking at this they would live. They did well, when they came to Moses, and said, “We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord, and against thee.” So far as I know, it is the only real expression of true sorrow and willing confession which we find in the wilderness story. “We have sinned.” And if so, it is well worth while for us to notice, that this was the occasion for God’s giving to them the great sign of mercy to which Jesus Christ pointed as a sign of Himself. So it is that God gives grace to the humble, encourages the contrite, is found of those who seek.1 [Note: E. S. Talbot.] 2. Recalling this incident of Israel, Jesus found in it a type and prophecy of Himself. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” It is very instructive to notice the New Testament use of the Old Testament record of Moses. His history and its incidents are constantly referred to as illustrations and types of Christ. St. Paul again and again finds his illustrations in the life of Moses, and much more than illustrations. Not with any curious fancy is it that his sturdy logic finds the materials for two compact arguments in these chapters. The manna, the rock, the veil on the face of Moses, are all immediately connected with Jesus Christ. St. John, too, in the Book of Revelation, constantly finds here the imagery by which he sets forth the things which are to come. And the Church in all ages has found in Egypt and the wilderness journey to the goodly land a very Pilgrim’s Progress. No type is more familiar, no illustration more constant. The arrangements of Jewish worship are full of predictions of Christ—living pictures of our salvation. The Lord Jesus is the sacrifice for our sins—the Lamb of God which beareth away the sins of the world. He is the Mercy-seat, as the word propitiation is rendered in the marginal reference. He is the High Priest who ever liveth to make intercession for us, and who is able to save to the uttermost all that come to God by Him.2 [Note: M. G. Pearse.] The old is always becoming the new. “As Moses … so the Son of man”; as the old, so the new; as the historical so the prophetical. All the pattern of the spiritual temple has been shown in the mountain, and has been frayed out in shapely and significant clouds which themselves were parables. “That the Scripture might be fulfilled.” History always has something more to do than it seems to have; it does not only record the event of the day, it redeems old subjects, old vows and oaths; it takes up what seems to be the exhausted past and turns it into the present and energetic action of the moment. As Moses, as Jonah, as Solomon, as the bold Esaias; it is always a going-back upon the sacred past and eating up the food that was there provided. Do not live too much in what we call the present; do not live upon the bubble of the hour; have some city of the mind, some far-away strong temple-sanctuary made noble by associations and memories of the tenderest kind. You could easily be dislodged from some sophism of yesterday. If you are living in the little programmes that were published but last night you have but a poor lodgment, and to-morrow you will be found naked, destitute, and hungry. Always go back to the “As Moses, as David, as Daniel, as Jeremiah,” and see in every culminating event a confirmation of this holy word—“that the Scripture might be fulfilled.” The plan was drawn before the building was commenced; the specification was all written out before the builder handled his hammer and his trowel; we do but work out old specifications—old, but not decayed; old with the venerableness of truth. See that you stand upon a broad rock, and do not try to launch your lifeship upon a bubble.1 [Note: Joseph Parker.] We have here— I. A Pressing Danger. i. Death from the bite of a Serpent—“The Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died” (Numbers 21:6). ii. Perishing in Sin—“might not perish” (John 3:15 A.V.; “should not perish,” Numbers 3:16). II. A Way of Escape. i. A Brazen Serpent lifted up on a pole—“Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a standard” (Numbers 21:8). ii. A Sin-bearer lifted up on the Cross—“As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up” (John 3:14). III. How to use the Way of Escape. i. Looking to the Serpent—“If a serpent had bitten any man, when he looked unto the serpent of brass, he lived” (Numbers 21:9). ii. Believing in the Sin-bearer—“that whosoever believeth in him,” R.V. “that whosoever believeth may in him have eternal life” (John 3:15). IV. The Good Effect. i. Life—“When he looked unto the serpent of brass, he lived” (Numbers 21:9). ii. Eternal Life—“that whosoever believeth may in him have eternal life” (John 3:15). I A Pressing Danger The danger is—(i.) Death from the bite of a serpent (Numbers 21:6); (ii.) “perishing” in sin (John 3:16). i. The Serpent and Death 1. The district through which the Israelites were passing is infested at the present day with venomous reptiles of various kinds, and this seems to have been its character in the time of Moses. It is impossible clearly to identify these “fiery serpents” with any of the several species now known, or to say why they received the appellation “fiery.” The name may have been given them on account of their colour, or their ferocity, or, inasmuch as the word is rendered “deadly” in the Septuagint, and “burning” in some other versions, it may indicate the burning sensation produced by their bite, and its venomous and fatal character. 2. The bite was fatal. “Much people died.” It was no light affliction which was but for a moment, a passing inconvenience that wore away with time; no sickness was it from which prudence and care could recover them. Not as when Paul shook off his venomous beast into the crackling flames, and it perished there. He who was bitten died: old and young, strong man and frail woman. “Ah,” said some of those who are always ready to make light of any illness unless it is their own, “he will get over it; he is young, and he has youth on his side.” “See,” said another, “what a splendid constitution he has; he will mend.” “Come,” said another, “we must hope for the best.” But much people died. In October, 1852, Gurling, one of the keepers of the reptiles in the Zoological Gardens, was about to part with a friend who was going to Australia, and according to custom he must needs drink with him. He drank considerable quantities of gin, and although he would probably have been in a great passion if any one had called him drunk, yet reason and common sense had evidently been overpowered. He went back to his post at the gardens in an excited state. He had some months before seen an exhibition of snake-charming, and this was on his poor muddled brain. He must emulate the Egyptians, and play with serpents. First he took out of its cage a Morocco venom-snake, put it round his neck, twisted it about, and whirled it round about him. Happily for him it did not rouse itself so as to bite. The assistant-keeper cried out, “For God’s sake, put back the snake,” but the foolish man replied, “I am inspired.” Putting back the venom-snake, he exclaimed, “Now for the cobra!” This deadly serpent was somewhat torpid with the cold of the previous night, and therefore the rash man placed it in his bosom till it revived, and glided downward till its head appeared below the back of his waistcoat. He took it by the body, about a foot from the head, and then seized it lower down by the other hand, intending to hold it by the tail and swing it round his head. He held it for an instant opposite to his face, and like a flash of lightning the serpent struck him between the eyes. The blood streamed down his face, and he called for help, but his companion fled in horror; and, as he told the jury, he did not know how long he was gone, for he was “in a maze.” When assistance arrived, Gurling was sitting on a chair, having restored the cobra to its place. He said, “I am a dead man.” They put him in a cab, and took him to the hospital. First his speech went, he could only point to his poor throat and moan; then his vision failed him, and lastly his hearing. His pulse gradually sank, and in one hour from the time at which he had been struck he was a corpse. There was only a little mark upon the bridge of his nose, but the poison spread over the body, and he was a dead Man 1:1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.] ii. Sin and Perishing 1. The bite of these serpents was mortal. The Israelites could have no question about that, because in their own presence “much people of Israel died.” They saw their own friends die of the snake-bite, and they helped to bury them. They knew why they died, and were sure that it was because the venom of the fiery serpents was in their veins. They were left almost without an excuse for imagining that they could be bitten and yet live. Now, we know that many have perished as the result of sin. We are not in doubt as to what sin will do, for we are told by the infallible Word, that “the wages of sin is death,” and, yet again, “sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” Sin can have but one ending—death—death—death. The soul that sinneth it shall die, so rings the warning of God. How foolishly we talk of it! When it is the child, we say, “He is young, and will grow better.” When it is the youth, we say, “Let him sow his wild oats, and he will settle down.” Ah, what cruel folly! What a man soweth, that shall he also reap. When it is middle age, we say, “Yes, it is very sad, but he has a great many good points, you know.” And when he is an old man and dies, we say, “Well, we must hope for the best.” And in upon this Babel there comes the terrible note of doom: The wages of sin is death.1 [Note: M. G. Pearse.] 2. Is it always immediate? Not always. May we not play with the serpent? We may not. Are there not moments when the cruel beast is not cruel? Not one. The sandwasp paralyses the beetle with his sting that he may, and that his progeny may profit, by the paralysis. The sandwasp does not kill the insect, but thrusts a sting into him, not fatally; the insect can still lay eggs for the advantage of the progeny of the sandwasp. It is so with many serpentine tricks; we are paralysed to be used, not to-day, but to be eaten in six months. We are so paralysed that we will do this or do that and have joy in it and have a banquet over it, ay, a foaming tankard of wine that froths out its own mocking laugh. It is the sting of the sandwasp; it has thrust in that venomous sting and hung us up for the next meeting, for the next occasion, just before the bankruptcy comes, and the devouring of our very soul by those whom we have wronged. The worst consequences of sin are sin itself, more sin. Drink and lust mean stronger passion, more ungovernable desire. Anger and temper mean as their consequence a heart more bitter, more ready for more wrath. Selfish ways mean less power even to see when we are selfish or what selfishness is. Yes, and not only is there deepening of the same sin, but other sins are bred from it; cruelty, even murderous, out of lust and drink; cruelty, too, out of selfishness; lying and slander out of the hot heart and ungoverned life of anger. So it goes: sin breeding sin, sin deepening into more sin.2 [Note: E. S. Talbot.] It is necessary to be ever vigilant, and, always looking on a trifling sin as one of magnitude, to flee far from it; because if the virtuous deeds exceed the sinful acts by even the point of one of the hairs of the eyelashes, the spirit goes to Paradise; but should the contrary be the case, it descends to hell.1 [Note: “The Dabistan” in Field’s Book of Eastern Wisdom, 121. 3. What was the sin the Israelites were guilty of? (1) The fiery serpents came among the people because they had despised God’s way. “The soul of the people was much discouraged because of the way.” It was God’s way; He had chosen it for them, and He had chosen it in wisdom and mercy, but they murmured at it. As an old divine says, “It was lonesome and longsome”; but still it was God’s way, and therefore it ought not to have been loathsome. His pillar of fire and cloud went before them, and His servants Moses and Aaron led them like a flock, and they ought to have followed cheerfully. Every step of their previous journey had been rightly ordered, and they ought to have been quite sure that this compassing of the land of Edom was rightly ordered too. But, no; they quarrelled with God’s way, and wanted to have their own way. This is one of the great standing follies of men; they cannot be content to wait on the Lord and keep His way, but prefer a will and a way of their own. (2) The people also quarrelled with God’s food. He gave them the best of the best, for “men did eat angels’ food”; but they called the manna by an opprobrious title, which in the Hebrew has a sound of ridicule about it, and even in our translation conveys the idea of contempt. They said, “Our soul loatheth this light bread,” as if they thought it unsubstantial, and only fitted to puff them out, because it was easy of digestion, and did not breed in them that heat of blood and tendency to disease which a heavier diet would have brought with it. Being discontented with their God they quarrelled with the bread which He set upon their table. This is another of man’s follies; his heart refuses to feed upon God’s Word or believe God’s truth. He craves the flesh-meat of carnal reason, the leeks and the garlic of superstitious tradition, and the cucumbers of speculation; he cannot bring his mind down to believe the Word of God, or to accept truth so simple, so fitted to the capacity of a child. II A Way of Escape The way is—(i.) a brazen serpent lifted up on a pole; (ii.) a Sin-bearer lifted up on the cross. i. The Brazen Serpent 1. The command to make a brazen or copper serpent, and set it on some conspicuous place, that to look on it might stay the effect of the poison, is remarkable, not only as sanctioning the forming of an image, but as associating healing power with a material object. Two questions must be considered separately—What did the method of cure say to the men who turned their bloodshot, languid eyes to it? and What does it mean for us, who see it by the light of our Lord’s great words about it? As to the former question, we have not to take into account the Old Testament symbolism which makes the serpent the emblem of Satan or of sin. Serpents had bitten the wounded. Here was one like them, but without poison, hanging harmless on the pole. Surely that would declare that God had rendered innocuous the else fatal creatures. That to which they were to look was to be a serpent, but it was to be a serpent triumphed over, as it were, not triumphing, and held up to view and exhibited as a trophy. Around on every side the serpents are victorious, and the people are dying. Here the serpent is represented as conquered and, we may say, made a spectacle of, and the people who see it live. Strong were the serpents in their power of death, but stronger was God in His omnipotence of life, and the life triumphed. The sight of the brazen serpent was as though God’s spear had pierced the plague, and held it aloft before their eyes, a vanquished, broken thing. It was not one of the serpents; it was an image of all and any of them; it was the whole serpent curse and plague in effigy.1 [Note: E. S. Talbot.] 2. How could a cure be wrought through merely looking at twisted brass? It seemed, indeed, to be almost a mockery to bid men look at the very thing which had caused their misery. Shall the bite of a serpent be cured by looking at a serpent? Shall that which brings death also bring life? But herein lay the excellency of the remedy, that it was of divine origin; for when God ordains a cure He is by that very fact bound to put potency into it. He will not devise a failure or prescribe a mockery. It should always be enough for us to know that God ordains a way of blessing us, for if He ordains, it must accomplish the promised result. We need not know how it will work, it is quite sufficient for us that God’s mighty grace is pledged to make it bring forth good to our souls. ii. The Sin-bearer 1. It is strange that the same which hurt should also heal; that from a serpent should come the poison, and from a serpent the antidote of the poison; the same inflicting the wound, and being in God’s ordinance appointed for the healing of the wound. The history would sound a strange one, and would suggest some underlying mystery, even if it stood alone, with no after-word of Scripture claiming a special significance for it. But it is stranger and more mysterious still when we come to the Lord’s appropriation of it to Himself. The Son of Man, healer and helper of the lost race whose nature He took, compared to a serpent! Of what is the serpent the figure everywhere else in Scripture? Not of Christ, but of Christ’s chiefest enemy; of the author of death, not of the Prince of life. Disguised in a serpent’s form, he won his first success, and poisoned at the fountain-head the life of all our race. His name is “the Old Serpent”; while the wicked are a “serpent seed,” a “generation of vipers,” as being in a manner born of him. Strange therefore and most perplexing it is to find the whole symbolism of Scripture on this one occasion reversed, and Christ, not Satan, likened to the serpent. There is only one explanation which really meets the difficulties of the case. In the words of St. Paul, to the effect that God sent “His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin,” we have the key to the whole mystery. 2. The “sign of salvation,” as it is called in the Book of Wisdom, which Moses was commanded of God to make, was at once most like the serpents which hurt the people, and also most unlike them; most like in appearance, most unlike in reality. In outward appearance it was most like, and doubtless was fashioned of copper or shining brass that it might resemble their fiery aspect the more closely; but in reality it was most unlike them, being, in the very necessities of its nature, harmless and without venom; while they were most harmful, filled with deadliest poison. And thus it came to pass that the thing which most resembled the serpents that had hurt them, the thing therefore which they, the Israelites, must have been disposed to look at with the most shuddering abhorrence, was yet appointed of God as the salve, remedy, medicine, and antidote of all their hurts: and approved itself as such; for “it came to pass that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.” Unlikely remedy, and yet most effectual! And exactly thus it befell in that great apparent paradox, that “foolishness of God,” the plan of our salvation. As a serpent hurt and a serpent healed, so in like manner, as by man came death, by man should come also the resurrection from the dead; as by “one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one should many be made righteous”; “as in Adam all die, even so in Christ,” the second Adam, “shall all be made alive.” 3. That serpent, so like in many points to those which hurt the people, so like in colour, in form, in outward show, was yet unlike in one, and that the most essential point of all—in this, namely, that it was not poisonous, as they were; that there was no harm or hurt in it, as there was in them. Exactly so the resemblance of Christ to His fellow-men, most real in many things, for He was “found in fashion as a man,” hungered, thirsted, was weary, was tempted, suffered, died like other men, was yet in one point, and that the most essential, only apparent. He only seemed to have that poison which they really had. Wearing the sinner’s likeness, for He came “in the likeness of sinful flesh,” bearing the sinner’s doom, “His face was more marred than any man’s,” He was yet “holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners”; altogether clear from every spot, taint, and infection of our fallen nature. What was, and indeed could only be, negative in a dead thing, such as that brazen serpent, the poor type and weak figure of the true, namely, the absence of the venom, this was positive in Him, as the presence of the antidote. And thus out of this Man’s curse came every man’s blessing, out of this Man’s death came every other man’s life. My predecessor, Dr. Gill, edited the works of Tobias Crisp, but Tobias Crisp went further than Dr. Gill or any of us can approve; for in one place Crisp calls Christ a sinner, though he does not mean that He ever sinned Himself. He actually calls Christ a transgressor, and justifies himself by that passage, “He was numbered with the transgressors.” Martin Luther is reputed to have broadly said that, although Jesus Christ was sinless, yet He was the greatest sinner that ever lived, because all the sins of His people lay upon Him. Now, such expressions I think to be unguarded, if not profane. Certainly Christian men should take care that they use not language which, by the ignorant and uninstructed, may be translated to mean what they never intended to teach.1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.] There is a text (2 Corinthians 5:21) which tells us that He “knew no sin.” That is very beautiful and significant—“who knew no sin.” It does not merely say did none, but knew none. Sin was no acquaintance of His; He was acquainted with grief, but no acquaintance of sin. He had to walk in the midst of its most frequented haunts, but did not know it; not that He was ignorant of its nature, or did not know its penalty, but He did not know it; he was a stranger to it, He never gave it the wink or nod of familiar recognition. Of course He knew what sin was, for He was very God, but with sin He had no communion, no fellowship, no brotherhood. He was a perfect stranger in the presence of sin; He was a foreigner; He was not an inhabitant of that land where sin is acknowledged. He passed through the wilderness of suffering, but into the wilderness of sin He could never go. “He knew no sin”; mark that expression and treasure it up, and when you are thinking of your substitute, and see Him hang bleeding upon the Cross, think that you see written in those lines of blood traced along His blessed body, “He knew no sin.” Mingled with the redness of His blood (that Rose of Sharon), behold the purity of His nature (the Lily of the Valley)—“He knew no sin.”2 [Note: Ibid.] 4. The Serpent and the Sin-bearer were “lifted up.” The elevation of the serpent was simply intended to make it visible from afar; but it could not have been set so high as to be seen from all parts of the camp, and we must suppose that the wounded were in many cases carried from the distant parts of the wide-spreading encampment to places whence they could catch a glimpse of it glittering in the sunshine. Of the meaning of this there cannot well be any mistake. It denotes the lifting up of our Lord on the Cross; as St. John, in another place, tells us, that when He said to the Pharisees, “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me,” He spoke, ‘signifying by what death he should die.” He did not mean merely that His Name should be preached in all the world, and made thoroughly known as the only way of salvation; He meant that He should be really and bodily lifted up. He meant His nailing to the Cross, and then the setting of the Cross upright in the earth. By this He became, more especially, the “scorn of men, and the outcast of the people.”1 [Note: John Keble.] It is the lifting up that is the chief point in the comparison The word is mentioned twice—“As Moses lifted up the serpent, even so must the Son of man be lifted up.” To Jesus, and to John as taught by Him, the “lifting up” was doubly significant. It meant death upon the Cross, but it also suggested the beginning of His exaltation. As the serpent was lifted up so that it might be seen, we are compelled to adopt the same reason for the lifting up of the Son of Man. It is a marvellous thought, an amazing foresight. The death which was intended to consign Him and His teaching to oblivion was the means by which attention was directed to them. That which was to make Him “accursed” became the means by which He entered into His glory. His name was not obscured, but was exalted above all other names by the shame which men put upon it. The crucifixion was the first step of exaltation, the beginning of a higher stage of Revelation 2 [Note: John Reid.] I feel a need divine That meeteth need of mine; No rigid fate I meet, no law austere. I see my God, who turns And o’er His creature yearns: Upon the cross God gives and claims the tear.3 [Note: Dora Greenwell, Carmina Crucis.] III The Acceptance of the Offer of Escape The offer of escape is accepted—(i.) by looking to the brazen serpent; (ii.) by believing in the Sin-bearer. i. Looking to the Serpent 1. We are not told that trust in God was an essential part of the look, but that is taken for granted. Why else should a half-dead man lift his eyelids to look? Such a one knew that God had commanded the image to be made, and had promised healing for a look. His gaze was fixed on it, in obedience to the command involved in the promise, and was, in some measure, a manifestation of faith. No doubt the faith was very imperfect, and the desire was only for physical healing; but none the less it had in it the essence of faith. It would have been too hard a requirement for men through whose veins the swift poison was burning its way, and who, at the best, were so little capable of rising above sense, to have asked from them, as the condition of their cure, a trust which had no external symbol to help it. The singularity of the method adopted witnesses to the graciousness of God, who gave their feebleness a thing to look at, in order to aid them in grasping the unseen power which really effected the cure. “He that hath turned himself to it,” says the Book of Wisdom, “was not saved by the thing which he saw, but by thee, that art the Saviour of all.” They would try all their own remedies before they turned to the Lord. I can think that none would be so busy as the charmers. Amongst them would be some who knew the secrets of the Egyptian snake-charmers. In the “mixed multitude” may have been the professional charmer, boasting a descent which could not fail in its authority. And they come bringing assured remedies. There is the music that can charm the serpent, and destroy the poison. There is the mystic sign set around the place that made it sacred. There are mysterious magic amulets to be worn for safety; this on the neck, and this about the wrist. There is a ceremony that shall hold the serpent spellbound and powerless. But come hither. Lift up this curtain. See here one lies on the ground. “He sleeps.” Nay, indeed, he will never wake again. Why, it is the charmer. Here are the spells and the charms and the mystic signs all around him. And lo! there glides the serpent; the charmer himself is dead.1 [Note: M. G. Pearse.] 2. We can imagine that when that brazen serpent was lifted up in the wilderness, there were some bitten by those fiery serpents who refused to look at this exalted sign of salvation, and so perished after all. We may imagine, for instance, a wounded Israelite saying, “I do not believe this hurt of mine to be deadly. If some have died of the same, yet this is no reason why all should die. Surely there are natural remedies, herbs, or salves which the desert itself will supply, by whose aid I can restore health to myself.” We can imagine another Israelite running into an opposite extreme, not slighting his hurt, but saying on the contrary, “My wound is too deadly for any remedy to avail for its cure. Thousands who have been bitten have already died, their carcases strew the wilderness. I too must die. Some, indeed, may have been healed by looking at that serpent lifted up, but none who were so deeply hurt as I am, none into whose frame that poison had penetrated so far, had circulated so long;” and so he may have turned away his face, and despaired, and died; and as the other perished by thinking lightly of the hurt, this will have perished by thinking lightly of the remedy, as fatal, if not as frequent, an error. Can we not imagine one of the Israelites demanding, in a moodier and more sullen discontent, “Why were these serpents sent at all? Why was I exposed to injury by them? Now, indeed, after I am hurt, a remedy is proposed; why was not the hurt itself hindered?” Translate these murmurings into the language of the modern world, and you will recognize in others, perhaps at times in yourself, the same displeasure against God’s plan of salvation. “Why should this redemption have been needful at all? Why was I framed so obvious to temptation, so liable to sin? I will not fall in with His plan for counterworking the evil which He has wrought. Let Him, who is its true author, answer for it.” We all know more or less of this temptation, this anger, not against ourselves, but against God, that we should be the sinners which we are, this discontent with the scheme of restoration which He has provided. But what is this after all but an angry putting of that question, older than this world of ours, “Why is there any evil, and whence?“—a mystery none have searched out or can search out here. This only is sure, that “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all”; and of the evil in the world, that it is against His will; of the evil in us, that He is on our side in all our struggles to subdue and cast it out. ii. Believing in the Sin-bearer 1. The brazen serpent was to be looked upon. The wounded persons were to turn their eyes towards it, and so to be healed. So Christ, lifted up on the Cross, is to be believed on, to be looked upon with the eyes of our heart. “The Son of man” is “lifted up, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” “The Law could not save us, in that it was weak through the flesh”; through the corruption of our fallen nature, for which it provided no cure. It could but point to Him who is our cure, as Moses did to the brazen serpent. It could not justify us, it could only bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. Justification by faith is that which was betokened by the healing of the Israelites when they looked up to the serpent. It justifies, because it brings us to Him, with whom to be united is to be justified; that is, to be forgiven and saved from this evil world, to be clothed with heavenly righteousness. 2. Trust is no arbitrary condition. The Israelite was told to turn to the brazen serpent. There was no connexion between his look and his healing, except in so far as the symbol was a help to, and looking at it was a test of, his faith in the healing power of God. But it is no arbitrary appointment, as many people often think it is, which connects inseparably together the look of faith and the eternal life that Christ gives. For seeing that salvation is no mere external gift of shutting up some outward Hell and opening the door to some outward Heaven, but is a state of heart and mind, of relation to God, the only way by which that salvation can come into a man’s heart is that he, knowing his need of it, shall trust Christ, and through Him the new life will flow into his heart. Faith is trust, and trust is the stretching out of the hand to take the precious gift, the opening of the heart for the influx of the grace, the eating of the bread, the drinking of the water, of life. Looking at Jesus—what does it mean practically? It means hearing about Him first, then actually appealing to Him, accepting His word as personal to one’s self, putting Him to the test in life, trusting His death to square up one’s sin score, trusting His power to clean the heart and sweeten the spirit and stiffen the will. It means holding the whole life up to His ideals. Ay, it means more yet; something on His side, an answering look from Him. There comes a consciousness within of His love and winsomeness. That answering look of His holds us for ever after His willing slaves, love’s slaves. Paul speaks of the eyes of the heart. It is with these eyes we look to Him, and receive His answering look.1 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Service, 16. Faith is the keynote of the Gospel by John. The very purpose for which this Gospel was written was that men might believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and that believing they might have life through His name (John 20:31). This purpose is everywhere its predominant feature. From the announcement that John the Baptist was sent “that all men through him might believe” (John 1:7), to the confident assurance with which the beloved disciple makes the declaration that he knows his testimony is true (John 21:24), the Gospel of John is one long argument, conceived with the evident intention of inducing men to believe that Jesus is the Son of God and the Saviour of all who trust in Him. The word “believe” occurs in this Gospel no fewer than ninety-eight times, and either that or some cognate word is to be found in every chapter.2 [Note: H. Thorne.] A woman who was always looking within herself, and could not reach assurance and peace, was told she must look out and up. Yet light did not come. One night she dreamed that she was in a pit which was deep, dark, and dirty. There was no way of escape—no door, no ladder, no steps, no rope. Looking right overhead she saw a little bit of blue sky, and in it one star. While gazing at the star she began to rise inch by inch in the pit. Then she cried out, “Who is lifting me?” and she looked down to see. But the moment she looked down she was back again at the bottom of the pit. Again she looked up, saw the star, and began to rise. Again she looked down to see who or what was lifting her, and again she found herself at the bottom. Resolving not to look down again, she for the third time gazed at the star. Little by little she rose; tempted to look down, she resisted the desire; higher and higher she ascended, with her eyes on the star, till at last she was out of the pit altogether. Then she awoke, and said, “I see it all now. I am not to look down or within, but out and up to the Bright and Morning Star, the Lord Jesus Christ.”3 [Note: J. J. Mackay.] IV The Good Effect The effect is—(i.) life: “when he looked unto the serpent of brass, he lived”; (ii.) eternal life: “that whosoever believeth may in him have eternal life.” i. Life It does not seem possible that so great a thing as life should depend upon so small a thing as a look. But life often depends on a look. A traveller was once walking over a mountain-road; it grew quite dark, and he lost his way. Then a thunderstorm came on, and he made all the haste he could to try to find some shelter. A flash of lightning showed just for a moment where he was going. He was on the very edge of a precipice. The one look that the lightning enabled him to take saved his life. A few weeks ago I was in a train after it was dark. The signal was put “all right,” and the train started. We had gone a few hundred yards, when I heard the whistle sound very sharply, and soon the train stopped. Some one had shown the engine-driver a red light, and warned him of danger. It turned out that one of the chains by which the carriages were coupled together had broken. If the man who saw the broken chain had not looked, and if the engine-driver had not looked and so seen the red light, most likely many lives would have been lost. Here, again, life depended upon a look. The wounded Israelite was in one sense dead already, his life was forfeit as soon as he was bitten; it follows that the new life infused by a look at the brazen serpent was miraculous in its character. What have we here but a striking figure of death and resurrection? Not by any natural process of improvement or gradual restoration was the death-stricken Israelite rescued from his fate, but by the direct and supernatural intervention of Him who was even then, as He is still, the resurrection and the life, in whom whosoever believes lives though he were dead.1 [Note: W. H. M. H. Aitken.] ii. Eternal Life 1. Our Lord said, “Ye must be born again,” and Nicodemus answered, “How can a man be born again when he is old?” Our Lord replied by telling him something more. A man needs to be born not only outwardly of water, but inwardly of the Spirit, and when he is so born he will be as free as the wind—from legal bondage—from the tyranny of sin. And to this Nicodemus replied by asking yet more impatiently, “How can these things be?” The answer that he receives is given through the speaking figure of death and resurrection, and if we desire a striking commentary on the figure, and a definite statement of the truth, we have only to turn to St. Paul’s Epistles. “You hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins.” “But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, and hath raised us up together.” “And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses.” “Having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in his cross.” Surely nothing can be more striking than the parallelism between the words of this passage and the symbolism of the scene that we are contemplating. Eternal life is the blessing of the Kingdom of God viewed as a personal possession. The description is peculiar to John’s Gospel, but it agrees with the “life” which is spoken of with such emphasis in the other Gospels. According to them, to enter into the Kingdom is to enter into “life” (Matthew 18:3; Matthew 18:8-9). It is not so much duration that is expressed by the word “eternal” as the peculiar quality of the life that arises out of the new relations with God which are brought about by Jesus Christ. It is deathless life, although the believer has still to die, “and go unterrified into the gulf of Death.” It may be described as a life which seeks to obey an eternal rule, the will of God; which is inspired by an eternal motive, the love of God; which lives for and is lightened by an eternal glory, the glory of God; and abides in an eternal blessedness, communion with God. It is both present and future. Here and now for the believer there are a new heaven and a new earth, and the glory of God doth lighten them, and the Lamb is the light thereof. No change which time or death can bring has power to affect the essential character of his life, though its glory as terrestrial is one, and its glory as celestial is another. Wherever after death the man may be who has believed in Jesus, the life that he lives will be the same in its inner spirit and relation. “To him all one, if on the earth or in the sun,” God’s will must be his law, God’s glory his light, God’s presence his blessedness, God’s love his inspiration and joy.1 [Note: John Reid.] I distinguish between Life, which is our Being in God, and Eternal Life, which is the Light of the Life, that is, fellowship with the Author, Substance, and Former of our Being, the Alpha and Omega. It is the heart that needs re-creation; it is the heart that is desperately wicked, not the Being of man. I think a distinction is carefully maintained in Holy Scripture between the life in the heart and the Life of the Being: “Lighten thou my eyes that I sleep not in death.” It is the Light of Life we want, to purify or re-create or regenerate our hearts so that we may be the Children of Light.2 [Note: R. W. Corbet, Letters from a Mystic of the Present Day, 63. 2. In the Revised Version there is a little change made here, partly by the exclusion of a clause and partly by changing the order of the words. The alteration is not only nearer the original text, but brings out a striking thought. It reads that “whosoever believeth may in him have eternal life.” “May in him have eternal life”—union with Christ by faith, that profound incorporation into Him, which the New Testament sets forth in all sorts of aspects as the very foundation of the blessings of Christianity; that union is the condition of eternal life. A soldier lay dying on the battlefield; the chaplain speaking to him read St. John 3. When he came to Numbers 21:14-15, he was asked to read them again; when they were read, the soldier, having repeated them, added, “That is enough for me; that is all I want.”3 [Note: L. N. Caley.] There is a most impressive little story which tells how Sternberg, the great German artist, was led to paint his “Messiah,” which is his masterpiece. One day the artist met a little gypsy girl on the street, and was so struck by her peculiar beauty that he requested her to accompany him to his studio in order that he might paint her. This she consented to do, and while sitting for the great artist she noticed a half-finished painting of Christ on the cross. The gypsy girl, who was ignorant and uneducated, asked Sternberg what it was, and wondered if Christ must not have been an awfully bad man to be nailed to a cross. Sternberg replied that Christ was the best man that ever lived, and that He died on the cross that others might live. “Did He die for you?” asked the gypsy. This question so preyed upon the mind of Sternberg, who was not a Christian, that he was greatly disturbed by it. The more he pondered it, the more impressed he became that, though Christ had died for him, he had not accepted the sacrifice. It was this that led him at last to paint the “Messiah,” which became famous throughout the world. It is said that John Wesley got one of his greatest inspirations from this picture. Literature Aitken (W. H. M. H.), God’s Everlasting Yea, 117. Banks (L. A.), On the Trail of Moses, 201. Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year, Holy Week, 114, 480. Mackay (J. J.), Recent Letters of Christ, 156. Maclaren (A.), Christ’s Musts, 1. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, 362; St. John i.–viii., 162, 171. Macpherson (W. M.), The Path of Life, 105. Parker (J.), The City Temple Pulpit, iv. 12. Pearse (M. G.), Moses, 253. Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, ix. 169. Reid (J.), Jesus and Nicodemus, 185. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxv. No. 1500. Talbot (E. S.), Sermons in Leeds Parish Church. 147. Thorne (H.), Foreshadowings of the Gospel, 57. Thorne (H.), Notable Sayings of the Great Teacher, 25. Trench (R. C), Sermons in Ireland, 228. Christian World Pulpit, xx. 237 (Walters). Churchman’s Pulpit (Second Sunday after Easter), viii. 15 (Caley). Preacher’s Magazine, iv. (1893) 469. The Amazing Gift of Love For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.—John 3:16. 1. This is perhaps the favourite text in the Bible—one of the first texts which we learn as children, and one whose meaning becomes only the more precious to us as we grow older. For in these few simple words the whole Gospel is summed up. The depth of God’s love, the greatness of His gift, and the blessings which He freely offers to us—all are made known to us every time that we repeat these words. I suppose it is a common fact of experience that those who live within sound of church bells after awhile do not notice their striking; might I suggest that something similar may be true of the great bell-note that is struck for us in the opening clause of this text? Which of us is sufficiently sensitive or responsive to its vibrations? Which of us realizes sufficiently that these words proclaim a final truth, the culmination of religious thought, something never to be transcended?1 [Note: J. Warschauer.] 2. It is no accident that has given to this statement its unique place in the mind and heart of Christendom. The deepest thinker sees in this verse a summing-up of the Gospel; the humblest believer feels that it expresses the whole substance of his faith. The inspired writer gathers himself up, as it were, to a supreme effort, and presents in one majestic, sweeping, comprehensive sentence the essence of Christian belief. And there stands the declaration still in all its simple grandeur, in all its boundless love, in all its mighty power. Centuries have passed over it, and left no impress. Time has failed to impair its freshness; it is the same to-day as it was yesterday. That which it is to-day it will be for ever. For eighteen hundred years and more it has poured forth its blessings with unceasing flow upon the foolish and the wise, upon the sinner and the saint, upon the martyr and his murderer. Years have thrown no new light upon its meaning. The wisdom and learning of men, the meditations of the holiest and the best, have not added one jot to our comprehension of its mystery. Age upon age of opposition, of scorn, and of derision have as little succeeded in shaking its power. When we accept it in all its fulness, is it not still as much the source of joy as when it supported men, women, and children to a cruel death, gladly offering their lives in its defence? When we reject it, what can we offer in its place to support the weak or encourage the desperate? Is it not still the most sovereign balm to bind up the broken hearts of mourners; the surest stay of the dying? Is it not still the silver clarion, whose peal rises high and clear above the din of strife—stirring wearied soldiers of Christ to renew their struggle with evil, whether within their own hearts or in the world? Is it not still the rock upon which Christianity is founded? Is it not in reality the sum and substance of Christianity itself? For six nights Mr. Moorhouse had preached on this one text. The seventh night came and he went into the pulpit. Every eye was upon him. He said, “Beloved friends, I have been hunting all day for a new text, but I cannot find anything so good as the old one, so we will go back to John 3:16”; and he preached the seventh sermon from those wonderful words: “God so loved the world.” I remember the end of that sermon: “My friends,” he said, “for a whole week I have been trying to tell you how much God loves you, but I cannot do it with this poor stammering tongue. If I could borrow Jacob’s ladder, and climb up into Heaven, and ask Gabriel, who stands in the presence of the Almighty, to tell me how much love the Father has for the world, all he could say would be: ‘God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.’ ”1 [Note: Life of D. L. Moody, 128. At the World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910, Dr. Tasaku Harada, President of the Doshisha College, said: “As regards the aspects of the Christian Gospel and Christian life which appeal to the Japanese, in the first place I mention the love of God. Dr. Neesima used to say that he regarded the 16th verse of the third chapter of St. John’s Gospel as the Fujiyama of the New Testament—‘God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.’ If there are two words which have created the greatest transformation since the introduction of Christianity into Japan they are the words ‘God’ and ‘love.’ ”1 [Note: World Missionary Conference, 1910, iv. 305. Fuji, it should be said, is not only the sacred mountain of Japan but the ideal of excellence. Its almost perfect cone can be seen from most parts of the main island, and it forms the background of many Japanese landscapes, whether actually visible or not. 3. These words explain to us the relation in which Jesus stands as Son of man, first to God and next to us; and they interpret to our understanding, as well as to our faith and affection, the method by which the Eternal seeks us and finds us, saves us from ourselves and our sins, grants us the quickening sense of pardon, and fills us with the calm and strength of His everlasting life. Selecting the familiar incident from the Hebrew Scriptures in which the brazen serpent is lifted up before the dying people, Jesus says, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth may in him have eternal life”: and then He adds the sublime statement, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.” Now, this revelation is inexhaustible in its significance. It is a gospel within a gospel; and though uttered almost as swiftly as a morning salutation, yet it comprehends the contents of all the Gospels. It is as when, beginning our study of the universe, we start with a sea-beach, a stone-quarry, or a flower-garden, and then rise from it to the everlasting hills, thence to the infinite splendours of the midnight sky, and afterwards, through telescopes of ever-increasing power, look into the depths of the immeasurable heavens, adding world to world, and system to system, till we are overwhelmed with the marvel and grandeur of the realms of God; so, beginning with this primal declaration of the only begotten Son who dwelt in the bosom of the Father, and learning some of its contents, we are led on and on in our investigation, charmed by its simplicity, gladdened by its wealth, and awed by its mystery, till, mastered by our effort to comprehend the breadth and length, depth and height of the message, even St. Paul’s language is too poor to express our wonder and our praise: “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgements, and his ways past tracing out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor? or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of him, and through him, and unto him, are all things. To him be the glory for ever.” The “comfortable words,” as they are called, in the Order of Holy Communion (Matthew 11:28; John 3:16; 1 Timothy 1:15; 1 John 2:1-2), form an element peculiar to the English rite, being found elsewhere only in those liturgies which derive their inheritance through the channel of the English Reformation. They appeared for the first time in the Prayer-Book of 1549, and their insertion was apparently suggested to our Reformers by the recent issue on the Continent of a manual, based on the work of Luther, Bucer, and Melanchthon, which contained numerous hints for reform in liturgical worship, and has left traces of its influence in other parts of the Book of Common Prayer. All will agree that the step here taken by our Revisers was a distinct enrichment of our Service, and that they have introduced a most beautiful characteristic of our present liturgy. You remember the place at which the words occur. The congregation is invited to kneel and join in a united confession of sin; and then, after the absolution has been pronounced, the four words of comfort are recited to the people, assuring them of the reality and meaning of that spiritual exercise in which they have been engaged. At such a moment each speaks with an eloquence which the heart of the faithful worshipper can readily understand. No comment is added, because none is required, and any paraphrase would be felt to jar upon the ear. The actual language of Holy Writ has been incorporated into the scheme of our liturgy, and the utterances of our Lord and His Apostles are left to make good by themselves the force of their appeal.1 [Note: H. T. Knight. The Cross, the Font, and the Altar, 1. 4. Let us distribute the text into parts for easier apprehension, and in such a way as seems to us best “for the use of edifying.” Dr. Warschauer proceeds in a direct line, taking the thoughts of the verse as they come—(1) God, (2) a loving God, (3) a great Giver, (4) the Gift of the Son, (5) Belief, (6) Eternal Life. Dr. Eadie makes God’s Love the subject, and begins with the world as the Object of God’s love, takes next the Gift of God’s love, and ends with the Design of God’s love. Dr. Maclaren’s divisions are: (1) The great Lake—“God so loved the world”; (2) the River—“that he gave his only begotten Son”; (3) the Pitcher—“that whosoever believeth on him”; (4) the Draught—“should have eternal life.” If any criticism should be made of so effective and attractive a division of the text, it would be that it misses the prominence due to the world. For it has to be remembered that the revelation to Nicodemus was twofold—first, that he, a Pharisee, had to be born again before he could enter the Kingdom of God; and, next, that the way was open not only to Pharisees, but to sinners, including sinners of the Gentiles, that is to say, to the whole world. And it is this second part of the great revelation that St. John is now giving us. Accordingly the next verse proceeds, “For God sent not the Son into the world to judge the world; but that the world should be saved through him.” Let us, then, in order to keep the world-wide offer in our mind throughout, adopt this method of exposition— God and the World—“God so loved the world.” Christ and the World—“that he gave his only begotten Son.” III. The World and Christ—“that whosoever believeth on him.” IV. The World and God—“should not perish but have eternal life.” I God and the World “God so loved the world.” The introductory “for” shows that this verse presents itself as the reason of a previous statement. The reference in it is to a remarkable incident in the history of ancient Israel. They had, in one of their periodical fits of national insanity, so provoked God that He sent among them “fiery flying serpents,” and many of them were bitten and died. But to counteract the chastisement, and make its terror a means of salutary impression, Moses was commanded to frame a brazen figure of one of the poisonous reptiles, and place it on the summit of a flagstaff, so that any wounded Hebrew might be able to see it from the extremity of the camp. And every one, no matter how sorely he felt the poison in his fevered veins, if he could only turn his languid vision to the sacred emblem, was instantly healed. It is then asserted that salvation is a process of equal simplicity, facility, and certainty—“even so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth on him may have eternal life.” But why are belief and salvation so connected; and how comes it that any one, every one, confiding in the Son of man, is rescued and blessed—saved from the death which he has merited, and elevated to a life which he had forfeited? This pledge of safety and glory to the believer has its origin in nothing else than the truth of the text: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.” i. God Jesus begins with God; God Himself, God in His totality; not with His “attributes” or “qualities,” but with Himself in His redeeming activity. God is; is the first and last; and Jesus who knows Him, and knows Him as no other visitant of our earth does, starts in His description of redemption not from man, in his weltering wickedness and glaring rebellions, but from God in His eternally loving thought of us. It is permissible to take the opposite order, beginning with the lowest and ascending to the highest; but it is wiser in this, as in all else, to follow the Master, and look first, not at man, his sinning and its fateful consequences, but at God and His love of the world, and what it leads to. Salvation belongs to the Lord. The righteous Lord delights in mercy, and Jesus knows it and affirms it, as the supreme and all-controlling fact in our interpretation of God and of His world. 1. There is perhaps no text that speaks so directly to the Christian heart. There is none perhaps that finds a more immediate or more enthusiastic welcome in our breast; because we feel that in it we have the answer to all the devious problems of intellect and the most pressing and urgent needs of our soul. For what after all is the great problem of all problems that come into the quiet of our own hearts? What is it that we most want to have assurance about? Surely in our deepest moments the thought that presses home most upon us is, What kind of a God is it we have to deal with? Is He a God who cares for us and loves us, or is He a God who moves so far away from us that we are, as it were, but the dust of the balance in His sight? 2. What, then, does the word “God” mean to us? There is probably no question that goes deeper to the root than this. We are not specially helped, certainly not in our religious life, when we have admitted that there must be a Supreme Power which has created and sustains the visible world. Granted that is so, such a Power has little to say to us. We might acknowledge its existence as we acknowledge the existence of some far-off fixed star, and with just as much or as little practical result, just as little effect upon our thought and life. Not that God is, but what God is, is what matters to us; nobody can be vitally interested in some far-off, great first cause, and we certainly are no better off—worse, if anything—when we hear or use such empty phrases as the totality of being, instead of speaking of our Father in heaven. ii. God’s Love 1. A God who does not care, does not count; if He is not interested in us, how—to say it boldly—are we to be interested in Him? That is why, in practice, pantheism is hardly to be distinguished from atheism; you cannot worship a totality of being—you cannot pray to a nameless Power that is heedless of your welfare, not concerned in human joy or despair. No, the assurance which man’s soul craves is that which bursts upon him in this declaration, “God so loved the world.” For a loving worm within the clod Were better far than a loveless God. He created the world, not in order to escape the boredom of eternity, but from love; He called souls into being, not for the purpose of conducting an endless series of aimless experiments, but in order that His love might have objects on which to bestow itself; He leads them, not through a gnat-like span of existence to the gloom of annihilation, but to the home of everlasting love. That conception—and it alone—gives us anything worth calling a religion; and because Christianity insists upon and emphasizes this conception—God’s love of the world and for the human soul—it is the absolute religion. If our endeavours, our struggles, our failures, our hopes, our aspirations, were nothing to the Eternal, what could the Eternal be to us? Here is a human document which came into my hands only a couple of days ago. The writer says: “The conception of God that I now have is not the personal one that I had under the old belief.… Instead of living under the daily notice of God’s favour or resentment, I find that … we are but unnoticed units in all the vast millions of the universe. The result is that I am questioning the value of life.” Can you wonder? I do not wonder at all! But if we feel that His eye is upon us, that our little lives mean something to His heart, that we matter to Him, and that His intention is for our good, then that very fact lifts our lives out of insignificance, makes the conflict worth waging, and enables the toiler, the sufferer, the witness for truth and right to say in the midst of seeming defeat and desolation, “And yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me.” God loves the world: all faith which stops short of that lacks the element which makes it faith indeed.1 [Note: J. Warschauer.] 2. “God loves.” Where, outside of Christianity, does anybody dare to say that as a certainty? Men have hoped it; men have feared that it could not be; men have dimly dreamed and strongly doubted; men have had gods cruel, gods lustful, gods capricious, gods good-natured, gods indifferent or apathetic, but a loving God is the discovery of Christianity. Neither the gross deities of heathenism, nor the shadowy god of theism, nor the unknown somewhat which (perhaps) “makes for righteousness” of our modern agnostics, presents anything like this—“God loves.” It seems to us a simple and purely elementary truth that God is holy love, but how could we have known anything about it without Christ and the revelation made by Him? Nature and history show us clearly the wise and mighty God, but where do they show Him as holy and loving?2 [Note: R. Rothe, Still Hours, 107. God is here set forth as a lover; loving men, all men, every man. “God so loved the world.” Let us then at once make an addition to the first avowal of the Apostles’ Creed, and say:—“I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and lover of the whole world.” We sing, “Jesus, lover of my soul.” We have equal right and warrant to sing, “God the Father Almighty, lover of my soul.”1 [Note: H. Johnson, From Love to Praise, 10. iii. The World This designation of the object upon which the Divine love rested and rests eternally is to be interpreted according to the usage of this Gospel, and that usage distinctly gives to the expression “the world” not only the meaning of the total of humanity, but also the further meaning of humanity separated by its own evil from God. And so we get, not only the statement of the universality of the love of God, but also this great truth, that no sin or unworthiness, no unfaithfulness or rebellion, nothing which degrades humanity even to its lowest depths, and seems all but to extinguish the spark within it that is capable of being fanned into a flame, has the least power to deflect, turn back, or alter the love of God. That love falls upon “the world,” the mass of men who have wrenched themselves away from Him, but cannot wrench Him away from themselves. They never can prevent His love from pouring itself over them; even as the bright waters of the ocean will break over some grim rock, black in the sunshine. Thus the outcasts, criminals, barbarians, degraded people that the world consents to regard as irrevocably bad and hopeless are all grasped in His love. The first meaning of the Greek word for world (kosmos) is “order.” And as all order is more or less beautiful, the second meaning of the term is “ornament.” The word is found with this meaning in 1 Peter 3:3,—“Whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel; but let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.” After the word had for ages been employed by the Greeks in these acceptations, it occurred to one of the greatest thinkers that ever lived that there was no order so wonderful as the order of the universe, no ornament so ornamental, so real, as the great world. Hence he employed the word which signified “order” and “ornament” to designate the “world.” The Holy Spirit, who guided the holy men who wrote the New Testament, approving of his idea, adopted the Greek term in its Pythagorean sense. And thus it is that we read such expressions as the following:—“The invisible things of God from the creation of the (orderly and beautiful) world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” “Glorify thou me with thine own self, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.” “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” To the eye of most of the ancients, however, the sun and the stars, instead of being orbs greater and more glorious than our earth, were only luminaries or lamps to light us by day and by night. The earth was to them almost all the universe. And it was the earth especially which they called the world. This import of the term became stereotyped; and thus we read in the Bible: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” But this world—the earth—is the temporary home of a vast multitude of thinking beings, every one of whom seems to be more wonderful and glorious than the vast earth on which he moves and has his being. These thinking beings use the earth; the earth does not use them. They think of the earth; the earth does not think of them. They feel too,—they feel the earth; the earth does not feel them. They live; the earth does not live. They are the lords of the earth, and subdue it and have dominion over it. They are men; and as they rise into the consciousness of what they are, they gradually reach the idea—“We are the world; the earth is beneath our feet.” The men of the earth are a world upon a world. They are a thinking, feeling, will-endowed, moral world. They are “the world.” Hence it is that we read of “all the world being guilty before God.” God shall “judge the world.” And in this Gospel according to Jesus, our Saviour is His own herald, and says that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.” The “world,” then, which is loved by God, is the world of men. It is, we may add, the world of all men. The word “world,” when not expressly limited in its scope by the mention of the parties to whom it refers, or when not obviously limited by the nature of the case, must be understood in its simple, unrestricted, universal acceptation. It is not expressly limited here by the mention of any mere section of the race. The expression is not “the fashionable world,” “the scientific world,” “the religious world,” “the commercial world,” “the literary world,” “the busy world.” Neither is there anything in the nature of the case referred to,—there is nothing in the nature of God’s love,—that should lead us to suppose that it is confined either to the religious, or to the fashionable, or the scientific, or the commercial, or the busy, or the literary. It must be the whole world—the world of all men—that is referred to. It is true that the word “world” is sometimes hyperbolically used with a limited reference. Even the expression, “the whole world,” is sometimes thus used. We read that “the whole world lieth in wickedness”; although in that very passage we also read that they who believe in Christ are not lying in wickedness, but are “of God.” Jesus said to His disciples, “If ye were of the world, the world would love his own; but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.” Here the word “world” obviously means somewhat less than all men. It means “the worldly.” It means those who are characterized by the spirit which actuated men in general all over the world. But in the text it is not used with limitation. It is the world of all men, without distinction or exception, that is meant. It is the same world which is called “the whole world” in that other precious little gospel which runs thus:—“If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” The true extent of the import of the word may be seen in those other passages which assure us that there “is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; who gave himself a ransom for all,” and who tasted death for every Man 1:1 [Note: J. Morison, Holiness and Happiness, 14. 1. But what about election? There is nothing in this text about it. God so loved the world—not a portion of the world—not the elect. The elect are only a part of the world and chosen out of it. But this love of God is world-wide, for everybody, without a hint of election in it. It sweeps away out beyond election, and has no boundaries, no limitations, no reservations. I believe in election. It is one of the great basal truths of Scripture, and a most blessed doctrine, charged with infinite stay and comfort for God’s believing children. It puts the Father’s everlasting arms about every child of His, and makes it certain he will never perish. But while it clearly and definitely includes somebody, it just as clearly and positively excludes nobody. It makes heaven sure for the chosen, but it keeps no one out of heaven. It is no chain gang bound about the necks of men, dragging some to salvation and some to perdition.1 [Note: H. Johnson, From Love to Praise, 17. 2. This is the vital doctrine of election, the election of some for the benediction of the whole. “I pray for these, that the world may believe.” The elect are called not to a sphere of exclusion, but to a function of transmission. They are elected not to privilege, but to service; not to the secret hoarding of blessing, but to its widespread distribution. The elect are not circles, but centres, heat centres for radiating gracious influence to remote circumferences, that under its warming and softening ministry “the world may believe” in the Son of God. That is the way of the Master. He will work upon the frozen streams and rivers of the world by raising the general temperature. He seeks to increase the fervour of those who are His own, and, through the pure and intense flame of their zeal, to create an atmosphere in which the hard frozen indifference of the world shall be melted into wonder, into tender inquisition, that on the cold altar of the heart may be kindled the fire of spiritual devotion. “I pray not for the world, but for these … that the world may believe.” Through the disciple He seeks the vagrant; through the believer He seeks the unbeliever; through the Church He seeks the world; through the ministry of Christian men and women the world is to be won for Christ. iv. God’s Love of the World God loves the world, the world of men, Gentile as well as Jew, Cornelius not less than Nicodemus, Scythian as well as Syrian, bond not less than free. God in His totality loves man in his totality, loves his welfare, which is purity and peace, faith and love, self-poise and perseverance, devotion to high ideals, and enduring joy. “There is no difference.” The Divine love is infinite as the Divine nature. It has no exclusions. Sin divides, degrades, excludes, but God is at war with sin. He loves the world. This is the glorious fact that sends its clear, pulsing light through all our human life. Oh, the joy, the unutterable joy of it! God loves the prodigal who in his wayward folly has lost the track to the Father’s house, the rebel who has defied His misjudged authority, the ingrate who has despised His goodness; and yet His love is such that it conquers their sin and ends their sinning, and brings them back to the Father’s home penitent, obedient, and grateful. 1. How can it be that God loves such a world? A partial explanation lies in the fact that it is God’s nature to love, that while others are by nature hard and unpitying, and even vengeful, God by nature is tender, sympathetic, and merciful. Yet it is the most tremendous statement that has ever confronted the human mind, the statement of God’s gracious love for the world. It is the most difficult statement for the belief of man to grasp. 2. There are those who are eminently disgusted with God’s world, who claim that we cannot have high moral perceptions and know humanity without feeling that humanity is despicable. There are those who would sweep the whole multitude of mankind into the sea and drown them; they have no patience with them and they have no hope for them. When, then, the theory is propounded that though God did indeed create this world and start humanity, He later cast off all thought of the world, having no further concern for humanity, the theory appeals to such persons, and they say that through such a theory they can understand the meaning of human life. (1) But any such theory is apart from the supreme fact of revelation. That supreme fact teaches that, the very nature of God being love, His love insistently and persistently goes out to every one of His creatures. If it be asked how can it be possible that a holy God in His omniscience can thus love those who are wrong, incomplete, and unattractive, the answer is that in that omniscience lies largely our explanation of His love. The Eastern shepherd, because he knows each individual sheep of his flock, knows the needs of each individual sheep. Did not Longfellow say that it makes no difference who the man is, provided we know him, know his temptations and trials, we are sure to love him? Is it not also said that no man can hate another if he understands all his failures and distresses? The prejudice of man towards his fellow is based on man’s ignorance of his fellow. Nothing in all this earth so awakens interest in the individual as acquaintance with the individual. The person who is actually hideous as a perfect stranger, as an acquaintance is found to have a past history and a present experience that appeal to pity and even to love. A. C. Benson, in Seen from a College Window, says: “If the dullest person in the world would only put down sincerely what he or she thought about his or her life, about work and love, religion and emotion, it would be a fascinating document.” (2) Beyond God’s omniscience lies His realization of the possible development of each one of all His world. He never is ashamed of humanity and He never allows that He has made a mistake in creating humanity. He believes that deep down in every human heart there are possibilities of development into beauty and even into power. Throughout history He has been laying His hand upon all sorts of people in sheepfolds or on farms, in obscure villages, in streets of both small and great cities, and He has summoned them to great riches of character, and to great usefulness of service. Where others look in hopelessness, He looks in profound expectation. To Him humanity has expressed itself in the spirit and conduct of Jesus Christ, and He anticipates that man after man from all sections and tribes of the earth will measure up to the likeness of Christ; and He rejoices with abundant joy when the Magdalenes are restored, the lepers are healed, the dumb sing, the blind see, and the dead live again. God is always anticipating glorious transformations of character. 3. Do we realize that, when we say “God loves the world,” that really means, as far as each of us is concerned, God loves me? And just as the whole beams of the sun come pouring down into every eye of the crowd that is looking up to it, so the whole love of God pours down, not upon a multitude, an abstraction, a community, but upon every single soul that makes up that community. He loves us all because He loves each of us. We shall never get all the good of that thought until we translate it, and lay it upon our hearts. It is all very well to say, “Ah yes! God is love,” and it is all very well to say He loves “the world.” But what is a great deal better is to say, as St. Paul said, “Who loved me and gave himself for me.” When we speak of loving a number of individuals—the broader the stream, the shallower it is, is it not? The most intense patriot in England does not love her one ten-thousandth part as well as he loves his own little girl. When we think or feel anything about a great multitude of people, it is like looking at a forest. We do not see the trees, we see the whole wood. But that is not how God loves the world. Suppose I said that I loved the people in India, I should not mean by that that I had any feeling about any individual soul of all those dusky millions, but only that I massed them all together, or made what people call a generalization of them. But that is not the way in which God loves. He loves all because He loves each. And when we say, “God so loved the world,” we have to break up the mass into its atoms, and to think of each atom as being an object of His love. We all stand out in God’s love just as we should do to one another’s eyes if we were on the top of a mountain-ridge with a clear sunset sky behind us. Each little black dot of the long procession would be separately visible. And we all stand out like that, every man of us isolated, and getting as much of the love of God as if there were not another creature in the whole universe but God and ourselves.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.] After this he seems to have again paid a flying visit to Bathgate, the residence of his brother-in-law; for to this year belongs a beautiful anecdote told of him in that place. A young man belonging to the Church there was very ill, “dying of consumption.” Mr. Martin had promised to take his distinguished relative to see this youth, and Irving’s time was so limited, that the visit had to be paid about six in the morning, before he started on his further journey. When the two clergymen entered the sick chamber, Irving went up to the bedside, and looking in the face of the patient said softly, but earnestly, “George M——, God loves you; be assured of this—God loves you.” When the hurried visit was over, the young man’s sister, coming in, found her patient in a tearful ecstasy not to be described. “What do you think? Mr. Irving says God loves me,” cried the dying lad, overwhelmed with the confused pathetic joy of that great discovery. The sudden message had brought sunshine and light into the chamber of death.2 [Note: Mrs. Oliphant, The Life of Edward Irving, ii. 87. 4. “God so loved the world.” The pearl of this wonderful statement is the measure it supplies of that eternal love which redeems sinful man. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.” It is the earthly way of describing the sacrifice God makes of God, of His true and real self for man. Language could not more clearly or strongly declare the fact that God gives Himself, His essential self, to the temptation and toil, the suffering and anguish, of our limited and burdened life, that He may carry out His world-loving purpose. The marvel of God’s love for mankind grows as we learn the degree of that love. It is the degree of it that is apocalyptic. The Old Testament had attempted to disclose the graciousness of God, telling men that like as a father pities, so God pities. Exterior nature too had tried to make known God’s healing and comforting power; abundant harvests telling of His affection, zephyrs breathing His soothing kindness, health-giving air and the recuperative tendencies within every normal body indicating that love is over mankind. But the degree of that love was never known to any man, however scholarly, until it was revealed when God out of desire to secure to man the highest possible good actually gave His Son for Man 1:1 [Note: J. G. K. McClure, Supreme Things, 19. Winds weary with the old sea tune Slide inland with some cloud, and soon From woods that whisper summer noon Weigh their wight wings with odour boon. So I, long salted in our ocean drear Of disbelief that Essence can be won By any form of thought invented here, Felt such a gush of joy about My heart-roots, as if in and out ’Twas life-blood billowed; and as stout As once we sent the battle-shout Pitching clear notes against barbaric din,— Oh, brother, my soul’s voice against the rout Of unbeliefs a man doth muse within, Arising and protesting wild, Spake, speaking out untruth defiled; Spake, speaking in the truth exiled; Spake, Little head and weary child, Come home, God loves, God loves through sin and shame,— Come home, God loves His world.2 [Note: Richard Watson Dixon.] II Christ and the World “He gave his only begotten Son.” The evidence of the love of God is the advent of God into the sinful and suffering life of man, bearing sin vicariously as His way of eradicating it from the heart and will of the sinner. “God,” as St. Paul says, “was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself.” “It is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus”—“the effulgence of the Father’s glory and the very image of his person,” uniquely and inexpressibly related to Him as “the only begotten Son”—He, and not a stranger, nor a seraph; He, and not one of the ordinary sons of men—“came into the world to save sinners”; to enter into contest with the awful power of sin; to make an end of it, and to bring in an everlasting righteousness. Here, then, in the life of Jesus are the only unerring measures of the love of God. He spared not Himself from the suffering and agony and sacrifice necessary to save them, but in love of them bore it for them, to rescue them from the stupor and death of sin, and lift them to a share in His life. He who sees Jesus in Bethlehem as a babe, in Galilee as a working healer and wise teacher, in Gethsemane and on Calvary as the Just One dying for the unjust, sees the Father, and knows and understands a little of the way in which He mediates the redemption of a lost world. 1. Let us seek, first of all, to get rid of misconceptions in this vital matter. (1) One of the most prevalent notions of God is this: that God is a hard, inexorable Being, who has been made mild and forgiving only by the death of Jesus Christ. This great Gospel text teaches just the contrary. It represents God as in love with men already before Christ came—with all men—with every man. “God so loved the world.” And this is not any elect or select portion of the world, but the whole world of human beings that ever have lived, that live now or that ever will live on the face of the earth: not the world of the elect, but the world of sinners. How can you appease love? How can a loving God propitiate Himself? Read this text with this thought of a propitiation of God injected into it, and see how it sounds. “God so loved the world that he gave his beloved Son to abate his own wrath and to placate himself!” Or, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that he might stop hating it.” This is simply suicide by self-contradiction! What folly to talk of bribing to mercy One who is bent by every instinct and prompting of His heart to the exhibition of mercy! Will you bribe a mother to love her child?1 [Note: H. Johnson, From Love to Praise, 5. (2) But there is another false notion of God quite as prevalent in our day as the one just named, and probably quite as mischievous. It arises from the swing of the human heart to the opposite extreme of thought. God is conceived of as a Being whose love is so vast and sweeping as to make punishment at last impossible. Instead of being thought of now as a stern judge who will by no means clear the guilty, He is thought of as a Father too loving to punish, and so full of mercy that it will not be in His heart to deal with men according to any rigid standard of justice. But this notion is as false and unscriptural as the other, and to this notion as well as to the other the great Gospel text we have before us stands opposed. In the bosom of this heavenly message we not only find the beat of an infinite heart, but the imperial majesty of a holy will. There is no more warrant for the dear God of sentimentalism than for the hard malignant God of railing unbelief, and there is no warrant whatever for either. Let us carefully read the text again. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish.” Whosoever believes. But suppose men do not believe and will not believe. Do you not see the inevitable, irresistible next step? If men still will not believe, then they still will perish. God’s love does not save everybody, although it goes out to everybody. Some men will not take its great gift. And if the sacrifice is rejected, how can it help the sinner it is made for? God is all Love, and nothing but Love and Goodness can come from Him. He is as far from Anger in Himself, as from Pain and Darkness. But when the fallen Soul of Man had awakened in itself a wrathful, self-tormenting Fire, which could never be put out by itself, which could never be relieved by the natural Power of any Creature whatsoever, then the Son of God, by a Love greater than that which created the World, became Man, and gave His own Blood and Life into the fallen Soul, that it might, through His Life in it, be raised, quickened, and born again into its first state of inward Peace and Delight, Glory and Perfection, never to be lost any more.1 [Note: William Law.] 2. “God so loved the world that he gave.” This is always and everywhere the sign and token of love, this generous need to give itself forth. Love is prodigal—a reaching out, an overflowing beyond the borders and boundaries of self; an imperious desire to make some sacrifice, to do something for the sake of the beloved. Wherever you meet this passion of affection, you will meet that same splendid impetus of self-giving. The one great passion of a poet like W. E. Henley is a love of his country—not always wise but always genuine—and it bursts forth into those exultant lines— What have I done for you, England, my England? What is there I would not do, England, my own? The story is told by Luther that when his translation of the Bible was being printed in Germany, pieces of the printer’s work were allowed to fall carelessly upon the floor of his shop. One day the printer’s little daughter coming in picked up a piece of paper on which she found just the words, “God so loved the world that he gave”—the rest of the sentence not having yet been printed. It was a veritable revelation to her, for up to that time she had always been told that the Almighty was to be dreaded, and could be approached only through penance. The new light thrown upon God’s nature by the scrap that had fallen into her hands seemed to flood her whole being with its radiance, so that her mother asked her the reason of her joyfulness. Putting her hand in her pocket, Luther tells us, the girl handed, out the little crumpled piece of paper with the unfinished sentence. Her mother read it, and was perplexed: “He gave—what was it He gave?” For a moment the child was puzzled, but only for a moment; then, with a quick intuition, “I don’t know; but if He loved us well enough to give us anything, we need not be afraid of Him.” Truly there are things hidden from the wise and prudent that are revealed to babes. How impossible is Spinoza’s demand that although God is not so much as interested in us, we ought to feel towards Him an overmastering love of the mind! And how absolutely true, on the other hand, is the insight which declares, “We love him because he first loved us!”1 [Note: J. Warschauer] In the next verse, where the same subject is dealt with, a different expression is employed. There we read, “God sent his Son.” But here, where the matter in hand is the love of God, sent is far too cold a word, and gave is used as congruous with loved. It must needs be that the Divine love manifest itself even as the human does by an infinite delight in bestowing. The very property and life of love, as we know it even in its tainted and semi-selfish forms as it prevails amongst us, is to give, and the life of the Divine love is the same. He loves, and therefore He gives. His love is a longing to bestow Himself, and the proof and sign that He loves is that “He gave his only begotten Son.”2 [Note: A. Maclaren.] 3. “He gave his only begotten Son.” We cannot reach the bottom of this saying. The shallow sounding lines of men that are cast into that deep water do not touch the bottom, though some imagine that they do. What does it mean?—“His only begotten Son.” There are some that would seek to minimize the force of that wonderful designation “only begotten.” They tell us that it does not always signify soleness, or even uniqueness; and they point us to the fact that Isaac is called Abraham’s only begotten son although Ishmael was equally his child. But such an argument is not good enough even to be called sophistical. It has no point and no relevancy. “Only begotten” must of necessity mean both uniqueness and soleness. Isaac was Abraham’s only begotten son from the standpoint from which the term was applied. He was so with reference to the promise and the seed of Abraham. He was the promised only begotten son of the sacred line, and that of course is the meaning which no sophistry, no amount of quibbling, can ever get rid of. As applied to Christ it means a relation to God, which is not, and can not, be shared by any other man or by any other creature in the whole universe of God. The true test, as it seems to me, between a view of Christ’s nature which can be regarded as a legitimate development of historical Christianity and one which can only be looked upon as a new and different creed, is this, “Does it admit the Divine Sonship of Christ in some unique, some solitary sense, or does it make Christ merely one of many sons of God?”1 [Note: H. Rashdall, Doctrine and Development, 79. It is hardly denied that Browning’s whole being was penetrated with this idea of Christ as the supreme revealer, the one paramount representative of God to man. And yet we have been told by his biographer that, though he uses the language of Christian Theology, his declarations cannot of course be understood in the sense of orthodox Christianity. Why “of course”? If we tried to get to the bottom of the old phrases in which orthodox Christianity has become stereotyped, we should find perhaps sometimes that the burning words of a nineteenth-century poet are after all only the present-day equivalent of the thoughts and words of a St. John in the first century, and of an Athanasius in the fourth. If there be any truth in the way in which I have attempted to explain this tremendous phrase, “the only begotten Son of God,” the thought which they contain is one of which Robert Browning’s poetry is simply full.2 [Note: Ibid. 81. Why have we only one Christ? We have had many philosophers, and neither to Socrates, nor Plato, nor Aristotle among the ancients; neither to Bacon, nor Descartes, nor Spinoza, nor Kant, nor Schelling, nor Hegel among the moderns, could the palm of solitary, indisputable superiority be given. We have had many poets, and neither to Homer, nor Dante, nor Shakespeare, nor Milton, nor Goethe could the praise of unique and unapproachable excellence be awarded. We have had many soldiers, and neither to Alexander, nor Hannibal, nor Cæsar, nor Charlemagne, nor to any of the mediaeval and modern commanders could absolutely unequalled military genius be attributed. And so in every other department of human thought and action. No man is entirely unique. Every man has many compeers; Christ, and Christ alone, and that in the highest department, the religious, is unique, solitary, incomparable; and our question is, Why? Why has the Creator of men created only one Christ, while He has created myriads of all other kinds of men? That Creator is infinitely benevolent; He loves His creatures, He seeks their highest well-being. That well-being Christ has promoted not only more than any other man, but more than all other men that have ever lived. If one Christ has been so mighty for good, what would a multitude have accomplished? Yet God has given to our poor humanity only one, and if we persist in asking, Why? can we find a fitter answer than the answer that stands written in the history of the Word made flesh? God in giving one gave His all: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.”1 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn, The City of God, 251. This has always been the Christian religion. There has never been any other Christian religion except this—never. St. Paul believed this. This was his religion. “God sent forth his Son made of a woman, made under the law.” “God sent forth his Son.” How can you reconcile that with Jesus Christ being only a very good man? “Declared to be the Son of God with power.” Does that sound like a very good man? “Through whom are all things.” Is that the sort of thing you would say about a man? “Who, though he was rich, yet for our sakes became poor.” When was He ever rich as man? Never. From those four undisputed Epistles of St. Paul—the two to the Corinthians, Romans, and Galatians—it can be proved to demonstration that St. Paul believed that the Incarnation was the centre of the Christian religion. Take St. Peter and read what he says about “the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls,” to see what he believed. Take St. John. This is St. John: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.” Take the old Christian liturgies—take a hymn like the Gloria in Excelsis, which has come down to us from the beginning, and you find the same thing: “Thou art the Everlasting Son.” Take the Nicene Creed, which the early Church fought about with those who did not believe, and its final shape states that the Son was of the very substance with the Father, the same, identically the same substance with the Father.2 [Note: Bishop Winnington Ingram, The Love of the Trinity, 117. One of the most notable events of my freshman’s term was the death of the Rev. Charles Simeon. He was persuaded, though much advanced in years and diffident concerning his own physical strength, to accept the office of Select Preacher for the month of November. He had prepared his four sermons; but when November came, he was lying on a sick-bed; and when St. Mary’s bell tolled for him, it announced, not his sermons, but his death. I heard those four sermons delivered by Mr. Simeon’s successor in his own pulpit. So far as I can remember, the first three were introductory to the fourth, and the fourth gathered up the whole course and showed how type and shadow and prophecy and all the preparatory portion of God’s dispensation found their fulfilment and explanation in the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. Whether my recollection of those particular sermons be correct or not, certain it is that the supreme position of Christ, as the Alpha and Omega of the revelation of God, as “the way, the truth, and the life,” as the true link between earth and heaven, as the one sufficient sacrifice for sin, “the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world,” as the one foundation of human hope laid by the love of God Himself—certain it is, I say, that this supreme position of Christ was the point to which all Mr. Simeon’s teaching turned, the basis upon which his ministry was built. What was the difference between that teaching and the teaching which it strove to supersede? It professed no new discovery, it did not consciously embody any doctrine which was not already embodied in the Book of Common Prayer. The difference would seem to be expressible by the phrase, the preaching of a living Christ. The teaching purported to reproduce the words of the text, “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son,” and to reassert the words of St. Paul, “we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.” A criticism of a similar kind may be made upon the teaching of a still more remarkable man, to some extent contemporary with Mr. Simeon; I mean John Wesley. What was the secret of the marvellous power of John Wesley’s preaching? It owed much, I have no doubt, to his great natural endowments; much to his zeal and the strength of his convictions; but I believe that the ultimate analysis of the subject would show that, fundamentally, the secret of his power was his own clear hold upon, and his living exposition of, the doctrine of the Incarnation of the Son of God. I say the living exposition because this is just what is necessary to infuse life into the souls of others. Vivum ex vivo, say the physiologists: vivum ex vivo, ought to echo the theologians; and a man who has a living apprehension of the love of God, as manifested to mankind in the mission of Him who is called “the only begotten Son,” possesses in that apprehension a spiritual power, which it is more easy to regard with wonder than to measure or to restrain. The preaching of John Wesley can scarcely be reproduced; but the hymns composed by him and by his brother, who in this respect was even more remarkable than himself, will go far towards substantiating what I have now been saying. Nor is it to be believed that the great movement of the Church of England which has taken place in the last half-century would have been the real and living thing which it has proved to be, if it had not rested upon Christ as the Incarnate Son of God. A superficial criticism may identify this movement with questions of forms, of vestments, of architecture, of chanting the Church’s offices; or, perhaps, with higher questions, such as the power of the Priesthood, the grace of the Sacraments, and other doctrines or practices, which, more or less, divide opinion. And, doubtless, it is true that as the movement described as the Evangelical was a reaction from the preceding condition of the Church, and contained a reassertion of doctrines which had been allowed to fall too much into abeyance, so the next great movement gained strength from the fact that in the fervour of the evangelical effort the symmetry of Catholic teaching had been to some extent lost sight of and injured. But allowing for all this, it may still be maintained that the real foundation of what is sometimes called the Catholic movement, equally with the Evangelical, was Christ, the Incarnate Son of God. Who can doubt this who has studied and loved Keble’s “Christian Year”? Foolish things may have been said, foolish things may have been done; but these foolish things have not helped the movement; they have tended to mar and hinder it. The wisest and best teachers, whether they be called High Church or Low Church, Catholic or Evangelical, so far as their teaching is wise, earnest, and true, can adopt the words of him who hated divisions, and simply styled himself “the servant of the Lord Jesus Christ,” when he wrote to one of the Churches, “I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” The same thing may be said if we go back to the greatest movement of all which can be found in our English Church history, namely, the Reformation of the sixteenth century. A variety of causes, as we all know, conspired at that time to bring about a great religious change; a variety of smaller causes conspired to determine the precise form which the change should assume in this country: general dissatisfaction with the then condition of things, long-standing jealousy of the Pope of Rome, the increase of learning, the translation of the Scriptures, the growth of the seed which John Wyclif had sown, combined with political and local causes to overthrow the Church as it then was. The traces of destruction are clear enough; but what were the forces of conservation and growth? Surely these were to be found in the fact that the wisest and best amongst the Reformers held fast to the doctrine of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Truly the Church needed a strong foundation in those terrible days; the storms raged and the winds beat upon the house; and it fell not, because it was founded upon a rock, and “that rock was Christ.” In this supreme crisis of the Church’s history she needed no new doctrine, no new faith, no new machinery, but only a clearing away of all that tended to obscure the visage of her Lord and towards substituting the legends and inventions of man for the faith once delivered to the saints. And if I wished for another illustration of the point which I am now pressing, I would seek it in a very different quarter, namely, in that wonderful book known by the title De Imitatione Christi. The title, as we know, is taken from one particular portion of the volume; but did you ever observe what an absolute misnomer it is as applied to the whole? To speak of imitating another implies that imitation is possible; a child imitates its father or its mother, or a man sees his neighbour do a charitable act and he follows his example, or the pupil imitates his tutor, hoping to become like him; and so when you read the history of Christ being kind and gentle, holy and devout and good; when you read of His being constant in prayer, or of His indignation against hypocrisy, and His compassion for the ignorant and fallen, or when you are told that when He was reviled He reviled not again, when He suffered He threatened not, and so forth throughout the whole human side of His history, you feel not only that you can try at least to follow His example, but that you ought and would like to do it; and if this were all, still more if Jesus Christ were such as Renan and others would represent Him to have been, you feel that there is at least nothing impossible in an imitation of Christ; but the Christ of Thomas à Kempis is very different from our modern pictures of Jesus of Nazareth; it is not only Christ the man, to be followed as an example, as all good men should be, but Christ the Son of God, who in the plenitude of His love and condescension holds converse with the human soul. And because this is so, the title of the book may be called a misnomer; but also because this is so, therefore the book has its marvellous and unequalled power of influence and magical fascination; it is the record of the possible communion of the soul with God through Christ, which is unspeakably precious, just because Christ is infinitely higher than humanity, and is worthy of worship, but incapable of imitation.1 [Note: Bishop Harvey Goodwin, in The Cambridge Review, Nov. 24, 1886. 4. Must we not say more and go further than this? Must we not say that in giving us Jesus Christ, God gave us Himself, just so far as we could receive this culminating gift? Is it not the fact that in Him we have the Way to God, the Truth about God, and the Life of God lived out among men? Is it not He who has made God real for us, by interpreting Godhead in terms of Fatherhood, so that henceforth we know God and have seen Him? He brings men to God as Teacher and Leader; but, even more wonderful, He brings God to men by visibly manifesting the Divine within Himself. In the face of so great a proof we can no longer doubt the love which prompted it. Men had thought of the Eternal as of some mighty Potentate, irresponsible in power, jealous of His own dignity, exacting obedience and praise and sacrifices; but in Christ they saw God willing to seek and to save, ready even, incredible though it might seem, to suffer and agonize for their sakes, loving men even in their disobedience and wilfulness, and giving Himself for them. “God so loved the world that he gave” Himself to us in His own dear Son. Men readily concede that God gave us Jesus, but they do not seem to see with equal clearness that God gave Himself in Jesus, and that He still continues to give Himself in everything worthy of Jesus that is making the world better, nobler, kinder. I remember reading during the South African war that the greatest deaths were those of the mothers who died in their sons, the greatest gifts were those of the mothers who gave their sons, the keenest anguish was that of the mothers who suffered in their sons for the sake of England. Here is a figure of the word of God for the world.1 [Note: R. J. Campbell.] (1) Here we come upon the doctrine of the Atonement, properly so called; that is, we are led to the recognition of the truth that the spiritual condition of the race of man has been changed, as the result of the Incarnation of the Son of God. Persons may of course easily misrepresent this doctrine, and say that it is derogatory to the character of the Almighty that He should require a human sacrifice to appease His wrath; that God is love and cannot be propitiated by the sufferings of the innocent; and that it is impossible for a man of honourable feeling to wish for a boon so obtained. But who preaches such doctrines as those which are thus reprobated? who does not maintain the doctrine of the text as the only ground of that of the Atonement, namely, that God so loved the world, that He even stooped Himself to save it? “What is the blood of Christ?” asked Livingstone of his own solitary soul in the last months of his African wanderings. “It is Himself. It is the inherent and everlasting mercy of God made apparent to human eyes and ears. The everlasting love was disclosed by our Lord’s life and death. It showed that God forgives because He loves to forgive.”1 [Note: J. Clifford, The Secret of Jesus, 101. (2) Not only is the gift of the only begotten Son the gift of God Himself, it is also the gift of God Himself in sacrifice. In giving Jesus to us God made a real sacrifice and really impoverished Himself to give it. If God had not truly loved us, or if He had loved us only in a measure, would He not have kept His Son in blessed fellowship, living in His love and finding in it His highest joy and the satisfaction of all His needs? But no; the love which God had was the love which stopped short at no sacrifice, and therefore He gave to us His only begotten Son. When we are asked, as we have been asked in Robert Elsmere, and in much literature that has preceded and followed it, why we do not get rid of the sternness and awfulness of religion and rest content simply with preaching the Fatherhood of God, our answer is plain. The one proof of God’s love that will ever convince the world is the Cross of Christ. Said the great German, “If I were God, the sorrows of the world would break my heart.” He knew not what he said. The sorrows of the world did break the Heart of hearts. Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, even unto blood, even unto broken-heartedness. Why do you not say that God is Father and that all is to be well, and leave Christ out? This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/greattexts/ No More Thirst Jesus answered and said unto her, Every one that drinketh of this water shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up unto eternal life.—John 4:13-14. 1. Those who have read with care the addresses of Christ must be struck, not only with their illustrative character, but, which is very important in the use of illustrations, with their perfect adaptation to the case in point. The force of His imagery is heightened by the fact that the emblems and figures used were taken from objects which the audience had in view at the time He addressed them, and from external things with which their minds were thoroughly familiar, and in which they had a special interest. When the multitudes sought Him at Capernaum for “the meat which perisheth,” He began to speak of “the meat which endureth unto everlasting life.” In the case before us, He gradually leads the mind of the woman of Samaria from the material water which she was drawing from the well of Jacob, to the “living water” that He could give, and which would be in her “a well of living water springing up unto eternal life.” 2. There are two kinds of wells, one a simple reservoir, another containing the waters of a spring. It is the latter kind that is spoken about here, as is clear not only from the meaning of the word in the Greek, but also from the description of it as “springing up.” That suggests at once the activity of a fountain. A fountain is the emblem of motion, not of rest. Its motion is derived from itself, not imparted to it from without. Its “silvery column” rises ever heavenward, though gravitation is too strong for it, and drags it back again. So Christ promised to this ignorant, sinful Samaritan woman that if she chose He would plant in her soul a gift which would thus well up, by its own inherent energy, and fill her spirit with music, and refreshment, and satisfaction. I The Thirst of the Soul “Every one that drinketh of this water shall thirst again.” It is not difficult to discern traces of this thirst in the faces of those whom we meet in the common way. If we take our stand at the corner of the street and scan the faces of the passing crowd, it is only now and again that we gaze upon a countenance which is significant of peace. How rarely the face suggests the joy and the serenity of a healthy satisfaction. We are confronted by an abounding unrest. The majority of people seem to be afflicted with the pain of unsatisfied want. The very faces are suggestive of a disquieting thirst. We have a varied vocabulary in which we describe this prevailing condition:—“restless,” “discontented,” “dissatisfied,” “not right with himself.” Water is an essential of animal and vegetable life. With a constantly recurring appetite we seek it. To have no thirst is a symptom of disease or death. But the soul also, not having life in itself, needs to be sustained from without; and when in a healthy state it seeks by a natural appetite that which will sustain it. And as most of our mental acts are spoken of in terms of the body, as we speak of seeing truth and grasping it, as if the mind had hands and eyes, so David naturally exclaims, “My soul thirsts for the living God.” In the living soul there is a craving for that which maintains and revives its life, which is analogous to the thirst of the body for water. The dead alone feel no thirst for God. The soul that is alive sees for a moment the glory and liberty and joy of the life to which God calls us; it feels the attraction of a life of love, purity, and righteousness, but it seems continually to sink from this and to tend to become dull and feeble, and to have no joy in goodness. Just as the healthy body delights in work, but wearies and cannot go on exerting itself for many hours together, but must repair its strength, so the soul soon wearies and sinks back from what is difficult, and needs to be revived by its appropriate refreshment.1 [Note: M. Dods.] I think there is something implanted in man’s heart, fallen creature as he is, which defies him to be content with anything but God alone. It is a trace of original majesty, which leaves a mark of what he was before the fall. He is always panting for something fresh; and that is no sooner attained than it palls upon his taste. And this strong necessity of loving something makes a man form idols for himself, which he invests with fancied perfections, and when all these fade away in his grasp, and he finds their unsubstantiality, he must become either a misanthrope or a Christian. When a man has learned to know the infinite love of God in Christ to him, then he discovers something which will not elude his hold, and an affection which will not grow cold; for the comparison of God’s long-suffering and repeated pardon, with his own heartless ingratitude, convinces him that it is an unchangeable love.1 [Note: Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson, 57. O God, where do they tend—these struggling aims? What would I have? What is this “sleep” which seems To bound all? Can there be a waking point Of crowning life? The soul would never rule; It would be first in all things, it would have Its utmost pleasure filled, but, that complete, Commanding, for commanding, sickens it. The last point I can trace is—rest beneath Some better essence than itself, in weakness; This is “myself,” not what I think should be: And what is that I hunger for but God?2 [Note: Browning, Pauline.] II The Wells of the World All things that are of earth are unsatisfactory. Our spirit craves for something more than time and sense can yield it. Nothing which comes of earth, even if it should yield a transient satisfaction, can long maintain its excellence. Pointing to the water in Jacob’s well, our Lord said, “Every one that drinketh of this water shall thirst again”; and therein He took up His parable against all earthly things, whether they be fame, or riches, or fleshly pleasure, or aught else beneath the sun. He that drinks at these shallow wells shall not quench his thirst, or if for a time he imagines that he has so done, he will be undeceived, and in a little season the old craving will return. “That which is born of the flesh” is flesh even at its best, and “all flesh is as grass, and all the glory thereof as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower falleth.” The religion of the flesh shares in the common fate, if it has a man’s own self for its author, his own energy as its impulse, and his own opinions for its creed. It may for a little while flourish like the flower of the field, but “the wind passeth over it and it is gone.” Waters from his own cistern may stay a man’s desires for a space, but ere long he must thirst again. Too often we try to allay a spiritual thirst by a carnal draught. When Newman in his early life was burdened with the sense of his own shortcomings in the presence of his Lord, and his letters home lacked their usual buoyancy, his mother wrote to him:—“Your father and I fear very much from the tone of your letters that you are depressed. We fear you debar yourself a proper quantity of wine.” That is a type of suggestion which is often made to people who are troubled with spiritual unrest. They are recommended to material ministries by which their feverish unrest is only intensified and inflamed. But they “thirst again.” Others make an attempt to realize satisfaction and peace by immersing themselves in stimulants like novel-reading and theatre-going, and in the manifold pleasures of society. They intensify the social stimulant. Yet they “thirst again.” Others plunge more deeply into business. The songster is languishing! How then? Re-gild his cage. The soul is languishing! How then? Re-gild her cage. Seek for more gold, more gold, and surround the soul with material treasure. And yet the soul refuses to be appeased, and “thirsts again.” Or, again, we give opiates to our disquieted and feverish souls. How many people find an opiate in making a promise to amend. They find contentment in their intentions. But the satisfaction is only transient. They speedily awake out of their unnatural rest, and they are thirsty still. Others give themselves the opiate of self-disparagement. Many a man thinks he is becoming better because he severely condemns himself. They esteem it a sign of virtue to denounce themselves as fools. They discover a sort of spiritual comfort from their own self-severity. All these are pitiable evasions. At the best they are only transient ministries, which, when their immediate influence passes away, leave us in deepened disquietude and intensified unrest.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, Thirsting for the Springs, 140. No man is so poor, so low, so narrow in capacity, so limited in heart and head, but he needs a whole God to make him restful. Nothing else will. To seek for satisfaction elsewhere is like sailors who in their desperation, when the water-tanks are empty, slake their thirst with the treacherous blue that washes cruelly along the battered sides of their ship. A moment’s alleviation is followed by the recurrence, in tenfold intensity, of the pangs of thirst, and by madness, and death. Do not drink the salt water that flashes and rolls by your side when you can have recourse to the fountain of life that is with God.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.] There is a Persian legend of the well of Chidher, the fountain of eternal youth, which men are ever seeking and never find. Thee have thousands sought in vain Over land and barren main, Chidher’s well,—of which men say, That thou makest young again; Fountain of eternal youth, Washing free from every stain. To thy waves the aged moons Aye betake them, when they wane; And the suns their golden light, While they bathe in thee, retain. From that fountain drops are flung, Mingling with the vernal rain, And the old earth clothes itself In its young attire again. Thitherward the freckled trout Up the water-courses strain, And the timid wild gazelles Seek it through the desert plain. Great Iskander, mighty lord, Sought that fountain, but in vain; Through the land of darkness went In its quest with fruitless pain, When by wealth of conquered worlds Did his thirst unslaked remain. Many more with parched lip Must lie down and dizzy brain, And of that, a fountain sealed Unto them, in death complain. If its springs to thee are known, Weary wanderer, tell me plain. From beneath the throne of God It must well, a lucid vein; To its sources lead me, Lord, That I do not thirst again, And my lips not any more Shall the earth’s dark waters stain.1 [Note: R. C. Trench, Chidher’s Well.] III The Eternal Spring 1. What, then, is this “living water”—this thirst-quenching, soul-satisfying gift promised by Christ? The answer may be put in various ways, which really all come to one. It is Himself, the unspeakable Gift, His own greatest gift; or it is the Spirit “which they that believe on him should receive,” and whereby He comes and dwells in men’s hearts; or it is the resulting life, kindred with the life bestowed, a consequence of the indwelling Christ and the present Spirit. And so the promise is that they who believe on Him and rest upon His love shall receive into their spirits a new life-principle which shall rise in their hearts like a fountain, “springing up unto everlasting life.” 2. As regards this wonderful water, there are four points to be specially noted. (1) It is a gift of God.—“The water that I shall give him,” says Christ. There is no suggestion as to digging deep with much learning into the bowels of mysterious truth to find the water for ourselves; this priceless draught is freely handed out to us by our Redeemer, without our bringing either bucket or line. There is no hint in the text that we are to purchase the life-giving water; it is presented to us without money and without price. There is no allusion to a certain measure of fitness to qualify us for the draught, it is purely a gift to be received by us here and now. Our Lord told the woman that had she known the gift of God she would have asked and He would have given. Sinner as she was, she had only to ask and have. There is no other way of obtaining eternal life but as the free gift of sovereign grace. The divine gift of eternal life is not in us by nature. It cannot be produced in us by culture, or infused into us by ceremonies, or propagated in us by natural descent; it must come as a boon of infinite charity from heaven, unpurchased, undeserved. Wisdom cannot impart it, power cannot fashion it, money cannot buy it, merit cannot procure it, grace alone can give it. If men desire wages they may earn them beneath the mastership of sin, for “the wages of sin is death.” On the side of God all is of grace, for “the gift of God is eternal life.” Whoever, then, is to be saved must be saved by the boundless charity of God—in other words, by the free gift of the Father through Jesus Christ our Lord.1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.] (2) It is a fountain within.—“It shall be in him,” it is something that we may carry about with us in our hearts, inseparable from our being, free from all possibility of being filched away by violence, rent from us by sorrows, or even parted from us by death. What a man has outside of him he only seems to have. Our real possessions are those which have passed into the substance of our souls. All else we shall leave behind. The only good is inward good; and this water of life slakes our thirst because it flows into the deepest place of our being, and abides there for ever. I stood a little while ago in the fine old ruin of Middleham Castle. I passed beyond the outer shell, and beyond the inner defences into the keep, and there in the innermost sanctum of the venerable pile was the old well. The castle was independent of outside supplies. If it were besieged it had resources of water at its own heart. The changing seasons made no difference to the gracious supply. That is the purpose of our Master in placing the “well” within us. He wants to make us independent of external circumstances. Whatever be the season that reigns without, He wants fulness and vitality to reign within. So the Master’s gift is the gift of a well, “springing up,” leaping up, “unto eternal life.” We are renewed “by his Spirit in the inner man.”2 [Note: J. H. Jowett.] (3) It is a springing fountain.—“The water that I shall give him shall become in him a springing fountain”; it shall not lie there stagnant, but shall leap like a living thing, up into the sunshine, and flash there, turned into diamonds when the bright rays smile upon it. Here is the promise of activity. There seems small blessing, in this overworked world, in a promise of more active exertion; but what an immense part of our nature lies dormant and torpid if we are not Christians! How much of the work that is done is dreary, wearisome, collar-work, against the grain. Do not the wheels of life often go slowly? Are we not often weary of the inexpressible monotony and fatigue? And do we not go to our work sometimes, though with a fierce feeling of “need-to-do-it,” yet also with inward repugnance? And are there not great parts of our nature that have never wakened into activity at all, and are ill at ease, because there is no field of action provided for them? The mind is like millstones; if we do not put the wheat into them to grind, they will grind each other’s faces. So some of us are fretting ourselves to pieces, or are sick of a vague disease, and are morbid and miserable because the highest and noblest parts of our nature have never been brought into exercise. Surely this promise of Christ’s should come as a true gospel to such, offering, as it does, if we will trust ourselves to Him, a springing fountain of activity in our hearts that shall fill our whole being with joyous energy, and make it a delight to live and to work. It will bring to us new powers, new motives; it will set all the wheels of life going at double speed. We shall be quickened by the presence of that mighty power, even as a dim taper is brightened and flames up when plunged into a jar of oxygen. And life will be delight-some in its hardest toil, when it is toil for the sake of, and by the indwelling strength of, that great Lord and Master of our work. The indwelling power of the Holy Spirit rises superior to all disadvantages, like a spring which cannot be kept under, do what we may. Our engineers and builders know how hard it is to bind up the earth-floods from overflowing, and the spiritual floods are yet more unconquerable. It is wonderful how springs will bubble up in places where we least expect them. The great desert of Sahara will no doubt be made a very easy county to traverse, and, perhaps, may even become a fertile plain, from the fact that there is water everywhere at no very great depth below the surface, and where it is reached an oasis is formed. The government of Algeria has sent engineers into parts of the Sahara bordering on the French possession, and these men have bored the rock by Artesian wells, and greatly astonished the natives; for in the wilderness have waters leaped out and streams in the desert. At the magic touch of the living water, palm trees have sprung up and an undergrowth of vegetation, so that the solitary places have been made to sing together. When the Lord gives our souls to drink from the fountains of the great deep of His own eternal love, and to have a vital principle of grace within us, our wilderness rejoices and blossoms as the rose, and the Sahara around us cannot wither our verdure; our soul is as an oasis, though all around is barrenness.1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.] In the mid garden doth a fountain stand; From font to font its waters fall alway, Freshening the leaves by their continual play:— Such often have I seen in southern land, While every leaf, as though by light winds fanned, Has quivered underneath the dazzling spray, Keeping its greenness all the sultry day, While others pine aloof, a parchèd band. And in the mystic garden of the soul A fountain, nourished from the upper springs, Sends ever its clear waters up on high, Which while a dewy freshness round it flings, All plants which there acknowledge its control Show fair and green, else drooping, pale, and dry.2 [Note: Trench, Poems, 144. (4) It is an eternal fountain.—The water of a fountain rises by its own impulse, but however its silver column may climb it always falls back into its marble basin. But this fountain rises higher, and at each successive jet higher, tending towards, and finally touching, its goal, which is at the same time its source. The water seeks its own level, and the fountain climbs until it reaches Him from whom it comes, and the eternal life in which He lives. The Christian character is identical in both worlds, and however the forms and details of pursuit may vary, the essential principle remains one. So that the life of a Christian man on earth and his life in heaven are but one stream, as it were, which may, indeed, like some of those American rivers, run for a time through a deep, dark cañon, or in an underground passage, but comes out at the farther end into broader, brighter plains and summer lands; where it flows with a quieter current and with the sunshine reflected on its untroubled surface, into the calm ocean. He has one gift and one life for earth and heaven—Christ and His Spirit, and the life that is consequent upon both. “It shall be in him a well of water springing up unto eternal life.” The grace continues with us, and overflows into a blessed immortality. The Spirit that redeems will also perfect. Whatever may be our estate when it finds us, our ultimate attainments will be the likeness of the Lord. The living water rises from Heaven, and rises towards Heaven. We shall at length be presented blameless before the Throne of God. “Never thirst.” That does not mean that in the Christian life desire is ended. “The ill of all ills is the death of desire.” In the redeemed life desire is intense and wakeful. There is desiring, but no despairing. There is longing, but no languishing. There is fervour, but no fever. There is aspiration and contentment. There is striving and rest. We still thirst for the fulness of grace not yet received, but there is no pain in the thirst. In the Christian life the very thirst for greater fulness is itself a delight. If I may quote Calvin, “Believers know desire, but they do not know drought.”1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.] My spirit longeth for Thee, Within my troubled breast, Altho’ I be unworthy Of so divine a Guest. Of so divine a Guest, Unworthy tho’ I be, Yet has my heart no rest, Unless it come from Thee. Unless it come from Thee, In vain I look around; In all that I can see, No rest is to be found. No rest is to be found, But in Thy blessed love; O! let my wish be crown’d, And send it from above!2 [Note: J. Byrom.] No More Thirst Literature Banks (L. A.), Christ and His Friends, 154. Bardsley (J. W.), Illustrative Texts and Texts Illustrated, 65. Hodges (G.), The Human Nature of the Saints, 230. Hopkins (E. H.), The Law of Liberty in the Spiritual Life, 55. Ingram (A. F. W.), The Gospel in Action, 261. Jay (W.), Short Discourses, ii. 447. Jowett (J. H.), Thirsting for the Springs, 18, 137. Liddon (H. P.), Passiontide Sermons, 244. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John i.–viii., 214. Matheson (G.), Leaves for Quiet Hours, 75. Parker (J.), Studies in Texts, v. 154. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xv. (1869) No. 864; xx. (1874) No. 1202. Tyndall (C. H.), Object Lessons for Children, 26. Wells (J.), Bible Echoes, 169. Christian World Pulpit, xxxix. 232 (Evans). True Worship God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth.—John 4:24. 1. The conversation between Christ and the woman of Samaria began on common topics. By and by it became more deep and interesting. He to whom all things here were types could not converse without a Divine meaning in all He said. A draught of water connected itself with the mystery of life. As soon as she discovered His spiritual character she put the question of her day about “the place where men ought to worship.” Christ took the opportunity of defining spiritual worship. He spoke of a new worship essentially different from the old. He made religion spiritual, He pointed out the difference between religion and theology, and He revealed the foundation on which true worship must rest. A new time was coming for a new worship: “The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth.” 2. It was to a very lowly soul that Jesus thus revealed Himself. She was a poor and unenlightened peasant, a woman, a Samaritan. It had been, too, a frail and erring life, that must have fallen into many mistakes, known many contumelies, endured slights and disheartenments untold. “Thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: this hast thou said truly.” How chequered and spotted an experience is there disclosed, one full of tragedies and unstanched wounds! But just to such an one Jesus Christ elects to make the revelation that the true tie between God and man lies deeper than externals, that it is an interior life which transcends all accidental differences of birth and nationality, of station and sex, even of creed and worship; that alike to Jew and to Samaritan, man and woman, saint or sinner, worshipper on Mount Zion or worshipper on Mount Gerizim, it is “a gift,” a gift of God, a personal relation established between the individual soul and the Divine life-giving source of all. It is a secret between ourselves and God. “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” Christ tells us here all that we need to know about the worship that is acceptable to God. He tells us— I. The Foundation of true Worship. II. The Nature of true Worship. I Its Foundation The first essential of true worship is a true appreciation of God’s character. The foundation on which the new worship rests is a revelation made by Christ respecting the character of God. 1. God is spirit. We should greatly mistake the meaning of this if we took it as a theological definition of the Being of God. It is not theological, but practical. It is chiefly negative. It says what God is not. He is not matter. He has not a form. “A spirit hath not flesh and bones.” (1) What is meant by spirit? There are false notions which regard it as attenuated gas, a wreath of air or vapour. This is only subtle materialism. Consider the universe, with the sun and stars, the harmony of the planets—all this force, order, harmony is from God. The spring season, with bursting vegetation—its life is God. Our own minds, their thought and feeling—that is spirit. God, therefore, is the Mind of the universe. This, then, was the great truth, that God is Mind, not separated by conditions of space and time from His creatures. (2) It is difficult for us to conceive of an absolutely spiritual being, without body, parts, or form; of One who is eternal as regards time, without beginning and without end; and infinite as regards space, everywhere present, filling all things, or rather containing all within Himself. It is this idea, baffling to our imagination, of the infinite Being of God that is the foundation of spiritual worship. It is because God’s Being is infinite that He is present alike to all, and takes cognizance of all persons and their concerns, the least as well as those which seem to us the greatest. (3) The ordinary objector reasons thus: All the persons I know are visible, subject to the scrutiny of eye and ear and touch. I can well understand expressions of love, thanksgivings, cries for help, addressed to a being thus accessible to ordinary sense. But these people call when there is no one visible to hear and answer; they address themselves to vacancy, and throw out their vain cries to the thin air. It is true they profess to be addressing a Spirit; but that means something which is not seen, heard, touched, handled,—an influence wholly beyond the scope of my senses. What evidence is there that such an impalpable Being hears and sees, knows, and wills, and acts? How can I be sure that it exists at all? (4) Yet the facts of the universe are not altered by our incredulity, our unwillingness or incapacity to perceive them. The realm of Spirit is a reality, spiritual laws govern everything, though we ignore both. To vulgar scepticism it might suffice to reply that its argument confuses Personality with the sensible signs of its presence. Wedded to materialist ideas it mistakes the visible, the audible, the tangible, for that which manifests its own reality and activity through these, but is not itself identical with one or all of them. It confounds the outward form with the inward essence; the symbol with the thing signified; the shell with the substance. It grossly identifies the body with the man himself. It argues as if the eye were identical with seeing, or the ear with hearing. It confounds the organ and instrument with that which acts through it. If it is true, as St. John has written, that “No man hath seen God at any time,” it is also true that no man hath at any time seen a person. Strictly speaking, persons are not visible, tangible, subject to the scrutiny of sense. For a person is surely not the group of related impressions present at a given moment to my sensorium; a man is not a certain outline or coloured surface stamped upon my retina, combined perhaps with certain vibrations of my auditory nerve and certain impulses conveyed through my nerves of touch. When we speak of a man or a person, we mean not these, but rather the unseen, unheard, unfelt reality which is the cause of them all, and which reveals its own existence to our perception through such mediating effects. Understand the terms of this statement, and it is impossible for us to deny its truth. (5) In our conceptions of God let us have no images of the fancy, no material realization. Stop every attempt to give any kind of embodiment to the Father. Leave it all indeterminate; put anything else away as a trespass and a presumption. The willingness to do this, the power to do this, is part of the discipline of the present life; it is the faith of our worship. All that we can safely have before us is quality, attributes. God is wisdom, God is power, God is greatness, God is holiness, God is love. Enshrined in those, as in a deep sanctuary, is the Infinite, the Unsearchable,—that is God. But we can see the enshrining only, the rest is hidden. It is there, and we speak to it, and we hear it, and we deal with it, and we feel it; but it is far above all sense, it is a name, it is a mystery, it is a Spirit, it is God. God is a Spirit. This relates to the nature of God; and as a spirit is the most excellent of beings that we have any notions of, God is represented under this character to heighten our thoughts of Him. We indeed know but little of the nature of spirits; the most of our acquaintance with them lies in the consciousness we have of our own souls, which all allow to be the noblest part of the man. And the most natural, obvious thought that arises in our minds about a spirit is that it is an incorporeal and invisible being, with life and action, understanding and will.1 [Note: Guyse.] Observe yon concave blue, That seems to close around our human view, And ends by sun and star Our keenest survey of those heavens afar. And yet we know full well, False is the specious tale our senses tell; That is no azure sky, Or solid vault, that meets our lifted eye. What curtains round our gaze, The background of the sun or starry maze, Is but blue-tinted light That veils from us the aërial infinite. And so, when we define Great heaven’s immensity by verbal sign, We act as though our bent Were here again to feign a firmament. Words in array we place, And deem therewith we see God face to face. Poor fools, and blind; not seeing Our words but mask and hide His unsearched Being.1 [Note: John Owen.] 2. The great truth that God is a Spirit, purely held, would be the best corrective of false doctrines in religion, the richest spring of peace, the most constant inspiration of duty. Examine a narrow creed, and it will not be difficult to point out where it forgets that God is a Spirit. A heart not at rest is a heart that does not know the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter. A dishonoured conscience, a violated sentiment, a rebellious will, are only other names for a broken fellowship with the Father of our spirits. A soul cleansed from unspiritual thoughts of God, and in daily communion with Him, however far it might be from the fulness of objective Truth, would have in it no springs of error, of trouble, or of sin. (1) The first error that arises from an unspiritual conception of God is a tendency to localize God. The woman’s question was, in fact, “Where?” Christ’s reply was, “Nowhere in particular—everywhere.” This question lies at the root of all superstition. It is observable among the heathen, who confine the agency of a god to a certain district; among the uneducated poor of our own country, in their notions of a cemetery; and among the more refined, in the clinging mysterious idea which they attach to a church, an altar, and the elements of the sacrament. Let us define what we mean by sanctity of place. It is a thing merely subjective, not objective; it is relative to us. It belongs to that law of association by which a train of ideas returns more easily by suggestion in some one place than in another. Worship in a festive room or over a shop, would suggest notions uncongenial with devotion. Hence the use of setting apart or consecrating places for worship. There is no other sanctity of place. We hear an objection to this. It is said to be dangerous to say this: it will unsettle people’s minds; a little of this illusion is wholesome, especially for the poor. Christ did not so reason. Consider how unsettling this was to the woman. The little religion she had clung to Gerizim. The shock of being told that it was not holy might have unsettled all her religion. Did Christ hesitate one moment? He was concerned only with truth. And we are concerned only with truth. Some people are afraid of truth. As if God’s truth could be dangerous! The straight road is ever the nearest. People must bear, and shall, what an earnest mind dares to say. Is God there or not? If not, at our peril we say He is.1 [Note: F. W. Robertson.] (2) A second error is the idea that forms are immutable. “Our fathers worshipped in this mountain,” therefore so must we. How much of the mischief of the separation of sects, with all the bitterness and mistrust that have come with it, has arisen from the fact that the form of worship has been mistaken for the worship itself. It was about one o’clock in the morning. I was the only white man then on the island, and all the natives had been fast asleep for hours! Yet I literally pitched my hat into the air, and danced like a schoolboy round and round that printing-press; till I began to think, Am I losing my reason? Would it not be liker a missionary to be upon my knees, adoring God for this first portion of His blessed Word ever printed in this new language? Friend, bear with me, and believe me, that was as true worship as ever was David’s dancing before the Ark of his God!2 [Note: John G. Paton, i. 202. (3) A third error is to mistake the object of worship. There is a feeling of devoutness inherent in the human mind. We hear the solemn tones of a child when repeating his prayer or hymn. Before what is greater, wiser, better than himself man bows instinctively. But the question is, what will he worship? The heathen bent before Power. To him the Universe was alive with Deity; he saw God in the whirlwind, in the lightning, and the thunder. But the forces of Nature are not God. The philosopher bows before Wisdom. Science tells him of electricity, gravitation, force. He looks down on warm devoutness; for he sees only contrivance and mind in Nature. He admires all calmly, without enthusiasm. He calls it Rational Religion. This also is ignorance. The spiritual man bows before Goodness, “The true worshippers worship the Father,” “We know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews,” that is, God is intelligible in Christ as Love, Goodness, Purity. God is a Spirit in nature; but He is a Father in character. This was part of Christ’s revelation of God to the woman of Samaria. “The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father.” Jesus was the herald of the Golden Age, and of the common worship of the universal Father. On that very day the Golden Age was dawning, for He, rising above the limits of a national religion, was seeking one outside its fold. True, as He declared to this woman, salvation was of the Jews. Unto the Jews God had revealed Himself by prophet and priest, and by means of ritual. Unto them had been granted special revelation; yet, notwithstanding all their privileges, the Jewish people had not yet learned the full glory of the Divine character. To them, God was Jehovah, the High and Mighty One inhabiting eternity; He was infinite, all-powerful, the God of Israel; but the coming of Jesus unveiled Deity, and revealed Him as the one Father of all humanity. Before His coming, men had dreaded Deity; but He, leading the children of men into the presence of the Infinite, said, “When ye pray, say, Our Father.” Thus He revealed the character of God to be that of infinite love.1 [Note: G. E. Walters, The Deserted Christ, 78. (4) A fourth error is a mistake about the nature of reverence. This Samaritan woman had what is often called reverence—veneration for antiquity, zeal for her Church, lingering recollections of the old mountain, respect for a prophet. But what was her life? He with whom she then lived was not her husband. In other words, reverence, veneration, awe, are feelings which belong to the imagination and are neither good nor bad: they may go along with religion, but also they may not. A man may kneel to sublime things, yet never have bent his heart to goodness and purity. A man may be reverential and yet impure. Next examine a man who is called irreverent. Constitutionally so framed that he does not happen to thrill at painted windows, Gothic architecture, and solemn music, is he, therefore, without veneration? Take him out into God’s grand universe, or put before him Christ’s character: is there no adoration, no deep intense love? Tell him of a self-denying action: is there no moisture in his eye? Tempt him to meanness: is there no indignant scorn? The man has bowed his soul before Justice, Mercy, Truth, and therefore stands erect before everything else that this world calls sublime. The enjoyment of noble architecture and music is not worship, and may be mistaken for it. The hush which falls on us, walking the aisles of a church of eight hundred years; the thrill of nerves and heart as the glorious praise begins, whose echoes fail amid fretted vaults and clustered shafts; all that feeling, solemn as it is, has no necessary connection with worshipping God in spirit and in truth. And we may delude ourselves with the belief that we are offering spiritual worship when it is all a mere matter of natural emotion, which the most godless man could share.1 [Note: A. K. H. Boyd, Sunday Afternoons in a University City, 87. (5) A fifth error is the failure to distinguish between interest in theology and interest in religion. Here was a woman living in sin, and yet deeply interested in a religious controversy. She found, doubtless, a kind of safeguard to rest on in the perception of this keen interest. Her religion was almost nothing, her theology most orthodox. Theological controversy sharpens our disputative faculties and wakens our speculative ones. Religion is love to God and man. We do not always distinguish between theology and religion. We make skill in controversy a test of spirituality. It is but a poor test. The way the woman questioned Christ is a specimen of a common feeling. The moment Christ appeared she examined His views. She did not ask whether the Man before her was pure and spotless, or whether His life was spent in doing good; but was He sound upon the vital question of the Temple? An elderly minister was asked to take the catechizing of the congregation in a parish in the pastoral uplands of the South of Scotland. He was warned against the danger of putting questions to a certain shepherd, who had made himself master of more divinity than some of his clerical contemporaries could boast, and who enjoyed nothing better than, out of the question put to him, to engage in an argument with the minister on some of the deepest problems of theology. The day of the ordeal at last came, the old doctor ascended the pulpit, and after the preliminary service put on his spectacles and unfolded the roll of the congregation. To the utter amazement of everybody, he began with the theological shepherd, John Scott. Up started the man, a tall, gaunt, sunburnt figure, with his maud over his shoulder, his broad blue bonnet on the board in front of him, and such a look of grim determination on his face as showed how sure he felt of the issue of the logical encounter to which he believed he had been challenged from the pulpit. The minister, who had clearly made up his mind as to the line of examination to be followed with this pugnacious theologian, looked at him calmly for a few moments, and then in a gentle voice asked, “Who made you, John?” The shepherd, prepared for questions on some of the most difficult points of our faith, was taken aback by being asked what every child in the parish could answer. He replied in a loud and astonished tone, “Wha made me?” “It was the Lord God that made you, John,” quietly interposed the minister. “Who redeemed you, John?” Anger now mingled with indignation as the man shouted, “Wha redeemed me?” The old divine, still in the same mild way, reminded him “It was the Lord Jesus that redeemed you, John,” and then asked further, “Who sanctified you, John?” Scott, now thoroughly aroused, roared out, “Wha sanctified ME?” The clergyman paused, looked at him calmly, and said, “It was the Holy Ghost that sanctified you, John Scott, if, indeed, ye be sanctified. Sit ye doon, my man, and learn your questions better the next time you come to the catechizing.” The shepherd was never able to hold his head up in the parish thereafter.1 [Note: Sir Archibald Geikie, Scottish Reminiscences, 72. 3. Now see how great this truth is. That God is a Spirit comes nearer to the business and the bosoms of men, to our real interests, to our belief in progress, to our feeling of God’s Fatherhood, to our sense of man’s brotherhood, than any other truth. Is there a Church laying down dogmatic terms of salvation? This rebukes it: God is a Spirit, and the spirits that desire Him He makes His own. Is there a merely conventional worship, a merely authoritative religion, a merely ceremonial, ecclesiastical way of approaching God? This disowns it: only those who are in personal communion with Him know Him at all, and they may know Him to their full content. Is there an upright man, a devout heart, misunderstood or forsaken by the world? This sustains him: God is a Spirit, and brings all things to light. Is there a conscience that would hide itself from the light? This disables it: “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” “The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.” Is there a troubled mind, a spirit that cannot find peace? What will quiet it? Nothing but some sense of the Infinite as very near to us; it may be from a glance at the unfathomable depths of Nature, with awe and shame at the contrast between our fretful selfishness and the silent realities of God in which we feel we have a part. To gaze upon the face of Nature is sometimes to be brought under the power of a calm and cleansing spirit then present to us; and what is religion but a quickening of the soul under the sense that a Spirit of Purity and Love is acting and looking upon us? And if ever the solemnity and beauty which man’s workmanship can produce does in its highest examples, in a cathedral, or in the Angel of the Resurrection from the great sculptor’s hand, contribute something to religious emotion, how much more may the sense of the Infinite come upon us from the spiritual aspects of the Temple not made with hands; still more if with understanding hearts we could gaze into the majestic face of Christ; still more if, led by Christ up to the Throne, into the real Presence, we could bring ourselves to look intently, with a full trust, into the fatherly face of God!1 [Note: J. H. Thom, A Spiritual Faith, 12. He who worships the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, must, in all the qualities of his soul, in all the relations of his life, be a better man than the atheist, than the man who denies the existence of God. The man who worships a stone is a better man than he who worships nothing. The man who falls down before carven wood, or worships the beasts of the field, is a grander nature than he who never bows his head in prayer, and never lifts up his heart in aspiration and religious desire. The tendency of worship is to elevate our nature. He who worships sincerely, however ignorantly, is the better for his worship; he is enlarged in his nature, his outlook upon things is widened, he is led away from self-trust, and is taught to depend upon a power, not lower, but higher, and in his estimation better, than his own.2 [Note: J. Parker.] II Its Nature To worship is man’s highest glory. He was created for fellowship with God: of that fellowship worship is the sublimest expression. All the exercises of the religious life—meditation and prayer, love and faith, surrender and obedience, all culminate in worship. Recognizing what God is in His holiness, His glory, and His love, realizing what we are as sinful creatures, and as the Father’s redeemed children, in worship we gather up our whole being and present ourselves to our God to offer Him the adoration and the glory which are His due. The truest and fullest and nearest approach to God is worship. Every sentiment and every service of the religious life is included in it: to worship is man’s highest destiny, because in it God is all. 1. “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” It is not a question of place. “Neither in this mountain nor yet in Jerusalem is the place.” It is no question of cathedral, or church, or chapel, or hall. Wherever a heart yearns for God and pours itself forth, there is God’s House, there is God’s blessing. Every sick-room can be a House of God; every hospital ward a House of God; every lonely heart away in the deepest solitude in seeking Him can find His House. It is not a question of time. If this true idea of worship be once grasped, that it is not an outward form, not outward ceremony, not at set times, but ever, always, the going out of hearts towards and after Him, it will mean that our worship will find expression in our home life, in our factory life, in our shop life, in our dock life, in our so-called secular life, and everywhere, always, all things, sacred and secular, will be blended in one lifelong act of worship, our heart going out to God in spirit and in truth. The Lord is in His Holy Place In all things near and far! Shekinah of the snowflake, He, And Glory of the star, And Secret of the April land That stirs the field to flowers, Whose little tabernacles rise To hold Him through the hours. He hides Himself within the love Of those whom we love best; The smiles and tones that make our homes Are shrines by Him possessed; He tents within the lonely heart And shepherds every thought; We find Him not by seeking far,— We lose Him not, unsought. Our art may build its Holy Place, Our feet on Sinai stand, But Holiest of Holies knows No tread, no touch of hand; The listening soul makes Sinai still Wherever we may be, And in the vow, “Thy will be done!” Lies all Gethsemane.1 [Note: William C. Gannett.] 2. We cannot read these words and not feel that the very genius and essence of the Christian religion is an exceeding simplicity. Had Christ reckoned externals of great importance, He certainly would have said so here. Those externals may be convenient, and they are helpful; and therefore the Church may justly, and with great propriety and benefit, ordain them. But if Christ’s words are to be taken in their plainest signification, God does not now require or command them. They are not a part of the new legislation; rather, they are decidedly and studiously omitted. For in this matter, it is clear that a contrast is drawn between the Samaritan and the Jewish ritual—which were both of them highly addressed to the senses—and that which Christ was introducing. He declares such things to be passed away. And nothing is laid down as the will of God respecting public worship, but this only—it must be spiritual and true. In our approaches to God, the frame of mind is everything. Like worships like. God is mystery, worship is faith; God is wisdom, worship is thought; God is love, worship is affection; God is truth, worship is sincerity; God is holiness, worship is purity; God is omnipresence, worship is everywhere; God is eternity, worship is always. Words are good, because words react on the mind, and clear and fix it; but words are not worship. Forms are good, because forms are stays and helps to our infirmities; but forms are not worship. Holy places, holy things, holy persons are good, because in such a defiled world as this, what is sacred must be isolated; but no places, no things, no persons are worship. Sacraments are good, because the sacraments are the very incorporations and the essences of our salvation; but sacraments are not worship. “God is a Spirit and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”1 [Note: James Vaughan.] I sit within my room, and joy to find That Thou who always lov’st art with me here, That I am never left by Thee behind, But by Thyself Thou keep’st me ever near; The fire burns brighter when with Thee I look, And seems a kinder servant sent to me; With gladder heart I read Thy holy book, Because Thou art the eyes by which I see; This aged chair, that table, watch, and door Around in ready service ever wait; Nor can I ask of Thee a menial more To fill the measure of my large estate, For Thou Thyself, with all a Father’s care, Where’er I turn, art ever with me there.2 [Note: Jones Very.] i. Worship in Spirit 1. God is Spirit, and what He reveals to man must be made through the medium of Spirit. If He were possessed of a material form, the way of recognition would be through the senses, but Spirit can only be spiritually discerned. God cannot be seen in the Bible, He cannot be seen in Nature, except through the exercise of the spiritual vision. Our worship, therefore, must consist in the effort of the human spirit to identify itself with the Divine, not in a mystic, self-destroying unity, but in the direction of its aspirations and its will. We seek to bring our souls into a state of conformity with God’s all-perfect will. The true worship is not the prostration of the body in kneeling, nor even the prostration of the soul in distant adoration, but the yielding of our living powers willingly and gladly to the Divine influence within us. There is an expression of the great Stoic emperor, Marcus Aurelius, who perhaps came nearer than any other non-Christian of the West to the Christian life and spirit: “I reverence the God who is within.” That God has been fully made known to us in Jesus Christ, and we can give a grander significance to this expression. Our God is within us. Let us allow our thoughts to be enlightened and our energies quickened by the spirit of holiness—the unseen, constraining power of righteousness—and we are practising the true worship.1 [Note: Dean Fremantle, The Gospel of the Secular Life, 209. 2. Before the Incarnation, man dared approach God only through priest and altar, and in an earthly temple. Jesus came to erect one altar—His Cross,—and to offer one sacrifice—Himself. He was born that He might die; and over all His pathway there fell the shadow of the Cross. The Cross was interwoven into all His life. Galilee would have made Him King; the whole region of the North went after Him. He said, “I go to Jerusalem.” He deliberately journeyed thither, everything in His journey pointing to His doom. The broken bread in the supper represented His broken body; the red wine His spilt blood. They nailed Him to His Cross, and there He was wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities. “It is finished,” He cried; “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Then the veil of the Temple was rent asunder. The Holy of Holies was open to mortal gaze. There was no longer any need for earthly priest or altar. The world had become a temple, the human heart the shrine of the Holy Ghost. Christ came to bring man’s spirit into immediate contact with God’s Spirit; to sweep away everything intermediate. In lonely union, face to face, man’s spirit and God’s Spirit must come together. It is a grand thought! Let us aspire to this, to greatness, goodness! So will our spirits mingle with the Spirit of the Everlasting.2 [Note: F. W. Robertson.] 3. The law of acceptable Christian worship is briefly this: it must be the worship of “the heart,” that is, of the will. Not of the voice merely; not of the hands merely; not of the bended knees merely; not of the decorously and comprehensively expressed prayer merely; not of the sweet incense merely; not of the lamb slain and burnt on the altar merely; not of the gorgeously-arrayed High Priest, nor yet of the simply-robed Scotch minister merely; not of feelings touched by old memories of our own departed days, and of those who used to worship with us long ago, but who will worship with us on earth no more; not of any or all of these things merely—but of the will. If our worship is of “the heart,” it follows that to be real we must have a real religious experience. Experience is the very soul or religion. Properly speaking, we do not begin to be religious until God and the soul have somehow come face to face. It is true that as children we are taught religious truth, but we have not experienced it, we are taught it; and there is a sense in which, if we receive that truth as little children, humbly, trustfully, teachably, we are truly religious and belong to the Kingdom of God. To very few is God more real than He is to the little child. But when that has been said, it needs to be repeated that there can be no real religion without a real religious experience. Religion is not in word alone; it is not in the hearing of the Word, it is not in the explanation of certain truths, but it is profoundly and most practically in spirit, in experience. God is not real to us until we have made our own discovery of Him in our life. This Pearl of Eternity is the Church or Temple of God within thee, the consecrated Place of Divine Worship, where alone thou canst worship God in Spirit and in Truth. In Spirit, because thy spirit is that alone in thee which can unite and cleave unto God, and receive the workings of His Divine Spirit upon thee. In Truth, because this Adoration in the Spirit is that Truth and Reality of which all outward Forms and Rites, though instituted by God, are only the Figure for a Time, but this Worship is Eternal. Accustom thyself to the Holy Service of this inward Temple. In the midst of it is the Fountain of Living Water, of which thou mayest drink and live for ever. There the Mysteries of thy Redemption are celebrated, or rather opened in Life and Power. There the Supper of the Lamb is kept; the Bread that came down from Heaven, that giveth life unto the world, is thy true nourishment: all is done, and known in real Experience, in a living sensibility of the Work of God on the Soul. There the Birth, the Life, the Sufferings, the Death, the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, are not merely remembered, but inwardly found and enjoyed as the real states of thy soul, which has followed Christ in the Regeneration.1 [Note: William Law.] ii. Worship in Truth Our worship must be “in truth”; truth as regards God Himself, and truth as regards our own state. 1. We need to have a true conception of God, as far as we know Him, as He is revealed to us through Christ. The Samaritans had not a true knowledge; the Jews knew more, they knew Him through the Prophets, though their knowledge was incomplete. They knew that Messiah should come. To worship the true God and not idols, that was the elementary teaching, the preliminary idea. But to us it is given beyond this to conceive aright of the living and unseen God. The Father is revealed to us in and through the Son—on whom human eyes have dwelt. And prayer becomes a different thing when it is a child’s cry to a Father’s heart, a child clinging to Him in His paternal character; and it is through this sense of filial relationship that we approach that inner embrace of the Father’s heart. The Son sympathizes with us in our hardness and pain. He has tasted all our trial, only without the sin, and our prayer through Him reaches the Father’s Heart through the sympathetic agency of the Son, the Spirit helping our infirmities and giving force to our prayer. Recent researches into the origins of the Old Testament have proved that the factor in the extraordinary development of moral and religious truth, which is so discernible in the history of Israel and in their gradual ascent to the loftiest heights of spiritual knowledge, from the low levels of life which they had once occupied with their Semitic neighbours, was the impression upon the people as a whole through the wonderful deeds of their history and the experience of their greatest minds, of the character of God.1 [Note: George Adam Smith, The Life of Henry Drummond, 244. Our worship must conform to our best intellectual conceptions about God and His will. Our Lord Himself once drew a powerful contrast between the influence of a higher and a lower estimate of God’s character on the actions of men. He told His disciples that the time would come when “Whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service. And these things will they do unto you,” said He, “because they have not known the Father.” That is, although they believed in God, they yet ignored the special revelation made by Jesus Christ of the Fatherhood of God. Ignorance of this revelation has been the origin of some of the most terrible crimes against humanity that have ever disgraced the world. Hundreds of men and women have been roasted to death by order of Inquisitors, who, veiling their cruelty under the term auto-da-fé, witnessed that they did it in the name of what they believed to be God. On the throne of the universe they saw nothing but an angry and despotic Tyrant, who so hated heterodoxy, that He had prepared for all heretics a pandemonium of everlasting fire, and hence, quite honestly, they sought to deter men by torture from such an awful fate.1 [Note: G. F. Terry, The Old Theology in the New Age, 52. 2. We must also have truth in ourselves. Holy character is a kind of worship. All true life is worship: “Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness”; “Lo, I come to do thy will, O God.” Before a material God a material knee would have to bow. Before a spiritual God, nothing but the prostration of the spirit can be acceptable. He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. Love is a kind of prayer—the truest lifting up of the soul. God is a real God. The worshipper is to be a real character. The Christian must be a true man—transparent, who can bear to be looked through and through. There must be no pretence; no gilded tinsel—true gold all through. Let us take care that all our relations to God, and all our communications with Him, are honest relations, “in truth.” If our body is on its knees, let us be sure that our heart is also on its knees. If we close our eyes, let us see that we close our fancies. If we say words, let us beware that they are the exact representatives of our thoughts. If we ask anything, let it be the thing we want. If we promise, let us be sure that we mean it. If we confess with our lips, let us stop, if our mind is not confessing with its inward convictions. If we praise, let us hush our soul, if it is not in tune. Let worship be worship,—a beggar knocking at the door; a sinner prostrate for mercy; a servant looking to his Master’s eye; a child speaking to his Father; a pardoned man resting; a saved man thanking; a saint rejoicing.2 [Note: James Vaughan.] Thy house hath gracious freedom, like the air Of open fields; its silence hath a speech Of royal welcome to the friends who reach Its threshold, and its upper chambers bear, Above their doors, such spells that, entering there, And laying off the dusty garments, each Soul whispers to herself: “Twere like a breach Of reverence in a temple could I dare Here speak untruth, here wrong my inmost thought. Here I grow strong and pure; here I may yield, Without shamefacedness, the little brought From out my poorer life, and stand revealed, And glad, and trusting, in the sweet and rare And tender presence which hath filled this air.”1 [Note: Helen H. Jackson.] True Worship Literature Ball (C. J.), Testimonies to Christ, 332. Balmforth (R.), The New Testament in the Light of Higher Criticism, 211. Boyd (A. K. H.), Sunday Afternoons at the Parish Church of a University City, 73. Brooke (S. A.), Sermons, ii. 339 ff. Carter (T. T.), The Spirit of Watchfulness, 225. Dale (R. W.), Discourses on Special Occasions, 81. Drummond (R. J.), Faith’s Certainties, 341. Drysdale (A. H.), Christ Invisible our Gain, 303. Duryea (J. T.), in The American Pulpit of the Day, i. 70. Eyton (R.), The True Life, 466. Fremantle (W. H.), The Gospel of the Secular Life, 197. Fürst (A.), Christ the Way, 253. Hall (A. C. A.), The Christian Doctrine of Prayer, 1. Hoare (E.), Great Principles of Divine Truth, 270. Jones (T.), The Divine Order, 68. McCombie (W.), Sermons and Lectures, 146. Macleod (A.), A Man’s Gift, 81. Miller (J.), Sermons Literary and Scientific, i. 280. Murray (A.), The Spirit of Christ, 33. Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, iii. 41. Rashdall (H.), Doctrine and Development, 1. Rendall (G. H.), Charterhouse Sermons, 174. Robertson (F. W.), The Human Race, 101, 115. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xii. (1866) No. 695. Terry (G. F.), The Old Theology in the New Age, 43. Thom (J. H.), A Spiritual Faith, 1. Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit, 1868), No. 602. Christian World Pulpit, x. 129 (Stanley); xxxiii. 124 (Wilson); xxxviii. 101 (Hocking); liii. 249 (Savage); lxx. 321 (Marshall); lxxii. 150 (Perry); lxxviii. 186 (Swithinbank); lxxix. 99 (Thomson). Church Pulpit Year Book, ii. (1905) 126; iv. (1907) 124. Homiletic Review, liv. 311 (Walters). Christ’s Doctrine of Election All that which the Father giveth me shall come unto me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.—John 6:37. 1. After claiming to be the Bread of Life, and condemning the Jews’ attitude towards Himself, Jesus announced His assurance that notwithstanding their unbelief all that the Father gave Him would come to Him, and then immediately uttered the gracious words which have given confidence and courage to all approaching Him through the centuries, “Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” In this twofold declaration the Lord revealed two aspects of one great effect, the heavenly and the earthly. The heavenly takes in the whole result, “All that which the Father giveth me shall come unto me.” The earthly declares the individual responsibility, and utters the word creating confidence, “Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” 2. The tone in which the words are spoken supplies another element in the picture. Jesus seems to pause after saying, “Ye have seen me, and yet believe not.” It is a sorrowful fact, and it is very mysterious. Here are His own people rejecting Him, or at any rate coming to Him in such a wrong fashion that He has to discourage them. It looks as though God’s plan of salvation were not working out right. Is it going to fail at the outset? Such questions must crowd into the Saviour’s mind, as He faces the fact that these people will not accept Him. But they are not allowed to cloud His faith for an instant. At once the Son acquiesces in the Father’s plan. It is all right; it cannot fail. “All that which the Father giveth me shall come unto me.” Nobody will be lost whom the Father designed to save. “Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” I am doing My part correctly. So all must be well. The Commander-in-Chief at the base of operations decides upon the plan of campaign, and entrusts its execution to another General who never doubts the strategy though it does not appear successful immediately, and never doubts His own perfect fulfilment of the plan.1 [Note: J. E. Roberts.] Mark well this passage, “I will in no wise cast him out.” Our Saviour doth plainly import that there neither is nor can be devised—no, not by God Himself—any one consideration whatsoever which might occasion Him to put off or say nay to any person that doth come. No consideration in the world, I say, can so aggravate a man’s condition, could he make it as bad as the devils themselves, yet, if there be a coming to Christ, there can be no consideration in the highest pitch of sinfulness for Christ to reject, or put by, a person coming to Him. For you must know, beloved, Christ is well acquainted with all the objections the heart of man (nay, the devil) can object against the freeness of His grace and life by Him. To save labour, therefore, in this one passage (I will in no wise cast out) Christ at once answers all the objections that could be made. And I dare be bold to maintain, in the name and stead of Christ, let a person but say and lay down this for granted, that come he would—that he would have Christ rather than his life,—let this be granted for a truth, I will be bold with Christ out of this passage to answer ten thousand objections, even fully to the silencing of every objection that can be made; “I will in no wise cast him out”; I will in no wise, that is, I will upon no consideration that can be imagined or conceived.2 [Note: Tobias Crisp.] I The Father’s Part “All that which the Father giveth me shall come unto me.” At once the question suggests itself, Who are given by the Father to the Son? The context supplies an answer. The charge brought by Jesus against these Jews is, “Ye see and believe not.” He has declared already, “This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.” It seems evident, therefore, that “that which the Father giveth” includes all who believe on the Son. That may include everybody. “Whosoever will” may believe. But to believe is the essential condition. Therefore the great truth of our text is that all who believe are saved. It sounds a commonplace: but consider what it means. Take a few cases. A is a denizen of the slums, poor in pocket and in education; B is a University professor, of high moral instincts and intellectual attainments; C is a Roman Catholic scientist; D is a cannibal on a mission station on the Congo. Now suppose each of these convicted of sin and desiring to trust Jesus. Their circumstances vary enormously. Coming to Christ and reaching Him mean very different experiences. A never uttered a prayer in his life, and scarcely understands any article of the Christian creed; B has considered the creed carefully and critically, and has been accustomed to reverent worship; C has to accept dogmas on the authority of the Church, though his reason may contradict them; D has dim conceptions of God and is governed by savage instincts which cannot be eradicated in a brief time. Does it seem at all likely that four men placed in such different circumstances should ever succeed in finding God in Christ? Jesus says they shall. “All that which the Father giveth me shall come unto me.” No lack of knowledge, no spirit of caution, no church dogma, no savage instinct shall hide the face of God in Christ or keep a seeking soul from the Saviour. Coming from East and West and North and South, the guiding star shall gather them all at the feet of the Son of God. The Christian doctrine of election used to be freely preached; but it was sometimes mis-stated, and therefore it was misunderstood. So it fell into disuse. Now it seems to be too much neglected. If it means what some people think it means—that God elected a certain number of individuals without reference to their moral fitness for salvation and consigned all the rest of mankind to eternal perdition—I do not wonder it is neglected. Such teaching conflicts with our knowledge of God and has no shred of evidence in the Scriptures. Its true meaning is given in this verse. God has elected for salvation not this or that individual, but all people who believe in His Son whom He hath sent. This may be all. God wants it to be all. All who believe are saved. That is, God elects, not the individuals, but the means, and guarantees that all who use the means shall be saved.1 [Note: J. E. Roberts.] As to this matter of election, I would to God that some who object to it had as much common sense in this matter as they have in the daily actions of ordinary life. I ask for no higher degree of common sense. Let me assume that a purse has been lost in the street adjoining our place of meeting; the purse contains a thousand guineas; whoever finds that purse may keep it. “Ha!” we say, “well, only one can find it; therefore what is the good of a thousand seeking it? Only one can have it; and if I am elected to be the man, it will come in my way.” I never heard people reasoning so with regard to an affair of that kind. Though only one may have it, ten thousand will strive for it if they know the conditions. There is a prize to be given in the school. It is one prize; there are five hundred scholars in the school. The boys say, “Well, only one of us can get it, why should five hundred of us be toiling and fagging for it?” Another boy says, “I know if I am to have the prize, I will get it; so I shall read no books, and make no preparation.” You would not allow a boy to reason so. Yet there are men who say this, “If we are called to heaven, we’ll get to heaven; if we are elected to be saved, we need not make any effort about it.” Thou wicked and slothful servant; out of thine own mouth I condemn thee; the whole action of thy evil life shall be thy answer on the day of judgment, and thou shalt be condemned to an ignominious silence because of a self-accusing conscience.1 [Note: J. Parker.] I am thankful to believe that my final salvation does not depend wholly on myself. If it did, it would be at stake to the very last! Salvation involves so much. It includes deliverance from sin, development of character, fitness to dwell with God. Man’s faith is often such a frail thing. It were a poor refuge, if there were no Divine purpose to support it. It becomes a sure defence if God says, “I pledge that man’s deliverance.” Here is a man battling with a rough sea. A belt is flung to him. What hope of deliverance can he have by clinging to a few pounds of cork? This hope, that there are fifty strong arms pulling him through the surf to the shore. Do not push the simile too far. The Christian life is not simply clinging to a belt; it is a daily conflict with temptation. But it is gloriously true that faith in Christ transfers the responsibility of salvation to the Saviour, and makes deliverance certain. Though I grasp the hand of Christ I might lose it in a moment of doubt or weakness, or when my feet enter the chill waters of the river of death. Thanks be unto God for the assurance that if I clasp the hand of Christ He grips mine, and none can pluck me out of that strong clasp. It is my sheet anchor amidst the storms of life and the floods of death.2 [Note: J. E. Roberts.] Because I seek Thee not, oh seek Thou me! Because my lips are dumb, oh hear the cry I do not utter as Thou passest by, And from my life-long bondage set me free! Because content I perish, far from Thee, Oh seize me, snatch me from my fate, and try My soul in Thy consuming fire! Draw nigh And let me, blinded, Thy salvation see. If I were pouring at Thy feet my tears, If I were clamouring to see Thy face, I should not need Thee, Lord, as now I need, Whose dumb, dead soul knows neither hopes nor fears, Nor dreads the outer darkness of this place— Because I seek not, pray not, give Thou heed!1 [Note: Louise Chandler Moulton.] II Man’s Part “Him that cometh to me.” 1. “Coming” is the only way of salvation. If there could have been any other way, this one would never have been opened. It is not conceivable that God would have given His only-begotten and well-beloved Son to die upon the cross of Calvary in order to save sinners if there had been any other way of saving them that would have been as consistent with the principles of infallible justice. If men could have entered into everlasting life without passing along the path stained and consecrated by the blood of Jesus, surely that blood would never have been “shed for many for the remission of sins.” The very fact that this new and living way has been opened proves that there is no other, for God would never have provided it unless it had been absolutely necessary. 2. But what is “coming”? The people He was addressing had followed Him for miles, and had found Him and were speaking to Him, but they had not “come” to Him. To come to Him is to approach Him in spirit, and with submissive trust; it is to commit ourselves to Him as our Lord; it is to rest in Him as our all; it is to come to Him with open heart, accepting Him as He claims to be; it is to meet the eye of a present, living Christ, who knows what is in man, and to say to Him, “I am Thine, Thine most gladly, Thine for evermore.” An Irish boy was asked what was meant by saving faith. “Grasping Christ with the heart,” said he. The truest answer possible. And faith is only another word for coming. The man who grasps Christ with the heart, “comes.”1 [Note: R. D. Dickinson.] 3. The one essential in coming is the desire to come. Christ pledges His gift to readiness of heart. As to the open eye the light pours in, and to the listening ear the music enters, so to the longing heart Christ gives the pardon and the purity and the peace which, though it has not shaped its need into those words, are in reality the gifts for which it yearns. The value of a photographic plate consists not in what it is, but in its readiness to receive the impression when the shutter of the camera is opened and the light streams in. If a mere piece of common glass were there instead of the plate, the light might shine on it for ever and no impression would be made; it is the prepared plate that receives the impression which the light conveys. So, too, it is the prepared soul that receives the gift of Christ. The one thing that the Saviour asks for is readiness, willingness, some movement of the life towards Him; if there is that within us we need not fear that Christ, who is light, will fail to bring His blessing to us or to leave His mark on us. Everything is possible to us if we are open to the influence of God. What is it that we want Christ to do for us? Is it to cleanse away our sin? He points us to His cross. Do we want rest from an accusing conscience and from the weary load of loneliness? “Come unto me,” He says, “and I will give you rest.” Is what is deepest in us still unsatisfied, although we have been seeking many fountains and drinking from many cups? “He that believeth on me shall never thirst.” At one critical time during this period of soul-conflict he stated in one of his addresses that the question, “Believe ye that I am able to do this?” was made a word of life to him. He writes: “I was very near death; I was almost despairing. The only thing that kept my head above water was the promise, ‘Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.’ I repeated it again and again, and prayed very earnestly, when the word came to me with such power, and with such a rebuke, ‘Believe ye that I am able to do this?’ He was able, and I believed Him, and He did it.”1 [Note: K. Moody-Stuart, Brownlow North, 41. (1) Unfitness is no barrier to coming.—It is strange how people are inclined to wait a little, to try to prepare themselves for Christ! They know how unlike Him they are, and how unfit they are for His presence and service; so, as a youth who waits awhile to prepare himself for some important examination, or as a soldier waits awhile to perfect himself in drill for some promotion—so they think they can wait. But their waiting never changes their nature or renews their heart. For their case is rather like that of those who suffer from a malignant disease. No amount of waiting or even of attention to the outward signs of the disease is of any avail, and the time spent over that but increases the danger; for the disorder is within, the whole system is poisoned and needs renewing, and it is to save their life that they at once put themselves in the hands of a qualified physician. Christ Jesus is the qualified physician, and His blood is a “full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.” I have heard of a cavalier who lost his life because he stopped to curl his hair when Cromwell’s soldiers were after him. Some of you may laugh at the man’s foolishness; but that is all that your talk about fitness is. What is all your fitness but the curling of your hair when you are in imminent danger of losing your soul? Your fitness is nothing to Christ. Remember the hymn— Let not conscience make you linger, Nor of fitness fondly dream; All the fitness He requireth Is to feel your need of Him.2 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.] (2) Emptiness and not fulness is required.—Before a building is erected it is necessary to excavate for a foundation, which involves the removal of much that seems important. And it is literally true that Christ wants not our fulness but our emptiness, that He may “build us up in our most holy faith.” We think ourselves full, and are reluctant to part with anything; whereas we are “poor”—destitute of everything that is necessary to appear before God with; we are “wretched,” being altogether out of harmony with the eternal joys of heaven; and we are “blind” to our actual condition, to our own welfare, and even to the salvation so freely provided and so fully revealed by Christ our Saviour, till the eyes of our understanding are opened, and we are led to see and desire the many things we need. And the faith that saves is that which takes us out of ourselves, where there is nothing, to Christ, where there is fulness for all we need—purity, peace, and joy, “without money and without price.” From all thou holdest precious, for one hour Arise and come away, And let the calling Voice be heard in power; Desert thyself to-day; If with thy Lord for once thou turn aside, With Him thou’lt fain abide.1 [Note: J. E. A. Brown.] 4. The coming is a personal coming to a personal Saviour.—How personal the text is concerning both the one coming and the One to whom he is to come: “him that cometh to me.” That is the long and the short of the whole matter, its Alpha and Omega, its beginning and its end; there must be a personal coming to the personal Christ. It will not suffice for us to come to Christ’s doctrines. We must, of course, believe what He taught; but believing His teaching will not save us unless we come to Him. It will not be enough merely to come to Christ’s precepts, and to try to practise them,—an utterly impossible task for our own unaided strength; we must first come to Christ, and then, when we trust in Him for salvation, His gracious Spirit will “take of the things of Christ, and shew them unto” us. In simple trust like theirs who heard Beside the Syrian sea The gracious calling of the Lord, Let us, like them, without a word Rise up and follow Thee.2 [Note: Whittier.] III Christ’s Part “I will in no wise cast out.” 1. Christ’s accessibility.—“Jesus never slept in a walled town” is the striking remark of a literary writer. There never lived so open a man, so accessible always to all. Sitting at the well of Sychar, and talking freely to the first comer; receiving Nicodemus by night; listening to the Syro-Phœnician mother, who breaks through His concealment; preaching to the five thousand, who disturb His retirement,—He is the property of every man that wants Him, and leaves us an example to follow His steps. 2. Christ’s longing for response.—“I once knew a mother,” says Canon Duncan, “who had a son who suffered from paralysis of the brain. Yet, how she loved and cared for him! But the cause of her great grief was this; she said: ‘I have nursed him from childhood, cleansed, fed, and clothed him, watched over him and supplied his every want, tried to please him, and to teach him little things, and now, though in years he is a man, yet he does not even know me, and shows no return of my love, but just lies there to eat and drink and sleep! And I feel that I cannot go on; I am just longing for some recognition—some response to my lifelong love and care!” How many are there, though not afflicted like that son, who nevertheless treat their God and Saviour much the same! He sacrificed His very life for them; fed, clothed, and cared for them day by day; and has called them by His providence, by His word, and by every token of love, and yet they give no response. He utters this word Himself, that, however long men may neglect it, however long it may be that they see and hear, and yet believe Him not, when they do finally come, He cannot, and will not, and must not cast them away.1 [Note: Schleiermacher.] It is the greatness of Thy love, dear Lord, that we would celebrate With sevenfold powers. Our love at best is cold and poor, at best unseemly for Thy state, This best of ours. Creatures that die, we yet are such as Thine own hands deigned to create: We frail as flowers, We bitter bondslaves ransomed at a price incomparably great To grace Heaven’s bowers. Thou callest: “Come at once”—and still Thou callest us: “Come late, tho’ late”— (The moments fly)— “Come, every one that thirsteth, come—Come prove Me, knocking at My gate”— (Some souls draw nigh!)— “Come thou who waiting seekest Me—Come thou for whom I seek and wait”— (Why will we die?)— “Come and repent: come and amend: come joy the joys unsatiate”— —(Christ passeth by …)— Lord, pass not by—I come—and I—and I. Amen.1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poems, 164. 3. The certainty of Christ’s welcome.—Every one who will come to Christ is sure of a welcome. That is the emphatic message of the text. The words used by our Lord are the strongest possible. Sweetly familiar as the music of the English version is, it scarcely represents their double emphasis. Literally they read, “Him that cometh to me I will not, not cast out.” That is to say, to use a modern phrase, there is not the slightest fear of his being cast out. A heart burdened with a spiritual need will never be repelled; a man panting with a spiritual desire may be absolutely certain that when he comes to Christ he will be welcome. “Oh!” cries Bunyan, “the comfort that I have had from this word ‘in no wise,’ as who should say, by no means, for no thing, whatever he hath done But Satan would greatly labour to pull this promise from me, telling me that Christ did not mean me. But I should answer him again—Satan, here is, in this word, no such exception, but him that comes, him, any him—‘him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.’ ” Bunyan was right. The welcome is for all, without any reserve or any exception, or any condition, save that of willingness to come. Of other ten adults at this time admitted, one was specially noteworthy. She was about twenty-five, and the Elders objected because her marriage had not been according to the Christian usage on Aniwa. She left us weeping deeply. I was writing late at night in the cool evening air, as was my wont in that oppressive tropical clime, and a knock was heard at my door. I called out— “Akai era?” (= Who is there?) A voice softly answered,—“Missi, it is Lamu. Oh, do speak with me!” This was the rejected candidate, and I at once opened the door. “Oh, Missi,” she began, “I cannot sleep, I cannot eat; my soul is in pain. Am I to be shut out from Jesus? Some of those at the Lord’s Table committed murder. They repented, and have been saved. My heart is very bad; yet I never did any of those crimes of Heathenism; and I know that it is my joy to try and please my Saviour Jesus. How is it that I only am to be shut out from Jesus?” I tried all I could to guide and console her, and she listened to all very eagerly. Then she looked up at me and said— “Missi, you and the Elders may think it right to keep me back from showing my love to Jesus at the Lord’s Table; but I know here in my heart that Jesus has received me; and if I were dying now, I know that Jesus would take me to Glory and present me to the Father.” Her look and manner thrilled me. I promised to see the Elders and submit her appeal. But Lamu appeared and pled her own cause before them with convincing effect. She was baptized and admitted along with other nine. And that Communion Day will be long remembered by many souls on Aniwa.1 [Note: John G. Paton, ii. 282. 4. The fulness and freeness of Christ’s welcome.—A man may have been guilty of an atrocious sin, too black for mention; but if he comes to Christ he shall not be cast out. To that atrocious sin he may have added many others, till the condemning list is full and long; but if he comes to Christ he shall not be cast out. He may have hardened his neck against the remonstrances of prudence, and the entreaties of mercy; he may have sinned deeply and wilfully; but if he comes to Christ he shall not be cast out. He may have made himself as black as night, as black as hell; yet, if he shall come to Christ, the Lord will not cast him out. This is the Charter of Christianity—that there lives no sinner too bad for Jesus to save. A year ago I met a doctor possessed of far more than ordinary gifts in dealing with one of our most fatal diseases. From all parts of the country men and women whose lives have been despaired of by their own physicians have journeyed to this man’s consulting-room, and have placed their last hope of recovery in his mysterious powers. And he described to me the pathos of his work. For again and again he has to face a body of anxious patients who are waiting from his lips their sentence of life or of death; and, while he is able to restore many to perfect health, he knows that he will find others for whom he can do nothing. Such is the lot of every physician but One. There is One to whom no case is hopeless; who never yet sent patient away unhealed. “Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.”1 [Note: H. Bisseker, Sunday Evenings in Methodism, 153. Lord, dost Thou me invite To sit in white At the great Feast which for Thy friends is spread? I could not be so bold, In raiment poor and old; Rather without Thy gates would stand unfed. Thy messenger mistook My hungry look, As claiming seat at table of the pure; I am too wise to dare My worthless presence there, Nor could my spirit that clear light endure. Hedge-rows for me instead, Their berries red Enough of sweetness for my lips contain; The glow-worm is my lamp ’Mid herbage damp; To tread Thy bright courts would be only pain. Yet still He calleth me— “Come, for I wait for thee, It is the lost and hungry that I need; Not luxury and pride, Already satisfied, The humble and the poor My feast shall feed.”2 [Note: J. E. A. Brown.] Christ’s Doctrine of Election Literature Bisseker (H.), in Sunday Evenings in Methodism, 153. Burrell (D. J.), The Golden Passional, 101. Davies (T.), Sermons, i. 306. Dods (M.), Footsteps in the Path of Life, 127. Duncan (J.), Popular Hymns, 148. Hall (J. V.), The Sinner’s Friend, 9. Hoyt (W.), in The American Pulpit of the Day, i. 34. Hutton (R. E.), The Crown, of Christ, ii. 543. McDougall (J.), The Ascension of Christ, 86. Power (P. B.), The “I Wills” of Christ, 47. Roberts (J. E.), The Lord’s Prayer, 73. Smellie (A.), In the Hour of Silence, 208. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, x. (1864) No. 599; xxx. (1884) No. 1762; xl. (1894) No. 2349; li. (1905) No. 2954; lvi. (1910) No. 3230. Spurgeon (T.), Down to the Sea, 215. Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit, 1866), No. 551. Christian World Pulpit, liv. 196 (Moule); lxiii. 76 (Mursell). Church of England Magazine, l. 168 (Dalton). Expositor, 3rd Ser., iii. 146. To Whom shall We go? Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.—John 6:68. 1. The situation in which our Lord found Himself at this stage in His career is full of pathos. He began His ministry in Judæa, and His success there seemed to be all that could be desired. But it soon became apparent that the crowds who followed Him misunderstood or wilfully ignored His purpose. They resorted to Him chiefly, if not solely, for material advantages and political ends. He was in danger of being accounted the most skilful metropolitan physician, or in the greater danger of being courted by politicians as a likely popular leader, who might be used as a revolutionary flag or party cry. He, therefore, left Jerusalem at an early period in His ministry and betook Himself to Galilee; and now, after some months’ preaching and mingling with the people, things have worked round in Galilee to precisely the same point as they had reached in Judæa. Great crowds are following Him to be healed and to be fed, while the politically inclined have at last made a distinct effort to make Him a king, to force Him into a collision with the authorities. His proper work is in danger of being lost sight of. He finds it necessary to sift the crowds who follow Him. And He does so by addressing them in terms which can be acceptable only to truly spiritual men—by plainly assuring them that He is among them, not to give them political privileges and the bread that perisheth, but the bread that endureth. They find Him to be what they would call an impracticable dreamer. They profess to go away because they cannot understand Him; but they understand Him well enough to see that He is not the person for their purposes. They seek earth, and heaven is thrust upon them. They turn away disappointed, and many walk no more with Him. The great crowd melts away, and He is left with His original following of twelve men. His months of teaching and toil seem to have gone for nothing. It might seem doubtful if even the Twelve would be faithful—if any result of His work would remain, if any would cordially and lovingly adhere to Him. Wearily and wistfully He turns to the Twelve, asking, “Will ye also go away?” And Simon Peter answers Him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.” 2. This answer of Peter’s contains a great assumption. There is a postulate in the reply, which being removed, the whole drops to pieces. It is that man must have some one to go to. It is that the soul wants, demands, cries out for, not some thing only but some One: cannot live without a Master, without a Guide, without a Revealer and a Comforter: is so constituted that it cannot live alone, cannot grope its own way, except as searching for One who shall be its rest: will not, cannot, ought not to be self-sufficing; inasmuch as this is the law of its being, and God has made it natural to us—natural, not as a malady or weakness, but as a part of our original constitution—not to inquire whether to any one, but only, confidently, this: To whom shall we go? So in the text we have these three things— I. The Fact—that we need some one to go to. II. The Question—To whom shall we go? III. The Answer—that only Christ can satisfy our wants, because He alone has “the words of eternal life.” I We need Some One to go to 1. St. Peter grasped the situation at once. He saw that they must go to some one. It may be that there flashed before his eyes certain possible masters—such as Moses the lawgiver, or John the Baptist, or perhaps some of the Gentile leaders; but in the light of Jesus Christ all these seemed absolutely impossible, and so he cried, “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.” Underlying this question, there is the same feeling which pervaded that saying of Amiel’s, “Men think they can do without religion; they do not know that religion is indestructible, and that the question simply is, Which will you have?” The only question possible for men is, “To whom shall we go?” There is a deep law of our nature in virtue of which men are ever haunted with a sense of need, a consciousness of dependence. In every age, in every country, this is what man has keenly felt. The instinct is irresistible, because it is set deep in the very roots of our being. There is no want more real, more imperative than this—we must have leaders whom we can follow, else nothing is done, no progress is made; there is no upward tendency, but, on the contrary, we fall back into loss and ruin. We must have our ideals, and from them alone can we draw the inspiration for better things. To put it in a well-known phrase, though one which has a heathenish smack about it, “Man must swear by his gods.” “No man liveth to himself” is a text which is fertile in its significance, and which among other meanings carries this, that we all of us—the best and wisest—want a stronger and a wiser to whom we can look, who shall be our highest example, whom we can follow, reverence, obey, exalt.1 [Note: G. T. Candlin, On Service with the King, 53. 2. It is not a question of choice between Christ and some thing else, but between Christ and some one else. For, singularly enough, since the world was, man has never been able, amid ten thousand forms of faith, to have a religion without a personality enshrined in the very heart of it. The disciples did not ask: “What shall we take up with if we leave Jesus; what system shall we believe in?” but: “To whom shall we go?” Ask not what the hundreds of millions of the human race believe in to-day. If you speak of abstract things, abstract principles, they believe in ten thousand things, or they believe in nothing. But ask in whom they believe, and the reply will be definite enough: Christ, Mohammed, Sakyamuni, Confucius, Zoroaster! It may be questioned if to an abstract principle men have ever yet, since the world was, built one solitary temple, reared a single altar, offered a single sacrifice, or breathed a single prayer. Where there is worship the demand for a person is quite inexorable. So when the Greeks created their sun-myths and worshipped the god of day, they had first to personify it and make it Apollo, the youth with golden locks and radiant countenance. (1) What Peter wanted—and what we want—is, first of all, some One who can raise us above Circumstance. A vast multitude of the mighty family are so placed as to be in perpetual depression. Circumstances, we say, are against them. Poverty, or its twin sister anxiety—the perpetual question of the day’s or the morrow’s bodily supplies—this is one case. Sickness, or its more trying and yet commoner likeness, ill-health—this is another. Disappointment—a perpetual experience, the bitterness of which is never quite lost, that the honours and distinctions of an academical or professional career are always for another, never for me—this is another depressing influence; and we might multiply them without limit. The sense of inferiority, physical or mental—the dulness of life’s routine—the dreary unmarked round of duties, scarcely worth calling by so grave a name—the seeing no end, the having no prospect, the being placed where we would not be, and the hopelessness of change from it—the presence of uncongenial, unamiable, or unfriendly kinsfolk—the denial, in some definite point, of the wish of the heart, the final irreversible defeating of the life’s hope—all these are common experiences. And it is a want, a primal necessity, of our being, that we should find One—for a thing it cannot be—to lift us above circumstance. When thou hast been compelled by circumstances to be disturbed in a manner, quickly return to thyself and do not continue out of tune longer than the compulsion lasts; for thou wilt have more mastery over the harmony by continually recurring to it.1 [Note: Marcus Aurelius.] There is more cause for joy than for complaint in the hard and disagreeable circumstances of life. Browning said, “I count life just a stuff to try the soul’s strength on.” Spell the word “discipline” with a final g,—“discipling.” We are here to learn Time’s lesson for Eternity’s business. What does it signify if the circumstances about us are not of our choice, if by them we can be trained, learning the lessons of patience, fortitude, perseverance, self-denying service, acquiescence with God’s will, and the hearty doing of it? Circumstances do not make character. The noblest character can emerge from the worst surroundings, and moral failures come out of the best. Just where you are, take the things of life as tools, and use them for God’s glory; so you will help the kingdom come, and the Master will use the things of life in cutting and polishing you so that there shall some day be seen in you a soul conformed to His likeness.1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 72. (2) A second want of our nature is some personal help to lift us above Sin. Of all the wants of the world, none is deeper than this. No misery is greater than the consciousness that having had a tendency to love and justice, to purity and pity, to wisdom and temperance, we have become unjust, envious, full of hatred, dissolute, fond of the baseness of all the flesh, cruel, living in folly and shame, intemperate in selfish desire, tyrannized over by self; and, living with these companions, restless and unsatisfied, inwardly ashamed. Men keep their unhappy hearts to themselves, but that silent, bitter cry of unquiet shame and fear, of longing for release, for peace and goodness, rises like a vast cloud of sorrow towards heaven from the universal heart of man. Ethics do not cure that, nor science, nor philosophy, nor humanitarianism; it is an inward matter of misery. Religious discussions do not help it. It is no remedy for that to be able to balance doctrine against doctrine and to analyse by logic the schemes of the Churches. It does not cure that to be a master-critic, to apply science to the miracles, and the laws of history to the Bible. The real matter is deep within, beyond these transitory things. Knowledge, the mind of man, can do nothing to help this sorrow to a final cure. I looked at the sky, I looked at the sea, I thought of the stars and moon,— And my soul went forth on the desolate slopes, Of the wastes of endless doom: And I knew myself for that filthy thing, That loves the death of its soul; For myself and my soul agreed to cling To the things we hate and loathe: And we seek the way and we hunt the path, To death, and hell, and shame, And we lightly do with a gloating laugh, Foul deeds-without-a-name.2 [Note: Desmond Mountjoy, The Hills of Hell. 20. (3) There is another universal, primal want of man’s nature—and that is, some One who shall raise us above Death itself. The writer to the Hebrews does not say one word too much upon this subject, when he declares that through fear of death all men through all their lifetime are subject to bondage. How else can we describe it? And our experience is of Christian times—of days, and of thoughts too, upon which Gospel light has shined, making it not only a figure of speech, but also something of a traditional feeling, that of course, now, death has lost its sting. Yet is not death, is not the shadow of death cast before in sickness, a terror and a tyranny still? We may forget him in health—we can lock and bar him out while we are in work and in society—but there he stands, just outside our door, now and then threatening, sometimes striking within, always in prospect, always an apprehension. May not this too be spoken of as a want, a natural want, an original want? Sir James Affleck, speaking about his visits to Dr. Alexander McLaren as his doctor, says: “As the burden of weakness and infirmity bore down upon him, he became more silent, while touches of sombreness were now and then discernible. On one of these occasions, in speaking of death, he remarked, ‘I cannot say I am more reconciled to death now than I was twenty years ago.’ I replied in the words of Watts— ‘But timorous mortals start and shrink, To cross this narrow sea.’ ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘it’s not only the sea, it’s what is beyond the sea’; and then after a pause, ‘I cannot perhaps always but sometimes I can say— But ’tis enough that Christ knows all, And I shall be with Him.’ “It is interesting to recall that Richard Baxter, who wrote these lines, himself said as he drew near to the end of life, ‘To get satisfying apprehensions of the other world is the great and grievous difficulty.’ “Dr. McLaren’s crossing of the narrow sea proved somewhat tedious, but eminently peaceful, and he is now safe with Him who ‘knows all.’ ”1 [Note: Dr. McLaren of Manchester, 264. (4) We need some one to go to for our ideals. There is a story that a certain eminent painter kept always in his studio a set of precious stones. They cost him the proceeds of many a canvas. But he said he needed them in order to refresh his jaded sense of colour. Back to them he would often turn when he had lost the vivid sense of blue or crimson. And in their calm, unfading depths he never failed to find new tone and beauty. So we need some one to give us back the glory of lost ideals, to tone up our stale lives, to keep our hearts up to pitch. To whom can we turn for such things? It was reserved for Christianity to present to the world an ideal character, which through all the changes of eighteen centuries has filled the hearts of men with an impassioned love; has shown itself capable of acting on all ages, nations, temperaments, and conditions; has been not only the highest pattern of virtue, but the strongest incentive to its practice; and has exercised so deep an influence that it may be truly said that the simple record of three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and to soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers, and all the exhortations of moralists.1 [Note: W. E. H. Lecky, History of European Morals, ii. 8. In the Sermon on the Mount Christ has expressed the eternal ideal toward which it is proper for men to tend, and that degree of its attainment which can be reached even in our time. The ideal consists in having no ill-will against any one, in calling forth no ill-will, in loving all; but the commandment, below which, in the attainment of this ideal, it is absolutely possible not to descend, consists in not offending any one with a word. And this forms the first commandment. The ideal is complete chastity, even in thought; the commandment which points out the degree of attainment, below which, in the attainment of this ideal, it is absolutely possible not to descend, is the purity of the marital life, the abstaining from fornication. And this forms the second commandment. The ideal is not to care for the future, to live only in the present; the commandment which points out the degree of the attainment, below which it is absolutely possible hot to descend is not to swear, not to promise anything to men. And this is the third commandment. The ideal is never, under any condition, to make use of violence; the commandment which points out the degree below which it is absolutely possible not to descend is not to repay evil with evil, but to suffer insult, to give up one’s cloak. And this is the fourth commandment. The ideal is to love our enemies, who hate us; the commandment which points out the degree of the attainment, below which it is possible not to descend, is to do no evil to our enemies, to speak well of them, to make no distinction between them and our fellow-citizens. All these commandments are indications of what we are fully able not to do on the path of striving after perfection, of what we ought to work over now, of what we must by degrees transfer into the sphere of habit, into the sphere of the unconscious. But these commandments fail to form a teaching, and do not exhaust it, and form only one of the endless steps in the approximation toward perfection.1 [Note: Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You (Works, xx. 104).] O well for him that loves the sun, That sees the heaven-race ridden or run, The splashing seas of sunset won, And shouts for victory. God made the sun to crown his head, And when death’s dart at last is sped, At least it will not find him dead, And pass the carrion by. O ill for him that loves the sun; Shall the sun stoop for anyone? Shall the sun weep for hearts undone Or heavy souls that pray? Not less for us and everyone Was that white web of splendour spun; O well for him who loves the sun Although the sun should slay.2 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, Ballad of the Sun.] II To Whom shall We go? Virtually, the question is, What will you substitute for the gospel of the Son of God? This is the pith of it, and it is a standing challenge to all comers and to all centuries. It is not hard to destroy, to pluck up, to pull down, to undermine by ridicule, by satire, and by sceptical objections. But when the house is down and dismantled, what next? What and how shall we build? We want a shelter, a roof overhead, a doctrine, a hope, a promise, a prospect, in view of the dark future that confronts us. Men obliterate creeds, cast miracle and prophecy out of the world, and declare that the young, lusty Samson of modern thought will not be bound by the tattered traditions of antiquity in an age of scientific experiment. They talk about intellectual emancipation; the abolition of intellectual servitude to a set of ideas that originated with an insignificant Semitic tribe who once lived in a corner of the earth. It is easy to carp and criticize, to deal in shadowy negations; men may demonstrate the absurdity of prayer, the impossibility of miracle, the antecedent unlikelihood of the Incarnation; they may call the resurrection of Christ a myth; they may account for Isaiah, Ezekiel, and the Apocalypse and all moral inspiration upon natural principles; but meantime all this does not feed men. We need something positive, some great spiritual affirmation, a ray of hope, a word of promise, as we stand huddled, frightened, shivering on this sandbank of finite existence. And where shall we get these? The modern man lives in a sort of supreme fear of being duped. But when this fear of self-deception goes so far as to get itself built into a sort of shrine and worshipped as Clifford worshipped it, we are at least candidates for commiseration. It is like keeping out of battle for the sake of avoiding wounds. And when all the deeper interests of the heart are the stake to be fought for! How bleak it all is! It is not easy to forget those frosted words of Clifford, written after he had cast out all his native beliefs. “I have seen the spring sun shine out of an empty heaven upon a soulless earth, and I have felt with utter loneliness that the Great Companion was dead.” 1. “To whom shall we go?” Shall we cast in our lot with the worldling? Shall we smother our fears, our misgivings, our aspirations, our hopes, in the amusements, the interests, the pleasures of this lower world, and thus by a determined effort quench the Divine light which is in us? We cannot do this. We cannot forget the home from which we came. Ever and again, the memory of the Father whom we left intrudes itself upon us. We began our career of self-will in riotous living; and we have ended it in famine and destitution. These husks may be good enough for the swine that perish; but to us, the children of our Father, to us, the heirs of heaven, they are vile, they are loathsome, they are sickening. A large section of humanity has espoused for its creed an abject materialism. “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” What a vanity fair is modern social life! Multitudes are trying to drown their disgust in deeper cups of pleasure and riot. Men call the doctrine of Jesus “hard.” “But how much harder,” cries Tolstoy, “how much harder is the doctrine of the world! In my own life I can reckon up as much suffering caused by following the doctrine of the world as many martyrs have endured for the doctrine of Jesus.” Yet this “doctrine of the world” is preached to human hearts as a doctrine of “good news,” and crowds have turned away from the Man of Nazareth to hear it. What a travesty upon hearts, what a mockery of happiness! The modern martyrs are not in the church; they are in the world. For real martyrdom to-day, name the frenzies of contemporaneous finance. Ask the women who are racked in an inquisition worse than Torquemada’s. Watch the young people training for the enjoyment of a diet of husks and sawdust. And worst of all, these crucifixions are entirely gratuitous. They give the cross without the crown or the promise of it. They yield the pang without the palm.1 [Note: G. C. Peck, Vision and Task, 134. 2. “To whom shall we go?” Shall we seek counsel of the secularist? Shall we be content to bind our hopes and fears by the limitations of time and space? Will it suffice us to extend our scientific knowledge, to perfect our machinery, to improve our police regulations, to study our sanitary conditions, shutting our eyes meanwhile to the immensity which lies above and around us? Nay, our eternal spirit would lash itself into agony against the bars of this narrow cage. “Our immortality broods” over us “like the day,” “a presence which is not to be put by.” The late Mr. Winwood Reade unhappily thought and published that there was no God. His wild book he called the Martyrdom of Man; and without God in the world man is a martyr. A personal creator he asserted was an impossibility, and, to prevent any approach to hope, the existence of a soul an improbability, but not as the other, a demonstrable falsehood. These wild and whirling words were uttered by one who in his last book, issued as he died, said that he often sighed for his old belief, when to him “God was semi-human and man was half Divine, and after life death began (?) and happiness never ceased, and my mother and my Margaret would be joined to me again. Now my heart rebels against the fate of the human race, doomed to work like coral insects of the sea.” This he wrote, says his biographer, his uncle, Charles Reade, “with the hand of death upon him.” We need not wonder at the mournfulness of one without hope in the world. We quote these words because the storm which lifts aside the waters shows the depths beneath. Let no man reject faith carelessly. No Christian hand could have painted more truly the want which Revelation, and that alone, supplies. The reviewer of a contemporary, with a full sympathy with Winwood Reade, quotes Schopenhauer, who, probably with like thoughts, says that, “if we take into account the pain and misery, the unhappiness and sin, with which the earth abounds, we can only wonder whether it would not have been better for us if the surface of the earth had remained like that of the moon, devoid of atmosphere, an inert mass of cinder and slag.” Can our readers blame us if we put a firm foot on the old ways, and insist again and again, out of pure love for our fellows, on the reasonable expectation of the larger hope and the fuller life, the warmth and happiness given by Him who is the Light of the world, in whose light we no longer walk in darkness, and who lighteth every man that cometh into the world, unless the heart rejects His light and crawls back into the hopeless gloom?1 [Note: J. H. Friswell, This Wicked World, 35. As some most pure and noble face, Seen in the thronged and hurrying street, Sheds o’er the world a sudden grace, A flying odour sweet, Then passing leaves the cheated sense Balked with a phantom excellence. So in our soul, the visions rise Of that fair life we never led; They flash a splendour past our eyes, We start, and they are fled; They pass and leave us with blank gaze, Resigned to our ignoble days.2 [Note: William Watson, The Fugitive Ideal.] 3. “To whom shall we go?” Shall we close with the teaching of the philosophical deist? What will he give us in return for our confidence? A cold abstraction, a far-off something, a personified tendency, a hard law, a rigid and lifeless thing like the marble statues which men worshipped of old, more imposing indeed but less beautiful, a being unknown and unknowable, whom we cannot approach, cannot realize, cannot pray to, cannot love. What consolation is there here in our sorrow? What strength is there here in our temptation? What purification is there here in our sin? Did Herbert Spencer ever convince you—did he ever convince anybody—did he ever for one mad moment convince himself—that it must be to the interest of the individual to feel a public spirit? Do you believe that, if you rule your department badly, you stand any more chance, or one-half of the chance, of being guillotined than an angler stands of being pulled into the river by a strong pike? Herbert Spencer refrained from theft for the same reason he refrained from wearing feathers in his hair, because he was an English gentleman with different tastes.1 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill.] 4. Shall we turn to the other religions of the world? There is a little group of people in Liverpool who have built a mosque and profess the tenets of Mohammedanism. There are a few people in England who profess to find in Buddhism that which meets their religious craving. But would it be uncharitable to say that such persons are religious curiosities, more eager for that which is novel than for that which is true? Can we imagine any serious sober-minded Englishman deliberately choosing any religion the world has ever seen in preference to Christianity—choosing, say, Buddhism, that religion of despair which takes away God, who is the very object of religion; or Confucianism, which calls to the worship of ancestors, no more worthy of worship than our contemporaries; or Brahmanism, with its many gods rather than one; or Zoroastrianism, with evil raised almost to the level of the good? I own in full the spiritual power which there is in every attempt of heathenism after God, but though there be other religions than the Christian, surely the full notion of religion is not to be gathered out of their imperfection, but out of the more perfect faith which does what they try to do and is what they try to be. If a man asks me what a tree is, I will not send him to a stunted, frost-bitten bush high up Mount Washington, but to the oak or elm which under the best conditions has opened the tree life into fullest glory. If any one asks me what a man is, I will not show him a Kafir or a Hottentot, but the best specimen of manhood that Europe or America can bring. And yet the mountain shrub is certainly a tree, and the Hottentot is certainly a man. So if anybody asks me what religion is, I will not point to Mohammedanism or to Buddhism, though they surely are religions; I will go to Christianity and in its central motive take out the real central force of all religion.1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, New Starts in Life, 323. 5. “To whom shall we go?” Shall we turn to self? Shall we make ourselves our standard? Instead of having before our eyes, in our thoughts, in our ideals, in our prayers, something that all men acknowledge as superhumanly lovely and ennobling, and all Christians deem assuredly Divine, shall we look to ourselves, to our own meagre selves, with our faults and our appetites, our tastes, our pettinesses; if so we shall lack the one thing that elevates, the sympathy with the best. Soon our path curves farther and farther away; it leads to absorbing and unsatisfied hunger after lower ends; and finally a death is felt approaching to which we look forward with reluctant acquiescence and secret terror, instead of with trustful expectation as but a step in the upward path. (1) Expediency may be a motive of good living and a means of human development. We all know how frequently it appears and what power it very often has. We are told that a good life is the best life, the safest and the happiest. “If you do what is wrong, no matter what may be the present pleasure of it, you certainly will suffer. If you do what is right, no matter how hard the struggle to which it sets you now, you certainly will prosper. Therefore, it is not well, it is not prudent, it is not expedient to be wicked.” The doctrine is immensely true. Its certainty is emphasized by all that we already know of human history, and misgivings of still more terrible assertions of it stretch forward into the other world. And the doctrine certainly is lofty, inasmuch as it asserts that right and wrong are not mere whims and fashions, but essential and eternal things, that they have to do with the very structure of man and of the world, that both man and the world are built so that the wrong finds its punishment and the right its reward. And certainly it is a doctrine which does to a very great extent control the actions of mankind. Some people will even call it religion. Some people will make religion to be nothing but a great system of expediency stretching out into the world beyond the grave. But clearly this is not religion. The religious man says, “This is right, and I will do it because God wants me to and I love Him for the great love wherewith He has loved me.” The prudent man says, “This is right, and I will do it because it will be best for me.” The first is religious and the second is not religious, only prudent. If a man merely holds that on the whole it is better and wiser to abstain from the sins of the flesh, but that there is no Divine command against them, depend upon it, occasions will arise when passion will be so strong that the mere notion of what is better will not stand for an instant before its storm. If a man merely considers that it is on the whole wiser to speak the truth, but that no Divine message has ever declared that all liars shall have their portion in the banishment of the wicked from the presence of the Lord, depend upon it that occasions will come to him when concealment, evasion, and duplicity will be irresistibly attractive. Where there is no belief in a Divine revelation, there can be no sense of sin.1 [Note: W. M. Sinclair, A Young Man’s Life, 183. (2) There is another power which men attempt to substitute for religion as the ruler and inspirer of life. It is that feeling which is in the heart of almost every man, the sense of self-respect which makes him say, “It is beneath my dignity to do a mean or wicked action.” Poor indeed is the man who does not know what that feeling is. You offer a man a temptation to steal. He turns away and will not steal because he is loyal to his master, God. That is religion. He draws back and will not steal because he knows that “Honour is the best policy.” That is expediency. He turns indignantly upon you and says, “Do you take me for a thief?” That is honour. What this great instinct of honour has done, it is hard to over-value. It has been the overruling power of whole sections of society, almost of whole periods of history. It has shone with splendid lustre in the eyes of many men, till it seemed to them all that humanity needed for its full consummation. It has had its martyrs who have given up their lives under its inspiration. It is romantic. It is the power of chivalry. There is hardly an age of history so dark that it may not be found burning there. It is a strong and, as it seems to many people, a sufficient power here to-day. There are many who would substitute the principle of honour for the principle of religion, many who think that the self-respect of the gentleman is enough without the loving consecration of the servant of God. But what is this honour that shines so splendidly? Is it conscience quickened and filled with pride? Its very principle of life is pride. It is a man’s supreme consciousness of his own value, so strong that he recognizes the obligations which rest upon one so valuable as he is. His nobility obliges him. The deficiencies of it seem to be premised in this very definition, and they show out all through the history of its influence on men. We believe that we have an immortal future, and are destined hereafter to an eternal weight of glory, not of enjoyment—for that is a mere libel—but of perfection and enlargement of all our noblest faculties. We believe that we can even here become partakers of the Divine nature. We believe that we have dwelling in us by faith and communion with the Most High, the very Spirit of God Himself, weaning us from the world, setting our affections on things above, purifying our thoughts, putting into our minds good desires, and daily bringing the same to true effect, strengthening our resolves, subduing our passions, and making us fit for the companionship of all that is best and most esteemed in humanity, in the pure and tranquil radiance of the regions of light, yes, and of the fellowship of God Himself the Father and the Son. Then I ask what moral scheme or persuasive ideal could be devised by the wit of man which would go anywhere near to produce in us such reason for that truest self-respect which is a humble and grateful union with God Himself?1 [Note: W. M. Sinclair, A Young Man’s Life, 185. III None but Christ can Satisfy 1. Men have offered to us many phantoms of religion. Many societies, each with its theory to bind human creatures together in worship and love, have knocked at our door to tell us the truth of life. Materialism has sought our suffrages, and humanitarianism. Ethics and science have offered us their dishes and said: “Eat and be satisfied.” Vague optimisms and mud-rooted pessimisms; a religion of humanity and a religion of unchristian theism have filled our ears with their cries; but when we have found the more excellent, we are not likely to descend to the less. We wish them all good fortune so far as they minister to love. But when we are asked for the foundation of life, we turn to Jesus and say: “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.” There are too many witnesses in His favour for us to leave Him. Call the roll of philosophers: Bacon, Locke, Johnson, Edwards, Hopkins, McCosh. They were Christians, and it was Locke who said, “If I had my life to live over, I would spend it studying the Epistles of Paul and the Psalms.” Call the roll of astronomers: Copernicus, Kepler, Sir Isaac Newton. They were Christians, and it was Kepler who said, “I am thinking the thoughts of God. I am overawed with the sense of His majesty. In the firmament God is passing before me in the grandeur of His way.” Call the roll of scientists: Agassiz, Miller, Proctor, Guizot. They were Christians. Then add the name of John George Romanes, who was an unbeliever, but became a devoted Christian, accepting the divinity of Jesus and the atonement of Christ, and died a triumphant death. The greatest historians, among whom were Bancroft and Green, were Christians. The greatest discoverers, among whom were Raleigh, Livingstone, and Stanley, were Christians. The greatest statesmen, among whom were Constantine, Charlemagne, Alfred the Great, Webster, Gladstone, and Bismarck, were Christians.1 [Note: J. W. Chapman.] (1) “Thou hast the words of eternal life.” St. Peter was convinced not only that Jesus had the words of eternal life, but that no one else had. “To whom shall we go?” St. Peter had not an exhaustive knowledge of all sources of human wisdom; but speaking from his own experience he affirmed his conviction that it was useless to seek life eternal anywhere else than in Jesus. And it seems equally hopeless still to look to any other quarter for sufficient teaching, for words that are “spirit and life.” Where but in Christ do we find a God we can accept as God? Where but in Him do we find that which can not only encourage men striving after virtue, but also reclaim the vicious? To put any one alongside of Christ as a revealer of God, as a pattern of virtue, as a Saviour of men, is absurd. There is that in Him which we recognize as not merely superior, but of another kind; so that those who reject Him, or set Him on a level with other teachers, have first of all to reject the chief part of what His contemporaries were struck with and reported, and to fashion a Christ of their own. No student of history doubts for a moment that Jesus Christ appeals to man as does no other character in human history. His appeal is not only to the whole man, that is, to the entire range of his faculties; in a remarkable way, He appeals to the whole of humanity. Mohammed appeals to the Arab, the Turk, the fierce and fatalistic nomad of the East. Buddha appeals to the reflective mind of the Orient. Jesus Christ’s appeal is uniquely cosmopolitan. He holds the sceptre of the Western world, and yet a learned Hindu has said, “None but Jesus deserves, and none but He shall have, the diadem of India.”1 [Note: C. C. Albertson, College Sermons, 45. (2) “Thou hast the words of eternal life.” St. Peter’s confession expressed the grounds on which he believed Jesus to be what He said, and our faith has the same proof to rest on. It does not rest on St. Peter’s certainty, but on the reason here stated, common to all who receive the evidence. The grounds of Christian faith in the Divine person of Jesus are His works, His words, and His character; what He did, what He said, and what He was. But prominence is here given to the “words.” For the “words” were at that time in some danger of being disparaged in favour of the “deeds.” An incident had just happened which implied that, and St. Peter here puts in, so to speak, his protest against the multitude. “It is not for the loaves or for the miracles we either believe or follow Thee: it is because Thou hast the words of eternal life.” The “words” are precisely that part of the evidence which is now just as valid for us as it was for St. Peter. The “words” are here, just as fresh and full of life and spiritually mighty as when they were first spoken. And what is still more to the point, the “words” interpret and explain all the rest. The relation of the miracles and the character of Jesus to His words may be stated as the relation of a seal or stamp to a document. It is the document—the writing—that defines and explains the authority conveyed by the seal.2 [Note: J. Laidlaw, Studies in the Parables, 339. (3) “Thou hast the words of eternal life.” That expression “eternal life” must have been very familiar to St. Peter and all the twelve, while Jesus went in and out among them. There were few days when they did not hear it fall from His lips, and they caught it up if they did not fully understand it. In the brief record of our Lord’s teaching, contained in the four Gospels, we have it twenty-five times. In St. John’s Gospel alone it occurs seventeen times. In this very chapter we read it five times over. No doubt it was ringing in St. Peter’s ears when he spoke. Christ’s words of eternal life were words about the nature of that life which He came into the world to proclaim,—a life begun in the soul by faith while we live, and perfected in glory when we die. They were words about the way in which this eternal life is provided for sinful man, even the way of His atoning death, as our Substitute, on the Cross. They were words about the terms on which this eternal life is made our own, if we feel our need of it, even the terms of simple faith. As Latimer said, it is but “believe and have.” They were words about the training and discipline on the way to eternal life, which are so much needed by man and so richly provided, even the renewing and sanctifying grace of the Holy Ghost. They were words about the comforts and encouragements by the way, even Christ’s daily help, sympathy, and watchful care. Christ is the source of spiritual life to all who believe in His name. The idea of Divine personality carries with it the idea of revelation, as all our modern discussions show. If the power that is behind the world is a personal power—a character or moral will, and not a mere blind force issuing endlessly into space, it cannot, in its very nature, but make itself known to man. And so the Word of God, God in Christ, becomes the essential correlative of the idea of God. If, in other words, there is an eternal life, a moral sphere beyond the present, of which the present is only a faint reflection, this can be known to us only through its expressions in such an one as Christ. That others have a spiritual life like ours we know only through communion with them in word or act. That there is a spiritual life, transcending the world and embracing an eternal life, on which the world and humanity rest, and out of which all good that is in the world or man comes, we can know only through its coming near to us in word or act. This is what the Apostles felt Christ had done for them. He had not merely spoken to them of an eternal life. He had not said, “It is a part of My teaching that there is such a life.” The Pharisees might have said this But all He said or did was the revelation of this life. They felt themselves, in contact with Him, to be at the same time in contact with a sphere of spiritual being above the world. And so the assurance of the eternal life can only come to any of us straight out of the words of Christ rather than out of any other source. The word of Christ is the highest evidence for us that there is any higher life at all, any ground of existence that is really eternal beneath all the changes of experience. If we cannot rest here, or get conviction here, as we look at Christ, we cannot rest anywhere, or touch the eternal as by faintest contact. In Him, in communion with His spirit, in all that He had ever said to them, the Apostles felt themselves assured of a higher being. They felt the outflow of the eternal life bathing their souls and suffusing them with its own deep serenity. This was why they could not go away with others. Where else could they turn? “Thou, O Christ, art the only true light of our souls. Thou hast the words of eternal life.”1 [Note: J. Tulloch, Sundays at Balmoral, 94. 2. What did Jesus purpose to do? We see what He is doing among men, but the question is, What did He purpose to do? Some men go all through life without a purpose. But most of us form a purpose before we have passed far into the years of youth. With one, it is to make a fortune, with another to win fame, with others, to carve, or paint, or write, or fight, or build, or heal, or plough. Now what did Jesus conceive His life’s task to be? Our wonder increases when we learn that He seriously purposed to found a kingdom, to destroy the works of evil, to institute the reign of love among men and among nations, to redeem society by bringing back to goodness and to God all the individuals of which society is composed. Did any other ever undertake a task like that? Compared with it, the emancipation of a race of slaves, or even the founding of a new nation, is a small thing. Go a little further into His life and we find He purposed and professed to solve the three greatest and gravest problems of life—the problems of sin, and sorrow, and death. Now look at His philosophy, His theology, His metaphysics, His ethics, His system, whatever it may be called, His Gospel, let us say, and you will see, potentially if not actually, the materials out of which all this is to be done. There is love, pure and sacrificial, upon which to found a kingdom in the hearts of men, love as the basis of a new brotherhood; there is grace abounding much more than ever sin abounded; inward strength and comfort for the heart with sorrow laden; and there is immortality with which to face the fearful phantasm of death. All these elements are in His Gospel, and they must impress us with their absolute adequacy. Surprise at first, and afterwards a sense of adequacy, are awakened by a study of the fact of Christ. Then follows in our minds the tribute we instinctively pay to greatness, to simplicity, and power. A good part of the admiration we have for Abraham Lincoln is based upon our perception of his native nobility, his elemental simplicity. He was so free from anything like artificial greatness, from the counterfeit semblance of dignity, and yet so masterful, so completely captain of his soul, and of the Ship of State he guided through the seething sea of war. It is easy to admire a man of our own flesh and blood, so near us that there are those still living who have touched his hand. It is not so easy to admire a personality separated from us by sixty generations. Yet admiration is a feeble word to measure the response in our hearts when we hear the name of Mary’s Son. He seems not so far away, after all. We read the Gospels and rise with a kind of feeling that if we have not seen Him, we have at least heard His footfall on the temple’s marble pavement or the street, that we have caught some accent of His voice, or touched the hem of His passing garments. Whittier puts it so— But warm, sweet, tender, even yet A present help is He; And faith has still its Olivet, And love its Galilee. The healing of His seamless dress Is by our beds of pain; We touch Him in life’s throng and press, And we are whole again.1 [Note: C. C. Albertson, College Sermons, 48. (1) When we know that we love God and that God loves us, we are healed of the grievous wounds of life. In the infinite flood of Divine and human love our sins and sorrows are drowned, and the ark of joy and peace alone survives. To have the heart full of love, and to feel that we are infinitely loved, is so Divine a passion that it lifts us into a world where we forget our pain and wrong. We feel our pains and sins, but even when we feel them—and many are our days of depression—we feel them only for a time. We know they will come to an end, and all the arguments based on them against the goodness and love of God drift away like feeble clouds before the summer wind. The soul is at peace, though life be shipwrecked in the storm. We know, though we have been battered by sin, that through love of Love we are becoming righteous. We know, though sorrows are deep, that out of hunger for righteousness we are attaining joy. We understand, though we are left as lonely often as a mountain peak, that we are not alone, for the Father is with us. This is the first truth as it is in Jesus. Lord, weary of a painful way, All night our heads we would not lay Under the naked sky; But ask who worthiest? who will best Entreat a tired and lowly guest With promptest courtesy? And Thou art worthiest; there will not One loving usage be forgot By Thee; Thy kiss will greet Us entering; Thou wilt not disdain To wash away each guilty stain From off our soilëd feet. We enter, from this time to prove Thy hospitality and love Shown tow’rd Thy meanest guest: From house to house we would not stray, For whither should we go away? With Thee is perfect rest.1 [Note: Trench, Poems, 145. (2) The second declaration Christ made followed on the first. It was the declaration of the forgiveness of sins. The removal of the natural results of wrong-doing, of what we call punishment, is not forgiveness. Forgiveness is to feel at one with love, with our Father’s heart; to feel like a child to God; to feel the strange delight that we are in union with God and His righteousness, and to do what the feeling urges; to feel the emotion of joy urging us to the act of good. Yes, that is the forgiveness of sins. A new life is open to us. We hear the voice of Jesus: “Go, you will sin no more.” For nearly twenty centuries, the words, the character, the life, the teaching, and the death of Jesus, all they were, and all they mean, have brought healing to this universal misery of man. There are millions of lives to testify to the truth of this. The lost have found themselves; the sinners have ceased to sin, the miserable have become happy; the restless have reached peace; the dissolute have become pure; the malicious and envious have learned to love; the selfish have devoted themselves to others; the poor of soul have become rich, the useless useful, the fearful brave, and the enslaved free. Where the secret lies we cannot altogether know, but we shall know hereafter. What we do know is the facts; the result of the words of Christ. Men are redeemed; and beneath every form of Christianity that is the permanent thing. The dogmas do not count, the criticism, the discussions are nothing: the healing power, the forgiveness of sins—that is all. It is the power within to lead a new life and to forget the burden of the past—a mighty thing indeed! And the reason of it all is contained in those words of Jesus, if we could but reach their infinite depth in thought: “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.” That was the second declaration of Jesus, and it followed from His doctrine of a Father of men who, being good, loved them, and could not, consistently with fatherhood, leave His children to be mastered by evil. He was bound to make them, in the end, holy with Himself. Wife murder was also considered quite legitimate. In one of our inland villages dwelt a young couple, happy in every respect except that they had no children. The man, being a Heathen, resolved to take home another wife, a widow with two children. This was naturally opposed by his young wife. And, without the slightest warning, while she sat plaiting a basket, he discharged a ball into her from his loaded musket. It crashed through her arm and lodged in her side. Everything was done that was in my power to save her life; but on the tenth day tetanus came on, and she soon after passed away. The man appeared very attentive to her all the time; but, being a Heathen, he insisted that she had no right to oppose his wishes! He was not in any way punished or disrespected by the people of his village, but went out and in amongst them as usual, and took home the other woman as his wife a few weeks thereafter. His second wife began to attend Church and School regularly with her children; and at last he also came along with them, changing very manifestly from his sullen and savage former self. They have a large family; they are avowedly trying to train them all for the Lord Jesus; and they take their places meekly at the Lord’s Table. It would give a wonderful shock, I suppose, to many namby-pamby Christians, to whom the title “Mighty to Save” conveys no ideas of reality, to be told that nine or ten converted murderers were partaking with them the Holy Communion of Jesus! But the Lord who reads the heart, and weighs every motive and circumstance, has perhaps much more reason to be shocked by the presence of some of themselves. Penitence opens all the Heart of God—“To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise.”1 [Note: John G. Paton, ii. 160. (3) But Christ’s words infer a third truth—the immortality of the soul, of the conscious personality of the child of God. The Father is immortal, therefore the child. Goodness and love—two names of the same thing—are necessarily eternal. If the child is to reach the goodness and love of the Father, he must be as eternal as the Father. If all this trouble be taken with the individual child, it is ridiculous to the reason, and inconceivable to the heart, that the Father should fling that which He laboured for and loved into annihilation. If we allow that God is a Father that conclusion of death is unthinkable. We then went for a three miles’ walk, my father talking of the Passion Play at Ober-Ammergau, of religion, of faith, and of immortality. While touching on the life after death he spoke of Carlyle, and his dimness of faith in the closing years of his life. He said that when he was stopping at a coffee-house in London, Carlyle had come to smoke a pipe with him in the evening and the talk turned upon the immortality of the soul; upon which Carlyle said: “Eh! old Jewish rags: you must clear your mind of all that. Why should we expect a hereafter? Your traveller comes to an inn, and he takes his bed, it’s only for one night, he leaves next day, and another man takes his place and sleeps in the bed that he has vacated.” My father continued: “I answered, ‘Your traveller comes to his inn, and lies down in his bed, and leaves the inn in the morning, and goes on his way rejoicing, with the sure and certain hope and belief that he is going somewhere, where he will sleep the next night,’ and then Edward Fitzgerald, who was present, said, ‘You have him there’ ”: “which proves,” said my father, “how dangerous an illustration is.”2 [Note: Tennyson: A Memoir, ii. 410. Dr. McLaren of Manchester gave an address at the “Union Assembly” in Edinburgh on the 9th of October 1901. His biographer says: There was one passage in particular, towards the end of the address, when his radiant look told even more than his words. It ran as follows:— “Consider how the conscious possession of that higher life in Christ brings with it an absolute incapacity of believing that what men call death can affect it. ‘Christ in us’ is ‘the hope of glory.’ The true evidence for immortality lies in the deep experience of the Christian spirit. It is when a man can say, ‘Thou art the strength of my heart’ that the conviction springs up inevitable and triumphant, that such a union can no more be severed by the physical accident of death than a spirit can be wounded by a sword, and that, therefore, he has the right to say further, ‘and my portion for ever.’ ” In the short pause that came after these words, and during the rustle of movement (preparation for another spell of sustained attention) one listener turned to another and whispered, “It is like seeing a spirit.” And it was true.1 [Note: Dr. McLaren of Manchester, 189. 3. This, then, is the teaching of Christ in relation to the individual soul. But if that were all, more than half of our deepest interests would be left out. More than half of human life would be unappealed to. The expansion of the soul in love would not only be unsecured, it would even be injured. If that were the whole of religion, it might end in fixing our thoughts only on ourselves, and so end, through engendering selfishness, in the death of religion. Men have made this personal religion all; but that was not the way of Christ. He secured a personal religion by bringing each of us into the closest contact with our Father, but He swept us far beyond that individual relation. His whole life and His death maintained that we were to pass beyond ourselves into union with mankind, and that only in sacrifice of self for those not ourselves could we win our true life. He that loveth his life shall lose it, he that loseth his life the same shall find it. Die for men; die for the truths that bless and redeem men; die for the love of your brethren, if you would live. Death of self for love’s sake is life eternal. Not cloistered saints, that bid the world Remember they forget—its lure defy, Whose abnegating robes accost the glance Of lost humanity; Not they whose moving lips attest Repeated prayer, to shame the throng or mart, Whose fingers outward clasp a crucifix; Not they who stand apart— Are Thy swift followers alone, Sweet Christ! Unveiled, untonsured, they there be Who hold their mired brothers to their heart, Even for love of Thee, Who didst remember to the end Thy world, though they had Thee forgot and fled— A hillside Calvary Thy holy lot, Mountain and sea Thy bed.1 [Note: Martha Gilbert Dickinson.] To Whom shall We go? Literature Aitken (W. H. M. H.), What is your Life? 164. Albertson (C. C.), College Sermons, 45. Brooke (S. A.), The Gospel of Joy, 339. Brooks (P.), New Starts in Life, 320. Calthrop (G.), Hints to my Younger Friends, 3. Candlin (G. T.), On Service with the King, 45. Chapman (J. W.), Another Mile, 57. Clark (H. W.), Meanings and Methods of the Spiritual Life, 134. Jones (J. S.), Saved by Hope, 79. Kellogg (S. H.), The Past a Prophecy of the Future, 95. Laidlaw (J.), Studies in the Parables, 329. Lightfoot (J. B.), Ordination Addresses, 225. Mayor (J. B.), The World’s Desire, 15. Merson (D.), Words of Life, 1. Parker (J.), The City Temple Pulpit, vi. 280. Pearson (J. B.), Disciples in Doubt, 90. Peck (G. C.), Vision and Task, 123. Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, x. 281. Ryle (J. C.), The Upper Room, 192. Salmon (G.), Non-Miraculous Christianity, 72. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxviii. (1882) No. 1646; lvi. (1910) No. 3210. Taylor (W. M.), The Limitations of Life, 144. Tulloch (J.), Sundays at Balmoral, 76. Vaughan (C. J.), Counsels to Young Students, 1. Vaughan (C. J.), University Sermons, 292. Wilson (J. M.), Sermons in Clifton College Chapel, i. 224. Cambridge Review, xv. Supplement No. 367 (Whitworth). Christian World Pulpit, xl. 72 (Thomas); xlix. 357 (Plunket); Iii. 197 (Davidson); lix. 50 (Horder); lxxii. 49 (Simon); lxxvi. 55 (Shaw). Churchman’s Pulpit: The Old and New Year: ii. 464 (Evans). The Will to Know If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it be of God, or whether I speak from myself.—John 7:17. 1. The Feast of Tabernacles was in progress in Jerusalem when Jesus entered the Temple to teach. A circle of Jews were gathered round Him, who seem to have been spellbound with the extraordinary wisdom of His words. He made no pretension to be a scholar. He was no graduate of the Rabbinical schools. He had no access to the sacred literature of the people. Yet here was this stranger from Nazareth confounding the wisest heads in Jerusalem, and unfolding with calm and effortless skill such truths as even these Temple walls had never heard before. Then “the Jews marvelled, saying, How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?” What organ of spiritual knowledge can He have, never having learned? Never having learned—they did not know that Christ had learned. They did not know the school at Nazareth whose Teacher was in heaven—whose schoolroom was a carpenter’s shop—the lesson, the Father’s will. They knew not that hidden truths could come from God, or wisdom from above. What came to them was gathered from human books, or caught from human lips. They knew no organ save the mind; no instrument of knowing the things of heaven but that by which they learned in the schools. But Jesus points to a spiritual world which lay still far beyond, and tells them of the spiritual eye which reads its profounder secrets and reveals the mysteries of God. “My doctrine is not mine,” He says, “but his that sent me”; and “my judgment is just,” as He taught before, “because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me.” And then, lest men should think this great experience was never meant for them, He applies His principles to every human mind which seeks to know God’s will. “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the teaching whether it be of God.” 2. “If any man willeth to do … he shall know.” The quality of our perceptions is to be determined by the character of our wills. If we look after our moral wills our spiritual eyes will attend to themselves. Our visions wait upon our volitions. Moral obedience is the secret of spiritual discernment. “If any man willeth to do”; that is the first step in the exploration of eternal truth; that is the “open sesame” into the region of light and glory. “If any man willeth to do,” that is the instrument; “he shall know,” that is the consequent revelation. “If any man willeth to do”; that is the telescope through which we survey the far-stretching panorama of Gospel truth, or it is the microscope through which we discern the mind of God in the immediate problem. “He shall know!” The first part of the text proclaims the means, the second enshrines the issues. Doing and knowing are blood relations. “Obedience is the organ of spiritual vision”—so Robertson re-issued the truth, that, if we would know God’s doctrine, we must do His will. Experiment and experience spring from the same root, and will not grow apart. Do you wish you had a Christian’s experience? Will to make the Christian experiment. Will you know who Christ is, and what He can do for you? Obey Him; do as He directs. Do not expect experience without experiment. “Follow me” was Christ’s way of saying “Taste and see that the Lord is good: Blessed is the man that trusteth in him.”1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 38. I Obeying “If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know.” Here we have the means by which knowledge of truth is attainable. There are a number of instruments for finding out the will of God. One of them is a very great instrument, so far surpassing all the rest in accuracy that there may be said to be but one which has never been known to fail. The others are smaller and clumsier, much less delicate, indeed, and often fail. They often fail to come within sight of the will of God at all, and are so far astray at other times as to mistake some other thing for it. Still they are instruments and, notwithstanding their defects, have a value by themselves; and when the great instrument employs their humbler powers to second its attempts, they immediately become as keen and as unerring as itself. The most important of these minor instruments is Reason; and although it is a minor instrument, it is great enough in many a case to reveal the secret will of God. God is taking our life and character through a certain process, for example. He is running our career along a certain chain of events. And sometimes the light which He is showing us stops, and we have to pick our way for a few steps by the dimmer lights of thought. But it is God’s will for us then to use this thought, and to elevate it through regions of consecration, into faith, and to walk by this light till the clearer beam from His will comes back again. Another of these instruments is Experience. There are many paths in life which we all tread more than once. God’s light was by us when we walked them first, and lit a beacon here and there along the way. But the next time He sent our feet along that path He knew the sidelights would be burning still, and let us walk alone. And then there is Circumstance. God closes things in around us till our alternatives are all reduced to one. That one, if we must act, is probably the will of God just then. And then there are the Advice of others—an important element at least—and the Welfare of others, and the Example to others, and the many other facts and principles that make up the moral man, which, if not strong enough always to discover what God’s will is, are not too feeble often to determine what it is not. Even the best of these instruments, however, has but little power in its own hands. The ultimate appeal is always to the one great Instrument, which uses them in turn as it requires, and which supplements their discoveries, or even supplants them, if it choose, by its own superior light, and might, and right. It is like some great glass that can sweep the skies in the darkest night and trace the motions of the farthest stars, while all the rest can but see a faint uncertain light piercing, for a moment here and there the clouds which lie between. And this great instrument for finding out God’s will, this instrument which can penetrate where reason cannot go, where observation has not been before, and memory is helpless, and the guiding hand of circumstance has failed, has a name which is seldom associated with any end so great, a name which every child may understand, even as the stupendous instrument itself with all its mighty powers is sometimes moved by infant hands when others have tried in vain. The name of the instrument is Obedience. Obedience, as it is sometimes expressed, is the organ of spiritual knowledge. As the eye is the organ of physical sight; the mind, of intellectual sight; so the organ of spiritual vision is this strange power, Obedience. This is one of the great discoveries the Bible has made to the world. It is purely a Bible thought. Philosophy never conceived a truth so simple and yet so sublime. And, although it was known in Old Testament times, and expressed in Old Testament books, it was reserved for Jesus Christ to make the full discovery to the world, and add to His teaching another of the profoundest truths that have come from heaven to earth—that the mysteries of the Father’s will are hid in this word “obey.” Men say that when they know they will do; Jesus says that when they do they will know. He does not promise to manifest Himself to the man who dreams or debates, but to him who keeps his commandments. The seeds of truth sprout in the soil of obedience. The words of Jesus in the mind of a disobedient man are no more vital than wheat in the wrappings of a mummy. To know the Divinity of Jesus’s teachings, we must do His will with definite intention. Moral disobedience is mental darkness, but to submit our wills in loyalty to His law is to open our minds to the light of His truth.1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 19. 1. “If any man.”—Observe the universality of the law. “If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it be of God, or whether I speak from myself.” The law was true of the Man Christ Jesus Himself. He tells us it is true of all other men. In God’s universe there are no favourites of heaven who may transgress the laws of the universe with impunity—none who can take fire in the hand and not be burnt—no enemies of heaven who if they sow corn will reap tares. The law is just and true to all: “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” In God’s spiritual universe there are no favourites of heaven who can attain knowledge and spiritual wisdom apart from obedience. There are none reprobate by an eternal decree, who can surrender self and in all things submit to God, and yet fail of spiritual convictions. It is not therefore a rare, partial condescension of God, arbitrary and causeless, which gives knowledge of the truth to some, and shuts it out from others; but a vast, universal, glorious law. The light lighteth every man that cometh into the world. “If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know.” Of all the insolent, all the foolish persuasions that by any chance could enter and hold your empty little heart, this is the proudest and foolishest,—that you have been so much the darling of the Heavens, and favourite of the Fates, as to be born in the very nick of time, and in the punctual place, when and where pure Divine truth had been sifted from the errors of the Nations; and that your papa had been providentially disposed to buy a house in the convenient neighbourhood of the steeple under which that Immaculate and final verity would be beautifully proclaimed. Do not think it, child; it is not so. This, on the contrary, is the fact,—unpleasant you may think it; pleasant, it seems to me,—that you, with all your pretty dresses, and dainty looks, and kindly thoughts, and saintly aspirations, are not one whit more thought of or loved by the great Maker and Master than any poor little red, black, or blue savage, running wild in the pestilent woods, or naked on the hot sands of the earth; and that, of the two, you probably know less about God than she does; the only difference being that she thinks little of Him that is right, and you much that is wrong.1 [Note: Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (Works, xviii. 36).] 2. “Willeth to do.”—The old version reads: “If any man will do his will, he shall know,” but the Revised Version takes us a step farther back, away to the preparatory conditions before any deed is yet accomplished. “If any man willeth to do … he shall know!” Back from doing to willingness to do. We are led from the realm of conduct to the region of character, from finished deed to primary aspirations. Notice the difference this makes in the problem. Before, it looked as if the doing were to come first and then the knowing His will; but now another element is thrown in at the very beginning. The being willing comes first and then the knowing; and thereafter the doing may follow—the doing, that is to say, if the will has been sufficiently clear to proceed. The whole stress of the passage therefore turns on this word “willeth.” And Christ’s answer to the question, How shall we know the will of God? may be simply stated thus: “If any man is willing to do God’s will, he shall know,” or, in plainer language still, “If any man is sincerely trying to do God’s will, he shall know.” The connection of all this with obedience is just that being willing is the highest form of obedience. It is the spirit and essence of obedience. There is an obedience in the world which is no obedience, because the act of obedience is there but the spirit of submission is not. On John 8:43-44 : “Ye cannot hear my word; and the lusts of your father ye will do,” Brownlow North remarks, “The ‘will’ explains the ‘cannot.’ You cannot, because your will is in opposition.”1 [Note: K. Moody-Stuart, Brownlow North, 265. “A certain man,” we read in the Bible, “had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, Son, go work to-day in my vineyard. He answered and said, I will not: but afterward he repented and went. And he came to the second, and said likewise. And he answered and said, I go, sir: and went not. Whether of them twain did the will of his father?” Obedience here comes out in its true colours as a thing in the will. And if any man have an obeying will, a truly single and submissive will, he shall know of the teaching, or of the leading, whether it be of God.2 [Note: H. Drummond, The Ideal Life, 309. 3. “His will.”—If there is one thing more than another which is more personal to the Christian, more singularly his than God’s love or God’s interest—one thing which is a finer symbol of God’s love and interest, it is the knowledge of God’s will—the private knowledge of God’s will. And this is more personal, just inasmuch as it is more private. My private portion of God’s love is only a private share in God’s love—only a part—the same in quality and kind as all the rest of God’s love, which all the others get from God. But God’s will is a thing for myself. There is a will of God for me which is willed for no one else besides. It is not a share in the universal will, in the same sense as I have a share in the universal love. It is a particular will for me, different from the will He has for any one else—a private will—a will which no one else knows about, which no one can know about, but me. (1) God has a life-plan for every human life. In the eternal counsels of His will, when He arranged the destiny of every star, and every sand-grain and grass-blade, and each of those tiny insects which live but for an hour, the Creator had a thought for each of us. Our life was to be the slow unfolding of this thought, as the corn-stalk from the grain of corn, or the flower from the gradually opening bud. It was a thought of what we were to be, of what we might become, of what He would have us do with our days and years, our influence and our lives. But we all had the terrible power to evade this thought, and shape our lives from another thought, from another will, if we chose. The bud could only become a flower, and the star revolve in the orbit God had fixed. But it was man’s prerogative to choose his path, his duty to choose it in God. But the Divine right to choose at all has always seemed more to him than his duty to choose in God, so, for the most part, he has taken his life from God, and cut out his career for himself. (2) It has happened, therefore, that the very fact of God’s guidance in the individual life has been denied. It is said to give life an importance quite foreign to the Divine intention in making man. One life, it is argued, is of no more importance than any other life, and to talk of special providences happening every hour of every day is to detract from the majesty and dignity of God; in fact, it reduces a religious life to a mere religious caprice, and the thought that God’s will is being done to a hallucination of the mind. But the Christian cannot allow the question to be put off with poor evasions like these. Every day, indeed, and many times a day, the question arises in a hundred practical forms. What is the will of God for me? What is the will of God for me to-day, just now, for the next step, for this arrangement and for that, and this amusement, and this projected work for Christ? For all these he feels he must consult the will of God; and that God has a will for him in all such things, and that it must be possible somehow to know what that will is, is not only a matter of hope, but a point in his doctrine and creed. 4. How may we assure ourselves that this willingness to do God’s will is ours? (1) We may judge our primary bias by our treatment of the light which we have already received. Our inclinations are reflected in our ways; our inclinations are the moulds in which our deeds are shaped. What, then, have our deeds to say about our inclinations? What have we done with the light which has already been given? For God has nowhere and at no time left Himself without a witness. In no man’s life, however imprisoned and bewildered, is there ever a heaven without a twinkle of guiding light. On the darkening wastes of every life, with all its moors and fens and torrents, there is a kindly gleam. Many things are hidden, but all things are not obscure. Some things are clear, and what have we done with them? We are praying for larger days, and there is a little glow-lamp at our feet; what have we done with that? Are we asking for stars and at the same time despising candles? Are we waiting for light upon unknown continents, and disdaining the proffered lamp that would guide us down the street? We are, perhaps, waiting for the sun to rise upon the dark and awful mysteries of the Atonement, while in our immediate presence there shines the light of a vivid and neglected duty. The text makes one thing plain, and we shall do infinitely well to heed it—that sunrises are not for those who neglect candles, and that we need never expect to enter into the illumined recesses of sacred truth if the condemnatory light of despised lamps is shining in our rear. “If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know,” and we are pathetically and tragically foolish if we are seeking the knowledge by any other road. The way to firm, fine perception, and therefore to the rich unfolding of truth and glory, is not through metaphysics, or by the towering aspirations of philosophic Babels, but by the humble commonplace road of reverent moral obedience. An earnest but pessimistic priest was talking to the Bishop about the state of his parish, and was specially troubled by the small success of his efforts to help the younger farm-lads lodging at the various homesteads. “For example, my Lord,” he said, “there is one lad with whom I had taken much trouble, and I hoped an influence for good was getting a lodgment in the boy’s heart. But, imagine my distress when I asked what he had done in the way of preparation for his early Communion at Easter, and all he said was, ‘I’s cleaned my boots, and put ’em under the bed.’ It is sad, indeed!”—“Well, dear friend,” replied the Bishop, “and don’t you think the angels would rejoice to see them there?”1 [Note: G. W. E. Russell, Edward King, Bishop of Lincoln, 114. (2) Many of us are putting second things first. We are seeking to know the mind of the Lord, to disengage His truth, when all the time we are rebels to the truth we know. Now a neglected duty always pollutes the air like a neglected lamp; it contributes smoke when it was purposed to contribute light, and the very minister of illumination makes the atmosphere more dense and opaque. In our quest for God and truth we must, therefore, see to it that there are no smoking lamps, and we do this when we firmly set ourselves to do the will we know. There are whole continents of spiritual truth lying back in twilight and night, but there is a fringe of revelation in the foreground, glimpses of our Lord’s will which leave us in no manner of doubt. Let us begin with the will we know, and through it move on to the unknown. But, when I say “the will we know,” I mean all the will we know. We are not to choose a candle here and a candle there, and reject and ignore the rest. We must not pick and choose among the lamps. If we are seeking the land of the morning, we must not despise a single candle which gives its kindly guidance by the way. Wherever we find a clear revelation of our Master’s will it is through scrupulous obedience to that will that we must seek the unveiling of the truth that still remains hid. Obey something; and you will have a chance some day of finding out what is best to obey.1 [Note: Ruskin, Fors Clavigera.] As long as we set up our own will and our own wisdom against God’s, we make that wall between us and His love which I have spoken of just now. But as soon as we lay ourselves entirely at His feet, we have enough light given us to guide our own steps; as the foot-soldier who hears nothing of the councils that determine the course of the great battle he is in, hears plainly enough the word of command which he must himself obey.2 [Note: Mr. Tryan, in Scenes of Clerical Life.] (3) If a man is willing to do the will of God, he will be watchful against the prejudices and prepossessions which would hinder him from knowing that will. He will know the danger which always exists of self-deception, and of confounding strong conviction with sound and solid persuasion. Some men have strong convictions, but they believe a lie, a lie for which, if need be, they are prepared to give up their life. Let us never forget that the firmness with which we hold any principle is no proof of its truthfulness, unless we have verified it in practice. The man whom Christ contemplates is one to whom all light is welcome, come from what quarter it may. It may disturb old convictions; it may reveal that as true which before seemed to be false; it may alter the proportions and relations of truths, giving a primary position to some which once held but a secondary, and, on the contrary, reducing to a lower status what once was highest of all. But it is the will of God he is bent on knowing and doing, and this is more than a recompense for all the disturbance which may befall merely inherited opinions. He will feel that there is no interest, either in this world or in any other, compared with that of finding out and fulfilling the will of God. This must be right, this must be best. The difficulty of gaining admission for any truth into the minds of men whose lives are in disconformity with it is proverbial. If a man’s interests, his present or even his fancied interests, or his pleasures are involved in his continuance in any course of action, we know what a mass of evidence is required to convince him that he is in the wrong. To the makers and sellers of silver shrines there will be no goddess like Diana of the Ephesians. If a craft, however iniquitous, be in danger, we need not be sanguine in our hopes of convincing of its wickedness those who are enriching themselves by its gains. We may be prepared with much evidence of its wrongfulness, but they have profits which overwhelm all our demonstrations. Hence it is that the opinions of men are quite as frequently the product of their practices as their cause; and the doctrine, while it gives its complexion to the life, as certainly takes its complexion from it. Thieves do not first excogitate evil maxims, and then begin to steal; they first begin to steal, and then adopt evil maxims; and as a rule, the worse the man, the worse must be the principles from which he acts; and the better the man, the nobler the principles which animate him.1 [Note: E. Mellor, The Footsteps of Heroes, 239. When the Cliffords tell us how sinful it is to be Christians on such “insufficient evidence,” insufficiency is really the last thing they have in mind. For them the evidence is absolutely sufficient, only it makes the other way. They believe so completely in an antichristian order of the universe that there is no living option: Christianity is a dead hypothesis from the start.2 [Note: W. James, The Will to Believe, 14. II Knowing “If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know.” Here we have the issue of obedience. This willingness to do His will, whether I find the clear revelation in the sacred word or in the private oratory of my own conscience, gives to my life the requisite atmosphere in which all spiritual truth is to be discerned. To be willing to do His will, and to do it, gathers into the life a certain air of refinement which is the only congenial medium for the discovery of spiritual truth. Everybody has noticed how clearly sounds travel when there is snow on the ground. When that white vesture clothes the earth soft sounds become articulate and doubtful callings become clear. And when, by scrupulous obedience to the will of the Saviour, the heart grows pure, when it is clothed in habits of consecration which dim even the whiteness of the virgin snow, then do the doubtful utterances of our Lord become articulate, and suggestions of remote and hidden truth speak clearly in our receptive ears. “If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching.” 1. “He shall know.”—If we hear our conscience and set our face to duty, it will be with us as with the traveller who ascends the Gemmi Pass. When he comes to the foot of the precipice along whose ledges and through whose crevices the narrow path ascends, the mist may be lying heavy, and at first he may not find the starting-point. Once his feet are upon the path, although he cannot see beyond a few yards and has no idea how the path may wind, it is only a matter of dogged and careful perseverance. With every step the mist grows more luminous, glimpses of the crest can now and again be caught, and suddenly the traveller comes out from the cloud into the clear sunlight on the height, with the spotless snow around him and the blue of God’s heaven over his head. He that wills to do God’s will shall come to know God’s will before set of sun. I have known men who have for long doubted the existence of God and denied that we could know anything of Him, resolutely set themselves to be true and pure and unselfish, and the changed attitude has begotten a yearning for and a trust in a truth and righteousness and goodness out of and beyond themselves. The conviction that they must dwell in a personal source has gradually grown within their aspiring spirits; and they have come to feel sure that it is a Personal Will that is at the centre of our complicated, perplexed, and mysterious life, always going out in work and always unexhausted—a Will and not a cold, hard, material “power-not-of-ourselves”; the Personal Will of a living and loving Father. In seeking to do the best, they have, like Zaccheus, come on the track of Him who is the Absolute Best embodied and made attractive to all men for the salvation of the world.1 [Note: J. Clifford, The Dawn of Manhood, 95. (1) “He shall know.”—There is a wide distinction between supposing and knowing—between fancy and conviction—between opinion and belief. Whatever rests on authority remains only supposition. We have an opinion when we know what others think. We know when we feel. In matters practical we know only so far as we can do. Feel God; do His will, till the Absolute Imperative within you speaks as with a living voice: Thou shalt, and thou shalt not; and then you do not think, you know, that there is a God. That is a conviction and a belief. Faith in Christ is an act rather of the spiritual nature than of the intellect, and as the result of sympathy with the truth rather than of critical examination of evidence. A painter or art-critic familiar with the productions of great artists feels himself insulted if you offer him evidence to convince him of the genuineness of a work of art over and above the evidence which it carries in itself, and which to him is the most convincing of all. If one of the lost books of Tacitus were recovered, scholars would not judge it by any account that might be given of its preservation and discovery, but would say, Let us see it and read it, and we will very soon tell you whether it is genuine or not. When the man you have seen every day for years, and whose character you have looked into under the strongest lights, is accused of dishonesty, and damaging evidence is brought against him, does it seriously disturb your confidence in him? Not at all. No evidence can countervail the knowledge gained by intercourse. You know the man, directly, and you believe in him without regard to what other persons advance in his favour or against him. Christ expects acceptance on similar grounds.2 [Note: Marcus Dods.] I never saw a moor, I never saw the sea; Yet know I how the heather looks, And what a wave must be. I never spoke with God, Nor visited in heaven; Yet certain am I of the spot As if the chart were given.1 [Note: Emily Dickinson.] (2) Let us remember, however, that the knowledge promised by Christ may become ours only gradually. Our experience may be like that of a man waiting for the dawn, rather than that of a man who is suddenly plunged out of darkness into the full blaze of the midday sun. The light grows upon us; and whilst, at first, we may see distinctly only one or another thing that lies nearest to us, after awhile other things rise into view, till at last whatever is within range becomes clearly visible. In relation to Divine truth we often find an impatience which would be counted very foolish in relation to natural truth. Men who are content to grope on very slowly in science, getting a glimpse now of one truth and then of another, expect in the region with which we are here concerned to pass almost at once into full light and certainty. This cannot be. Moral loyalty, earnest and well-directed labour and humble patience, are necessary conditions of entering into full possession of the secret of the Lord. I think I cannot be mistaken here. Could you know how I have lived in His mind, and tried to understand Him, till comprehension became adoration, you would think so. I am not pretending to a superior appreciation beyond yours—except only on this ground, that, professionally forced to the contemplation, and forced more terribly by doubts and difficulties that nearly shattered morals and life, till I was left alone with myself and Him, I am, perhaps, qualified to speak with a decision that would be otherwise dogmatism.2 [Note: Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson, 407. 2. “He shall know of the teaching.”—We ought to fix in our minds what exactly Jesus intended by His words when He spoke of knowing the teaching and doing the will. He did not mean that we must be acquainted with the various dogmas which scientific religion has from time to time created and into whose mould the fluid idea concerning spiritual truth has been run. Dogmas are the achievement of the intellect, and the Pharisees were exceedingly strong in their dogmatic knowledge. When Jesus spoke of teaching He referred to the burden of His own teaching, and the sum of all His teaching was God. His aim was to impress the mind with a certain idea of God, and it was a moral rather than an intellectual conception. We do not find Jesus enlarging upon the existence and attributes of God after the manner, say, of the Athanasian Creed. He said nothing about the being of God, but He endeavoured to convince men that God was the merciful and faithful Father of the human race; that He loved men, both good and bad, with a patient fatherly love; that He desired His children to abandon their sins and come home to His fellowship; that He was ready to receive them if they would only trust and obey Him. This was not theology, it was religion. It was not God’s being but God’s doing that Jesus preached, not His nature but His character. He desired not that men should solve problems about God, but that they should have fellowship with Him. I cannot but think that the brethren sometimes err in measuring the Divine love by the sinner’s knowledge.1 [Note: Dinah Morris, in Adam Bede.] 3. “Whether it be of God.”—The earnest purpose to do the will of God operates upon the heart of man, and leads him to the knowledge of the teaching, whether it be of God. Who can set himself to the higher life without there coming upon his soul a sense of contrast between such life and that which he has hitherto led? There is something enlightening in the very entertainment of a true purpose. It gives notice to all the unworthy passions of the heart that a conflict is at hand. The birth of this heavenly resolution is not unmingled pleasure. It cannot be. For there is a past which comes up with its records of sin and guilt, and the man feels that that past is his, and cannot be treated as if it had never been. He cannot wipe it from his memory, nor can he silence the accusations of conscience. Does not the soul feel that the teaching is of God, whatever may be the mysteries which envelop it—that it is of God, because it addresses itself to the awakened conscience—that it is of God, because it does not sweep justice away that it may find room for mercy, but blends the claims of both in the sovereign and the fatherly dispensation which saves the sinner, while it condemns his sins? I asked myself what my life was, and received as an answer: “An evil and an absurdity.” And indeed, my life—that life of pampered appetites and whims—was meaningless and evil, and so the answer, “Life is evil and meaningless,” had reference only to my life, and not to human life in general. I comprehended the truth, which I later found in the gospel, that men had come to love the darkness more than the light because their deeds were bad, for those who did bad deeds hated the light and did not go to it, lest their deeds be disclosed. I saw that in order to comprehend the meaning of life it was necessary, first of all, that life should not be meaningless and evil, and then only was reason needed for the understanding of it. I comprehended why I had so long walked round such a manifest truth, and that if I were to think and speak of the life of humanity, I ought to think and speak of the life of humanity, and not of the life of a few parasites of life. This truth had always been a truth, just as two times two was four, but I had not recognized it because, if I recognized that two times two was four, I should have had to recognize that I was not good, whereas it was more important and obligatory for me to feel myself good than to feel that two times two was four. I came to love good people and to hate myself, and I recognized the truth. Now everything became clear to me.1 [Note: Tolstoy, My Confession (Complete Works, xiii. 62).] 4. What wonderful light the words of our Lord cast on the true channel through which spiritual knowledge enters man, and how they rebuke the pride and arrogance of that reason which presumes to have the power to master all things. Reason has its sphere assigned to it by its Maker, and within that sphere it is “a vision and a faculty Divine”; but there are realms in which it plays, and was designed to play, a subordinate part, and in which its discovering power is very small. Even apart from religion, how many departments of truth there are in which reason is but an incompetent authority. How many men of the highest intellectual powers are shut out of the beauties created by the genius of the artist, the poet, the painter, the sculptor, and the musician. Their reason is blind and deaf before forms and sounds of the most transcendent loveliness. Many a mathematician, peerless in his power of calculation, stands in blank and unsympathetic mood before the loveliest forms that ever breathed on the canvas; and many a logician, whom no sophistry could elude, hears nothing but a succession of incoherent and confused noises in some marvellous creation of music which enthrals the appreciative soul. And yet the truth of art is as true as that of such matters as are within the province of reason itself, and can no more be justly discarded or despised by the merely intellectual philosopher than the radiant glories of the external universe can be denied by the man who is blind. So also, but in still higher degree, religion has its truths, which, though not contrary to reason, lie beyond its power to discover or, it may be, for the present, to harmonize. Shall reason, shut out of so many realms of truth even in the natural world, claim a sovereignty over the world in which infinite love and infinite wisdom are displaying their resources to redeem man from sin? Reason by itself has almost as little to do with the deeper experiences of the soul as affection has to do with the questions of arithmetic or the problems of geometry; for these deeper experiences are those of repentance, remorse, faith, hope, temptation, and struggle and heavenward aspiration. Love is ever the key to the deepest mysteries. Though shut to the scrutiny of the keenest reason, they open to the knocking of an affectionate and reverent heart. Hidden from those who regard themselves as the wise and prudent, they are revealed unto babes. They that seek to do the will of God shall indeed be taught of Him. If e’er when faith had fall’n asleep, I heard a voice “believe no more” And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the Godless deep; A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason’s colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answer’d “I have felt.”1 [Note: Tennyson, In Memoriam.] I’ve seen pretty clear ever since I was a young un, as religion’s something else besides notions. It isn’t notions sets people doing the right thing—it’s feelings. It’s the same with the notions in religion as it is with math’matics,—a man may be able to work problems straight off in’s head as he sits by the fire and smokes his pipe; but if he has to make a machine or a building, he must have a will and a resolution, and love something else better than his own ease.1 [Note: Adam Bede, in Adam Bede.] 5. There are two types of men to whom Jesus’ words ought to be a warning. (1) The first is the man who supposes that he knows the doctrine, but is not doing the will. Is he sure that he knows anything which counts when his knowledge is so absolutely divorced from life? He has a very strong theory about the inspiration of the Bible, but what good is his devotion to the letter when the spirit of the Book has not affected his heart? He believes that he knows God, but how can he?—for God is love, and this man is not loving his brother. He is very keen about the Deity of Christ, but what right has he to speak of Christ since he will not carry Christ’s cross in mercy and humility? He is convinced that his sins are forgiven, and prates about assurance, but can they be loosed if he will not give quittance to his brother man? He has an unfaltering confidence that he will reach heaven when he dies, but what place can he have in heaven who to-day is carrying a hell of unclean or malignant passions in his heart? (2) The other is the man who is proud of his scepticism, and complains that he cannot know, while all the time he is refusing to obey. Granted that the Holy Trinity and the sacrifice of Christ are mysteries, and that God Himself is the chief mystery of all, he ought to remember that everything in life is not a mystery. It is open to us all to do our daily work with a single mind, to be patient amid the reverses of life, to be thoughtful in the discharge of our family duties, and to be self-denying in the management of our souls. Duty at any rate is no mystery, and it is grotesque that a man should proclaim that he cannot believe the most profound truths when he is making no honest effort to keep the plainest commandments. “I wish I had your creed, then I would live your life,” said a seeker after truth to Pascal, the great French thinker. “Live my life, and you will soon have my creed,” was the swift reply. The solution of all difficulties of faith lies in Pascal’s answer, which is after all but a variant of Christ’s greater saying, “He that willeth to do the will of God, shall know the teaching.” Is not the whole reason why, for so many of us, the religion of Christ which we profess has so little in it to content us, simply this, that we have never heartily and honestly tried to practise it?1 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Empire of Love, 101. Therefore be strong, be strong, Ye that remain, nor fruitlessly revolve, Darkling, the riddles which ye cannot solve, But do the works that unto you belong; Believing that for every mystery, For all the death, the darkness, and the curse Of this dim universe, Needs a solution full of love must be: And that the way whereby ye may attain Nearest to this, is not through broodings vain And half-rebellious, questionings of God, But by a patient seeking to fulfil The purpose of His everlasting will, Treading the path which lowly men have trod. Since it is ever they who are too proud For this, that are the foremost and most loud To judge His hidden judgments, these are still The most perplexed and lost at His mysterious will.2 [Note: Trench, Poems, 102. 6. Jesus’ word has great comfort for two kinds of people. (1) The first is the man who is harassed by many perplexing questions, but who is doing his duty bravely. Courage, we say, and patience. No one ever carried Christ’s Cross without coming near to Christ Himself, and where Christ is, the light is sure to break. There is no sacrifice we make, no service we render, that is not bringing us nearer to the heart of things; for the heart of the universe is love. Let us watch as those who watch for the morning, and watch at our work, for the day will break and it will come with morning songs. St. Thomas could hardly believe anything, but he was willing to die with Christ, and Christ showed him His wounds. With anxious thoughts at this time General Booth avers, when the rubicon was passed and the severance from the Methodist New Connexion made final, “That he and his wife went out together not knowing a soul who would give them a shilling, neither knowing where to go.” Mrs. Booth wrote to her parents, “I am so nervous I can scarcely write. I am almost bewildered with fatigue and anxiety. If I thought it was right to stop here in the ordinary work I would gladly consent. But I cannot believe that it would be so. Why should he spend another year plodding round this wreck of a circuit, preaching to twenty, thirty, and forty people, when, with the same amount of cost to himself, he might be preaching to thousands? And none of our friends would think it right if we had an income. Then, I ask, does the securing of our bread and cheese make that right which would otherwise be wrong when God has promised to feed and clothe us? I think not; William hesitates. He thinks of me and the children, and I appreciate his love and care. But I tell him that God will provide if he will only go straight on in the path of duty. It is strange that I, who always used to shrink from the sacrifice, should be the first in making it.”1 [Note: The Life Story of General Booth, 55. I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty; I woke, and found that life was Duty. Was thy dream then a shadowy lie? Toil on, sad heart, courageously, And thou shalt find thy dream to be A noonday light and truth to thee.2 [Note: Ellen S. Hooper.] (2) The other is the man who laments the simplicity of his intellect. Be of good cheer, and do not despair or despise yourself. The Master thanked God that He had hidden the deep things from the wise and had revealed them to babes; He also set a child in the midst of the disciples and told them that if any one desired to be great he must become as a little child. It is not through deep thinking, but through faithful doing, that one comes to know the mystery of God; and faithful doing is within every one’s reach. The path which philosophers and scientists have often missed has been found by shepherds on the hills, and by working women. Mary of Bethany and the fishermen of Galilee knew more of God than the scholars of Jerusalem. One hears sometimes of religious controversies running very high; about faith, works, grace, prevenient grace, the Arches Court and Essays and Reviews;—into none of which do I enter, or concern myself with your entering. One thing I will remind you of, That the essence and outcome of all religions, creeds and liturgies whatsoever is, To do one’s work in a faithful manner. Unhappy caitiff, what to you is the use of orthodoxy, if with every stroke of your hammer you are breaking all the Ten Commandments,—operating upon Devil’s-dust, and, with constant invocation of the Devil, endeavouring to reap where you have not sown?3 [Note: Carlyle, Miscellaneous Essays, vii. 229. The Will to Know Literature Abbey (C. J.), The Divine Love, 301. Banks (L. A.), Christ and His Friends, 215. Butler (A.), Sermons, ii. 168. Clifford (J.), The Dawn of Manhood, 83. Conn (J.), The Fulness of Time, 136. Davies (J. Ll.), Sermons on the Manifestation of the Son of God, 124. Dawson (G.), Sermons on Disputed Points and Special Occasions, 249. Dawson (W. J.), The Threshold of Manhood, 20. Drummond (H.), The Ideal Life, 297. Horton (R. F.), The Trinity, 229. Illingworth (J. R.), Sermons in a College Chapel, 105. Ingram (A. F. W.), Under the Dome, 28. Laidlaw (J.), in the Modern Scottish Pulpit, No. 28. Macdonnell (D. J.), Life and Work, 442. Mellor (E.), In the Footsteps of Heroes, 230. Pattison (T. H.), The South Wind, 167. Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 200. Porter (N.), Yale College Sermons, 118. Robertson (F. W.), Sermons, ii. 94. Shepherd (A.), Men in the Making, 221. Simon (D. W.), Twice Born, 34. Smith (D.), Christian Counsel, 183. Watson (J.), The Inspiration of Our Faith, 133. Christian Age, xlv. 194 (Howe). Christian World Pulpit, xxiv. 37 (Matthews); xxix. 156 (Van Dyke); xxxviii. 281 (Batchelor); 1. 38 (Black); lx. 228 (Spurr) j lxxii. 125 (Selbie). Churchman’s Pulpit: Sermons to the Young: xvi. 529 (Gibbon). Examiner, May 3, 1906, p. 420 (Jowett). Living Water Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.—John 7:37. 1. The occasion and date of this great saying are carefully given by the Evangelist, because they throw much light on its significance and importance. It was “on the last day, the great day of the feast,” that “Jesus stood and cried.” The Feast was that of Tabernacles, which was instituted in order to keep in mind the incidents of the desert wandering. The peculiar greatness of the eighth day lay in the fact that it was the close of the whole festival and was kept as a Sabbath (Leviticus 23:36). It has been conjectured that it was observed in memory of the entrance into Canaan. At present it is treated as a separate Festival. Part of the ceremonial was that on each morning of the seven, a procession of white-robed priests wound down the rocky footpath from the Temple to Siloam, and there in a golden vase drew water from the spring, chanting, as they ascended and re-entered the Temple gates, where they poured out the water as a libation, the words of the prophet, “With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation.” It is uncertain whether the libations were made on the eighth day. If they were not, the significant cessation of the striking rite on this one day of the feast would give a still more fitting occasion for the words of the text. 2. The true worshippers among these Israelites had been seeing a spiritual meaning in the water, and had been conscious of an uneasy feeling of thirst still in the midst of these Temple services, an uneasy questioning whether even yet Israel had passed the thirsty desert, and had received the full gift God had meant to give. There were thinking men and thirsty souls then as there are now; and to these, who stood perhaps a little aside, and looked half in compassion, half in envy, at the merry-making of the rest, it seemed a significant fact that, in the Temple itself, with all its grandeur and skilful appliances, there was yet no living fountain to quench the thirst of men—a significant fact that to find water the priest had to go outside the gorgeous Temple to the modest “waters of Siloah that go softly.” All through the feast these men wondered morning by morning when the words of Joel were to come true, when it should come to pass that a fountain should “come forth of the house of the Lord,” or when that great and deep river should begin to flow which Ezekiel saw in vision issuing from the threshold of the Lord’s house, and waxing deeper and wider as it flowed. And now once more the last day of the feast had come; the water was no longer drawn, and yet no fountain had burst up in the Temple itself; their souls were yet perplexed, unsatisfied, craving, athirst, when suddenly, as if in answer to their half-formed thoughts and longings, a clear, assured, authoritative voice passed through their ear to their inmost soul: “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” 3. Strange words to say anywhere, daring words to say in the Temple court! For there they could mean nothing less than Christ’s laying His hand on that old miracle, which was pointed to by the rite, when the rock yielded the water, and asserting that all which it did and typified was repeated, fulfilled, and transcended in Himself, and that not for a handful of nomads in the wilderness, but for all the world, in all its generations. So here is one more occasion on which, in this Gospel, we find Christ claiming to be the fulfilment of incidents and events in that ancient covenant,—Jacob’s ladder, the brazen serpent, the manna, and now the rock that yielded the water. He says of them all that they are the shadow, and the substance is in Him. Let us consider, as they are set forth in the text, these three things— I. Christ’s View of Humanity. II. Christ’s View of Himself. III. Christ’s Invitation to Humanity. I Christ’s View of Humanity 1. “If any man thirst.”—Christ confronts man’s deepest need. He sees humanity “thirsting.” No metaphor could be more intense in a dry and thirsty land like Palestine. It fittingly pictures the deepest want of the human soul. (1) It is characteristic of the teaching of Christ that He always speaks of man’s chief spiritual needs in the terms of his greatest physical necessities. The words by which He describes the need of the soul for God are such words as “hunger” and “thirst.” We all know what it is to have physical thirst. Toiling under the hot sun, trudging along the dusty road—the painful sensation is familiar enough to us. But more real and intense would be the figure to an Eastern. Ask him who has crossed the desert, “What is thirst?” and he will tell you of the bones of men and beasts all bleached and white that mark its highway. Smitten with thirst on its burning sands, what will a man not give for water? The fine sand entering into every pore of his skin, choking and blinding him, the scorching wind drying up the very marrow of his bones, his tongue cleaving to his mouth, his eyes bloodshot, the desert reels around him, and he is willing to fill the cup with pearls in exchange for a cupful of water. Water is always an attractive word in the East. But at the time when Jesus uttered this saying it would have an effect that was almost magical. It was in the autumn weather, when the sun had been shining in fierceness for months, and the barren ground was crying out for rain. (2) We need not go over all the dominant desires that surge up in men’s souls, the mind craving for knowledge, the heart calling out for love, the whole nature feeling blindly and often desperately after something external to itself, which it can grasp, and in which it can feel satisfied. We all know them. Like some plant growing in a cellar, and with feeble and blanched tendrils feeling towards the light which is so far away, every man carries about within himself a whole host of longing desires, which need to find something round which they may twine, and in which they can be at rest. (3) The misery of man is great upon him, because, having these desires, he misreads so many of them, and stifles, ignores, atrophies to so large an extent the noblest of them. There is no sadder tragedy than the way in which we misinterpret the meaning of these inarticulate cries that rise from the depths of our hearts, and misunderstand what it is that we are groping after, when we put out empty, and, alas! too often unclean, hands, to lay hold on our true good. We do not know what we want, many of us, and there is something pathetic in the endless effort to fill up the heart by a multitude of diverse and small things, when all the while the deepest meaning of aspirations, yearnings, longings, unrest, discontent, is, “My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.” “Isaac Williams,” wrote Mr. Copeland, “mentioned to me a remark made on Hurrell Froude by S. Wilberforce in his early days: ‘They talk of Froude’s fun, but somehow I cannot be in a room with him alone for ten minutes without feeling so intensely melancholy, that I do not know what to do with myself. At Brighstone, in my Eden days, he was with me, and I was overwhelmed with the deep sense which possessed him of yearning which nothing could satisfy and of the unsatisfying nature of all things.’ ”1 [Note: Dean Church, The Oxford Movement, 55. Its warping winds swept thro’ my soul: Its fires scorched all my arc of life: Of joy it gave a trivial dole— Then brought me anguish, shame and strife: An hour of pulsing feverish joy, Framed in a flame of blazing red; Then, rotting in its own rank soil, The swift-born flower lay swiftly dead.2 [Note: Desmond Mountjoy, The Hills of Hell, 15. 2. “If any man thirst.”—Christ speaks as if that thirst was by no means universal, and, alas! it is not. “If any man thirst”; there are some of us that do not, for we are all so constituted that, unless we use continual self-discipline, and self-suppression, and self-evolution, the lower desires will overgrow the loftier ones, and kill them, as weeds kill the precious crop. And some of us are so much taken up with gratifying the lowest necessities and longings of our nature, that we leave the highest all uncared for, and the effect of that is that the unsatisfied longing avenges itself, for our neglect of it, by infusing unrest and dissatisfaction into what else would satisfy the lowest. “He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance with increase,” but he that loves God will be satisfied with less than silver, and will continue satisfied when decrease comes. If we would suck the last drop of sweetness out of the luscious purple grapes that grow on earth, we must have the appetite for the best things, recognized, and ministered to, and satisfied. And when we are satisfied with God, we shall have learnt in whatsoever state we are, therewith to be self-sufficing. The late Sir James Stephen in a lecture to young men once said that he could put his suggestions in one word—Aspire. That was very good advice. But what should the aspiration be?1 [Note: Lord Avebury, Peace and Happiness, 77. On the morning of January 7, 1900, Bishop Creighton, a few days before he died, seemed particularly well. His chaplain, Mr. Percival, was with him for a long while, and they spoke of various answers which had been given to the question, What is the greatest danger of the coming century? The Bishop said, “I have no doubt what is the greatest danger—it is the absence of high aspirations.”2 [Note: The Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, ii. 463. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, “What do you like?” Tell me what you like, and I’ll tell you what you are. Go out into the street, and ask the first man or woman you meet, what their “taste” is; and if they answer candidly, you know them, body and soul. “You, my friend in the rags, with the unsteady gait, what do you like?” “A pipe, and a quartern of gin.” I know you. “You, good woman, with the quick step and tidy bonnet, what do you like?” “A swept hearth, and a clean tea-table; and my husband opposite me, and a baby at my breast.” Good, I know you also. “You, little girl with the golden hair and the soft eyes, what do you like?” “My canary, and a run among the wood hyacinths.” “You, little boy with the dirty hands, and the low forehead, what do you like?” “A shy at the sparrows, and a game at pitch farthing.” Good; we know them all now. What more need we ask?3 [Note: Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive (Works, xviii. 434).] 3. It is only the thirsty whom Jesus Christ invites to come to Him as the source from which they can draw spirit and life. Those who have eaten and drunk to the full must become thirsty before they can understand, and certainly before they can take to heart, what it means when a man who has trod this earth bears witness to a whole people, and lastly to all mankind: “I am the inexhaustible well from which all man’s longing after life and spirit may be satisfied.” I know not any pleasure of sense more exquisite than a draught of cool, clear water, when you are thirsty; but few things are more insipid than water when there is no thirst. It is thus that Christ and His salvation are very sweet to one, and very tasteless to another.1 [Note: W. Arnot, The Anchor of the Soul, 31. O Lord, the most Fair, the most tender, My heart is adrift and alone; My heart is a-weary and thirsty, Athirst for a joy unknown. From a child I followed it, chased it, By wilderness, wold, and hill; I never have reached it or seen it, Yet must I follow it still. In those olden years did I seek it, In the sweet, fair things around; But the more I sought and I thirsted, The less, O my Lord, I found. When nearest it seemed to my grasping, It fled like a wandering thought; I never have known what it is, Lord, Too well know I what it is not. “It is I, it is I, the Eternal, Who chose thee Mine own to be— Who chose thee before the ages, Who chose thee eternally. I stood in the way before thee, In the ways thou wouldest have gone; For this is the mark of My chosen, That they shall be Mine alone.” II Christ’s View of Himself “If any man thirst, let him come unto me.” Christ claims to satisfy man’s deepest need. The claim is a tremendous one. Other teachers have counselled a course of action or a mode of life. This Teacher claims to be Himself the source of good and the fountain of life. Truly never man spake like this Man. 1. The people’s thirst shall be quenched, if they will but come to Him: this is the first and obvious meaning of His words. That they had some thirst for spiritual blessing their very presence in Jerusalem proved; for, however mingled may have been their desires, however worldly in many respects their thoughts of the Kingdom of God, yet they did desire God and God’s Kingdom; and if the religious hopes of the nation could have been obliterated, their one distinguishing characteristic would have been gone. But they are seeking to satisfy their souls in ways that do not, that cannot, succeed. God’s true presence is lost in the very abundance and show of the paraphernalia and ceremony of worship, and the life of God is dried up in them by the endless elaboration of their minute and barren rules of living. The truth of their holy religion does little more for their actual satisfaction than the sweet, living water of Siloam did for the golden vessel that it filled; and it does no more through them for others than the water poured from such vessel on to the altar, and wasted, as it streamed and trickled away. Let the people come to Him, and God Himself shall live in them. 2. All the cravings after a settled and eternal state, all the longings for purity and fellowship with the Highest, which the Temple services rather quickened than satisfied, Christ says He will satisfy. The Temple service had been to them as a screen on which the shadows of things spiritual were thrown; but they longed to see the realities face to face, to have God revealed, to know the very truth of things, and set foot on eternal verity. This thirst is felt by all men whose whole nature is alive, whose experience has shaken them out of easy contentment with material prosperity; they thirst for a life which does not so upbraid and mock them as their own life does; they thirst to be able to live, so that the one-half of their life shall not be condemned by the other half; they thirst to be once for all in the “ampler ether” of happy and energetic existence, not looking through the bars and fumbling at the lock. This thirst and all legitimate cravings which we feel, Christ boldly and explicitly promises to satisfy; nay more, all illegitimate cravings, all foolish discontent, all vicious dissatisfaction with life, all morbid thirst that is rapidly becoming chronic disease in us, all weak and false views of life, He will rid us of, and give us entrance into the life that God lives and imparts—into pure, healthy, hopeful life. It is on record that a visitor once ventured to ask Alfred Tennyson what he thought of our Saviour. They were walking in a garden. The poet was silent for a moment. Then he stopped by a beautiful flower, and pointing to it said: “What the sun is to that flower, Jesus Christ is to my soul.”1 [Note: Arthur W. Robinson, The Voice of Joy and Health, 49. Christ claims to be able to meet every aspiration, every spiritual want, every true desire in this complex nature of ours. He claims to be able to do this for one, and therefore for all. He claims to be able to do it for all the generations of mankind, right away down to the end. Who is He that thus plants Himself in the front of the race, knows their deep thirsts, takes account of the impotence of anything created to satisfy them, assumes the Divine prerogative, and says, “I come to satisfy every desire in every soul, to the end of time”?2 [Note: A. Maclaren.] 3. He claims to be separate altogether from those whose thirst He would satisfy. It is a claim which only Divinity can warrant Him in making, or can fulfil when it is made. And from that day when He stood in the Temple and cried these words, down to this day, there have been, and there are, millions who can say, “We have drawn water from this fountain of salvation, and it has never failed us.” Christ’s audacious presentation of Himself to the world as adequate to fill all its needs, and slake all its thirst, has been verified by nineteen centuries of experience, and there are many men and women all over the world to-day who would be ready to set to their seals that Christ is true, and that He, indeed, is all-sufficient for the soul. Jesus Christ threw a totally new light upon the personality of man. He took love as His point of departure, the central principle in our nature, which gathers all its other faculties and functions into one; our absolutely fundamental and universal characteristic. He taught us that virtues and graces are thorough only when they flow from love; and further, that love alone can reconcile the opposite phases of our life—action and passion, doing and suffering, energy and pain,—since love inevitably leads to sacrifice, and sacrifice is perfect love. It may be granted that previous teachers had said somewhat kindred things. But Jesus Christ carried His precepts home by practice, as none had ever done before. He lived and died the life and death of love; and men saw, as they had never seen, what human nature meant. Here at last was its true ideal, and its true ideal realized.1 [Note: Illingworth, Personality, Human and Divine, 201. III Christ’s Invitation to Humanity 1. “Jesus stood and cried.” The phrase used is singularly vivid: Jesus was standing, watching, it might be, the procession of the people from their booths to the Temple, and then, moved by some occasion, He cried. As Jesus stood and cried to the people, He was conscious of power to impart to them a freshly welling spring of life—a life that would overflow for the strengthening and gladdening of others besides themselves. He has the same consciousness to-day. The deep, living benefits He confers are as open to all ages as the sunshine and the air; there is no necessity binding any one soul to feel that life is a failure, an empty, disappointing husk, serving no good purpose, bringing daily fresh misery and deeper hopelessness, a thing perhaps manfully to fight our way through but certainly not to rejoice in. If any one has such views of life it is because he has not honestly, believingly, and humbly responded to Christ’s word and come to Him. We all forget that Christ’s teaching is not a teaching like that of Moses, of Mohammed, and like all other human teachings, that is, a doctrine of rules to be executed. Christ’s teaching is a gospel, that is, a teaching of the good. He who is thirsty, let him go and drink. And so, according to this teaching it is impossible to prescribe to any one, to rebuke any one for anything, to condemn any one. “Go and drink, if thou art thirsty,” that is, take the good which is revealed to us by the spirit of Truth. Can one be ordered to drink? Can one be ordered to be blessed? Even so a man cannot be rebuked for not drinking, or for not being blessed, nor can he be condemned. The one thing that Christians can do, and always have done, is to feel themselves blessed and to wish to communicate the key of blessedness to other people.1 [Note: Tolstoy, Aphorisms (Complete Works, xix. 83).] (1) The invitation was delivered with great earnestness. This is the world’s way turned upside down. We are accustomed to hear those crying who are ready to perish, while those who go out to save are calm and silent. Here this method is reversed. The lost whom He saves are silent and satisfied; the Saviour, who brings deliverance, cries. They act as if they were full, and He as if He were needy. Why did He cry? All things are His in heaven and on earth; what want is gnawing at the heart of Him in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily? It is the longing of His soul, not to get, but to give, redemption. He has a more eager desire to give pardon than any awakened sinner has to get it. (2) “If any man.” The invitation was universal. The Gospel is as free as the air or the sunshine. “Any”—the man may be atheist or deist or idolater; the man may be sceptical and unbelieving: the man may be broken-hearted, because all his cisterns are broken; the man may be disappointed with all the wells to which he has been accustomed to resort; the man may be an outcast, forbidden to come where men drink, or an apostate, one who has forsaken the fountain of living water; the man may be conscious that he deserves only to die of thirst; the man may be sad at his heart’s core, and weary in every limb, and dying of thirst; the thirst may be morbid and foul, the thirst may be varied and deep, the thirst may be refined and elevated, but to every man Jesus says, “Come unto me.” The thirsty one may have no apparel but rags and these filthy, no vessel but an earthen one and that broken, no money, no commendation; but Jesus says, “Come.” He may have nothing, and may need everything—life, knowledge, power, joy—still Jesus says, “Come.” He may be a most thirsty soul, with wide capacity and fiery eagerness, but Jesus says, “Come and drink.” And if those who hear Jesus say, “Come and drink,” do come and drink, they live satisfied, they die satisfied, and they abide satisfied for ever; but if they never come, they live thirsty, die thirsty, and abide madly thirsty for ever. (3) “Let him come unto me.” The invitation is from a ceremony to a Person. Christ is a personal Saviour. The world had had enough of ritual. It had gone the weary round of form until life was almost extinct, and it seemed as if the smoke of sacrifice only darkened the skies and brought man no nearer vision of God. The Law increased the burden it professed to lift. Says Christ, It is not from Siloam’s stream, it is not from your silver songs and solemn litanies, not from your priests and altars and censers, that you can gain rest—“If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.” He that thirsts and wants relief must come to Christ Himself. He must not be content with coming to His Church and His ordinances, or to the assemblies of His people for prayer and praise. He must not stop short even at His holy table, or rest satisfied with privately opening his heart to His ordained ministers. He that is content with only drinking these waters “shall thirst again.” He must go higher, further, much further than this. He must have personal dealings with Christ Himself: all else in religion is worthless without Him. The King’s palace, the attendant servants, the richly furnished banqueting-house, the very banquet itself, all are nothing unless we speak with the King. His hand alone can take the burden off our backs and make us feel free. The hand of man may take the stone from the grave and show the dead; but none but Jesus can say to the dead, “Come forth, and live.” We must deal directly with Christ.1 [Note: Bishop J. C. Ryle, The Upper Room, 117. I remember a simple story that twined its clinging tendril fingers about my heart. It was of a woman whose long years had ripened her hair, and sapped her strength. She was a true saint in her long life of devotion to God. She knew the Bible by heart, and would repeat long passages from memory. But as the years came the strength went, and with it the memory gradually went too, to her grief. She seemed to have lost almost wholly the power to recall at will what had been stored away. But one precious bit still stayed. She would sit by the big sunny window of the sitting-room in her home, repeating over that one bit, as though chewing a delicious titbit, “I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.” By and by part of that seemed to slip its hold, and she would quietly be repeating, “that which I have committed to him.” The last few weeks as the ripened old saint hovered about the borderland between this and the spirit world, her feebleness increased. Her loved ones would notice her lips moving, and thinking she might be needing some creature comfort, they would go over and bend down to listen for her request. And time and again they found the old saint repeating over to herself one word, over and over again, the same one word, “Him—Him—Him.” She had lost the whole Bible but one word. But she had the whole Bible in that one word.”1 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Service, 77. (4) “Let him come.” He that thirsts and wants relief from Christ must actually come to Him. It is not enough to wish, and talk, and mean, and intend, and resolve, and hope. The thirsty have to come. To come in inquiry and by knowledge, to come in thought and by faith, to come in prayer and by trust, to come in the surrender of themselves to the Saviour. The sole condition is coming, and the only limit to the ministrations of the Saviour is our receptivity. Simple as this remedy for thirst appears, it is the only cure for man’s spiritual disease, and the only bridge from earth to heaven. Kings and their subjects, preachers and hearers, masters and servants, high and low, rich and poor, learned and unlearned, all alike must drink of this water of life, and drink in the same way. For eighteen centuries men have laboured to find some other medicine for weary consciences; but they have laboured in vain. Thousands, after blistering their hands, and growing grey in hewing out “broken cisterns, which can hold no water,” have been obliged to come back at last to the old Fountain, and have confessed in their latest moment that here, in Christ alone, is true peace. (5) “And drink.” Too many analyse, criticize, gather to the fountain and gaze on its waters; they do not drink. They do not live by Christ. When we drink of love we live on it, it enters into all our thoughts, colours all our hopes, gives strength to all our purposes; it is ourself. It must be even so with us and Christ. We must drink, must so draw His life and spirit into our souls that we shall be able to say, “For me to live is Christ.” So shall the thirst of the heart be satisfied, but only so. How many seem to come to Jesus Christ, and yet do not drink! How few Christians are like a tree planted by the rivers of water! What would you have thought of the Jews, if, when Moses smote the rock, they had refused to drink? or what would you have thought if they had only put the water to their lips? Yet such is the way with most Christians. It pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell. The Spirit was given to Him without measure. The command is given to us to draw out of His fulness; yet who obeys? Not one in a thousand. A Christian in our day is like a man who has got a great reservoir brimful of water. He is at liberty to drink as much as he pleases, for he never can drink it dry; but instead of drinking the full stream that flows from it, he dams it up, and is content to drink the few drops that trickle through. O that ye would draw out of His fulness, ye that have come to Christ! Do not be misers of grace. There is far more than you will use in eternity. The same waters are now in Christ that refreshed St. Paul, that gave St. Peter his boldness, that gave St. John his affectionate tenderness. Why is your soul less richly supplied than theirs? Because you will not drink: “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.”1 [Note: R. M. M‘Cheyne, Additional Remains, 308. 2. Christ satisfies every thirst of the soul. Do we thirst for activity? Jesus says, “Come unto me, and drink.” Hear Jesus say, “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.” He opened the eyes of the blind, unstopped deaf ears, made the lame to walk, healed the sick, cleansed the leper, and raised the dead. We thirst for enjoyment, and still Jesus says, “Come unto me, and drink.” Christ gives joy in every gift, and promises it in every promise. There is joy in the eternal life He gives, joy in the rest He gives, and joy in the peace which He bequeaths. We thirst for power, and Christ continues to say, “Come unto me, and drink,” for He makes His disciples now the salt of the earth and the light of the world, and ultimately He makes them kings and priests unto God. We thirst for society, and still Jesus says, “Come unto me, and drink.” Our Saviour makes those who are strangers and foreigners and aliens fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God. We thirst for the love of others, and Christ says, “Come unto me, and drink”; for He directs streams of kindness to every one who comes to Him by means of His new commandment, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” We thirst for knowledge, and Jesus says, “Come unto me, and drink.” “Learn of me.” Those who come to Jesus are instructed by Him in the highest subjects. To all such Jesus is Himself the truth, and the truth concerning all that it is essential we should know. We thirst for God, and Jesus says, “Come unto me, and drink.” He manifests God’s name to us, and shows us how He Himself is to us the brightness of the Father’s glory and the express image of His Person. Thus if any man thirst for life, activity, pleasure, social fellowship, knowledge, power, the love of others, or for God, He may come to Jesus Christ and drink. 3. No one who has not come thus to Christ and trusted Him has found perfect satisfaction in this world. Whatever good we have, we have not the highest good. Deep down in our hearts there is some want that has not been met, some secret thirst which yet torments us. We moralize, we philosophize about the discontent of man. We give little reasons for it; but the real reason of it all is this—that which everything lying behind it really signifies—that man is greater than his circumstances, and that God is always calling to him to come up to the fulness of his life. Dreadful will be the day when the world becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not for ever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is the child of God. I asked for Peace,— My sins arose And bound me close; I could not find release. I asked for Truth,— My doubts came in, And with their din They wearied all my youth. I asked for Love,— My lovers failed,— And griefs assailed Around, beneath, above. I asked for Thee,— And Thou didst come To take me home Within Thy heart to be.1 [Note: Digby Mackworth Dolben.] Living Water Literature Arnot (W.), The Anchor of the Soul, 23. Dods (M.), Footsteps in the Path of Life, 61. Gray (J. A.), Salvation from Start to Finish, 117. Hamilton (J.), Faith in God, 284. Howatt (J. R.), Jesus the Poet, 265. McCheyne (R. M.), Additional Remains, 304. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John i.–viii., 310. Martin (S.), Rain upon the Mown Grass, 254. Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, iv. 1265. Ryle (J. C.), The Upper Room, 110. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxxi. (1885) No. 1875. Westcott (B. F.), The Historic Faith, 228. Zahn (T.), Bread and Salt from the Word of God, 203. Christian World Pulpit, xxx. 91 (Hughes); xxxviii. 166 (Bramham); xlvi. 404 (Hall); lxvii. 251 (Body); lxxviii. 59 (Mrs. Dora Donaldson). Homiletic Review, xxxviii. 320 (Meyer). The Light of the World Again therefore Jesus spake unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life.—John 8:12. 1. Jesus spoke these words in the Temple at Jerusalem. He was sitting in the treasury, within the court of the women; and it was the time of the Feast of Tabernacles, when this court was crowded with pilgrims. The purpose of the Feast of Tabernacles was to commemorate a chapter in the life of the Hebrew nation away far back in its history. The observance of it was bound up with thoughts of the forty years’ wanderings in the wilderness. It was held at the close of the harvest and the vintage, after the farmers had finished the round of the year’s labours in the fields. When the set time arrived, the people quitted their homes to go up to Jerusalem; and they lived there during the week of the festival in small booths made of branches of olive, and palm, and myrtle, the purpose of this being to recall the tent-life of their fathers in the Arabian Desert. The little huts of greenery were set up in the open courts of the houses, upon the flat roofs, along the principal streets, in the open places of the city, and in some of the outer courts of the Temple. Two characteristic ceremonies of this Festival gathered up in expressive symbols the lessons of a Divine sustenance and of a Divine Presence, which remained as the great results of the teaching of the desert, and both of these were treated by Christ as parables of Himself. Each morning water was brought in a golden vessel from the Pool of Siloam and poured upon the altar of sacrifice. That water recalled to the people the supply drawn from the rock at Meribah, and pointed forward to the spiritual water which hereafter men should draw “out of the wells of salvation.” For in Christ the living rock, the image and the prophecy found their accomplishment; and so “in the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.” Then again, every evening there were lighted in one of the courts of the Temple two great lamps which are said to have cast their light over every quarter of the Holy City. These recalled the pillar of fire which had been in old times the sure token of Divine leadership and pointed forward to “the sun of righteousness” which should “arise with healing in his wings.” In Christ—the “light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of his people Israel”—the image and the prophecy found their accomplishment, “and therefore” He “spake again unto” the people, “saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life.” 2. “I am the light of the world.” This is one of those short, pregnant statements of our Lord characteristic of this Gospel, which impress us at once by their brevity, their beauty, and their largeness of meaning. Statements of a similar kind, of equal terseness and force, occur to every one—“I am the good shepherd”; “I am the resurrection, and the life”; “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Sometimes Jesus gathers His work and nature up in one descriptive word, and offers it, as it were out of a wide-open hand, complete to His disciples. In such a word all the details of His relation to the soul and to the world are comprehensively included. As the disciple listens and receives it, he feels all his fragmentary and scattered experiences drawing together and rounding into unity. As, having heard it, he carries it forth with him into his life, he finds all future experiences claiming their places within it, and getting their meaning from it. Such words of Jesus are like spheres of crystal into which the world is gathered, and where the past and future, the small and great, may all be read. What Divine audacity there is in such sayings! and how little we can suppose them to be the sayings of a mere teacher or prophet! They have no parallel in the words of even the greatest teachers. One and all imply something which the most powerful and enlightened, conscious of their own capacities to communicate truth or to do good, would scruple to arrogate to themselves. They might claim respect for the truth they speak, and summon men to attend to it with a voice of authority. But no merely human teacher would dare to make himself the centre of all truth, and the centre of the world. It was indeed a magnificent word, a stupendous word. It is one of those sayings of our Lord which prove that never man spake as this Man. It is utterly unaccountable and inexplicable save on one assumption. It either makes us tremble with a shock of surprise, with a feeling of doubt which we wish to crush down as blasphemy, or it brings us to our knees in worship, as before One who is lifted immeasurably above the ordinary limitations of humanity. There are only two possible conclusions to which we can come concerning such words as these. They are either the wildest words of audacity and self-deluded egotism that human lips ever uttered, or they are the language of one who was set far above all human criticism and judgment by His real and unmistakable Divinity. Had such a claim as this been made by the greatest teacher, prophet, or apostle of the ancient world, his words and memory would long since have perished in the scorn and disgust which it would have provoked; and were such a claim advanced by any person in the present day, there would be a universal feeling that mental derangement was at the base of it. No wonder that the men who listened to Him were either filled with indignation or inspired with reverential awe. No wonder that He seemed to them either a blasphemer or the Son of God. There could be no middle course. It was certain that the person who talked in this way would either be scorned and hated and crucified by the world or lifted by adoring hearts wholly above the world in love and honour and supremest adoration. And no middle course has ever been possible for long. Men have never continued to reverence Him as a man unless they have learned to worship Him as God. It is difficult to trust Him at all unless we trust Him all in all. These words are either so extravagant or so sublime, that the Man who spoke them was guilty of a self-conceit unparalleled in human history, or He was higher than the highest human thought can reach and not to be addressed save in the worshipful words of Thomas, “My Lord and my God.” We have ever to make our choice, and most of us have made it to our heart’s rest and joy. We are sure that He knew what He was saying and had Divine right to say it: “I am the light of the world.” 3. What does Jesus mean? How is He the light of the world? Let us understand what light is and does. (1) “The light of the world,” “the light of life”—the words send us instantly abroad into the world of Nature. They set us on the hilltop watching the sunrise as it fills the east with glory. They show us the great plain flooded and beaten and quivering with the noonday sun. They hush and elevate us with the mystery and sweetness and suggestiveness of the evening’s glow. Any one who has watched a sunrise among mountains will know how the light opens out depths of beauty and life where but lately the eye rested on a cold monotony of gloom or mist. At one moment only the sharp dark outline of the distant ranges stands out against the rosy sky, and at the next peak after peak catches the living fire, which then creeps slowly down their rocky slopes, and woods and streams and meadows and homesteads start out from the dull shadows, and the grass on which we stand sparkles with a thousand dewdrops. Walk on the central glacier of the Oberland in the gloom of a summer night. The grey clouds have hung about the Grimsel, and inflicted on you the sense of chill October, instead of bringing the sweet clearness of an August afternoon. The night has gathered starless and cold; but you are bent on your journey, though it requires all the energy of your determination to carry you through the discomforts of the march. The path at first is sharp and stony, then it is steep—steep in descent, steep in ascent—and your already tired and aching feet make you feel that it is hard to know which is the worse of the two. However, you have passed the polluted moraine, and at last you are on the ice. How cold it is! The breeze comes sweeping down the glacier, and chills you to the bone. Onward you go. The clouds are clearing. Things are better. Star after star is plain above you, and the giant mountains tower grim and gaunt around you, but, at any rate, less wrapped in shrouds. Onward you go, taking more and more courage. What is that shaft of amber, clear and fine as polished steel? What is that flash of deeper glory which shoots across the heavens? What is that line of scintillating gold and crimson which marks the crenulated crests of the mountains, and makes their snow-peaks and ice-lines like transparencies drenched in living fire? How glorious it is, the breaking of the dawn—the breaking of a real splendid August morning over the region of eternal snow! Gradually it steals down the slope of the mountains, till the very glacier itself is aglow. Now a world is before you, startling in its wildness and beauty—your graceful Finster Aar and savage Schreckhorn, and Strahleck barrier, and then, beyond, the soaring Eiger and the grim and meditative Mönch. Wild and beautiful in form and strangeness,—it is all before you now. Ah! it was all there, in its strangeness and stateliness, even when you shivered in the mist and darkness. It was all before you; but to you it was useless, unperceived, unwondered at. You needed the magic of light to reveal it. You know what it is, though it was there before you knew it. You are a debtor to the tender mystery of the dawn.1 [Note: Knox Little, The Light of Life, 4. Twice recently has it been my privilege to watch the sun rise in circumstances of unusual beauty. Long before his appearing we had tokens of his coming. The horizon, and the clouds that gathered in little flocks about the horizon, and banks of clouds further remote abiding motionless in the highest places, began to clothe themselves in appropriate raiment to welcome the sovereign of the morning. Dull greys, gleaming silver, deep reds, dark purple—all available hues were to be seen in that array. Then in the fulness of time the great flame rode out among the encircling glories, making them all appear dim and faint in the presence of his own effulgence.2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, The Silver Lining, 69. (2) Now the idea of light, long before the time of St. John, had become spiritual in its religious application; and when Christ speaks of Himself as the “light of the world,” it is no darkness of nature that He has in view, but the darkness that rests on men’s thoughts and life, the darkness that all true men feel more or less in themselves. Wherever men have arisen to the power of thought, and are capable of looking “before and after,” there comes home to them a deep sense of their ignorance. Their outlook is fast bound on all sides; and “more light” is their instinctive cry amid encircling darkness, or a twilight of uncertainty more perplexing sometimes than darkness itself. They look upwards, and long that the day may break on their mental struggle, and the shadows flee away from their hearts. The outward light is not enough. The eye is not satisfied with seeing. There is the conscious need of a higher light than ever. lit up sea or shore. The darkness of the world, in short, is a moral darkness, in which man is often unable to see his true way or choose his own good. He that has light within his own clear breast May sit i’ the centre, and enjoy bright day: But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts Benighted walks under the mid-day sun; Himself is his own dungeon.1 [Note: Milton, Comus.] “I am the light of the world”; and before His coming, His appearance was foretold in tokens of purple and gold. Here and there, in Isaiah and Jeremiah, we have great peaks tipped with the light of the coming day, suggesting the glory in which the whole world would be bathed in after time. “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd”; is not that a foretoken of the tenth chapter of John? “Liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound”; is not this the herald of the wonderful happenings which thrill the gospel story through and through? And then, after all these golden hints of promise there came the Sun, the Sun of Righteousness with healing in His wings, and the whole world passed into a new day.2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, The Silver Lining, 69. (3) But Christ’s words must be interpreted by their reference to the light which was then being celebrated. Of that light we read that “the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light.” This was a customary mode of directing the movements of large bodies of men, whether caravans or armies. In the case of an army a tall pole was erected in front of the chief’s tent, and from it a basket of fire was suspended, so that the glare of it was visible by night, and its smoke by day. The head of a marching column could thus be descried from a great distance, especially in wide level tracts with little or no vegetation and few inequalities of surface to interrupt the view. The distinctive peculiarity of the Israelitish march was that Jehovah was in the fire, and that He alone controlled its movements and thereby the movements of the camp. When the pillar of cloud left its place and advanced the tents were struck, lest the people should be separated from Jehovah and be found unfaithful to Him. During the whole course of their sojourn in the wilderness their movements were thus controlled and ordered. The beacon-fire that led them was unaffected by atmospheric influences. Dispelled by no gales, and evaporated by no fiercest heat of the Eastern sun, it hovered in the van of the host as the guiding angel of the Lord. The guidance it gave was uninterrupted and unerring; it was never mistaken for an ordinary cloud, it never so altered its shape as to become unrecognizable. And each night the flame shot up, and assured the people they might rest in peace. There is no difficulty in understanding what was in our Lord’s mind at this time. Already He had made two distinct allusions to the incidents of the wilderness journey. In the sixth chapter He spoke of the manna which God had sent down from heaven, and He said: “I am the bread of life.” Then in the seventh chapter He spoke of the water which gushed out of the rock, and He said, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink”; as much as to say, “I am the rock from which the living water flowed.” And in the text it is said: “Then spake Jesus again unto them”—implying that He was taking up the same subject after a little interval—“saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life,” alluding, evidently, to the third great symbol of the exodus, the pillar of fire, by which Jehovah guided His people through the wilderness. So it seems clear that our Lord is referring here to Himself as the fulfilment of this great Old Testament type—“I am the light of the world.” 4. There are two things, then, that light does, and it seems as if Christ had them both before Him when He said, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in the darkness.” The first is that it enables us to see. Enter a dark room and you do not see anything; but bring a light and you see what the room contains. The other is that it guides us. The lights at the harbour mouth are there to guide vessels safely into the harbour. And one has sometimes discovered the use of a light, even though it were but the glimmer of a candle in a cottage window, when one has been overtaken by the darkness on some hillside or unfrequented moor. So we have— I. Christ is the Light of the world because He enables men to see what is in the world. II. Christ is the Light of the world because He guides men through the world. I He Enables Men to See The lights by the altar in the Temple were memorials of the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. When, then, Jesus says, “I am the light of the world,” He would declare Himself as being in reality, and to every soul of man to the end of time, what that cloud with its heart of fire was in outward seeming to one generation of desert wanderers. Now, the first thing which it was to these was the visible vehicle of the Divine presence. “The Lord went before them in a pillar of a cloud.” “The Lord looked through the pillar.” “The Lord came down in the cloud, and spake unto him.” “The cloud covered the tabernacle, and the glory of the Lord appeared.” Such is the way in which it is ever spoken of, as being the manifestation to Israel in sensible form of the presence among them of God their King. 1. He enabled men to see God. (1) He made clear in His own life and words the Divine idea, as no one had done before, and no one has ever done since. Men had been struggling with this idea from the first efforts of religious speculation. It was still unformed and imperfect. Outside of revelation it fluctuated and took many shapes, now presenting itself as a multiplicity of Divine energies, with more or less coherence; and now retreating into a vague Absolute or Necessity, encompassing all being, but without thought or love for any. Polytheism more refined or more sensualistic, and Pantheism more or less abstract, divided the thought of the Gentile world. On the other hand, the idea of God had been to the Hebrews one of growing clearness. He was the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, the God of Israel, who had given the covenant on Mount Sinai, who had led their fathers by the way of the wilderness into the promised land, a “jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation,” and yet also “the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, and transgression, and sin,” a holy God, “of purer eyes than to behold evil,” even a Father whose pitying mercy was able to measure all the depths of our weakness. “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.” This sublime conception of the Hebrew mind was perfected in Christ. Every attribute of spiritual excellence was brought out into clearer distinction, and every element less exalted was enlarged and purified. Hitherto the God of the Hebrews had remained too isolated and apart. With all their growth of religious intelligence—the voice of the Divine always speaking more clearly as we descend the course of their prophetic literature—there still clung certain restrictions to their highest conception. Jehovah was their God in some special manner—the Giver of their Law, the God of their Temple, who was to be worshipped in Jerusalem. They had difficulty in enlarging the Divine idea so as to embrace the human race, in rising above local privilege and national prerogative to the thought of God as the spiritual Source and Guide of all men alike. Christ fixed for ever this great thought. “God is a Spirit,” He said; “and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” “Neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem,” was there any special virtue, so far as the Divine presence was concerned. This presence was universal and universally spiritual, embracing all life, claiming the homage and devotion, the faith and love, of all moral intelligence—the presence of the Father as well as the Sovereign of men. (2) How did He accomplish this? By the manifestation of His person even more than by His doctrine, since He said, not “I bring the light and the truth,” but “I am the light, and I am the truth.” He is the light of the world, because in Him is the glory of God. His words are madness, and something very like blasphemy, unless they are vindicated by the visible indwelling in Him of the present God. The cloud of the humanity, “the veil, that is to say, his flesh,” enfolds and tempers; and through its transparent folds it reveals, even while it swathes, the Godhead. Like some fleecy vapour flitting across the sun, and irradiated by its light, it enables our weak eyes to see light, and not darkness, in the else intolerable blaze. Yes! Thou art the light of the world, because in Thee dwelleth “the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” Thy servant hath taught us the meaning of Thy words, when he said: “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us; and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” In that famous picture which Holman Hunt has painted of this wonderful scene and utterance in the Saviour’s life, there is one fatal blunder, as it appears at least to those who read Jesus with clearest eyes. The Saviour stands in the encircling gloom, lamp in hand, through which rays of light stream out upon the dusky archways of the Temple, upon the shadowy forms in the background, and upon His own sad, beautiful face. But it is from the lamp which He carries that the illumination comes. That is the mistake. It ought to have been shown as the irradiation from His own person, the glory of His own face, the sunlight of His own matchless purity, grace, and love. He Himself is the light of the world—not what He taught, but what He was and did. His very incarnation is the world’s light. The fact that God could and did dwell in a human form, could speak through human lips, and think through a human mind, and feel the beatings of a human heart, and suffer all human pangs, and render into perfect beauty a human life; the fact that God’s great, awful, mysterious, holy, and loving nature could have its abode in the flesh in a body like our own and glorify it,—that to begin with, and more than all things else, is the light of the world, for it lightens the face of every man that comes into the world.1 [Note: J. G. Greenhough, The Cross in Modern Life, 90. 2. Christ has made clear not only the idea of God, but the idea of man. (1) The two ideas everywhere interchange, and react the one upon the other. The glory of Christ is that He seized so clearly the spiritual essence of both, and set the great realities of the spiritual life in man in front of the Supreme Spiritual Reality whom He revealed. There is nowhere for a moment any doubt in Christ as to what the true life of man is. He is here and now, a creature of nature, like all other creatures; but his true life is not natural, like that of the fowls of the air or the lilies of the field. He is essentially a moral being, with relations beyond nature, and wants and aspirations and duties which connect him with a Divine or Supernatural order. From first to last this spiritual conception underlies the Gospels, and makes itself felt in them. There is no argument, because there is no hesitation. “Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?” The possibility of a negative answer is not supposed. The claims of the natural order, some have even thought, are unduly depressed. The spiritual life seems to overshadow and displace them. But this is only by way of emphasis, and in order to rouse man from the dreams of a mere sensual existence. “After all these things do the Gentiles seek”—those who know no better, to whom the meaning of the spiritual and Divine order has not come. “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” The spiritual must be held in its true place as primary; after this the natural has also its place, and is to be recognized in addition. (2) But the great thought is, that man is the dependant of a Divine kingdom, everywhere transcending the visible and present world. God has made him in His own image, and loves him, however far he may have degraded that image and wandered away from Divine good. He claims man as His own—as rightfully belonging to the higher world of spiritual intelligence, of which He is the Head. And so Christ came “to seek and to save that which was lost.” Surely this is a higher conception of human life than that of either ancient or modern secularism—a conception truer to the radical instincts of human nature, ever looking beyond the present, and owning the power of more than earth-born thoughts. From the fact of sin itself and a sense of wrong there comes a voice which speaks of something better—of a life akin to angels and to God. The very misery of man attests his greatness, and that there is more in his life, which “appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away,” than the experience of a day. Towards this thought the yearnings of all larger hearts, and the searchings of all higher minds, had pointed for centuries. It was the dream alike of Plato and of Cicero, of Egypt and of Persia. Hebrew Prophecy and Psalmody had grasped it more firmly as the Divine shone upon them more clearly. Yet withal it remained a comparative uncertainty before Christ. He, as no one before Him had done, held forth before men the conception of a higher life, greater than all the prizes of earth, and more enduring than all the accidents of time. That which was but faintly apprehended by Gentile philosopher, or even Jewish seer, was made manifest by the appearing and resurrection of our Lord, “who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.” As St. Peter says in his First Epistle, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away.” Christ asserts for man his true dignity and his rightful place in the universe of matter and of spirit. There is no single point in respect to which Christ has wrought so complete a revolution as in respect to the dignity and worth of the individual man. He effected this change, not by teaching a new philosophy, but by living a new life, and consecrating that life by His pitying death. He came to save man, not because man was wise or worthy, but because he was ignorant and lost, and yet could be exalted to wisdom and holiness. Therein did He declare that the lowliest and the most simple have an intrinsic worth in the judgment of God, such as the world had never before accorded to man as man. It was the reproach of Christ, that He consorted with publicans and sinners. His eating with them, however, did not signify that He sympathized with them as they were; it signified that He knew what they might become. To accomplish His work for man, Christ not only was found in fashion as a man, but, being such, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death—even the death of the cross. In this He attested still more strikingly what manhood, as manhood, is worth in the judgment of God. It is not surprising that the light that streamed from Christ’s life and death slowly but surely effected changes so great in all the estimates that Christendom has learned to put upon man. How great is little man! Sun, moon, and stars respond to him, Shine or grow dim Harmonious with his span. How little is great man! More changeable than changeful moon, Nor half in tune With Heaven’s harmonious plan. Ah rich man! ah poor man! Make ready for the testing day When wastes away What bears not fire or fan. Thou heir of all things, man Pursue the saints by heavenward track: They looked not back; Run thou, as erst they ran. Little and great is man: Great if he will, or if he will A pigmy still; For what he will he Song of Solomon 1 [Note: C. G. Rossetti, Poems, 121. (3) The new ideal of man was set forth by our Lord not only in His discourses but in Himself. Jesus never taught a systematic and scientific morality. He simply replaced the moral world on its true axis, which is the love of God and of man; but on no occasion did He attempt a classification of our duties, a complete explanation of the motives, aims, impulses, and restraining forces of our moral conduct. In the Sermon on the Mount, He showed the inner and spiritual nature of the law; He pointed out what is true purity and love. In His inimitable parables He has taught us, by many examples, what are the conditions of eternal life; but it is, above all, by the manifestation of His Person, and by the radiance of His life, that He has revealed to us the moral ideal of humanity. For the first time, a life absolutely fulfilling the moral law was seen in Him, a life wholly directed by the love of God and man, a life in which there is not an action, a word, a thought, or an impulse of the heart which does not conduce to the glory of God and the good of mankind, and which is not inspired, filled, penetrated by this love. In Him we see for the first time the admirable union of all those virtues which seem contrary to each other, and which usually exclude each other—authority and simplicity, majesty and humility, strength and gentleness, hatred of evil and tender mercy, purity without asceticism, condescension without servility; so that, to employ an image which the subject affords us, just as the various colours which are separated by the prism—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet—vivid and brilliant as they are, form, when united, a perfect white of spotless beauty, so all those different features which compose the form of Christ unite and blend in a harmony so extraordinary and so lifelike that it is imprinted for ever on the conscience of mankind. Through Him, light has for ever been thrown upon man. In Him, man has been seen as he ought to be. This great example stands before us; and wherever it is seen, the absolute return to darkness is impossible. Doubtless the powers of darkness may fall at times on portions of humanity; baseness, lying, hypocrisy, and violence may even shelter themselves under the name of Christ; but misconception and confusion will not last long; the light will at length be triumphant, the delusive shadows, the hideous nightmares, will disappear, and, in the fair and glorious daybreak of morning, justice, purity, and love will shine forth resplendent. Science is teaching us lessons concerning the physical structure of the universe. The same stuff is ablaze in Sirius and the Sun and the flaming heart of the earth, and so Jesus Christ gives us the moral unity of all the worlds. The setting of the next life we can little imagine, but this we know, that God’s ideal of life is Jesus Christ. We are to be like Him. That is the real predestination. He who in both worlds delighted to do His Father’s will, suffered with brave hope, obeyed with changeless fidelity, served with supreme, unfailing love, is the universal type. God tells us that it is enough to be like Him. The words He uttered, “Good and faithful,” are negotiable in both worlds. Character and capacity are all of life that we can take with us when death swings open the door from this into the next room in our Father’s house.1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 62. 3. But now, since Jesus has perfectly revealed to us what God is and what man ought to be, He has lighted up the profound abyss which separates man from God. The more His holiness is made evident and clear, the more evident does our own imperfection become; all our virtues pale beside His perfection, as the false glitter of glass trinkets is outshone by the lustre of a pure diamond. His purity brings out the frightful and repulsive character, not only of our crimes, but of those thoughts, evil intentions, hatreds, and covetous desires, which, though unreached by human law, are revealed through Him. He shows us at once the evil that we have done, and the good which we have neglected to do; He casts a searching light on all hollow pretence, on all ostentation, pursuit of earthly glory, and selfishness more or less cleverly dissimulated. Never before Him had our nature been so profoundly, so accurately judged; never before had man been so clearly revealed to man. Thus were realized the prophetic words which the aged Simeon pronounced over the child Jesus—that by Him the thoughts of many hearts would be revealed (Luke 2:35). Thus the light which shines forth from His person, and which at first attracts us by its sublimity, ends by becoming overwhelming and terrible when it penetrates to the depths of our being, and clearly shows our corruption. (1) One phase of the mystery of man is that which meets us in the mass of sin, and seemingly base, lost life, which there is in the world. It is that same mystery of man’s moral nature; only not of its struggling, but of where it has ceased to struggle. That is the terrible thing which one is apt to feel wherever life is in dense masses, as in large cities—the multitudes who do not seem to struggle, who are complacent in the hollowest shams of vanity and folly; who are sunk in low, grovelling tastes, from which nothing seems to rouse them; who grow up hard, bold, defiant, and despise the very efforts that you make to help them upwards. And there are yet deeper abysses: all the lost, broken-down lives that fester in the byways of our cities; the masses of crime; the even more hopeless baseness of those who fatten by fostering crime,—whole classes, lost, lost, so lost that we cannot tell even how to try to save them, how to begin to try! And what is to be the end and outcome of it all? (2) This light would be overpowering, and would leave us without hope, if, after having shown us our misery, it did not at the same time reveal the Divine mercy, if it did not show us in God a love greater than our rebellion, a pardon greater than our iniquity. This is what “Christ crucified” teaches us beyond all else, and it is for this reason that these grand words, “I am the light of the world,” never appear grander or more true than when they emanate from the Cross. At the foot of the Cross the sinner sees and receives a pardon truly worthy of God, because it completely satisfies His justice while at the same time revealing His mercy. In the Howard Prize Essay for 1885, on “The Preservation of Health,” by Dr. Clement Dukes, the following passage occurs: “Light is not only the great preserver of health, but a great preventer of disease; for Tyndall found that sunlight arrested the growth of organisms, so that, as Dr. Murphy states, sunlight serves the double purpose of aiding the growth of those organisms which are necessary for man, as well as of man himself, while it retards the production of those which are antagonistic to his existence.” Many illustrations are given of this in the essay. The author, drawing upon his own experience, says that when house surgeon in a London hospital, he found that in one of its wards, which was very dark, simple fractures took seven to fourteen days longer in uniting than they would have done in a well-lighted ward, whilst they were afraid to put compound fractures in it at all; and when, from want of space, they were compelled to do so, they chose a bed where the light was greatest. Florence Nightingale, as the result of her wide observation, remarks: “One of the greatest observers of human things says: ‘Where there is sun there is thought.’ All physiology goes to confirm this. Where is the shady side of deep valleys, there is cretinism. Where are cellars and the unsunned sides of narrow streets, there is the degeneracy and weakness of the human race; mind and body equally degenerating. Put the pale, withering plant and human being into the sun, and, if not too far gone, each will recover heart and spirit.” In France there are hospitals where they trust almost entirely to light for the cure of disease. Surely there is here an earthly analogue to a spiritual fact, namely, that only by the beams of the Sun of Righteousness can the evil growths in humanity be stayed and the good ones be fostered. I was talking some time ago to a City Missionary, an earnest-hearted woman working in the worst parts of one of our great cities; and she told me, how, at first, her work made her utterly despairing. There seemed to be nothing she could do; and she was among a whole population who seemed just sinking down, down to hell—nothing else for it, according to all her old creed. She told me how she used to go home and be haunted with the horror of it; and then she went out again, praying, and longing, and trying, but still reaching only one here and there. But one day it came to her—just the thought of the Heavenly Father’s love shadowed forth in Christ’s, and compared to which her love could be nothing; and like a great flood of light it all broke upon her, that she could trust Him. Why should she be racking her soul with anxiety almost to madness as if she alone in this great universe cared for them? And ever after that, she told me, she had laboured on, not less earnestly than before, but with an easier, freer heart, feeling the mystery losing itself not in darkness, but in light. That light was Christ’s. That anxiety of love for sinners, and that trustful thought of God, are both from Him. There were kind loving hearts before Christ, sad for human suffering; but nowhere, before, do you find that peculiar sadness for sin, and for the poor, lost sinners of the world. That is like a new light upon the great dark mystery, the light of a new love, which has ever since been working in the world; and, the light of a greater love still than ours, a love in the infinite Heart of things, a love to which our hearts go out in that strong trustful plea Whittier has shaped for us— Father of all,—Thy erring child may be Lost to himself, but never lost to Thee!1 [Note: B. Herford, Courage and Cheer, 144. II He Guides Men The second thought is that Christ, like the pillar of cloud and fire to the Israelites, is a guiding light to us in our march through the wilderness of this world. But if Christ is to lead we must follow. “He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness.” The first demand is for obedience. How emphatically the Book of Numbers (chap. 9) dwells upon the absolute control of all the marches and halts by the movements of the cloud. When it was taken up, they journeyed; when it settled down, they encamped. As long as it lay spread above the Tabernacle, there they stayed. Impatient eyes might look, and impatient spirits chafe—no matter. The camp might be pitched in a desolate place, away from wells and palm trees, away from shade, among fiery serpents, and open to fierce foes—no matter. As long as the pillar was motionless, no man stirred. Weary, slow days might pass in this compulsory inactivity; but “whether it were two days, or a month, or a year, that the cloud tarried upon the tabernacle, abiding thereon, the children of Israel journeyed not.” And whenever it lighted itself up,—no matter how short had been the halt, how weary and footsore the people, how pleasant the resting-place—up with the tent-pegs immediately, and away. Whether the signal was given at midnight, when all but the watchers slept, or at mid-day, it was all the same. All true following of Christ begins with faith, or we might almost say that following is faith, for we find our Lord substituting the latter expression for the former in another passage of this Gospel parallel with the present. “I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness.” The two ideas are not equivalent, but faith is the condition of following; and following is the outcome and test, because it is the operation, of faith. None but they who trust Him will follow Him. He who does not follow does not trust. To follow Christ means to long and strive after His companionship; as the Psalmist says, “My soul followeth hard after thee.” It means, the submission of the will, the effort of the whole nature, the daily conflict to reproduce His example, the resolute adoption of His command as our law, His providence as our will, His fellowship as our joy. Between teaching and leading there may be all the difference that there is between theory and practice. A teacher may content himself with the thought, the attention, the contemplation, of his pupils, but a leader calls for action. That is precisely the note which is struck in these words: “he that followeth me.” Like the host in the wilderness following the pillar of fire, like the pilgrims to Mecca following the fire-cages slung high upon the poles, so must men follow this Christ, that they may not walk in darkness, but may have the light of life. 1. We have the promise that if we follow faithfully we shall not walk in darkness. This is true in practice of life and its perplexities. Nobody who has not tried it would believe how many difficulties are cleared out of a man’s road by the simple act of trying to follow Christ. No doubt there will still remain obscurities enough as to what we ought to do, to call for the best exercise of patient wisdom; but an enormous proportion of them vanish like mist when the sun breaks through, when once we honestly set ourselves to find out whither the pillared Light is guiding. It is a reluctant will, and intrusive likings and dislikings, that obscure the way for us, much oftener than real obscurity in the way itself. It is seldom impossible to discern the Divine will, when we only wish to know it that we may do it. And if ever it is impossible for us, surely that impossibility is like the cloud resting on the Tabernacle—a sign that for the present His will is that we should be still, and wait, and watch. I only speak my own experience; I am not talking theology or philosophy: I know what I am saying, and can point out the times and places when I should have fallen if I had been able to rely for guidance upon nothing better than a commandment. But the pure, calm, heroic image of Jesus confronted me, and I succeeded. I had no doubt as to what He would have done, and through Him I did not doubt what I ought to do.1 [Note: Mark Rutherford.] So the years went on, and the sense of unreality in my teaching grew steadily more intense and intolerable. I saw myself continually expending all the forces of my mind on theories which left me and my hearers alike unchanged in the essential characteristics of our lives. I felt myself, like St. Augustine, but a “seller of rhetoric.” I was inculcating a method of life which I myself did not obey, or obeyed only in those respects that caused me neither sacrifice nor inconvenience. In order to continue such labours at all various forms of excuse and self-deception were required. Thus I flattered myself that I was at least maintaining the authority of morals. I did not perceive that morals are of no value to the world until vitalized by emotion. At other times I preached with strenuous zeal the superiority of the Christian religion, and dilated on its early triumphs. This pleased my hearers, for it always flatters men to find themselves upon the winning side. What I wonder at now is that they did not perceive that my zeal to prove Christianity true was exactly proportioned to my fear that it was false. Men do not seek to prove that of which they are assured. Jesus never sought to prove the existence of a God, because He was assured of it; He simply asserted and commanded. In my heart of hearts I knew that I was not sure. But I did not easily discover the reason of my uncertainty. I supposed the source to be the destructive criticism of the Gospels which had reduced Jesus Himself to a probability. In my private thoughts I argued that it was no longer possible to feel the intense reality of Christ. Francis might feel it, Catherine might feel it, because they lived in an atmosphere of poetry, unchilled by criticism. I could never feel as they felt because I could not transport myself into their atmosphere. Yet as often as I turned to these great lives, something thrilled within me, some living responsive fibre, so that I knew that I was not after all quite alien to them. Could it be that there was that in me that made me, or could make me, of their company? But how could I attain to their faith? What could give back to a modern man, tortured by a thousand perplexities of knowledge of which they never dreamed, the reality of Christ which they possessed? And then the answer came—not suddenly, but as a still small voice growing louder, more positive, more intense—Live the Life. Try to do some at least of the things that Jesus did. Seek through experience what can never come through ratiocination. Be a Francis; then it may be thou shalt think like him, and know Jesus as he knew Him. Live the life—there is no other way.1 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Empire of Love, 112. 2. But there is a higher meaning in the words than even this promise of practical direction. In the profound symbolism of Scripture, especially of this Gospel, “darkness” is the name for the whole condition of the soul averted from God. So our Lord here is declaring that to follow Him is the true deliverance from that midnight of the soul. There is a darkness of ignorance, a darkness of impurity, a darkness of sorrow; and in that threefold gloom, thickening to a darkness of death, are they enwrapt who follow not the Light. That is the grim, tragical side of this saying, too sad, too awful for our lips to speak much of, and best left in the solemn impressiveness of that one word. But the hopeful, blessed side of it is, that the feeblest beginnings of trust in Jesus Christ, and the first tottering steps that try to tread in His, bring us into the light. It is not necessary that we should have reached our goal, it is enough that our faces are turned to it, and our hearts desire to attain it; then we may be sure that the dominion of the darkness over us is broken. To follow, though it be afar off, and with unequal steps, fills our path with increasing brightness, and even though evil and ignorance and sorrow may thrust their blackness in upon our day, they are melting in the growing glory, and already we may give thanks “unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light: who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son.” Only he can be a true follower whose life and love are in union with the life and love in Christ. He will not be “light in the Lord” until his will is intermarried with the will of his Lord. Every man who is thus joined to the Lord is one Spirit with Him, and walks in His marvellous Light. He is inly and immovably persuaded that nothing can separate his love from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus his Lord; and the comforting, assuring light of this love floods his understanding. The love of God in his will, and the light of God in his mind, make him a new man. The descent of God’s life and light to dwell in his soul makes him sure and certain of his final ascent to God. 3. But we have not merely the promise that we shall be led by the light and brought into the light. A yet deeper and grander gift is offered here: “He shall have the light of life.” That means, not, as it is often carelessly taken to mean, a light which illuminates the life, but, like the similar phrases of this Gospel—“bread of life,” “water of life,”—light which is life. “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” These two are one in their source, which is Jesus, the Word of God. Of Him we have to say, “With thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light.” They are one in their deepest nature; the life is the light, and the light the life. And this one gift is bestowed upon every soul that follows Christ. Not only will our outward lives be illumined or guided from without, but our inward being will be filled with the brightness. “Ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord.” This is the great distinction between the light which Christ is and the light by which the Israelites were led from day to day. They had an external means of ascertaining promptly which way they should go. Their whole life was circumscribed, and its place and mode determined for them. The guidance offered us by Christ of an inward Kind. A God without might seem perfect as a guide, but a God within is the real perfection. God does not now lead us by a sign which we could follow, though we had no real sympathy with Divine ways and no wisdom of our own; He leads us by communicating to us His own perceptions of right and wrong, by inwardly enlightening us, and by making us ourselves of such a disposition that we naturally choose what is good. If I had fulness of life I would have perfectness of vision; I would know what God is, what man is, what heaven is. Is it not written, “This is life eternal that they should know thee”? And yet, marvellous to tell, this unspeakable glory may be mine—be mine now, here, in the midst of the present world: “He that followeth me shall not walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life.” It is not by dying it shall come to me; it is by following—following the steps of the Master through life’s strait gate and life’s narrow way. It is by taking up the cross, by lifting the burden, by bearing the sacrifice, by doing the will, that the doctrine shall be known to me.1 [Note: G. Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 251. The still commandress of the silent night Borrows her beams from her bright brother’s eye; His fair aspect fills her sharp horns with light; If he withdraw, her flames are quench’d and die; E’en as the beams of thy enlight’ning Sp’rit, Infus’d and shot into my dark desire, Inflame my thoughts, and fill my soul with fire, That I am ravish’d with a new delight; But if thou shroud thy face, my glory fades, And I remain a nothing, all composed of shades. Eternal God! O Thou that only art The sacred fountain of eternal light, And blessed loadstone of my better part, O Thou, my heart’s desire, my soul’s delight, Reflect upon my soul, and touch my heart, And then my heart shall prize no good above Thee; And then my soul shall know Thee; knowing, love Thee; And then my trembling thoughts shall never start From Thy commands, or swerve the least degree, Or once presume to move, but as they move in Thee.2 [Note: Francis Quarles.] 4. Christ is our guiding light even unto death. The night cometh. I shall have to lie down and die. Is there any light? “I am the light.” He claims that to those who are in Him the night shineth even as the day. What does my Lord do in the hour of death to break up the reign of darkness? He gives us the cheer of sovereignty. “All things are yours … death!” Then I do not belong to death? No, death belongs to me. Death is not my master, he is my servant. He is made to minister to me in the hour of translation, and I shall not be enslaved by his approach. That was a true and beautiful word uttered by Mrs. Booth when she was passing home: “The waters are rising, but I am not sinking!” Death was her minister, floating her forward to glory. “All things are yours … death.” And my Lord further softens the night by the gracious light of fellowship. “I will be with thee.” When we are in fine and congenial company how the time passes! The hours slip away and we marvel when the moment for separation comes. And so it will be in death! Our company will be so rich and welcome that the season will pass before we know it. I think the Christian’s first wondering question on the other side will be: “Am I really through? Really?” “Even the night shall be light about thee.” It matters not how stormy the night may be, the Light of Life shall never be blown out. “At eventide it shall be light.”1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, The Silver Lining, 73. Whence are we—and whither? Especially, whither? How that question has pressed upon the heart of man. Do you remember the first living glimpse that we get of our old Saxon forefathers, as they stood facing Christianity, not yet converted to it, but wondering if perhaps it might be true? They are facing it with this mystery of the unknown beyond pressing on their hearts. I know few more beautiful episodes in old-world thought. It was a few years after Augustine had come as a missionary to England, and in the rude North, King Edwin of Northumbria had gathered his chiefs and thanes together in “Witenagemot,” or “Wise men’s meeting,” that they might consider this new faith. One by one they told their faith about it, but the best word spoken was this. Said one of the thanes: “Truly the life of man in this world is on this wise. It is as when thou, O King, art feasting with thy thanes in winter-time, when the hearth is lighted and the hall is warm; but without, the rains and the snows are falling, and the winds howl. Then cometh a sparrow and flieth through the hall; it cometh in by one door and goeth out at the other. When a little moment brief and pleasant is passed, it disappears, and from winter returns to winter again. So is it with the life of man, O King. It is but for a moment; what goeth before it, and what cometh after it, wot we not at all. Wherefore, if these strangers can tell us aught, let us hearken to them and follow their law.”2 [Note: B. Herford, Courage and Cheer, 145. 5. And, finally, Christ guides His followers to another and a better life. Through the opened doors of that immortality which He has brought to light by means of His gospel, there has streamed ever since a steady radiance, towards which the hearts of all men have turned with thankfulness and hope. Christ has done for immortality what He had done for theism. He has not demonstrated it to the reason, but He has verified it as a fact. He has not superseded the necessity of searching and scrutinizing its possibility or probability on grounds of reason, but He has enforced these demonstrations by the best attested events of human history; and He stands before the rational faith of men declaring afresh to all the generations, “I am he that liveth and was dead,” and “Behold, I am alive for evermore,” and “Because I live, ye shall live also.” What about the morrow? When the river is crossed, is there any light upon the regions beyond? Am I to gaze into blackness, impenetrable, inscrutable? “I am the light.” What kind of light does He give me here? “In my Father’s house!” Is there not a softening gleam in the very phrase? Look here for a sheaf of rays of welcome light. “In my Father’s house,” there is our habitation! “I go to prepare a place for you,” there is the preparation for us! “I will receive you unto myself,” there is a welcome for us! Does not this throw the soft light of the morning on the Beyond? The same light which has been given to me along the way of time will shine upon me in the realms of the new day. “The Lord God is the light thereof.” So you see it is Jesus all the way; my light to-day, to-night, to-morrow!1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, The Silver Lininig, 74. There is an ancient prayer for the departed which runs: Grant them, O Lord, eternal rest, and let light perpetual shine upon them. The Light of the World Literature Aglionby (F. K.), The Better Choice, 51. Banks (L. A.), Christ and His Friends, 254. Banks (L. A.), Sermons which have won Souls, 75. Brooks (P.), The Light of the World, 1. Church (R. W.), Cathedral and University Sermons, 80. Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, iii. 46. Greenhough (J. G.), The Cross in Modern Life, 88. Herford (B.), Courage and Cheer, 138. Hopkins (E. H.), in The Keswick Week, 1908, 10. Horne (C. S.), The Light of the World, 1. Ingram (A. F. W.), The Gospel in Action, 23. Jerdan (C.), For the Lambs of the Flock, 54. Jowett (J. H.), The Silver Lining, 69. Lewis (J.), The Mystic Secret, 143. Little (W. J. Knox), The Light of Life, 1. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John i.–viii., 319. Marten (C. H.), Plain Bible Addresses, 100. Matheson (G.), Moments on the Mount, 250. Maurice (F. D.), Lincoln’s Inn Sermons, iv. 174. Miller (J.), Sermons Literary and Scientific, ii. 218. Newman (J. H.), Oxford University Sermons, 1. Porter (N.), Yale College Sermons, 204. Pulsford (J.), Loyalty to Christ, ii. 7. Ragg (L.), Christ and our Ideals, 51. Ross (J. M. E.), The Self-Portraiture of Jesus, 80. Tulloch (J.), Some Facts of Religion and of Life, 209. Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), Nos. 375, 687. Walters (C. E.), The Deserted Christ, 21. Westcott (B. F.), The Revelation of the Father, 47. Christian World Pulpit, xxxi. 380 (Horder); xxxvi. 138 (Whiton), 362 (Perowne); xlvi. 310 (Lang); lvi. 161 (Hughes); lxvii. 177 (Ingram); lxxvii. 70 (Marshall). Clergyman’s Magazine, iii. 193 (Bersier). Truth and Freedom And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.… If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.—John 8:32; John 8:36. 1. In the text we find united two of the greatest words in our language. There are perhaps no words in the language which have been so variously interpreted, or around which the conflict of opinion has raged more fiercely; no words which have had greater power to call forth the energy and devotion of human hearts, or which, on the other hand, have more often been employed to give an ideal colouring to base and selfish ends. How many rebels against just law, or wholesome moral restraint, have masked their caprice under the name of liberty; how many fires of persecution have been kindled in the pretended cause of truth! And, on the other hand, what noble battles have been fought for the most sacred interests of humanity, which were identified with these two names! We should blot out half of the heroic pages of history if we were to erase the deeds done, and the sufferings endured, for Truth and Freedom. In the text the two words are used to throw light upon each other, and, as it were, to exclude the false interpretations which might be given to each taken by itself. That is Truth which makes me really free; that is the genuine and only valuable Freedom which is based upon the Truth. 2. Let us recall the occasion on which the words were spoken. To some who had attached themselves (slightly, as it would seem) to Him, the Lord had said, “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Instead of joyfully accepting, they resented this gracious encouraging word of His, this promise, “Ye shall be made free,” and rejoined in displeasure—“We were never in bondage to any man.” How strangely men are often blinded by pride and presumption! Listen to these proud Jews, “We were never in bondage to any man”; while yet the whole past history of their nation was the record of one bondage following hard on another, they for their sins having come at one time or another under the yoke of almost every people round about them. They had been, by turns, in bondage to the Canaanites, in bondage to the Philistines, in bondage to the Syrians, in bondage to the Chaldeans; then again to the Græco-Syrian kings; and even at the very moment when this indignant disclaimer was uttered, the signs of a foreign rule, of the domination of a stranger, everywhere met their eye. They bought and sold with Roman money; they paid tribute to a Roman emperor; a Roman governor sat in their judgment hall; a Roman garrison occupied the fortress of their city. And yet, with all this plain before their eyes, brought home to their daily, hourly, experience, they angrily put back the promise of Christ, “The truth shall make you free,” as though it conveyed an insult: How sayest Thou, Ye shall be made free? We were never in bondage to any man. 3. These words of the Jews grew out of a total misunderstanding of the freedom of which Christ was speaking. It was not, in the first place, freedom from the yoke of the stranger, it was not deliverance from the tyranny of Rome, that Christ was promising here to as many as continued in His word, but freedom from the yoke of sin, deliverance from the bondage of corruption, from the tyranny of their own passions and desires. It was this that Christ promised, for it was this that He came from heaven to impart. That other freedom might and would follow in course of time; for men who are free inwardly are sure, sooner or later, to achieve an outer freedom as well. It was not, however, of this that Christ was speaking here, but of quite another freedom; and therefore, not caring to note that angry rejoinder of theirs, or to entangle Himself in controversy on so unprofitable a theme, but lifting up the whole question between Himself and them into a higher sphere, He replied, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.” Every sinner, He would say, is the servant, or slave, of the sin which he commits—is in bondage to it, and needs liberty, even the liberty which I, the Truth, alone am capable of giving him; which he can receive from no other hands save only from Mine. If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed; otherwise, you are slaves and servants, and such must continue to the end. The text, therefore, deals with— I. The Need of Liberation. II. The Truth that Liberates. III. The Liberty that the Truth gives. I The Need of Liberation Christ’s aim was to make all men free. He saw around Him servitude in every form—man in slavery to man, and race to race; His own countrymen in bondage to the Romans—slaves of both Jewish and Roman masters, frightfully oppressed; men trembling before priestcraft; and those who were politically and ecclesiastically free, in worse bondage still—the rich and rulers slaves to their own passions. Conscious of His inward Deity and of His Father’s intentions, He, without hurry, without the excitement which would mark the mere earthly Liberator, calmly said, “Ye shall be free.” 1. First, then, we have to face this fact, that we are in bondage.—The Jews felt their political position acutely; they writhed under foreign dominion, and again and again broke out into rebellion, seeking an external freedom by casting off the hated Roman yoke. It was intolerable to them to be considered the slaves of Cæsar, and the most horrible scenes attended their several patriotic uprisings. The purpose of our Lord was to convince them of an underlying slavery, which accounted for their political servitude, and to confer upon them the spiritual liberty which contains the potency and promise of all freedoms. The essential slavery is interior; political coercion may imprison the body or intellectual error degrade the mind, but by far the most abject and fatal bondage is that of the soul under the dominion of ignorance, passion, and wilfulness. (1) The bondage of the mind is one source and method of the essential slavery, the bondage of the mind being the tyranny of materialism. Our Lord often speaks of sin as unbelief, unbelief in the spiritual universe—blindness to God, to the spirituality of the law, to the rewards and retributions of the life beyond; and this unbelief, blocking out the spiritual universe, leaves us slaves of the senses. We are caged in by the body, limited by the bars of circumstance, victims of the material, the worldly, and the temporal. The carnally-minded may fancy themselves possessed of a large liberty, but earth and time at their widest are narrow to the spirit. To be governed from below is the essential slavery. To obey only animal impulses, to seek sensuous pleasure, to hope for nothing beyond social promotion, to find our motive and end in earthly things, and, in a word, to surrender ourselves to the fatalism of circumstance, is an infinitely worse slavery than to be bound hand and foot. In this cruel bondage thousands live and die without one great thought, principle, or hope in their maimed and fettered life. A recent writer upon the London Zoological Gardens refers to “the spacious aviary” provided for the eagles. Spacious aviary! One would like to know what the eagles think of that. Surely the amplest artificial horizon is narrow and the loftiest dome mean to creatures born to range the skies and seek the sun. The noble birds must feel in dull, strange ways the loss of their native heaven; the most spacious aviary can only grievously and mysteriously fret them. So the world, and the things of the world, painfully cramp the creature in whose heart God has set eternity; his cage is narrow even when the stars are its gilded wires. It is said that a bird of the north, confined in a yard, and longing for his arctic haunts, has been known in spring to migrate from the southern to the northern side of his narrow confines. And, however men doom themselves to the straitened life of sense, the instinct of eternity pathetically asserts itself within absurd limits, and distracts the soul with morbid repinings.1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson, The Bane and the Antidote, 228. (2) The bondage of the will is another part of the essential slavery. All see what an awful tyranny sin is when it has once become the habit of life. Some kinds of sin are coarser, others less offensive, but thousands who have committed sin find themselves miserably incapable of shaking off its tyranny; they are victims of vanity, envy, covetousness, ambition, temper, impatience, or sensual indulgence, and they struggle unavailingly with the despotism which holds them down. He who unwittingly grasps the handles of an electrifying-machine soon writhes in pain and shrieks for deliverance. Why does he not let go the torturing thing? He cannot; he is at the mercy of the operator, and is the butt of the crowd. It is thus with multitudes who have committed sin: they are its slaves; they are astonished at themselves, ashamed of themselves, filled with grief and remorse, yet utterly unable to break the infernal spell. There is often more hope for the poor wretch agonizing in the tentacles of the devil-fish than there is for some of these victims of vice. In the Bay of Naples are several islands famous for their beauty. The sky of infinite depth and purity; the sea pure as the sky, and rivalling its manifold tints of ever-changing glory; the landscapes rich with the silver of the olive and the purple of the vine; the atmosphere full of the balm of flowers; and the horizon studded with picturesque spots, as a royal girdle with jewels, conspire to create a vision of delight. The Greek and Roman in their quest of loveliness and pleasure built their palaces here, and to this focus of colour and joy the modern lovers of beauty hasten as butterflies to roses. Now one of these fairy islands is the property of the Italian Government, and its only inhabitants are convicts. How little to them all this matchless scenery! Fettered, watched, driven, scourged, they can only be sickened by the splendour and irritated by the lavish treasures of earth and heaven. Is it not much like this with unregenerate man in regard to the blessings of life and the glory of the world?1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson, The Bane and the Antidote, 235. (3) The bondage of the conscience is part of the slavery of sin. Men are built in three storeys, so to speak. Down at the bottom, and to be kept there, are inclinations, passions, lust, desires, all which are but blind aimings after their appropriate satisfaction, without any question as to whether the satisfaction is right or wrong; and above that a dominant will which is meant to control, and above that a conscience. That is the pyramid; and as the sunshine illumines the gilded top of some spire, so the shining apex, the conscience, is illumined when the light of God falls upon it. The commission of sin defiles the conscience, and conscience degrades us into convicts and cowards. The sense of dignity, freedom, and confidence is lost in the act of transgression, and with the consciousness of guilt comes fear and bondage. And is not life to the unregenerate man a harsh and gloomy servitude? We look upon God as “a hard Master.” Is not that the natural conception of God? The heathen look upon Him in this light and represent Him by terrible images in their temples; and although we do not set up ghastly idols, our pessimistic conceptions of the world’s Creator and Ruler are equally terrible. We think of Him, and are troubled. We look upon human duty as inequitable and exhausting, and fulfil our task with the discontent and bitterness of a slave. Finally, we look forward to the issues of life with deep misgiving. Through fear of death we are all our lifetime subject to bondage. At the bottom of all our pessimism, abjectness, and hopelessness is the consciousness of sin and guilt. Never did Shakespeare write a greater, deeper line than the one he puts into the mouth of Hamlet—“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.” The unintelligible wretchedness of human life and the vague terrors which haunt us are not in any wise mental in their origin and strength and to be abolished by fuller intellectual light; they arise in the accusing conscience, and here primarily must our bondage and cowardice be dealt with. The evils that we do, and that we cherish undone in our hearts, are like the wreckers on some stormy coast, who begin operations by taking the tongue out of the bell that hangs on the buoy, and putting out the light that beams from the beacon. Sin chokes conscience; and so the worse a man is, the less he feels himself to be bad; and while a saint will be tortured with agonies of remorse for some slight peccadillo, a brigand will add a murder or two to his list, and wipe his mouth and say, “I have done no harm.” We are ignorant of our sins because we bribe our consciences, because we drug our consciences, and will not attend to the facts of our own spiritual being.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.] 2. The second thing that claims attention is that we may be unconscious of our bondage. This unconsciousness may be due to our never having consciously enjoyed freedom, or it may be due to the long time that has elapsed since we lost it, so that slavery has become a second nature. (1) We may never have opened our hearts to the joy of being free. There is nothing about us that is more remarkable and more awful than the power that we have, by not attending to something, of making that something practically non-existent. The great searchlights that they now have on battleships will fling a beam of terrible revealing power on one small segment of the vast circle of the sea; and all the rest, though it may be filled with the enemy’s fleet, will be lying in darkness. So just because we will not think of the facts of our slavery to sin, the facts are non-existent as far as we are concerned. Surely it is not a thing worthy of a man never to go down into the deep places of his own heart and see the ugly things that coil and wrestle and swarm and multiply there. Ezekiel was once led to a place where, through a hole broken in the wall, there was shown him an inner chamber, on the walls of which were painted the hideous idols of the heathen. And there, in the presence of the foul shapes, stood venerable priests and official dignitaries of Israel, with their censers in their hands, and their backs to the oracle of God. There is a chamber like that in all our hearts; and it would be a great deal better that we should go down, through the hole in the wall, and see it than that we should live, as so many of us do, in this fool’s paradise of ignorance of our own sin.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.] (2) The unconsciousness may be due to the force of habit. A slave may be only all the more a slave that he is insensible to his bondage. There is no sense of bondage when the instincts of freedom are unrepressed; but neither is there any when despotism has lasted long enough to kill them out. A man’s nature may have become so thoroughly habituated to slavery that he has ceased to know or think of anything better. On the other hand, the very consciousness of bondage is a kind of emancipation. He who has begun to know and feel the irksomeness of his limits, is already, in a sense, beyond them. There must be in him at least some measure of, and sympathy with, what transcends the bounds that hem him in, before he can feel them as bounds. Pain is the proof that vitality is not extinct. Shame is the witness that the soul is not utterly lost to goodness. And the blush on the slave’s cheek and the sense of degradation in his heart are at least the sign that he is not all a slave. In the closing stanzas of that most graphic yet touching poem, “The Prisoner of Chillon,” Byron well expresses the deadness of soul, the hopelessness, and even carelessness concerning life and freedom, begotten in those who have too long worn the chains of slavery. For the canker of such fetters eats more deeply into the soul than into the enchained limbs. It might be months, or years, or days, I kept no count, I took no note, I had no hope my eyes to raise And clear them of their dreary mote; At last men came to set me free, I asked not why, and reck’d not where, It was at length the same to me, Fetter’d or fetterless to be I learn’d to love despair. And thus when they appear’d at last, And all my bonds aside were cast, These heavy walls to me had grown A hermitage—and all my own! And half I felt as they were come To tear me from a second home. II The Truth that Liberates All truth gives freedom. We hardly need to prove this in the present day. We know that in every sphere ignorance is bondage, and knowledge is power. So sure are we of it that we fearlessly argue from effect to cause. That which fetters is not true, that which frees us and gives us power cannot be false. 1. The craving for liberty lies deep in human nature, and many means have been tried to satisfy it. (1) Force has been tried. Wherever force has been used on the side of freedom we honour it; the names which we pronounce in boyhood with enthusiasm are those of the liberators of nations and the vindicators of liberty. Israel had had such—Joshua, the Judges, Judas Maccabæus. Had the Son of God willed so to come, even on human data the success was certain. Let us waive the truth of His inward Deity, of His miraculous power, of His power to summon to His will more than twelve legions of angels. Let us only notice now that men’s hearts were full of Him, ripe for revolt; and that at a single word of His, thrice three hundred thousand swords would have started from their scabbards. But had He so come, one nation might have gained liberty; not the race of man. Moreover, the liberty would only have been independence of a foreign conqueror. Therefore as a conquering king He did not come. Cromwell was strong that things obtained by force, though never so good in themselves, are both less to the ruler’s honour and less likely to last. “What we gain in a free way is better than twice as much in a forced, and will be more truly ours and our posterity’s”; and the safest test of any constitution is its acceptance by the people. And again, “It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition he may abuse it.” The root of all external freedom is here.1 [Note: John Morley, Oliver Cromwell, 513. (2) Legislation has been tried. Perhaps only once has this been done successfully, and by a single effort. When the names of conquerors shall have been forgotten, and modern civilization shall have become obsolete, when England’s shall be ancient history, one Act of hers will be remembered as a record of her greatness, that Act by which in costly sacrifice she emancipated her slaves. But one thing England could not do. She could give freedom, but she could not make fit for freedom, she could not make it lasting. The stroke of a monarch’s pen will do the one, the discipline of ages is needed for the other. Give to-morrow a constitution to some feeble Eastern nation or a horde of savages, and in half a century they will be subjected again. Therefore the Son of Man did not come to free the world by legislation. (3) Civilization has been tried. Civilization does free; intellect equalizes. Every step of civilization is a victory over some lower instinct. But civilization contains within itself the elements of a fresh servitude. Man conquers the powers of nature and becomes in turn their slave. The workman is in bondage to the machine which does his will; his hours, his wages, his personal habits are determined by it. The rich man fills his house with luxuries, and cannot do without them. A highly civilized community is a very spectacle of servitude. Man is there, a slave to dress, to hours, to manners, to conventions, to etiquette. Things contrived to make his life more easy become his masters. Therefore Jesus did not talk of the progress of the species or the growth of civilization. He did not trust the world’s hope of liberty to a right division of property. He freed the inner man, that so the outer might become free too. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” If there were any doubt as to Christianity being truth, that complete freedom, which cannot be oppressed by anything, and which a man experiences the moment he makes the Christian life-conception his own, would be an undoubted proof of its truth.1 [Note: Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You (Complete Works, xx. 220).] 2. Only the Truth can make us free. We must be true in our attitude to ourselves and to our fellow-men. (1) Of course the Truth meant is not mere information. In that sense, the wisest of men can know only a little; he has to content himself with being ignorant of all but a fraction of what is knowable. And, what is more important, true wisdom does not depend upon the extent of a man’s information. There cannot indeed be wisdom without information, gathered from books and from communication with others; but such information is but the raw material out of which wisdom has to be extracted; and often a mind that is not possessed of any great store of knowledge, and whose experience is very limited, shows itself able to draw more light out of it than others who have had a wide intercourse with men and things. (2) Nor, again, is the Truth referred to the holding of correct doctrines in theology, or in any other subject. It has been one of the most fatal mistakes to regard such correctness according to some standard of orthodoxy as the root of the matter, and to suppose that the one thing needful was, by whatever measures might be necessary—by violence or constraint, by hindering men from speaking and thinking freely, by narrowing their lives, and so preventing the natural action of their minds—to confine them to one set of opinions. Opinions, however right, are mere prejudices, unless they spring from a living root in our own experience and thought. We have many opinions which have come to us, we might almost say, in our sleep—by imitation of those around us, by the fact that we have heard things said and never heard them controverted, or at best, by a superficial exercise of our understanding upon first appearances. Such opinions therefore sit upon us very lightly, and we could part with them without much loss or change. We should not feel diminished, nor would our lives be essentially altered, if they were turned into their opposites. (3) There is, however, a deeper kind of conviction than this, which is continually forming itself within every man, and constitutes for him the genuine result of his experience; a conviction as to the real meaning of his life in this world, what is most to be sought for, and what is most to be avoided, what he himself would wish to be, and what attitude he should take up in relation to his fellow-men; a conviction which may be said to constitute his real religion or to determine what he really worships. This conviction may not come readily to our lips, and indeed it often needs a kind of self-analysis, to which most men are very averse, to recognize it at all; yet it is continually shaping itself more and more definitely within us, and every act we do, and every serious thought we think, is a contribution to its growth. Every one is continually, by every action and thought, building up within him a true or a false view of his own nature and of the world, a view which puts him into a right or a wrong attitude to himself and to his fellow-men. Now, if we ask the secret of success or failure in this process, looking at conspicuous instances of either, what do we find? It is that success seems to depend upon a certain inward sincerity of soul, a willingness to apprehend the real facts of the case and to accept their lesson, upon a hatred of falsehood and illusion and a desire to stand in the clear light of day, and to understand the real meaning of the experience which life brings to us; while failure seems to be the result of a certain unwillingness to admit anything we do not like, a readiness to accept anything as true that flatters our desires, and an obstinate shutting of our ears to anything that opposes them. “O ye hypocrites,” said Christ to the Pharisees, “ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?” At first it seems hard that men should be condemned for not having insight enough to discern the signs of the times, that is, to see what were the really important circumstances in their surroundings and what was the line of conduct, of thought and action, which would make them useful to their day and generation. But the justice of the condemnation becomes evident when we realize that such want of discernment is due, not to merely intellectual limitations, but to that lack of truthfulness of soul which alone makes a man open to the inner meaning of the facts before him. In truth, men often go through life only half-awake, or seeing as in dreams only the pictures evoked by their own desires and feelings; and thus that which is most important in the experiences of their own lives is all but entirely lost to them.1 [Note: E. Caird, Lay Sermons Delivered at Balliol College, 30. 3. What, then, is the Truth which Christ says shall make us free? Truth is the vital law or principle of life. “If ye continue in my word … ye shall know the truth.” Clearly, this sequence of ideas regards truth as the vital principle of life. It is not a theory, a calculation, an abstraction, a logical deduction, but a practical continuing in the word of life. When a man has discovered the word which fulfils his life he has found the very soul and essence of truth. In no other way can truth be found, in no other way can it be satisfactorily tested. (1) The essential truth for the seed that is sown in the ground consists in the vital principle in virtue of which it germinates and unfolds its own proper life. By this principle it is distinguished from all the other products of the world, and receives its own charter of individual existence. The truth of the barley seed lies in that principle by which it unfolds its particular and distinctive qualities, and produces wholesome barley, and not something else. The truth of the rose tree is held in the principle which distinguishes it from all other flowering plants, and causes it to produce the beauty of the rose. Plainly enough, the truth of any and every plant does not consist in what botany discourses about them, but in the vital principle which gives them distinctive existence and perfection of life. The principle is, of course, as wide as creation. The essential truth for all created things lies in the potent principle in which they “live and move and have their being.” In the last issue, universal truth is the eternal pulse of the life of God. (2) The truth of intellect lies, therefore, not in any discoveries or theories of the human mind, but in the deeper laws by which the mind itself is constituted and developed. The things that are essential to mind, not the theories that are incidental to it, are its truth. The things that cannot be denied without contradicting the being of thought are indisputable truth. Among these are the ideas of order, arrangement, cause and effect, and universal relation. (3) When we carry this principle into the province of the human spirit, we reach the deepest home of truth, the last word upon which all others depend, to which all others are subjugated, and in which all others are completed. The truth for the human spirit is that which is experienced and realized by it as the energy and satisfaction of its own life; that which, in flowing through its being, imparts inspiration, expansion, and potency. For example, the consciousness of an indwelling God, the pulse of a universal moral law, and the potencies of immortality, are vital elements of our spiritual nature, being essential to spiritual self-realization. The spirit of man cannot deny these without committing spiritual suicide. These are as fundamental a part of spiritual being as order and relation are of intellectual being. It is in spiritual life, and there alone, that the truth of the spirit can be tested and approved. The word of Jesus Christ answers this test; for it has been proved by man’s spiritual nature to give life, and to give it abundantly. No arguments in the world can countervail a fact like this. As the principle of life for a tree constitutes the truth of that tree, so the proved principle of life for the spirit of man constitutes the truth for his spirit. In the word of Christ the vital principle of spiritual life is given in its perfect form; the indwelling God is invested with supreme glory, the consciousness of moral law is uplifted into its perfected grandeur, and the pulse of immortal life is flushed with the final energy of demonstration and revelation. In Jesus Christ the spiritual life of man has experienced a power and development unknown to it before. “As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.” For the spirit (which is the only rightful judge), this proof is irrefragable, for it lies in undeniable potencies of life. The question, “What is truth?” is satisfactorily answered. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” 4. Christ is “the Truth,” and His teaching, accepted by the will and expressed in the life, is the Truth that makes us free. The truth which He taught was chiefly on three points— (1) God.—Blot out the thought of God, a Living Person, and life becomes mean, existence unmeaning, the universe dark, and resolve is left without a stay, aspiration and duty without a support. The Son exhibited God as Love: and so that fearful bondage of the mind to the necessity of Fate was broken. A living Lord had made the world; and its dark and unintelligible mystery meant good, not evil. He manifested Him as a Spirit; and if so, the only worship that could please Him must be a spirit’s worship. Not by sacrifices is God pleased; nor by droned litanies and liturgies; nor by fawning and flattery: nor is His wrath bought off by blood. Thus was the chain of superstition sent asunder; for superstition is wrong views of God; exaggerated or inadequate, and wrong conceptions of the way to please Him. (2) Man.—We are a mystery to ourselves. Go to any place where nations have brought together their wealth and their inventions, and before the victories of mind you stand in reverence. Then stop to look at the passing crowds who have attained that civilization. Think of their low aims, their mean lives, their conformation only a little higher than that of brute creatures, and a painful sense of degradation steals upon you. So great and yet so mean! And so of individuals. There is not one whose feelings have not been deeper than we can fathom, not one who would venture to tell out to his brother man the mean, base thoughts that have crossed his heart during a single hour. Now this riddle He solved. He looked on man as fallen, but magnificent in his ruin. We, catching that thought from Him, speak as He spoke. But none that were born of woman ever felt this or lived this like Him. Beneath the vilest outside He saw this—a human soul, capable of endless growth; and thence He treated with what for want of a better term we may call respect all who approached Him; not because they were titled Rabbis, or rich Pharisees, but because they were men. Here was a germ for freedom. It is not the shackle on the wrist that constitutes the slave, but the loss of self-respect, to be treated as degraded till he feels degraded, to be subjected to the lash till he believes that he deserves the lash. And liberty is to suspect and yet reverence self, to suspect the tendency which leaves us ever on the brink of fall, to reverence that within us which is allied to God, redeemed by God the Son, and made a temple of the Holy Ghost. (3) Immortality.—Christ taught that this life is not all; that it is only a miserable state of human infancy. He taught that in words, by His life, and by His Resurrection. This, again, was freedom. If there is a faith that cramps and enslaves the soul, it is the idea that this life is all. If there is one that expands, and elevates, it is the thought of immortality; and this is something quite distinct from the selfish desire of happiness. It is not to enjoy, but to be that we long for; to enter into more and higher life—a craving which we can part with only when we sink below Humanity, and forfeit it. This was the martyrs’ strength. They were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might attain a better resurrection. In that hope, and the knowledge of that truth, they were free from the fear of pain and death. 5. We must know the Truth. A servant may obey his master’s will without any intelligent apprehension of its meaning, or sympathy with his intentions and aims. If he is sent on an errand, he may carry correctly the words of a message which he does not understand. He may go on a mission the nature of which is quite above his apprehension, simply following out certain precise directions without any discretionary power of action. He may construct, if he has mechanical skill, an elaborate piece of mechanism, simply working, bit by bit, according to the detailed plan or drawing placed before him. But suppose that by diligent study the workman’s mind has become developed and his knowledge increased, so as to enable him to understand the principle and enter with intelligent appreciation into the idea of the thing; or even more than that, suppose advancing knowledge and culture have raised him generally into a capacity of sympathy and fellowship with the master’s mind—then, in that case, though he might continue to obey the master’s behests, there would be a complete change in the character of the work. Only then have I reached the deepest conviction, only then does faith stand on the impregnable rock of certitude, when I can say, “I know this to be the truth of God; its teaching has touched the deepest springs of thought and feeling within my breast, it has awakened my conscience, moved my heart, kindled my aspirations after a, purer, better life, brought peace and rest to my spirit, and though a thousand authorities should contradict it, though Paul or an angel from heaven should teach another doctrine, I will not, cannot receive it.”1 [Note: John Caird, University Sermons, 206. (1) To desire the truth is the beginning. We might almost call it the end as well. The desire, if it is genuine, will inevitably teach a man the true road to follow. For the genuine desire to see and hold the truth is bound up with the longing for excellence which our Lord calls the hunger and thirst after righteousness. “If any man willeth to do God’s will,” our Lord says, “he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God.” To desire to see the truth is one condition of seeing it; to will to do God’s will is the other. The truth is revealed to those who are straining towards their Father in heaven. Heavenly aspirations, earnest desire for goodness, the face turned towards Christ, the desire ever to live by whatever within us is highest and best, the willing obedience to our own best thoughts, the cheerful, the glad resolution to do whatever shall seem to us kindest, truest, justest, purest, noblest—that is the life which opens the eyes, and, whenever God reveals any part of the excellence of His holiness, as He will assuredly reveal it to each man in fitting time, that is the life which catches the light, and that is the man whom the truth conducts to perfect freedom. (2) The light of truth is, in some degree, like the light of heaven. It comes by God’s ordinance for the most part, and not wholly by man’s seeking. The pearl of great price was found by the man who was seeking goodly pearls. He sought for truth, and he found in the course of his search the one truth of all. But the treasure hid in a field was found by one who was not seeking at all. The truth was given in the course of God’s Providence, and looked as if it came by chance. He accepted with his whole heart and soul the Christian representation of man as originally a child in the house of the Infinite Father, who speaks truth to him in a voice he can recognize as His. This representation he was well aware rests upon two vast assumptions, 1st, that man actually knows God, and, 2nd, that he is able to recognize His voice. He always frankly admitted that he could not prove these positions, but he held them fast as the main support of his intellectual and moral life. He strongly held that man reaches highest truth only when God utters it to his soul by His Word and Spirit. Through learning and science we get subordinate truths; but through Divine teaching alone the highest truth. This conviction, which took full possession of him, produced a beautiful intellectual humility. No one ever imbibed more of the levelling spirit of the Gospel that calls the sage to sit beside the little child in the school of Christ.1 [Note: David Brown, Memoir of John Duncan, 381. III The Liberty that Truth Gives The whole Bible is a book of liberty. It rings with liberty from beginning to end. Its great men are the men of liberty; and the Old Testament is the emancipator, leading forth out of imprisonment the people of God, who were to do the great work of God in the very much larger and freer life in which they were to live. The prophet and the psalmist are ever preaching and singing about liberty, the enfranchisement of the life of man. When we turn from the Old Testament to the New Testament, how absolutely clear that idea is! Christ is the very embodiment of human liberty. In His own personal life and in everything that He did and said, He was for ever uttering the great gospel that man, in order to become his completest, must become his freest; that what a man did when he entered into a new life was to open a new region in which new powers were to find their exercise, in which he was to be able to be and do things which he could not be and do in more restricted life. 1. What is Liberty? Try to give a definition of liberty, and it will be something of this kind: Liberty is the fullest opportunity for man to be and do the very best that is possible for him. There is no definition of liberty, that oldest and dearest phrase of men, and sometimes the vaguest also, except that. It has been perverted; it has been distorted and mystified, but that is what it really means—the fullest opportunity for a man to do and be the very best that is in his personal nature to do and to be. It immediately follows that everything which is necessary for the full realization of a man’s life, even though it seems to have the character of restraint for a moment, is really a part of the process of his enfranchisement, is the bringing forth of him to a fuller liberty. (1) Man thinks of every change that is to come to him as in the nature of denial of something that he is at the present doing and being, as the laying hold upon himself of some sort of restraint, bringing to him something which says: “I must not do the thing which I am doing. I must lay upon myself restraints, restrictions, commandments, and prohibitions. I must not let myself be the man that I am.” The Old Testament comes before the New Testament, the law ringing from the mountain-top with the great denials, the great prohibitions, that come from the mouth of God. Thou shalt not do this, that, or the other. Thou shalt not murder. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods. That is the first conception which comes to a man of the way in which he is to enter upon a new life, of the way in which the denial in his experience is to take effect. It is as if the hands were stretched out in order that fetters might be placed upon them. The man says: “Let some power come that is to hinder me from being this thing that I am.” And the whole notion, is the notion of imprisonment, restraint. So is it with all civilization. It is perfectly possible for us to represent civilization as compared with barbarism, as accepted by mankind, as a great mass of restrictions and prohibitions that have been laid upon human life, so that the freedom of life has been cast aside, and man has entered into a restricted, restrained, and imprisoned condition. So is it with every fulfilment of life. It is possible for a man always to represent it to himself as if it were the restriction, restraint, and prohibition of his life. The man passes onward into the fuller life which belongs to a man. He merges his selfishness in that richer life which is offered to human kind. He makes himself, instead of a single, selfish man, a man of family; and it is easy enough to consider that marriage and the family life bring immediately restraints and prohibitions. The man may not have the freedom which he used to have. So all development of education, in the first place, offers itself to man, or seems to offer itself to man, as prohibition and imprisonment and restraint. There is no doubt truth is such an idea. We never lose sight of it. No other richer and fuller idea which we come to by and by ever does away with the thought that man’s advance means prohibition and self-denial, that in order that man shall become the greater thing he must cease to be the poorer and smaller thing he has been. You capture a fish in the stream, and place it in a confining globe or bowl of water. You have taken away its liberty by restriction. But suppose that, instead of placing it in the globe, you fling it far away upon a far-stretching lea. You have not confined it. You have given it more free space than it had before. It was previously confined within the waters of the stream, but now all the wide world is an open space around it. Have you given it freedom? No; you have enslaved it by depriving it of its vital constraint. Within the constraint of the waters it flashed along joyously like a beam of light. On the open meadow, it gasps and writhes in pitiful helplessness and distress. It has lost its liberty in the lawlessness of licence. You have taken it out of those vital relations that controlled and perfected its activities.1 [Note: J. Thomas.] In a lecture given at Woolwich, Ruskin recalled an incident of his early childhood which his mother was fond of telling him. “One evening when I was yet in my nurse’s arms, I wanted to touch the tea-urn, which was boiling merrily. It was an early taste for bronzes, I suppose; but I was resolute about it. My mother bade me keep my fingers back; I insisted on putting them forward. My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said—“Let him touch it, Nurse.” So I touched it,—and that was my first lesson in the meaning of the word Liberty. It was the first piece of Liberty I got, and the last which for some time I asked for.2 [Note: E. T. Cook, The Life of Ruskin, i. 10. (2) But when a man turns away from his sins and enters into energetic holiness, when a man sacrifices his own self-indulgence and goes forth a pure servant of his God and his fellow-men, there is only one cry in the whole gospel of that man, and that is the cry of freedom. As soon as I can catch that, as soon as I can feel about my friend, who has become a better man, that he has become a larger and not a smaller, a freer and not a more imprisoned man, as soon as I lift up my voice and say that the man is free, then I understand him more fully, and he becomes a revelation to me in the higher and richer life which is possible for me to live. The man puts aside some sinfulness. He breaks down the wall that has been shutting his soul out of its highest life. He has been a drunkard, and he becomes a sober man. He has been a cheat and becomes a faithful man. He has been a liar and becomes a truthful man. He has been a profligate, and he becomes a pure man. What has happened to that man? Shall he simply think of himself as one who has crushed this passion, shut down this part of his life? Shall he simply think of himself as one who has taken a course of self-denial? No. It is self-indulgence that a man has really entered upon. It is an indulgence of the deepest part of his own nature, not of his unreal nature. He has risen and shaken himself like a lion, so that the dust has fallen from his mane, and all the great range of that life which God gave him to live lies before him. This is the everlasting inspiration. This is the illumination.1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Addresses, 82. (3) It is no wonder that, if the negative, restricting, imprisoning conception of the new life is all that a man gets hold of, he should still linger on in the old life. For just as soon as the great world opens before him he is like a prisoner going out of the prison door—is there then no lingering? Does not the baser part of him cling to the old prison, to the ease and the provision for him, to the absence of anxiety and of energy? There can hardly be a prisoner who, with any leap of heart, goes out of the prison door, when his term is finished, and does not even look into that black horror where he has been living, or cast some lingering, longing look behind. He comes to the exigencies, to the demands of life, to the necessity of making himself once more a true man among his fellow-men. But does he stop? He comes forth, and if there be the soul of a man in him still, he enters into the new life with enthusiasm, and finds the new powers springing in him to their work. When I bring a flower out of the darkness and set it in the sun, and let the sunlight come streaming down upon it, and the flower knows the sunlight for which it was made and opens its fragrance and beauty; when I take a dark pebble and put it into the stream and let the silver water go coursing down over it and bringing forth the hidden colour that was in the bit of stone, opening the nature that is in them, the flower and the stone rejoice. I can almost hear them sing in the field and in the stream. What then? Shall not man bring his nature out into the fullest illumination, and surprise himself by the things that he might do?1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Addresses, 88. 2. What is that Liberty which the Truth gives? (1) Is it political freedom?—Christ’s gospel did not promise political freedom, yet it gave it; more surely than conqueror, reformer, or patriot, that gospel will bring about a true liberty at last. And this, not by theories or by schemes of constitutions, but by the revelation of truths. God is a Spirit: man is His child—redeemed and sanctified. Before that spiritual equality, all distinctions between peer and peasant, monarch and labourer, privileged and unprivileged, vanish. A better man, or a wiser man than I, is in my presence, and I feel it a mockery to be reminded that I am his superior in rank. Let us hold that truth; let us never weary of proclaiming it: and the truth shall make us free at last. (2) Is it intellectual freedom?—Slavery is that which cramps powers. The worst slavery is that which cramps the noblest powers. Worse therefore than he who manacles the hands and feet is he who puts fetters on the mind, and pretends to demand that men shall think, and believe, and feel thus and thus, because others so believed, and thought, and felt before. There is a tendency in the masses always to think—not what is true, but—what is respectable, correct, orthodox: we ask, Is that authorized? It comes partly from cowardice, partly from indolence, from habit, from imitation, from the uncertainty and darkness of all moral truths, and the dread of timid minds to plunge into the investigation of them. Now, truth known and believed respecting God and man, frees from this, by warning of individual responsibility. But responsibility is personal. It cannot be delegated to another, and thrown off upon a church. Before God, face to face, each soul must stand, to give account. We hear much about “free-thought”; but free-thought is realized only in Him who delivers from the illusions of time and matter, and persuades us of the real and abiding universe. He fres the understanding from the most fatal of errors. He opens our eyes that we may see; strikes from the soul the fetters of sense; cleanses our wings from the clogging bird-lime of earthliness; and for the first time we are free, gloriously free like the eagle “ringed round with the azure sky.”1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson.] (3) Is it freedom of the will?—It is not enough to define the liberty which Christ promises as freedom from sin. Many circumstances will exempt from sin which do not yet confer that liberty “where the Spirit of the Lord is.” Childhood, paralysis, ill-health, the impotence of old age, may remove the capacity and even the desire for transgression: but the child, the paralytic, the old man, are not free through the Truth. Therefore, to this definition we must add, that one whom Christ liberates is free by his own will. It is not that he would, and cannot; it is that he can, and will not. Christian liberty is right will, sustained by love, and made firm by faith in Christ. Wherever a man would and cannot, there is servitude. He may be unable to control his expenditure, to rouse his indolence, to check his imagination. Well—he is not free. He may boast, as the Jews did, that he is Abraham’s son, or any other great man’s son; that he belongs to a free country; that he never was in bondage to any man; but free in the freedom of the Son he is not. An act is free when it is the expression of our own thought and will, when our own nature and our whole nature goes with it. If in what we do we are merely doing blindly another’s bidding, following mechanically the directions laid down for us, we may be a useful tool, a convenient instrument of a master’s purposes, but our work is not our own, but his; we are not free. To make us free, the work itself must constitute or contain the motive of our activity. The satisfaction or delight of doing it, and not any ulterior end or object, must be all in all to us. In the measure in which any other motive,—hope or fear, desire of honour or reward, dread of punishment or disgrace, nay, even a sense of duty or obligation,—interferes or intermingles with our activity, in that measure we are not free.2 [Note: John Caird, University Sermons, 208. “A man,” said Epictetus, is free only when “whatever is the will of God is his will too, and whatever is not God’s will is not his will.” This was a true definition of the highest freedom, provided that acceptance of the will of God is not a matter of necessity and submission merely, as it was with many of the Stoics. This would be the self-contradictory thing, freedom under compulsion. A man is truly free only when the will of God is not merely accepted, but loved and desired as that which is wholly good; when the love of God, of His Will, and of all that He is, becomes the active principle of the life. Then God’s will is for the man not merely law but love and life. He has the will of God, as far as may be, as his will; in the highest sense possible to man he is one with God.1 [Note: W. L. Walker, The True Christ, 27. (4) Is it freedom of the conscience?—Is it freedom of the inner self, carrying with it the fulness of moral freedom, and the superiority to all fears? Fear enslaves, courage liberates—and that always. Whatever a man intensely dreads, that brings him into bondage, if it be above the fear of God, and the reverence of duty. The apprehension of pain, the fear of death, the dread of the world’s laugh, of poverty, and the loss of reputation enslave alike. From such fear Christ frees, and through the power of the truth. He who lives in the habitual contemplation of immortality cannot be in bondage to time or enslaved by transitory temptations. Do not say he will not; “he cannot sin,” saith the Scripture, while that faith is living. He who feels his soul’s dignity, knowing what he is and who, redeemed by God the Son, and freed by God the Spirit, cannot cringe, or pollute himself, or be mean. He who aspires to gaze undazzled on the intolerable brightness of that One before whom Israel veiled their faces, will scarcely quail before any earthly fear. Of truth, as well as of love, it may be said that there is no fear in truth, but perfect truth casteth out fear. The eye which is strong enough to pierce through the shadow of death is not troubled because the golden mist is dispelled and it looks on the open heaven.2 [Note: Benjamin Jowett.] A lady with whom he was slightly acquainted assailed him for “heterodox opinions,” and menaced him with the consequence which in this world and the next would follow on the course of action he was pursuing. His only answer was, “I don’t care.” “Do you know what don’t care came to, sir?” “Yes, madam,” was the grave reply, “He was crucified on Calvary.”3 [Note: S. A. Brooke, Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson, 353. Then he stood up, and trod to dust Fear and desire, mistrust and trust, And dreams of bitter sleep and sweet, And bound for sandals on his feet Knowledge and patience of what must And what things may be, in the heat And cold of years that rot and rust And alter; and his spirit’s meat Was freedom, and his staff was wrought Of strength, and his cloak woven of thought. For what has he, whose will sees clear, To do with doubt and faith and fear, Swift hopes, and slow despondencies? His heart is equal with the sea’s And with the sea-wind’s, and his ear Is level with the speech of these, And his soul communes and takes cheer With the actual earth’s equalities,— Air, light, and night, hills, winds, and streams, And seeks not strength from strengthless dreams.1 [Note: Swinburne.] (5) It is the freedom of fellowship with God.—Freedom is perfect harmony between our souls and God’s law. Jesus is the truth that shows us God and gives us hearts to love Him; teaches us our relations to Him and enables us to live in harmony with those relations. “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” The choice is before us—the bondage of Satan or the liberty of the sons of God; slaves of sin or freemen in Christ Jesus. No other choice is open to us. We cannot say, “I will be free, but not in Christ.” We cannot free ourselves, else the Son would never have come to free us. We can be made free only by the truth as it is in Jesus. “If the Son shall make you free.” We can all admit that what the Son of the King does, He does with an authority and delegated power second only, if second, to the King Himself. But this is not all. This parallel will go only a very little way to meet the case. To the Christ, the crucified and risen Christ, and because He was crucified, the Father has committed the whole government of our world. This Son, the Son of God, became the Son of man, that He might do this very thing; so that the word is doubly true and doubly emphatic, the Son, the Son of God, being the Son of man. “If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” It is all to be attributed to the promise of God’s incarnate Son; there is no other way in which it can be accomplished. “Ye shall be free indeed.” It is a grand word, “indeed.” It is very comforting in its simplicity; and it is a word for wonder—“indeed.” There are many kinds of liberty, but not “indeed.” There is the liberty of forgetfulness; there is the liberty of licentiousness; but “indeed” means so much behind it, “Ye shall be free indeed.”1 [Note: J. Vaughan.] “I was one of a party who visited Chatsworth the other day. We were allowed the privilege of going through the noble house. But our liberties were severely restricted. We were allowed to pass rapidly through what is called “the showrooms,” but we were rigidly excluded from the “living-rooms.” In many places there were red cords stretched across inviting passages, and our progress was barred. If I had been a son of the house, I could have passed into the living-rooms, the place of sweet and sacred fellowships, the home of genial intercourse, where secrets pass from lip to lip, and unspoken sentiments radiate from heart to heart.”2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, British Weekly, Dec. 29, 1910. Truth and Freedom Literature Arnot (W.), The Lesser Parables, 62. Banks (L. A.), Christ and His Friends, 265. Brooks (P.), Addresses, 1. Burrell (D. J.), Christ and Men, 258. Burell (D. J.), The Spirit of the Age, 362. Caird (E.), Lay Sermons and Addresses, 21. Caird (J.), University Sermons, 196. Carter (W.), The Church of the People, 200. Chadwick (W. E.), Christ and Everyday Life, 154. Dresser (H. W.), The Greatest Truth, 221. Eaton (T. T.), The Southern Baptist Pulpit, 67. Farquhar (J. W.), The Gospel of Divine Humanity, 60. Fothergill (H.), The Hiding of His Power, 151. Hopkins (E. H.), The Law of Liberty in the Spiritual Life, 77. Horne (C. S.), The Doctrine of the Trinity, iii. Hutton (W. H.), A Disciple’s Religion, 186. Mayor (J. E. B.), Twelve Cambridge Sermons, 53. Mills (B. R. V.), The Marks of the Church, 189. Moore (A. L.), in Keble College Sermons, 211. Robertson (F. W.), Sermons, i. 265. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, x. (1864) No. 565. Temple (F.), Sermons in Rugby School Chapel, iii. 149. Thomas (J.), Concerning the King, 84. Trench (R. C.), Sermons for the Most Part in Ireland, 54. Trench (R. C.), Westminster and Other Sermons, 269. Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xxiii. (1883) No. 1246. Walker (W. L.), The True Christ, 21. Watkinson (W. L.), The Bane and the Antidote, 225. Whiton (J. M.), Gloria Patri, 205. Cambridge Review, iv. Supplement No. 91; vii. Supplement No. 163. Christian World Pulpit, x. 376 (Caird); xxxvii. 209 (Brooks); xlix. 145 (Gore); lxiv. 423 (Lang); lxvii. 97 (Henson). Contemporary Pulpit, 1st Ser., v. 104 (Cowie); x. 193 (Barry). Truth and Freedom And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.… If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.—John 8:32; John 8:36. 1. In the text we find united two of the greatest words in our language. There are perhaps no words in the language which have been so variously interpreted, or around which the conflict of opinion has raged more fiercely; no words which have had greater power to call forth the energy and devotion of human hearts, or which, on the other hand, have more often been employed to give an ideal colouring to base and selfish ends. How many rebels against just law, or wholesome moral restraint, have masked their caprice under the name of liberty; how many fires of persecution have been kindled in the pretended cause of truth! And, on the other hand, what noble battles have been fought for the most sacred interests of humanity, which were identified with these two names! We should blot out half of the heroic pages of history if we were to erase the deeds done, and the sufferings endured, for Truth and Freedom. In the text the two words are used to throw light upon each other, and, as it were, to exclude the false interpretations which might be given to each taken by itself. That is Truth which makes me really free; that is the genuine and only valuable Freedom which is based upon the Truth. 2. Let us recall the occasion on which the words were spoken. To some who had attached themselves (slightly, as it would seem) to Him, the Lord had said, “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Instead of joyfully accepting, they resented this gracious encouraging word of His, this promise, “Ye shall be made free,” and rejoined in displeasure—“We were never in bondage to any man.” How strangely men are often blinded by pride and presumption! Listen to these proud Jews, “We were never in bondage to any man”; while yet the whole past history of their nation was the record of one bondage following hard on another, they for their sins having come at one time or another under the yoke of almost every people round about them. They had been, by turns, in bondage to the Canaanites, in bondage to the Philistines, in bondage to the Syrians, in bondage to the Chaldeans; then again to the Græco-Syrian kings; and even at the very moment when this indignant disclaimer was uttered, the signs of a foreign rule, of the domination of a stranger, everywhere met their eye. They bought and sold with Roman money; they paid tribute to a Roman emperor; a Roman governor sat in their judgment hall; a Roman garrison occupied the fortress of their city. And yet, with all this plain before their eyes, brought home to their daily, hourly, experience, they angrily put back the promise of Christ, “The truth shall make you free,” as though it conveyed an insult: How sayest Thou, Ye shall be made free? We were never in bondage to any man. 3. These words of the Jews grew out of a total misunderstanding of the freedom of which Christ was speaking. It was not, in the first place, freedom from the yoke of the stranger, it was not deliverance from the tyranny of Rome, that Christ was promising here to as many as continued in His word, but freedom from the yoke of sin, deliverance from the bondage of corruption, from the tyranny of their own passions and desires. It was this that Christ promised, for it was this that He came from heaven to impart. That other freedom might and would follow in course of time; for men who are free inwardly are sure, sooner or later, to achieve an outer freedom as well. It was not, however, of this that Christ was speaking here, but of quite another freedom; and therefore, not caring to note that angry rejoinder of theirs, or to entangle Himself in controversy on so unprofitable a theme, but lifting up the whole question between Himself and them into a higher sphere, He replied, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.” Every sinner, He would say, is the servant, or slave, of the sin which he commits—is in bondage to it, and needs liberty, even the liberty which I, the Truth, alone am capable of giving him; which he can receive from no other hands save only from Mine. If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed; otherwise, you are slaves and servants, and such must continue to the end. The text, therefore, deals with— I. The Need of Liberation. II. The Truth that Liberates. III. The Liberty that the Truth gives. I The Need of Liberation Christ’s aim was to make all men free. He saw around Him servitude in every form—man in slavery to man, and race to race; His own countrymen in bondage to the Romans—slaves of both Jewish and Roman masters, frightfully oppressed; men trembling before priestcraft; and those who were politically and ecclesiastically free, in worse bondage still—the rich and rulers slaves to their own passions. Conscious of His inward Deity and of His Father’s intentions, He, without hurry, without the excitement which would mark the mere earthly Liberator, calmly said, “Ye shall be free.” 1. First, then, we have to face this fact, that we are in bondage.—The Jews felt their political position acutely; they writhed under foreign dominion, and again and again broke out into rebellion, seeking an external freedom by casting off the hated Roman yoke. It was intolerable to them to be considered the slaves of Cæsar, and the most horrible scenes attended their several patriotic uprisings. The purpose of our Lord was to convince them of an underlying slavery, which accounted for their political servitude, and to confer upon them the spiritual liberty which contains the potency and promise of all freedoms. The essential slavery is interior; political coercion may imprison the body or intellectual error degrade the mind, but by far the most abject and fatal bondage is that of the soul under the dominion of ignorance, passion, and wilfulness. (1) The bondage of the mind is one source and method of the essential slavery, the bondage of the mind being the tyranny of materialism. Our Lord often speaks of sin as unbelief, unbelief in the spiritual universe—blindness to God, to the spirituality of the law, to the rewards and retributions of the life beyond; and this unbelief, blocking out the spiritual universe, leaves us slaves of the senses. We are caged in by the body, limited by the bars of circumstance, victims of the material, the worldly, and the temporal. The carnally-minded may fancy themselves possessed of a large liberty, but earth and time at their widest are narrow to the spirit. To be governed from below is the essential slavery. To obey only animal impulses, to seek sensuous pleasure, to hope for nothing beyond social promotion, to find our motive and end in earthly things, and, in a word, to surrender ourselves to the fatalism of circumstance, is an infinitely worse slavery than to be bound hand and foot. In this cruel bondage thousands live and die without one great thought, principle, or hope in their maimed and fettered life. A recent writer upon the London Zoological Gardens refers to “the spacious aviary” provided for the eagles. Spacious aviary! One would like to know what the eagles think of that. Surely the amplest artificial horizon is narrow and the loftiest dome mean to creatures born to range the skies and seek the sun. The noble birds must feel in dull, strange ways the loss of their native heaven; the most spacious aviary can only grievously and mysteriously fret them. So the world, and the things of the world, painfully cramp the creature in whose heart God has set eternity; his cage is narrow even when the stars are its gilded wires. It is said that a bird of the north, confined in a yard, and longing for his arctic haunts, has been known in spring to migrate from the southern to the northern side of his narrow confines. And, however men doom themselves to the straitened life of sense, the instinct of eternity pathetically asserts itself within absurd limits, and distracts the soul with morbid repinings.1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson, The Bane and the Antidote, 228. (2) The bondage of the will is another part of the essential slavery. All see what an awful tyranny sin is when it has once become the habit of life. Some kinds of sin are coarser, others less offensive, but thousands who have committed sin find themselves miserably incapable of shaking off its tyranny; they are victims of vanity, envy, covetousness, ambition, temper, impatience, or sensual indulgence, and they struggle unavailingly with the despotism which holds them down. He who unwittingly grasps the handles of an electrifying-machine soon writhes in pain and shrieks for deliverance. Why does he not let go the torturing thing? He cannot; he is at the mercy of the operator, and is the butt of the crowd. It is thus with multitudes who have committed sin: they are its slaves; they are astonished at themselves, ashamed of themselves, filled with grief and remorse, yet utterly unable to break the infernal spell. There is often more hope for the poor wretch agonizing in the tentacles of the devil-fish than there is for some of these victims of vice. In the Bay of Naples are several islands famous for their beauty. The sky of infinite depth and purity; the sea pure as the sky, and rivalling its manifold tints of ever-changing glory; the landscapes rich with the silver of the olive and the purple of the vine; the atmosphere full of the balm of flowers; and the horizon studded with picturesque spots, as a royal girdle with jewels, conspire to create a vision of delight. The Greek and Roman in their quest of loveliness and pleasure built their palaces here, and to this focus of colour and joy the modern lovers of beauty hasten as butterflies to roses. Now one of these fairy islands is the property of the Italian Government, and its only inhabitants are convicts. How little to them all this matchless scenery! Fettered, watched, driven, scourged, they can only be sickened by the splendour and irritated by the lavish treasures of earth and heaven. Is it not much like this with unregenerate man in regard to the blessings of life and the glory of the world?1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson, The Bane and the Antidote, 235. (3) The bondage of the conscience is part of the slavery of sin. Men are built in three storeys, so to speak. Down at the bottom, and to be kept there, are inclinations, passions, lust, desires, all which are but blind aimings after their appropriate satisfaction, without any question as to whether the satisfaction is right or wrong; and above that a dominant will which is meant to control, and above that a conscience. That is the pyramid; and as the sunshine illumines the gilded top of some spire, so the shining apex, the conscience, is illumined when the light of God falls upon it. The commission of sin defiles the conscience, and conscience degrades us into convicts and cowards. The sense of dignity, freedom, and confidence is lost in the act of transgression, and with the consciousness of guilt comes fear and bondage. And is not life to the unregenerate man a harsh and gloomy servitude? We look upon God as “a hard Master.” Is not that the natural conception of God? The heathen look upon Him in this light and represent Him by terrible images in their temples; and although we do not set up ghastly idols, our pessimistic conceptions of the world’s Creator and Ruler are equally terrible. We think of Him, and are troubled. We look upon human duty as inequitable and exhausting, and fulfil our task with the discontent and bitterness of a slave. Finally, we look forward to the issues of life with deep misgiving. Through fear of death we are all our lifetime subject to bondage. At the bottom of all our pessimism, abjectness, and hopelessness is the consciousness of sin and guilt. Never did Shakespeare write a greater, deeper line than the one he puts into the mouth of Hamlet—“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.” The unintelligible wretchedness of human life and the vague terrors which haunt us are not in any wise mental in their origin and strength and to be abolished by fuller intellectual light; they arise in the accusing conscience, and here primarily must our bondage and cowardice be dealt with. The evils that we do, and that we cherish undone in our hearts, are like the wreckers on some stormy coast, who begin operations by taking the tongue out of the bell that hangs on the buoy, and putting out the light that beams from the beacon. Sin chokes conscience; and so the worse a man is, the less he feels himself to be bad; and while a saint will be tortured with agonies of remorse for some slight peccadillo, a brigand will add a murder or two to his list, and wipe his mouth and say, “I have done no harm.” We are ignorant of our sins because we bribe our consciences, because we drug our consciences, and will not attend to the facts of our own spiritual being.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.] 2. The second thing that claims attention is that we may be unconscious of our bondage. This unconsciousness may be due to our never having consciously enjoyed freedom, or it may be due to the long time that has elapsed since we lost it, so that slavery has become a second nature. (1) We may never have opened our hearts to the joy of being free. There is nothing about us that is more remarkable and more awful than the power that we have, by not attending to something, of making that something practically non-existent. The great searchlights that they now have on battleships will fling a beam of terrible revealing power on one small segment of the vast circle of the sea; and all the rest, though it may be filled with the enemy’s fleet, will be lying in darkness. So just because we will not think of the facts of our slavery to sin, the facts are non-existent as far as we are concerned. Surely it is not a thing worthy of a man never to go down into the deep places of his own heart and see the ugly things that coil and wrestle and swarm and multiply there. Ezekiel was once led to a place where, through a hole broken in the wall, there was shown him an inner chamber, on the walls of which were painted the hideous idols of the heathen. And there, in the presence of the foul shapes, stood venerable priests and official dignitaries of Israel, with their censers in their hands, and their backs to the oracle of God. There is a chamber like that in all our hearts; and it would be a great deal better that we should go down, through the hole in the wall, and see it than that we should live, as so many of us do, in this fool’s paradise of ignorance of our own sin.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.] (2) The unconsciousness may be due to the force of habit. A slave may be only all the more a slave that he is insensible to his bondage. There is no sense of bondage when the instincts of freedom are unrepressed; but neither is there any when despotism has lasted long enough to kill them out. A man’s nature may have become so thoroughly habituated to slavery that he has ceased to know or think of anything better. On the other hand, the very consciousness of bondage is a kind of emancipation. He who has begun to know and feel the irksomeness of his limits, is already, in a sense, beyond them. There must be in him at least some measure of, and sympathy with, what transcends the bounds that hem him in, before he can feel them as bounds. Pain is the proof that vitality is not extinct. Shame is the witness that the soul is not utterly lost to goodness. And the blush on the slave’s cheek and the sense of degradation in his heart are at least the sign that he is not all a slave. In the closing stanzas of that most graphic yet touching poem, “The Prisoner of Chillon,” Byron well expresses the deadness of soul, the hopelessness, and even carelessness concerning life and freedom, begotten in those who have too long worn the chains of slavery. For the canker of such fetters eats more deeply into the soul than into the enchained limbs. It might be months, or years, or days, I kept no count, I took no note, I had no hope my eyes to raise And clear them of their dreary mote; At last men came to set me free, I asked not why, and reck’d not where, It was at length the same to me, Fetter’d or fetterless to be I learn’d to love despair. And thus when they appear’d at last, And all my bonds aside were cast, These heavy walls to me had grown A hermitage—and all my own! And half I felt as they were come To tear me from a second home. II The Truth that Liberates All truth gives freedom. We hardly need to prove this in the present day. We know that in every sphere ignorance is bondage, and knowledge is power. So sure are we of it that we fearlessly argue from effect to cause. That which fetters is not true, that which frees us and gives us power cannot be false. 1. The craving for liberty lies deep in human nature, and many means have been tried to satisfy it. (1) Force has been tried. Wherever force has been used on the side of freedom we honour it; the names which we pronounce in boyhood with enthusiasm are those of the liberators of nations and the vindicators of liberty. Israel had had such—Joshua, the Judges, Judas Maccabæus. Had the Son of God willed so to come, even on human data the success was certain. Let us waive the truth of His inward Deity, of His miraculous power, of His power to summon to His will more than twelve legions of angels. Let us only notice now that men’s hearts were full of Him, ripe for revolt; and that at a single word of His, thrice three hundred thousand swords would have started from their scabbards. But had He so come, one nation might have gained liberty; not the race of man. Moreover, the liberty would only have been independence of a foreign conqueror. Therefore as a conquering king He did not come. Cromwell was strong that things obtained by force, though never so good in themselves, are both less to the ruler’s honour and less likely to last. “What we gain in a free way is better than twice as much in a forced, and will be more truly ours and our posterity’s”; and the safest test of any constitution is its acceptance by the people. And again, “It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition he may abuse it.” The root of all external freedom is here.1 [Note: John Morley, Oliver Cromwell, 513. (2) Legislation has been tried. Perhaps only once has this been done successfully, and by a single effort. When the names of conquerors shall have been forgotten, and modern civilization shall have become obsolete, when England’s shall be ancient history, one Act of hers will be remembered as a record of her greatness, that Act by which in costly sacrifice she emancipated her slaves. But one thing England could not do. She could give freedom, but she could not make fit for freedom, she could not make it lasting. The stroke of a monarch’s pen will do the one, the discipline of ages is needed for the other. Give to-morrow a constitution to some feeble Eastern nation or a horde of savages, and in half a century they will be subjected again. Therefore the Son of Man did not come to free the world by legislation. (3) Civilization has been tried. Civilization does free; intellect equalizes. Every step of civilization is a victory over some lower instinct. But civilization contains within itself the elements of a fresh servitude. Man conquers the powers of nature and becomes in turn their slave. The workman is in bondage to the machine which does his will; his hours, his wages, his personal habits are determined by it. The rich man fills his house with luxuries, and cannot do without them. A highly civilized community is a very spectacle of servitude. Man is there, a slave to dress, to hours, to manners, to conventions, to etiquette. Things contrived to make his life more easy become his masters. Therefore Jesus did not talk of the progress of the species or the growth of civilization. He did not trust the world’s hope of liberty to a right division of property. He freed the inner man, that so the outer might become free too. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” If there were any doubt as to Christianity being truth, that complete freedom, which cannot be oppressed by anything, and which a man experiences the moment he makes the Christian life-conception his own, would be an undoubted proof of its truth.1 [Note: Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You (Complete Works, xx. 220).] 2. Only the Truth can make us free. We must be true in our attitude to ourselves and to our fellow-men. (1) Of course the Truth meant is not mere information. In that sense, the wisest of men can know only a little; he has to content himself with being ignorant of all but a fraction of what is knowable. And, what is more important, true wisdom does not depend upon the extent of a man’s information. There cannot indeed be wisdom without information, gathered from books and from communication with others; but such information is but the raw material out of which wisdom has to be extracted; and often a mind that is not possessed of any great store of knowledge, and whose experience is very limited, shows itself able to draw more light out of it than others who have had a wide intercourse with men and things. (2) Nor, again, is the Truth referred to the holding of correct doctrines in theology, or in any other subject. It has been one of the most fatal mistakes to regard such correctness according to some standard of orthodoxy as the root of the matter, and to suppose that the one thing needful was, by whatever measures might be necessary—by violence or constraint, by hindering men from speaking and thinking freely, by narrowing their lives, and so preventing the natural action of their minds—to confine them to one set of opinions. Opinions, however right, are mere prejudices, unless they spring from a living root in our own experience and thought. We have many opinions which have come to us, we might almost say, in our sleep—by imitation of those around us, by the fact that we have heard things said and never heard them controverted, or at best, by a superficial exercise of our understanding upon first appearances. Such opinions therefore sit upon us very lightly, and we could part with them without much loss or change. We should not feel diminished, nor would our lives be essentially altered, if they were turned into their opposites. (3) There is, however, a deeper kind of conviction than this, which is continually forming itself within every man, and constitutes for him the genuine result of his experience; a conviction as to the real meaning of his life in this world, what is most to be sought for, and what is most to be avoided, what he himself would wish to be, and what attitude he should take up in relation to his fellow-men; a conviction which may be said to constitute his real religion or to determine what he really worships. This conviction may not come readily to our lips, and indeed it often needs a kind of self-analysis, to which most men are very averse, to recognize it at all; yet it is continually shaping itself more and more definitely within us, and every act we do, and every serious thought we think, is a contribution to its growth. Every one is continually, by every action and thought, building up within him a true or a false view of his own nature and of the world, a view which puts him into a right or a wrong attitude to himself and to his fellow-men. Now, if we ask the secret of success or failure in this process, looking at conspicuous instances of either, what do we find? It is that success seems to depend upon a certain inward sincerity of soul, a willingness to apprehend the real facts of the case and to accept their lesson, upon a hatred of falsehood and illusion and a desire to stand in the clear light of day, and to understand the real meaning of the experience which life brings to us; while failure seems to be the result of a certain unwillingness to admit anything we do not like, a readiness to accept anything as true that flatters our desires, and an obstinate shutting of our ears to anything that opposes them. “O ye hypocrites,” said Christ to the Pharisees, “ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?” At first it seems hard that men should be condemned for not having insight enough to discern the signs of the times, that is, to see what were the really important circumstances in their surroundings and what was the line of conduct, of thought and action, which would make them useful to their day and generation. But the justice of the condemnation becomes evident when we realize that such want of discernment is due, not to merely intellectual limitations, but to that lack of truthfulness of soul which alone makes a man open to the inner meaning of the facts before him. In truth, men often go through life only half-awake, or seeing as in dreams only the pictures evoked by their own desires and feelings; and thus that which is most important in the experiences of their own lives is all but entirely lost to them.1 [Note: E. Caird, Lay Sermons Delivered at Balliol College, 30. 3. What, then, is the Truth which Christ says shall make us free? Truth is the vital law or principle of life. “If ye continue in my word … ye shall know the truth.” Clearly, this sequence of ideas regards truth as the vital principle of life. It is not a theory, a calculation, an abstraction, a logical deduction, but a practical continuing in the word of life. When a man has discovered the word which fulfils his life he has found the very soul and essence of truth. In no other way can truth be found, in no other way can it be satisfactorily tested. (1) The essential truth for the seed that is sown in the ground consists in the vital principle in virtue of which it germinates and unfolds its own proper life. By this principle it is distinguished from all the other products of the world, and receives its own charter of individual existence. The truth of the barley seed lies in that principle by which it unfolds its particular and distinctive qualities, and produces wholesome barley, and not something else. The truth of the rose tree is held in the principle which distinguishes it from all other flowering plants, and causes it to produce the beauty of the rose. Plainly enough, the truth of any and every plant does not consist in what botany discourses about them, but in the vital principle which gives them distinctive existence and perfection of life. The principle is, of course, as wide as creation. The essential truth for all created things lies in the potent principle in which they “live and move and have their being.” In the last issue, universal truth is the eternal pulse of the life of God. (2) The truth of intellect lies, therefore, not in any discoveries or theories of the human mind, but in the deeper laws by which the mind itself is constituted and developed. The things that are essential to mind, not the theories that are incidental to it, are its truth. The things that cannot be denied without contradicting the being of thought are indisputable truth. Among these are the ideas of order, arrangement, cause and effect, and universal relation. (3) When we carry this principle into the province of the human spirit, we reach the deepest home of truth, the last word upon which all others depend, to which all others are subjugated, and in which all others are completed. The truth for the human spirit is that which is experienced and realized by it as the energy and satisfaction of its own life; that which, in flowing through its being, imparts inspiration, expansion, and potency. For example, the consciousness of an indwelling God, the pulse of a universal moral law, and the potencies of immortality, are vital elements of our spiritual nature, being essential to spiritual self-realization. The spirit of man cannot deny these without committing spiritual suicide. These are as fundamental a part of spiritual being as order and relation are of intellectual being. It is in spiritual life, and there alone, that the truth of the spirit can be tested and approved. The word of Jesus Christ answers this test; for it has been proved by man’s spiritual nature to give life, and to give it abundantly. No arguments in the world can countervail a fact like this. As the principle of life for a tree constitutes the truth of that tree, so the proved principle of life for the spirit of man constitutes the truth for his spirit. In the word of Christ the vital principle of spiritual life is given in its perfect form; the indwelling God is invested with supreme glory, the consciousness of moral law is uplifted into its perfected grandeur, and the pulse of immortal life is flushed with the final energy of demonstration and revelation. In Jesus Christ the spiritual life of man has experienced a power and development unknown to it before. “As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.” For the spirit (which is the only rightful judge), this proof is irrefragable, for it lies in undeniable potencies of life. The question, “What is truth?” is satisfactorily answered. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” 4. Christ is “the Truth,” and His teaching, accepted by the will and expressed in the life, is the Truth that makes us free. The truth which He taught was chiefly on three points— (1) God.—Blot out the thought of God, a Living Person, and life becomes mean, existence unmeaning, the universe dark, and resolve is left without a stay, aspiration and duty without a support. The Son exhibited God as Love: and so that fearful bondage of the mind to the necessity of Fate was broken. A living Lord had made the world; and its dark and unintelligible mystery meant good, not evil. He manifested Him as a Spirit; and if so, the only worship that could please Him must be a spirit’s worship. Not by sacrifices is God pleased; nor by droned litanies and liturgies; nor by fawning and flattery: nor is His wrath bought off by blood. Thus was the chain of superstition sent asunder; for superstition is wrong views of God; exaggerated or inadequate, and wrong conceptions of the way to please Him. (2) Man.—We are a mystery to ourselves. Go to any place where nations have brought together their wealth and their inventions, and before the victories of mind you stand in reverence. Then stop to look at the passing crowds who have attained that civilization. Think of their low aims, their mean lives, their conformation only a little higher than that of brute creatures, and a painful sense of degradation steals upon you. So great and yet so mean! And so of individuals. There is not one whose feelings have not been deeper than we can fathom, not one who would venture to tell out to his brother man the mean, base thoughts that have crossed his heart during a single hour. Now this riddle He solved. He looked on man as fallen, but magnificent in his ruin. We, catching that thought from Him, speak as He spoke. But none that were born of woman ever felt this or lived this like Him. Beneath the vilest outside He saw this—a human soul, capable of endless growth; and thence He treated with what for want of a better term we may call respect all who approached Him; not because they were titled Rabbis, or rich Pharisees, but because they were men. Here was a germ for freedom. It is not the shackle on the wrist that constitutes the slave, but the loss of self-respect, to be treated as degraded till he feels degraded, to be subjected to the lash till he believes that he deserves the lash. And liberty is to suspect and yet reverence self, to suspect the tendency which leaves us ever on the brink of fall, to reverence that within us which is allied to God, redeemed by God the Son, and made a temple of the Holy Ghost. (3) Immortality.—Christ taught that this life is not all; that it is only a miserable state of human infancy. He taught that in words, by His life, and by His Resurrection. This, again, was freedom. If there is a faith that cramps and enslaves the soul, it is the idea that this life is all. If there is one that expands, and elevates, it is the thought of immortality; and this is something quite distinct from the selfish desire of happiness. It is not to enjoy, but to be that we long for; to enter into more and higher life—a craving which we can part with only when we sink below Humanity, and forfeit it. This was the martyrs’ strength. They were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might attain a better resurrection. In that hope, and the knowledge of that truth, they were free from the fear of pain and death. 5. We must know the Truth. A servant may obey his master’s will without any intelligent apprehension of its meaning, or sympathy with his intentions and aims. If he is sent on an errand, he may carry correctly the words of a message which he does not understand. He may go on a mission the nature of which is quite above his apprehension, simply following out certain precise directions without any discretionary power of action. He may construct, if he has mechanical skill, an elaborate piece of mechanism, simply working, bit by bit, according to the detailed plan or drawing placed before him. But suppose that by diligent study the workman’s mind has become developed and his knowledge increased, so as to enable him to understand the principle and enter with intelligent appreciation into the idea of the thing; or even more than that, suppose advancing knowledge and culture have raised him generally into a capacity of sympathy and fellowship with the master’s mind—then, in that case, though he might continue to obey the master’s behests, there would be a complete change in the character of the work. Only then have I reached the deepest conviction, only then does faith stand on the impregnable rock of certitude, when I can say, “I know this to be the truth of God; its teaching has touched the deepest springs of thought and feeling within my breast, it has awakened my conscience, moved my heart, kindled my aspirations after a, purer, better life, brought peace and rest to my spirit, and though a thousand authorities should contradict it, though Paul or an angel from heaven should teach another doctrine, I will not, cannot receive it.”1 [Note: John Caird, University Sermons, 206. (1) To desire the truth is the beginning. We might almost call it the end as well. The desire, if it is genuine, will inevitably teach a man the true road to follow. For the genuine desire to see and hold the truth is bound up with the longing for excellence which our Lord calls the hunger and thirst after righteousness. “If any man willeth to do God’s will,” our Lord says, “he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God.” To desire to see the truth is one condition of seeing it; to will to do God’s will is the other. The truth is revealed to those who are straining towards their Father in heaven. Heavenly aspirations, earnest desire for goodness, the face turned towards Christ, the desire ever to live by whatever within us is highest and best, the willing obedience to our own best thoughts, the cheerful, the glad resolution to do whatever shall seem to us kindest, truest, justest, purest, noblest—that is the life which opens the eyes, and, whenever God reveals any part of the excellence of His holiness, as He will assuredly reveal it to each man in fitting time, that is the life which catches the light, and that is the man whom the truth conducts to perfect freedom. (2) The light of truth is, in some degree, like the light of heaven. It comes by God’s ordinance for the most part, and not wholly by man’s seeking. The pearl of great price was found by the man who was seeking goodly pearls. He sought for truth, and he found in the course of his search the one truth of all. But the treasure hid in a field was found by one who was not seeking at all. The truth was given in the course of God’s Providence, and looked as if it came by chance. He accepted with his whole heart and soul the Christian representation of man as originally a child in the house of the Infinite Father, who speaks truth to him in a voice he can recognize as His. This representation he was well aware rests upon two vast assumptions, 1st, that man actually knows God, and, 2nd, that he is able to recognize His voice. He always frankly admitted that he could not prove these positions, but he held them fast as the main support of his intellectual and moral life. He strongly held that man reaches highest truth only when God utters it to his soul by His Word and Spirit. Through learning and science we get subordinate truths; but through Divine teaching alone the highest truth. This conviction, which took full possession of him, produced a beautiful intellectual humility. No one ever imbibed more of the levelling spirit of the Gospel that calls the sage to sit beside the little child in the school of Christ.1 [Note: David Brown, Memoir of John Duncan, 381. III The Liberty that Truth Gives The whole Bible is a book of liberty. It rings with liberty from beginning to end. Its great men are the men of liberty; and the Old Testament is the emancipator, leading forth out of imprisonment the people of God, who were to do the great work of God in the very much larger and freer life in which they were to live. The prophet and the psalmist are ever preaching and singing about liberty, the enfranchisement of the life of man. When we turn from the Old Testament to the New Testament, how absolutely clear that idea is! Christ is the very embodiment of human liberty. In His own personal life and in everything that He did and said, He was for ever uttering the great gospel that man, in order to become his completest, must become his freest; that what a man did when he entered into a new life was to open a new region in which new powers were to find their exercise, in which he was to be able to be and do things which he could not be and do in more restricted life. 1. What is Liberty? Try to give a definition of liberty, and it will be something of this kind: Liberty is the fullest opportunity for man to be and do the very best that is possible for him. There is no definition of liberty, that oldest and dearest phrase of men, and sometimes the vaguest also, except that. It has been perverted; it has been distorted and mystified, but that is what it really means—the fullest opportunity for a man to do and be the very best that is in his personal nature to do and to be. It immediately follows that everything which is necessary for the full realization of a man’s life, even though it seems to have the character of restraint for a moment, is really a part of the process of his enfranchisement, is the bringing forth of him to a fuller liberty. (1) Man thinks of every change that is to come to him as in the nature of denial of something that he is at the present doing and being, as the laying hold upon himself of some sort of restraint, bringing to him something which says: “I must not do the thing which I am doing. I must lay upon myself restraints, restrictions, commandments, and prohibitions. I must not let myself be the man that I am.” The Old Testament comes before the New Testament, the law ringing from the mountain-top with the great denials, the great prohibitions, that come from the mouth of God. Thou shalt not do this, that, or the other. Thou shalt not murder. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods. That is the first conception which comes to a man of the way in which he is to enter upon a new life, of the way in which the denial in his experience is to take effect. It is as if the hands were stretched out in order that fetters might be placed upon them. The man says: “Let some power come that is to hinder me from being this thing that I am.” And the whole notion, is the notion of imprisonment, restraint. So is it with all civilization. It is perfectly possible for us to represent civilization as compared with barbarism, as accepted by mankind, as a great mass of restrictions and prohibitions that have been laid upon human life, so that the freedom of life has been cast aside, and man has entered into a restricted, restrained, and imprisoned condition. So is it with every fulfilment of life. It is possible for a man always to represent it to himself as if it were the restriction, restraint, and prohibition of his life. The man passes onward into the fuller life which belongs to a man. He merges his selfishness in that richer life which is offered to human kind. He makes himself, instead of a single, selfish man, a man of family; and it is easy enough to consider that marriage and the family life bring immediately restraints and prohibitions. The man may not have the freedom which he used to have. So all development of education, in the first place, offers itself to man, or seems to offer itself to man, as prohibition and imprisonment and restraint. There is no doubt truth is such an idea. We never lose sight of it. No other richer and fuller idea which we come to by and by ever does away with the thought that man’s advance means prohibition and self-denial, that in order that man shall become the greater thing he must cease to be the poorer and smaller thing he has been. You capture a fish in the stream, and place it in a confining globe or bowl of water. You have taken away its liberty by restriction. But suppose that, instead of placing it in the globe, you fling it far away upon a far-stretching lea. You have not confined it. You have given it more free space than it had before. It was previously confined within the waters of the stream, but now all the wide world is an open space around it. Have you given it freedom? No; you have enslaved it by depriving it of its vital constraint. Within the constraint of the waters it flashed along joyously like a beam of light. On the open meadow, it gasps and writhes in pitiful helplessness and distress. It has lost its liberty in the lawlessness of licence. You have taken it out of those vital relations that controlled and perfected its activities.1 [Note: J. Thomas.] In a lecture given at Woolwich, Ruskin recalled an incident of his early childhood which his mother was fond of telling him. “One evening when I was yet in my nurse’s arms, I wanted to touch the tea-urn, which was boiling merrily. It was an early taste for bronzes, I suppose; but I was resolute about it. My mother bade me keep my fingers back; I insisted on putting them forward. My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said—“Let him touch it, Nurse.” So I touched it,—and that was my first lesson in the meaning of the word Liberty. It was the first piece of Liberty I got, and the last which for some time I asked for.2 [Note: E. T. Cook, The Life of Ruskin, i. 10. (2) But when a man turns away from his sins and enters into energetic holiness, when a man sacrifices his own self-indulgence and goes forth a pure servant of his God and his fellow-men, there is only one cry in the whole gospel of that man, and that is the cry of freedom. As soon as I can catch that, as soon as I can feel about my friend, who has become a better man, that he has become a larger and not a smaller, a freer and not a more imprisoned man, as soon as I lift up my voice and say that the man is free, then I understand him more fully, and he becomes a revelation to me in the higher and richer life which is possible for me to live. The man puts aside some sinfulness. He breaks down the wall that has been shutting his soul out of its highest life. He has been a drunkard, and he becomes a sober man. He has been a cheat and becomes a faithful man. He has been a liar and becomes a truthful man. He has been a profligate, and he becomes a pure man. What has happened to that man? Shall he simply think of himself as one who has crushed this passion, shut down this part of his life? Shall he simply think of himself as one who has taken a course of self-denial? No. It is self-indulgence that a man has really entered upon. It is an indulgence of the deepest part of his own nature, not of his unreal nature. He has risen and shaken himself like a lion, so that the dust has fallen from his mane, and all the great range of that life which God gave him to live lies before him. This is the everlasting inspiration. This is the illumination.1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Addresses, 82. (3) It is no wonder that, if the negative, restricting, imprisoning conception of the new life is all that a man gets hold of, he should still linger on in the old life. For just as soon as the great world opens before him he is like a prisoner going out of the prison door—is there then no lingering? Does not the baser part of him cling to the old prison, to the ease and the provision for him, to the absence of anxiety and of energy? There can hardly be a prisoner who, with any leap of heart, goes out of the prison door, when his term is finished, and does not even look into that black horror where he has been living, or cast some lingering, longing look behind. He comes to the exigencies, to the demands of life, to the necessity of making himself once more a true man among his fellow-men. But does he stop? He comes forth, and if there be the soul of a man in him still, he enters into the new life with enthusiasm, and finds the new powers springing in him to their work. When I bring a flower out of the darkness and set it in the sun, and let the sunlight come streaming down upon it, and the flower knows the sunlight for which it was made and opens its fragrance and beauty; when I take a dark pebble and put it into the stream and let the silver water go coursing down over it and bringing forth the hidden colour that was in the bit of stone, opening the nature that is in them, the flower and the stone rejoice. I can almost hear them sing in the field and in the stream. What then? Shall not man bring his nature out into the fullest illumination, and surprise himself by the things that he might do?1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Addresses, 88. 2. What is that Liberty which the Truth gives? (1) Is it political freedom?—Christ’s gospel did not promise political freedom, yet it gave it; more surely than conqueror, reformer, or patriot, that gospel will bring about a true liberty at last. And this, not by theories or by schemes of constitutions, but by the revelation of truths. God is a Spirit: man is His child—redeemed and sanctified. Before that spiritual equality, all distinctions between peer and peasant, monarch and labourer, privileged and unprivileged, vanish. A better man, or a wiser man than I, is in my presence, and I feel it a mockery to be reminded that I am his superior in rank. Let us hold that truth; let us never weary of proclaiming it: and the truth shall make us free at last. (2) Is it intellectual freedom?—Slavery is that which cramps powers. The worst slavery is that which cramps the noblest powers. Worse therefore than he who manacles the hands and feet is he who puts fetters on the mind, and pretends to demand that men shall think, and believe, and feel thus and thus, because others so believed, and thought, and felt before. There is a tendency in the masses always to think—not what is true, but—what is respectable, correct, orthodox: we ask, Is that authorized? It comes partly from cowardice, partly from indolence, from habit, from imitation, from the uncertainty and darkness of all moral truths, and the dread of timid minds to plunge into the investigation of them. Now, truth known and believed respecting God and man, frees from this, by warning of individual responsibility. But responsibility is personal. It cannot be delegated to another, and thrown off upon a church. Before God, face to face, each soul must stand, to give account. We hear much about “free-thought”; but free-thought is realized only in Him who delivers from the illusions of time and matter, and persuades us of the real and abiding universe. He fres the understanding from the most fatal of errors. He opens our eyes that we may see; strikes from the soul the fetters of sense; cleanses our wings from the clogging bird-lime of earthliness; and for the first time we are free, gloriously free like the eagle “ringed round with the azure sky.”1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson.] (3) Is it freedom of the will?—It is not enough to define the liberty which Christ promises as freedom from sin. Many circumstances will exempt from sin which do not yet confer that liberty “where the Spirit of the Lord is.” Childhood, paralysis, ill-health, the impotence of old age, may remove the capacity and even the desire for transgression: but the child, the paralytic, the old man, are not free through the Truth. Therefore, to this definition we must add, that one whom Christ liberates is free by his own will. It is not that he would, and cannot; it is that he can, and will not. Christian liberty is right will, sustained by love, and made firm by faith in Christ. Wherever a man would and cannot, there is servitude. He may be unable to control his expenditure, to rouse his indolence, to check his imagination. Well—he is not free. He may boast, as the Jews did, that he is Abraham’s son, or any other great man’s son; that he belongs to a free country; that he never was in bondage to any man; but free in the freedom of the Son he is not. An act is free when it is the expression of our own thought and will, when our own nature and our whole nature goes with it. If in what we do we are merely doing blindly another’s bidding, following mechanically the directions laid down for us, we may be a useful tool, a convenient instrument of a master’s purposes, but our work is not our own, but his; we are not free. To make us free, the work itself must constitute or contain the motive of our activity. The satisfaction or delight of doing it, and not any ulterior end or object, must be all in all to us. In the measure in which any other motive,—hope or fear, desire of honour or reward, dread of punishment or disgrace, nay, even a sense of duty or obligation,—interferes or intermingles with our activity, in that measure we are not free.2 [Note: John Caird, University Sermons, 208. “A man,” said Epictetus, is free only when “whatever is the will of God is his will too, and whatever is not God’s will is not his will.” This was a true definition of the highest freedom, provided that acceptance of the will of God is not a matter of necessity and submission merely, as it was with many of the Stoics. This would be the self-contradictory thing, freedom under compulsion. A man is truly free only when the will of God is not merely accepted, but loved and desired as that which is wholly good; when the love of God, of His Will, and of all that He is, becomes the active principle of the life. Then God’s will is for the man not merely law but love and life. He has the will of God, as far as may be, as his will; in the highest sense possible to man he is one with God.1 [Note: W. L. Walker, The True Christ, 27. (4) Is it freedom of the conscience?—Is it freedom of the inner self, carrying with it the fulness of moral freedom, and the superiority to all fears? Fear enslaves, courage liberates—and that always. Whatever a man intensely dreads, that brings him into bondage, if it be above the fear of God, and the reverence of duty. The apprehension of pain, the fear of death, the dread of the world’s laugh, of poverty, and the loss of reputation enslave alike. From such fear Christ frees, and through the power of the truth. He who lives in the habitual contemplation of immortality cannot be in bondage to time or enslaved by transitory temptations. Do not say he will not; “he cannot sin,” saith the Scripture, while that faith is living. He who feels his soul’s dignity, knowing what he is and who, redeemed by God the Son, and freed by God the Spirit, cannot cringe, or pollute himself, or be mean. He who aspires to gaze undazzled on the intolerable brightness of that One before whom Israel veiled their faces, will scarcely quail before any earthly fear. Of truth, as well as of love, it may be said that there is no fear in truth, but perfect truth casteth out fear. The eye which is strong enough to pierce through the shadow of death is not troubled because the golden mist is dispelled and it looks on the open heaven.2 [Note: Benjamin Jowett.] A lady with whom he was slightly acquainted assailed him for “heterodox opinions,” and menaced him with the consequence which in this world and the next would follow on the course of action he was pursuing. His only answer was, “I don’t care.” “Do you know what don’t care came to, sir?” “Yes, madam,” was the grave reply, “He was crucified on Calvary.”3 [Note: S. A. Brooke, Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson, 353. Then he stood up, and trod to dust Fear and desire, mistrust and trust, And dreams of bitter sleep and sweet, And bound for sandals on his feet Knowledge and patience of what must And what things may be, in the heat And cold of years that rot and rust And alter; and his spirit’s meat Was freedom, and his staff was wrought Of strength, and his cloak woven of thought. For what has he, whose will sees clear, To do with doubt and faith and fear, Swift hopes, and slow despondencies? His heart is equal with the sea’s And with the sea-wind’s, and his ear Is level with the speech of these, And his soul communes and takes cheer With the actual earth’s equalities,— Air, light, and night, hills, winds, and streams, And seeks not strength from strengthless dreams.1 [Note: Swinburne.] (5) It is the freedom of fellowship with God.—Freedom is perfect harmony between our souls and God’s law. Jesus is the truth that shows us God and gives us hearts to love Him; teaches us our relations to Him and enables us to live in harmony with those relations. “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” The choice is before us—the bondage of Satan or the liberty of the sons of God; slaves of sin or freemen in Christ Jesus. No other choice is open to us. We cannot say, “I will be free, but not in Christ.” We cannot free ourselves, else the Son would never have come to free us. We can be made free only by the truth as it is in Jesus. “If the Son shall make you free.” We can all admit that what the Son of the King does, He does with an authority and delegated power second only, if second, to the King Himself. But this is not all. This parallel will go only a very little way to meet the case. To the Christ, the crucified and risen Christ, and because He was crucified, the Father has committed the whole government of our world. This Son, the Son of God, became the Son of man, that He might do this very thing; so that the word is doubly true and doubly emphatic, the Son, the Son of God, being the Son of man. “If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” It is all to be attributed to the promise of God’s incarnate Son; there is no other way in which it can be accomplished. “Ye shall be free indeed.” It is a grand word, “indeed.” It is very comforting in its simplicity; and it is a word for wonder—“indeed.” There are many kinds of liberty, but not “indeed.” There is the liberty of forgetfulness; there is the liberty of licentiousness; but “indeed” means so much behind it, “Ye shall be free indeed.”1 [Note: J. Vaughan.] “I was one of a party who visited Chatsworth the other day. We were allowed the privilege of going through the noble house. But our liberties were severely restricted. We were allowed to pass rapidly through what is called “the showrooms,” but we were rigidly excluded from the “living-rooms.” In many places there were red cords stretched across inviting passages, and our progress was barred. If I had been a son of the house, I could have passed into the living-rooms, the place of sweet and sacred fellowships, the home of genial intercourse, where secrets pass from lip to lip, and unspoken sentiments radiate from heart to heart.”2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, British Weekly, Dec. 29, 1910. Truth and Freedom Literature Arnot (W.), The Lesser Parables, 62. Banks (L. A.), Christ and His Friends, 265. Brooks (P.), Addresses, 1. Burrell (D. J.), Christ and Men, 258. Burell (D. J.), The Spirit of the Age, 362. Caird (E.), Lay Sermons and Addresses, 21. Caird (J.), University Sermons, 196. Carter (W.), The Church of the People, 200. Chadwick (W. E.), Christ and Everyday Life, 154. Dresser (H. W.), The Greatest Truth, 221. Eaton (T. T.), The Southern Baptist Pulpit, 67. Farquhar (J. W.), The Gospel of Divine Humanity, 60. Fothergill (H.), The Hiding of His Power, 151. Hopkins (E. H.), The Law of Liberty in the Spiritual Life, 77. Horne (C. S.), The Doctrine of the Trinity, iii. Hutton (W. H.), A Disciple’s Religion, 186. Mayor (J. E. B.), Twelve Cambridge Sermons, 53. Mills (B. R. V.), The Marks of the Church, 189. Moore (A. L.), in Keble College Sermons, 211. Robertson (F. W.), Sermons, i. 265. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, x. (1864) No. 565. Temple (F.), Sermons in Rugby School Chapel, iii. 149. Thomas (J.), Concerning the King, 84. Trench (R. C.), Sermons for the Most Part in Ireland, 54. Trench (R. C.), Westminster and Other Sermons, 269. Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xxiii. (1883) No. 1246. Walker (W. L.), The True Christ, 21. Watkinson (W. L.), The Bane and the Antidote, 225. Whiton (J. M.), Gloria Patri, 205. Cambridge Review, iv. Supplement No. 91; vii. Supplement No. 163. Christian World Pulpit, x. 376 (Caird); xxxvii. 209 (Brooks); xlix. 145 (Gore); lxiv. 423 (Lang); lxvii. 97 (Henson). Contemporary Pulpit, 1st Ser., v. 104 (Cowie); x. 193 (Barry). The Sinlessness of Christ Which of you convicteth me of sin?—John 8:46. It has some times been inferred from the context of these words that the word “sin” really means here intellectual rather than moral failure: “Which of you convicteth me of error? And if I say the truth, why do ye not believe me?” The second question is thus made to repeat its meaning into the translation of the first. But the word translated “sin” means moral failure throughout the New Testament; and our Lord is arguing from the genus to the species, from the absence of moral evil in Him generally to the absence of a specific form of moral evil, namely, falsehood. He is maintaining that as they cannot detect in Him any kind of sin, they ought not by their disbelief to credit Him practically with falsehood, or, at least, indifference to truth, and His own means of attaining and proclaiming it. It has also been thought that our Lord here only challenges the detective power of His Jewish opponents, and that He does not literally imply His sinlessness. But the challenge would hardly have been offered unless the Speaker had been conscious of something more than guiltlessness of public acts which might be pointed to as in some sense sinful. Sin, like holiness, is not merely a series of facts which may be measured and dated: it is a particular condition of the will, it is a moral atmosphere. It is more than the act and word; it is the attitude of the soul towards God and man. Sin dishonours God and lives for self rather than for others. Christ alone could say, “I honour my Father,” “I seek not my own glory.” The perfect life was based on a perfect motive. Our Lord claims, then, to be sinless in a very different sense from that in which a man might defy an opponent to prove against him a specific form of wrongdoing in a court of law. We are here in the atmosphere not of law but of morality; and morality is a question not of external facts merely, but of internal motives. The question, “Could the Jews convict Christ of sin?” is but a part of the greater question, “Was Christ sinless?” We shall consider— I. The Proof of Christ’s Sinlessness. II. The Value of Christ’s Sinlessness for us. I The Proof of Christ’s Sinlessness 1. External evidence.—All that we know about our Lord goes to show that He was sinless. This impression was produced most strongly on those who were brought into the closest contact with Him. (1) The Apostolic writings clearly emphasize this remarkable feature of Christ’s career—that it was without sin. “Who did no sin,” is St. Peter’s phrase about Christ. “Him who knew no sin,” is the kindred expression of St. Paul. “In him is no sin,” writes St. John in his First Epistle. “Without sin,” is the similar description of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. The important fact is that the New Testament writers were not unconscious of the extraordinary character of this “sinlessness” with which they credited Christ, or of the marked exception which it formed to the generally normal aspect of His life. It would not be true to say that the Synoptic portraiture of Christ is in the main supernatural. The “Son of man,” as described by His biographers, is genuinely human, and moves easily among His contemporaries. There are supernatural elements in the records, no doubt, but they do not obliterate the historical figure of the Saviour, or destroy the generally normal aspect of His earthly course. Mystery there is in abundance, but the true manhood stands out always to view. It would be difficult to construct a juster summary of the Synoptic account of our Lord than that which is contained in the text: “We have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but one that hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” Whatever else might be said of Him, this at least must be said, that He was truly man. Only one invariable human trait is absent from the portrait they draw—there is no sin in Christ. The marks of passion, of weakness, of pride, of the love of popularity, and the consequent lack of moral courage, of a thousand infirmities of the flesh, some of which we notice in all other men, are certainly not obvious, or anywhere forced upon our recognition, in the life and conversation which is mirrored in the four Gospels. On the contrary, Jesus was not only followed and loved, but, by those who knew Him best, He was worshipped before He died.1 [Note: N. Smyth, Old Faiths in New Light, 94. Renan’s Jesus is a charming Galilean with a certain sympathy for beautiful scenery and an affectionate tenderness for the peasants who follow him; but he is provoked to violence, impatience, base trickery, as soon as he finds his mission as a reformer unsuccessful. The Frenchman, bred amidst pious frauds, calls him the most delightful and wonderful of men, who practises innocent artifices, resorts to thaumaturgy unwillingly, but when he does resort to it is guilty of wilful imposture beside the grave of his friend. We in England should say he was a horrible liar and audacious blasphemer. We should pronounce the Jews right in the judgment which they passed upon him. To me the book is detestable, morally as well as theologically. It has brought to my mind, as I have said in my paper on it, that wonderful dream of Richter’s in which Jesus tells the universe, “Children, you have no Father.”2 [Note: F. D. Maurice, Life, ii. 464. (2) Christ’s sinlessness is apparent in the attitude of His enemies towards Him. When Pilate repeatedly asked the priests, who were clamouring for His blood, “Why, what evil hath he done?” all the answer they could give (sufficient, no doubt, for their purpose) was, “We have a law, and by that law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God.” The impression of Christ’s sinlessness is observable too in Pilate himself, who yielded to the wishes of Christ’s enemies, while he admitted the innocence of their Victim; in the restless anxiety of the wife of Pilate, haunted in her dreams by the thought that the blood of “that just person” might be visited on her husband; in the lower sense of the pregnant declaration made by the centurion at the cross—“Truly this was the Son of God”; above all, in the remorse of Judas. Judas, who had known Christ as Peter had known Him for three years of intimate companionship; Judas, who would gladly, had it been possible, have justified his treachery to himself by any flaw that he could dwell on in his Master’s character, was forced to confess that the blood which he had betrayed was innocent. In the hatred of the Sanhedrists, as described particularly in St. John’s Gospel, the purity and force of Christ’s character is not less discernible. It is the high prerogative of goodness, as of truth, in their loftier forms, that they can never be approached in a spirit of neutrality or indifference; they must perforce create a decided repulsion when they do not decidedly attract. The Pharisees would have treated an opposing teacher, in whom any moral flaw was really discernible, with contemptuous indifference: the sinless Jesus of Nazareth provoked their irreconcilable, implacable hostility. Even the Pharisees betray the impression of a quite original and wonderful elevation. For though they regarded Him as a sinner and despiser of the law, from the viewpoint of their inherited moral and religious axioms, yet they could not stop short at this and view Him as an ordinary sinful man, or teacher of error. Rather He appeared to them, in the very estrangement in which they had placed themselves towards Him, so much one possessed of power (Matthew 7:29; John 7:46), so wonderfully firm, strong, and great of His kind, that they were obliged to attribute to Him a superhuman power of evil, after they had resolved not to concede to Him a superhuman power of good.1 [Note: Dorner, in British and Foreign Evangelical Review, xi. 586. (3) How does the matter stand to-day, as from our modern standpoint we examine the facts? The most exacting criticism of the documents has not disallowed the Apostolic belief. The New Testament, read in the light of honest criticism, justifies, so far as documents can justify, the Apostolic doctrine of the sinlessness of Christ. In bringing a human career lived out in the first century to be judged by the moral standard accepted in the twentieth we are applying a test the most severe imaginable. If we were judging a man in order to appraise his merits, this test were the unjustest in the world; but in the case of the Son of Man, it is not so much unjust as inevitable. He, whom we Christians worship as the Incarnate Creator, must be able to command the homage not of one age only, but of all ages. Let the moral standard of mankind be raised as high as you will, it must never rise above the standard of Christ; His standard must always be the goal towards which the moral effort of the race is moving, and never a single advance in goodness must be unable to find its interpretation and justification in the complete goodness of the Son of Man. Applying, therefore, necessarily our educated twentieth-century consciences to the historic Jesus, is He stripped of His attribute of sinlessness? Rationalists of the baser sort accumulate what they describe as immoral, or contradictory, or unreasonable teachings from the Gospels, but if we have the patience to examine their procedure we shall find that it violates every accepted canon of sound criticism and cautious interpretation. Fairly examined, honestly interpreted, the teaching of Christ commands the deliberate approval of the general conscience of our age. Not even now would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete than “to endeavour so to live that Christ would approve our life.”1 [Note: J. S. Mill, Three Essays on Religion, 255. What impression does He make on us? His portrait is before us in the Gospels and other New Testament writings; we can still follow His steps, hear Him speak, look into His eye, watch the development of His character, observe His behaviour under the most diverse and trying conditions, and test Him by all the standards we apply to our fellow-men. What is the result? He stands faultless and unique among men, severed from them by the whole diameter of perfection. We see Him grow through a beautiful infancy and childhood into maturity, and then live a life and display a character in which we can find no flaw. He is pure truth and trust, honesty and honour, righteousness and reverence, goodness and mercy and love, sympathy and service and sacrifice. No excess or defect, fault of omission or commission, evil disposition or temper, selfishness or sinister motive ever mars the splendid beauty of His perfection. He fulfils all human relations, passes through all experiences, is seen in joy and in sorrow, under the whips and stings of malice and in the agony of crucifixion, and yet He never loses His poise and balance or gives way to any ill-temper, but is always pure sweetness and light. It is true that He shows indignation, but only such as is the expression of righteous wrath. As we watch this Man, there is nothing we would add to Him or subtract from Him, no criticism we would pass upon Him, no finishing touch we could give to Him, but we are lost in admiration of Him as the one perfect and most beautiful personality in all the world.1 [Note: J. H. Snowden, The Basal Beliefs of Christianity, 80. 2. Christ Himself claims to he sinless.—By what standard was He judging Himself? What was His conception of sin? How was it with His spiritual organs? Were they quick and sensitive, or were they sluggish and benumbed? What was the state of His moral consciousness? Before we can determine His claim to sinlessness these questions must be answered. (1) Until this Man of Nazareth arose, sin had never been tracked to its roots. The analysis had often been attempted, but it had never proved conclusive and ultimate. Christ’s analysis was an unveiling of its genesis. He probed behind ritual; He probed behind posture; He probed behind feeling; He probed behind thought, and His lance touched the innermost quick at the will. He pushed everything else aside as effects; He discovered the cause in the will. This was His uniqueness as a teacher. “Make the tree good, and the fruits will be good,” and He addresses Himself to the regeneration of the roots. This Man, with the claim to sinlessness, unveiled the nature of sin and revealed its contents to the light as they had never been seen before. (2) Christ’s spiritual senses were far more finely perceptive than even the delicate organ of sight. Let us recognize how unspeakably refined His soul must have been to be capable of registering such exquisite distinctions. If a poor woman came near to Him in a spirit of faith, His soul thrilled with the presence, and He said, “Who touched me?” If doubt and suspicion drew near unto Him, His soul was chilled with the presence, and “he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief.” So refined and delicate was His spirit that He perceived evil thoughts that lay unexpressed in the hearts of those about Him. “He perceived the thought of their heart”; “He knew what was in man.” His soul instinctively registered the presence of good and evil, just as a fine barometer registers the passing of a genial breeze or a chilling draught. In one constituted like Jesus, to be without the sense of sin was to be sinless, to be conscious of no disobedience was to have always obeyed.1 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn, Studies in the Life of Christ, 61. An artist goes into a building and is troubled by it exceedingly; a thousand laymen are there, and are quite comfortable. The artist’s eye instantly detects the false proportion, the line that is out of course, and his eye will turn to it; he may put very severe repressive restraints upon himself; he may make many a vow to be blind to the defect; but the trouble will come again and again upon him, because on that side of his life he is highly cultured, so much so as to be almost perfect. And by so much as any man is himself perfect, does he instantly detect what is defective and imperfect in other people.2 [Note: J. Parker.] II The Value of Christ’s Sinlessness for Us 1. Christ is our Ideal.—The sinless Christ satisfies a deep want of the soul of man—the want of an ideal. No artist can attempt a painting, a statue, a building, without some ideal in view; and an ideal is not more necessary in art than in conduct. Each nation has its ideals; so has each city, each family, each profession, each school of thought; and how powerfully these energetic phantoms of the past control and modify the present is obvious to all who observe and think. There is no truer test of a man’s character than the ideals which excite his genuine enthusiasm; there is no surer measure of what he will become than a real knowledge of what he heartily admires.3 [Note: H. P. Liddon.] Just as there are two ways for indicating the road to a traveller, even thus there are two ways for moral guidance in the case of a man who is seeking the truth. One way consists in indicating to the man the objects which he will come across, and then he is guided by these objects. The other way consists in giving the man the direction by the compass, which he is carrying with him, and on which he observes the one immutable direction, and, consequently, every deflection from it. The first way of moral guidance is the way of external definitions, of rules: man is given definite tokens of acts which he must perform and which not. “Observe the Sabbath, be circumcised, do not steal, drink no intoxicating drink, kill no living being, give the tithe to the poor, make your ablutions, and pray five times a day,” and so forth,—such are the injunctions of external religious teachings,—of the Brahmanical, Buddhistic, Mohammedan, Hebrew, and the ecclesiastic, falsely called Christian. The other way is to indicate to man unattainable perfection, the striving after which man is cognizant of; man has pointed out to him the ideal, in relation to which he is at any time able to see the degree of his divergence from it. “Love God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbour as thyself.—Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” Such is the teaching of Christ.1 [Note: Tolstoy, Epilogue to the Kreutzer Sonata (Complete Works, xviii. 426).] Whate’er thou’st won, remaineth still much more; Heaven hath abundance yet for thee in store; Still glows the grand Ideal on before!— Which all thy best achievements doth degrade, Thy boasted virtues dwarfs, and makes to fade, Yea pass into complete eclipse and shade. Ev’n he who such high eminence had gained Yet counted not that aught was yet attained, But onward to the goal with ardour strained,— Reckoning his reach but as the starting-place, Whence to pursue the spirit’s boundless race; Of life’s grand edifice but laid the base. E’en saints on high with heavenly honours crowned Their crowns of glory cast upon the ground, Not otherwise loyal and faultless found. Great is the goal, the guerdon ’fore thee set, No self-complacence must thy progress let, Press boldly on, the things behind forget; Part with thy past, let go!2 [Note: William Hall.] (1) Humble penitence grows in the life of a saint. How is it, then, that with our Lord the very reverse is the case? How is it that He is absolutely unconscious of any shortcoming or sin? Why is there not a vestige of personal penitence in any word of Christ’s? Why is He absolutely satisfied as He contemplates Himself? How is it that the possibility of sinning, or failing to do God’s will, never enters His mind? A good person is full of regrets, always discontented because be knows he is still far off from his ideal. Why does our Lord never express any such regret? How is He so sublimely conscious that His ideal is reached, or rather that He has never been for one moment separated from its realization? There is practically no answer to these questions but this—He is Himself the ideal that man is reaching after. Scripture is a succession of saintly biographies all upon one type, the penitential. By a sudden transition there springs up one solitary instance of a completely opposite type, which vanishes, and never reappears. But the solitary and insulated unpenitential type makes also a solitary assumption of worth, and the assumption is part of the portrait.1 [Note: J. B. Mozley, in Contemporary Review, vii. 495. If you want to find those who have the keenest sense of sin, you will not find them among the reprobates or among the newly repentant, but among the experienced and maturing saints. It is at the beginning of the Christian life, when the great heights of holiness are still to climb, that the sense of sin and of unworthiness is most imperfectly developed. It is growth in grace that deepens the consciousness of the blackness of personal sin and that makes confession of sin the painful wail of the soul. And so it is among the holy ones that you hear the most heart-sick expressions of sin. Here is John, the mystic of the twelve, fitted by his refinement of spirit to lean on the Master’s breast, and catch the soft whispers of the deeper things; and yet, from this man, there come the words, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” Here is Paul, of masculine mind and of childlike heart, abounding in labours, persistent in sacrifice; and yet in old age, when the veil was almost transparent, he writes to his beloved Timothy, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.” Here is John Bunyan, whose intimacy with the ways of the Almighty passed far beyond the human ken; brave, lowly, saintly, and yet his writings abound in agonizing confession of personal unworthiness and sin. And here is one of the saints of our own time, the holy Andrew Bonar, whose long life was like an unbroken beam of the Eternal light; and yet to the very week of his death his diary abounds in expressions of unworthiness and the pained confession of personal sin. These are the common characteristics of the lowly saints.2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, in The Examiner, March 26, 1903, p. 300. (2) The sinlessness of Jesus deepens the conviction of our own sinfulness. We no longer judge ourselves by law, or convict ourselves at the bar of conscience; His life is our law, and He is our conscience, and from Him comes our fullest and most convincing condemnation. But we feel sin as men could not feel it before Christ came. Fear has deepened into pathos, and penitence into the tenderest contrition, because although He was the sinless One, yet He was the suffering One—“For our sins and for our salvation.” Sinless, Christ has filled men’s hearts with a profounder sense of sin than even the saintliest men of old ever knew or felt. To the best of men life has become one long season of Lent—a season of penitence because the vision of His life and the vision of His Cross are ever with us. “Which of you convicteth me of sin?” has become not only His defence but our condemnation. For myself, it is only since His Divine image rose before my soul that I have properly learned what is the true state of man. Previously, I always measured myself with the little, and so appeared in my own eyes to be great. Now I measure myself with Him, and have become very little indeed.1 [Note: A. Tholuck, Hours of Christian Devotion, 31. Sin began in man with the dawn of the ideal. It was with the infancy of the race as with the individual infant; which, born a mere bundle of sensations and appetites, arrives gradually at moralhood, where it can sin, and does. A perception of sin, we say, is an element of moral progress. There are no shadows where there is no light.2 [Note: J. Brierley, Life and the Ideal, 40. Drop, drop, slow tears, And bathe those beauteous feet, Which brought from heaven The news and Prince of peace: Cease not, wet eyes, His mercies to entreat; To cry for vengeance Sin doth never cease: In your deep floods Drown all my faults and fears; Nor let his eye See sin, but through my tears.3 [Note: P. Fletcher.] 2. Christ is our Example.—A difficulty arises here in connection with the sinlessness of our Lord which has troubled some people. “How,” they say, “can He be our example if He could not sin? We are sinners. He is sinless. Is it of any avail to say to us, Be like Jesus Christ? We cannot be like Him, just because He is without sin and we are not.” Now, it is quite true that on the face of it to imitate Christ as we are is an impossibility. And, in fact, He never did preach Himself simply as an example apart from other claims that He made. He did not merely live a human life of perfect goodness and then say, “Be like me.” We must take what He said about following Him in connection with all the rest of His claim and His work. He did realize the ideal human life, but He also offered a propitiatory sacrifice for sin, and promised to give us of His Spirit whereby we can be made partakers of His holy human Nature. His first appeal to us is to believe on Him, that is, to entrust our lives to Him as God and Man. It is “Come unto me” first, and then “Learn of me.” It is only the man who has first handed over his life into the keeping of Christ, who has accepted His atoning work, who seeks His Spirit, who can really, with any likelihood of success, imitate the example of Jesus. It is only to the believer, pardoned by the sacrifice of Christ, filled with the transforming power of the life of Christ, that Christ is an example of conduct. It is a false supposition that the ideal of infinite perfection cannot be a guidance for life, and that, looking at it, it is necessary to dismiss it with a motion of the hand, saying that it is useless to me because I can never attain it, or to degrade the ideal to the level on which my weakness wants to stand. To reflect in this manner is the same as though a navigator should say: “Since I cannot go in the direction indicated by the compass, I shall throw away the compass or cease looking at it, that is, I will abandon the ideal or will fasten the needle of the compass to the place which at a given moment will correspond to the direction of my vessel, that is, I will degrade the ideal in accordance with my weakness.” The ideal of perfection which Christ has given us is not a dream or a subject for rhetorical sermons, but a most necessary, most accessible guide of moral life for man, just as the compass is a necessary and accessible implement guiding the navigator; all that is necessary is to believe in the one as in the other. In whatever situation a man may be, the teaching about the ideal, given by Christ, is sufficient in order to obtain the safest indication of those acts which one may and which one may not perform. But it is necessary completely to believe in this teaching, this one teaching, and to stop believing in any other, just as it is necessary for the navigator to believe in the compass, and to stop looking at and being guided by what he sees on both sides. One must know how to be guided by the Christian teaching, how to be guided by the compass, and for this it is most important to understand one’s position, and to be able not to be afraid precisely to indicate one’s own deflection from the one, ideal direction. No matter on what round man may stand, there is always a possibility of his approaching this ideal, and no position of his can be such that he should be able to say that he has attained it and no longer can strive after a greater approximation.1 [Note: Tolstoy, Epilogue to the Kreutzer Sonata (Works, xviii. 431).] 3. Christ is the Reconciler between God and man.—Christ’s sinlessness affects the value of His sacrifice. The sinbearer, as all the types of the Mosaic law prefigured, must be himself sinless—“a lamb without blemish and without spot.” The eternal, immutable, inevitable law of God claims an entire fulfilment. Who is to fulfil it? One has said, “Lo, I come to do thy will, O God.” Did He do it, or did He not? He twice says of Himself that He did do it; and at the supreme moments of His life. Once in His High Priest’s prayer, after the Paschal supper—“I have glorified thee on the earth; I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.” Once, just before He died—“It is finished.” Let us conceive (if we may without irreverence) that some one single sin, untruthfulness, or vanity, or cruelty, could be really charged on Him, and what becomes of the atoning character of His Death? How is it conceivable that He should even have willed to die for a guilty world? For while, if we look at it on one side, His death appears to have been determined by circumstances, on the other, it was as certainly the result of His own liberty of action. “No man taketh my life from me, but I lay it down of myself: I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.” At once Priest and Sacrifice, Christ is represented in the Epistle to the Hebrews as “offering himself without spot to God.” It was the crowning act of a life which was throughout sacrificial; but had He been conscious of any inward stain, how could He have desired to offer Himself in sacrifice to free a world from sin? Had there been in Him any personal evil to purge away, His Death might have been endured on account of His own guilt: it is His absolute Sinlessness that makes it certain that He died for others.2 [Note: H. P. Liddon, Passiontide Sermons, 14. The Sinlessness of Christ Literature Adderley (J. G.), in Sermons far the People, New Ser., iii. 126. Barry (A.), Sermons at Westminster Abbey, 165. Deshon (G.), Sermons for the Ecclesiastical Year, 160. Hadden (R. H.), Sermons and Memoir, 68. Henson (H. H.), The Value of the Bible, 146. Kuegele (F.), Country Sermons, New Ser., iv. 233. Lid don (H. P.), Passiontide Sermons, 1. Scott (M.), The Harmony of the Collects, Epistles, and Gospels, 92. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, ix. (1865) No. 492. Tholuck (A.), Hours of Christian Devotion, 30. Thorold (A. W.), Questions of Faith and Duty, 122. Tomlins (W. H.), in Sermons on the Gospels: Advent to Trinity, 190. Trench (R. C.), Sermons for the Most Part in Ireland, 87 Wood (W. S.), Problems in the New Testament, 31. Christian World Pulpit, lxxvii. 305 (Campbell). Churchman’s Pulpit; Fifth Sunday in Lent: vi. 206 (Hodges). Clergyman’s Magazine, 3rd Ser., i. 178 (Reaney). A Time to Work We must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.—John 9:4. These words were drawn from Jesus Christ by a remarkable question addressed to Him by His disciples. Our Saviour’s attention had been arrested by the sad but familiar spectacle of a blind beggar. We may reasonably infer from the Evangelist’s account that this afflicted man’s case was notorious. He was “blind from his birth.” Thus he presented to view in its most pathetic because its least disciplinary shape the very common, but not on that account more tolerable, phenomenon of physical affliction. This, then, was the occasion of the remarkable inquiry on the part of Christ’s disciples: “Rabbi, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind?” From the point of view of Jewish monotheism, suffering appeared to be in all cases the consequence of sin. But the difficulty was how to apply this principle to the present case. The only two alternatives presented to their minds, and indicated by the question of the disciples, viz. that either his own sin or that of his parents was the cause of his misfortune, seemed equally inadmissible. The context sufficiently explains our Lord’s reply. He does not deny the existence of sin either in this man or in his parents; but neither does He recognize the necessity of any moral connection between this individual or family sin and the blindness with which the unfortunate man was visited. Individual suffering is not often connected, except in a very general manner, with the collective sin of humanity. Hence it gives us no right to judge those who suffer, but only furnishes a summons to fulfil a Divine mission towards them by assisting them. As truly as evil exists in the world, so truly has God His work on earth; and His work consists in finding matter for good in evil itself. Hence all the acts by which we concur in the accomplishment of this Divine purpose are called “the works of God.” But this word is here applied more specially to acts which bear the seal of Divine Omnipotence, such as the physical cure of the blind man, and his spiritual illumination. The call to heal this unhappy one had made itself felt in the Lord’s heart at the very moment when His eyes beheld him, and it was with this feeling that He fixed them upon him. Jesus seeks to make His disciples share with Him the point of view from which He regards suffering, by applying it to His personal task during His sojourn on earth. I We Must Work 1. Christ felt this necessity.—With Christ it was not, “I may if I will”; not, “I can if I like”; not the mere possibility and the mere potentiality of work, but an imperious necessity—“I must.” He could not help Himself. If we may use such words concerning One who was none the less Divine that He was human, He was under restraint; He was bound; He was compelled. The cords which bound Him, however, were the cords of His Deity. They were the cords of love which bound Him who is love. “I must work.” It was because He loved the sons of men so well that He could not sit still and see them perish. He could not come down from heaven and stand here robed in our mortal flesh, and be an impassive, careless, loitering spectator of so much evil, so much misery. His heart beat high with desire. He thirsted to be doing good, and His greatest and grandest act, His sacrifice of Himself, was a baptism with which He had to be baptized, and He was straitened until it was accomplished. What a friend Necessity is! It stops our standing on one foot; it ends our looking at our watches, and wondering about three or four things; it moves the previous question; it says, “This one thing you do!” It is good discipline to conquer indecision, but it is better for us and for the world, knowing “what must be,” to be about it. It saves time. Goethe spoke of the “dear must.” Emerson calls a man’s task his life-preserver. Let us recognize the purpose of God in the inevitable, and accept it gracefully, whether discipline or duty. Swift adjustment means peace and power. Necessity will then be but the iron band inside the golden crown.1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 40. 2. As Christ’s followers, this necessity is ours.—“We must work.” Christ associates His disciples with Himself in His Divine enterprise of mercy. They, too, are commissioned to “destroy the works of the devil,” and the range of their activity must be coextensive with their Lord’s. Physical suffering, and all that makes for physical suffering—unjust conditions of living, insanitary dwellings, inadequate and misdirected education, harsh and unequal laws, oppressive social conventions—all the perennial springs of human misery and disgrace are within the sphere of that redemptive mission which was Christ’s in Palestine nearly two millenniums ago, and is Christ’s still, wherever His true disciples are found. Has He not identified Himself with them, clothing them with the authority of His own person? “He that heareth you heareth me; and he that rejecteth you rejecteth me.” “We must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day.” The exemplary worth of Christ’s conduct follows from this identity of His mission with ours, and the abiding importance of the Gospel but reflects the conviction of men that in the life therein recorded they can learn their own practical obligations. The work which Christ appeals to us to do is not left to our single-handed weakness or timidity. We are sustained by the example and the co-operation of a goodly fellowship, the goodliest and mightiest fellowship that ever banded together to cheer a fainting soul; no less a fellowship than God and Christ and all things. “For my Father worketh even until now,” said Jesus—no night for Him—“and I work,” and “all things,” said His Apostle, “work together.” Was ever band of workers like this: God, His Son, and all His universe, working for ever, working together, for good? Should the thought of that magnificent, harmonious fellowship, whose work is from everlasting to everlasting, marching triumphantly on through the generations, not brace the weakest will, strengthen the faintest heart, nerve the slackest hands of men whose day at the longest is short and rounded with a sleep? So Christ’s appeal is charged with all the forces of heaven and of earth, when He says, “We”—not I, as the Authorized Version has it—“we must work the works of him that sent me.” We—for He is not ashamed to call us brethren; and we, His brethren, must work. The Divine necessity lies upon men whose hearts can be touched by an appeal of Christ, and by the weird power of the night that is coming to bring to an end all the work of the day, be it never so faithful and never so earnest.1 [Note: J. E. McFadyen, The Divine Pursuit, 155. 3. God has appointed a work for each and all.—Vain are the complaints so often made, that we have no distinct work in life appointed for us; that we stand idle because we have not been called into the vineyard to labour. God has made duties for us, and placed us in the midst of them, just as He has made light for the eyes, and air for us to breathe. There is not an action of our life that may not become an act of worship, if it is consecrated by the love of God in the heart of the doer. But the common round of our common daily life is full of occasions of Christian duty. Who is he that stands idle because he is not hired? One it must be who can find neither poverty, nor ignorance, nor wickedness at his hand; who cannot influence one person by the Christian tone of his own life; who cannot sweeten the daily life of his home with kindness; who never comes near a sinner rushing headlong to his ruin; who cannot even find a child to encourage in struggling with an evil temper, or a stricken heart to be consoled by a word of sympathy. In the summer vacation of 1856 I remained behind for a few days. A message came from Royston that there was a German woman dying there who could not speak English, and was a Catholic. They asked if anybody could go to her from the College. Dr. Vaughan, who spoke German, at once volunteered to go. He asked me to go with him, and I drove him to Royston, which was thirteen miles from the College. In was in the month of July, and I remember it was a very hot drive. He found the poor woman alive, heard her confession, and gave her the Last Sacraments. I believe she died the next day. Some forty years afterwards, on my recalling this to his memory, he said, “Ah yes; I remember it well, and I have often quoted it as an instance that we never know how anything we learn may be turned to God’s account. He has His own design in prompting us to acquire, say, a language, and I have often cited this example of my visit to that poor German woman as an illustration of this, for it was the only occasion in my whole life that I ever had any practical need of the German language. I have no doubt that God inspired me to study German for the sake of that poor woman’s salvation.”2 [Note: Mgr. Fenton, in The Life of Cardinal Vaughan, i. 91. Lord, send us forth among Thy fields to work! Shall we for words and names contending be, Or lift our garments from the dust we see, And all the noonday heat and burden shirk? The fields are white for harvest, shall we stay To find a bed of roses for the night, And watch the far-off cloud that comes to sight, Lest it should burst in showers upon our way? Fling off, my soul, thy grasping self, and view With generous ardour all thy brothers’ need; Fling off thy thoughts of golden ease, and weed A corner of thy Master’s vineyard too. The harvest of the world is great indeed, O Jesus! and the labourers are few.1 [Note: Martha Perry Lowe.] II How We must Work 1. It must he God’s work.—Much has been said in these days as to work. Some of the most piercing and emphatic voices which the century has heard have made work the keynote of their message, proclaiming it as at once the end of man’s being and the gospel of his deliverance. So far, there is no fault to be found with them, for anything that will wake men and shame men out of idleness must be good. But, after all, work for the mere work’s sake is a doubtful evangel to preach. It is true that inactivity has its sins, but it is true that work has its own sins also. There are those who work till their work carnalizes them, and their being becomes sense-bound and earth-bound, dense as the clods that they break in their fields, mechanical as the wheels that they turn in their mills, shrivelled as the parchments that they study in their office-rooms. No, there is nothing that is necessarily elevating, nothing that is necessarily purifying, nothing that is necessarily acceptable, in work. Work may be done that is wrong work; work that is right may be wrongly done; and the only reception for which the workman is toiling may be this: “Unfaithful and unprofitable servant, who hath required these things at thy hand?” But here is a text for the labourer, both defining the scope of his tasks and ennobling and sanctifying their nature: “I must work the works of him that sent me.” That is, “What I do, I will do because God has assigned it, and I will do it, too, because God will therein be glorified, His character unfolded, His purpose proclaimed, and His gospel adorned among men.” And with that as our great guiding principle we have all that we need. It contains the secret of labour’s redemption, it yields the germ and the pledge of labour’s reward. It may be questioned whether any work of fiction ever produced so tangible an effect as the impetus which Uncle Tom’s Cabin gave to the destruction of American slavery. The author’s account of the matter was characteristically simple: “I did not write it; God wrote it.”1 [Note: G. W. E. Russell, Afterthoughts, 70. I too could now say to myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name! ’Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called To-day; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.2 [Note: Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, bk. ii. ch. x.] 2. To do God’s work we must have received His Spirit.—We cannot do God’s works unless we have received His Spirit and accepted His will as the law of our lives so as to have become fellow-workers with Him. It is only those who surrender their hearts in faith and love to God, only those in whose souls God savingly works by His Holy Spirit, who can truly labour in God’s service. Otherwise than through regeneration there is no possibility of becoming one of His workmen. His works are spiritual works which can be performed only by spiritual men. If we have not repented of our sins and turned from them to God; if we have not believed on the Lord Jesus Christ; if we have not come under the influence of the Holy Spirit; then, no matter how diligently and strenuously we may toil, or how useful our exertions may seem to ourselves or others, the works we do are not the works which God would have us to do, for they are not done in dependence on His Spirit. III When We must Work 1. Christ’s interpretation of the “day.”—Christ uses the language of urgency. His Divine mission must be fulfilled in the brief space of His “day” of opportunity, or not fulfilled at all. We gain a glimpse of our Lord’s view of His own career. He, like all His brethren, worked under the hard conditions of risk and uncertainty. His “day” was a short one. The life of Jesus in the world had ended when most human lives may be said to be but beginning. It is, indeed, true that His earthly career is but an episode in His warfare against evil, but it is no less true that it is the supreme episode on which hung the issue of men’s redemption. After the Passion the conditions of Christ’s life changed; there was no longer any opportunity for the performance of those works by which, in terms of human experience, the character of the unseen, unknown Father might be discovered to human view. The life of Christ constitutes the revelation of God, and that revelation is adequate and faithful as that life is perfect. This image partially finds place in the “Sayings of the Jewish Fathers”: R. Tarphon said, “The day is short, and the task is great, and the workmen are sluggish, and the reward is much, and the Master of the house is urgent.” 2. The brevity and uncertainty of life.—“The day is short.” When another year has gone into the dead past beyond our recall for ever, when we look back and think how rapidly, and, it may be, how unprofitably, it has glided away, the impression of this truth may be vivid upon us; but we seldom feel it as we ought. It is not useless admonition that Scripture gives us when it insists so often on life’s brevity, comparing human existence to the most fleeting things in nature; to the mist which disappears before the sun, to the cloud driven by the winds, to the shadows that flit across the landscape, to the smoke that ascends and mingles with the atmosphere, to the leaf of the forest tree, and to the flower of the field. It cannot be compared to any of the more stable objects of nature. How many generations of men has the earth successively borne on her bosom; on how many generations have the sun and the moon looked down! There is many a tree still fresh and vigorous, although the hands that planted it have for centuries been dust. Man is far more fragile even than many of his own works. From the pyramids of Egypt more than “forty centuries look down upon us”; but where are the builders? The day of our life is as uncertain as it is short. It is a day in which there is often no gradual fading away of the light to warn us that it is drawing near to a close. It is often with man’s life as with countries in other zones than ours, where night, instead of climbing gradually up the heavens and giving evidence of its approach by an ever-deepening twilight, overspreads it at once and envelops all living creatures in sudden darkness. In the course we have to run there is no point, however near the one from which we started, where our race may not terminate. In the whole period of life usually allotted to man there is no year, month, week, day, or even instant, but it may be the last to each individual. There is no truth of which we are more frequently or strikingly reminded. Have you measured and mapped out this short life and its possibilities? Do you know, if you read this, that you cannot read that—that what you lose to-day you cannot gain to-morrow?1 [Note: Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (Works, xviii.62).] It is not merely of the literal shortness of our time, or the possible nearness of death, that our Lord’s words should set us thinking, when He warns us that we must work while it is day. If we measure our life by the things we should accomplish in it, by the character it should attain to, by the purposes that should be bearing fruit in it, and not by mere lapse of time, we soon come to feel how very short it is, and the sense of present duty grows imperative. It is thus that the thoughtful man looks at his life; and he feels that there is no such thing as length of days which he can without blame live carelessly, because in these careless days critical opportunities will have slipped away irrecoverably; he will have drifted in his carelessness past some turning-point which he will not see again, and have missed the so-called chances that come no more.2 [Note: Bishop Percival, Sermons at Rugby, 27. I have long said: “The night cometh,” etc., but that does not make it right to act in a hurry. Better not do a thing than do it badly. I must be patient and wait on God. If it is His Will I should do more He will give me time. I am not serving Him by blundering.1 [Note: Newman, in Wilfrid Ward’s Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman, ii. 126. Our life is long. Not so, wise Angels say Who watch us waste it, trembling while they weigh Against eternity one squandered day. Our life is long. Not so, the Saints protest, Filled full of consolation and of rest; “Short ill, long good, one long unending best.” Our life is long. Christ’s word sounds different: “Night cometh; no more work when day is spent.” Repent and work to-day, work and repent. Lord, make us like Thy Host, who clay nor night Rest not from adoration, their delight, Crying, “Holy, Holy, Holy!” in the height. Lord, make us like Thy Saints, who wait and long Contented: bound in hope and freed from wrong, They speed (may be) their vigil with a song. Lord, make us like Thyself: for thirty-three Slow years of toil seemed not too long for Thee, That where Thou art, there Thy Beloved might be. (1) The need for diligence.—We ought to be misers of our time and opportunities. If Jesus Christ said, “I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day; the night cometh,” some of us ought very specially to say it, and to feel it, because the hour when we shall have to lay down our tools is coming very near, and the shadows are lengthening. If you had been in the fields in these summer evenings during the last few days, you would have seen the haymakers at work with more and more diligence as the evening drew on darker and darker. Some of us are at the eleventh hour. Let us fill it with diligent work.2 [Note: A. Maclaren.] When he was urged to desist and take rest his favourite expression was, “No, I will never be a loafer. If there are no meetings to be addressed, I will return to my work in Australia and the Islands.” “You tell me I am working too hard,” he would say, “but my time to work for Jesus cannot be long now. I only wish I could press three times the quantity of work for Him into each day, resting on His promise for the needed help: ‘Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end.’ ”1 [Note: John G. Paton, iii. 44. (2) Postponement of duty is loss.—Postponement of the obvious duty means irretrievable loss and inevitable incompleteness when the day is done. Our Lord’s more immediate meaning would seem to be that the work and the moment are so adjusted that what is missed at one time cannot be made up at another. Not only does the day bring its task, but every separate hour has its appointed portion of the work. So that if the work of the third hour be missed, there is no time in which to do it. Each subsequent hour brings its own responsibility, and there is no room for any work that does not belong to that hour. The work of the passing moment must be done in it, or remain for ever undone. This is a law of life that will be acknowledged the moment it is mentioned, and yet we are apt to grow strangely indifferent to it. But consider what it means. The omission of this moment tells upon the work of the next. One stone is left out, and the wall shakes for the want of it. A word is left out of the sentence, and the sense of it is thereby obscured. An exercise is skipped in the lesson, and the examination is rendered unsatisfactory. Christ’s work was cumulative, and every step in the staircase was fitted in its place. So must it be with us if we would be prime and perfect workmen. Sins of commission are the usual punishment for sin a of omission. He that leaves a duty, may well fear that he will be left to commit a crime.2 [Note: Gurnall.] I should have said your letter delighted me, but for the news you gave me of D——’s death.… My dear, it is awful; not that death is awful or even to be regretted, but I could have borne with more composure the news of the death of my most intimate friend. Learn from me what I never so fully realized before, the self-reproach that follows upon the omission of duty. I am most deeply grieved when I think that D——’s appearance, manners, peculiarities, stood in my way of doing what I might have done: time after time I have thought of his real merits, of his honesty, integrity, zeal, conscientiousness, and I have thought, “Some day, when I have more time, when I am less worried, I will try and see if I cannot make his solitary life happier, make him less eccentric.” I have felt that it was hard for him to be condemned to loneliness, to be cheered by scanty sympathy on his course, which was an honest hard-fought one, because his voice was loud, and other little matters. I feel that I have weakly disregarded a noble human soul because it had an unsightly body; and now he has gone, and I cannot ask his pardon or make amends.1 [Note: Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, i. 105. “But who art thou, with curious beauty graced, O woman, stamped with some bright heavenly seal? Why go thy feet on wings, and in such haste?” “I am that maid whose secret few may steal, Called Opportunity. I hasten by Because my feet are treading on a wheel, Being more swift to run than birds to fly. And rightly on my feet my wings I wear, To blind the sight of those who track and spy; Rightly in front I hold my scattered hair To veil my face, and down my breast to fall, Lest men should know my name when I am there; And leave behind my back no wisp at all For eager folk to clutch, what time I glide So near, and turn, and pass beyond recall.” “Tell me; who is that Figure at thy side?” “Penitence Mark this well that by decree Who let me go must keep her for his bride. And thou hast spent much time in talk with me Busied with thoughts and fancies vainly grand, Nor hast remarked, O fool, neither dost see How lightly I have fled beneath thy hand.”2 [Note: J. E. Flecker, Forty-two Poems, 28. IV Why We must Cease from Working 1. The coming night.—It was Jesus who assured us that God was the God of the living, not of the dead; yet it was Jesus who told us that the night was coming. In the glamour and fretful haste of the day, we too often forget the blackness of the night into which it is rushing, and thereby lose all the directness and concentration of aim, which would chase away the terror of the night when it falls. And yet terror there should be none; for in the beginning God ordained that in every night the moon and the stars should shine, and no night can be very dark into which Christ the Light has passed. Yet, with all its gracious possibilities, it is night that awaits us. The longest day dies into night, and though out of the darkness a new day will be born, yet that darkness is the grave of a day that is gone. The greatest of English moralists felt this so strongly, that on the dial of his watch—ready to catch his eye whenever he looked at it—he had these words engraved in their original tongue—“For the night cometh.” He thought it fit that every time he looked to see how time was going on, he might be reminded of the end of it. He thought there was something he might be the better for remembering, at the commencement of every engagement, in every company, in every place, in every occupation; in the bustle of the street when crowds of men went by; in the quiet chamber over his papers and his books, where the hours passed on so silently; in the view of regal state, and youthful beauty; still something worth remembering in that most suggestive truth expressed in the simple words—“For the night cometh!”1 [Note: A. K. H. Boyd, The Graver Thoughts of a Country Parson, ii. 255. “Work while you have light,” especially while you have the light of morning. There are few things more wonderful to me than that old people never tell young ones how precious their youth is. They sometimes sentimentally regret their own earlier days; sometimes prudently forget them; often foolishly rebuke the young, often more foolishly indulge, often most foolishly thwart and restrain; but scarcely ever warn or watch them. Remember, then, that I, at least, have warned you, that the happiness of your life, and its power, and its part and rank in earth or in heaven, depend on the way you pass your days now.2 [Note: Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (Works, xviii. 37).] Bishop Whipple tells a story of an old man among the North American Indians who was confirmed late in life. His rheumatism made kneeling very painful to him. He said to the Bishop: “I put it off too long. I ought to have done it when my knees were not rheumatic.”3 [Note: D. Williamson, From Boyhood to Manhood, 172. Just on the Borders of Enchanted Land We linger,—culling here and there some bloom; From distant gardens sweet and rare perfume The soft breeze gently wafteth where we stand. We might have enter’d—you and I, dear Heart! Lo, the dusk falleth—and ’tis time to part.1 [Note: Una, In Life’s Garden, 3. 2. Man is immortal till his work is done.—Let us grasp this thought that no good man dies with his work half done. We may not see its last touch. It may appear to our dim vision to be sunset at noon. But He in whose hand is our time, and from whom we receive our task, sets His seal and attestation upon the work done in His name. Sometimes you will hear it said that a good man has died prematurely; you have even heard it said that Christ died early. By what false standard do we reach such extraordinary decisions as these? All standards are false that are not in harmony with this great utterance. “We must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day.” Edward Thring, of Uppingham, wrote out this prayer when he was a student at Cambridge: “O God, give me work till the end of my life, and life till the end of my work; for Christ’s sake, Amen.”2 [Note: Morning Watch, 1903, p. 10. Lord, I read of the two witnesses, And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them. They could not be killed whilst they were doing, but when they had done their work; during their employment they were invincible. No better armour against the darts of death than to be busied in Thy service. Why art thou so heavy, O my soul? No malice of man can antedate my end a minute, whilst my Maker hath any work for me to do. And when all my daily task is ended, why should I grudge then to go to bed?3 [Note: Thomas Fuller.] Let me not pass till eve, Till that day’s fight is done; What soldier cares to leave The field until it’s won! And I have loved my work and fain Would be deemed worthy of the ranks again. Let twilight come, then night, And when the first birds sing Their matin songs, and light Wakens each slumbering thing, Let some one waken me, and set My feet to steps that lead me upward yet. A Time to Work Literature Aitken (W. H. M. H.), Temptation and Toil, 241. Arnold (T.), Sermons, vi. 164. Bellew (J. C. M.), Sermons, i. 53, 73. Boyd (A. K. H.), The Graver Thoughts of a Country Parson, ii. 253. Bramston (J. F.), Fratribus, 50. Brooke (S. A.), The Gospel of Joy, 279. Channing (W. E.), The Perfect Life, 155. Cox (S.), Expositions, iv. 179. Cunningham (W.), Sermons, 303. Flint (R.), Sermons and Addresses, 264. Gray (W. A.), The Shadow of the Hand, 239. Henson (H. H.), Light and Leaven, 165. Houghton (C. A.), Problems of Life, 95. Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year: Lent to Passiontide, 367. Lamb (R.), School Sermons, i. 155, 173. Little (W. J. Knox), Characteristics and Motives of the Chiristian Life, 1. McFadyen (J. E.), The Divine Pursuit, 153. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John ix.–xiv., 1. Mortimer (A. G.), Lenten Preaching, 118. Paget (F. E.), Sermons for Special Occasions, 233. Percival (J.), Sermons at Rugby, 21. Percival (J.), Some Helps for School Life, 226. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xiii. (1867) No. 756; xvi. (1870) No. 943; xxix. (1883) No. 1754. Stuttard (J.), The Man who was Born Blind, 39. Thomson (W.), Life in the Light of God’s Word, 106. Thomson (W.), Sermons in Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, 298. Vaughan (D. J.), Questions of the Day, 188. Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xxi. (1882) No. 1208. Wilkinson (J. B.), Mission Sermons, lii. 1. Christian World Pulpit, xiv. 318 (Ward); lii. 214 (Perry); lxxi. 56 (Henson); lxxvi. 325 (Hearn). Church of England Pulpit, xliv. 207 (Perry); lv. 158 (Henson); lix. 197 (Tupholme); lxii. 396 (Henson). Churchman’s Pulpit: First Sunday in Advent: i. 312 (Pope). Expositor, 1st Ser., vii. 197 (Milligan). The Greatest Thing in the World The thief cometh not, but that he may steal, and kill, and destroy: I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.—John 10:10. Jesus is here contrasting Himself with other teachers; with those who taught the people only in order to win their following, while He, in the spirit of disinterested love, taught them for their own good. Those were more worthy of the title “thieves” than “shepherds,” for their object was a selfish and a sectarian, not a humanitarian one. They wanted men for their church. He wanted men for their salvation. He claimed to be the “Good Shepherd” because He secured for the sheep life at the cost of His own. And not merely that. It was not bare life that He secured for them, but abounding life, life that it is a joy to live. The sheepfold of the East is an enclosure made of high stakes or palings. As the evening closes in, the shepherd comes from the pasture-land leading his flock of sheep. It is a small flock always, such as he can oversee easily; and he knows every sheep by nature and by name. He leads the flock into the fold. Another shepherd comes with his flock. And when all the flocks are housed, the porter shuts the door (each shepherd having gone home to his cottage in the neighbour village), and stays beside the flocks till morning. In the night a thief comes stealthily, climbs over the palings, and slips down noiselessly into the fold. He lays hold of one of the sheep, but the porter has seen him. There is a struggle. If not the porter himself, at least the sheep the thief has seized is killed, and probably destroyed. He escapes before the shepherds arrive in the morning. With the early dawn the shepherds come. Each shepherd knocks at the door of the sheepfold; the porter opens. He calls his own flock by name, and they follow him away to the pasture-ground for the day. Jesus is the Shepherd of the sheep. The Pharisees and Sadducees are the thieves. Jesus comes to give: they come to steal. Jesus comes to give life: they come to take life away. Jesus comes to give life in abundance: they come to destroy it altogether. The Pharisees and Sadducees of to-day are the enemies of Christ, be they who they may. They are the world, the flesh, the devil. The sheep are those for whom the choice is waiting. Choose ye this day. We are the sheep of some one’s pasture—His or the Devil’s. We may follow Him to receive, to receive life, to receive life in abundance. We may follow Satan to lose, to lose life, to lose it utterly! 1. The thief takes: the Shepherd gives. “The thief cometh not, but that he may steal: I came that they may have.” This is the ineffaceable distinction between the world and the Saviour. The world cries, “Give me”: the Saviour cries, “I give thee.” The world is selfish: the Saviour is unselfish. The princes of this world exercise lordship: I am among you as He that serveth. Selfishness, they say, is the essence of sin: it is certainly the essence of the world, which is the sphere of sin. The world says—and practises it—that it is more blessed to receive than to give: Jesus says it is more blessed to give than to receive; and He gave His life a ransom. 2. The thief takes life: the Shepherd gives life. “The thief cometh not, but that he may kill: I came that they may have life.” Life and death are the great words of Scripture, and their meaning must be watched. “Death” on the lips of Jesus is not physical, but spiritual. “The maid is not dead, but sleepeth”—and they laughed Him to scorn. As if they did not know when a person was dead! But He spake not of the death of the body. That was not death. “She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.” So also with “Life.” Life was not physical health and strength, it was fellowship with God, in the language of Jesus. Life, say the men of science, is correspondence with the things around us; death comes when we get out of touch. Spiritual life is correspondence with Him who is a spirit; it is trust, it is truth. Every antagonist of God—the world, the flesh, the devil—seeks to break our fellowship with God. Till Satan came, Adam walked with God; then he hid himself. Jesus comes to the hidden Adam that He may restore the fellowship. “That they all may be one as we are: I in them, and thou in me.” “If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” 3. The thief comes to destroy: Jesus comes to give life abundantly. Before the thief—be he world, flesh, devil—can destroy, he must get us in his grasp. This is a late stage of the process. We lose when we begin to follow the world; then we are killed, the very conscience becoming blunt and blind; then we are utterly destroyed, generally body and soul, though the body does not always visibly show it. Before Jesus can give us life in abundance, He must give us life. We are first born again, and then we are changed into the same image from glory to glory. I Life 1. Suppose we were asked any of the following questions:—Can you tell me in a word the subject of the New Testament? Or, can you explain, just as briefly, the object with which Christ came into the world? Or, can you indicate the final purpose of the multitude of various religious organizations and movements which we find at work all round us, many of them tending, like other kinds of modern machinery, to become more and more complex? Can you say why all the sermons are preached, why all the various services are held, why all our Communions are made? Will not a single word answer all these questions? Surely the one word “life” is a sufficient reply to them all. Is not life the one subject of all Christian teaching and study? Is not life the one object of every kind of Christian effort? 2. From time to time in the course of His ministry our Lord briefly, yet quite comprehensively expressed, by means of some pregnant phrase, His whole purpose and object. For instance, in the hearing of the Pharisees, He said it was “for judgment” that He came into this world. Then He told Pilate that He came “to bear witness of the truth.” But never more fully or completely did our Lord express the whole purpose of His mission than in these words of the text—“I came that they may have life.” Sum up the gospel in a single word, and that one word is “life.” Get at the heart of all Christ had to teach, and life is nestling against that heart. One thought determines every other thought; one fact interprets and arranges everything, and that one fact, so dominant and regal, is the deep fact of life. Deeper than faith, for faith is but a name, unless it issue from a heart that lives; deeper than love, though God Himself be love, for without life love would be impossible, life is the compendium of the gospel, the sweet epitome of all its news; it is the word that gathers in itself the music and the ministry of Christ. “The words that I speak unto you,” He said, “they are spirit, and they are life.” “I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.” “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” “I am the resurrection and the life.” All that He came to teach, all that He was, is summed and centred in that little word.1 [Note: G. H. Morrison] 3. There are always two ways of interpreting such a word as “life,” when we find it in Holy Scripture. There is the exclusive or distinctive meaning, in which, e.g., life stands for the “life that is life indeed,” eternal life, the highest life of the soul. And there is the inclusive or general meaning, in which the word gathers up and covers all the meanings of which it is capable, so that in this case life would mean vitality in all its forms, from physical vigour up to the highest energies of man’s spirit inspired by the Spirit of God. Before all things beware of narrow and unworthy conceptions of life. That which God hath joined, let not man put asunder. The animal life, the social life, and the spiritual life form one organic whole; and though we can have the lower without the higher, we cannot have the higher without the lower. The social life is unsound if the animal life is stunted in the slums or the monasteries, and the life to God is maimed if either the social life or the animal life is counted profane. No doubt it is better to enter into life with one eye than to be cast into outer darkness, but it is better still to enter having two eyes. As the plant feeds on things without life, so the animal life feeds ultimately on plant life, the social life feeds on the animal life, and the life to God feeds on the social life.2 [Note: H. M. Gwatkin, in The Interpreter, January, 1912, p. 146. 4. Life as we see it is manifested in a succession of rising grades. Lowest, there is the vegetable world or plant life, with no volition or consciousness, tied down by invariable laws. Higher, we witness in the animal world the rise of life from the physical to the psychical; in even the lowest forms of animal life there would seem to be some dawning consciousness and volition. In man, the inner, psychical life shows itself superior to the physical. It is lighted by reason, capable of deliberate choice and self-direction, able to discern the moral ideal, and it is the seat of spiritual aspirations. We may therefore speak separately (1) of physical or natural life, (2) of intellectual, (3) of moral, and (4) of religious or spiritual life. (1) Physical Life.—Man is a self-conscious Personality with the power of self-formation. Life is given us, a fresh supply comes to us day by day, given into our hand, as it were, and in a large measure we can shape it as we choose—make it larger and fuller, keep it much the same, or let it dwindle away almost into nothingness. How we shall shape our lives will depend for the most part on what we deem the true good. Each man’s life is governed by that which seems to him, from moment to moment, most desirable for him to attain to and enjoy. We may not deliberately think about it, yet there is always some end which we seek to gain. The greatness of man and his responsibility lie in the fact that he is capable of determining what his end in life shall be. He is thus, so far, his own creator and the “master of his fate.” He may remain largely on the level of the merely vegetative life, dominated unconsciously by moods and circumstances. Except when self-interest becomes so keen as to assert itself, he may be entirely a slave to what is outside himself. This cannot be the true life of man. Or he may suffer himself to be swayed in the main by the appetites and passions and necessities of his physical or animal nature, thus also failing to rise to manhood. The worship of material well-being, with its unceasing round of distractions and occupations, cannot bring rest to its devotees. Nor, again, can the nobler activities and pleasures which attract others exhaust their capacities or satisfy their nature. These at the best show life under the limitations of time, and, as one of our great poets has said, Life’s inadequate to joy, As the soul sees it. A man can use but a man’s joy And he sees God’s. Therefore by the necessity of our being we cry from the depths of our heart for life, not for the instruments of life only or for the means of living; but for life, for more life, fuller, deeper, more certain, more enduring; for the prospect of untroubled calm with fruitful activity; of strenuous labour without weariness; for the pledge of Some future state Unlimited in capability For joy, as this is in desire for joy: for a life, that is, reaching through the seen into the unseen: a life able to unite and interpret “all objects of all thought”: to satisfy and inspire all effort. So the voice comes to us from the Gospels with a new meaning and a new power: “I came that they may have life.” (2) Intellectual and emotional Life.—Christ vitalizes the intellect and the emotions. A man does not live until his intellectual nature is truly awake. Is there anything more calculated to quicken the mental faculties and arouse intellectual enthusiasm than a consideration of those lofty and inspiring topics that were the theme of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth? He made everybody think. Indeed, what is called “conversion” is often as much an intellectual as a spiritual awakening. The Christian life tends to develop the thinking faculty and is a culture by itself. Interest is aroused in questions that can be solved only by thought and reflection, and spiritual awakening appears often to be accompanied by an accession of intelligence. Plain, uneducated people seem suddenly to attain to a much greater fulness of intellectual life. The man who is “born from above” is raised to a higher plane of contemplation. He holds commerce with larger ideas, and is greatened in his whole nature thereby. And what is true of the intellect is true, and generally much more obviously, of the emotions. (3) Moral Life.—The moral life is higher than the merely intellectual and emotional. “The honest man”—honest all over—“is king o’ men for a’ that,” in spite of all that shines more brightly or that towers above him. The man who can conquer and command himself in loyalty to the visions of justice and duty which shine upon him, who dares to do right though the heavens should fall, who will act honestly whatever the consequences to himself, who seeks always to do justly in relation to himself and his fellows, to respect them as persons equally with himself, whatever their outward position may be, and to serve and help them in whatever way he can, has risen, every man in his inmost self feels and knows, to a far higher conception of life than that which is governed by intellect and emotion merely. He has got, in some measure at least, beyond himself into the larger life of his fellows. The simple fact that he has done so proves that he has reached a higher and truer, richer and fuller life. Christ comes to give moral life. (4) Spiritual Life.—The moral life may not be the highest, although it is inseparable from it. However perfect in itself, it may still have its limitations. It may be bounded by time and limited to earth. While it has a due regard for others as having equal rights and mutual duties, it may fail to recognize a Will above us all, with which we are meant to be in harmony, which, indeed, seeks to operate through us. It may fail to rise to the Infinite, to expand into the Universal, to ally itself with the Divine, to become as far as possible one with God. To be alive to the world around us and our fellow-men therein, but dead to the Eternal Source of being, to whom we owe our all, is surely to come far short of the true life. The spirit of life that moves within us and seeks expression through us makes us feel and know that there is a still higher, wider, truer life open to us, inviting us, into which we ought to rise. It is in the life of religion, as Jesus Christ set it before us and called us to it, and as God by His Spirit in our heart moves us thereto, that we find the highest and truest life of man. For man is conceived in the image of God Himself, created and called to be His son and heir. Sometimes the Bible speaks as if the spirit were non-existent in the natural man; but in other places, and perhaps more exactly, it speaks of it as not developed. At all events, it has not attained its position of superiority and supremacy because the spirit ought to stand up above the other faculties of man and command life. And so essential is this to the Divine conception of man, that where this spiritual element is not operative the Bible speaks of human beings as dead, however much they may be alive in the lower ranges of their faculties. For instance, as already quoted, “She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.” Just look at a woman or a girl who lives in pleasure. Why, is not she the very picture of life? Her body is so glowing with life that her beauty attracts all who see her; her mental life may also be so rich that, wherever she moves in the circles where she seeks her pleasures, she is accompanied by a crowd who admire her wit and cleverness; and her emotional life may be in so healthy a condition that she has a heart rich in love to give to the happy man who is able to win it. She seems to be the very picture of life. Yes! but follow her into another sphere of existence, where a different set of powers comes into operation, and there you will find that she prays not, she thinks not of God, she neither loves nor serves Christ, she is not laying up treasure in heaven; in short, her spirit, the true glory of womanhood, in her is dead; and so, as Scripture says, she “is dead while she liveth.” It goes without saying that Christ confers upon a man completeness of spiritual life. In most the spiritual principle lies latent, dormant. It is there, but overlaid by the physical instincts, the animal nature. Christ evokes it, kindles it, raises it to a passion; and when the Spirit of Christ has its “perfect work,” all the elements that go to a spiritual life are balanced; faith with love; strength with sympathy; courage and steadfastness with tolerance and tenderness; so that there is produced a noble symmetry of character. Everything is full-grown and yet subordinated to everything else. The whole man comes under the elevating and inspiring influence of Christ’s life-idea. The spiritual life is too much regarded as something quite distinct and separate from the other expressions of human faculty. This is a matter rightly urged by Eucken in his writings, and it deserves the serious attention of Christians. As the life of God in man—the life represented in Christ and proceeding from Him to the world—ought to be the deepest influence and the dominating power in the entire life of men, giving direction and character to what we term the secular life and its manifestations as well as to that which we mark off as religious—“bringing every thought,” as St. Paul puts it, “into captivity to the obedience of Christ”; as the whole lower life in the world contributes to the human, so should the physical and entire psychical life of man contribute to the spiritual. Ideally, that was first, although last in appearance. It is life in its truth and therefore should embrace all lower manifestations without exception.1 [Note: W. L. Walker, The True Christ, 180. 5. We are now able to see in some measure what Christ meant when He said, “I came that they may have life.” He meant realization of self, service for others, and fellowship with God. (1) Life is fellowship with God.—The life which Christ is and which Christ communicates, the life which fills our whole being as we realize its capacities, is active fellowship with God. “This is,” not this shall be in some unimaginable future, “this is,” Christ said, even now, in the light and shadow of our changing days, “life eternal, that they might know,” with ever fuller knowledge, “thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). For the knowledge by which we live is a knowledge which grows: not truth given and mastered once for all, but truth to be illuminated and interpreted by the ever increasing sum of human experience. Thus the coming of Christ, the Incarnation, binds together two worlds, and makes the earthly with all its workings a sacrament, so to speak, of the heavenly. A few years ago a famous book called attention to a definition of life, given by an eminent man of science, whose attitude towards Christianity can hardly be regarded as friendly; and then proceeded to make good use of it. Perfect life was defined as perfect correspondence with environment. Working with that definition, the meaning of this verse becomes blessed indeed. For the environment of a man’s soul consists on the one hand in God and in influences from God (always the most important things about a man), and on the other hand in the opportunities for the discipline and perfecting of character, which the ordinary circumstances of life afford. It is Christ alone who can put a man into proper correspondence with the former part of that environment, or enable him to meet the urgent and ceaseless demands of the latter. A profitable, if not altogether necessary, exercise of thought would be the attempt to re-state some of the leading doctrines of Christianity from the same point of view. The Incarnation, for instance, might be regarded as “God opening up to man the possibility of correspondence with Himself through Jesus Christ.” Because Christ thus brings us right conceptions of what God is and of what we may become in relation to Him, and, better still, because He breathes into us the power to become it all, the statement of this verse admits almost of a scientific defence. It is Christ alone who can give men what science itself has to recognize as life; and He gives that with such largesse and abundance that, if we like, it will survive all the dangers of this world, and last on in undecaying vigour and ever richer functions throughout eternity.1 [Note: R. W. Moss, The Discipline of the Soul, 27. (2) Life is service for others.—What is the highest duty of life? It is certainly not personal acquisition, but the rendering of the fullest service that lies within our power; it is also bestowing upon others the fullest possible opportunity of rendering that service. To enable men to do this Christ taught and healed; but also, and this was His most important work of all, He transformed their characters from sin to holiness. In the light of Christ’s teaching what is the joy of life? It does not consist in thinking how much we have obtained. Does it not rather consist in inspiring others with life? Is it not found in awakening others to high ideals? Indeed, is it not the highest happiness to struggle, and to encourage others to struggle, after those ideals? What, again, in the light of Christ’s teaching, is the end or purpose of life? Is it not to bestow life upon others, to impart to others that deep, personal, experimental knowledge of God which we have received through our own personal communion with God, which communion is the essence of eternal life? Many years ago religion became strongly individualistic. We need not underrate the importance, we should rather speak of the necessity, of cultivating individual knowledge and individual holiness, that is, of making individual effort after the closest personal communion with God in Christ; for by these means we largely obtain that supply of life which it is our duty to bestow. But if we study the lives of some so-called religious people, we might imagine that the text read, I am come into the world that I may have life, that I may secure as much life as possible for myself. By these people life here is apparently regarded only as an opportunity of making themselves as sure as possible of heaven hereafter. But that is not the teaching of Christ. We have now a deepening consciousness of the unity, the solidarity of mankind. The truth lies in the phrase, “The Word became flesh”; He took to Himself not simply a human life but humanity. If the Gospel is necessarily addressed to the individual, it is not to the individual alone and isolated, but to the individual as a member of a body. And more than this: Christians are “a kind of firstfruits of God’s creatures” (James 1:18). They are taught to look to an end in which the differences of race and condition and even the fundamental distinctions of sex shall be done away: “There can be,” St. Paul writes, “neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male and female; for ye are all one (man) in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). On all sides there is an indefinite desire for closer fellowship among men; a restless, almost impatient, striving to alleviate distress and to remove its causes; a willingness to acknowledge that all wealth, material, intellectual, moral, spiritual, is a trust to be administered for the common good. Numberless lines of reflection constrain us to confess that our life is in no sense our own either in its origin or in its development; that the ideal which in “hours of insight” rises before us is not of our creation, but a Divine disclosure, “the fountain light of all our day, a master light of all our seeing.” Many and unexpected lessons from the interpretation of history and the interpretation of nature press upon us the ennobling duty of taking our part in the fulfilment of a purpose of unimaginable grandeur and infinite hope, at length discernible in its broad outlines, of obeying the call addressed to our age and nation, the call to service of man and fellowship with God in Christ. One of the most distinguished men in this country once described in a public address what he called his creed. He disclaimed any intention of speaking in the name of religion. “I do not trench,” he said, “on the province of spiritual guides.” None the less, he was led to sum up his faith in what he called the triune formula of the joy, the duty, and the end of life. What is the joy of life? It is to use one’s powers. And what is the duty of life? It is to do with thy might what thy hand finds to do. And what is the end of life? It is nothing else than life itself. So to live as to live more truly, wisely, effectively, abundantly,—that is at once joy, duty, and end. It is most interesting to observe a man who may be properly called, in the best sense, a man of the world, approaching so closely to the language of the Christian religion. Throughout the New Testament the aim of life is to gain more life. “I came,” says Jesus, “that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.” What is the reward of one’s bodily exercise? It is the capacity to use the body more effectively. You train your life, and the result of your training is more life. What is the reward of keeping your temper? It is the capacity to keep your temper better. What is the consequence of doing your duty? It is the ability to do more duties. Out of the duty done opens the strength to do a larger duty. You have been faithful over a few things and become the ruler over many things. There is, however, one striking difference between the self-cultivating life and the Christian life. The man of the world finds the joy and duty and end of life in its increase of his own resources. The Christian teaching finds that joy and duty and end, not in getting, but in giving life. “I came,” says Jesus, not to secure more life for Myself, but “that they may have life.” “He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” “Death worketh in us,” says the Apostle Paul, “but life in you.” The triune formula of joy, duty, and end, according to the Christian teaching, is discovered in the communicative and self-propagating nature of spiritual power. What is the joy of life? It is the discovery of the capacity to inspire life. And what is the duty of life? It is not acquisition, but service. And what is the end of life, or, in the language of the New Testament, its crown? It is not a crown of gold, or gems, which one may wear on his own head; it is, as the Book of Revelation says, “a crown of life,”—the increase of capacity, the enrichment of opportunity, the chance to be of use, the power to say with Jesus Christ: “I give unto them eternal life.”1 [Note: F. G. Peabody, Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 107. (3) Life is the realization of self.—What a responsibility it is to live at all, to be one link in that great chain of existence which God is ever weaving in the secrets of His providence. Just as in some great carpet factory you see the coloured threads darting in under the swift-gliding machinery—to be lost, as you think, in the intricacies of the meshes—but reappearing, a tuft here, a shade there, a colour there, in a pattern slowly unfolding at your feet, so nations, individuals, lives great and small appear, disappear, reappear in the great secrets of God’s will. It is a wonderful thing to live; even to have opened our eyes on the order, the beauty of this world, with its marvellous history and its glorious possibility, is to merit that burst of approving wonder, if one may venture to say so with reverence, which escaped from the lips of our blessed Lord, “Blessed are the eyes which see the things that; ye see.” But what is that undertone of sorrow which we see stamped sometimes as the dominant mark of expression on the faces we meet? What is that awful mystery of pain and death and sickness and bereavement? It is the echo of the old wail of the Greek tragedy, “Not to be born is the best thing in the world, and failing that, to die as quickly as possible, and to fade away into nothingness.” A life alone, unilluminated, unspiritualized, unhelped, may be a doubtful blessing after all. It was just when men had found out this, just when it was bursting upon them in the most bitter anguish of a startling truth, when emperors were offering a reward to any one who could teach them a new pleasure, when Stoics were asserting that death was the end and the only mode of escape from the evils of life—it was then that a new revelation burst upon the world, heralded by the angels who appeared in the heavens on that Christmas Eve; God came to make life a richer blessing, a truer happiness, to make possible that life which alone can be called life. He came in His Incarnation, with His glorious proclamation, to which the suffering world clings with eager tenacity, “I came that they may have life.” Man may now claim something more than existence, something more even than a conscious contribution to the great widening out of the ages; he can claim life in its highest form, supernatural life, by the power and the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ. Supernatural life, what is this? A life which is above nature, above its aches and pains, its failures, its disappointments, above death itself. “I came that they may have life.” Here, then, lies our duty. It is, first and above all, to realize this life, and then to display it. It is our task not merely so to argue that the world shall listen to us when we ask, “Why do you not believe as we do?” but so to act that the world of its own accord shall ask, “Why cannot we live as you do?” I believe that the great reason why so much of our toil and giving, our work and self-denial, counts for so much less than it should is because so many of us men and women are living on the wrong side of our power—as somebody has put it—on the wrong side of Pentecost. Chronologically, we are living on the right side. Many of us know Christ, are following Christ, some closer, some further off; but some have not claimed our own Pentecost, and sought at Christ’s hands that equipment without which all other equipment counts for nothing, the Holy Ghost of God in the life, that which is to the Christian more of what genius is to the artist, and without which, whatever his technique, there can be no soul because there is no life. All Christians have the Spirit, but all Christians have not the fulness of the Spirit, and it is the fulness of the Spirit that is the clamant want to-day, as it is the clamant want of every day.1 [Note: A. Shepherd.] Since most remote times and among the different nations, the great teachers of humanity have revealed to men ever clearer definitions of life, which solve its internal contradiction, and have pointed out to them the true good and the true life that are proper for man. Since the position of men in the world is the same for all men, and, therefore, the contradiction between his striving after his personal good and the consciousness of its impossibility is the same also, all the definitions of the true good and, therefore, of the true life, as revealed to men by the greatest minds of humanity, are by their essence the same. “Life is the dissemination of that light which came down from heaven for the good of men,” Confucius said, six hundred years before Christ. “Life is a wandering and perfecting of the souls attaining a greater and ever greater good,” said the Brahmins of about the same time. “Life is self-renunciation for the sake of attaining blissful Nirvana,” said Buddha, a contemporary of Confucius. “Life is the path of humility and abasement for the sake of attaining the good,” said Lao-tse, another contemporary of Confucius. “Life is that which God blew into the nostrils of man, in order that he, fulfilling the law, might attain the good,” says the Jewish wisdom. “Life is subjection to reason, which gives men the good,” said the Stoics. “Life is love of God and of our neighbour, which gives man the good,” said Christ, including all the former definitions into His own.2 [Note: Tolstoy, On Life (Complete Works, xvi. 244).] II Abundance of Life “And may have it abundantly.” What does this mean? It can hardly denote that some further gift will be added to that of life, inasmuch as spiritual life in its processes and issues includes all that even a God can give. It means that the life will be given so plentifully that there will be no need for a devout soul ever to languish, that its life will become buoyant, possessed always of just a little more vital energy than is really needed either for its endurance of pain or for its triumph over sin. One of the greatest of Methodist theologians once expounded the phrase as a pledge of “more spiritual life than Adam lost, more than unfallen man could ever have known, more than eternity itself can contain.” Holy Scripture is fond of large promises. In one passage, for instance, the writer was unable to find in the language he was using a word that was adequate, and so he coined a new one, and in that way managed to express what the Authorized Version renders, God “is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.” Even in the Old Testament large words are occasionally met with, especially when there is any reference to the patience or bounty of God. Jeremiah teaches one or two ethical truths more forcibly than they are taught in any other part of Scripture, but he is probably regarded, justly or unjustly, as the dullest and most depressed of inspired writers. Even Jeremiah represents Jehovah once as saying, “I will satiate the soul of the priests with fatness, and my people shall be satisfied with my goodness.” This verse goes beyond that; for, whilst that speaks of satisfaction and satiety, this speaks of superfluity. It sets forth the purpose of Christ’s coming as being to bring to man God’s gift of a life that can never be exhausted, the energies of which may always exceed our duties, and the range of which has no limit.1 [Note: R. W. Moss, The Discipline of the Soul, 27. 1. The abundant life is a life of great vitality.—In the spiritual world, as in every other sphere of being with which we are acquainted, various degrees of vitality are to be found. The rule obtains among all organisms on the globe that the unknown force which we call “life” exhibits itself with feebler intensity in some species than in others, and in some individuals within each species. Weak vitality in animals is marked by dulness of sensation, by a more restricted range of action, by less sensibility to pain, and by the comparative absence of intelligence. A similar diversity obtains among human beings. In many cases delicacy of constitution may be the index to a low vitality. We speak, too, of the slow understanding, the cold heart, and the feeble will. What we mean is that in such cases the life-power is scanty. On the other hand, individuals are found who seem to be all force and fire. A robust physique and a vigorous personality are far from being always combined in the same individual; but where these do combine, we recognize the conditions of exceptional power. When we meet with a man of quick perception and keen feelings, whose sympathies run swiftly in many directions, who is prompt in his decisions and so energetic in action that he can infuse into others a little of his own ardent temperament, then we all acknowledge the presence of a strong or exuberant vitality. Of him it may be said that he has abundance of life. The striking words of the text imply that it is just the same in the higher region of Christian experience. They prepare us to find in the Church, as we do, examples of every degree of spiritual animation. This depends partly on natural capacity, partly on the extent to which the Holy Spirit is suffered to operate and rule within the interior life. There are lukewarm believers, and believers aflame with fervour; molluscous Christians, torpid or inert, and Christians full of faith and power. If a low type of religious vitality be unhappily prevalent in most Churches, yet we are now and then taught by illustrious exceptions of what consecration and saintliness a man is capable when he not only has in him the life of Christ, but has that life “abundantly.” It is deficient vitality more even than ignorance that makes the mischief and misery of the world. “To be weak,” a poet has said, “is to be miserable, doing or suffering”; whereas to be alive is to be strong in faith and hope and love—is to be in tune with all holy and beautiful influences that lift up the soul above sordid aims and mean thoughts. To be alive is to be open to sympathy at every pore, to face life’s ills in a cheerful and resolute spirit, to be full of the moral energy that throws off the poison of evil, as a perfectly healthy body repels the germs of disease.1 [Note: J. W. Shepard, Light and Life, 250. If An embankment is to be thrown up, or a cutting to be dug out. You want labourers. Here are your spades, and your picks, and your wheelbarrows, but the men are required. See, a number of persons offer themselves for hire. They are very thin, they have singularly bright eyes, sunken cheeks, and hollow churchyard coughs—they are a choice company from the Consumptive Hospital. Will you hire them? Why do you look so dubious? These men have life. “Oh, yes,” you say, “but I wish they had it more abundantly: they cannot do such work as I have to offer them.”1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.] 2. The abundant life is a life of wide interests.—It has come true, even with reference to ordinary secular affairs, that the effect of Christianity has been, not to deaden men to the interests of this life, with its common joys and sorrows, but, on the contrary, to make their experience larger and more intense. This is not the prevalent opinion. Both the injudicious friends of Christianity and its shrewd opponents have represented it as rendering its disciples “dead to the world,” in a quite different sense from that of the New Testament. Perhaps the ancient error of the ascetics is in part responsible for this current view. It is true enough that the gospel does deliver a man from exorbitant and unreasonable concern about affairs which are merely private or personal. It rids us—or it ought to rid us—of excessive longing after temporal good for its own sake; and it makes it impossible for us to indulge in extravagant regret when we forfeit temporal advantages. It teaches us to regard this world mainly as a scene of discipline. But it is a mistaken inference from this that secular pleasure and pain, gain and loss, birth and death, and whatever goes to fill up our daily round, must have lost interest or meaning for the true Christian. On the contrary, everything which happens gains in meaning and in interest by being brought, as the Gospel brings it, into relationship with God and with eternity. This world itself is become a graver and a vaster place to Christians since Jesus Christ died for it. Each trifling incident—say when a sparrow falls—is seen now to be linked to the will of our Heavenly Father and woven into a plan which has man’s spiritual good for its issue. Homes with their births and death-beds, their daily tables and nurseries for Christ’s little ones, are infinitely more sacred spots, so near are they seen to lie to the gate of heaven. Common business rises in importance when by it you have to glorify your Saviour and serve your brother-men. Social and political problems of the hour do not claim less attention from the Christian, but more, because in them is wrapt up the welfare of that humanity for which Jesus suffered and which He calls upon us to seek and save along with Him. Christianity is so far from being a deadening influence, dulling one’s concern in everything which touches the well-being of society, that it is precisely Christianity that has elevated this mean life by letting in upon it the light of eternity. It has brought into relief all its possibilities, and has made every small thing grand and every dull person noble by linking them to the destinies of our race—to the everlasting God and to the solemn cross of His dear Son. Christ came that we might have life, and life in all its range. He was not like some who have even boasted that they care for nothing but immortal souls. In a far deeper sense than the Roman ever dreamed of, nothing that is human can be foreign to its incarnate Lord. Every creature of God claimed His loving sympathy. He could rejoice in the glory of the lilies and the joy of the birds. The beginning of His mighty signs He did at the marriage feast, and the first of His royal gifts was of the wine that maketh glad the heart of man. He feeds the multitude, and does not forget to command that something be given to the child to eat. He passes through a short and bright career of doing good. To the sick, and even to the dead, He gives the bounding joy of life restored; and yet it is no formal gift, but the natural outflow of the loving spirit of the sinless Man 1:1 [Note: H. M. Gwatkin.] Richard Le Gallienne, in The Religion of a Literary Man, tells of a friend of his who lost her husband by a sudden and violent death. It was a heart-breaking tragedy, and some of her friends looked to see her sink beneath the shock. But she did not. With courage and self-command she came back from the graveyard to resume her work. And when some of her friends marvelled at it, one who knew her intimately said, “No—she is a woman of many interests.” That sounded strange, “a woman of many interests.” What had that to do with her loss? Simply this: her life was too large to be defeated by any loss death could inflict. It was not that she did not love her husband with “the love that makes the world a temple.” But the power that made her capable of one intense affection, made her capable of inviolable attachments to children, and friends, and mission schools, and charities. So when death left her a widow, instead of withdrawing herself from life’s activities, she enshrined in her heart the memory of the absent one, and gave herself anew to the work of her life.1 [Note: C. C. Albertson, The Gospel According to Christ, 193,] 3. The abundant life is a life of deep enjoyment.—A man is not fully living, who does not enjoy living. It is when we are weak and only half alive that life is a burden and a sigh. Fulness of life is fulness of joy. This Christ came to confer. Life is gladness, save where Death has touched it in sickness, in sin, or in what the lawyers call the Act of God; and the gladness takes higher forms as we move up the scale of life. Only the higher animals can play, and only man can laugh with gladness. Then come the higher joys of social life, with their chequering of sorrow; and yet again, crowning all and blending with them all, the joy that overcometh sorrow, the joy of peace with God, the peace that passeth understanding, the peace of Christ, the peace our own good Lord has left us. Nothing is more interesting or more remarkable in the history of Christianity than the radiant joy which filled the hearts of its first disciples. Read how “with gladness and singleness of heart” they “broke their bread,” how they took “joyfully” even “the spoiling of their goods”; how they went singing to their martyrdoms as to a festival. Go into the Catacombs and read the inscriptions inspired by their simple, happy faith. It was because the word and life of Christ “dwelt in them richly” that for very gladness they broke out into incessant “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.” That is the ideal Christian temperament. “Rejoice, and again I say unto you rejoice.” But the joy will come only as the life comes. You have seen the sportive lamb in the meadows in the springtime. He is full of life and consequently full of joy in life. He frisks and gambols all the day long. “He leaps in useless leaps; he leaps with all his legs up at once into the air”; in his abounding life and happiness he cannot help it; “and to the wise man every leap of that little heart is a new note of the heavenly anthem—fulness of life.” And truly those who can accept Christ’s revelation of the Father in Heaven earing for His children, and the “hope full of immortality” which He disclosed, ought to be the happiest of men and to show it. No wonder the Christian has joy. No wonder the Apostle Peter could exclaim, “Believing, ye rejoice greatly with joy unspeakable and full of glory” (1 Peter 1:8). Believing, we rejoice. In other words, faith produces joy. The relation is that of inseparability, of cause and effect. The believing is the cause of the rejoicing. Faith brings gladness. Trusting brings happiness. Let us not fail to notice also the nature of the joy faith produces. It is “unspeakable.” That is, it is unspeakably great. It is also in its nature not a noisy, but “a deep and silent thing.” In this sense, too, it is “unspeakable.” And that is the reason, we doubt not, why it is so often mistaken for the opposite. Because it is calm and sometimes even grave, the world thinks it severe. But, as has been said, “The gods approve the depth and not the tumult of the soul.” Joy may be a very quiet thing, a “calm rapture,” as Jonathan Edwards once denned it.1 [Note: G. B. F. Hallock, The Christian Lifte, 123. Old sorrows that sat at the heart’s sealed gate Like sentinels grim and sad, While out in the night damp, weary and late, The King, with a gift divinely great, Waited to make me glad; Old fears that hung like a changing cloud Over a sunless day; Old burdens that kept the spirit bowed, Old wrongs that rankled and clamoured loud— They have passed like a dream away. In the world without and the world within He maketh the old things new; The touch of sorrow, and stain of sin, Have fled from the gate where the King came in, From the chill night’s damp and dew. Anew in the heavens the sweet stars shine, On earth new blossoms spring; The old life lost in the Life divine, “Thy will be mine, my will is thine, Is the new song the new hearts sing.2 [Note: Mary Lowe Dickinson] 4. The abundant life is a life of eternal duration.—This is the most familiar aspect of the life which Christ came to give. Its most common title is “eternal life.” Now “eternal” is not the exact equivalent of “everlasting”; it is more than everlasting; but it includes the idea of endlessness. The life in Christ can never cease to be. Here in the body, in whatever degree we possess that life, it must come to an end as far as its continued expression through these bodies of flesh and blood is concerned. But there is something in that life that has never found expression, and that cannot find expression, in and through these bodies. There is something in its depths, not of man merely, but of God, something, not finite only but infinite, not merely temporal but eternal. This is why the true life that Christ called men to is always described as “eternal life.” It is life above and beyond time and sense. It is eternal because it is nothing less than the life of God in us. You have seen the aged, whose hearts expanded with their years into even wider and more unselfish affections; whose passions seemed to have been filtered away in life’s discipline; over whom the floods of trial had swept only to leave their richness behind; who had passed through struggle into peace; whose serene virtues, as the sun makes bright whatever it shines on, inspired all around with a higher justice and humanity; whose hopeful faith loved to make excursions into that world which they approached; who lived in an atmosphere of beneficent, trusting, and devout thought—you have seen them going down that valley, often so dark, but not dark to them, because there shone into it from above a heavenly light—and here was life. The body might be dying, but the breaking up of the senses only seemed to reveal more and more the soul’s light. I have seen such persons die, and laid in the grave, and yet in a few days the remembrance of that event seemed gone from the mind. I could never think of them except as alive. It seemed as if you might meet them at every turn, so entirely did the spiritual life in them overtop and embrace in its radiance, and keep out of view, all the circumstances of mortality. This is life. And more of it is often seen in the patience and submission and cheerful trust of those who can only wait God’s will than in those who with their grasping and struggling energies shake the world. The true life is not in length of days; that is but an inferior life which beats in the throbbing blood and flames in the whirl and tempest of the passions.1 [Note: E. Peabody.] We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; In feelings; not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best. Life’s but a means unto an end; that end, To those who dwell in Him, He most in them, Beginning, mean and end to all things, God.1 [Note: Bailey, Festus.] The Greatest Thing in the World Literature Abbey (C. J.), The Divine Love, 211. Albertson (C. C.), The Gospel according to Christ, 187. Banks (L. A.), Hidden Wells of Comfort, 106. Brooks (P.), The More Abundant Life, 31. Chadwick (W. E.), Christ and Everyday Life, 1. Dykes (J. O.), Plain Words on Great Themes, 199. Gordon (A. J.), The Twofold Life, 1. Hague (D.), The Life Worth Living, 75. Hallock (G. B. F.), The Teaching of Jesus concerning the Christian Life, 107. Halsey (J.), The Beauty of the Lord, 305. King (T. S.), Christianity and Humanity, 90. Magee (W. C.), The Gospel and the Age, 155. Mellor (E.), In the Footsteps of Heroes, 172. Moss (R. W.), The Discipline of the Soul, 25. Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 107. Potts (A. W.), School Sermons, 71. Shepard (J. W.), Light and Life, 242. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xx. (1874) No. 1150. Talbot (E. S.), The Trusteeship of Life for the World, 1. Walker (W. L.), The True Christ, 169. Wardell (R. J.), Studies in Homiletics, 40. Westcott (B. F.), Lessons from Work, 285. British Congregationalist, June 1, 1911, p. 463 (Adeney). Christian World Pulpit, xlv. 347 (Stalker); Leviticus 22 (Welldon), 254 (Bliss); lx. 98 (Abbott); lxiv. 376 (Beeby); lxix. 195 (Shepherd); lxxii. 1 (Griffith-Jones), 4 (Horne); lxxiv. 161 (Holland). Church Times, October 27, 1911, p. 556 (Donaldson). Churchman’s Pulpit: Whit-Sunday: ix. 246 (Sadler), 250 (Battershall), 253 (Peabody). Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., iv. 321 (Newbolt). Interpreter, January, 1912 (Gwatkin). Sunday at Home, August, 1910, p. 799 (Morrison). The Good Shepherd I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd layeth down his life for the sheep.—John 10:11. 1. The imagery of the text is an incidental claim on the part of our Lord to be the Messiah of Israel. For it was as a shepherd that Jehovah was to fulfil His promise of redemption to His people. “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom.” So wrote Isaiah, and Ezekiel after him, “Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I, even I, will both search my sheep, and seek them out.” The Divine promise is fulfilled in Jesus who preaches Himself as the fulfiller and the fulfilment of Israel’s hope and expectation: “I am the good shepherd”; and then, going beyond all former revelation of Divine grace and love, He adds, “the good shepherd layeth down his life for the sheep.” How quietly and unostentatiously, but at the same time with what confidence and assurance, our Lord assumes to Himself titles that were predicted of the Messiah in the Old Testament. He adopts them in the most natural manner, folds them about Him as a man would clothe himself in his own garments. There is never any excuse or apology for doing so. Everywhere our Lord takes His Messiahship for granted. He and no other is the being pointed to by the finger of prophecy, and so after His resurrection He took trouble with His disciples to show them out of those Scriptures the things concerning Himself. 2. This Messianic title of “Shepherd” is also freely accorded to Him afterwards by His followers, as, for example, by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who calls Him “that great shepherd of the sheep,” and by St. Peter, who speaks of Him as “the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls,” and says to the faithful presbyters of the Church “when the chief Shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away.” When we pass out of the region of Scripture and from the Apostolic Church the figure still haunts us. The early Christians in the days of their trial and persecution loved to depict on the walls of the catacombs Jesus as the Good Shepherd, with His sheep standing round Him, and earnestly gazing up into His face. With authority and power did our Lord arrogate to Himself the care and guidance of His Church to the end of time when He spoke these expressive words—“I am the good shepherd.” There are two points to be considered— I. Christ’s Claim. II. Its Significance. I Christ’s Claim “I am the good shepherd.” 1. I am the Shepherd. We are all familiar enough with the ideas connected with shepherd-life as it is pictured amongst ourselves. The poetry of our country dwells much upon it, especially down to about the beginning of last century. It was described as the ideal of a simple natural life. It was associated with the piping times of peace. The shepherds were regarded as happy swains, living a free, healthy life in communion with nature. But the shepherd’s life in Palestine was attended with much hardship and great danger. In a country where at any moment sheep are liable to be swept away by a mountain torrent, or carried off by hill robbers, or torn by wolves, every hour of the shepherd’s life is risk. David tells how, in defence of his father’s flock, he put his life in his hand and slew both a lion and a bear; while Jacob reminds Laban how he watched the sheep, exposed to the extreme of heat and cold. Pitiless cold at night, long hours of thirst in the day, must be endured, if the flock is to be kept in safety. So it is not difficult to imagine how a feeling of affection would spring up between the lonely Syrian shepherd and the dumb objects of his care. The sheep would follow him wherever he might lead, or call them with his voice. And so it was the ordinary duty of every shepherd not only to gather and feed and watch the flock, but also to lead them, to know them and to run some risk for them. A great deal has been made out of these last three points in the application of the metaphor to Christ, showing how Christ is the Good Shepherd because He leads His flock, because He knows them, and because He runs some risk for them. But these are not characteristic points of the Good Shepherd as distinguished from the hireling. Even the hireling in the East led the sheep, as that was the ordinary custom, even he knew them to a certain extent, and it was a necessary part of shepherd life to run some risk for the flock. If that had been all, Jesus might have said “I am a shepherd,” but His words are “I am the good shepherd.” A man may be a hired priest, as Demetrius was at Ephesus—“By this craft we get our living.” Or he may be a paid demagogue, a great champion of rights, and an investigator of abuses—paid by applause; and while popularity lasts, he will be a reformer—deserting the people when danger comes. There is no vital union between the champion and the defenceless, the teacher and the taught.1 [Note: F. M. Robertson.] 2. I am the good shepherd. The shepherd’s work may be done and done well by the paid servant, it may be faithfully performed and the reward honestly earned; but our Lord’s claim to be a shepherd was something essentially different. “I am the good shepherd.” Good, not in the sense of benevolent, but in the sense of genuine, true born, of the real kind—just as wine of nobler quality is good compared with the cheaper sort, just as a soldier is good or noble who is a soldier in heart, and not a soldier by mere profession or for pay. It is the same word as that used by St. Paul when he speaks of a good, i.e. a noble soldier of Christ. Certain peculiar qualifications made the genuine soldier, certain peculiar qualifications make the genuine or good shepherd. What, then, is that quality which constitutes the essential characteristic of the Good Shepherd, and without which you cannot conceive the idea of one bearing a true shepherd heart and doing a true shepherd work? The Lord tells us: “The good shepherd layeth down his life for the sheep.” He seeks the slafety and well-being of the sheep; and He does so at the cost of any self-sacrifice, even of life itself. Out on one of the great sheep-ranges of the North-West of America, a shepherd was left in a very lonely station in charge of a large flock of sheep. He lived in a little cottage which was fitted up with the necessary comforts for all seasons of the year. There was no other house anywhere near. This man, Hans Neilson, lived there with only his dog Shep for company. After he had lived out there for two years there came a dreadfully severe winter. The sheep-sheds were old, and the shelter for the sheep was poor. New sheds were to be built in the following spring. It was hard work for Hans, but he succeeded in saving all his sheep until the last and most violent blizzard of all. The wind blew and the snow fell for three days. After it was over, help was sent from headquarters to see how Hans had fared. They found his dead body near the sheep-folds, and his dog standing on guard by his master. The sheep were all alive and well, and it was quite clear to the men that Hans had been trying to place additional protection at the broken places in the old sheds when his brave battle ceased and he was overcome by the intense cold. He might have saved his life by neglecting the sheep, but he had literally given his life for his sheep.1 [Note: J. Learmount, In God’s Orchard, 221. 3. “I am the good shepherd.” Why did Christ call Himself the Good Shepherd? Many interpret this “the” as a “the” of degree, and amplify the passage thus: “There are many good shepherds, but I am the Good Shepherd, par excellence.” But this is not the meaning of the text. Christ has showed us that the essence of good shepherding lies in this fact of laying down one’s life for the sheep. No man has any claim at all to be called a good shepherd unless he does lay down his life for the sheep. Christ is the only one to whom the epithet “Good Shepherd” in its metaphorical sense may be applied at all. The “the” is an absolute one. Christ is not to be considered as first among compeers, but as the one between whom and others there can never be any comparison at all. Our Lord not only declares that He is the reality of which the earthly shepherd is the shadow, and that He as such is the flawless, perfect One, but that He alone is the reality. “I am the Good Shepherd; in Me and in Me alone is that which men need.” This question, “Was Christ merely a good Man and a great Teacher, or was He something more? Is He to be to us simply one of many teachers, to be discarded possibly sooner or later because, however valuable in the past, the world is destined more and more to outgrow His teaching? Is He to be merely one of many, or are His claims upon us unique, supreme, paramount?”—this is a question which I do not think you can afford to leave wholly unanswered. To this extent the question, “What think ye of Christ?” is one which you must face. To leave it on one side is virtually to negative any exceptional claim on Christ’s part.1 [Note: H. Rashdall, Doctrine and Development, 83. We have just lost one who was at the time of his death, with one exception, the greatest master of the English language still left among us. Some of the press notices of the late Professor Seeley show a strangely inadequate recognition, as it seems to me, of his true place both in English literature and in English religion. The advance of criticism may have somewhat diminished the value of Ecce Homo as an historical study: I do not think it has touched its usefulness as a help to practical Christianity. To many in our generation Ecce Homo has taught far more than such a book as Imitatio Christi (with all its truth and beauty) can teach to men who do not live in a medieval monastery, about the practical application of our Lord’s moral teaching to the spiritual needs and the everyday duties of modern life. To some of us it has come to seem almost like the very Gospel itself rewritten in the language of the nineteenth century. Its declared purpose is simply to constitute an historical inquiry into the ethical teaching of Jesus Christ. With Theology, strictly speaking, it does not avowedly concern itself at all. And yet the writer who summed up the essence of Christ’s teaching in the famous phrase, “the enthusiasm of humanity,” found that he could not give an historical account of what Christ taught or of the reasons of His success without recognizing in the fullest and most explicit manner the claim to a unique personal authority which is implied as much in the Sermon on the Mount as in the Johannine version of the Master’s life. A morality which is essentially bound up with a devotion to a Person is already a religion. I hardly know of any book that appeals so directly to the conscience of a man anxious, amid all difficulties intellectual and practical, to get an answer for his own soul’s sake to the old question, “What must I do to be saved?” The book is throughout intensely practical, and yet it distinctly implies a Theology, a Theology which may be all the more impressive to some minds because it is more often implied than expressed. Had its author attempted to sum up that implied Theology in a sentence, he would perhaps have expressed himself in some such words as these, which I take from a like-minded writer whose name is revered in this place [Oxford]: “For most of us,” said Arnold Toynbee, “Christ is the expression of God, i.e., the eternal fact within us and without us. In time of peril, of failing, and of falsehood, the one power that, enables us to transcend weakness is the feeling of the communion of the two eternal facts in Christ.”1 [Note: H. Rashdall, Doctrine and Development, 86. II The Significance of Christ’s Claim “The good shepherd layeth down his life for the sheep.” Christ not only proclaims Himself the Good Shepherd; He expounds the significance of this great word. In His exposition, He leads us into depths of Divine wisdom which must evermore constitute the subject of profound study. 1. “The good shepherd layeth down his life for the sheep.” Christ’s love as portrayed in His death illustrates the law of Sacrifice. The goodness of Jesus Christ shines forth from Him, and in His death finds its crown and consummation. That death is not an isolated fact, for it is associated with the whole history of Christ’s redemption. The Lord, throughout His earthly ministry, set that before Him, and said of it as His baptism, “How am I straitened till it be accomplished.” Thus that death was no mere accident or afterthought. It was the necessary outcome of the life and ministry of the incarnate Son of God. Messiah had been represented as the Shepherd of Israel, but it remained for the Son of God, in His supreme revelation, to represent the Shepherd as dying for His flock. And so He says, “the good shepherd layeth down his life for the sheep.” (1) We must observe the perfect voluntariness of His self-devotion. “No man,” He says of His sacrificed life, “taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.” There was no external need for Jesus dying an early, violent death. If He had so willed it, He could have kept Himself out of the hands of the men who crucified Him. He lived a life that none other lived, and He died a death that none other died. He lived because He willed to live, and He died because He willed to die. The law of love never expressed itself so gloriously as in the death of Jesus Christ. So He taught mankind through all time that love is sacrifice, when for us men and for our salvation He made that oblation of Himself upon the Cross of Calvary, once, and once for all. Love must be prepared for the greatest sacrifice. We may never conclude that love is unreal merely because its thoughts are large. It may have the widest schemes, and be prepared to devote the utmost pains to their accomplishment. It should give itself freely to the most romantic enterprises. The Lord would not be for all time the King of Love if He had shrunk back from the cup of suffering which, as He knew, was to be drained at the end of that progress to Jerusalem. We need “public souls”—men and women who are capable of cherishing great ideas, and who delight to spend themselves for their brethren. There is a growing demand for such in the Church and in the Empire. If, in the providence of God, the way should open for any of us to some conspicuous path of devotion, let us count it high honour, and prepare ourselves bravely for the cost it will involve, cost far greater than will appear at the outset; cost of opposition, and criticism, and misunderstanding, and disappointment; cost, it may be, of seeming failure to achieve anything, or to make any immediate impression. Love must be prepared for the greatest sacrifice. That is the first criterion and test.1 [Note: A. W. Robinson, The Voice of Joy and Health, 167. (2) Christ, the Good Shepherd, in pronouncing goodness to lie in self-sacrifice, is but realizing and consummating that principle which is striving to free itself from the tangled web of Nature. But have we always recognized that the heart of goodness, of natural goodness, lies in self-sacrifice? Have we been loyal to this as the verdict of Nature? Somehow, as we know, we came to believe a little time ago that whatever supernatural grace might demand, Nature laid its approval not upon self-sacrifice, but upon self-assertion. So Science had seemed to say. It had opened our eyes upon a dismal scene in which beast battled with beast, each struggling with desperate energy for its own survival. Nature appeared as a wild and blind monster, working with tooth and claw, shrieking against our moral creed. There was no goodness to be detected at work in a war where egoism alone counted. But ever since the early recognition of the law of natural selection, which Darwin emphasized as the sole determinant of evolution, Science has been limiting and qualifying the range of its activity. To many of us it seems there is too much red in the picture which Darwin painted; and the trouble is that his picture has been reproduced by cheaper and coarser processes, until it has lost all subtlety and truth, and become a harsh and ugly print of Nature, as if it were a dismal type of vast gladiatorial show. This is not merely bad as a piece of unbalanced cosmogony; but by a vicious circle the libel projected upon Nature is brought back to justify one set out of human methods, the egoistic; and to condemn others as altruistic. But the organic process depends on much more than a squabble round a platter, or internecine struggle at the margin of subsistence; it includes all the multitudinous efforts for others, as well as for self, between the two poles of hunger and love; all endeavours that mate makes for mate, and parent for offspring, and kin for kin. Love and life are factors in progress as much as pain and death, and the premium in the struggle for existence on tooth and claw is not greater than that on the warm solicitude of the maternal heart, or on the patience of a brooding bird. So, again, we will say if we make a curve of the ascent of vertebrates, marking their position according to the degree of brain development, we find that as the curve ascends the co-ordinates of parental affection and parental love and gentle emotions are heightened. And those organisms so endowed survive, in spite of the admitted egoistic competition. And that is the proof of Nature’s censure. Earth may be strong, but it is also lovely, and the lovely and the strong exist together. And we see that, according to its own ascending mind and age, the loving become more and more strong. From the dawn of life, as Herbert Spencer said, altruism has been no less essential than egoism; self-sacrifice is as primordial as self-preservation. More and more we see that it is possible to interpret the ideals of ethical progress through love and sociality, through co-operation and sacrifice, not as mere Utopias, contradicted by natural experience, but as the highest expression of the central evolutionary process in the natural world.1 [Note: Geddes, Ideals of Science and Faith, 70. Learn in self-sacrifice to find thy joy, The only bliss unmingled with alloy; All lesser pleasures soon must pall and cloy. Better it is to give than to receive, All to forsake than unto aught to cleave;— ’Tis in the act of giving that we live. All spiritual Being lives by this— The ground and basis of the Godhood’s bliss; Who turn therefrom the Life Eternal miss. For though discharged in full strict duty’s round, If in the chains of self-hood thou art bound— Lifeless and void of worth thy works are found. Throughout the extent of Nature’s wide domain See this great law of sacrifice obtain, The creature’s loss conditioning its gain. The very elements this law obey,— The beams that from the solar source outray, The springing fount’s perpetual sparkling play. All living things are constituted so, All organisms from out earth’s womb that grow; As is the outward, so the to-ward flow: So that whate’er impedes or hindereth The pores’ free play, the issue of the breath, Is the concomitant or cause of death: Would’st truly live?—let go!1 [Note: W. Hall, Via Cruris.] 2. “The good shepherd layeth down his life for the sheep.” Christ’s death illustrates the law of Redemption. Here is the doctrine of vicarious sacrifice: the sacrifice of one instead of another: life saved by the sacrifice of another life. Most of us know the meagre explanation of these words which satisfies some men: they say that Christ merely died as a martyr, in attestation of the truths He taught. But we must observe the strength of the expression which we cannot explain away, “I lay down my life for the sheep.” If the Shepherd had not sacrificed Himself, the sheep must have been the sacrifice. There was something the Lord passed through, passed through once and for ever, something awful and unspeakable, in order that we might never share it. We Christians shall never die as He died. Our material bodies will wear away and cease, and they will be carried over the well-trodden way to the cemetery. Men will speak of us as having died, hut we shall never die as our Saviour died. There was something in His death which His followers will never know. “He that believeth in me shall never taste death.” The danger which threatened us was not bodily death, for from that we are not delivered. But it was something with which the death of the body is intimately connected. Bodily death is as it were the symptom, but not the disease itself. It is that which reveals the presence of the pestilence, but is not itself the real danger. It is like the plague-spot that causes the beholder to shudder, though the spot itself is only slightly painful. Now a skilful physician does not treat symptoms, does not apply his skill to allay superficial distresses, but endeavours to remove the radical disease. If the eye becomes bloodshot he does not treat the eye, but the general system. If an eruption comes out on the skin, he does not treat the skin, but alters the condition of the blood; and it is a small matter whether the symptom goes on to its natural issue, if thereby the eradication of the disease is rather helped than hindered. So it is with death: it is not our danger; no man can suppose that the mere transference from this state to another is injurious; only, death is in our case the symptom of a deep disease, of a real, fatal ailment of soul. We know death not as a mere transference from one world to another, but as our transference from probation to judgment, which sin makes us dread; and also as a transference which in form forcibly exhibits the weakness, the imperfection, the shame of our present state. Thus death connects itself with sin, which our conscience tells us is the great root of all our present misery. It is to us the symptom of the punishment of sin, but the punishment itself is not the death of the body but of the soul; the separation of the soul from all good, from all hope,—in a word, from God. This is the real danger from which Christ delivers us. If this be removed, it is immaterial whether bodily death remain or not; or rather, bodily death is used to help out our complete deliverance, as a symptom of the disease sometimes promotes the cure. Christ has tasted death for every man, and out of each man’s cup has sucked the poison, so that now, as we in turn drink it, it is but a sleeping draught. There was a chemistry in His love and perfect obedience which drew the poison to His lips; and, absorbing into His own system all the virulence of it, by the immortal vigour of His own constitution, He overcame its effects, and rose again triumphing over its lethargic potency.1 [Note: M. Dods.] A doctor in one of the London hospitals found a child-patient dying of diphtheria, and sucked away the suffocating film from the throat, with fatal consequences to himself. Was he justified? There are many side issues to this problem, but they do not alter the main question. To answer it we must put ourselves on the spot at the given moment, and see the two human beings face to face with the emergency; the child gasping for breath, the doctor conscious that he holds in his hands a possible means of retaining the life that has almost escaped. He uses it. Can this be called renouncement? Surely not. It is an action love-prompted, generous, beautiful. He does not act thus in order to give away his own life, but to save the child’s; not to lose, but to win something not otherwise to be won.1 [Note: M. C. Albright, The Common Heritage, 77] The Good Shepherd Literature Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, vi. 226. Arnold (T. K.), Sermons, 1. Bickersteth (C.), The Gospel of Incarnate Love, 163. Butler (W. J.), Sermons for Working Men, 235. De Koven (J.), Sermons, 19. Hamilton (J.), Faith in God, 127. Hill (J.), Waymarks, 23. Holland (H. S.), Vital Values, 141. Learmount (J.), In God’s Orchard, 218. Liddon (H. P.), Easter in St. Paul’s, 312. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John ix.–xiv., 34. Manning (H. E.), Sermons, iii. 1. Manning (H. E.), The Teaching of Christ, 123. Newman (J. H.), Parochial and Plain Sermons, viii. 230. Palmer (J. R.), Burden-Bearing, 115. Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, vii. 161, viii. 209. Ritchie (A.), Sermons from St. Ignatius’ Pulpit, 173. Ritchie (D. L.), Peace the Umpire, 20. Robertson (F. W.), Sermons, ii. 251. Ross (J. M. E.), The Self-Portraiture of Jesus, 110. Russell (A.), The Light that Lighteth every Man, 115. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, li. (1905) No. 2919. Wilson (S.), Lenten Shadows and Easter Lights, 144. Christian World Pulpit, lxvii. 305 (Scott Holland); lxxix. 330 (Birch-enough). Church of England Pulpit, xxxi. 304 (Carr); xl. 209 (Price); lv. 254 (Swithinbank); lxiii. 277 (Silvester). Church of Ireland Gazette, May 28, 1909, p. 525 (Dean of St. Patrick’s). Churchman’s Pulpit: Second Sunday after Easter: viii. 44 (Taylor), 46 (Jones), 49 (Manning), 52 (Newman), 55 (Gurney), 57 (Alford), 59 (Price), 61 (Meyer). Homiletic Review, xlix. 302 (Jennings). The Resurrection and the Life Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth on me, though he die, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die.—John 11:25-26. In order to appreciate the significance of these words, “I am the resurrection, and the life,” let us look at the conditions under which they were spoken. The revelation was granted to Martha, the bereaved sister, whose cheerful round of domestic activities was suddenly arrested and her heart torn open to its depths—depths hitherto perhaps unsounded—by the thunder-stroke of death. Our Lord uttered His greatest sayings often to very commonplace people. He spoke to Martha not as He might have spoken in an hour of serene communion with some elect and lofty spirit, but as to any of ourselves, to our common human heart chastened by bereavement, awed and awakened by the visitation of death. Martha’s grief was intensified by the fact that Lazarus was cut off in the midst of his days, his task unfinished, his goal unreached. Of all the perplexing problems of the grave this seemed one of the hardest. Why did it claim the man who had just come to the perfection of his powers and was abler than ever he was to perform his task? It was lonely to be without her brother, it was chilling to think of his loneliness; but these griefs came home with double poignancy when she thought that he had not lived out half his days, and might still have been with them. Once more, it seemed an accident that he died. To Martha it seemed cruel—so often He was with them—that Jesus should not be there when He was most needed. Oh, why did it happen that the Lord was not there? It might so easily have been otherwise; and the thought added to her grief. But at last word was brought of a Visitor welcome above all others; Jesus who had been so strangely long in coming was in Bethany at last. Martha met Him with a cry that was half faith and half despair—“Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died,” and she was answered by the quiet words, “Thy brother shall rise again.” I think her heart must have been for the moment chilled. Was the Master then going to offer the mere conventional consolation that every visitor of these past days had offered, until she was more than weary of it? “I know,” she said—and you can hear an undertone of disappointment and rebellion in the words—“I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” She knew that her brother would rise again. But, like the Jews of her time, even like most Christians now, who inherit their resurrection doctrine more from the Jews than from Christ, Martha thought only of a grand and general resurrection-day far distant. Long ere that day she would be with her brother in the supposed place of expectant souls, waiting till the buried body should be raised and given back. And then came the great words that have pealed through the ages, weighty with the Divine power which so soon sets its seal upon them, gentle with the human sympathy which meant them for healing to broken hearts: “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth on me, though he die, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die.” A double consciousness spoke in these words: Our Lord knew that He was standing near the grave of a dead disciple: He felt perhaps even more vividly that He was standing in the midst of a dead world. He spoke these words with reference to the occasion He was then dealing with; yet there was a larger meaning in them, and the meaning that was for the moment was only a fragment of their infinite truth. We are arrested by— I. The immediate Occasion of the Words. II. Their eternal Application. I The Immediate Occasion “I am the resurrection, and the life.” 1. The promise.—Martha had expressed her faith in the common doctrine of the resurrection at the last day. Christ neither denies it nor assents to it, but passes over it as if it had little power to assuage the actual suffering of death. If it be true, it is a far-off event, ages hence, at the last day; it hardly touches the present fact of death. It has nothing definite, immediate, or specially consolatory in its character, being simply an affirmation of future existence. So little power had it that Martha did not think of it till led to it by Christ’s question. She doubtless shared the vague belief of the Jews, that “her brother would ascend some time or other on angels’ wings into a place somewhere above the stars”; but how could that comfort her? She could not bridge the gulf of time and space between herself and that event. She could get from it no assurance that her brother would ever be known by her; that the ties sundered by death would ever be joined again. There her brother lay in the tomb, dead, fast passing to corruption, soon to become as the dust of the earth, and there he would lie for ages, dead. She herself would soon die and lie beside him, and sleep the long sleep of utter forgetfulness. What comfort is there here for yearning human love that longs for nearness and response? Martha regarded the resurrection in the last day not necessarily as a spiritual fact or as one having a spiritual bearing, but as a mere matter of destiny like birth and death, a distant mysterious event. Christ draws it near, takes it out of time, vitalizes it, puts it into the category of faith, and connects it with Himself. (1) “I am the resurrection, and the life.” For belief in some future great event, Jesus substitutes belief in His own person. It is as if He had said to Martha, “Your faith is not settled on its proper object; you are clinging to a doctrinal truth instead of leaning on a living person; you are thinking of an event, something in the distant future; you should think of me. I am the resurrection, and the life. It is not of the rising of the dead at the last day that you should think; that is indeed something to look forward to, but I am the resurrection in my own person; it is not apart from me.” Christ draws her eyes away from one reality to another and a greater—from the grim fact of death to the greater fact of His own person and power and love; He confronts her with this dilemma—she must pronounce either death or Himself to be the greater reality! There is a wide difference between belief in a doctrine and trust in a person. We can believe a doctrine but we cannot trust it. We can grasp it with our minds, but it makes no appeal to our hearts; like Martha, we may believe in the resurrection without believing in Him who is the resurrection and the life. This is a mistake we often make. We believe in the abstract doctrine and forget the living Person. Half our Christian faith is assent to various propositions instead of trust in a personal Redeemer, who is Himself the substance and explanation of them all. “I,” said Jesus, “I am the resurrection, and the life.”1 [Note: D. Fairweather, Bound in the Spirit, 304. (2) “I am the resurrection, and the life.” In turning Martha’s attention to Himself, Jesus substitutes a present for a future object of trust, a living object for a dead. Martha can think only of that remote time when she and her brother will be reunited. Jesus says, I am the resurrection, and the life, here and now. In Me the dead live. It is not as if Lazarus had gone to nothingness. He has passed away indeed from you, but to Me he lives, for I am the life, and in Me the dead live. The intention of our Lord was plainly to make an immediate comfort out of what is generally held to be a prospective joy. People commonly explain the passage still as belonging to a period which is yet to come. They understand it to mean that, when Christ shall appear again, there will be a resurrection, and that then the dead shall live. Doubtless this is in the words. But is this all? Is this the first and chief meaning? No, Christ was decidedly and definitely leading the woman’s mind away from what she felt would be to what then actually was. “Martha saith unto him, I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day. Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth on me, though he die, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die.” A gentleman stepping into a poor woman’s house saw framed and glazed upon the wall a French note for a thousand francs. He said to the old folks, “How came you by this?” They informed him that a poor French soldier had been taken in by them and nursed until he died, and when he was dying he had given them that little picture as a memorial of him. They thought it such a pretty souvenir that they had framed it, and there it was adorning the cottage wall. They were greatly surprised when they were told that it was worth a sum which would be quite a little fortune for them if they would but turn it into money. They had done as Martha did when she took the words, “Thy brother shall rise again,” and put round about them this handsome frame, “in the resurrection at the last day.”1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.] (3) “I am the resurrection, and the life.” In some of the Old Testament psalms this idea is brought out with wonderful clearness, and through what we must call sheer faith. The Old Testament saints knew nothing of Him who is the resurrection and the life, and the grave was to most of them only a place of gloom; but occasionally we come across a Psalm like the sixteenth, where the writer protests against the idea of death separating him from God. “Thou wilt not leave thy pious one to see the pit,” he says; “thou wilt not leave my soul in Sheol.” He feels in his veins the new life God has given him, feels that he is in union with God, and that such a union must for ever abide uninterrupted even by death. So also taught Jesus. “I am the resurrection,” He said, “and the life.” He that believeth on me, though he die, yet shall he live, because he who is united to Me, he in whom I live, can never in any sense die, for I am the life. That which we call death will be his lot; but life, true life, life which is union with God, life in which Christ lives, is independent of death. Death had not sundered Lazarus from Jesus; through resurrection it had brought him nearer in reverential love. It had not divided him from his sisters; it had made the ties of affection more strong and holy than they had ever been before. It had not quenched one faculty of his being; for to him every power of sight, and speech, and hearing would be more sacred and noble than they were in his former life. In one word Christ showed this—that there was in him a life that rendered death only the gateway through which it rose into life more perfect, and holy, and free. At an open-air service in Delhi, held in a Chamar’s (bootmaker’s) courtyard, another missionary and I had both spoken on faith as a condition of eternal life. When I had finished, a Chamar, who had been working away at his trade all the time, though evidently listening and thinking as well, remarked, “How do you make out that Christians do not die? Those about here do; and as far as I see, peoples of all religions die. Why, even Brahmans die.” A student-evangelist was with us, and he gave this reply:—“Brother! (let Westerns note how friendly and familiar Eastern preachers are!) you know the Delhi Fort?” Of course he did! Every Delhi man is proud of that most striking feature of his city, with its high walls of red sandstone glistening in the sun, and its magnificent towering gateways which lead into the city. Said the preacher, “I want you to imagine for the moment that it has but one exit, the famous Lahore Gate. In the old days, the great Emperor of India lived inside the Fort, in the Marble Palace, still to be seen, a palace of exquisite beauty and glittering splendour. When the Emperor came forth into the city, as for example he did every Friday to visit the Great Mosque for prayer, he came out at that Lahore Gate in all his glory, and crowds witnessed the Royal spectacle. In the same Fort was the State Prison with its dungeons of horror, and in them lay the prisoners condemned to death, till the day of execution, when they too passed forth through that same Gate, and crowds witnessed their shame and despair. This world in which we live is like that Fort, and for all of us there is the one exit, the Gate of Death. They who accept Christ as their Saviour pass out as ‘Kings and Priests’ to glory and honour, and they who accept Him not, go forth to dishonour and death.” “Bravo!” exclaimed the heathen listeners. “Well answered.”1 [Note: Stephen Sylvester Thomas.] 2. The fulfilment of the promise.—Nowhere do we so come to the limit and end of our power as at the door of a vault; nowhere is the weakness of man so keenly felt. There is the clay, but who shall find the spirit that dwelt in it? Jesus has no such sense of weakness. Believing in the fatherly and undying love of the Eternal God, He knows that death cannot harm, still less destroy, the children of God. “God is not the God of dead beings but of living beings, for all live unto him.” All do not live to us; to us the dead are dead, but to God the dead are living; all live unto Him; as He sees men there are none dead. In proof of this, witness the resurrection of Lazarus. What was that miracle? Merely this: God making the dead, but really living, Lazarus visible to us. To Christ Himself Lazarus was alive; to his sisters he was dead. Christ comforted them by showing them he was alive. He called the soul back to the old frame it had worn and so made Lazarus visible again. He had not been dead. Jesus spoke to him. He had a secret of communication which we have not, and having the secret He called back the soul to the old body, that He might for ever prove to us that our beloved dead are in reality alive. We have but lost the means of communication. Christ asked Lazarus to come forth and show himself that we might be assured of this truth. “I am the resurrection, and the life.”1 [Note: D. Fairweather.] When the chemist has produced in his laboratory a certain desired and attested scientific result, when he has mastered the secret of some new process in nature and exhibited the product in a single sample, the problem is solved, the result is guaranteed. He may now set up his factory and invest his capital, and invite the co-operation of wealth and labour, and build up a vast collective industry with full assurance of faith upon the evidence gathered from his crucible, upon the security afforded by the laws of nature that what they have once allowed and yielded, they will always yield to the action of the same cause; and there lies in his hand the power to do a million times what he has actually effected once. The raising of Lazarus was a prompt and a majestic verification on the part of the Lord Jesus Christ of His claim to be the destined Raiser of the dead, a pledge and earnest of all that was to follow.2 [Note: G. G. Findlay, The Things Above, 149. II The Eternal Application The miraculous resurrection of Lazarus was simply a symbol of a far more important truth than the mere restoration of an earthly life conveys. It was a visual illustration of a fact which is too inward and subtle to come under the eye of observers at all. If, as indeed we are bound to do, we strive to set before ourselves with vivid particularity the various emotions which are crowded into the narrative—the bitter regret for help unbrought, the sudden awakening of vague hope, the mysterious grief of the Lord Himself, the awful suspense before the opened grave—it must be that we may the better realize that Truth which calms and satisfies them all. The miracle is nothing more than a translation of an eternal lesson into an outward and intelligible form. The command of sovereign power, “Lazarus come forth,” is but one partial and transitory fulfilment of the absolute and unchanging gospel, “I am the resurrection, and the life.” i. I am the Resurrection, and the Life 1. “I am the resurrection, and the life.”—“I am” in point of time, and also in respect of essential being. (1) In point of time.—Christ does not think of immortality as we do. The thought of immortality is with Him involved in, and absorbed by, the idea of life. Life is a present thing and its continuance a matter of course. When life is full, and abundant, and glad, the present is enough, and past and future are unthought of. It is life, therefore, rather than immortality that Christ speaks of; a present not a future good; an expansion of the nature now, which necessarily carries with it the idea of permanence. It is the devastating mistake of ages of imperfect faith that the emphasis and crisis of life is carried forward into the next world, robbing this of its dignity, disrobing this of its loftiest motives, cheapening by withholding from it its proper fruitions. There is no juster word used among men than “probation,” and none more perverted. Life is indeed probation, but the judgment that decides is in perpetual session; not for one moment is it adjourned; every hour it renders the awards that angels fulfil; daily and forever does the Christ of humanity judge according to the deeds done in this present life of humanity, and send to right or left hand destinies. There is no day of eternity more august than that which now is. There is nothing in the way of consequence to be awaited that is not now acting, no sweetness that may not now be tasted, no bitterness that is not now felt. What comes after will be but the increment of what now is, for even now we are in the eternal world. The Kingdom of heaven has come and is ever coming; its powers and processes, its rewards and punishments are to-day in full activity, mounting into ever higher expression, but never more real in one moment of time than in another.1 [Note: T. T. Munger, The Freedom of Faith, 285. In deserts of the Holy Land I strayed, Where Christ once lived, but seems to live no more, On Lebanon my lonely home I made, I heard the wind among the cedars roar, And saw, far off, the Great Sea’s solemn shore: “But ’tis a dreary wilderness,” I said, Now the prophetic spirit hence has fled: Then, from a convent in the vale, I heard, Slow-chanted forth, the everlasting Word, Saying “I am he that liveth, and was dead, And lo! I am alive for evermore.” Then forth upon my pilgrimage I fare, Resolved to find and praise Him everywhere.1 [Note: J. Gostick.] (2) In essence.—And so we come to the second chief thought suggested by the words: “I am.” The resurrection and the life are not simply through Christ but in Christ. “I am,” He said—not I promise, or I bring, or I accomplish—“I am the resurrection, and the life.” And when we fix our attention upon the words from this point of view, we see at once that they include deeper mysteries than we can at present fathom, that they open out glimpses of some more sublime form of being than we can at present apprehend, that they gather up in one final utterance to the world what had been said before darkly and partially of the union of the believer with his Lord and of the consequences which proceed from it. But though we can perhaps do no more, it is well that we should at least devoutly recognize that we do stand here in the face of a great mystery, which if indistinct from excess of glory, yet even now ennobles, consecrates, transfigures life; which does even now help us to feel where is the answer to difficulties which our own age has first been called to meet; which gives a vital reality to much of the language of Holy Scripture that we are tempted to treat as purely metaphorical. Whenever the Lord says, “I am,” He speaks as ideal Man, as the Life, holding the power of Self-manifestation. What we see in Him is potentially in us, or we could not see it in Him. We may say we are what He is, because He is the representative of the true Man in every man. By His Incarnation this was brought into our consciousness. All are in Him by virtue of their Being, but He makes us aware of what we are. He who comes into this external relationship with us is He who is also the substance of our Being. He is the expression of the hidden Being of all, and the Promise also that each shall rise into the full consciousness of their Being, and be able to say, as did Jesus when on earth: “I and the Father are One Thing.”2 [Note: R. W. Corbet, Letters from a Mystic of the Present Day, 111. 2. “I am the resurrection.”—Christ is the Resurrection inasmuch as He rose again from the dead, and, further, because He has the power to raise us up also. (1) Christ Himself died and rose again. He alone is the true pattern of the resurrection, “the Firstborn,” as St. Paul and St. John style Him, “out of the dead.” In this highest sense He not only effects but He is the Resurrection. He was this inwardly, in His own spirit and consciousness. Jesus described Himself, while on earth in mortal flesh, as “the Son of man which is in heaven.” His eye pierced the veils of sense. The Father was in Him and He in the Father. But outwardly, as well as inwardly, Christ is the pattern of our risen life. Dying a little while after He uttered these words, Jesus Christ appeared to His disciples an embodied resurrection, as if made man over again and more worthily, Firstborn of the “sons of the resurrection.” He was the same, yet mysteriously and loftily transformed. We all know the effects of the Renaissance upon the modern world. Renaissance is re-birth, regeneration, resurrection if you like. The intellectual forces of the Middle Ages had spent themselves; the greater part of Europe was lying in a sleep which might almost be described as death. But when Constantinople was captured by the Turks, many Greek scholars who had been working there had to flee to the shores of Italy, bringing with them Homer and Sophocles, Aristotle and Plato, the forgotten science and art and scholarship of the ancient world. And almost at the same time a new world of unexplored territory was revealed by explorers like Cabot and Columbus. And the result was the awakening of Europe from its death-like sleep, and the stirring of a new life that is not exhausted yet. These men, exiled scholars and brave explorers, were the Renaissance; they were the resurrection and the life of European learning, because it was through them and their labours that the quickening came. Now, what these men did intellectually for Europe at one period, Christ came to do morally and spiritually for the world for all time.1 [Note: J. M. E. Ross, The Self-Portraiture of Jesus, 133. (2) But Christ not only died and rose again; He has the power, in the fullest sense of the word, to make us do likewise. “Though he die,” He says, “yet shall he live.” Did not Christ then really die, and do we not all die, even if we believe in Him? In one sense Christ did die. He suffered this housing of the soul to be torn away, the tabernacle to be taken down, but He will not call it death. It does not touch the life; that flows on, an unbroken current, and rises into greater fulness. And so Christ says that those who believe in Him, and die in this sense, do not really die; though dead, they live. Physical death is not the termination of human life. The grim fact touches only the surface life, and has nothing to do with the essential, personal being. He that believes on Jesus, and he only, truly lives, and his union with Jesus secures his possession of that eternal life, which victoriously persists through the apparent, superficial change which men call death. Nothing dies but the death which surrounds the faithful soul. For it to die is to live more fully, more triumphantly, more blessedly. So though the act of physical death remains, its whole character is changed. The grave of Albrecht Dürer, the great painter, is in the cemetery of his native city, Nuremberg. On his tombstone they have put the word Emigravit—he has emigrated. I do hear From the revolving year A voice which cries: “All dies; Lo, how all dies! O seer, And all things too arise: All dies, and all is born; But each resurgent morn, behold, more near the Perfect Morn.”1 [Note: Francis Thompson, “The Night of Forebeing.”] 3. I am the life.—There is more in our Lord’s words than a mere guarantee to His people of a life of some sort beyond the grave. To Christ and His Apostles, life is not a matter of mere duration; in their rich and inspiring conception the thought of quality is far more prominent than the thought of duration. God had created mankind for life—the life that is life indeed. But man had, in a most real sense, chosen death instead of life, and had made of his world a sepulchre. And now into this world of death there came this Saviour sent down from God, trampling death in all its forms under foot from the beginning of His victorious career. It marked a new epoch in the faith in immortality when the Son of Man stood in the midst of men and said: “I am the resurrection, and the life; he that believeth on me, though he die, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die.” And did He not prove the mighty utterance? Whatever He touched received life. He touched dead eyes, and they saw. He touched dead ears, and they heard. He touched the fatal disease, and life sprang back into the distempered veins. He touched the dead body on the bier, and it awakened from the sleep of death. He went into the grave Himself, and with resurrection power left it empty on the third day. ii. Whosoever liveth and believeth Christ, being the life, promises that “whosoever liveth … shall never die.” 1. Whosoever liveth.—We must be alive in order to know what deathlessness is. We must begin to live as a soul, and not as an animal, if we want to be rid of the fear of death and the doubt of immortality. The way out of the doubts and fears which oppress us is not altogether by the gate of knowledge or of logic, but by the avenues of the spirit. To those who already share the Divine life the terrors of death are abolished. Its inevitable wrench to the spirit is mostly overcome, and its change no more than from life to life. If we are acquainted with our soul, if we have learned to live already with the immortal part of us, and to take pleasure in the things that minister to the life of that part of us, we shall not deem it such a lonesome, blank, and unbearable thing to go away with our own self, our real self, even out of this body into some other. But we must be something more than “dead in trespasses and sins,” something more than choked with “the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches,” before this thought can be realized in us. He whose real life consists not “in the abundance of the things which he possesseth”; he whose spirit is sustained and fed by streams of love; he who lives in faith on all the Divine things; he who works out his faith in pure conduct, exalted aims, unselfish purposes, affectionate service to others,—that man does not die in death. Death only sets free for larger activity the soul which has already begun its undying developments. To live is not to be gay or idle or restless. Frivolity, inactivity, and aimlessness seem equally remote from the true idea of living, I should say that we live only so far as we cultivate all our faculties, and improve all our advantages for God’s glory. The means of living will then be our own endowments, whether of talent or influence; the aim of living, the good of men; the motive of living, the love of God. I do not say that these ideas are to enter prominently into every detail of life, any more than that in every movement we must be distinctly conscious of the vital principle physically; but just as this must necessarily exist before we can take one step, so the whole groundwork of our inner life must be these feelings to which I have alluded.1 [Note: Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott, i. 145. The Bishop of Caledonia had opened a Mission on the Skeena river, which he and his wife had carried on for a year. Then a Missionary and his wife were left in charge. And now let us hear the Bishop’s own words. He says—“They recoiled from the horrors of savage life, and to our great surprise, at the end of one year, suddenly appeared at my house on the coast en route to England. It was too late to find a clergyman to succeed him, and a long winter’s break would probably ruin the work and prospects. Before they had been in my house an hour, I had a volunteer. It was my wife. She said, ‘Let me go, I will hold it together until you find somebody else.’ ‘Do you mean it?’ I asked. ‘Yes!’ ‘Then wait till morning, and we will discuss it.’ Early in the morning, being pressed for an answer, I said ‘Yes.’ “It was difficult to get a crew to face a November ‘Skeena,’ which freezes in hummocks from end to end; but that same day, with a year’s provisions, we started.… It was a dismal journey for both of us, camping and sleeping on the snow being the least of the discomforts. At the end of fifteen days we arrived, and packed the provisions in the little log house. I offered my crew an extra pound a-piece if they would delay their return but a single day, but nothing would induce them to wait, lest the river would freeze. So I left her behind among Indians and miners, the only white woman within one hundred and seventy miles, and the first to ascend the river. The isolation was complete. Events forced me to visit England, but I had returned before she knew that I had left the diocese, and travelled fourteen thousand miles.… At the end of a year I had found an excellent man for the new Mission so that I was able to fetch away my wife. The miners said she was the best Missionary they ever had, and the Indians call her ‘Mother’ to this day. It was a hard time. Her entire household consisted of two Indian schoolboys.” Foil’d by our fellow-men, depress’d, outworn, We leave the brutal world to take its way, And “Patience! in another life,” we say, “The world shall be thrust down, and we up-borne.” And will not, then, the immortal armies scorn The world’s poor, routed leavings? or will they, Who fail’d under the heat of this life’s day, Support the fervours of the heavenly morn? No, no! the energy of life may be Kept on after the grave, but not begun; And he who flagg’d not in the earthly strife, From strength to strength advancing—only he, His soul well-knit, and all his battles won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.1 [Note: Matthew Arnold.] 2. He shall never die.—The quality of this life has a direct bearing on its survival beyond the grave. When God so raises the soul of man to the level of His own holy and loving life, will He allow death to destroy His handiwork? Imagine an artist carving a statue. He has chosen rare and costly materials. He has provided delicate tools. He spends long years in bringing the work to perfection. Do you think that when his purpose is almost complete he will summon his servant and bid him break the work in pieces? Imagine a master training a servant. He is very thorough, very patient, very loving. He treats the servant as a son and not as a slave. And he is well repaid by the response the servant gives: the blunders are almost past; the faults are almost conquered; there is a co-operation of sympathy and of intelligence that is almost perfect. Do you think he will then cast his servant aside like some worn-out tool? Yet that is what happens if God trains the souls of men and bestows His best gifts upon them to make them His true children, and then refuses to dower them with immortality. Christ spends Himself, He gives Himself to raise men from spiritual death to spiritual life. Will He do the greater miracle and not do the less? Will He lose His own work when it is almost complete? It is unthinkable. There is deepest reason in His words, “Because I live, ye shall live also”; there is unanswerable logic in the contention that when Christ has made men sharers of His holiness, He will make them sharers of His immortality as well. In Jesus Christ the believer has an enriched spiritual experience, a more intense consciousness of union with the Divine life. The sense of spiritual renewal in Christ is in many ways a new spiritual experience for the world. God has come nearer to men in the Son of Man. Already in union with Christ there is the experience of a spiritual resurrection, which must imply the fuller I resurrection of the complete life. For “if any man be in Christ Jesus, he is a new creature. Old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new.” We already feel the life of Christ coursing even in our mortal body. It is not we that live, but Christ liveth in us. We are conscious of having “risen with him,” and we know that when Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall we also appear with Him in glory. Be assured, come what come will, What once lives never dies—what here attains To a beginning, has no end, still gains And never loses aught.1 [Note: Browning, Parleyings with Certain People.] 3. “He that believeth on me”—“Whosoever believeth on me.”—Christ asks us to believe in Him, but not without first giving us a proof of His belief in us. “I came that they may have life,” He said. That life was His life; He felt it in Himself, felt its infinity. And as He came, He saw the men that He was coming to; He saw all that was base about them, saw how superficial and how shallow they were. He saw them filled with sin through the love of sin, and yet He said, “I am coming to give Myself through the love of Me, to give them Myself deeper and deeper, little by little, until they shall have received Me perfectly.” Look what a faith in the possibilities of human nature the Incarnation implied! The faith of Christ in man—that is what is written in the Incarnation. The faith of Christ in us—that is what is written in the visit of Christ to us, when, coming and standing directly across our path of wickedness and death, He says to us calmly and surely, “I am come that you might have life, the life of holiness which is by love of Me.” Such life, now abundant and evermore abiding, Christ affords to all who believe on Him. But how is it that believing on Christ thus puts us beyond the reach and power of death? The entire truth that Christ had in mind was this: that faith in Himself, by its own law, works away from death towards life. For Christ is life; to believe on a person is to become like that person, or one with him. Hence, to believe on Christ the Life is to become a sharer with Him in whatever He is, therefore in His life. We are told that Christ could not be holden of death; faith in Him works towards the same freedom. The assimilating power of faith, that is, the power of faith to make those who believe like that in which they believe, is a recognized principle. The whole nature follows the faith, and gravitates towards its object. A moulding process goes on; faith is the workman and the object of faith is the pattern. Starting within, down amongst the desires and affections, it works outward, till the external man becomes in form, feature, and expression like the absorbing object. We meet men every day in whose faces we see avarice, lust, or conceit, as plainly as if it were imprinted on their foreheads. They have so long thought and felt under the power of these qualities that they are made over into their image. A man who worships money comes to wear the likeness of a money-worshipper down to the tips of his fingers; his eyes and nose and the very posture of his figure bear witness to the transforming power of faith. The Hindu who worships Brahma sleeping on the stars in immovable calm gets to wear a fixed expression. The mediæval saints who spent days and nights in contemplation of the crucifix, came to show the very lineaments of the man of sorrows, as art had depicted them, and sometimes, it is said, the very marks of His torture in their own bodies. It is a principle wonderful in its method and power. We are all passing into the likeness of that in which we believe. There is no need that men should be labelled, or that they should make confession with their lips. Very early the faith hangs out a label, and soon the whole man becomes a confession of its truth. You have but to look, and you will see here a voluptuary, there a sluggard; here a miser, there a scholar; here a bigot, there a sceptic; here a thinker, there a fool; here a cruel, unjust man, there one kind, generous, true; here one base throughout, there one radiant with purity. It is wonderful, this power of faith, first moulding, then revealing. It is the power of love directed by will, which together makes up faith; and as it works out so it works within, shaping all things there in like manner. It is by this principle that Christ unites men to Himself.1 [Note: T. T. Munger, The Freedom of Faith, 281. Therefore to whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable Name? Builder and maker, Thou, of houses not made with hands! What, have fear of change from Thee who art ever the same? Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands? There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before; The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more; On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.2 [Note: Browning, Abt Vogler.] The Resurrection and the Life Literature Adams (J. C.), The Leisure of God, 129. Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, i. 285. Atwool (H. C.), At His Feet, 107. Bickersteth (C.), The Gospel of Incarnate Love, 172. Brookfield (W. H.), Sermons, 117. Brooks (P.), The More Abundant Life, 36. Campbell (R. J.), The Song of Ages, 239. Dawson (W. J.), The Evangelistic Note, 273. Drummond (R. J.), Faith’s Perplexities, 195. Fairweather (D.), Bound in the Spirit, 295. Findlay (G.), The Things Above, 141. Horton (R. F.), The Teaching of Jesus, 267. Hull (E. L.), Sermons at King’s Lynn, i. 1. Ingram (A. F. W.), The Gospel in Action, 232. Learmount (J.), Thirty Chats with Young Folks, 22. Little (W. J. K.), Labour and Sorrow, 158. McClelland (T. C.), The Mind of Christ, 133. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Esther, Job, etc., 43. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John ix.–xiv., 81. Manning (H. E.), Sermons, iv. 342, 356. Munger (T. T.), The Freedom of Faith, 273. New (C.), Sermons in Hastings, 169. Ritchie (D. L.), Peace the Umpire, 54. Ross (J. M. E.), The Self-Portraiture of Jesus, 123. Snell (B. J.), Sermons on Immortality, 56. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxvi. (1880) No. 1568; xxx. (1884) No. 1799. Thomas (J.), The Mysteries of Grace, 243. Vaughan (J.), Sermons in Christ Church, Brighton, ii. 106. Westcott (B. F.), The Revelation of the Father, 91. Whiton (J. M.), Beyond the Shadow, 31. Williams (T. Ll.), “Thy Kingdom Come,” 59. Christian World Pulpit, xliii. 72 (Pierson); lxvii. 377 (Ingram). Church of England Pulpit, xlv. 205, xlix. 15 (Headley); lvii. 210 (Hitchcock). Clergyman’s Magazine, 3rd Ser., xiii. 291. The Tears of Jesus Jesus wept.—John 11:35. In this text, containing only the two words “Jesus wept,” we have not before us the whole character of Jesus Christ; we have but one aspect of His many-sidedness, but one point in His very complex character. Yet the text is worth separate and careful study, for it is only by studying the seemingly small points that we shall in time arrive at any just appreciation of the wonder of Christ. The subject divides itself into three branches— I. The Causes of Christ’s tears. II. Their Nature. III. Their Lesson to us. I The Causes of Christ’s Tears 1. Christ’s humanity.—It is difficult to realize the fact of our Lord’s true humanity. It fades away from our view in the splendour of His divinity, so close was the union of man with God. But it was nevertheless a distinct manhood, as perfect in itself as that worn by any of our race. The entire record of Christ’s life proves the assertion. He was born as the children are born—a partaker of their “flesh and blood”; and He was nursed as the children are nursed—growing “in wisdom and stature.” He was hungry, and He ate; He was thirsty, and He drank; He was weary, and He lay down: He was fatigued, and He slept; He was smitten, and He died. Still it is no easy task to picture to ourselves the merely human sensations and tendencies which characterized the man Jesus. We believe that His human nature, sin excepted, was as ours; but it is scarcely possible for us to feel it and imagine it, from the overshadowing glory of His higher essence. In consequence of this failure, we are apt to miss no little instruction and comfort as we read the incidents and travel over the scenes of His life. We invest the man with attributes belonging to the God, and unconsciously deify His humanity. But the Evangelist, from the first, lays down the principle: The word was made flesh. “It is not with a heart of stone that the dead are raised,” says Hengstenberg; and Hebrews 2:17 teaches us that he who would help the unhappy must first of all surrender his heart to feel that very suffering from which he desires to deliver them. It is a remarkable thing that the very Gospel in which the Deity of Jesus is most clearly asserted is also that which makes us best acquainted with the profoundly human side of His life. At first sight, it seems a profane absurdity to talk of God being ignorant, or in sorrow; in pain, or in sickness. Yet we are told that there was no human emotion, in itself sinless, which Jesus could not feel. Hunger, thirst, weariness; the daily discomforts of life, as well as the anguish of the passion and the cross, were as real to Him as to any one of us. Thus there were, no doubt, moments when the manhood asserted itself so strongly as for a little while to dominate, if the word be permissible, over the Godhead. We may find a parallel, though but faint and imperfect, in our own experiences. It occasionally happens that though we are intensely interested in some piece of work, we are compelled to lay it aside, because we are exhausted by hunger. Our intellectual, our real self, chafes and frets at desisting from the fascinating task, but the exhausted body refuses to continue; the brain itself even shows signs of flagging.1 [Note: Canon Bonney.] 2. Christ’s pity.—Why did the Son of God become Son of man? Among other reasons, that He might be in perfect sympathy with us; that, as Bone of our bone, and Flesh of our flesh, He might be able to feel, not merely for us but with us, in all our difficulties and sorrows and pains. Christ’s tears do not mean here what His tears meant when He wept over Jerusalem. He wept then as foreseeing what calamities their hardness of heart would bring upon the people whom He had sought to save; as thinking what might have been, had they known, in their day of grace, the things which belonged to their peace. There would be no such thought in His mind as He drew near to the grave of His faithful servant. What drew those silent tears from Jesus was His sympathy with the mourning sisters. His tears were the answer of His human heart to the appeal of their sorrow. More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.1 [Note: George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss.] Jesus wept not merely from the deep thoughts of His understanding, but from spontaneous tenderness; from the gentleness and mercy, the encompassing loving-kindness and exuberant fostering affection of the Son of God for His own work, the race of man. Their tears touched Him at once, as their miseries had brought Him down from heaven. His ear was open to them, and the sound of weeping went at once to His heart.2 [Note: J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, iii. 133. 3. Christ’s sorrow.—Christ’s sorrow was twofold. (1) To begin with, may we not say that Jesus wept here for pity of the frailty of man, and the victory of death? Of course He does not stand alone in this feeling; all serious men share it with Him more or less, and the profoundest souls feel it deeply. The great literatures of the world are all shadowed by the sense of the shortness of man’s life on earth, and the most moving poetry in particular vibrates to this deep undertone. And naturally so; for the fact goes deep into human existence, and shapes and colours it all through. Even the most unthinking of us feels it in his own commonplace way. (a) The tears of Jesus were then in part caused by the thought of all the humiliation and suffering which sin had brought into His once so happy world, as exemplified in the death of Lazarus, and the bereaved and desolate home. We know that sin did cause “The Holy One of God” deep pain, though we can never tell how deep; and we may be quite sure that what He saw of its effects here did touch, and wring, His loving heart. (b) He saw visibly displayed the victory of death. Here was the Creator of the world at a scene of death, seeing the issue of His gracious handiwork. Would He not revert in thought to the hour of creation, when He went forth from the bosom of the Father to bring all things into existence? There had been a day when He had looked upon the work of His love, and seen that it was “very good.” Whence had the good been turned to evil, the fine gold become dim? “An enemy hath done this.” Weep not for broad lands lost; Weep not for fair hopes crost; Weep not when limbs wax old; Weep not when friends grow cold; Weep not that Death must part Thine and the best-loved heart; Yet weep, weep all thou can— Weep, weep, because thou art A sin-defilθd Man 1:1 [Note: Trench, Poems, 145. (2) But there was still another thought to call forth Christ’s tears. This marvellous benefit to the forlorn sisters, how was it to be attained?—At His own cost. Joseph knew he could bring joy to his brethren, and at no sacrifice of his own. Christ was bringing life to the dead by His own death. His disciples would have dissuaded Him from going into Judζa, lest the Jews should kill Him. Their apprehension was fulfilled. He went to raise Lazarus, and the fame of that miracle was the immediate cause of His seizure and crucifixion. He felt that Lazarus was wakening to life at His own sacrifice; that He was descending into the grave which Lazarus left. He felt that Lazarus was to live and He to die; the appearance of things was to be reversed; the feast was to be kept in Martha’s house, but the last passover of sorrow remained for Him. Is it impossible to think that Christ may have felt the shadow of His own great Passion reflected in some small degree in the scene before Him? “Jesus wept”; but are the tears any less real that they are shed perhaps to some extent for His own sorrow? He is rather by that very fact enabled to sympathize more truly with the griefs of others. Pain is a mere word to the being that never felt pain. “Have you ever been laid up yourself, sir?” a young man on his death-bed asked another young man who visited him by way of comfort. It revealed a longing for exact appreciation of the situation, and an instinct that true sympathy could come only from actual knowledge.2 [Note: H. Black, Comfort, 108. II The Nature of Christ’s Tears 1. Jesus wept calmly.—In Gethsemane, Christ’s own anguish, endured indeed for us, wrung the bitter drops from His eyes. On Olivet, He wept for foes resolved and doomed to perish. Near the grave of Lazarus, He wept in sympathy with loved friends. In approaching the sepulchre, He felt a tender sympathy for the grief which had possessed the heart of His friend at the moment of separation, and that which the two sisters were at that very moment feeling. The word (δακρύειν) to weep, does not (like κλαίειν) indicate sobs, but tears; it is the expression for a calm and gentle sorrow. But His calmness was not attained without an effort. We read that He “groaned in the spirit and was troubled” and the words indicate a physical commotion, a bodily trembling which might be perceived by the witnesses of this scene. Such grief would have been excusable in view of all that the present scene meant to Jesus, but He mastered His most bitter grief. “Jesus wept,” but the tears have nothing in them of weak or unreasonable anguish; Jesus by the grave of a dead friend, amidst the sorrow of the world, in the shadow of His Passion, could still weep calmly. Grief should be Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate; Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free; Strong to consume small troubles; to commend Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end.1 [Note: Aubrey de Vere.] 2. Jesus wept reservedly.—In the sorrow of our Lord there was no ostentation. It was necessary that our Lord’s grief should be manifested for the comfort of the mourners, and for the trial of the hearts of the spectators; but beyond this He had no wish to exhibit His sorrow. The affectation and vain-glory which court applause for any quality whatever, were utter strangers to His meek and lowly mind. St. Francis is said to have shed so many tears that they affected his power of vision. Of a certain St. Abraham it is recorded that no day passed after his conversion without his shedding tears. Bishop Andrewes’s Devotions were so blistered with tears that his editors could scarcely read them. Of an old Scotswoman, turned from a life of great sin, it is told that she actually “wept her eyes out.” From all such tears, of course, our Saviour was free.1 [Note: T. Marjoribanks, In the Likeness of Men, 41. 3. Jesus wept unashamedly.—Jesus wept and was not ashamed of His human weakness. He could have repressed His tears—many men do so habitually. No doubt there may be great sorrow, very great sorrow, where there is no open expression of it. The Saviour could doubtless, if so He wished, have hidden His grief; but He did not choose to do so, for He was never unnatural. Jesus wept, as the mourners about Him wept. The sight of such sorrow overpowered Him, and He could not refrain. That was a true manhood which felt this touch of nature, and broke into tears. There was no stoicism in His constitution. There was no attempt to restrain His sympathies, and educate Himself into a hard and inhuman indifference. Neither was He ashamed of possessing our ordinary sensibilities. He felt it no weakness to weep in public with them that wept. It is no part of heroism to affect insensibility to suffering. The strongest manhood has its roots in tender feeling. The ideal man’s emotional nature is as quick, powerful, urgent, undeniable as his intellect is lofty and his will unbending. The patriarchs are all represented as men of tender feeling. “Abraham came to weep.” “Jacob lifted up his voice, and wept.” “Joseph fell upon his father’s face, and wept.”2 [Note: J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, i. 176. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight.3 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.] III The Lesson of Christ’s Tears 1. They are a pledge.—Christ’s tears speak about the future, and show us what Jesus will always be. Everything done by Christ on earth was done for all time. The meaning of His actions was not confined to the persons and the places of the hour. They stand out as parables to teach the world. When Jesus wept with Martha and Mary, His tears promised that all His suffering followers to the end of time should have His pitying regard. Job’s rebellion came from the thought that God, as a sovereign, is far off, and that, for His pleasure, His creature suffers. Our own theory comes to the mourner with the assurance, “Your suffering, just as it is in you, is God’s suffering. No chasm divides you from God. He is not remote from you even in His eternity. He is here. His eternity means merely the completeness of His experience. But that experience is inclusive. Your sorrow is one of the included facts.” I do not say, “God sympathizes with you from without, would spare you if He could, pities you with helpless external pity merely as a father pities his children.” I say, “God here sorrows, not with but in your sorrow. Your grief is identically His grief, and what you know as your loss, God knows as His loss just in and through the very moment when you grieve.”1 [Note: J. Royce.] It is our great mistake, I think, to set Divine suffering in a bare fact of history come and gone, an episode of once and no more, and to preach our sharing of it only as an emotional transaction and an effort of the good will. It is this, but more, far more. I share all my pain with God, and He bears our griefs whether we see Him or are blind. Not over against me, holding back a hand which might help, but side by side, nay, “closer than breathing,” within the inmost hiding-place of my suffering self, He suffers too and bears all pain with me. Therefore, if I will, His strength may be my strength, His love may succour me; new life and light may arise within me to be and to remain my own, and to turn even suffering into joy.2 [Note: A Modern Mystic’s Way.] 2. They are an example. (1) The following of Christ does not free us from suffering. It often leads to it. Not only are we liable to the ills which press upon humanity, but special chastenings are set apart for us. Believers have sufferings in common with others; but they have also trials adapted particularly to themselves. The object of Christianity is to train the soul; and it takes advantage of suffering to aid it in the process of tuition. It works in the sphere of experience. Genuine grief will have genuine vent; it demands expression. It is right to grieve, and even deeply grieve, over the sorrows that befall us as we go through the world. It is an inhuman spirit that says, “I will not grieve,” whether the determination springs from a proud defiance of fate, or from an exaggerated view of the nothingness of the creature before the Creator, or from an impossible attempt to ignore the bitterness of the means He uses in the great worthiness of the ends He is bringing about. On the contrary, grief is natural and right for the human spirit. It is the confession of the subordination of our lives to the heavenly will, and, at the same time, of the existence in us of those strange capacities of pain and anguish, through which the perfecting of our nature is so largely brought about. Christ, the model of manhood, the mirror of all that was noble and dignified, did not deny Himself the relief of tears; and shall men be looked upon as effeminate, as falling from the dignity of their sex, if, with emotions like Christ, they shed tears like Him? No. He who would aspire to a transcendental apathy that man was not made for, and which Jesus despised, he who would do such violence to his nature insults his Creator, and would foolishly set himself above the example of his Redeemer. Instead of raising himself above humanity, he sinks beneath its level. The brow that never wore a smile, is not more unnatural than the eye that never glistened with a tear.1 [Note: J. Eadie, The Divine Love, 294. (2) Once more the tears of Jesus bid us sympathize with all sad hearts, and seek to comfort them. For here, as always, He is an example to the sons of God. Our sympathy is, indeed, a weak thing, compared with the sympathy of Jesus; yet it can do something to help others. We are made for one another. We have a common root. Life is the whole of life. There is a circulation of the blood of the race as well as of the body. We have no exclusive rights to our sorrows, nor has any trouble exclusive rights over us. That which Christ did He bids us do. He bids us follow Him in His sympathy. He bids us have sympathy with man; not in the way of condescension; not as angels stooping to condole; not as the pure mourning over the impure, but as men touching to heal; as men not loving the sin yet loving the sinner; not as breathing by choice infected air, but as infected men nursing, cherishing, giving ourselves for the infected. The practical weakness of the vast mass of modern pity for the poor and the oppressed is precisely that it is merely pity; the pity is pitiful, but not respectful. Men feel that the cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is injustice to equals; nay, it is treachery to comrades. This dark, scientific pity, this brutal pity, has an elemental sincerity of its own, but it is entirely useless for all ends of social reform.1 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens.] The Tears of Jesus Literature Arnot (W.), Roots and Fruits of the Christian Life, 224. Banks (L. A.), Christ and His Friends, 310. Belfrage (H.), Sacramental Addresses, 241. Eadie (J.), The Divine Love, 268. Fry (J. H.), Tears, 21. Gibbon (J. M.), Evangelical Heterodoxy, 53. Knight (G. H.), In the Cloudy and Dark Day, 149. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John ix.–xiv., 91. Marjoribanks (T.), In the Likeness of Men, 39. Martin (A.), Winning the Soul, 265. Newman (J. H.), Parochial and Plain Sermons, iii. 128. Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, i. 89. Roberts (A.), Sermons on Gospel Miracles, 247. Robertson (F. W.), The Human Race, 108. Smith (D.), Man’s Need of God, 79. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxxv. (1889) No. 2091. Swing (D.), in The American Pulpit of the Day, i. 271. Vaughan (C. J.), Christ and Human Instincts, 111. Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), ix. (1874) No. 874. Wood (G. R. H.), Miracle Messages, 63. Christian World Pulpit, xii. 217 (Skinner); xiii. 67 (Heard); xxxvi. 15 (Spurgeon); l. 199 (Thomas); lxx. 93 (Swanson). Church of England Pulpit, li. 85 (Bonney). Fruitfulness through Death Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit.—John 12:24. 1. Jesus was always alive to the beautiful and instructive analogies between the natural and the moral world; but this occasion, when He illustrated heavenly truth by the striking comparison of the grain of wheat, was one of more than ordinary interest. The Apostles Andrew and Philip had approached Him on the part of certain Greeks, with the request that they might be introduced to Him of whom, no doubt, they had heard much. It is probable, since Greek Jews are called Hellenists and not Greeks in the New Testament, that these persons were proselytes of the gate from among the nations where the Greek tongue was then spoken. As they had been won over from heathenism into acceptance of the Mosaic religion, they seem to have awakened in the prophetic soul of Christ the conception of a time when the heathen would flock to His spiritual standard, and the prince of this world would be cast out from his kingdom. The next associated thought was the means for such a great and fruitful result, which was no other than His death. He who was thus waited on by men from strange lands would, in a very few days, be hanging on a cross, under condemnation as a malefactor. But His death and burial, so far from destroying His cause, were to become the life of the world. And the same in substance holds good of those who will follow Him. Just as the seed committed to the earth suffers a separation of its parts and is buried before it can germinate, so man must, in a spiritual sense, pass through death before he can truly live and be to others a source of life. If he abideth alone, he is unfruitful; but if he die, he bringeth forth much fruit. 2. Jesus is just about to be conclusively rejected by His own people; just on the point of being crucified by them. Some have shut their eyes, and stopped their ears, and hardened their hearts in the most determined manner against Him and His teaching; others, not insensible to His merits, have meanly and heartlessly concealed their convictions, fearing the consequences of an open profession. Pharisaism, Sadduceeism, ignorance, indifference, fickleness, cowardice, have confronted Him on every side. How refreshing, amidst abounding contradiction, stupidity, and dull insusceptibility, this intimation brought to Him at the eleventh hour: “Here are certain Greeks who are interested in you, and want to see you.” The words fall on His ear like a strain of sweet music; the news is as reviving to His burdened spirit as the sight of a spring to a weary traveller in a sandy desert; and in the fulness of His joy He exclaims: “The hour is come that the Son of man should be glorified.” Rejected by His own people, He is consoled by the inspiring assurance that He shall be believed on in the world, and accepted by the outlying nations as all their salvation and all their desire. 3. The thoughts of Jesus at this time were as deep as His emotions were intense. Specially remarkable is the first thought to which He gave utterance in these words: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit.” He speaks here with the solemnity of one conscious that He is announcing a truth new and strange to His hearers. His object is to make it credible and comprehensible to His disciples that death and increase may go together. He points out to them that the fact is so in the case of grain; and He would have them understand that the law of increase, not only in spite but in virtue of death, will hold equally true in His own case. “A grain of wheat, by dying, becometh fruitful; so I must die in order to become, on a large scale, an object of faith and source of life. During My lifetime I have had little success. Few have believed, many have disbelieved; and they are about to crown their unbelief by putting Me to death. But My death, so far from being, as they fancy, My defeat and destruction, will be but the beginning of My glorification. After I have been crucified, I shall begin to be believed in extensively as the Lord and Saviour of men.” 4. It is not at all difficult to see why Jesus laid special and weighty emphasis on the fact that death, self-surrender, self-renunciation, self-sacrifice, is the condition of all life, or why He called the special and earnest attention of the Greeks to it. For not only is the truth itself a fundamental truth of His Gospel and Kingdom, lying at the very root both of Christian theology and of Christian experience, and finding its supreme expression in the Cross; not only is it repugnant to man’s general bent and inclination—for who cares to impose on himself either a yoke or a cross?—but it also ran right in the teeth of Greek thought and civilization. Self-culture and self-enjoyment were the master words with the Greeks—the chief good of human life, the supreme aim, the ruling bent of the whole Grecian world, as we may learn from their literature, their art, their political economy, their social and civic institutions; from which we may also learn how miserably, in pursuing this aim, they fell short of the ends for which man was created and made. So that in calling them to substitute self-renunciation for self-culture, and self-sacrifice for self-gratification, the Lord Jesus was virtually asking them to reverse the whole bent of their thought and conduct, and to set before themselves an ideal the very opposite to that which they had hitherto pursued. I Death the Condition of Fruitfulness in Nature The illustration which our Saviour employs is generic. Take a particle of grain into your hand. It is round and complete; hard and self-contained. It seems to be dead, but there lies within it the possibility of a wondrous and manifold life. The mystery of life sleeps within it. The beauty of summer lies hidden in its dark and narrow breast. But of it the paradox is true, that it is dead, because it has not died. It must die in order to become alive. It must be cast away from the hand of the sower, fall into the ground, and be buried in darkness. Its outer form must be broken up and decay, that the dormant life within it may be awakened, and manifested, and its beautiful and manifold being come out of the prison-house of its loneliness, and wave and rustle and shine in the sunlight. Unless it go through this process, it remains a lonely and unproductive seed. Every seed is alone until it dies. It may be laid up with other seeds in the store house; but in the midst of multitudes it is alone. It has no living union with any, being cut off from the universal life; and the reason why it escapes from its loneliness through death is, that thereby its individual life is placed in living contact with the all-pervading life of nature. When it is embedded in the soil, it is no longer alone, but unites itself with the universal life; and thus the day of its death is the day of its birth to a higher life. Every annual plant dies when it has produced blossom and fruit; every individual branch in a tree which corresponds with an annual plant also dies when it has blossomed and fruited. It is interesting to notice the strange effect of the effort to flower in the American aloe. It appears to exhaust all its energies, so that the huge, fleshy leaves, which before stood firm and erect, gradually shrink, shrivel, and droop as the process of inflorescence advances, and the plant becomes a mere ghost of its former self. So, too, the Talipat palm, which lives to a great age and attains a lofty stature, flowers only once, but it bears an enormous quantity of blossoms, succeeded by a crop of nuts sufficient to supply a large district with seed, while the tree immediately perishes from the exhaustion of over-production. These are beautiful illustrations of the natural love of self-sacrifice.1 [Note: Hugh Macmillan.] This law of self-sacrifice is embedded in nature. Minot, the embryologist, and Drummond, the scientist, tell us that only by losing its life does the cell save it. The new science exhibits the body as a temple, constructed out of cells, as a building is made of bricks. Just as some St. Peter’s represents strange marble from Athens, beauteous woods from Cyprus, granite from Italy, porphyry from Egypt, all brought together in a single cathedral, so the human body is a glorious temple built by those architects called living cells. When the scientist searches out the beginning of bird or bud or acorn he comes to a single cell. Under the microscope that cell is seen to be absorbing nutrition through its outer covering. But when the cell has attained a certain size its life is suddenly threatened. The centre of the cell is seen to be so far from the surface that it can no longer draw in the nutrition from without. The bulk has outrun the absorbing surface. “The alternative is very sharp,” says the scientist, “the cell must divide or die.” Only by losing its life and becoming two cells can it save its life. Later on, when each of the two cells has grown again to the size of the original one, the same peril threatens them and they too must divide or die. And when, through this law of saving life by losing it, nature has made sure the basis for bud and bird, for beast and man, then the principle of sacrifice goes on to secure beauty of the individual plant or animal and perpetuity for the species. In the centre of each grain of wheat there is a golden spot that gives a yellow cast to the fine flour. That spot is called the germ. When the germ sprouts and begins to increase, the white flour taken up as food begins to decrease. As the plant waxes, the surrounding kernel wanes. The life of the higher means the death of the lower. In the orchard also the flower must fall that the fruit may swell. If the young apple grows large, it must begin by pushing off the blossom. But by losing the lower bud the tree saves the higher fruit.1 [Note: N. D. Hillis, The Investment of Influence, 159. First the grain, and then the blade— The one destroyed, the other made; Then stalk and blossom, and again The gold of newly minted grain. So Life, by Death the reaper cast To earth, again shall rise at last; For ’tis the service of the sod To render God the things of God.2 [Note: John B. Tabb.] II Death the Condition of Fruitfulness in the Life of Christ 1. The need for Christ’s death.—A comparison of the good done by the life of Christ with that done by His death shows how truly He judged when He declared that it was by His death He should effectually gather all men to Him. His death, like the dissolution of the seed, seemed to terminate His work, but really was its germination. So long as He lived, it was but His single strength that was used; He abode alone. There was great virtue in His life—great power for the healing, the instruction, the elevation of mankind. In His brief public career He suggested much to the influential men of His time, set all men who knew Him a-thinking, aided many to reform their lives, and removed a large amount of distress and disease. He communicated to the world a mass of new truth, so that those who have lived after Him have stood at quite a different level of knowledge from that of those who lived before Him. And yet how little of the proper results of Christ’s influence, how little understanding of Christianity, do you find even in His nearest friends until He died. By the visible appearance and the external benefits and the false expectations His greatness created, the minds of men were detained from penetrating to the spirit and mind of Christ. It was expedient for them that He should go away, for until He went they depended on His visible power, and His spirit could not be wholly received by them. They were looking at the husk of the seed, and its life could not reach them. They were looking for help from Him instead of themselves becoming like Him. When Jesus was upon the earth, the Spirit of God was in some peculiar sense associated with, and confined to, His person; and He taught His disciples that He must needs depart from them, that the Spirit might be poured out in larger measure. “I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.” And, therefore, He departed from the world, that He might come nearer to it; inasmuch as a spiritual presence is nearer than a bodily presence. The one living temple of God was broken down and removed out of sight, that every Christian might be a temple of the Holy One.1 [Note: Fergus Ferguson.] This truth is not here spoken for the first time. It is the truth wrapt up in the first promise respecting the woman’s seed, the man with the bruised heel. It is the truth to which Abel’s sacrifice pointed so explicitly. It is the truth coming out in all the Levitical sacrifices and rites. It is the truth uttered by prophets: “When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days.” It is the truth announced by apostles: “Without shedding of blood is no remission.” It is the truth to which such prominence is given in the Apocalypse, when the Son of God is seen as the Lamb slain, and when the saints sing, “Thou hast redeemed us to God by thy blood.”2 [Note: Horatius Bonar.] 2. The fruit of Chrisf’s death.—As seed produces grain of its own kind, so Christ produces men like Christ. He ceasing to do good in this world as a living man, a multitude of others by this very cessation are raised in His likeness. By His death we receive both inclination and ability to become with Him sons of God. “The love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge that if one died for all, then were all dead; and that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them.” By His death He has effected an entrance for this law of self-surrender into human life, has exhibited it in a perfect form, and has won others to live as He lived. Who shall measure the fruitfulness of that one death? It is the source of all true thought, of all holy feeling, of all noble action, of all the heavenly graces of the Spirit. We see but the beginning of what it is designed to bear. The day alone will declare it; that day when Jesus will appear at the head of the whole family of God, saying, “Behold I and the children which God has given me.”1 [Note: Fergus Ferguson.] The voluntary death of the Son of God, His self-sacrifice, put mankind in a new position. He came back from the grave with the powers of Godhead no longer in abeyance. He came back to act no longer according to the restrictions which He had imposed on Himself during those previous three and thirty years; no longer to confine Himself to man’s condition, to be seen only in one place, heard only by one company, teaching a handful of men; but He was to act henceforth in the plenitude of Godhead. He was to give efficacy to the work of those three years of His ministry, He was to fill His sacraments with grace, to make them channels for conveying and renewing life, for imparting the life that was in Himself to His members. He was to write His new law on the heart, i.e. to work it into the mind, to make it men’s pleasure to obey. He was to perform to the end of time moral miracles, corresponding to those first physical ones. The Apostles He had trained were to perpetuate a succession to the end of time. The society He founded was never to be broken up. The prayer He had issued, whenever earnestly offered, should be supported by His own intercession. The cross He died on should be for ever dear. Not only the literal cross should be honoured, be worn as an ornament and decoration, be lifted high over cities, wave in banners, be the ground-plan of cathedrals; but, far more important than these outward effects, men should carry out the idea of the cross, call their trials crosses, take them up in His Spirit, bear them meekly, patiently, as He had borne His.1 [Note: H. W. Burrows.] III Death to Self the Condition of Fruitfulness in the Christian Life 1. The law of the seed is the law of human life. If we use our life for present and selfish gratification and to satisfy our present cravings, we lose it for ever. If we renounce self, yield ourselves to God, spend our life for the common good, irrespective of recognition or the lack of it, personal pleasure or the absence of it, although our life may thus seem to be lost, it is finding its best and highest development and passes into life eternal. Our life is a seed now, not a developed plant, and it can become a developed plant only by our taking heart to cast it from us and sow it in the fertile soil of other men’s needs. This will seem, indeed, to disintegrate it and fritter it away, and leave it a contemptible, obscure, forgotten thing; but it does, in fact, set free the vital forces that are in it, and give it its fit career and maturity. This may be called a dying life, when a man for the love of God refuses to gratify his senses and take his natural pleasure, and follow his own will; and as many lusts as he dies to, so many deaths does he offer to God, and so many fruits of life will he receive in return. For in what measure a man dies to himself, and grows out of himself, in the same measure does God, who is our Life, enter into him.2 [Note: Tauler.] One night I got a letter from one of the students of the University of Edinburgh, page after page of agnosticism and atheism. I went over to see him, and spent a whole afternoon with him, and did not make the slightest impression. At Edinburgh University we have a Students’ Evangelistic Meeting on Sunday nights, at which there are eight hundred or one thousand men present. A few nights after this, I saw that man in the meeting, and next to him sat another man whom I had seen occasionally at the meetings. I did not know his name, but I wanted to find out more about my sceptic, so when the meeting was over, I went up to him and said, “Do you happen to know ——?”—“Yes,” he replied, “it is he that has brought me to Edinburgh.”—“Are you an old friend?” I asked.—“I am an American, a graduate of an American University,” he said. “After I had finished there I wanted to take a post-graduate course, and finally decided to come to Edinburgh. In the dissecting-room I happened to be placed next to ——, and I took a singular liking to him. I found out that he was a man of very remarkable ability, though not a religious man, and I thought I might be able to do something for him. A year passed and he was just where I found him.” He certainly was blind enough, because it was only two or three weeks before that that he wrote me that letter. “I think you said,” I resumed, “that you only came here to take a year of the post-graduate course.”—“Well,” he said, “I packed my trunks to go home, and I thought of this friend, and I wondered whether a year of my life would be better spent to go and start in my profession in America, or to stay in Edinburgh and try to win that one man for Christ, and I stayed.”—“Well,” I said, “my dear fellow, it will pay you; you will get that man.” Two or three months passed, and it came to the last night of our meetings. We have men in Edinburgh from every part of the world. Every year, five or six hundred of them go out never to meet again, and in our religious work we get very close to one another, and on the last night of the year we sit down together in our common hall to the Lord’s Supper. This is entirely a students’ meeting. On that night we get in the members of the Theological Faculty, so that things may be done decently and in order. Hundreds of men are there, the cream of the youth of the world, sitting down at the Lord’s table. Many of them are not members of the Church, but are there for the first time pledging themselves to become members of the Kingdom of God. I saw —— sitting down and handing the communion cup to his American friend. He had got his man. A week after he was back in his own country. I do not know his name; he made no impression in our country, nobody knew him. He was a subject of Christ’s kingdom, doing His work in silence and in humility. A few weeks passed and —— came to see me. I said, “What do you come here for?”—He said, “I want to tell you I am going to be a medical missionary.” It was worth a year, was it not?1 [Note: The Life of Henry Drummond, 338. 2. The seed must die if a harvest is to spring firm it. That is the law for all moral and spiritual reformations. Every cause must have its martyrs. No man can be fruit-bearing unless he sacrifices himself. We shall not “quicken” our fellows unless we “die,” either literally or by the not less real martyrdom of rigid self-crucifixion and suppression. But that necessity is not only for Apostles or missionaries of great causes; it is the condition of all true, noble life, and prescribes the path not only for those who would live for others, but for all who would truly live their own lives. Self-renunciation guards the way to the “tree of life.” That lesson was specially needed by “Greeks,” for ignorance of it was the worm that gnawed the blossoms of their trees, whether of art or of literature. It is no less needed by our sensuously luxurious and eagerly acquisitive generation. The world’s war-cries to-day are two—“Get!” “Enjoy!” Christ’s command is, “Renounce!” And in renouncing we shall realize both of these other aims, which they who pursue them alone never attain.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.] The apparent death of a cause is sometimes but the beginning of its true and world-wide life. Let it alone, and it will remain alone; but persecute it—threaten it with death, and you only increase its vitality. When you try to chase a truth out of sight you only chase it into public notice. When you think you have exterminated it, cut it in pieces or burned it, there springs up around you a thousand witnesses to the truth that seemed to be dead. Every drop of blood shed has a voice, and cries from the ground. It is the truth of this text that is expressed in the familiar words, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.2 [Note: Fergus Ferguson.] You have heard of Henry Martyn, the Cornishman, of whom Cornishmen are justly proud. Though with all the devotion of a saint he laboured to carry the story of the Cross to the hearts of the heathen, perseveringly and without complaint, he saw but little result. His death did what his life could not do. The noble self-sacrifice was not in vain. The news of his death sent a thrill of interest and love through many English hearts, which resulted in a deeper sense of responsibility towards the heathen, which has not died away. The corn of wheat fell into the ground, and died, and brought forth much fruit.3 [Note: W. R. Hutton, Low Spirits, 64. But all through life I see a Cross, Where sons of God yield up their breath: There is no gain except by loss, There is no life except by death, And no full vision but by Faith, Nor glory but by bearing shame, Nor Justice but by taking blame; And that Eternal Passion saith, “Be emptied of glory and right and name.”1 [Note: Walter C. Smith, “Olrig Grange.”] 3. If a man does not die to himself, to his selfishness, to his own will; if he is not born to a new life, to a life of renunciation, of expansion and of love, he remains alone—alone with regard to God, and with regard to all creatures in the universe,—alone in the present life, and alone in the life to come. The life of the man who is not dead to himself in order to live again spiritually, the life whose principle is selfishness, is a perpetual moral solitude: and there is no chastisement more frightful than that eternal solitude which is its inevitable result. To escape that fatal isolation, to have on earth and in heaven loved hearts which understand us, which beat in sympathy with our own, can be secured but in one way—that is, to die to ourselves, to our lusts; it is to crucify our selfishness as Jesus Christ was crucified, in order to be born again with Jesus Christ to a new life, the principle of which is love—love to God and love to man. The measure of our willingness to deny ourselves in order to do good, is the measure, also, of the good that we actually will do. If we do for Christ and for our fellow-men only that which costs us nothing, we shall do but little good, and that little will scarcely be worth the doing. Cost, sacrifice, self-denial, toil, generosity, self-forgetfulness, the laying down, every day, in whole or in part, of even life itself—this is ever the Divine condition of usefulness, the price we must ever pay in order to be benefactors to our fellow-men or helpers to advance the Kingdom of Christ in the world. Annihilation of self; Selbsttödtung, as Novalis calls it; casting yourself at the footstool of God’s throne, “To live or to die forever; as Thou wilt, not as I will.” Brother, hadst thou never, in any form, such moments in thy history? Thou knowest them not even by credible rumour? Well, thy earthly path was peaceabler, I suppose. But the Highest was never in thee, the Highest will never come out of thee. Thou shalt at best abide by the stuff; as cherished house-dog, guard the stuff,—perhaps with enormous gold-collars and provender: but the battle, and the hero-death, and victory’s fire-chariot carrying men to the Immortals, shall never be thine. I pity thee; brag not, or I shall have to despise thee.1 [Note: Carlyle, Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, i. 89. The great obdurate world I know no more, The clanging of the brazen wheels of greed, The taloned hands that build the miser’s store, The stony streets where feeble feet must bleed. No more I walk beneath thy ashen skies, With pallid martyrs cruelly crucified Upon thy predetermined Calvaries: I, too, have suffered, yea, and I have died! Now, at the last, another road I take Thro’ peaceful gardens, by a lilied way, To those low eaves beside the silver lake, Where Christ waits for me at the close of day. Farewell, proud world! In vain thou callest me. I go to meet my Lord in Galilee. Fruitfulness through Death Literature Bonar (H.), Family Sermons, 168, 175. Burrell (D. J.), The Verilies of Jesus, 39. Burrows (H. W.), Lenten and other Sermons, 111. Cox (S.), Expositions, ii. 258. Debenham (A.), On Guard, 24. Eyton (R.), The True Life, 440. Ferguson (F.), Sermons, 123. Gotwald (L. A.), Joy in the Divine Government, 107. Howell (D.), in The Welsh Pulpit of To-Day, 214. Humberstone (W. J.), The Cure of Care, 97. Hutton (W. R.), Low Spirits, 63. Inge (W. R.), Death the Fulfilment of Life, 1. Jay (W.), Short Discourses, i. 51. Leitch (R.), The Light of the Gentiles, 125. Liddon (H. P.), Passiontide Sermons, 100. Lorimer (G. C.), The Modern Crisis in Religion, 37. Mackenzie (W. L.), Pure Religion, 20. Macmillan (H.), Two Worlds are Ours, 230 Mantle (J. G.), “The Way of the Cross,” 83. Moberly (G.), Plain Sermons at Brighstone, 76. Monod (H.), in The Foreign Protestant Pulpit, ii. 43. Morrison (G. H.), Sunrise, 84. Mulling (E. Y.), in The Southern Baptist Pulpit, 246. Rogers (J. H.), The “Verily, Verilys” of Christ, 164. Selby (T. G.), in God’s Garden, 193. Skrine (J. H.), The Heart’s Counsel, 34. Tauler (J.), Life and Sermons (by Winkworth), 395. Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit, 1865), No. 513. Woolsey (T. D.), The Religion of the Present and of the Future, 288. Christian World Pulpit, x. 347 (Mercer); xxiv. 247 (Heard); xxix. 253 (Young); xxx. 368 (Austin); xxxviii. 206 (Rice); lxii. 44 (Jeffs). Contemporary Pulpit, 1st Ser, x. 30 (Liddon). The Love of Jesus for His Own Having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end.—John 13:1. 1. Those who study St. John’s Gospel critically find it divided into sections. As many as seven divisions are made out by some. In a simpler way the Gospel divides itself into two. The first division, containing twelve chapters, relates how Jesus wrought the works of Him that sent Him while it was day. The second, beginning with this thirteenth chapter, describes His departure. The keynote of the first section of the second part is this, that “having loved his own, he loved them unto the end.” The latter half of St. John’s Gospel, which begins with these words, is the Holy of Holies of the New Testament. Nowhere else do the blended lights of our Lord’s superhuman dignity and human tenderness shine with such lambent brightness. Nowhere else is His speech at once so simple and so deep. Nowhere else have we the heart of God so unveiled to us. On no other page, even of the Bible, have so many eyes, glistening with tears, looked and had the tears dried. The immortal words which Christ spoke in that upper chamber are His highest self-revelation in speech, even as the Cross to which they led up is His most perfect self-revelation in Acts 1 [Note: A. Maclaren.] 2. The explanation of all that follows is in these words: “Having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end.” It is the key to His action of washing their feet, to give them a proof of His enduring love. It is the explanation of all His previous life, and of the death He is to accomplish soon. St. John gives us in these words the right point of view for understanding the true significance of all that follows and of all that went before. He was possessed and governed by love, the Apostle declares. If we do not see this, we see nothing and understand nothing. All that Jesus did and was, was the fruit of love. He had loved His own which were in the world, and now He loves them unto the end. A Latin proverb says that the end crowns the work. When the Saviour said on the Cross, “It is finished,” His end of sacrifice was the carrying forward and culmination of all His grace. This supreme act is the summit and crown of all His love. I Love the Explanation St. John, looking back reflectively, sees that only love explains all that Jesus did that night. He remembers how the disciples, as they came to the Upper Room, were heated with false ambitions, and were squabbling about precedence, so angry with and jealous of each other that none of them would perform the usual office of taking off each other’s sandals and washing the feet. There had arisen a contention which of them would be accounted greatest, and no one would lower his pretensions by undertaking a menial task and so confess himself the servant of all. It was in a temper of self-assertion and in a mood of resentment that they entered the Upper Room. How can they listen to all the deep things of the Spirit which their Master desires to tell them so long as such passions are in their hearts? That Jesus should humble Himself to teach them the lesson He did must have brought a bitter humiliation to them. To St. John it was a proof of enduring love, far more remarkable on looking back on it than it could have been at the time. For the shadow of the Cross was on Christ’s heart, the betrayal, the desolation, the trial, the crucifixion, the crisis of His whole cause and Kingdom. The Apostle sees on looking back that only perfect love could have done what Jesus did then, as He turned from His own thoughts and bent to the menial task. He had loved them—that was plain,—and nothing had tired out that love, not their folly or thoughtlessness or selfishness. He came to minister, to serve, and He went on serving unto the end. Their childish pettiness on this occasion only gave a gentler pity to His love and a sweeter and more patient tone to His speech. He does not give up loving because He sees they are so unworthy of His love. The shadow of their unloveliness only throws into keener brilliance the light of His love. How many kinds, measures, and tones of meaning are comprehended in this word “Love”! So it is in common language, and even when one specific use of it has been excluded. So it is in Scripture. There is a difference in the love of God as God, of Jesus Christ as Saviour, of our friends and relations, of our neighbours, of our enemies, of our people, of our kind. It is all love, but with what various combinations of idea and measures of feeling! So on the Divine side. The Father loved the Son; God loved the world; Jesus loved His own (in that common character); He loved them as individuals; He “loved Martha and Mary and Lazarus,” and there was one disciple “whom Jesus loved.” We are all sensible of the differences of impression conveyed in these connexions, though it would be vain to attempt to describe them.1 [Note: T. D. Bernard, The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 35. 1. Its Manifestation.—It is love that makes the man, builds the character, saves the city, and redeems the world. It is love that is the strongest and most potent motive of all in the action and speech of Jesus Christ. And here it is central to St. John’s statement, for Jesus “having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end.” It is the key to all that follows right to the end of the section, which closes with the seventeenth chapter. That love is here, not as a lane of light going through these speeches, but as the sun in his full midday glory shining over the whole of the acts of Jesus Christ, and through the words that come from His lips. It is in love that He washes His disciples’ feet, as though He were the menial and they the master, so that He may impress upon their minds the sublimity of lowly service, of humble ministry for the salvation of the world. It is love that speaks out to this little band gathered at this Supper, and says, “The one badge which you are always to wear, by which you are always to be recognized everywhere, is love to one another.” It is love that says, Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God; believe in Me; believe in heaven; believe in the infinite power of the Spirit. It is love that tells upon these disciples, and binds them in love to Him, and makes them one with Him as the branch with the Vine. It is love that assures these followers of His, that though He will soon be received out of their sight, and they will no longer be able to grasp His hand, still another Comforter will come and be with them, and lead them into the sphere of all truth. And it is love that breathes out the great intercessory prayer, that these disciples may be kept from the evil of the world, and enabled to realize their unity with Him and with the Father; “Having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end,” to the last, to the uttermost, till everything was finished. And at once He proceeded to wash their feet that He might show the reality and the quality of His love. I was once talking with a friend about a man who had achieved great distinction, but who had somehow missed the love of his fellowmen, and my friend said: “The trouble with that man is that he cannot bow himself.” He had achieved integrity, rectitude, self-respect, but he had not attained that final grace of character which made him able to stoop and serve.1 [Note: F. G. Peabody, Mornings in the College Chapel, 2nd Ser., 49. Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back, Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning If I lack’d any thing. “A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here” Love said, “You shall be he.” “I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on Thee.” Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, “Who made the eyes but I?” “Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d them: let my shame Go where it doth deserve.” “And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?” “My dear, then I will serve.” “You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste My meat.” So I did sit and eat.2 [Note: G. Herbert.] 2. Its Effect.—It was in the Upper Room that Jesus bound the hearts of His disciples to Himself for ever. This section of St. John’s Gospel has been described as “the development of faith in the disciples.” The narrative takes a new departure, retiring within the little company of the Twelve. The close is as clearly marked as the beginning. The precious scene which is here spread before us becomes more striking from the lurid background which it finds in the temple and the streets of Jerusalem. The growth of faith within—what a contrast to the growth of unbelief without! Here are the Eleven with Jesus—there are the scribes, the priests, the Pharisees. Outside, events are leading to the cross; inside, they are preparing for Pentecost and the salvation of the world. The last word the disciples spoke in that room shows how their faith had grown since they sat down with Jesus to the Paschal Feast: “Now know we that thou knowest all things, and needest not that any man should ask thee; by this we believe that thou camest forth from God.” Every fear and doubt has been driven out. Christ is all and in all to the disciples. After such a voluntary tribute, there was nothing left for Jesus save to bow with them at the feet of God. The world outside lies heavy on His heart; but its unbelief adds a new touch of gratitude and thanksgiving for the spirit of those who are with Him in the Upper Room. “O righteous Father, the world knew thee not, but I knew thee; and these knew that thou didst send me.” If we want to kill our pride we must burn it in the consuming fire of shame. The pride of these twelve men melted away in the fierce heat of their own shame. Let a man know that Jesus is stooping at his feet with the basin, and the fire of shame will be kindled. For that is always the attitude of our Master towards us. “He loved me and gave himself for me.” And we may alter the tense of that great sentence, turning it from the past into the present, and it is equally and unutterably true, “He loves me, and gives himself for me.” It is when a man realizes that supreme sacrifice of our Lord that all his petty pride and vanity shrivel away. It was when St. Paul felt the Master at his feet that there came from his bursting heart the great and zealous ambition, “I count all things but loss that I may win Christ.” Christ changes our ideas of sovereignty; He takes the dispositions we had resented, and henceforth they are crowns. The servile virtues are lifted into heavenly places in Christ. Humility, obedience, service—all shine with the radiant distinction of the Lord. “The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister.” The washing of weary feet is a ministry ever needed in the dusty ways of human life; and if that ministry is to become a ready and spontaneous affection we need the fulness of the Holy Ghost.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, in The Examiner, April 12, 1906, p. 348. They thought to heal me, when they cast Reproving glances towards me; As if their proud contempt could shrive me Of my sin, or scorn could drive me E’er to mend my ways,— Liefer end my days! They thought to lift me, when they held A pattern pure above me; As if to gaze on cold perfection Ever could give new direction To my wrecked desires; Or awake new fires! Then came a voice of cadence sweet, And winning tones that touched me, “I love thee, friend”—and, deeply welling In my soul, and all-compelling, Love leapt at the sound; Life and Heaven I found!2 [Note: T. Crawford, Horæ, Serenæ, 18. II Love for His Own 1. In regard to the love of Christ, the one distinction to be recognized here is that between His love to the world and His love to His own which are in the world. The love of Christ to the world is love to men as such: He being the head of the creation, which through Him came into being, and of the race of whose reason and conscience, He, as the Eternal Word, is the author, and with which, in taking flesh, He has assumed a natural and universal kindred. It is a love of compassion and benevolence and Divine desire, in which He gives Himself for all, and dies for all, and provides reconciliation, and preaches peace, and seeks the lost, and waits to be gracious, and would “draw all men unto himself.” But the love for His own which are in the world is no longer mere desire and endeavour. It is being realized in results intended. It has found response, and is generating a reciprocal life, and has the joy of exercising an attraction which is felt and owned, and of carrying on a work which imparts blessing and tends to perfection, restoring men to God through relations with Him who has loved them, relations which are spiritual, intimate, and eternal. Such love enters into the inner life of the beloved, and finds occasion for its exercise in their needs and dangers, their infirmities and failings. It delights to comfort and protect, to cleanse, to heal, to strengthen, to exalt. It is an inexhaustible fountain of gifts; it is the “love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” Yet, being true love, it is not content to give. It desires also to receive. It would be understood and trusted and confided in. It invites sympathy and fellowship. It claims reciprocity of affection. It would not only love, but be loved. Even in these last respects this is the character of the love which these chapters disclose. For our sake they disclose it, teaching us how He once loved, and by consequence how He ever loves, how He now loves, His own which are in the world. Is there any reason why we should be afraid of saying that the universal love of Jesus Christ, which gathers into His bosom all mankind, does fall with special tenderness and sweetness upon those who have made Him theirs and have surrendered themselves to be His? Surely it must be that He has special nearness to those who love Him; surely it is reasonable that He should have special delight in those who try to resemble Him; surely it is only what one might expect of Him that He should in a special manner honour the drafts, so to speak, of those who have confidence in Him, and are building their whole lives upon Him. Surely, because the sun shines down upon dunghills and all impurities, that is no reason why it should not lie with special brightness on the polished mirror that reflects its lustre. Surely, because Jesus Christ loves the publicans and the harlots and the outcasts and the sinners, that is no reason why He should not bend with special tenderness over those who, loving Him, try to serve Him, and have set all their hopes upon Him. The rainbow strides across the sky, but there is a rainbow in every little dewdrop that hangs glistening on the blades of grass.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.] True charity or love in its noblest forms is in some measure like the Divine love. In some ways it is ubiquitous, though in other ways it seems condensed or concentrated. As Dr. Martineau said concerning the omnipresence of God and His special presence in the soul of Christ, no distant star missed Him the more because He shone with such peculiar brightness in the fair glory of that pure life.1 [Note: A. H. Craufurd, The Religion and Ethics of Tolstoy, 74. Perhaps we do not yet know what the word “to love” means. There are within us lives in which we love unconsciously. To love thus means more than to have pity, to make inner sacrifices, to be anxious to help and give happiness; it is a thing that lies a thousand fathoms deeper, where our softest, swiftest, strongest words cannot reach it.2 [Note: M. Macterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble, 162. 2. He loved His own which were in the world. For He must leave them in the world. For many years after He has reached His glory, they will be exposed to pain and peril. So, in His tender pitying love for “his own,” He devoted His last free hours of life to their instruction and warning, and comfort. In the majesty of His humility the Only-begotten Son of God washed the disciples’ feet, even those of the traitor Judas. He instituted the blessed Sacrament of the Supper as the memorial of His love. He gave the disciples the promise of the Comforter. He left them the legacy of His own peace. He poured out in their behalf as well as His own the powerful pleadings of His great intercessory prayer. The emigrant who, after years of absence in a foreign land, is at length on the eve of returning to his native shores, may be excused if he allows the new ties formed in the strange country to slacken, seeing he has the near prospect of looking again upon the old familiar scenes, and upon the faces of father and mother, in his childhood’s home. But who can conceive the attractions and associations of the Redeemer’s home? In going back to God He was returning to the glories of heaven, to the throne of the universe, to the companionships of eternity, to the bosom of the Father! And yet, in this same glorious hour, so far from being self-absorbed, His love begins to burn with irrepressible ardour for “his own,” whom He is to leave behind.3 [Note: C. Jerdan, For the Lord’s Table, 36. III Love to the End “Unto the end”—this is the measure of the Saviour’s love, and the word does not mean merely so long as He lived, but also in the highest degree, to the very uttermost. It is not merely a measure of time, but a measure of the quality and passion of love. Not merely to the end of His life did He love, but to the end of love, to the limits of a limitless love. There are no conditions, no barriers, no limits. Place the end where you will or how you will, draw the circumference as wide as you may, He fills the whole circle with His love. He loves unto the end, that is its quality. To the end of His life, the end of our life, the end of the world, the end of time—more than that, it is to the end of an endless thing, to the extreme limit of the limitless, the very end of love itself. It does not mean merely that He loved till He died, not merely that He loved in the highest degree; it includes all that and more. It means that He loved through all that love brought Him, the humiliation, the suffering, the sorrowful way, the Cross. Love to the end expresses the height and depth and breadth and strength of love; and that was how He loved and loves. Shakespeare, in the cxvi. Sonnet, gives this enduring quality as characteristic of the highest and best love: Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: … Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. Many good commentators prefer to read the last words of the text, “He loved them unto the uttermost,” rather than “unto the end”—so taking them to express the depth and degree rather than the permanence and perpetuity of our Lord’s love. And that seems to me to be far the worthier and the nobler meaning, as well as the one which is borne out by the usual signification of the expression in other Greek authors. It is much to know that the emotions of these last moments did not interrupt Christ’s love. It is even more to know that in some sense they perfected it, giving even a greater vitality to its tenderness, and a more precious sweetness to its manifestations. So understood, the words explain for us why it was that in the sanctity of the Upper Room there ensued the marvellous act of the feet-washing, the marvellous discourses which follow, and the climax of all, that High-priestly prayer. They give utterance to a love which Christ’s consciousness at that solemn hour tended to sharpen and to deepen.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.] 1. He has loved His own all the way.—Let us interpret all our experience by this great fact, and the whole path is illumined and the meaning of much that was dark is made clear. We will not judge God by every little unexplained corner of the road, but by the whole long stretch of His providence. While we were in the dark patches we did not understand and sometimes doubted, but on looking back over all the way we see it to be ruled and governed and directed by love. The disciples might sometimes think they had reason to doubt the Master’s perfect love. At this very time they might ask, why if He loved them they should be bereaved, why they were to be left as sheep among the wolves? His dealing with them was indeed marked by love, but was it all love and only love and love unto the very end? St. John saw afterwards that it was so, from first to last—indeed there was no last. We sometimes do not understand the way of His love. Some passages and events puzzle us and alarm our faith. We cannot explain them on the hypothesis that they are the result of absolute love. Why should certain things happen that we dreaded, and other things be denied us that we desired? As George Bowen says in his beautiful book, Love Revealed: “He takes extraordinary liberties with us. Believing in His love and having our own particular conception of what love is, we settle in our minds that a certain contingency can never by any possibility be allowed to come to pass. Against everything else we prepare—not against that. We feel that it would be an unpardonable outrage to His most holy nature to suppose for a moment that He should suffer that contingency to come to pass. And yet that is the very thing that He brings to pass. We had boasted of the love of Jesus among our neighbours and told them that He would not suffer our brother Lazarus to die, but would assuredly come and restore him to health; and lo! Lazarus dies and is buried, and it is much if our sense of the love of Jesus be not buried with him. He takes what seem to us frightful liberties with our sensibilities and with our trust.” Well, St. John did not understand all that was taking place that night in the Upper Room, and all that happened so soon after, but his final testimony afterwards was, as the final explanation of it all: “Having loved his own, he loved them unto the end.”1 [Note: H. Black, Christ’s Service of Love, 199. 2. And He loves His own still.—In the glory, when He reached it, He poured out the same loving heart; and to-day He looks down upon us with the same face that bent over the table in the Upper Room, and the same tenderness flows to us. When St. John saw his Master next, after His Ascension, amidst the glories of the vision in his rocky Patmos, though His face was as the sun shineth in his strength, it was the old face. Though His hand bore the stars in a cluster, it was the hand that had been pierced with the nails. Though the breast was girded with the golden girdle of sovereignty and of priesthood, it was the breast on which St. John’s happy head had lain; and though the voice was “as the sound of many waters,” it soothed itself to a murmur, gentle as that with which the tideless sea about him rippled upon the silvery sand when He said, “Fear not … I am the first and the last.” Knowing that He goes to the Father, He loves to the uttermost, and being with the Father, He still so loves. Having loved, He loves. Because He had been a certain thing, therefore He is and He shall be that same. That is an argument that implies Divinity. About nothing human can we say that because it has been therefore it shall be. Alas! about much that is human we have to say the converse, that because it has been, therefore it will cease to be. And though they are few and they are poor who have had no experience in their lives of human hearts whose love in the past has been such that it manifestly is for ever, yet we cannot with the same absolute confidence say about one another, even about the dearest, “Having loved, he loves.” But we can say so about Christ. There is no exhaustion in that great stream which pours out from His heart, no diminution in its flow. “He loved His own unto the end,” And asked their love; He said, “I call you each My friend, And not My servant; and I send One from above, Who shall reveal such grace and truth to you As in My sojourn here ye never knew.” “But why depart?” they cry, “why will To leave us here? Thou sayest that Thou dost love us still; Can it be love if thus Thou fill Our cup of fear? O Master, Master, should’st Thou now depart All sorrow needs must overwhelm our heart.” Yet it is love: He said “I go; For could I stay, Your earth-bound thoughts would never know Love’s fullest mysteries, which flow From Me alway; My human heart might linger with you yet, But now affections must on heaven be set. “You could not know Me more, unless My Spirit came And taught the ways of righteousness, How sin and judgment to confess, How learn to blame All clinging to inferior things of earth, Blind to the glory of your heavenly birth. “My peace I leave with you, but not As this world gives; My Spirit comes to you, yet what He teaches shows no earthly lot: He ever lives, The world must learn. I hear the Father’s call Away from earth!—A while I leave you all. “Arise! let us go hence.” He rose, And, as He spake, Calmly He moved, as one who knows The coming onset of his foes. The night winds shake With distant sounds, as through the olive grove “Let us depart” is echoed from above.1 [Note: William Josiah Irons.] The Love of Jesus for His Own Literature Beeching (H. C.), The Bible Doctrine of the Sacraments, 68. Benson (R. M.), The Final Passover, ii. (pt. i.), 1. Bernard (T. D.), The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 31. Black (H.), Christ’s Service of Love, 192. Blackwood (A.), Christian Service and Responsibility, 26. Carter (T. T.), Meditations on the Public Life of our Lord, ii. 222. Elmslie (W. G.), Memoir and Sermons, 267. Jeffrey (J.), The Personal Ministry of the Son of Man, 253. Jerdan (C.), For the Lord’s Table, 30. Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year: Sundays after Trinity, xiii–end, 451. McClelland (T. C), The Mind of Christ, 69. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John ix.–xiv., 170. Morrison (G. H.), The Footsteps of the Flock, 241. Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Cluipel, 2nd Ser., 48. Raleigh (A.), The Way to the City, 23. Smellie (A.), In the Hour of Silence, 69. Smith (J.), Short Studies, 153. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xiv., No. 810. Taylor (W. M.), Peter the Apostle, 110. Telford (J.), The Story of the Upper Room, 14. Watson (J.), The Upper Room, 60. Wilkinson (J. B.), Mission Sermons, 3rd Ser., 324. Christian World Pulpit, xlvi. 199 (Wright); lvii. 349 (Wiseman); Ixiii. 344 (Lacey); lxxiv. 397 (Goldsmith French); lxxviii. 95 (Wicher). Churchman’s Pulpit: Fifth Sunday in Lent: vi. 230 (Wilson); Holy Week: vi. 480 (Codd); Ascension Day: viii. 439 (Lacey). Examiner (1906), 348 (Jowett). Preacher’s Magazine, vii. 197 (Clifford). Regeneration and Renewal Jesus saith to him, He that is bathed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit.—John 13:10. 1. This answer of our Lord to Peter has naturally a double meaning. It is both literal and figurative. Just as one who, having bathed in the morning, considers himself clean and does not repeat this total ablution at meal-time, but is contented with washing his feet on entering, to remove such accidental defilement as he may have contracted by the way; so he who, by sincerely attaching himself to Christ, has found pardon for his sins, needs nothing else than a daily and continual purification from the moral defilement of which he becomes conscious during the course of his life. Peter was clean because he sincerely believed in Christ. The purpose, then, of what Jesus was now doing for him was not to reconcile him to God, but to remove from him, by such an example of humility, that particular defilement, the desire for earthly power and greatness, which Jesus at that very moment observed in His own. I never understood the full meaning of our Lord’s words in St. John 13:10, until I beheld the better sort of East Indian natives return home after performing their customary ablutions. As they return to their habitations barefoot, they necessarily contract in their progress some portion of dirt on their feet; and this is universally the case, however nigh their dwellings may be to the riverside. When, therefore, they return, the first thing they do is to mount a low stool, and pour water into a small vessel to cleanse them from the soil which they may have contracted on their journey homewards; if they are of the higher class of society, a servant performs it for them, and then they are “clean every whit.”1 [Note: D. L. Moody.] If you speak of sanctification as the original act of God in separating us to Himself, then it is a completed thing, for we are described as “having been sanctified in Christ Jesus.” If, again, you speak of it as a legal cleansing from all past guilt, it is complete; for, being washed in the precious blood, we are already clean. But if you regard it as the personal holiness of daily life, the purifying of the heart through faith by the indwelling power of the Holy Ghost, then I am prepared to maintain from the whole testimony of the whole Word of God from one end to the other, that so long as we are in this world of conflict the sacred work is not complete, but progressive.1 [Note: E. Hoare, Sanctification, 66. 2. It is doubtful whether in this new rite which preceded the Paschal supper, and in the reference to a past bathing, there is any specific allusion to baptism. Of course the sacramental process of initiation into the Christian society, and the action-parable of the Upper Room, express a common truth, that flesh and spirit must alike be cleansed before a frail, erring man is fit to stand in the presence of the Divine King and fulfil His behests. We have no direct statement that the twelve Apostles ever were baptized, although it is more than probable that those who were followers of John had received the rite at his hands, and these may have administered it to their comrades. Jesus Himself did not baptize. Yet without any express mention of the baptism of the twelve, Jesus affirms that they had been “bathed,” and that, with one sad exception, the virtue of the act remained. It was by the Word they had been cleansed. There is no suggestion that the spiritual change was coincident in time with the use of an outward rite which typified it. By response to the personal influence of Jesus Christ, they knew in the first fresh moments of their surrender to His will that the prophetic promise had been fulfilled, and that from the guilty errors and disabilities of the past they had been purified. A modern writer, who lived for years in distressing poverty, and had no facilities in his sordid lodgings for washing, used to perform the greater part of his morning toilet at the British Museum, where he was a constant reader. He describes the shame he felt when he found a notice affixed, “These basins are to be used for casual ablutions only.” He had the sensations of a detected criminal. There is a wide distinction between the bathing of the body and “casual ablutions,” and the distinction runs through the teaching of the incident before us. The daily-repeated grace is a complement to the washing of regeneration which comes through the all-encircling, soul-pervading influences of Jesus Christ. It is not to supersede or obscure that primary need, as Simon Peter was in danger of supposing.1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Divine Craftsman, 210. One evening, before Thomas De Quincey died, he said to his daughter, “I cannot bear the weight of clothes on my feet.” She pulled off the heavy blankets. “Yes, my love,” he said, “that is much better; I am better in every way. You know these are the feet that Jesus washed.” Ah, I scarcely can tell which I should admire most: His passion for me or His patience with me; His suffering or His longsuffering.2 [Note: A. Smellie, In the Hour of Silence, 289. I Regeneration 1. In this text Jesus teaches that the efficacy of a disciple’s first act of faith abides, and must not be thought of as invalidated by after-infirmities. If there were Divine forces present in that memorable change, it surely had qualities of permanence in it, for that which God effects cannot pass away as the morning cloud. We do not commit ourselves to the doctrines of indefectible grace and unconditional perseverance when we so interpret the Master’s saying. The reference here made to Judas proves that to the rule of patient, tireless, long-continued, all-subduing grace there may be a tragic break. By false dealing, by calculated delinquency, by obstinate transgression, the bathed man may hopelessly defile himself again. But in eleven cases out of twelve the sanctifying grace asserts its permanence, for it is stamped with some of the qualities of its unchanging Minister. When the great warrior knew that the end was sure, he met it with the confident resignation of his faith. He had seen death too often and too near to dread the parting hour of mortal anguish. Chaplains, preachers, godly persons, attended in an adjoining room and came in and out as the heavy hours went on, to read the Bible to him or to pray with him. To one of them he put the moving question, so deep with penitential meaning, so pathetic in its humility and misgiving, in its wistful recall of the bright bygone dawn of life in the soul: “Tell me, is it possible to fall from grace?” “No, it is not possible,” said the minister. “Then,” said the dying Cromwell, “I am safe, for I know that I was once in grace.”1 [Note: John Morley, Oliver Cromwell, 506. The efforts of an unregenerate man to resist evil may be compared to the waves that break away from the receding tide; they are vain and constantly declining struggles against the backward movement of the heart. The falls of a regenerate man, on the other hand, are the recessions of the wave in an advancing tide; the great progression will still be Godward. What we want is the flow of the new nature to overbear all the obstacles of wind and sand, and this must be given by attraction from above.2 [Note: John Ker, Thoughts for Heart and Life, 21. 2. Why should the grace which wipes out past sin, and renews the thoughts and affections of the heart, fill this commanding place in the religious history? The Master forbids the idea that those successive effusions of spiritual influence, which keep the disciple in constant fitness for His uses, can compare in vital importance with this initial transformation. As He judges things, regeneration is a fact standing apart, and nothing must come into competition with it. The answer is many-sided. Initiation into the cleansing fellowship of Jesus is coincident with a deeper and more exhaustive self-discovery than is possible at the later stages of the religious history, unless indeed there has been flagrant, stupefying apostasy. The new convert has put off his disguises, making a frank and a full confession of sin and attaining a memorable release from its power. The whole manhood is moved by the fresh and dramatic disclosures of saving grace which attend the first surrender to the gospel call. The past is put off with a thoroughness which leaves little or no room for repetition. A man convinced of sin, and impelled by the new-born hope of redemption from its power, is passive under the processes of Divine mercy to an extent never perhaps equalled again. As those blessed influences which purify from the taint of the past immerse the soul, a strangely quiescent and submissive temper arises. The disciple is more conscious of God’s act and less of his own than in those subsequent experiences in which the factors of self-discipline and self-direction tend to predominate. And because Divine power is so supremely conspicuous in this purifying change its results abide, as perhaps grace sought through channels of daily edification does not. Many and great gifts of the Holy Spirit do come really into a man, which yet are not regeneration; but they go and come. Whereas that is regeneration when and where God hath planted His habitation, and God is become one with man. In God, neither the world, nor pleasure, nor joy is suffered; nature must want all these when the mind standeth in God.1 [Note: Matthew Weyer.] II Renewal 1. When the gift which changes the moral habits, and puts away the dishonour and condemnation of the past, has been received, accessory processes are needed so that the disciple may be kept without spot. Christ’s followers are moving in the midst of the unregenerate, and it is only through daily vigilance and faith that they can escape the mischances inseparable from their position in the world. Through this lowly ministry, commonly performed by the slave at the opening of a feast, Jesus wished to save His disciples from that loss of hope which their imminent backsliding might cause, to remind them of the gentle and compassionate view He took of their infirmities, and to prevent, where it might still be possible, infirmities from passing into flagrant sins. He is willing to treat their passing moods of envy and ambition as mere casualties of the way, like the dust and films of foulness cleaving to the feet of the pilgrim. Such things do not belong to the new manhood which has been called forth within them, but have in part happened through contact with the world. Learn a lesson from the eye of the miner, who all day long is working amid the flying coal-dust. When he emerges in the light of day, his face may be grimy enough; but his eyes are clear and lustrous, because the fountain of tears, in the lachrymal gland, is ever pouring its gentle tides over the eye, cleansing away each speck of dust as soon as it alights. Is not this the miracle of cleansing which our spirits need in such a world as this? And this is what our blessed Lord is prepared to do for us, if only we will trust Him.2 [Note: F. B. Meyer, Present Tenses, 22. As these men had with shame to lay their feet in Christ’s hands, so must we. As His hands had to come in contact with the soiled feet of the disciples, so has His moral nature to come in contact with the sins from which He cleanses us. His heart is purer than were His hands, and He shrinks more from contact with moral than with physical pollution; and yet without ceasing we bring Him into contact with such pollution. When we consider what those stains actually are from which we must ask Christ to wash us, we feel tempted to exclaim with Peter, “Thou shalt never wash my feet!” As these men must have shivered with shame through all their nature, so do we when we see Christ stoop before us to wash away once again the defilement we have contracted; when we lay our feet soiled with the miry and dusty ways of life in His sacred hands; when we see the uncomplaining, unreproachful grace with which He performs for us this lowly and painful office. But only thus are we prepared for communion with Him and with one another. Only by admitting that we need cleansing, and by humbly allowing Him to cleanse us, are we brought into true fellowship with Him. With the humble and contrite spirit which has thrown down all barriers of pride and freely admits His love and rejoices in His holiness does He abide.1 [Note: Marcus Dods.] 2. We must seek daily release from the incipient defilements which fasten upon the regenerate personality without at first bringing upon it specific marks of guilt and wrong-doing. The neglected stain, however extenuating the circumstances in which it affixed itself, may end in a disfigurement that will be more than skin-deep in its results. Forgetfulness of the solemn lesson taught by the feet-washing may make the apostate. A lapse of temper, an unwatched desire provoked by our converse with the world, often incubates into a flagrant sin. “Let not the sun go down upon your wrath”; and may we not add, upon any thoughtless mood or unchastened temper which has settled upon us whilst moving through secular scenes? The feet that have trod the hot, foul highways, or that perhaps have not even crossed the threshold of the home, must be washed. Do not slight the little shortcomings which befall you, and allow them to accrete into blemishes which may vitiate the life. To become indifferent or insensitive to the stains of daily sin is one of the saddest things that can befall us. Little by little it puts a space between us and the Saviour, as begrimed windows seem to put the light further and further off. We must keep the glass clean if we would have the cheerful light; and we must keep close touch with the pardoning blood if we would maintain the joy of salvation.1 [Note: J. R. Howatt, Jesus the Poet, 273. In describing the different habits of the people of two adjacent provinces the Chinese say, “A Hupeh man does not sleep unless he has first cleansed his feet; but a Honan man only washes his feet on the day when he fords a river.” Up the long slope of this low sandy shore Are rolled the tidal waters day by day; Traces of wandering feet are washed away, Relics of busy hands are seen no more. The soiled and trampled surface is smooth’d o’er By punctual waves that high behests obey; Once and again the tides assert their sway, And o’er the sands their cleansing waters pour. Even so, Lord, daily, hourly, o’er my soul Sin-stained and care-worn, let Thy heavenly Grace— A blest, atoning flood—divinely roll, And all the footsteps of the world efface, That like the wave-washed sand this soul of mine, Spotless and fair, smooth and serene, may shine!2 [Note: Richard Wilton.] Regeneration and Renewal Literature Arnold (T.), Sermons, ii. 127. Barrett (G. S.), Musings for Quiet Hours, 74. Bonar (H.), Family Sermons, 87. Farrar (F. W.), In the Days of thy Youth, 243. Howatt (J. R.), Jesus the Poet, 272. Jerdan (C.), Gospel Milk and Honey, 285. Robertson (F. W.), Sermons, iii. 239. Selby (T. G.), The Divine Craftsman, 207. Smellie (A.), In the Hour of Silence, 289. Temple (F.), Sermons in Rugby School Chapel, ii. 116. Waterston (R.), Thoughts on the Lord’s Supper, 91. Webster (F. S.), My Lord and I, 154. Wordsworth (C.), Christian Boyhood at a Public School, i. 438. Expositor, 2nd Ser., iv. 146 (Cox). The New Commandment A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; even as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.—John 13:34. When the Lord spoke to His disciples the words of the text, Judas had just left the company for the purpose of carrying out his plans. It was a night much to be observed, the events of which are recorded in the chapter from which the text is taken; it was the night upon which the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was instituted, in which Judas joined; it was the night upon which Christ gave that remarkable lesson in humility to His disciples by washing their feet, the feet of Judas apparently amongst the rest; it was the night, too, on which the Lord gave distinct warning to this same Judas of the treachery which he was about to commit; and it was after receiving this warning that Judas went out to do his work, leaving the eleven faithful disciples behind. Any lesson, therefore, given on such a night would be likely to be well remembered, to sink deeply into the heart, and one cannot be surprised that the Lord should take advantage of such an occasion to impress some important precepts and doctrines upon His disciples; one might expect that some things which the Lord would desire to say to the Apostles before His passion, and which could scarcely be said in the presence of Judas, would now be uttered without reserve. And indeed it does seem as though the departure of Judas had taken (if one may venture to say so) a weight from off the heart of the Lord, for He enters at once into some of His deepest and most affectionate conversations with the faithful eleven. The time is short, and there is much to be done. The preparations for His capture will begin forthwith, and He has many things to say to His Apostles which cannot be so well said at any other time. What lesson shall He take first? Upon what doctrine shall He chiefly lay stress? “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; even as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” Can we wonder that this new commandment should have afterwards so completely absorbed St. John’s own mind, when we remember that he heard it enunciated under such circumstances as these? I The New Commandment 1. The emphatic word of the text is the word translated “one another.” And the moment we place the emphasis there the meaning is evident. “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another.” Jesus had only the eleven disciples with Him; for the traitor had already gone out into the night. In the hearing of these eleven He had already announced the old commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” with an added emphasis and extended grasp. In particular, He had pointed out that their neighbour included their enemy, even such as the hated and despised Samaritan. Now He says, “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love”—not your enemies, but—“one another.” The old commandment is not taken away; it lies upon these men with a great obligation, such as never was known by Jew or Gentile before. But another is added to it, another and a different commandment, that Peter love John, and John love Andrew, and Andrew love “Judas-not-Iscariot.” “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another.” In the seventeenth century the minister of Anwoth, on the shores of Galloway, was the famous Samuel Rutherford, the great religious oracle of the Covenanters. It is one of the traditions cherished on the spot, that on a Saturday evening, at one of those family gatherings whence, in the language of a great Scottish poet, Old Scotia’s grandeur springs, when Rutherford was catechizing his children and servants, a stranger knocked at the door of the Manse, and (like the young English traveller in the celebrated romance which has given fresh life to those same hills in our own age), begged shelter for the night. The minister kindly received him, and asked him to take his place amongst the family and assist at their religious exercises. It so happened that the question in the Catechism which came to the stranger’s turn was that which asks, “How many commandments are there?” He answered, “Eleven.” “Eleven!” exclaimed Rutherford; “I am surprised that a person of your age and appearance should not know better. What do you mean?” And he answered, “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” The stranger proved to be the great divine and scholar, Archbishop Ussher, the Primate of the Church of Ireland.1 [Note: R. E. Prothero, The Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, ii. 272. 2. It is the love of one follower of Christ to another. And it was new, altogether new; for till then there were no Christians to love or be loved. The disciples recognized it as new. Of this we have an immediate and conclusive proof. When a new thing comes into the world, one of the first needs is a new name to call it by. A new invention or discovery must have its new name—the “telephone,” let us say. So the disciples, recognizing that a new thing had appeared in the world chose a word,—like “telephone,” compound of two things,—a word not absolutely new, but rarely used before, to name it. Phil-adelphia they called it, “love of brothers,” “brotherly-love.” And their use of this word shows us that they recognized this commandment as not only new, but different in kind from the old commandment of love. In the rope of Christian virtues, as it has been well called, which St. Peter weaves in the first chapter of his second letter, the last two strands are “brotherly-love” and “love,” as the Revised Version does well to inform us: “In your faith supply virtue … and in your godliness love-of-the-brethren, and in your love-of-the-brethren love.” The two virtues are kept distinct, for they rest upon two separate and distinct commands, the one very old, and the other altogether new. The Law had also already taught some points of this duty. Thus the Mosaic statute said, “Thou shalt not suffer sin upon thy brother,”—a mode of brother-love which, though negative in its form, was positive in its spirit. But in its expressiveness and comprehensiveness this command was new. It was now given in direct phraseology, and it developed the one principle to which all preceding enactments were to be traced. Incidental injunctions had contained some one or other of the features of this brother-love; but all such commands were absorbed in this novel and engrossing declaration, “Love one another.” Various practical elements had been previously delineated; but now, and for the first time, the theory was enforced.1 [Note: J. Eadie, The Divine Love, 244. This new love is the fruit of the Holy Spirit dwelling in the Church. It is like the difference between carrying water with great exertion from a distant fountain and having a stream from that fountain flow by one’s own door, from which he can drink copiously, by whose invigorating scent he feels his spirits revived, into which he can throw himself for a refreshing bath. The Holy Spirit comes with glorious blessings to the children of God under the New Covenant. They drink, not with scant measure, but from a full and overflowing cup. They revel in the fulness of eternal love. And He that creates this blessedness is the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, whom Jesus has sent from the Father.2 [Note: A. Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, 574. II The Old and the New 1. There rest upon the follower of Christ two different commands to love. The old is not taken away; the new is added to it. Thou shalt love thine enemies, thou shalt do good to them that hate thee, thou shalt bless them that curse thee, thou shalt pray for them that despitefully use thee. That is the great Mosaic command: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Christ added nothing to it when He gave it to His followers. He simply pointed out its scope and intensity. Then, when the time came, He gave them another commandment to love, of a different scope and a different nature. And thenceforth these two separate commandments have lain upon every follower of Christ. If we would take even the old commandment and live up to it, it would solve a great many perplexing problems. Lay it down along the line of life, and see in imagination how life’s problems would find in it their solution. “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Let the slave-master simply apply that rule, and will he not straightway manumit his slave and set him free? Let us apply that rule to the perplexing problem of immigration. What if you or I were living under the harrow in Italy or Germany, and we saw the broad acres of America ready with fruitful juices to answer to our plow and our hoe,—what should we want America to do for us? Apply it to the labour problem. Let all working men, banded together as Knights of Labour or any other organization, do to the employer as they would have the employer do to them; and let the employers, the board of directors, the railroad managers, do to their employed as they would wish done to themselves, the relation being reversed: would there be any labour problem left? Our labour problem as it actually presents itself in real life is simply this: How can a community of men that are dealing with each other selfishly live peaceably? And the answer is, They cannot at all. Peace can be brought about only when that law of justice which is expressed by the Golden Rule and the law, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” are inwrought into the industrial fabric of society. Why, if the girl in the kitchen would always act as she would wish to be acted by if she were mistress, and the mistress would always act to the girl in the kitchen as she would wish to be acted by if she were the girl in the kitchen, the greatest plague of life would be a plague no longer.1 [Note: L. Abbott, Signs of Promise, 234. 2. But is it possible for the Christian to love in two different ways? Yes; it is not only possible, it is inevitable. Not only must he love the world out of Christ in one way, and his brethren in Christ in another, but he cannot help it. Mark Guy Pearse, in his inimitable way, tells a story which lends itself readily to illustration. “Said one of my little ones to the youngest, in that threatening tone which is usually adopted in teaching, ‘You must be good, you know, or father won‘t love you.’ Then I called him to myself, and I said, gravely and tenderly: ‘Do you know what you have said? It is not true, my boy—not a bit true.’ ‘Isn’t it?’ said the little one, surprised and doubtful. ‘No,’ I said; ‘it is far away from the truth.’ ‘But you won’t love us if we are not good, will you?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I can’t help loving you; I shall love you for ever and ever, because I can’t help it. When you are good I shall love you with a love that makes me glad; and when you are not good I shall love you with a love that hurts me; but I can’t help loving you, because I am your father you know.’ ” Truly God has bound Himself by love’s sweet constraint to make us capable of a love that is similar to His own; that is to share the highest of all things with us to the full. The self-sacrificing love that began in God must also go on in us. By every means, our hearts must be made capable of possessing and reciprocating it all. God knows how sweet it is to love and to be loved. And so the glory that He gave to Jesus—the supreme glory of self-sacrificing love—He has given even to us also, that we may be one in love even with the Father and the Son. Having therefore equipped us with this highest power, He lays on us the command which, enforced by His example, finds such an echo in our hearts. “Above all things have fervent love among yourselves!”1 [Note: Frank W. Crossley.] (1) God the Father loves with this twofold love. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” Was the love that demanded that a love that made Him glad? Was it not a love that “hurt” Him? But, says Jesus, “If a man love me, he will keep my word: and my Father will love him.” Why, the Father loves every man, whether he keeps the commandments of the Lord or not. But this is a new love—a love that makes the Father glad. So also is God the Son capable of a twofold love. What a yearning love there is in that cry over the self-doomed city: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem!” How different from the love He bore to that disciple—“the disciple whom Jesus loved!” If you are reverent, you may see the love of Jesus by loading in succession John 11:1-5, Mark 14:3-9, and Luke 10:38-42. “Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus.” And one man is known to all history as the friend of Jesus. They called Him the friend of publicans and sinners, a name that dimly reveals the inner secret of His life. And the last hours of His life were reserved, not for the crowd or the impenitent, but for those who loved Him best, and whose love He trusted when He went down to death.2 [Note: F. W. Lewis, The Unseen Life, 18. (2) And so also to the follower of the Lord is this double love not merely possible but quite inevitable—a love that hurts, and a love that makes him glad. Sharing the love of Christ which sent Him to die for sinners, he loves those for whom Christ died, though they do not recognize Him as a Prince and a Saviour. It is a real love in the true Christian, an anxious, eager, almost consuming love sometimes—a love which brings no gladness, but burns the breast with yearning desire. It is a love which suffers persecution, which makes the gentle woman courageous, which amazes and staggers the unbeliever. But there is a love also which makes the follower of Jesus glad. In a block of London’s poorest abodes a woman was visiting one night. Trying room after room, she found only misery, filth, brutality. When to the weary knock at one more door a cheerful “Come in” was the response, and she found herself welcomed at the bright fireside of a poor but real follower of Jesus, there rushed forth to meet that welcome a love that made her glad. The one is a love that demands self-denial, the other is spontaneous, irresistible. The one makes us fit for the inheritance of the saints in light, the other proves us saints upon the earth. III The Example 1. “As I loved you”—these words point to an action which is past and done, not to a continued state. Westcott endeavours to preserve the tense and yet apply it in a general way. “The exact form (‘I loved’),” he says “implies that Christ’s work is now ideally finished.” But a much simpler explanation lies to our hand. “That ye love one another; as I loved you.” The act He refers to is just past. It is the washing of their feet. We view that marvellous action chiefly as a great wonder of condescending love. He meant it as an instance of true brotherly love. If I, your Lord and Master, act as a brother towards you, ye ought to act as brothers towards one another. A new commandment I give unto you, that ye act towards one another as I have just acted towards you. The whole strange action of the feet-washing leads up to this command; and the command interprets the action. “As I have just loved you”—the exact meaning of the word is brought out better by that translation than by any other. In washing their feet He offered them a single instance of the brotherly love He commanded. It was, however, an instance which involved the principle, and was capable of endless application. 2. The instance of washing the disciples’ feet involves, we say, the principle. From this and other instances of Christ’s love St. John deduces that principle and applies it: “Hereby know we love, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” Not die for the brethren. We may be called to death, and we may not; but we are to lay down our lives for the brethren. It is a comparatively easy thing to die for other people; but to live for them,—to lie down in the muddy road and let other men walk over us, to stand and let other people climb upon us, to be underneath our equals, to be the means by which they climb to preferment and reward,—that is hard. And that is what Christ did, and what Christ held up as the ideal for His children evermore. “It is well,” said John Wesley, “that you should be thoroughly sensible of this: the Heaven of Heavens is Love, there is nothing higher in religion, there is in effect nothing else. If you look for anything but more Love, you are looking wide of the mark: you are getting out of the royal way.” “Beloved, let us love one another,” says St. John, Eagle of eagles calling from above: Words of strong nourishment for life to feed upon, “Beloved, let us love.” Voice of an eagle, yea, Voice of the Dove: If we may love, winter is past and gone; Publish we, praise we, for lo it is enough. More sunny than sunshine that ever yet shone, Sweetener of the bitter, smoother of the rough, Highest lesson of all lessons for all to con, “Beloved, let us love.”1 [Note: C. G. Rossetti.] 3. Brotherly love is to be so openly shown that the followers of Christ will be recognized thereby. “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” Discipleship had previously been recognized by various tests. But no “master” had ever dreamed of imposing such an obligation, and creating by it such a characteristic. The scholars of the Academy, the Portico, or the Lyceum were at once known by their modes of reasoning, their attachment to distinctive theories, and their frequent appeals to Plato, Zeno, or Aristotle. The Jew was recognized by his dress and language, his reverence for Moses, his selection among meats and drinks, and his antipathy to all the races of the uncircumcision. If you entered a company of Greeks, and found them theorizing upon pleasure, its nature, enjoyment, and modes, you would at once pronounce them to be Epicureans; or if, mixing with another crowd, you were met with such sounds as fate, liberty, necessity, wisdom, and chief good, you would feel in a moment that you were among the Stoics. Did you, in any city of Judæa, see a man clothed with a robe fringed deeper than common, and adorned with a phylactery of unusual breadth; did you follow him, and hear him pray with a stentorian voice to attract all passers-by, or see him give alms so ostentatiously as to draw upon him the public gaze and admiration, you would have no doubt that you beheld a Pharisee. And if, on the streets of Jerusalem, you met one in whose dress the prominent portions of the national uniform were carefully pared down, who, as he passed with you near the temple, observed with a quiet sneer that the scent of the burning sacrifice tainted the air, or who, as he looked on the place of sepulchres, assumed a philosophic air and spoke of death as the debt of nature, as a hard and universal necessity; smiled at the idea of a spirit-land, and hinted that the prevailing belief on that point was not consonant with reason, or based on a rational interpretation of Scripture—you would have no difficulty in detecting the speaker to be a Sadducee. But our Lord discards what is external; and His followers are to be known not by dress, language, or occupation, but by the mutual kindness which they cherish and exercise towards one another. They are to be known not by mind, but by heart; not by intellect, but by soul. In the first age of the Church the critical importance of the mutual love of Christians was recognized. Jerome preserves an anecdote of St. John which admirably illustrates this fact. In his last days, when he had to be carried into church, and was too old to speak for any length of time, the Apostle used in addressing the congregation to repeat simply the old commandment, which yet is, indeed, always new, “Little children, love one another.” Then, as ever since, Christians were impatient of that teaching. His disciples, weary of the continual repetition, asked why he always said this. “Because,” he replied, “it is the Lord’s commandment: and if it only be fulfilled, it is enough.” Tertullian, in a famous passage of his “Apology,” describes the impression made on the heathen by the mutual love of believers. They could not understand it. “See,’ say they, ‘how they love each other!’ for they themselves hate each other. ‘And see how ready they are to die for each other!’ for they themselves are more ready to slay each other.”1 [Note: H. H. Henson, Godly Union and Concord, 161. Two centuries later than Tertullian a still more illustrious Christian—Chrysostom—describes the scandal caused to the heathen by the lovelessness of believers. His language is on many grounds very remarkable, and singularly apposite to the conditions of the modern Church. He is commenting on Christ’s “new commandment,” and the testimony which, by obeying it, Christians are to deliver to the world; and, after his practice, he draws on his intimate knowledge of the religious life of his time in order to illustrate the sacred text, and to press home on his hearers its practical lessons. “Miracles, he says, “do not so much attract the heathen as the mode of life; and nothing so much causes a right life as love … And with good reason. When one of them sees the greedy man, the plunderer, exhorting others to do the contrary, when he sees the man who was commanded to love even his enemies treating his very kindred like brutes, he will say that the words are folly … We, we are the cause of their remaining in error. Their own doctrines they have long condemned, and in like manner they admire ours, but they are hindered by our mode of life.” Chrysostom goes on to say that it is vain to point out to the disgusted heathen the virtues of famous Christians of former times. About them they are sceptical so long as the Christians whom they see and know are scandalously unworthy of their profession. “Wherefore,” he concludes, “I fear lest some grievous thing come to pass, and we draw down upon us heavy vengeance from God.”2 [Note: Ibid. 162. Almost twenty years ago, while living in America, I went to reside in a little town called Delaware, in Ohio; and the first Saturday evening of my residence I went as a young man to the Y.M.C.A. prayer-meeting. There were about one hundred young men present, and the meeting was of a most hearty type. The last hymn sung was— Blest be the tie that binds Our hearts in Christian love. And during the singing of that hymn there was a general handshaking going on, and I, as a stranger, was specially singled out for attention. The result, so far as I was concerned, was that I attended that prayer-meeting regularly for more than five years. That may be a trifle too unconventional for our Churches, but we want more, much more, of the spirit that prompted that exhibition of sympathetic Christian friendliness and love.1 [Note: W. Lee, From Dust to Jewels, 96. “What is love, Mary?” said Seventeen to Thirteen, who was busy with her English lessons. “I think it is a verb,” said John, “and I think it must have been originally the perfect of live, like thrive, throve, strive, strove.” “Capital, John,” suddenly growled uncle Oldbuck, “it was that originally, and it will be our own faults, children, if it is not that at last, as well as, ay, and more than at first.”2 [Note: John Brown, Horæ Subsecivæ, 2nd Ser., 299. If we really and lovingly studied the characters of others we should often end by being interested and even fascinated where at first we were only repelled. A portrait-painter must often feel this. Some of us may be reminded of the lines of Browning. “Beside the Drawing-board”:— Little girl with the poor coarse hand I turned from to a cold clay cast— I have my lesson, understand The worth of flesh and blood at last. Nothing but beauty in a Hand? Because he could not change the hue, Mend the lines and make them true To this which met his soul’s demand— Would Da Vinci turn from you? And, more than that, if we love and care for others we shall often find that the very fact of our loving them helps them to make themselves more love-worthy, just as a carefully tended plant responds to the gardener’s care.3 [Note: E. Wordsworth, Onward Steps, 129. “As every lord giveth a certain livery to his servants,” says Latimer, “Love is the Livery of Christ.” The New Commandment Literature Abbott (L.), Signs of Promise, 232. Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, iv. 223. Bernard (T. D.), The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 113. Eadie (J.), The Divine Love, 242. Goodwin (H.), Parish Sermons, iii. 258. Greenhough (J. G.), in Great Texts of the NT, 97. Henson (H. H.), Godly Union and Concord, 153. Horne (W.), Religious Life and Thought, 13. Horton (R. F.), The Commandments of Jesus, 319. Hughes (H. P.), The Philanthropy of God, 15. Jack (J. W.), After His Likeness, 13. Kuyper (R.), The Work of the Holy Spirit, 570. Lee (W.), From Dust to Jewels, 85. Lewis (F. W.), The Unseen Life, 13. Lilley (J. P.), The Pathway of Light, 79. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John ix.–xiv., 226. Maclaren (A.), Last Sheaves, 56. Mantle (J. G.), According to the Pattern, 75. Marjoribanks (T.), The Fulness of the Godhead, 77. Morgan (G. C.), The Ten Commandments, 203. Robertson (F. W.), Sermons, 1st Ser., 234. Senior (W.), God’s “Ten Words,” 345. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, li. (1905), No. 241. Stanford (C.), Central Truths, 153. Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit) xiii. (1876), No. 1008. Wilson (J. H.), The Gospel and its Fruits, 233. Wilson (J. M.), Rochdale Sermons, 239. Wordsworth (E.), Onward Steps, 123. Christian World Pulpit, xlvii. 166 (Klein); lx. 305 (Henson); lxxvi. 49 (Ronald). Church of England Pulpit, lii. 290 (Henson); lxi. 322 (Plummer). Churchman’s Pulpit: Holy Week: vi. 490 (Robertson). The Secret of the Untroubled Heart Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.—John 14:1. 1. There is one chapter in the biography of distinguished persons—in the biography of great geniuses, or of eminent saints or seers—which has for us special interest, the chapter entitled “Closing Days.” We are curious to learn how the great man bore himself, or what fell from his lips, during those days, in the shadow of the approaching end; to see something of the thoughts which then occupied his mind, or to hear something of his latest words. What of his behaviour, his expression, we ask, in his latest hours? The favourite pursuit—was its influence upon him then exemplified? The ruling passion—was it strong with him in death? Geoffrey Chaucer died making a ballad; Waller, reciting verses from his beloved Virgil; Haller, the famous physician, fingering his pulse and murmuring, when he found it almost gone, “Yes, the artery ceases to beat”; John Keats, whispering low in reply to a friend who inquired how he felt, “Better, better. I feel the daisies growing over me.” “Let me hear once more,” sighed Mozart, “those notes, so long my solace and delight.” Rousseau, when dying, bade his attendants place him before the open window, that he might take a final look at his garden, and bid adieu to Nature. In this scene we have the beating of Christ’s heart and the vision of His soul. Here He is, we may say, in His habitual considerateness and sympathy, in the quick, tender considerateness and sympathy that characterized Him all through His course, from the moment when, at the beginning of His ministry, He was filled with compassion for the multitude because they were as sheep without a shepherd, to the moment when, in the night of His betrayal, He pleaded, “If ye seek me, let these go their way.” 2. Night had fallen with Oriental swiftness upon Jerusalem; and there, in the guest-chamber of a friend’s house, Jesus was partaking of the Passover Supper with His disciples. Not with all of them. Judas had gone on his mission of darkness. The shadow of some boding treachery had fallen on these men and chilled their hearts. “One of you shall betray me.” In the intense quiet that had followed those words, they had looked at one another and doubted one another; they had searched their own hearts and almost doubted themselves. Only one of them had been free from doubt, and he had something worse—he knew. But he had gone; and after his departure the cup of foreboding was filled to the brim by Jesus Himself. Quietly, but with an awful intensity of meaning, He told them that He too was going away—going where they could not follow Him then. Not by any dusty Syrian highway was He going from them. No farewell in history approaches this in bitterness. Before another sun had set Jesus was lying low in death. His disciples were orphaned. No wonder that they were troubled. Their universe seemed shaken. Every ambition, every hope, was taken from them. Failure appeared to be written on their Lord’s mission and on their own. Such trouble is not mere sorrow. That may be hard to bear, but this is the collapse of all plans of service, all visions of future good and blessing. The sky was falling; all the lights in the firmament were being put out. Their life had become like a heaving sea, and even Jesus seemed powerless to quiet it. Their Master bids them conquer that passion of anxiety, of fear, of bitter disappointment. They are not to yield to it, for yielding means despair; it is paralysis for every hope of influence and usefulness. There is a glorious picture in St. John’s Apocalypse: God “shall wipe away every tear from their eyes.” That is a golden promise. Here is something still more suggestive. The disciples are themselves to dry up the fountain of tears; they are to quiet their own heaving breasts. Trouble has come, but Jesus bids them master it. 3. How does He comfort them? Not by commonplace ethics or moralizings, but by drawing aside the veil that conceals the spiritual world, and revealing to them entirely new conceptions concerning the Father Himself, the future life, and their own relations to it. He, their Lord, is the Lord of life, and He will prepare for them a place in the glorious world which He Himself is about to enter. He does not so much teach truths as reveal facts about the future life. He “brings life and immortality to light.” He is to depart, they are to remain. More remains concealed than even He can reveal to them. They can only trust Him, their loving Lord, and wait for the heavenly life of which He assures them. His chief urgency is that they should implicitly trust in Him—trust Him even as they trusted God Himself: “Ye believe in God, believe also in me.” My last lesson was the fullest revelation of the master (James Prince Lee). I was staying with him for a day or two at Mauldeth, a short time before his death. We were alone. After dinner I turned the conversation from work at Manchester to work at Birmingham. He was glad, I think, to go back to the old days. He spoke with proud delight of his favourite classical authors, as if they were still his familiar companions. He poured out quotation after quotation as we used to hear them at school, and dwelt on that finest single line, as he said, in Latin literature, “Virtutem videant intabescantque relicta.” Graver, sadder subjects followed; memories of failures and disappointments. Then came a long silence. It was growing dark. Suddenly he turned to me and said, “Ah, Westcott, fear not, only believe.” In those four words—no more was spoken—there was a true interpretation of life as the teacher saw it, and as he prepared his scholars to see it: Work to be done, work to be done in the face of formidable difficulties, work to be done in faith on God.1 [Note: Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott, i. 28. I Faith in God “Ye believe in God.” “As ye believe in God, so believe in me.” This seems to be the true relation of the two clauses of our Lord’s command. The words of the original are capable of a fourfold interpretation, but this seems to be the simplest, and most consistent with the moral and spiritual truth of our Lord’s teaching. He would not call them to believe in God as they believed in Himself, for that would really be setting forth His created manifestation as more trustworthy than the Divine reality. Neither would He bid them practise a double faith, believing in God and believing in Himself. Such a command would imply the insufficiency of believing in God. We are not to believe in God as an abstract object, and in Christ as a collateral object; not in God as an eternal object, and in Christ as a distinct object more available as being within the reach of our natural senses. We are to believe in God with a supreme all-absorbing faith, and because we do so, we are to believe in Christ as the manifestation of His eternal love, not separate, collateral, instrumental, but identical, co-essential, indissolubly one with Himself. The belief which we have in God will be the measure of our true belief in Christ. As God is independent of all outward circumstance, so are we to believe in Christ with an entire independence of all outward circumstance. The events of the world do not shake our belief in God. Neither must they shake our belief in Christ. 1. Faith in God implies an act of the will.—Faith in God is a moral act; it is not an emotion, an impression, the result of considerations which act upon a man from without; it is an act in which he exercises moral choice. To have faith we must will to have it. This is not to say that there can be a true faith apart from reasonable grounds of faith. But these grounds may exist, they may be apparent, and yet faith may be absent, because the temper and spirit of the man make him reluctant to exert his will, or because he misconceives the nature of the act. Men confound faith and opinion; even in opinion a man’s moral habits and tendencies count for a great deal; and we often predict what a man’s opinions will be from what we know of his character. But in the formation of opinion the will has no direct function except to compel the intellect to investigate the facts by which opinion should be determined. In faith the case is wholly different. When the facts which should command faith are present and seen, faith may be withheld. Faith is an act of the will; and if we suppose that we shall come to believe in God and in Christ as the result of external forces which compel belief, we shall not believe at all. And when faith, resting on adequate grounds, is assaulted by doubt, the doubt must be met by a resolute decision. No man can ever estimate the power of the will. It is a part of the Divine nature, all of a piece with the power of creation. We speak of God’s fiat. “Fiat lux et lux erat” (Let light be and light was). Man has his fiat. The achievements of history have been the choices, the determinations, the creations of the human will.1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 1. 2. Belief in God precedes belief in Christ.—Manifestly, everybody must believe in God before he can believe in Jesus Christ in any deep sense; for to say that “Jesus is the Son of God” already implies a belief in God. This was clearly true of the Christian converts from among the Jews, who were already worshippers of Jehovah; and it was true also, though to a less extent, of the Greeks, as St. Paul recognized in his famous speech at Athens; and it remains true of the converts from heathendom to-day. In the mind of all men there is some recognition of a Creator Spirit, with whom they are led to identify the Spirit of Jesus. And so the progress of belief is logically from the first article of the Creed to the second, from belief in God the Father and Creator to belief in Him whom the Father sent. At the same time, the belief in Jesus at once reacts upon the belief in God. The heathen convert, though he may employ the same word for God as before, has very different thoughts about Him; he is taught to believe that the holiness and loving-kindness of Jesus are the holiness and loving-kindness of the Creator God; and even the pious Jew gained a new insight into what these great qualities meant—the mercy and truth which he had always held to be the attributes of Jehovah. The two beliefs therefore go together. First, I learn to believe in God the Father, who has made me, and all the world; secondly, in God the Son, who has redeemed me, and all mankind. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that modern Christians have inverted the order of the text. They believe in Christ, and therefore they believe in God. Indeed, this would seem to be the inevitable order of discipleship. Christ calls men to Himself. “Come unto me,” “Follow me,” and in obedience to His summons men come also to God; but Christian Apologetic is concerned not with disciples, as such, but with those who are not disciples, but, at most, friendly inquirers. Therefore the order of reason is the order of Apologetic. First Theism, then Christianity. “Ye believe in God, believe also in me.” Every Theist is to that extent Christian, that is to say, Christianity is the logical inference from his Theistic belief. A Christianity which violates Theism is a contradiction in terms.1 [Note: H. Hensley Henson, The Value of the Bible, 143. II Faith in Christ “Believe also in me.” Christ makes for Himself the most majestic claim. “Believe in Me,” He says, “as you believe in God, and so you will believe in God in a richer and fuller form.” “Ye believe in God—as all your Jewish ancestors believed in Him—add to that faith all the things I have shown you and taught you. Believe in God, as He has spoken to you with My lips, and dwelt with you in My fellowship with you, and loved you with My heart. You know I have dwelt with you and loved you. Do you know why? It is that you may know that God is love. It is that you may come to know that beyond the darkness of the hour and the loneliness of the years—alike in the starlight and in the storm—there is but one thing: the breath, the light, the end of being; and that thing is the love wherewith God loves you.” There is a clear claim put forward by Christ that His disciples shall repose in Him the same absolute, unquestioning, unlimited faith that they repose in God. It is not merely that Jesus claims absolute infallibility for His teaching concerning God and man, though this is necessarily included; and, if there were no clear assertion beyond this, we should still be driven to seek a deeper explanation of it. Even if we had nothing to direct us beyond our Saviour’s repeated assertions that the words He spoke were without any exception or qualification the words of God, that not the slightest taint of imperfection marked His presentation of eternal truth, that His union with God was so perfect that He could say: The Father loveth the Son, and showeth Him all things that Himself doeth;—even if there were nothing more than this we should find it utterly impossible to explain Jesus Christ by any principles of human development, or by any conceivable communication of the Divine Spirit to one who was a son of Adam and nothing more. Nowhere except out of the very bosom of the Father could He come who was the effulgence of the Father’s glory, and the express image of His person. Is not Christendom built on the “also” of Christ’s supper table? Luther has remarked that in this fourteenth chapter “we have the great articles of Christian doctrine in most impressive exhibition, and fundamentally established as in hardly another place of Scripture.” This is true. Sometimes we turn with a sigh from the elaborate confessions of later ages to the confession summed up in the short saying of the Lord. Less than this there may not be, more than this there need not be, in the faith of a Christian. The “also” must stand out in bold relief, rightly apprehended and firmly grasped; but when it is so grasped the mind holds the essential Christian verity. It is the plus in respect of which the faith of the Christian Church is apart from and more than every mere theistic religion—a plus that is not an addition only, but a new faith. For the trust in God, which is “also “with trust in Christ, is not the same as the trust which is without.1 [Note: J. M. Laing.] 1. Christ is the Revealer of God.—Jesus Christ is the Divine Revealer of God. Without Christ there is no real knowledge of God in the depth of His love, the tenderness of His nature or the lustrousness of His holiness; there is no certitude; the God that we see outside of Jesus Christ is sometimes doubt, sometimes hope, sometimes fear, always far-off and vague, an abstraction rather than a person, “a stream of tendency” without us, that which is unnameable, and the like. Jesus Christ has showed us a Father, has brought a God to our hearts whom we can love, whom we can know really though not fully, of whom we can be sure with a certitude which is as deep as the certitude of our own personal being; He has brought to us a God before whom we do not need to crouch far off, He has brought to us a God whom we can trust. Very significant is it that Christianity alone puts the very heart of religion in the act of trust. Other religions put it in dread, worship, service, and the like. Jesus Christ alone says that the bond between men and God is that blessed one of trust. And He says so because He alone brings us a God whom it is not ridiculous to tell men to trust. To those who can receive this heavenly vision all human life is altered. We have dimly seen the heart of God, and we are no longer scared by the strangeness of His vesture or by the rough voice with which He sometimes seems to speak to us in the course of the world. We believe that His very nature and property is to forgive and pity, that the central core of His ethical being is love, that He withdraws Himself from us at times, only in order to increase our hunger and thirst for His presence, that though for a small moment He may forsake us, yet with everlasting kindness will He have mercy upon us. And thus by His sublime anthropomorphism Jesus assuages for His followers all the worst terrors and sorrows that Nature brings upon us. Through Him we have learnt that love, and even self-sacrificing love, is no local and transient product, but something at the very root of the universe, as it were, “the lamb slain from the foundation of the world,” a partial manifestation of that which was in the beginning with God, of the very soul of God. The God disclosed to us by Christ is not one who regards the terrible drama of human suffering from afar, but one who Himself shares our strife and bears our woes. Christ gave us the conception of a God who actually leads struggling souls on personally, and is not content with merely pointing out the road to them. St. Philip and other anxious and sorrowing spirits need no longer go about groping for guidance and crying mournfully, “Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us.” Jesus has already shown us the Father. Those who have really seen Him have seen the Father so far as it is possible or necessary that we should see Him in this life. God has fulfilled to man that old gladdening promise, “I will make all my goodness pass before thee.” Christ is the ladder between God and man. In His humanity He touches the earth; in His Divinity He touches the heaven, and on Jesus Christ as a ladder God comes down from heaven to earth and makes Himself known to man; on Jesus Christ as a ladder man climbs up from earth to heaven and is joined to God. Wonderful is the comprehensiveness of this short creed which Jesus Christ taught us: “Believe in God,”—that solves all the problems of creation; “Believe in me”—that solves all the problems of redemption.1 [Note: A. T. Pierson, The Hopes of the Gospel, 130. 2. Christ is Himself Divine.—Not only is Jesus Christ the Revealer of God, but He Himself is God. Light shines through a window, but the light and the glass that makes it visible have nothing in common with one another. The Godhead shines through Christ, but He is not a mere transparent medium. It is Himself that He is showing us when He is showing us God. “He that hath seen me hath seen”—not the light that streams through Me—but “hath seen,” in Me, “the Father.” And because He is Himself Divine and the Divine Revealer, therefore the faith that grasps Him is inseparably one with the faith that grasps God. Men could look upon a Moses, an Isaiah, or a Paul, and in them recognize the irradiation of the divinity that imparted itself through them, but the medium was forgotten in proportion as that which it revealed was beheld. You cannot forget Christ in order to see God more clearly; to behold Him is to behold God. This was reached at a very early stage of Christian thought by a writer of inspired insight who seized his pen and, without argument or explanation, wrote: the Word was God. The critical penetrativeness of that writer is too little recognized. He overleapt centuries of controversy. He saw at the first glance, what all history has abundantly demonstrated, that all intermediate compromises, such as the Arian, were neither historically nor logically tenable, and that, therefore, the issue was clean and clear between mere humanity and very Deity. With that issue before him, he wrote, not so much the best or highest but the only description of Jesus that he could write. As a Christian, he could not describe Christ as mere man; nor can we. As a thinker he could not describe Him as an intermediate divinity; nor can we. If then he was to write at all he could write but one thing, and if we are to say at all what Christ is, we can say but that one thing too. It is saved from being quite incredible only by being quite inevitable.2 [Note: P. C. Simpson, The Fact of Christ, 111. 3. All imperfect revelation of God is prophetic of, and leads up towards, the perfect revelation in Jesus Christ.—The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews gives that truth in a very striking fashion. He compares all other means of knowing God to fragmentary syllables of a great word, of which one was given to one man and another to another. God “spoke at sundry times and in manifold portions to the fathers by the prophets”; but the whole word is articulately uttered by the Son, in whom He has “spoken unto us in these last times.” The imperfect revelation, by means of those who were merely mediums for the revelation, leads up to Him who is Himself the Revelation, the Revealer, and the Revealed. And in like manner, all the imperfect faith that, laying hold of other fragmentary means of knowing God, has tremulously tried to trust Him, finds its climax and consummate flower in the full-blossomed faith that lays hold upon Jesus Christ. The unconscious prophecies of heathendom; the trust that select souls up and down the world have put in One whom they dimly apprehended; the faith of the Old Testament saints; the rudimentary beginnings of a knowledge of God and of a trust in Him which are found in men to-day, and amongst us, outside of the circle of Christianity—all these things are as manifestly incomplete as a building reared half its height, and waiting for the corner-stone to be brought forth, the full revelation of God in Jesus Christ, and the intelligent and full acceptance of Him and faith in Him. As ideas, the central points of Christian faith—such as a trust in the Divine Fatherhood and a hope beyond the grave—are not altogether new. Many earnest and noble souls have stretched out their minds towards them. What, then, was lacking for faith? Just that, after all, there were but ideas, speculations, yearnings; and our thoughts on these matters are not the sure measure of what really is. Before the stern unyielding facts of life and especially before life’s final fact of death, how easily such thoughts falter and fail. Man is of dust: ethereal hopes are his, Which, when they should sustain themselves aloft, Want due consistence; like a pillar of smoke, That with majestic energy from earth Rises; but, having reached the thinner air, Melts, and dissolves, and is no longer seen. Who will assure us, in face of “the thinner air” that is the breath of death, that these hopes and speculations are the sure “pillar of cloud” leading us truly to a promised land, and are not but a “pillar of smoke” from the fires of human fancy? A faith thus founded will always be cherishable by certain temperaments—and it is largely a matter of temperament—but it will never really grip the mass of men, simply because it is a mere edifice of conceptions insecurely founded on the bed-rock of fact. But it is just this that Christian faith possesses. Its basis is not the ideas of Jesus but the fact. It brings, not a new doctrine merely, but new data. It comes not with the theory of a fatherly God, but with a phenomenon, in history and experience, which means that. Now all this is precisely what faith needs. Faith—as indeed may be said of all truth—is like Antaeus in Greek legend, who was invincible when touching mother-earth; and the mother-earth of faith is fact—the fact of Christ. It was as if God had a revelation to make to the world, a word to teach it, His own name; and He taught it as we teach a little child, letter by letter. To one nation came a message by Buddha, to another by Zoroaster, to another by Confucius, to another by Moses, until at last the full Word was revealed, the Word that was made flesh and dwelt with us.… No truth can be taught until the world is prepared for it.… To me it seems I can read my Bible with a greater reverence and interest now I see in it a continuous record of a continuous revelation, wherein God appears ever growingly more tender, more merciful, where the false human ideas of Him as held by Abraham, Joshua and Saul are softened down in the tenderness of Isaiah, and finally in the life of our Lord Jesus.1 [Note: Quintin Hogg, 307. 4. Without faith in Christ, faith in God is incomplete.—Without faith in Christ such faith in God as is possible is feeble, incomplete, and will not last long. Historically a pure Theism is all but impotent. There is only one example of it on a large scale in the world, and that is a kind of bastard Christianity—Mohammedanism; and we all know what value that has as a religion. There are many among us who claim to be very advanced thinkers, and who call themselves Theists, and not Christians. That is a phase that will not last. There is little substance in it. The God whom men know outside of Jesus Christ is a poor, nebulous thing; an idea, not a reality. He, or rather It, is a film of cloud shaped into a vague form, through which you can see the stars. It has little power to restrain. It has less to inspire and impel. It has still less to comfort; it has least of all to satisfy the heart. You will have to get something more substantial than the far-off God of an unchristian Theism if you mean to sway the world and to satisfy men’s hearts. Mr. Fujimoto was led to tell us some of his early difficulties in the Dôshisha University at Kyoto. He had been baptized, but had adopted extreme views on Higher Criticism. He could acknowledge the one God and Father, but beyond that he could not see. Various “holiness” and other meetings were held, but he found no comfort in them. Mr. Barclay Buxton tried hard to help him, but still he had no real light. One day having been pressed hard to attend one of these meetings, he said to himself, “No, I am going instead into the country alone to fight it out with myself and God!” He went and spent four hours in agonizing prayer to the God and Father for further light, if such light was really to be had. It was about 1.30 p.m. (halfway through the four hours) that a moment came which he says he shall always distinctly remember. He seemed to hear a voice saying in the concluding words of St. John 14:1, “Believe also in me.” He instantly took out his Testament and read straight through the chapter and on to the end of chapter 16, and he returned from that four hours a believer in our Lord Jesus Christ.1 [Note: Bishop Ingham, From Japan to Jerusalem, 48. III The Secret of a Quiet Heart “Let not your heart be troubled.” The word used here by our Saviour and translated “be troubled” does not signify any kind of sadness or sorrow; nor are we to understand that it is either desirable or possible to banish all sadness and sorrow from the mind of any son of man under the conditions that prevail upon this earth. The word used by Jesus signifies to be agitated, perplexed, and thrown into confusion. It is the description of a life thrown as it were off its centre, and tossed hither and thither by the force of perplexing and adverse circumstances. It is the antithesis of that state which Christ described as peace, the rocky strength that is not exempt from sorrow, but remains unshaken by it. For we must remember that Jesus Christ Himself, though He spoke of giving His peace to His disciples, was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” “Troubled” is the best English equivalent we can give for the Greek; but, as generally employed, its force is fainter. The original verb—used often of the agitation of waters, the heaving and surging of the sea—aptly represents the deeper agitations of the soul, painful to strong natures, dangerous to the weak. Thrice it is used of our Lord Himself in some access of vehement emotion. So He shared the experiences which in us He would comfort and control. Such a condition needs control, tending as it does to confusion of judgment and suspension of faith. “Let not your heart be troubled” was then not only a word of sympathetic kindness, but a needful counsel; and it is so still, falling with composing power on many an agitated mind.1 [Note: T. D. Bernard, The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 125. I happened to read, one immediately after the other, the lives of two women written by themselves; the one was Sarah Bernhardt’s, the other Marianne Farningham’s. I gathered little in the way of help from Sarah Bernhardt’s. She is a woman with a kind heart. That at least can be said of her. At the siege of Paris she got all her friends safely out of the city, but remained herself, and turned her house into a hospital where she nursed the wounded soldiers. But in looking for any guiding principle of her life, it seemed to be chiefly this—that whatever she was thwarted in, whatever she was asked or recommended not to do, that was the very thing she would set herself to do with all the somewhat hysterical energy of her nature. It was refreshing to turn to Marianne Farningham’s. In quoting what have been the two mottoes of her life, she says, “We change our mottoes as we proceed through life. Mine is now ‘Let not your heart be troubled,’ but through all my working years my favourite was ‘I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.’ ” One can understand why she changed her motto in later life, from a remark she made in reply to an Address presented to her—“The beauty of getting old is that not so much is expected of one, and one has time to sit and think.” In her strenuous years she had the earlier motto. For the “doing” we need Christ’s strength, for the “thinking” we need Christ’s comfort. The evening of her days had come, when the hands had to be folded from much labour, and she had to face the approaching night. We are so helpless, so ignorant, in view of the great unseen realities which each day’s journey is bringing us nearer to, We need hope and comfort, and Christ’s words are specially suited to such conditions and such times.1 [Note: John S. Maver.] 1. Christ does not offer exemption from sorrow.—It has been a mistake of most of the remedies proposed for a troubled heart that they have aimed at eliminating sorrow from the earth. In this they have aimed, not only at what is impossible, but at what is, as a primary aim, undesirable also. Ancient Epicureanism, for example, sought to banish sorrow as far as possible by avoiding excess of pleasurable excitement, by making the tenor of life so even that extravagant excesses in pleasure should not occur to plunge men into consequent excess of pain. Modern Epicureanism, a more wretched fallacy still, adopts as its watchword: “A short life and a merry one; let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” It endeavours by the constant inoculation of pleasure in its most feverish form to exclude the possibility of pain, and to drive life’s pulse at its hottest pace, let the end come when it will. Stoicism sought to remove sorrow by the destruction of feeling, to create men who should not be flesh and blood, but iron and brass. It tried to crush and destroy the emotional side of life by such tremendous acts of self-conquest, or rather of self-mutilation, as to make man a monster—a “reason” with an iron will and no heart. And Buddhism, with all its beauty, has at the very centre of it a feminine anguish to be released from sorrow, and knows no way to cure earth’s heart-break except in an unmanly longing for extinction, in giving up the life, not in the Christian way so as to find it again, but in such a way that it disappears altogether into the great abyss of the Infinite. Securely cabined in the ship below, Through darkness and through storm I cross the sea, A pathless wilderness of waves to me: But yet I do not fear, because I know That he who guides the good ship o’er that waste Sees in the stars her shining pathway traced. Blindfold I walk this life’s bewildering maze; Up flinty steep, through frozen mountain pass, Through thorn-set barren and through deep morass; But strong in faith I tread the uneven ways, And bare my head unshrinking to the blast, Because my Father’s arm is round me cast; And if the way seems rough, I only clasp The hand that leads me with a firmer grasp.1 [Note: Anne Charlotte Lynch Botta.] 2. The world cannot give us heartsease.—The worldling says “Come with me, and we will go where there is the lilt of merry music and the twinkle of dancing feet. Once at the feast, you will forget your sadness.” We know how little this man’s advice is worth. We have heard and, it may be, yielded to this plea for a little diversion; and we know that a troubled heart cannot be sung and danced and fooled out of its grieving. The world’s music may get into your feet; but only the music of heaven, of the Divine promises, can get into a troubled heart. In this world of problem and passion, and fear and distress, where the shadow of separation veils from us much that once was ours and lies soft and silent upon all that we do now possess, there is but one way to the quiet heart. It lies, not in the wisdom that would know all, or in the folly that would forget all, but in the faith that trusts the love of God the Father in the face of Jesus Christ—the faith that leads a man, in all the trouble of his days, to shelter his soul in the promise, yes, and in the silence of the Infinite Mercy. “Ye believe in God, believe also in me.” Some think that the secret of peace is in the vision of science. There is a tendency to approach every experience of life along the line of the intellect. Faith in some quarters is depreciated. But, however men may slight it, they learn soon or late that they cannot live without it. These scientists, with their delicate instruments and their subtle treatises can say a great many things to us, but they cannot say all we need to hear. During the last fifteen years I have read many of their books. I honour them, and the service they have wrought; but I have missed one note in them all—the note of comfort. There is one thing they cannot in all their wisdom say to us: “Let not your heart be troubled.” They cannot say that. They can teach us to talk wisely, but they cannot help us to live quietly. They do not give any help in the day of a troubled heart. In that day I do not want to be reasoned with, I want to be comforted. I do not want learning, I want love. I do not want man, I want God. I do not want science, I want faith.2 [Note: P. C. Ainsworth, A Thornless World, 90. 3. Jesus unfolds the secret.—He says that personal faith will keep the heart at peace. We may not be able to rule the storm, but we can keep the storm from ruling us. Christ tells of the man who built his house upon a rock; and flood and tempest came and beat upon the house, but it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock. God has not taught us how to rule tempests, but He has taught us how to build houses that will defy these tempests. He has not given us lordship over life’s stressful weather, but He has given us the lordship of our hearts. If we trust we may be quiet. Trust is always tranquillity. To cast a burden off myself on others’ shoulders is always a rest. But trust in Jesus Christ brings infinitude on my side. Submission is repose. When we cease to kick against the pricks they cease to prick and wound us. Trust opens the heart, like the windows of the Ark tossing upon the black and fatal flood, for the entrance of the peaceful dove with the olive branch in its mouth. Trust brings Christ to my side in all His tenderness and greatness and sweetness. If I trust, “all is right that seems most wrong.” If I trust, conscience is quiet. If I trust, life becomes “a solemn scorn of ills.” If I trust, inward unrest is changed into tranquillity, and mad passions are cast out from him that sits “clothed and in his right mind” at the feet of Jesus. There is a beautiful figure employed in the Apocalypse to denote the calmness of the soul which arises from the consciousness of God’s presence. Before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal. The idea conveyed to our minds by this emblem is that of a sea, not of glass, but like glass, a sea the glassy surface of whose waters is ruffled by not so much as a passing breeze, and whose crystal depths are lit up with sunshine, a sea smooth and clear as crystal. The beauty of the emblem is that it combines the most restless, unstable thing in nature with the idea of perfect repose and tranquillity. The sea in its restlessness is a true likeness of the human heart. Every breath of wind disturbs the one, every breath of adversity troubles the other. But there is something which can bring perfect repose to the soul—the presence of God. This is the truth which is taught by this sublime image of the sea like glass before the throne. It represents the calm of a soul which dwells in the presence of God. We think of heaven as calm because it is out of reach of the storms of earth, but this is not the idea conveyed by the vision. The heaven which it reveals is a heaven on earth. The scene of the Apocalypse is laid, not in some far-off sphere, some fabled Elysium, but here on earth. Heaven is within the good man’s heart. The sea which is before the throne is smooth and clear as crystal, not because it is remote from earthly storms, but because the Spirit of God moves upon the face of the waters. I knew a man, since gone to his rest, who carried on an active service for his Master in the busiest of all cities, and who selected for himself a telegraphic address which might stand at the head of his notepaper. What do you think this busy man’s address was? It was this:—“Undisturbed, London.” And it always found him at home—that is to say, in God—so far as I could judge of his dwelling-place in the days when I knew him, before he had run out his leasehold in the Church militant and taken up his freehold in the Church triumphant. Such an one, living at such an address, verifies the truth of the Scripture which says of the good man that— He shall not be afraid of evil tidings; His heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord.1 [Note: J. Rendel Harris, Aaron’s Breastplate, 44. Oh! the bells rang out for Easter, rang strong and sweet and shrill, And the organ’s rolling thunder pealed through the long church aisle, And the children fluttered with flowers, and I sat mute and still, I who had clean forgotten both how to pray and to smile. And I murmured in fierce rebellion: “There is nought that endures below, Nought but the lamentations that are rent from souls in pain”; And the joy of the Easter music, it struck on my ears like a blow, For I knew that my day was over, I could never be glad again! And then—how it happened I know not—there was One in my sight who stood, And lo! on His brow was the thorn-print, in His hands were the nails’ rough scars, And the shadow that lay before Him was the shade of the holy rood, But the glow in His eyes was deeper than the light of the morning stars. “Daughter,” He said, “have comfort! Arise! keep Easter-tide! I, for thy sins who suffered and died on the cruel tree, I, who was dead, am living; no evil shall e’er betide Those who, beyond or waiting, are pledged unto life with Me.” Now I wake to a holier Easter, happier than of old, And again my voice is lifted in Te Deums sweet and strong; I send it to join the anthem in the wonderful city of gold, Where the hymns of the ransomed for ever are timed to the Easter song. And I can he glad with the gladness that is born of a perfect peace; On the strength of the Strong I am resting; I know that His will is best, And who that has found that secret from darkness has won release, And even in sorrow’s exile may lift up her eyes and be blessed. The Secret of the Untroubled Heart Literature Ainsworth (P. C.), A Thornless World, 84. Alexander (S. A.), The Mind of Christ, 28. Allon (H.), The Indwelling Christ, 321. Archer-Hind (T. H.), Some Scripture Problems, 1. Banks (L. A.), Christ and His Friends, 334. Benson (R. M.), The Final Passover, ii. (pt. i.), 235. Bernard (T. D.), The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 123. Craufurd (A. H.), The Religion of H. G. Wells, 133. Dowen (L. T.), Christus Consolator, 1. Fotheringham (D. R.), The Writing on the Sky, 51. Harris (J. R.), Aaron’s Breastplate, 25. Henson (H. H.), The Value of the Bible, 130. Holland (H. S.), Pleas and Claims, 18. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John ix.–xiv., 253. Matheson (G.), Times of Retirement, 114. Muir (P. M.), Modern Substitutes for Christianity, 127. Owen (J. W.), Some Australian Sermons, 2. Pierson (A. T.), The Hopes of the Gospel, 121. Purves (P. C.), The Divine Cure for Heart Trouble, 1. Robertson (J.), Sermons and Expositions, 275. Smith (D.), The Pilgrim’s Hospice, 97. Smith (H. A.), Things New and Old, 91. Telford (J.), The Story of the Upper Room, 77. Thomas (J.), Sermons: Myrtle Street Pulpit, ii. 61. Tipple (S. A.), Days of Old, 123. Wilberforce (B.), The Hope that is in Me, 65. Wilson (J. M.), The Origins and Aims of the Four Gospels, 130. Cambridge Review, vii., Supplement No. 155 (Billing). Christian Age, xlv. 146 (Abbott). Christian World Pulpit, ix. 40 (Roberts); xii. 200 (Beecher); xxix. 10 (Davies); lxi. 348 (Hall); lxvi. 310 (Johnson); lxvii. 380 (Scholes); lxxix. 406 (Henson). Churchman’s Pulpit: Trinity Sunday: ix. 400 (Mulchahey). The Preparation and the Reception I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.—John 14:2-3. One does not wonder that the disciples were troubled when told that their Master was about to die. There is no anguish so sharp and desolating as that which bereavement causes. He who had been to them infinitely more than friend or brother, whom they had loved with a love having all the reverence of worship and all the intensity of passion, whose life had been their ideal of goodness, whose love had been their blessedness, whose Divine teaching and working had been their glory—He was about to be taken from them; they are to be bereaved of more than affection ever lost before. Never had sorrow so great an occasion. The grief of bereavement is measured by the greatness of possession. Only those who had known Him could know what it was to lose the man Christ Jesus. Therefore “sorrow had filled their hearts,” the depth of which was attested alike by the vehemence of St. Peter and the tenderness of St. John. His comfort for them was, trust in Him as the immortal Christ, who would go to prepare a place for them, and come again to receive them to Himself. I The Preparation “I go to prepare a place for you.” These words are so simple that a child or an unlettered peasant might understand them. Christ has gone to prepare a place for us in the house of His Father; what more need we know? This is enough to give us the exhilarating hope and joy which are necessary for righteousness; this is enough to invigorate the faith which is agitated by the mysteries that environ us; this is enough to sustain the fortitude which is likely to give way under the recurring shocks of earthly trouble. 1. The Going.—It is not so much the going as the preparation that is in His mind. Yet what a way was that by which He had to go. It was the way of Gethsemane, and the judgment-hall, and Calvary; it was the way of the cross and of the grave; the way of the resurrection and the ascending on high. It was thus He opened the Kingdom of heaven to all believers, and thus He rendered possible for us life in the Father’s house. (1) He goes because He first came. Christ came into this world not as a native but as a visitor, a messenger from another sphere. “I go my way,” He cries, “to him that sent me.” He returns to His rightful place, as a voyager setting sail to his native shore, as a son wending his way joyfully homewards when the task on which he set out is finished. What poets and philosophers have sometimes imagined concerning man, that he has descended by the passage of birth from some diviner realm of which he brings dim recollections with him, that Trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home,— this was true in a sense deeper and grander than they had imagined, in the case of the Son of Man, our Lord Jesus Christ. He came from the bosom of the Father. Nothing is more evident from the narrative of the Gospels than that Jesus made this claim; nothing is more certain than the fact itself, if His words are in any wise true. Listen to Him: “I came out from the Father, and am come into the world; again I leave the world, and go to the Father.” Language cannot be plainer or more positive than this. The gates of birth and of death alike are transparent to Jesus Christ; through both He sees His Father’s heaven. (2) He goes because for our sakes He must go. It was necessary to part, necessary to leave them behind; nothing else would have snapped the chain which held them to this visible life which they knew, and in which they had known their Master; nothing but losing Him, and knowing why they had lost Him—that He had gone to prepare their place, the place where at last they should be with Him, and where He was with the Father for over. He went up on high: and then with tears and with great joy they understood the lesson that to give Him up was not to lose Him. Then they knew that to have Him out of sight was to have Him none the less. Then they knew that they parted with Him on earth to have One whom they had followed and conversed with, on the throne of heaven. Then they perceived that though their work and their sufferings might be for a while on earth, they themselves belonged to where their Master was gone; the place prepared for them was nothing less than the unutterable and never-changing glory into which He was withdrawn. Wherever He would have His disciples go, He goes first Himself, and through the door which He has opened He draws them by His love. That is the whole philosophy of Christian culture. And that is the meaning of the Incarnation. God entered into human life; made Himself one with it as He only could have done with a nature that was originally one with His own. He became man as He could not have become brute or stone. Then in that human nature He outwent humanity. He opened yet unopened gates of human possibility. He showed what man might be, how great, how godlike! And by the love and oneness He has always been claiming man for the greatness whose possibility He showed.1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, The Mystery of Iniquity, 179. 2. The Preparation.—“If I go,” He said. But “go” is a cold word. It tells of parting. There is a sigh of desolation in it, like the moaning of the wintry wind as it sweeps through the leafless branches of the trees in the dead of night. It was a word which filled the heart of the disciples with sorrow. They thought it the coldest word that they had ever heard from Him. It seemed to hang like an icicle upon the lips of the Christ. Only the satisfaction that He was going to prepare a place for them made the word bearable. “I go to prepare” are His words. To go, then, does not mean to forget. Christ’s exaltation is an exaltation to service. No trouble will be too great for Him in our interests. “Prepare.” God believes in preparation. He did not place man on earth without having first prepared the earth for him; and as the ages move we are more and more impressed with the extent of the preparation. From this we can understand better the meaning of the word “prepare” as applied to heaven. And, more, we can see better why our Lord should speak of “abiding places.” A home which takes so long in preparing must not be a transient one. In the Divine economy there is always a sublime relation between the means and the end. When a guest is coming to the house, the hostess prepares. The rooms are there, the furniture is there, but the thoughtful, tender-hearted woman has something to do beyond making them ready. She prepares for the guest. This, she says to herself, is his favourite flower, his favourite book, and that little touch of kindness makes the welcome perfect. It may not be much that she is able to do, but the little means that she would fain do all. So Christ prepares for Peter, prepares for John, prepares for Thomas. He knows what they like, and He does not forget. So He prepares for His people through the generations till the end arrives.1 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, The Lamp of Sacrifice, 169. I remember how once travelling in Syria the guide upon whom we wholly depended disappeared. By and by he came back to us as we rode along and told us where he had been: that in the village which we were approaching, and where we were to spend the night, his family lived; that he had ridden on to see that they were ready to receive him and to prepare quarters in their house for us, the travellers under his charge, and now came back to conduct us thither; and by and by he brought us where he belonged, and where through him provision had been made and a welcome was waiting for us.2 [Note: Phillips Brooks, The Mystery of Iniquity, 173. (1) There are two remarkable things about this statement. The first is that the master should prepare for the servant. This upsets the ordinary course of procedure. You are expecting to entertain some chosen friends. All your appointments are made; you have sent before your face servants in whom you have confidence, and have told them to do as you have commanded, that all things may be in readiness for the invited guests. This is customary; this is considered right. But Jesus Christ says to His servants,—such poor, incomplete, and blundering servants, too,—“I, your Lord and Master, go to prepare a place for you.” This is quite in keeping with the method which Jesus Christ adopted in His ministry. This is no exceptional instance of condescension, self-ignoring, self-humiliation. He took a towel, girded Himself, and washed His disciples’ feet and dried them, and having finished this lowly exhibition, He said, “If I, then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another’s feet.” I have given you an example. So His whole life was a humiliation. Suppose we had a near relative and friend who had long been away in far-distant lands. At length he determined to return home, and settle down quietly after his long, and tiresome, and wandering life. He wrote to us to provide a house for him, to prepare it, to furnish it completely, and even to lay out the grounds, all ready for his arrival and immediate occupation. That preparation would cost us very grave anxieties. How carefully we should endeavour to recall his old disposition, his old fancies and partialities! We should provide everything that we imagined could be pleasing to him. We should be all the while thinking about him. And yet, when we had it all ready, if a mutual friend should come to look over the house and grounds, he would see a great many signs of our own peculiar taste, our own individual preferences. We could not help making the house a little expression of ourselves, and a little expression of our friend. So it must be with the Lord Jesus. He is preparing a place for us, and He is thinking of us; of our real wants, and of our varied wishes. But all the while He is impressing His own character upon it; He is filling it with indications of His own likings and sympathies. And the exceeding charm of our Heaven will be to us this: it will be so largely, and so evidently, Christ’s Heaven, but at the same time it will be so manifestly our own Heaven—Christ’s preparation, but prepared for us.1 [Note: R. T. Light for Life’s Eventide, 27. (2) The second remarkable thing about the text is that the Divine being, God the Son, should ever have occasion to “prepare” anything. To prepare may signify to get ready, to put things in order, to look after arrangements, appointments, and the like, so as to have all things in due proportion and relation, that the eye may be pleased, that the ear may be satisfied, and that all our desires may be met and fulfilled. Jesus Christ talks in the text as if there were a good deal of work for Him to do somewhere, and He must make haste and get it done. Go to prepare? Can He who fills infinitude and breathes eternity have anything to do in the way of arranging and ordering and getting things ready for His servants. He accommodates Himself to our modes of thinking. He does not always “throw the infinite at us.” He often steps out of His tabernacle of glory and talks our own speech,—makes a child of Himself that He may be understood in this little rickety nursery of a world. He knows we are all in the cradle still, that the mightiest speaker among us is only a lisping babbler, and that He must continually break up His words, in order that He may convey the very dimmest hint of His unutterable meaning! There are some things which only the Master can do. Will you go and prepare summer for us? You might try. You have seen half a hundred summers: now you go and try to make the fifty-first! Come! You are an artificer: you have the organ of form largely developed; you have an eye for beauty; you can buy oils and paints and colours and canvas and brushes of all kinds. Why don’t you go and prepare summer for us? The great Master, looking down upon this little under-world of His—this basement-storey of His great building—says, “I am going to prepare the summer for you.” And He makes no noise, He makes no mistakes in His colours, never gets things into discord. He continually renews the face of the earth, and not a man in all the busy, boastful world can do it! If the servant cannot prepare the summer, how could he prepare heaven? If the saint exhausts himself when he lights a candle, how could he fill the great heavens with the morning that should never melt into sunset?1 [Note: J. Parker.] II The Reception “I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.” “If I go, I come again” (He uses the present tense, not the future), “that where I am, there ye may be also.” There is the Father’s house, there is the place prepared, and there is the coming of the Christ to take us to our place. He will not leave His disciples to find their own way; He will come again and receive them to Himself, that they may abide with Him for ever. The going was preparatory. It was with a view to returning, and the returning, again, is with a view to the final reunion of all with Himself. “If I go, I come again.” 1. The Coming.—There are many comings of Christ to the world, and to the individual. The words no doubt refer to the Second Advent, but the promise must not be limited to that one coming which is the consummation of all comings. In many ways and times Christ has come and is coming. From the day He ascended to His Father, He has been continuously coming, manifesting Himself as the risen Lord and the life-giving Spirit to the Church and the world. The signs of His advent are everywhere around us. Christ has come again already, and come to dwell. His is an abiding presence. “Lo,” He said, “I am with you all the days, even unto the consummation of the age.” Especially is there one coming of Christ to us which we all await with mingled feelings of awe and fear and hope. May we not say that death is for each individual a true coming of Christ, that through it Christ’s words, “I receive you unto myself,” have a true fulfilment? When our Lord departed, to confirm our assurance He returned again for a little while, with the keys of death and the grave hung at His girdle; He “shewed himself alive after his passion,” Master of both worlds, “Lord of both the dead and the living,” and moving as He would this side or that the veil. By the resurrection of Jesus Christ we know that there is an exit from the grave, and that our holy dead live unto God. Paradise is no fable then; the celestial hills gleaming beyond the dark river are no cloudland born of our wishes and our fancies. When Jesus speaks of His Father’s house, He does not invite us to a castle in the air, to some palace in the fairyland of childhood, but to that which is the most certain and solid as it is the most glorious of realities. It is this world that is unsubstantial, that is the realm of dreams and shadows. “The things which are seen are temporal: but the things which are not seen are eternal.” The earth beneath our feet is but a little flying dust, the everlasting mountains fade and dissolve as the morning mists that cover them; we look for “a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” He will come again! Sometime He will surely stand once more On the earth which His own hand hath made— Only never as before, Weary, lonely, and in pain, As the Lamb on whom our sin was laid— Stretching out His hands in vain, All the day, To a people gone astray. He will come again! O, the word Which our joyful ears have heard Cannot fail, nor pass away. He hath spoken! It shall be! Our expectant eyes shall see Him for whom we watch and wait, Coming soon to claim All whose trust is in His name— For the hour is growing late; Time wears on, And the little while is almost gone. He will come again! In the hope our hearts grow strong— Strong to bear the watching and the strain Of the time between— Strong to bear His cross—to undertake, For His sake, All the burdens of the day— All the roughness of the way— Reaching out toward the things unseen— Finding not our rest below— Counting all the joys of earth, All things here, Sometime dear, Of but little worth, Since we know That at His appearing we shall see All the glory, and the light— Hidden now from human sight— Of the risen One, And, beholding, in His likeness be, While eternal ages run.1 [Note: E. H. Divall, A Believer’s Rest, 68. 2. The Reception.—One of the best tests of the truth and reality and vigour of our Christian life lies in this, that when we anticipate the great life to come, however far speculation may endeavour to trace its course in the province of that mysterious land, we return to this thought, which satisfies completely all the deepest and best desires of our hearts,—that where Christ is, we are to be also. But there is a personal delight in these words of Christ’s: His joy would be incomplete if we were not with Him in the Father’s house. It would diminish our gladness, our anticipation of supreme bliss, if we did not know that our presence with Him would heighten His own happiness. He is not so absorbed in the splendours of His Eternal Throne, or in the great tasks which belong to Him as the Lord of the heaven and the earth, as to be indifferent to the affection that binds Him to us and to God. Nor is He so absorbed even in the blessedness of His eternal fellowship with the Father. If on the one side of His nature He is eternally one with God, on the other side of His nature He is eternally one with us; and fellowship with us, in the perfection of our righteousness and the perfection of our blessedness, is as necessary to the heavenly glory of Christ as His fellowship with the Father Himself. The joy that was set before Him when He endured the Cross, despising the shame, was this,—that He might redeem us from sin; and knowing as only He knows the blessedness of living in the eternal love of God, He wanted us in our measure to know that blessedness likewise. Heaven is the Father’s house, where we shall be young again, the ideal home life here revived and sanctified, where friend will meet with friend, where the many mansions will extend their ample hospitality to people of every kindred and tongue and nation; yet even this is not the chief feature of that life to come. Its chief feature is the fellowship not of friend with friend, but of all with Christ—“That where I am, there ye may be also.” The Father’s house is not a perfect place to Christ until He gathers into its mansions all those for whom He died. Not until He has His loved ones beside Him where He is, and has made them what He is, will He be satisfied. That is heaven,—to be with Christ, to see Him as He is, to be as He is. “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” The Tannese called Heaven by the name Aneai; and we afterwards discovered that this was the name of the highest and most beautifully situated village on the island. Their best bit of Earth was to them the symbol and type of Heaven; their Canaan, too, was a kind of prophecy of another country, even a heavenly Canaan. The fact that they had an Aneai, a promised land, opened their minds naturally to our idea of the promised land of the future, the Aneai of the Gospel hope and faith.1 [Note: John G. Paton, i. 121. I used to think of heaven and its golden streets and pearly gates, and it was the place I thought of; but as I grew older and my loved ones passed on before, my thoughts of heaven changed altogether. I no longer think of the place, but of the great company I shall meet there, of my Poly. boys who have gone home, of the mother who loves me none the less because her love has been made perfect in her Saviour’s presence. I believe that when our opening eyes first pierce the mysteries of that land beyond the river, our first feeling will be a deep inward sensation of being at home; the surroundings that are so often antagonistic to our better nature will be gone: there will be no more sea.2 [Note: Quintin Hogg, 309. Let not thy heart be troubled; in the vast spaces there is a home for thee. The Son of Man has gone before; there is a region prepared for humanity. There is a spot in this stupendous universe where human nature dwells. That spot is thy one comfort, thy one glory. No other glory would make up for it. There may be golden streets and pearly gates and sapphire thrones. There may be rivers clear as crystal, and trees rich in foliage, and flowers full of bloom. There may be suns that never set, and hands that never weary, and lives that never die. But about these many things thy heart is not troubled. One thing is needful, without which all were vain—the sympathy of a brother’s soul. Content mayest thou be to have no revealing of the many lights in the upper chamber, since thou hast been allowed to gaze on one glimmering light of love—“I go to prepare a place for you.”3 [Note: G. Matheson, Searchings in the Silence, 212. Dr. Story, speaking of his last interview with Mrs. Oliphant, then on her death-bed, says: Her voice was still strong with its old, familiar tone; her wonderful eyes were as lambent as ever; and her mind was as calm and clear as a summer’s sea. “I am dying,” she said, “I do not think I can last through the night.” Thinking of the “Little Pilgrim” and the “Seen and the Unseen,” and the many touching efforts her eager imagination had made to lift the impenetrable veil, I said, “The world to which you are going is a familiar world to you.” “I have no thoughts,” she replied, “not even of my boys; but only of my Saviour waiting to receive me, and of my Father.”1 [Note: Memoir of Robert Herbert Story, 288. The city’s shining towers we may not see With our dim earthly vision; For Death, the silent warder, keeps the key That opes the gates Elysian. But sometimes, when adown the western sky A fiery sunset lingers, Its golden gates swing inward noiselessly, Unlocked by unseen fingers. And while they stand a moment half ajar, Gleams from the inner glory Stream brightly through the azure vault afar, And half reveal the story. O land unknown! O land of love Divine! Father, all-wise, eternal! O guide these wandering, way-worn feet of mine Into those pastures vernal!2 [Note: Nancy Priest Wakefield.] The Preparation and the Reception Literature Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, i. 365. Allon (H.), The Indwelling Christ, 321. Brooks (P.), The Mystery of Iniquity, 171. Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, iii. 176. Dale (R. W.), Christ and the Future Life, 33. Fairweather (D.), Bound in the Spirit, 151. Findlay (G. G.), The Tilings Above, 188. Ingram (A. F. W.), The Mysteries of God, 135. Lewis (F. W.), The Unseen Life, 119. MacColl (M.), Life Here and Hereafter, 71. Matheson (G.), Searchings in the Silence, 210. Moody (D. L.), Heaven, 61. Mozley (J. B.), Sermons Parochial and Occasional, 268. Nicoll (W. R.), The Lamp of Sacrifice, 155. Parker (J.), Studies in Texts, v. 86. Parkhurst (C. H.), A Little Lower than the Angels, 214. Parkhurst (C. H.), The Pattern in the Mount, 227. Smith (D.), The Pilgrim’s Hospice, 97. Christian World Pulpit, xxix. 10 (Davies). The Way, the Truth, the Life Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life.—John 14:6. 1. The words of Christ immediately preceding the text seem to have been obscure and puzzling to the Apostles. Apparently they were not yet persuaded that their Master was shortly to die; and, accordingly, when He spoke of going to His Father’s house, it did not occur to them that He meant passing into the spiritual world. His assuring words, “that where I am, there ye may be also,” therefore fell short. And when He sees their bewilderment written on their faces, He tentatively, half interrogatively, adds, “And whither I go, ye know the way.” Unless they knew where He was going, there was even less consolation in the promise that He would come for them after He had gone and prepared a place for them. And when He thus challenges them candidly to say whether they understood where He was going, and where He would one day take them also, Thomas at once replies, “Lord, we know not whither thou goest; how know we the way?” This interruption by Thomas gives occasion for the great declaration, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” 2. Some people find it hard to trace the connexion between way, and truth, and life; and that difficulty was well expressed by Maldonatus in the pithy saying, “If Christ had been less liberal in explanation, we had less labour in exposition.” The three terms, way, truth, and life, are not co-ordinate, as Luther and Calvin hold, i.e. beginning, middle, end; neither do they express a single notion, as Augustine’s vera via vitae; nor does Reuss seem to express quite accurately their relation when he combines them, by defining the way as the means of arriving at truth and life. The phrase may be interpreted, according to Lightfoot and others, as a Hebraism equivalent to “the true and living way”; but it is better to take the two latter phrases as explanations of the former. Jesus means to say: “I am the means of coming to the Father, because I am the truth and the life.” I Christ the Person “I am.” The distinguishing feature and the chief glory of this wonderful declaration of Christ lies in its personal element. The special force of the utterance lies not in the words, “the way, and the truth, and the life,” but in Christ’s resolving their whole meaning into Himself. “No man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” It is this presentation of a Person, as concentrating within Himself all that can be embraced in the all-comprehensive words, “the way, and the truth, and the life,” that constitutes the grand peculiarity and the chief wonder of the text. 1. Man’s need is satisfied only by a person. If anything is obvious in our everyday experience, and in the history, both secular and religious, of mankind, it is that in the formation of character, in great social changes, in shaping the destiny of our race, the great factor is not abstract truth, system, or form, but living, thinking, willing beings—mind acting on mind, heart on heart, life on life. This is human nature—on the one hand, an obvious and universal susceptibility to the influence of the person; and, on the other, such influence at all times and in all directions at work, moulding character and gradually determining the great changes that mark our history. Take home life. What is moulding the natures there, and day after day shaping the future man and woman? Is it the acknowledged regulations of the house, the teachings out of book, or lip, or is it the teacher—the verbal lessons of the mother, or the mother herself? Take school life. This moulding, this gradual ripening is going on with obvious reality there; and what is doing it? The books, the maps, the desks, the forms, the cane? No. It is the teacher and the companions that are training and stamping the future man. Take a wider view of life, and the same lesson is as clearly taught. Who can calculate the personal influence of Confucius, of Zoroaster, or Mohammed? What may be fairly traced, in the Christian era, to the spirit and life of Paul, of Augustine, of Calvin, of Luther, of Wesley? In politics, what is well done or worth doing without a leader in whom the party fully trusts? In war, who can exaggerate the potency of the captain? What would have been our recollections of Waterloo in the absence of Wellington? In general the progress of mankind has not been gradual, but sudden, like the burst of summer in some ice-bound clime. Still less has it been a common effort of the whole human race. If we take away two nations from the history of the world; if we imagine further that the six greatest among the sons of men were blotted out, or had never been, the peoples of the earth would still be “sitting in darkness and the shadow of death.” The two nations were among the fewest of all people: scarcely in their most flourishing period together amounting to a hundredth part of the human race. The golden age of either of them can hardly be said to extend over two or three centuries. The nations themselves were not good for much; but single men among them have been the teachers, not only of their own, but of all ages and countries. If the Greek philosophers had never existed, is it too much to say that the very nature of the human mind would have been different? We can hardly tell when or how the sciences would have come into being; many elements of religion as well as of law would have been wanting; the history of nations would have changed. So mighty has been the influence of two or three men in thought and speculation—the world has gone after them.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, Sermons on Faith and Doctrine, 284. The intense devotion which the Vaishnavas feel for Rama is merely another proof that, East and West alike, the greatest moulding force is a great personality. In the former days of the British Raj great personalities, especially in the army, had free play. They remained long years in the country, and won not only the loyalty, but, as in Nicholson’s and Sir Henry Lawrence’s case, the devotion of the natives. The almost universal complaint now is that natives are not brought sufficiently into personal relations to their rulers, but are governed too much by red tape and machinery. The importance which the natives attach to personality was seen, as Sir Bampfylde Fuller points out in his Studies in Indian Life and Sentiment, in the great loyalty felt by millions of natives towards Queen Victoria, of whom most of them knew nothing more than the name. But she was a Person, and embodied the idea of the British Raj in a way that appealed strongly to them. They recognized gratefully her sympathy shown in comparatively trivial acts, such as her learning Hindustani in order the better to understand her Indian subjects.1 [Note: C. Field, The Charm of India, ix.] 2. Christ supplies man’s need of a leader. He is a person. His teaching is unique, because of the personal authority which He claims for Himself. Other teachers have been content to obliterate themselves that they may magnify the truths they come to teach, but Jesus speaks of Himself. He tells us who He is and why He is come. He puts Himself before His teaching. He did not only preach the gospel; He was the gospel. In this thing Jesus sets His religion over against all other religions. Buddhism, as has often been pointed out, is the religion of a method; Mohammedanism is the religion of a book; Christianity is the religion of a person. It is Jesus. Whosoever enters it, enters Him; whosoever would learn its lessons, learns Him; whosoever would feed upon its nourishment, eats His body and drinks His blood. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Plato is not Platonism; Platonism might have been taught though its author had never lived. Mohammed is not Islam; the Koran itself would warn us against any Buch confusion between the teacher of its doctrine and the substance of the doctrine itself. But Christ Himself is Christianity; His teaching is inextricably bound up with His Person; and it is not merely because He taught what He did, but because He is what He is, that through Him we can come to the Father.2 [Note: Canon Liddon.] 3. Christ would not be so great a person if He were not more than man. It is by reason of His Divinity that He is Perfect Man. By Him things were said which were never before and never have been since ascribed to any other being on earth—things which it is impossible to reconcile with any theory short of His perfect humanity and essential Deity. No wonder those who heard Him were astonished at His teaching, struck by the authority with which He spoke. None among their prophets, not even the greatest, Moses or Elijah or the Baptist, had ever dared to say, “I am,” as Jesus so often did. “I am the light of the world”; “I am the bread of life”; “I am the good shepherd”; “I am the door” of the fold; “I am the resurrection and the life”; “I am the true vine.” What did He mean as He spoke thus? There is only one explanation. It certainly was not in a spirit of self-assertion, for He was “meek and lowly in heart.” He, in coming to earth, “made himself of no reputation”; He came not to be a master but to be a servant. Why was it, then? It was because He was a Divine as well as a human Teacher. In very truth the claims of Christ are more eloquent of what He is than any assertions that can be made about Him. Wonderful to tell, it is His very greatness that is our security. If He were less than He is, we might be afraid of Him. But greatness which is infinite makes room For all things in its lap to lie: We should be crushed by a magnificence Short of infinity!1 [Note: A. W. Robinson, The Voice of Joy and Health, 45. 4. Every word in the text is emphatic and remarkable. It is not, “I teach the way; I declare what is true; I reveal or announce the life to come.” Not that; but “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. I am all this, in a sense quite distinct from My prophetic teaching. I, personally, am the way to God. I am Myself embodied truth. I have in Myself the source and springs of immortal life.” That by “the way” He means “the way to God” is clear from the relation of the last clause of the verse to the first. “I am the way;—no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” Jesus does not simply assert, then, that He reveals and opens this way to the eye of the reason by an authoritative message; that He sets it forth in His discourses: that, by word and speech, in sermon and parable, He makes known to man in what way he may approach God, have communion with Him, enjoy His favour and friendship, and be ultimately admitted to His presence and glory in the upper world. It is not that, or that only, that He does. All this He may do, but there is something else and something more. He does not merely teach the way, He is the way. He not only says what is true, He Himself is the truth. He does not merely utter, in the Divine name, the promise of eternal life, He is the life. In his Jottings from the Pacific (p. 83), Mr. Gill speaks of a native preacher in Rarotonga who referred to the custom at a great wedding for the bride to walk to her new home over the prostrate bodies of her husband’s clan, whilst the bridegroom made a similar progress over his wife’s people. Then came the application: “Tread boldly, brethren, on the prostrate body of Jesus: for He is our only way to the Father. Trust your entire weight with all your burdens on Him; He will not wince or cry. Only thus shall we safely arrive at the home of the redeemed.” A beautiful story is told of Agassiz. When he was a boy his family lived on the edge of a lake in Switzerland. One day the father was on the other side of the lake, and Louis and a younger brother set out on the ice to join him. The mother watched the boys from her window. They got along well till they came to a wide crack in the ice. The taller boy leaped over easily, but the other hesitated. “The little fellow will fall in,” the mother said, “and drown.” But as she watched a moment she saw Louis, the older boy, get down on the ice, lay himself across the crack, his hands on one side and his feet on the other, and make a bridge of his body. Then the little fellow climbed over him in safety to the other side, and both the boys ran on to find their father.1 [Note: J. R. Miller Our New Edens 27. II Christ the Way “I am the way.” 1. The necessity of a way.—(1) To be taught the way to God is man’s supreme need. We instinctively use the figure, even though we know that it is but a figure. Moral distance is naturally represented by spacial distance. The sinner is pictured not only by Christ but by himself as in a far country; and though God be not far from any of us, men feel after Him, like the blind who have lost their way, if haply they may find Him. To reach God is the confessed goal of human life. To know the way to Him is our chief necessity. So testifies the history of all religions that have ever held sway over humanity. So testify the longings and felt needs of every thoughtful heart. God is necessary for our happiness. Life is unfinished until it is in harmony with God. Only in God can we be satisfied and saved. And so the cry of all earnest, awakened souls the world over is for God. Livingstone, who waded waist-deep through pestilential marshes for weeks, to die at last in a miserable hut by the lake shore; the traveller, who has to cut his way for hundreds of miles through tangled forest and jungle at the rate of half a mile a day; the emigrant, who has to cross the trackless alkali plain, and who may perish midway; the military commander, who has to carry his forces over mountains, some sections of which are almost perpendicular,—know how a well-engineered path is the first condition of successful movement.1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Imperfect Angel, 248. You remember the character of Calista in one of Cardinal Newman’s finest tales, the story that contains the wonderful picture of the locust plague in northern Africa, and her cry, “Oh, that I could find Him! On the right hand and on the left I grope and touch Him not. Why dost Thou fight against me, O First and only Fair?” And you remember the same longing expressed in one of Matthew Arnold’s essays, in which he quotes—Mr. Hutton says he could not have been the first to use them—the words of Israel: “Thou, O Eternal, are the thing that I long for. Thou art my hope, even from my youth.” And you remember the passionate expressions of this longing in the Psalms: “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.” “O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee; my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee, in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is.” And nothing appeals to us quite so much, I think, as we read the lives of good men as those great experiences in which they have entered at last into the fulness of the consciousness of God.2 [Note: R. E. Speer, The Master of the Heart, 211. (2) If, then, man is so desirous of coming to God, what stands in his way? He is estranged by sin from filial fellowship with the Father. A few false and fatal steps have served to separate him from the fountain of eternal good. Every proud, unaided effort he may make to return only increases the intervening distance. Man and his Divine Father are lost to each other, moving in diametrically opposite planes. The Father mourns the alienated trust, love, and service of His rebellious child. The child no longer feels the rest, strength, rapturous awe once realized in the manifested presence of the Father. All the restlessness of ambition and all the disappointment that lurks in achieved success, all the fever that burns in the gold-hunt, and all the sickness of heart that leads man, after he has exhausted the last ambition on his programme, to lie down and long to die, are the inarticulate cries of this bitter orphanhood. Sin hides the Father’s face. In the innermost part of the tabernacle—the Holy of Holies—the visible symbol of God’s presence rested between the cherubim, and over the mercy-seat. This part of the tabernacle was divided from all the other parts by a thick and curiously-wrought veil. Through that veil, none might pass but the high priest, and he, only once a year, and with blood. The Holy Ghost this signifying, that sinful man may not approach a holy God. 2. Christ is the way from man to the Father.—The great difficulty is—How is sin to be put away? Many attempts have been made to remove it, but there is no way of escaping from the guilt of sin except by Jesus Christ. Some have hoped for pardon from future good conduct, but the payment of a future debt can by no means discharge a past debt, so that even the perfect future obedience of man could not touch his past sins. Self-righteousness, therefore, even if it could reach perfection, would not be “the way.” Some hope much from the mercy of God, but the law knows nothing of clearing the sinner of guilt by a sovereign act of mercy—that cannot be done; for then God’s justice would be impugned, His law would be virtually annulled. He will by no means clear the guilty. Every transgression must have its just recompense of reward, so that the absolute mercy of God as such is not the way out of the guilt of sin, for that mercy is blocked up by avenging justice, and over the face of that star of hope called absolute mercy there passes an eclipsing shadow, because God is righteous as well as gracious. There is no way by which a sinner can escape from the guilt of sin but that which is revealed in Jesus Christ. In proclaiming Himself “the way,” Christ pronounced Himself able to effect the most real union between parties and conditions as separate as heaven and earth, sin and holiness, the poor creature I know myself to be and the infinite and eternal God who is so high I cannot know Him.1 [Note: Marcus Dods.] Thou art the way. Hadst Thou been nothing but the goal, I cannot say If Thou hadst ever met my soul. I cannot see— I, child of process—if there lies An end for me, Full of repose, full of replies. I’ll not reproach The way that goes, my feet that stir. Access, approach, Art Thou, time, way and wayfarer.2 [Note: Alice Meynell, in The Mount of Vision, 31. (1) Christ is the way for all.—Unless there be a road which the many can travel, unless Christianity can in a very real sense be made easy and popular, it fails of its purpose. If the treasures of its truth are at the disposal of only the wise and the clever, they need hardly have been revealed at all: there must be a way into the heart of them open to all, so that even the wayfaring man need not err therein, so that even the simplest need not despair of attainment. A road is an essentially democratic thing: all ranks and kinds meet and jostle there; there are few explorers, few excavators, few mountaineers, few aeronauts, but there are many wayfarers, and the road is for them all.3 [Note: J. M. E. Ross, The Self-Portraiture of Jesus, 189. Astronomers tell us that, inconceivably vast as is the distance of some of the fixed stars, there is no point in the universe to which the influence and attraction of our sun does not extend. Christ’s mediating and restoring influence overflows every circle of conscious life, and touches the last extreme of degradation.4 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Imperfect Angel, 249. (2) Christ is the way now and for all time.—The mind of man always seeks in the distance what the word of God presents close at hand. Thus Martha relegated to the far future the hope of her brother’s resurrection, and Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life.” So here, Thomas claims that he does not know the way although it is there before his eyes, and Jesus has to explain to him: “I am the way.” But Christ was not the way only to Thomas and the other disciples. As is often the case with the words of Christ, we can hear beneath them a more general truth than the disciples recognized. Jesus was the present way for the disciples, and He is the way for us for all time. All that Christ said to the Apostles on the eve of His Passion He has said and still says to men in every great crisis of history. The trial to which the first disciples were exposed was peculiar in its form rather than in its essential character. It was the trial which belongs to every period of transition. It was the trial which presses and will press most heavily upon our generation. And if we in our turn would face it, and come out victors from the contest, it can only be by listening with absolute devotion to the revelation of Christ which makes clear to us that there is a purpose running through all the ages and broadening upwards to the threshold of a Father’s home; that there is an abiding reality underneath the shifting phenomena of the world which cannot be lost: that there is a law of coherence, of progress, of growth uniting in a harmonious whole movements, efforts, energies which appear to us to be broken, discordant, conflicting: it can only be by claiming for our own direct instruction, as charged with a new meaning and reaching to new realms, the words with which Christ answered the appeal of St. Thomas: “I am the way.” It is a way that never has been broken up, and never will be. All the fioods of all His people’s sins have never made a swamp or bog-hole in this blessed way; all the earthquakes and upheavals of our rebellious natures have never made a gap or chasm in this glorious way. Straight from the very gates of hell, where the sinner is by nature, right up to the hilltops of heaven, this glorious causeway runs in one unbroken line, and will for ever and for ever, till every elect one shall be gathered safe into the eternal home.1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.] (3) Christ is the only way.—“I am the way.” The saying has a negative as well as a positive aspect, an excluding as well as an assertive force; yet there is nothing arbitrary in this assertion, nor is it a warning against presumption. Christ is not announcing conditions on which a man shall be allowed to approach the Father, and threatening with rejection those who fail to observe them. He does not declare that no man may, but simply that no man does, come to the Father unless it be through Him. He is not a kind of angel standing at the gate of the Garden of Eden with a flaming sword, saying, “You cannot come to the Father and the happiness of heaven unless you come in just the way I point out.” We are mistaken if we interpret this text in any such narrow and exclusive way as this. Christ does not say, “You must not come unless you come by Me.” He says that, in point of fact, no man does come except by Him. It is the broad and general declaration that there is no coming to the Fatherhood except as men come through the knowledge of the Son; that men have not come to a knowledge of the Father unless they have come through the revelation made by Jesus Christ His Son. A pupil applies for admission to the Packer Institute, and asks to study logarithms. And the President answers, “You must begin with arithmetic.” “But I don’t like arithmetic; I don’t want to study arithmetic; I want to study logarithms.” “You cannot study logarithms unless you first study arithmetic.” The pupil says, “I think that is very mean. I think it is a narrow and bigoted rule that I cannot study logarithms unless I first study arithmetic.” The President replies, “There is no other road. It is not possible for you to come to an understanding of logarithms unless you take the only way men ever will enter into that knowledge—namely, the way of arithmetic.”1 [Note: Lyman Abbott.] I am the way! Lo, as of old, one Voice is ever speaking; Yet, all the day, Still earnest souls another way are seeking. Who, save the Son, Our condemnation in His body bearing— With us made one— Our likeness in His Father’s presence wearing— O who, save He, Could lead us safely through the night of sadness, With Him to be, Through an eternity of rest and gladness? Lord, we have heard: Thou art the Way, and in Thyself confiding, We trust Thy Word; We trust ourselves in all things to Thy guiding.1 [Note: E. H. Divall, A Believer’s Rest, 14. (4) Christ is the way and the end.—Here a question arises, which has often been asked: How can Christ be the way? The way is the means to an end. When the end is gained, the means may be discarded. In common material things this is so. What we desire is the end; we choose the means solely with a view to the end; there is no significance or value in the means except as introductory to the end. But in higher things we cannot thus sharply distinguish means and the end: the search after truth has a worth in itself, the way to life is itself life; the way and the end are one. Here in Cambridge we are scholars all; teachers or learners; or rather teachers and learners at once. Learning is no doubt a mean—a mean whereby we may be enabled to serve God and our country in Church and State. Yet learning is not only a mean even to this high end, much less to those low grovelling ends which, by a corruption of language unknown to our founders, are called the rewards or prizes of knowledge. No single result is the satisfying fruit of labour, but the labour itself, steadily moving onward day by day, and proving itself not to be in vain, is the best proof that God’s blessing is upon us. The work of education is the end and the reward: and that teacher and that student will labour restlessly and slavishly, not with a free and hearty enthusiam, who do not lose themselves and all distant ends in the engrossing enjoyment of the work itself.2 [Note: J. E. B. Mayor, Sermons, 9. III Christ the Truth “I am the truth.” 1. Were these words merely equivalent to “I speak the truth,” it would be much to know this of One who tells us things of so measureless a consequence to ourselves. The faith of the disciples was being strained by what He had just been saying to them. Here was a man in most respects like themselves: a man who became hungry and sleepy, a man who was to be arrested and executed by the rulers, assuring them that He was going to prepare for them everlasting habitations, and that He would return to take them to these habitations. He saw that they found it hard to believe this. Who does not find it hard to believe all that our Lord tells us of our future? Think how much we trust simply to His word. If He is not true, then the whole of Christendom has framed its life on a false issue, and is met at death by blank disappointment. Christ has aroused in our minds by His promises and statements a group of ideas and expectations which nothing but His word could have persuaded us to entertain. Nothing is more remarkable about our Lord than the calmness and assurance with which He utters the most astounding statements. The ablest and most enlightened men have their hesitations, their periods of agonizing doubt, their suspense of judgment, their laboured inquiries, their mental conflicts. With Jesus there is nothing of this. From first to last He sees with perfect clearness to the utmost bound of human thought, knows with absolute certainty whatever is essential for us to know. His is not the assurance of ignorance, nor is it the dogmatism of traditional teaching or the evasive assurance of a superficial and reckless mind. It is plainly the assurance of One who stands in the full noon of truth and speaks what He knows. For every question which our most anxious and trying experiences dictate He has the ready and sufficient answer. But more than this is contained in His words. He says not merely “I speak the truth,” but “I am the truth.” 2. Our Lord has declared that He is Himself the truth. We are to discover in Him all we can learn of the ultimate nature of things Divine and human, all we can need to know of the mystery of the universe and the meaning of our lives. (1) Christ is the truth about man.—“I am the truth,” said Christ. Our attitude in respect of that saying of His is determined by our belief as to His person. It is revealed in Scripture, and accepted by the Church, that God in becoming man took upon Him the nature of humanity at large, that He united to Himself not the personality of a favoured individual, but the nature of the race. Thus He represents in Himself all men, past, present, and to come, with their gifts and their achievements no less than their troubles and their tears. He shows us what man is, and what man may be. We measure ourselves over against Him, and for the first time we realize ourselves. We hold ourselves aloof from Him, and our ideals seem glorious, and our attainment passable, and our sins venial. We measure ourselves against Christ, and we abhor ourselves in dust and ashes. We stand up face to face with Him who is the truth about man, and for the first time we understand what we are—all the misery and the flaw of our lives, all the shame and the loathsomeness of our shortcomings. And we look up into His face once again, and we see there not alone what we are, but what we may be. We hear Him speaking of Himself as the Son of Man; we hear Him telling us that the Father sent Him to show what in the Father’s mind we are, and that we may hide ourselves in Him. Jesus Christ is to us the truth about ourselves as we are and as we may be. Christ’s unique power as a teacher of morals lies in the fact that He embodied in His own life His whole teaching. Did He teach the love of God and man? His life expressed just that; for His whole career was nothing but the utterance of love to God and to man. Did He teach the duty of personal, sincere, absolute righteousness? Did He teach humility and meekness and purity? Did He say, “As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise”? Did He say, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you”? All this was pictured in His own condition and character for the admiration and imitation of mankind. He could say, “I am the truth.”1 [Note: G. T. Purves, The Sinless Christ, 129. Though Goethe’s history be known but imperfectly, the Faust, with what there is of teaching in it, will live. Though Dante’s sad life-path be never followed, we can still tremble at the Inferno, or drink hope from the Purgatorio, and from the Paradiso consolation. Though dim to our minds the life-struggle of Shakespeare, we shall still weep and wonder at Portia, at Hamlet, at Lear. The message—such as it is—comes, though the messenger be withdrawn into shadow. Not so with Christ. He is absolute truth.2 [Note: W. J. Knox Little, Sunlight and Shadow, 28. And so the Word had breath, and wrought With human hands the creed of creeds In loveliness of perfect deeds, More strong than all poetic thought.1 [Note: “In Memoriam.”] (2) Christ is the revelation of God.—He was God manifest in the flesh. It is common to say that Christ was the great Revealer of God, who, by His inestimable instructions, has made us acquainted with the Divine character and will. Now this is true, but it is not the whole truth, nor yet indeed the chiefest and most blessed portion of the truth. He was not only the Revealer of God, but He was Himself the revelation of God. Not merely did He say things about God which are written in a Book, not merely did He inspire His servants to write in that Book still other things which they came to understand only after He had left them, by the illuminating influence of His Holy Spirit, but He was the Book Himself. He is the Truth in reference to the Divine nature. That Truth, then, is not a mere matter of words. It is not only His speech that teaches us, but Himself that shows us God. His whole life and character, His personality, is the true representation within human conditions of the Invisible God; and when He says, “I am the way, and the truth,” He is saying substantially the same thing as the great prologue of this Gospel says when it calls Him the Word, and the Light of men, and as St. Paul says when he names Him “the image of the invisible God.” This is the function of the Son of Man, to give men their Heavenly Father, the Father whom He knew, the God with whom He lived in communion, in the personal relations of Spirit with spirit. To preach theologies would have been no new thing; to preach theologies in the belief that through them we are making acquaintance with realities is an occupation and an illusion of which the world never wearies; but to have the living God mirrored in a human soul, as face answers to face in a glass, this was not the old work of announcing abstract truths about God, it was to reveal God Himself. We have no means of knowing God except by knowing His image in our own nature. The knowledge of God was lost to the world, because the image of God had been lost out of the soul. Christ, through obedience to the inward promptings, kept the mirror pure, without flaw or soil, and so manifested the Father in the Son. There is no other mirror, to which we have access, in which He can spiritually be seen as He is. Other mirrors, as those of outward Nature, are dead mirrors, which have to convey their symbols to a living soul there to be interpreted. How could we know God if we saw Him only in the reflection of a soul that is itself unclean, clouded, distorted? If there had been no unsoiled mirror, we could have known God under no adequate living type. “If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also.” “We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.”1 [Note: J. H. Thom, Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ, 13. IV Christ the Life “I am the life.” The phrase, “I am the life,” points to all Christ’s work upon us as a life-giving Spirit, a Quickener and an Inspirer. Dead men cannot walk a road. It is no use making a path if it starts from a cemetery. Christ taught that men apart from Him are dead, and that the only life that they can have by which they can be knit to God is the Divine life which was in Himself, and of which He is the source and the principle for the whole world. Thou art the Life! All ways without Thee paths that end in death; All life without Thee with death harvest rife; All truths dry bones, disjoined, and void of breath: Thou art our Life!2 [Note: E. R. Charles.] 1. Christ is the life of the body.—We may take Christ’s words first of all in their most literal meaning. (1) “I am the life.”—It is a tremendous claim for any man at any time to make, and He who makes it here is about to die. But as the Apostles listen, startling deeds of His come back to their recollection—His healing of the sick, His restoring of the dying, and His raising of the dead. It is a plain fact of history,—true as the decrees of truth are true,—that everything which ever came into the presence and contact of Christ, when He was upon the earth, lived. No corpse was ever under the influence of that high touch, but it took again its vital power. When He met the dead body upon the road, when He was in the same room with the dead child, when He stood at the mouth of the grave of a dead man—and those are the only recorded occasions of His intercourse with death—death retired and life came back. See the poor woman in the crowd, who has spent all her living on seeking health, and has spent that living in vain. She comes behind the great Teacher, in the crowd secretly, saying, “If I do but touch his garment I shall be made whole.” She had tried every other resource, gone to every other professed healer, had been filled with disappointment, and she was about to give up in despair; and in that critical hour of her experience, she touched the Saviour and was healed.1 [Note: J. Parker.] Around Bethesda’s healing wave, Waiting to hear the rustling wing Which spoke the angel nigh, who gave Its virtues to the holy spring,— With earnest, fixed solicitude, Were seen the afflicted multitude. Among them there was one whose eye Had often seen the waters stirred; Whose heart had often heaved the sigh— The bitter sigh of hope deferred; Beholding, while he suffered on, The healing virtue giv’n and gone. No pow’r had he; no friendly aid To him the timely succour brought; But while his coming he delayed, Another won the boon he sought; Until the Saviour’s love was shown, Which healed him by a word alone.2 [Note: B. Barton.] (2) Christ is also the life, from the fact of His own resurrection. When Christ says: “lam the life,” He does not mean, “I lived the perfect life on earth”; He means, “I, through the very fact of My death, am the life for evermore, and as a symbol of this, witness My death and resurrection.” Never was one born into the world like Him. Other men are born to live, to act, to do; He was born to die. But the death which cast its shadow over the Eleven and over Himself should itself be swallowed up in life. Standing there beneath the shadow of His cross, before the open grave over which the stone was to be rolled to hide His burial, Jesus Christ, the frailest life in the world, declared to men, “I am the life.” For three-and-thirty years, a living seed, A lonely germ, dropt on our waste world’s side, Thy death and rising Thou didst calmly bide: Sore companied by many a clinging weed Sprung from the fallow soil of evil and need; Hither and thither tossed, by friends denied; Pitied of goodness dull, and scorned of pride; Until at length was done the awful deed, And Thou didst lie outworn in stony bower Three days asleep—oh, slumber godlike-brief For Man of sorrows and acquaint with grief! Life-seed Thou diedst, that Death might lose his power, And Thou, with rooted stem and shadowy leaf, Rise, of humanity the crimson flower.1 [Note: George MacDonald, Poetical Works, i. 257. 2. Christ is the spiritual life.—He did not only say, “I am the living One,” as if He meant to affirm His own immortality. That was indeed true, but it was clearly not His only idea in this place. But Jesus said, “I am the life,” the life, that is, of renewed souls, the power which alone can make humanity truly live, the moral and spiritual vital force of the Kingdom of heaven. (1) Christ is the life now. The eternal life of the spirit is not altogether a future blessing, which we are to get from Christ hereafter, but a present blessing too, which we are to look for from Christ now. It is Jesus Christ who brings us into connexion with this source of life eternal—He bears it in His own person. In Him we receive a new spirit; in Him our motive to live for righteousness is continually renewed; we are conscious that in Him we touch what is undying and never fails to renew spiritual life in us. Whatever we need to give us true and everlasting life we have in Christ. Whatever we need to enable us to come to the Father, whatever we shall need between this present stage of experience and our final stage, we have in Him. The more, then, we use Christ, the more life we have. The more we are with Him and the more we partake of His Spirit, the fuller does our own life become. It is not by imitating successful men that we become influential for good, but by living with Christ. It is not by adopting the habits and methods of saints that we become strong and useful, but by accepting Christ and His Spirit. Nothing can take the place of Christ. Nothing can take His words and say to us, “I am the life.” If we wish for life, if we see that we are doing little good and desire energy to overtake the good that needs to be done, it is to Him we must go. If we feel as if all our efforts were vain, and as if we could not bear up any longer against our circumstances or against our wicked nature, we can receive fresh vigour and hopefulness only from Christ. O ancient streams, O far-descended woods Full of the fluttering of melodious souls; O hills and valleys that adorn yourselves In solemn jubilation; winds and clouds, Ocean and land in stormy nuptials clasp’d, And all exuberant creatures that acclaim The Earth’s divine renewal: lo, I too With yours would mingle somewhat of glad song. I too have come through wintry terrors—yea Through tempest and through cataclysm of soul Have come, and am deliver’d. Me the Spring, Me also dimly with new life hath touch’d, And with regenerate hope, the salt of life; And I would dedicate these thankful tears To whatsoever power beneficent, Veil’d though his countenance, undivulged his thought, Hath led me from the haunted darkness forth Into the gracious air and vernal morn, And suffers me to know my spirit a note Of this great chorus, one with bird and stream And voiceful mountain.1 [Note: William Watson.] (2) Christ is the life for ever. Not only is He the life in us now, but through Him and in Him we never die. Our souls rise up in war against the thought of ending, and as they struggle with their limitations and their chains, the great Deliverer comes, as He came that night to the little group shocked with the sorrow of His departure, and says to us, “I am the life.” The man who is sailing under trustworthy captainship, and in company with genial friends, out of one zone into another, is scarcely conscious of the lines of demarcation over which the ship glides. Throughout the months of summer, darkness is unknown in the latitudes of the far north. The rising and the setting suns blend their light without the handbreadth of a shadow between.1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Imperfect Angel, 255. I lift mine eyes to see: earth vanisheth. I lift up wistful eyes and bend my knee: Trembling, bowed down, and face to face with Death, I lift mine eyes to see. Lo what I see is Death that shadows me: Yet whilst I, seeing, draw a shuddering breath, Death like a mist grows rare perceptibly. Beyond the darkness light, beyond the scathe Healing, beyond the Cross a palm-branch tree, Beyond Death Life, on evidence of faith; I lift mine eyes to see.2 [Note: C. G. Rossetti, Poems, 193. The Way, the Truth, the Life Literature Bernard (J. H.), From Faith to Faith, 63. Bigg (C.), The Spirit of Christ in Common Life, 11. Brown (A. G.), In the Valley of Decision, 115. Brown (J. B.), Idolatries, 136. Brown (J. B.), The Divine Mystery of Peace, 21. Burrell (D. J.), The Religion of the Future, 97. Chadwick (W. E.), Christ and Everyday Life, 154. Dale (R. W.), Christ and the Future Life, 111. Dods (M.), Footsteps in the Path of Life, 4. Forsyth (P. T.), Missions in State and Church, 197. Fürst (A.), Christ the Way, 1. Gibson (J. M.), The Glory of Life on Earth, 69. Illingworth (J. R.), Sermons in a College Chapel, 60. Illingworth (J. R.), University and Cathedral Sermons, 21. Liddon (H. P.), Advent in St. Paul’s, 587. Little (W. J. Knox), Sunlight and Shadow, 1. Lorimer (G. C.), The Modern Crisis in Religion, 204. Macdonnell (D. J.), Life and Work, 45. Maclaren (A.), Creed and Conduct, 283. Macnicol (D. C.), Some Memoirs and Memorials, 84. Mayor (J. E. B.), Twelve Cambridge Sermons, 3. Paget (E. C.), Silence, 96. Paget (F.), Christ the Way, 1. Pearson (J. B.), Disciples in Doubt, 30. Purves (G. T.), The Sinless Christ, 121. Ragg (L.), Christ and our Ideals, 51. Ridgeway (C. J.), The King and His Kingdom, 112. Ross (J. M. E.), The Self-Portraiture of Jesus, 181. Sinclair (W.), Christ and our Times, 137. Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 174. Speer (R. E.), The Master of the Heart, 206. Telford (J.), The Story of the Upper Room, 98. Thomas (J.), Sermons: Myrtle Street Pulpit, i. 151. The Giving of the Comforter If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth: whom the world cannot receive; for it beholdeth him not, neither knoweth him; ye know him: for he abideth with you, and shall be in you.—John 14:15-17. 1. There is no such profoundly moving scene in all history as this last evening of our Lord before His death. We need not, and we may not, add one touch to the simple narrative of St. John; in his words the scene stands out in its absolute simplicity. As we read these last chapters of his Gospel we seem to be admitted to the very scene itself; to the sorrow, the bewilderment, the helplessness of the Twelve; to the far-reaching Divine mind and infinite loveliness of the Master. We stand before some great picture and strive to read the mind of the artist, and one of us will see one subtle meaning and another another; or we contemplate the many-sided aspect of nature, and each of us reads into it some reflex of his own mind; and so it is with a great historic scene like this; according to our spirituality, to our insight, and devotion, and purity, and truth, will be the lessons we shall draw from it. This Scripture is of no private interpretation; it is wider and larger than any of our little formulas in which we may try to bind it. It is the task of a life to interpret all that is involved in this farewell address of Christ. 2. The disciples were in something like a panic over the announcement made to them by Christ that He was going away. At the bare word the world seemed to become a blank for these men. All the sunshine of life seemed to suffer immediate and total eclipse. For Jesus was everything to them. In a sense they had nothing in the world but Jesus. He was more than their best friend. He was their all in all. For Him they had sacrificed fathers and mothers and home and friends and business and every earthly prospect. And now He was going! In response to His call they had embarked upon a new life. They had taken up their cross and followed Him. It was not an easy life; it was a hard life, a toilsome life, a sacrificial life. Already they had been called upon to suffer trial and persecution for His Name’s sake. But with Jesus at their side they had never faltered. With His presence to cheer and strengthen them, they had bravely held on their way. But now He was going. The whole edifice of their life seemed to fall crashing in ruins about their ears. And then to these panic-stricken disciples Jesus explained what His departure meant. He had been as God to them. In Him God had touched the very springs of their life and entered into their souls. His going did not mean that God would forsake them. If He went, they would not be left desolate; God would send them another Advocate, another Helper, who would be to them all that Jesus Himself had been and more; who would bring them just the same sense of God’s nearness and presence; who would inspire and help them just as effectively as Jesus Himself had done. 3. The subject, then, is the giving of the Comforter, and the passage divides itself easily into two parts:— I. On what Conditions the Comforter is given. II. For what Purposes the Comforter is given. I On what Conditions the Comforter is given There are two conditions expressly named that have to be fulfilled before the Comforter comes. The first condition is that the disciples must he obedient. “If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments, and …” The other is that Jesus prays the Father to give them the Comforter: “And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you.” From these two conditions there flow two results: first, that the Comforter is a gift—“he will give you another Comforter”; and second, that He is given to the disciples who are obedient, and not to the disobedient “world.” i. Obedience “If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments.” 1. Before the promises there is a proviso. It is premised that there is a state of heart and a character of life to which they belong. As the works and the gifts of power were made dependent on faith and prayer, so the experiences now foretold presuppose the life of love and duty. This appropriation is laid down to begin with, and is insisted on more largely as the promises unfold. The preferable reading, “If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments,” gives the future instead of the imperative of the Authorized Version, rather describing a process than imposing a condition; but the meaning is the same—namely, that these are promises which belong only to him who loves and obeys.1 [Note: T. D. Bernard, The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 159. 2. In “If ye love me” we hear a confiding rather than a doubtful tone. The love is supposed, as elsewhere it is expressly recognized. But it proves true love only in one way, “If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments”; and again, “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.” There is a voice of Divine authority in the phrase, “my commandments.” They claim obedience, but the obedience of love; and love will render it. Love is the spring of action, and is in its nature free; but it is not left to its own impulses; it acknowledges authority; it is placed under rule, and includes the element of obligation. The connexion between love and commandment dwelt on the mind of St. John, and reappears more than once in his Epistle. It is not according to the tendencies of human nature, as we all know, and as St. Paul has set forth in the seventh chapter of his Epistle to the Romans in recording his experience of the law and its effects. It is, in fact, distinctive of Christian duty and of the morality of the Gospel. In Christ the claims of authority and the affections of the heart agree in one. Here, as ever, the teaching of Jesus fixes our minds on the practical side of religion—on doing what we know, on living and walking by His words.2 [Note: Ibid.] 3. Obedience is the one test of sincerity, the one mode of retaining the warmth of love. “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.” The Bible says very little of what we call religion; but very much of God, and of Christ, and of love. Christ does not say, “If ye love me, then ye will meet often to worship me”; He does say, “ye will keep my commandments”; and the chief and summary of all the commandments are the love of God and the love of our neighbour. The true worship of God is obedience and love. It is an idolatrous notion that God is pleased with mere worship. Just as thousands of burnt-offerings and ten thousands of rivers of oil availed nothing without the love and obedience of the worshipper, so not all our gifts or our services are precious to Him except in so far as they are the offering of our love and obedience, and as they help us in our daily life. God cannot, will not, does not, bless those who are living in disobedience. But only set out in the path of obedience, and at once, before one stone is laid upon another, God is eager, as it were, to pour out His blessing. “From this day will I bless you.”1 [Note: Hudson Taylor’s Sayings, 43. 4. But do we not need the Spirit to make us obedient; do we not long for the Spirit’s power, just because we mourn so much the disobedience there still is, and desire to be otherwise? And yet Christ claims obedience as the condition of the Father’s giving and our receiving the Spirit. The answer is that Christ Jesus had come to prepare the way for the Spirit’s coming. Or rather, His outward coming in the flesh was the preparation for His inward coming in the Spirit to fulfil the promise of a Divine indwelling. The outward coming appealed to the soul, with its mind and feeling, and affected these. It was only as Christ in His outward coming was accepted, as He was loved and obeyed, that the inward and more intimate revelation would be given. Personal attachment to Jesus, the personal acceptance of Him as Lord and Master to love and obey, was the disciples’ preparation for the baptism of the Spirit. It is as we prove our love to Jesus in a tender listening to the voice of conscience, and a faithful effort to keep His commands, that the heart will be prepared for the fulness of the Spirit. Our attainments may fall short of our aims, we may have to mourn that what we would we do not—if the Master sees the whole-hearted surrender to His will, and the faithful obedience to what we already have of the leadings of His Spirit, we may be sure that the full gift will not be withheld.1 [Note: A. Murray, The Spirit of Christ, 72. ii. Prayer “And I will pray the Father.” 1. There are two telephones across the abyss that separates the ascended Christ from us. One of them is contained in His words, “If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will do it”; the other is contained in these words, “If ye keep my commandments, I will ask.” Love on this side of the great cleft sets love on the other side of it in motion in a twofold fashion. If we ask, He does; if we do, He asks. His action is the answer to our prayers and His prayers are the answer to our obedient action. 2. “I will ask” seems a strange drop from the lofty claims with which we have become familiar in the earlier verses of this chapter. “Believe in God, believe also in me”; “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father”; “If ye shall ask anything in my name I will do it”; “Keep my commandments.” All these distinctly express, or necessarily imply, Divine nature, prerogatives, and authority. But here the voice that spake the perfect revelation of God, and gave utterance authoritatively to the perfect law of life, softens and lowers its tones in petition; and Jesus Christ joins the ranks of the suppliants. Now common sense tells us that apparently diverse views lying so close together in one continuous stream of speech cannot have seemed to the utterer of them to be contradictory; and there is no explanation which does justice to these two sides of Christ’s consciousness—the one all Divine and authoritative and lofty, and the other all lowly and identifying Himself with petitioners and suppliants everywhere—except the belief that He is “God manifest in the flesh.” The bare humanistic view which emphasizes such utterances as these does not know what to do with the other ones, and cannot manage to unite these two images into a stereoscopic solid. That is reserved for the faith which believes in the Manhood and in the Deity of our Lord and Saviour. In all utterances of Jesus Christ which express the lowest humiliation and completest identification of Himself with humanity, there is ever present some touch of obscured glory, some all but suppressed flash of brightness which will not be wholly concealed. Note two things in this great utterance; one, Christ’s quiet assumption that all through the ages, and to-day, nineteen centuries after He died, He knows, at the moment of their being done, His servants’ deeds. “Keep my commandments, and, knowing that you keep them, I will then and there pray for you.” He claims in the lowly words an altogether supernatural, abnormal, Divine cognizance of all the acts of men down the ages and across the gulf between earth and heaven.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.] 3. Christ’s prayer is the expression of the eternal Will respecting those for whom He prays. There is no thought of the Son for man that is not the thought of the Father. There is no dissonance of feeling, no discordance of desire, no conflict of will. The promise that Christ will pray is the assurance that the thing He asks for will be given. It is the utterance of that which is in the heart of God. We are not to think of Christ’s advocacy in heaven as if it were of the nature of supplication on our behalf. It is much more than that, although it is to be feared that the modern ideas which have usurped the ground which the word “intercession” covers have nearly evacuated the word of its fuller and more glorious signification. The word used by Christ in this very verse implies that His Personal mediation is an “appeal” of a higher kind than we understand by prayer. So, again, in John 17:9; John 17:15; John 17:20. And notice that this word is used by Him before His glorification. He never uses of Himself the word “ask” which He so often uses when He bids us pray. We have to ask in His Name, and the ground of our reliance when we so pray is His universal intervention for His Church, the result of His sacrificial “appeal.” He intervenes in heaven (Romans 8:34; Hebrews 7:25), personally, presenting His merits as our High Priest on behalf of all His members who come unto God through Him. The other Paraclete intervenes on earth (Romans 8:27), not by intermediate advocacy, but by the elevating power of Divine inspiration, lifting us up to speak with God our Father in the fulness of Christ’s merits, by the living fellowship wherein He unites us with Him.2 [Note: R. M. Benson, The Final Passover, ii. (pt. i.) 359. 4. As our Saviour prayed to the Father for them, so now they would pray for themselves by the grace of the Advocate. Much of our Saviour’s work among men was teaching them to help themselves. He taught them to pray, not simply by putting a form of words into their mouths, but by leading them into the presence of the Father, by instructing and encouraging them to maintain a humble boldness in that presence, and by assuring them that their prayers offered in His name would have as much power as His own prayers offered by Himself. The disciples seem to have made the mistake of thinking that they must always have His intercession to lean upon. They were thankful for it, but it was becoming a hindrance to their own devotions; as all help becomes a hindrance the moment it discourages personal effort instead of drawing it forth. The mother’s finger is useful to the little child learning to walk, as long as it is needed to impart courage and give steadiness; but as soon as it tempts to idleness and thoughtlessness, it must be withdrawn. And so any religious help is good as long as our ignorance, or coldness, or want of faith requires a kind of external support, but that should only be preparatory to our walking, working, and praying by virtue of an inner impulse. Our Lord was the advocate outside His disciples, praying for them sometimes while they slept, reading their wants and interpreting them to God, doing for them what they must do for themselves if they are to become strong men. And the time for the withdrawal of His aid was at hand; and instead of it was to be substituted the advocacy of the Holy Ghost in their hearts; through His grace they would be enabled to plead for themselves as earnestly and successfully as Christ had done for them; which would be a clear spiritual gain. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father. And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will do it.” iii. The Gift “He will give.” 1. The Father sent His Son into the world. He does not send His Spirit into the world, but He gives Him to the faithful. The word “giving” is larger than the word “sending.” Although the latter is also used respecting the Holy Ghost whom the Father gives, yet the more adequate word is that which Jesus uses here. The mission would not imply any covenanted circle of recipients. A mission may be towards enemies. When we were enemies God sent His Son, that we might be reconciled by His death (Romans 5:10). The Son was not given to all mankind. He was “sent” to them. God sent His Son (John 8:16). God “commissioned” Him (1 John 4:10). God sent His Son into the world. He gave Him not to the world, but for the world as a sacrifice (John 3:16). The Spirit is “given” to the faithful, to dwell in them. A gift implies a permanent bestowal. The Presence of the Holy Ghost with the Church is a permanent bestowal. He is not to be withdrawn. This is “the gift of God,” respecting which our Lord spoke to the woman of Samaria. Similarly our Lord says of His flesh, “The bread which I will give is my flesh, for the life of the world” (John 6:51). This promised gift of Christ’s flesh is by the power of His Spirit. So the gift of the Spirit of life is prior and preparatory to the gift of the food of life. 2. The Spirit is the gift of the Father, because the Father is the Fountain of all Godhead. The Manhood of Christ is represented by our Lord as setting before the Father the necessities of the case, the human needs of His brethren, those whom the Father has given to Him. The Father, as the Source of all Divine life, gives the Spirit; not a created agency, but an essential communication of the indivisible Godhead which is in the Father. The gift of God must be worthy of God, and therefore cannot be less than God. 3. This gift had never yet been given. The Holy Ghost had indeed been sent from God to the prophets by whom He spoke, but He had not been given to the prophets. He was not given to any one previously; much less could there be any “ministration of the Spirit” by human agency in a covenanted society such as it would be when Christ was glorified as the Head of the Body, the Church. The Father’s gift would be a continuous presence pledged to that society which Christ had called out of the world. Twice have I erred: a distant God Was what I could not bear; Sorrows and cares were at my side; I longed to have Him there. But God is never so far off As even to be near; He is within: our spirit is The home He holds most dear.1 [Note: F. W. Faber.] iv. The World “Whom the world cannot receive.” 1. The world cannot receive the Spirit of truth, because it lives content with the superficial knowledge of things around. It does not contemplate God so as to gain a loving familiarity with Divine truth. Instead of looking at the phenomenal from the standpoint of Divine faith, so as to see in outward things the operation of Divine relationships, it is content with registering them as they appear to the outward senses. The contemplation of God’s moral government will go a long way towards solving many of the difficulties which we find in creation. If we refuse to accept that amount of Divine truth which has come down to us by the primitive traditions of our race, and has been developed by the teaching of prophets and the contemplations of the faithful in subsequent ages, we are not in a position to receive the Spirit of truth. Nature becomes to us what a geometrical figure would be to those who disregarded the elementary problems of geometry necessary for its elucidation. If the movements of a planet can prove the existence of another planet by whose proximity it is affected, how much more ought the varied operations of nature to lead a thoughtful mind, which has a love of truth, to recognize the creative mind by which all the functions of the universe are regulated and maintained in unity! If, on the contrary, the interest which superficial occurrences excite becomes so absorbing as to make men give up the deeper devotional acknowledgment of that which is hidden, then they are rejecting the eternal truth, however assiduously they may seek to record and illustrate those data which constitute our science—so shallow after all, although to us so seemingly profound. They unfit themselves for the reception of the Eternal Spirit of truth.1 [Note: R. M. Benson, The Final Passover, ii. (pt. i.) 368. 2. The Lord does not say that the world cannot receive many good things, for it does receive them; nor does He say that it cannot appreciate them, for it is alive to their excellence. Many of the world’s people see and appreciate the beautiful; and beauty is a good, whether in nature, art, or literature. They see the value of honour and probity in all the affairs of the present life, and they denounce falsehood and overreaching; but they do not know the Holy Spirit. They have no consciousness of His working, for they are unyielding. There may be movements of the Spirit of truth towards something better in not a few of their minds, but they are resisted; the Spirit is not discerned or recognized; and thus neglected and insulted He withdraws. I once stood far up on the Becca di Nona in Piedmont, the valley in which the old Roman city of Aosta lies being below, and on the other side, not far off, two great peaks of the mountains, part of the Alpine range. There were two clouds, about equal in size, floating and abiding above the two peaks, whose course I watched. The one cloud kept in a compact mass together, seemingly repelled by the hardness and non-receptivity of the granite peak beneath it. The other, after a little while, apparently drawn and attracted by its peak beneath, gradually opened out its fleecy beauties and gracefully descended, bathing the happy mountain peak in its exquisite softness and beauty. So, thought I, is it with the influences of the blessed Spirit. They are near us, ready to descend upon us in their sweetest blessings; but the world is as the granite peak which did not attract the cloud, while the humble, God-fearing soul does not repel, and the Divine Spirit descends and fills it with His grace.2 [Note: H. Wilkes, The Bright and Morning Star, 125. 3. The two reasons which our Lord gives for the fact that the world does not receive the Spirit are (1) that the world beholds Him not, and (2) that it knows Him not. (1) “It beholdeth him not.”—This is the real secret of men’s laughter at the idea of the existence of the Holy Ghost—they see Him not. Tell the worldling, “I have the Holy Ghost within me.” He says, “I cannot see it.” He wants it to be something tangible: a thing he can recognize with his senses. Have you ever heard the argument used by a good old Christian against an infidel doctor? The doctor said there was no soul, and he asked, “Did you ever see a soul?” “No,” said the Christian. “Did you ever hear a soul?” “No.” “Did you ever smell a soul?” “No.” “Did you ever taste a soul?” “No.” “Did you ever feel a soul?” “Yes,” said the man—“I feel I have one within me.” “Well,” said the doctor, “there are four senses against one: you have only one on your side.” “Very well,” said the Christian, “Did you ever see a pain?” “No.” “Did you ever hear a pain?” “No.” “Did you ever smell a pain?” “No.” “Did you ever taste a pain?” “No.” “Did you ever feel a pain?” “Yes.” “And that is quite enough, I suppose, to prove there is a pain?” “Yes.” So the worldling says there is no Holy Ghost because he cannot see Him. Well, but we feel Him. You say that is fanaticism, and that we never felt Him. Suppose you tell me that honey is bitter, I reply, “No, I am sure you cannot have tasted it; taste it, and try.” So with the Holy Ghost; if you did but feel His influence, you would no longer say there is no Holy Spirit, because you cannot see Him. Are there not many things, even in nature, which we cannot see? Did you ever see the wind? No; but you know there is wind, when you behold the hurricane tossing the waves about and rending down the habitations of men; or when in the soft evening zephyr it kisses the flowers, and makes dewdrops hang in pearly coronets around the rose. Did you ever see electricity? No; but you know there is such a thing, for it travels along the wires for thousands of miles, and carries our messages. So you must believe there is a Holy Ghost working in us, both to will and to do, even though He is beyond our senses.1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.] (2) The other reason why worldly men do not receive the Holy Spirit is because they do not know Him. If they knew Him by heart-felt experience, and if they recognized His agency in the soul; if they had ever been touched by Him; if they had been made to tremble under a sense of sin; if they had had their hearts melted; they would never have doubted the existence of the Holy Ghost. No explanation is of any value in matters which do not grow out of experience. Until a deaf man hears music, it is wasted breath to describe it, and there is no proof of colour to the blind. When Jesus spoke to the disciples the words recorded in the fourteenth chapter of John, He offered them truth for experience without explanation. He promised them manifestation of Himself. He knew that the one who should enter into this experience would never be perplexed by Divine reticence in explanation, or by the imperfection of human philosophy.1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 17. II For what Purposes the Comforter is given The first purpose is to comfort. But as He is spoken of as the Spirit of truth, a special form of the comfort is the leading of the disciples into the truth. A third purpose is that He may abide for ever. i. The Comforter The true Christian has three Comforters, and each of them is Divine. God the Father is styled by St. Paul, in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, “the God of all comfort; who comforteth us in all our tribulation.” God the Son, in the words of the text, speaks of Himself as one Comforter; and St. Paul tells us that “our consolation” or comfort “aboundeth by Christ.” God the Holy Ghost is specifically named by Jesus Christ in several instances as “the Comforter,” and His peculiar office as such is fully unfolded in the last discourse of our Lord to His disciples before His crucifixion. Thus each person of the ever-blessed Trinity is a Comforter, Divine in character, infinite in fulness, eternal in duration. There is, then, no true comfort or consolation that the heart can desire which may not be found in God the Father as the God of all comfort; in God the Son as the Paraclete with the Father; and in God the Holy Ghost as “the Comforter” who proceedeth from the Father and the Son. 1. The word “Comforter.”—The word translated “Comforter” is found only in the writings of St. John. You look in vain for it in all other portions of Scripture. We have it four times in the Gospel according to St. John, as coming from the lips of Jesus. We find it once in the First Epistle of St. John (John 2:1). In the Gospel, where the word is used by Christ and is applied to the third person of the Trinity, it is translated Comforter; in the Epistle, where it is applied to Jesus, it is translated Advocate. In both instances the word is the same; it is the Divine Paraclete. It was the custom in the ancient tribunals for the parties to appear in court attended by one or more of their most influential friends, who were called in Greek paracletes, in Latin advocatus. These paracletes, or advocates, gave their friends—not from fee or reward, but from love and interest—the advantage of their personal presence and the aid of their judicious counsel. They thus advised them what to do, what to say, spoke for them, acted on their behalf, made the cause of their friends their cause, stood by them and for them in the trials, difficulties, and dangers of their situation. In this sense our Lord is said by St. John to be our Paraclete—where he says, “We have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous”—One in heaven before God, who appears there on our behalf, patronizes our cause, urges our plea, ever living to “make intercession for us.” While on earth, our Lord had counselled, advised, spoken for, and on behalf of, His disciples. They had looked to Him for aid, succour, comfort, truth, grace; and thus, ever at their side, He had been to them a Paraclete, or Advocate. He had most thoroughly identified Himself with them, had taught them to pray, to preach, to live, to work miracles, and the mysteries of the Kingdom. But He was now to leave them. His bodily form was to be removed. Yet, with a sweetness of compassion peculiarly touching, He says, “I will not leave you comfortless,” orphans, undefended, unadvocated, unsustained. “It is expedient for you that I go away: and I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever.”1 [Note: W. B. Stevens.] Many are the emergencies of human life, and many are the forms of help which they require, and all are included in this great comprehensive name. If we wish to distinguish, we may range them in two divisions, the advocacy of our cause before others, the support of companionship to ourselves. When we think of the one office, we speak of an advocate; when of the other, of a comforter. But the same person will fulfil either office as need requires; and both are included in the word “Paraclete.” Therefore the choice of the English equivalent in any particular case may be dictated by the nature of the occasion and the general feeling of the situation. If so, the Revisers have done well in retaining the old rendering “the Comforter” in the four passages in which “Paraclete” here occurs, as they were plainly right in retaining that of “Advocate” in the only other passage where it is found (1 John 2:1). The situation presented in the Gospel more naturally suggests the first rendering, while that contemplated in the Epistle certainly prescribes the second.1 [Note: T. D. Bernard.] 2. “Another Comforter.”—The word “another” signifies that Jesus Himself was an advocate, helper, paraclete, comforter. But it does not mean that He was now to be superseded, or that, going out of sight, He was also to be out of mind. Scarred with wounds and enthroned as the Head of the Church, He was to be more in His people’s minds and hearts, better represented in their lives, than hitherto. For—let us be clear about this—Jesus, and He alone, is our life; it was He and He alone who bore our stripes and carried our death down into His grave, transfiguring our departure, with whatever distress and humiliation may attend it, into a promotion and home-going. “He that hath the Son hath life.” If we can say with a true and thankful heart, “I am Thine own, O Christ”; “My beloved is mine, and I am his”; “To me to live is Christ,”—then we possess the everlasting Life, and will never see Death. Although Jesus spoke of another Comforter, two facts are clear—the one, that He would continue, and more fully than ever, to be the life of the believing soul and the believing Church; and the other, that the Holy Spirit would be the vehicle of that life, uniting Christ and the soul, and so bringing it to pass that the Church should not so much mourn an absent Lord as rejoice in a present Spirit. God forbid that our thoughts should for one moment be turned away from the Lord Jesus Christ Himself as the Incarnate Head of His ransomed Church. It is as His executive that the Holy Spirit acts, and in Him there is nothing approaching to either abdication or desertion. There is no such thing as abdication; for we are told that God “hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things to the church.” Nor is there desertion, for in the self-same chapter in which He gives the promise of another Paraclete He gives also the promise of His own presence in the words, “I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you” (John 14:18); and in the assurance given to those that love Him, He says (John 14:23), “My Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” It may be asked, How is such language consistent with those other words of His, in which He said, “It is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away the Comforter will not come unto you”? But the answer is simple. As the localized incarnate Son of man, He is gone away, and is now where Stephen saw Him, at the right hand of God; but as the eternal Person of the undivided Trinity, He is omnipresent and ever acting; nor is it within the capacity of finite beings like ourselves to put any limit on His Divine action.1 [Note: E. Hoare, Great Principles of Divine Truth, 234. 3. How does the Comforter comfort?—We know by the fruits of His comfort. To the disciples everything about the working of that Divine Comforter was wrapt in mystery except the fruits. How He made His temple in man, how He imparted His light and His truth to His creatures, how He strengthened the vacillating, and spoke without words to the inward ear, and raised the fallen, and won back the wanderer, none could trace, none could know. The wind bloweth where it listeth: the ways of the Spirit are unsearchable. It is vain to imagine how that Heavenly Person associates Himself with our spirit, becomes to us the source of light and strength, and of the desire of good, making His work our work too, overshadowing, protecting, guarding our souls, giving us thoughts above our own thoughts, surprising us into an earnestness so unlike our common selves. Why should we expect to be conscious of His Presence? Why should we expect, such as we are, to recognize and discern clearly what is of God? But the effects of His Presence were soon recognized in the world, and have never ceased to be recognized since. They were seen in those two contrasted lists in the Epistle to the Galatians, of the works of the flesh and the fruits of the Spirit—of what the moral world had been and was, without Him, and of that new phenomenon and substantial fact of character which had shown itself beyond denial since He had come. (1) Let us take the word “comfort” first in its modern sense, a sense covered by the Greek word, though not its chief meaning. Then we may say that He comforts us in our sorrow, providing consolation and affording relief. When I think over the troubles of which I have heard even this week, I know that this is a world that needs comfort. One boy of brilliant promise lies struck down by sudden illness in a nursing-home; another man in the prime of life, doing a brilliant work, has a sickness on him to-day which I fear will never leave him, or, if it leaves him, will take away all power of work. There are two young women lately married; one is a widow after eight months, and the other after three. Another woman has her child born dead. And as these sorrows roll on me, at the centre of this great diocese—and I rejoice that people should pour their troubles on to me, inadequate as I feel myself to help them—I look up to heaven and I say, “If there were not a Comforter sent from heaven, where should we be?” And it was because our Saviour knew this that during that sad Holy Week, before He left, He made us this beautiful promise: “It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send Him unto you. I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter besides Me, another Comforter who shall abide with you for ever; there shall be with you the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.”1 [Note: Bishop A. F. W. Ingram, A Mission of the Spirit, 192. (2) But the Spirit’s function is not merely, or chiefly, to soothe sorrow and wipe away the tear. The word really does not suggest so much the quiet room as the battle-field. It is an energetic, forceful, militant word. It implies conflict and struggle, and for the conflict and the struggle the Spirit is a fortifier—He lifts men above fear; He reinforces them; He gives them triumph in battle—and that is exactly what the Spirit proved to be to these first disciples. We borrowed the term from a language, the makers of which set great store by these things. “Only be thou strong and very courageous,” was the Lord’s message to Joshua, the leader of the host of Israel. “As I was with Moses, so will I be with thee.” Confortare is the rendering of the first phrase in the Vulgate Version of the Old Testament, and in the Septuagint it reads literally, “Be strong and play the man.” In Isaiah 41:10 our noble Authorized Version gives us, “Fear thou not, for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee.” Confortare is once again the equivalent for this promise of strength. We observe, therefore, that the word which our fathers considered the best English equivalent of the Greek, “Paraclete,” is one with a history, in which sweetness and strength are united. There is a sympathy which enervates and a sympathy which braces, a love which weakens and a love which inspires. In our Lord’s promise of the Comforter it is Divine sympathy and love of the latter kind that are suggested. Did not the Apostle pray on behalf of his Ephesian friends that they might be strengthened with might by God’s Spirit in the inner man? Did not our Lord give His disciples to expect that they should “be endued with power from on high”? Did He not associate this expectation with the promise of the Spirit? I think we may feel the idea of this strengthening to be an ingredient in the meaning of the word comfort as employed in the New Testament; as, for instance, when we are told that the Church in Judæa, Galilee, Samaria, had rest, and, “walking in the fear of the Lord, and in the comfort of the Holy Ghost, was multiplied.” And I should say this element of strengthening entered more or less into the meaning intended to be conveyed by the word comfort or Comforter in various places in our Prayer-Book: in the prayer at Confirmation, “Strengthen them … with the Holy Ghost the Comforter,” and in the invitation, “Draw near with faith, and take this holy Sacrament to your comfort.” In truest comfort, in God-given comfort—and of this the New Testament speaks—there is power; it may prove to be an essential element or condition of real power.1 [Note: J. W. Bishop, The Christian Year and the Christian Life, 247. Just over a century ago Robert Morrison set sail for China; it seemed a quixotic business. “Do you think,” said the captain of the ship in which he sailed, “that you are going to convert China?” “No,” replied Morrison, “but I believe that God will.”2 [Note: J. D. Jones, Things Most Surely Believed, 141. ii. The Spirit of Truth 1. Three times in these verses is the Spirit called the Spirit of truth. And, in the original, each time the title occurs, it is the Spirit of the truth. This must be taken to mean the truth which is in Jesus, the truth which is Christ Himself, which was incarnate in Him. For shortly before giving forth this promise of the Spirit He had proclaimed Himself to be “the way, and the truth, and the life.” “I am … the truth:” “the Spirit is the truth.” “He shall [both] teach you all things, and [more especially] bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you.” “He shall bear witness of me.” “He shall guide you into all the truth.” “He shall glorify me: for he shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you.” The Spirit for whose coming, for whose replenishing or baptism, foretold by the Baptist, the disciples would have still a little while to wait, would make clear to them something of the meaning of Jesus’ earthly life, and of His teaching concerning God and man and duty, so that they might make it clear to others. He is the “Spirit of truth,” not as if He brought new truth. To suppose that He does so, opens the door to all manner of fanaticism; but the truth, the revelation of which is all summed and finished in the Person and work of Jesus Christ, is the weapon by which the Divine Spirit works all His conquests, the staff on which He makes us lean and be strong. He is the Spirit by whom the truth passes into our personal possession, by no mere imperfect form of outward teaching, which is always confused and insufficient, but by the inward teaching that deals with our hearts and our spirits. The method used by the Spirit of truth is not driving or forcing, but “leading,” “guiding,” by winning ways and by persistently pointing to the truth and commendingly interpreting it. When we gaze upon a picture we may for ourselves see much that is beautiful and attractive in its mode of exhibiting colour, form, and expression. But to understand the inner meaning of the picture and appreciate its main purpose and idea, we may need some skilled interpreter to open our eyes to its most vital and inherent excellencies. The Holy Spirit is such a guide to the Saviour and such an interpreter and revealer of the true grace and glory of Jesus Christ in His purpose and mission into this world.1 [Note: A. H. Drysdale, Christ Invisible our Gain, 186. 2. Christ is the Truth. The Comforter, the Holy Ghost, is the Spirit of truth. He is the Spirit of truth in two ways. He is communicated from Jesus, who is the Truth, and He is the living power of the Triune Energy, by which Jesus Himself is the Truth. In Him the Son of God is begotten eternally as the Image of the Father. By Him the Son of God was conceived in the womb according to the fulness of the Divine purpose. The truth of Christ’s Godhead in the unity of the Holy Ghost necessitated the truth of His Manhood assumed by the power of the Holy Ghost. 3. The Spirit of truth, communicated to the Church, is the living Presence, in wisdom, power, and love, of that Divine energy which formed the worlds. They were formed for the habitation of God purposing to become incarnate. The Spirit of the Incarnate God fits the Church as the Body of Christ, to exercise dominion over all the creation which He has framed with a fitness for this final occupation. There is nothing superfluous, so as to be beyond the eventual purposes of God for His Church. There is nothing wanting, so that the Church of God, the Body of Christ, may feel within herself a Divine capacity for which the created universe gave no practical scope. The truth of the creature is not separable from the truth of the Creator. Creation is true to itself, while it is true to the mind of the Creator. The first laws of creation are the impress of the Eternal Mind. If they were not so, they would be purely accidental and mutable. Doubtless there are harmonies in creation far deeper and grander than we can trace out. Harmonies of sight and sound, of number and weight, of mechanical power and chemical combination, of microscopic delicacy and astronomical magnificence, of universal distribution and temporal sequence, may be the objects of our guess-work at present, but at the best we can know them now only as one standing on the shore can know the waves whose ripple washes over the sand, all ignorant of the vast ocean far away. But all the universe is true, because the worlds of matter and spirit are the projection of the infinite intelligence of Him who is in His own true essence the law of beauty and truth to which all His creatures must be conformed.1 [Note: R. M. Benson, The Final Passover, ii. (pt. i.) 364. 4. How does the Spirit of truth operate? (1) He enlightens our mind that we may know Christ Jesus.—He opens the eyes to the true meaning and aims of Christ’s words and work by furnishing insight into them, and enabling us to realize not only their true inwardness, but their vital importance—giving an attractiveness to them and a fascinating interest in them to our yearning and wondering heart and mind. We can see the process of enlightenment going on in the New Testament. Take the one matter of the universality of the Kingdom. When Christ left the disciples, they were as narrow in their notions as any Jews in the land; they saw no place for Gentiles in the Kingdom: but see how gradually the Spirit led them to an understanding of Christ’s purpose. First of all, the Samaritans receive the word. Then, at the impulse of the Spirit, Philip preaches to the Ethiopian eunuch and baptizes him. Then, at the direct and imperious bidding of the Spirit, Peter goes to Cornelius, the Roman centurion, and baptizes him. And then, finally, the Spirit thrusts forth Barnabas and Saul into the work of evangelizing the world, and so the truth is gradually brought home to the disciples and Apostles that they shall come from the North and the South and the East and the West, and sit down in the Kingdom of God. When Jesus says of this Spirit that “he shall guide you into all truth,” He does not mean that the Holy Ghost will guide us into natural truth, or scientific truth, or metaphysical truth; but into those great central truths—the atoning death, the justifying righteousness of Jesus Christ; those poles on which turn as on an axle the whole round scheme of redemption and grace. As it was by this Spirit of truth that the prophecies concerning Christ were uttered which fill the Old Testament; as it was by the Spirit of truth that Jesus was conceived by the Virgin Mary; as it was by this Spirit of truth that He was anointed for His ministry after His baptism: so is it declared that His office is to take of the things of Christ and show them unto men. Nor is it a new revelation which the Spirit gives, but rather a more perfect understanding of that which has already been given in Christ. Here, then, is the test by which to try all that claims the authority of spiritual truth. Does it “glorify” Christ? Does it lead us into a fuller knowledge of Him “in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden”? “Whosoever goeth onward,” says St. John, in a remarkable passage, for which English readers are indebted to the Revised Version, “and abideth not in the teaching of Christ, hath not God.” In other words, no true progress is possible except as we abide in Christ. I sometimes sit at my study window on a bright morning, and combine with my work the pleasure of looking at my share of God’s beautiful world. It is a wonderful blend of landscape and marine, colour and form: trees and flowers in the foreground, dark roofs and tiled chimneys beyond, and behind all the grey and azure of the mighty sea. Not simply once, but many times, do I lift my eyes to it, yet the picture is always the same. Floating clouds overhead may modify the light and shadow, but they do not change the permanent features in the least. And yet I know the picture is not out there: it is within me; it is not the eye but the mind that sees. The effect of the landscape is being impressed upon my consciousness, by the light of day—itself invisible. And every ray of light contains the perfect picture. I may look up a thousand times—it will always be there, while the light can fall upon the eye. And you may come with me and view the same picture. If you have eyes to see you shall have the perfect picture too. And a million persons may, if they choose, stand and gaze. The whole scene is theirs, as much as yours or mine. There is but one scene and one sun, but every ray of the energies of the latter reveals the whole of the former to every eye that is turned upon it. So it is with the work of the Divine Spirit, the other Paraclete. He reveals the Christ to those who seek Him, writes His name, and forms His likeness within the human soul. The living Christ, the indwelling Christ, becomes a rich personal spiritual experience in the power of the Holy Ghost.1 [Note: R. J. Campbell.] (2) He encourages us to appropriate Christ.—We feel entitled, without being chargeable with any vain confidence, to appropriate and apply to ourselves such words of personal conviction as, “The Lord is my Shepherd,” “Thou knowest that I love thee,” or, “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him.” The very sting of death is extracted, and its terrors no longer keep the soul in thrall. So the dying saint, falling back at last as at first into the arms of a glorified Redeemer, breathes out his soul in fidelity, meekness, and hope, saying in fearless triumph, “Into thy hands I commend my spirit.” The immortal Bengel died in 1752. One of his friends was travelling, and spent all night at Bengel’s house. The great commentator was very busy with his Bible, and worked till nearly midnight. But the friend still waited. He knew the rich Christian character of the scholar, and wished to hear his evening prayer. At length the books were put on one side; Bengel arose, and knelt down beside his chair. He had been studying the words of Christ, and he knew that the blessed Master was near him all the time. So now there was no lengthened agony of supplication. Sweetly and simply the words of the scholar rose to heaven, “Lord Jesus, things are just the same between us,” and then he laid himself down to rest. Perfect peace! perfect confidence! For he had appropriated Christ as his personal Saviour, and he knew Christ was his.1 [Note: J. A. Clapperton, Culture of the Christian Heart, 36. (3) He enables us to overcome sin and grow in true holiness.—Our Lord prays, “Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.” Men of science have at length discovered what is the character of the world so far as it consists of animated things. “It is a struggle for existence;” it is “the survival of the fittest.” So it is with the Christian life. The old man conquered, but not thoroughly subdued, contends with the new life which has been superinduced. It is a contest between the lower principles of man’s nature and the higher, quickened and sanctified by the Spirit of God. It is a struggle between the animal man and the spiritual man; between pleasure and duty; between selfishness and benevolence; between appetite and conscience; between lust and reason; between love of ease and zeal for good; between cowardice and courage; between deceit and candour; between selfishness and love; between the fear of man and the fear of God; between earth and heaven. But they that be with us are far stronger than they that can be against us. The believer is not perfect in this world, but he is going on towards perfection in obedience to the command, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” “He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.” The connexion between justification and sanctification is not merely human gratitude for Divine grace as the motive of a new life; it is not only a conscious personal communion with a Divine Saviour and Lord, a communion that must be potent in conforming man to His moral perfection; but it is a habitation and operation in man of God by His Spirit, the very life of God become the life of Man 1:2 [Note: A. E. Garvie, Studies of Paul and his Gospel, 190. (4) He gives strength for witness and for service.—The Holy Spirit who comes to give fulness to the work of Jesus must communicate new power proportionate to the new revelation. The new kingdom is to be marked by profounder spiritual life, by a clearer vision of eternal things, by a more vivid consciousness of sin, by mightier energies of holiness, by a diviner dynamic of spiritual love. In the might of inward spiritual force men and women are to occupy the heavenly places with Christ. To this end they must be endued with new power, with a vaster momentum of spiritual energy. There need be no hesitation in affirming that the communication of inward spiritual power is the fundamental office of the Holy Spirit of the New Covenant. It is through this new influx of spiritual power that the new illumination is given. “The spiritual man judgeth all things, but he himself is judged of no man.” At Pentecost and throughout the records of the Apostolic Church, the ministry of the Holy Spirit is fundamentally the giving of holy power. The keynote of the Spirit’s presence is given by our Saviour in such words as these: “Tarry ye in the city, until ye be clothed with power from on high.” “But ye shall receive power, when the Holy Ghost is come upon you.” This is the new spiritual power demanded by the new revelation. For, in view of the reception of this power, the Lord continued: “And ye shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judæa and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” “Ye shall receive the power of the Holy Ghost coming on you, and ye shall be witnesses unto me.” The copula links together the power and the witness-bearing. Few facts of history are more convincing, as to the need of the Holy Ghost’s power for Christian service, than that these first disciples, who had lived in our Lord’s immediate society for three years and more, were yet not equipped by that long intimacy of fellowship and observation for the great task which He intended them to carry out. No. They had to tarry in the city of Jerusalem till they had been “endued with power from on high”; until they had received Him who was designated by the great title: “the promise of the Father.” From this we may learn that a distinct gift, other than personal knowledge of Christ, and experience of His wonderful ways, confidence in His grace and power, remembrance of His words and works, and much besides, which these men possessed, is needed if we are to bear an effective witness for our loved and trusted Master.1 [Note: R. C. Joynt, Liturgy and Life, 208. iii. The Abiding 1. The Comforter is to abide with us for ever. He is the instrument whereby the glory of Christ is communicated to His members, and so His Presence with the Church is coextensive in duration with the glory of Christ the Head. The ministry of humiliation was to cease. The ministry of righteousness was to be an eternal glory. 2. The Presence, the ever-continued assistance of the Holy Ghost, unearthly as it is, is yet a thing of the immediate present—of the present shaping and improvement of life, of present growth in depth and reality, and elevation of character. If ever we rise above what is of the earth, earthy; above what is of time, transitory; above what is of this world, fugitive, unsatisfying, corruptible—it is to Him that we shall owe it. 3. Two phrases, significant in variety, are used to describe the relation of the Spirit of truth to believers. First, that relation is spoken of as a Fellowship—“He abideth with you”; and next, it is represented as an Indwelling—“and shall be in you.” Webster once said: “The greatest thought that ever entered my mind was that of my personal responsibility to a personal God.” A great thought truly, and yet a greater is beneath it: my personal relation to a personal God.1 [Note: Bishop A. Pearson, The Claims of the Faith, 24. (1) Fellowship.—“He abideth with you.” While Jesus was with His disciples below, the Holy Ghost dwelt with them in His person. They saw in Him the presence of the Divine Spirit. His mighty works, His wonderful words, His perfect holiness and charity and self-denial and truth, all these things, daily witnessed by them and profoundly reverenced, were results of the Spirit given to Him not by measure. Though He was very God, yet He acted below within the limits (as it were) of a perfectly inspired humanity. It was of the essence of His humiliation, that He lived and acted, spoke and wrought, during His earthly sojourn, as though He were only a Man full of the Holy Ghost. Thus, when He dwelt with them, the Holy Spirit dwelt with them; dwelt with them in a sense and with a fulness never realized in the case of any others. And the Spirit who was in Jesus kept them also in the truth by virtue of a controlling influence put forth upon them from Him. “While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name.” This fellowship of the Spirit is ours also. The Comforter dwells with us in Church ordinances. Every time that we meet for worship there is a coexistence with us of the Holy Ghost. And He dwells with us in the haunts of common life. He dwells with us in Christian lives; in the daily sight and hearing of the conduct and language, of the acts and the words, of true Christian people (2) Indwelling.—“And shall be in you.” It would be esteemed a rare privilege to have a great and truly noble person dwell with us, a Paul, a Chrysostom, an Augustine; to have such an one as our perpetual monitor, and adviser, and exemplar; to have him show us how to act, how to speak, how to live; to have the benefit of his oversight, his wisdom, his favour. But then the person thus favoured might never fully copy the devotion of an Augustine, the eloquence of a Chrysostom, or the holiness of a Paul. How different, however, would the case be if there were a process by which the spirit of those great men, in its wholeness could be infused into the minds and hearts of others, so that instead of dwelling with an Augustine, Augustine should by his spirit dwell in them; instead of living with a Chrysostom, Chrysostom should live his life in them; instead of copying a Paul beside us, Paul should dwell in us as the abiding spirit. What a difference there would be! The indwelling spirit of an Augustine would make a second Augustine; the infused spirit of a Chrysostom would make another golden-mouthed preacher; and a Paul living in us would reproduce the spirit and the deeds of the great Apostle in our own life and work. The Comforter, as the Spirit of truth, not only dwells with us as a guest, but dwells in us as the inner controlling, shaping, enlightening, sanctifying Spirit, evolving out of Himself through the functions and faculties of our being, the fruits and graces of a holy life, and the beautiful character of a true Christian. The artist who paints a picture, or chisels a statue, impresses a certain amount of his own genius on flat canvas or cold marble. It is not a beauty developed from within, working outward; but something put upon the passive canvas or marble, by an outside process that never goes beneath the surface, never imparts life within. But the artist power of the Holy Ghost is seen in that, taking up His abode in the heart, He renews and sanctifies that heart, and the outward life is but the development of the inward grace.1 [Note: W. B. Stevens.] To all the world mine eyes are blind; Their drop serene is—night, With stores of snow piled up the wind An awful airy height. And yet ’tis but a mote in the eye: The simple faithful stars Beyond are shining, careless high, Nor heed our storms and jars. And when o’er storm and jar I climb— Beyond life’s atmosphere, I shall behold the lord of time And space—of world and year. Oh vain, far quest!—not thus my heart Shall ever find its goal! I turn me home—and there thou art, My Father, in my soul!2 [Note: George MacDonald.] The Old Testament is full of the thought of the presence of God with His people. With very few exceptions—which are found chiefly in the Psalms—it is always “with.” “My presence shall go with thee.” “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee.” This thought—and it is a very grand and comforting one—characterizes the whole of the ancient dispensation. Neither is it forgotten in the New. “Lo! I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” But the new and determining feature of the Second Testament is the “in,” the “in you.” “I am in you.” “Christ in you.” “The Holy Ghost which is in you.” “God is in you of a truth.” “I will dwell in them, and walk in them.”3 [Note: James Vaughan.] The Giving of the Comforter Literature Aitken (J.), The Abiding Law, 11. Benson (R. M.), The Final Passover, ii. (pt. i.) 353. Bernard (T. D.), The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 157. Bishop (J.), The Christian Year in Relation to the Christian Life, 243. Bourdillon (F.), Short Sermons, 189. Brown (J. B.), The Divine Mystery of Peace, 65. Butler (W. J.), Sermons for Working Men, 289. Church (R. W.), Cathedral and University Sermons, 182. Dick (G. H.), The Yoke and the Anointing, 160. Drysdale (A. H.), Christ Invisible our Gain, 175. Hoare (E.), Great Principles of Divine Truth, 218. Ingram (A. F. W.), A Mission of the Spirit, 190. Jackson (G.), The Teaching of Jesus, 65. Jerdan (C.), For the Lambs of the Flock, 346. Jones (J. D.), Things most surely believed, 126. Joynt (R. C.), Liturgy and Life, 204. McCosh (J.), Gospel Sermons, 150. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John ix.–xiv., 320. Murray (A.), The Spirit of Christ, 60. Pearson (A.), The Claims of the Faith, 14. Russell (A.), The Light that lighteth Every Man, 138. Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 339. Spurgeon (C. H.), New Park Street Pulpit, i. 4. Stevens (W. B.), Sermons, 28. Thomas (J.), The Mysteries of Grace, 192. Vaughan (C. J.), Doncaster Sermons, 463. Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), New Ser. xiii. No. 1005. Wilson (J. M.), Sermons preached at Clifton College Chapel, i. 165. Christian World Pulpit, ix. 332 (W. Roberts); lxi. 294 (R. J. Campbell). Where He Delights to Dwell If a man love me, he will keep my word: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.—John 14:23. 1. The Judas, in reply to whose question our Lord spoke these words, held but a low place among the Apostles. In all the lists he is one of the last of the groups of four into which they are divided, and which were evidently arranged according to their spiritual nearness to the Master. His question is exactly one which a listener, with some dim, confused glimmer of Christ’s meaning, might be expected to ask. He grasps at His last words about manifesting Himself to certain persons; he rightly feels that he and his brethren possess the qualification of love. He rightly understands that our Lord contemplates no public showing of Himself, and that disappoints him. It was only a day or two ago that Jesus seemed to them to have begun to do what they had always wanted Him to do—manifest Himself to the world. And now, as he thinks, something unknown to them must have happened in order to make Him change His course, and go back to the old plan of a secret communication. And so he says, “Lord! what has come to pass to induce you to abandon and falter upon the course on which we entered when you rode into Jerusalem with the shouting crowd?” Notice how, in His reply, our Lord subtly and significantly alters the form of the statement which He has already made. He had formerly said, “If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments,” but now He casts it into a purely impersonal form, and says, “If a man,” anybody, not you only, but anybody—“if a man love me, he,” anybody, “will keep my word.” And why the change? Probably in order to strike full and square against that complacent assumption of Judas that it was “to us and not to the world” that the showing was to take place. Our Lord, by the studiously impersonal form into which He casts the promise, proclaims its universality, and says to His ignorant questioner, “Do not suppose that you Apostles have the monopoly. You may not even have a share in My self-manifestation. Anybody may have it. And there is no ‘world,’ as you suppose, to which I do not show Myself. Anybody may have the vision if he observes the conditions.” 2. “He will keep my word.” That is more than a “commandment,” is it not? It includes all His sayings, and it includes them all as in one vital unity and organic whole. We are not to go picking and choosing among them; they are one. And it includes this other thought, that every word of Christ, be it revelation of the deep things of God, or be it a promise of the great shower of blessings which, out of His full hand, He will drop upon our heads, enshrines within itself a commandment. He utters no revelations simply that we may know. He utters no comforting words simply that our sore hearts may be healed. In all His utterances there is a practical bearing; and every word of His teaching, every word of His sweet, whispered assurances of love and favour to the waiting heart, has in it the imperativeness of His manifested will, has a direct bearing upon duty. All His words are gathered into one word, and all the variety of His sayings is, in their unity, the law of our lives. Here we have laid down for all time in precise language the condition of Divine manifestation, and the realization of Divine and quickening power as the reward of fulfilling that condition. I The Condition is Loving Obedience He that longs for more satisfying knowledge of spiritual realities, he that thirsts for certainty and to see God as if face to face, must expect no sudden or magical revelation, but must be content with the true spiritual education which proceeds by loving and living. To the disciples the method might seem slow; to us also it often seems slow; but it is the method which nature requires. Our knowledge of God and our belief that in Christ we have a hold of ultimate truth and are living among eternal verities, grow with our love and service for Christ. It may take us a lifetime—it will take us a lifetime—to learn to love Him as we ought; but others have learned and we also may learn, and there is no possible experience so precious to us. Obedience is the very pulse of spiritual life.1 [Note: Rainy, Life, i. 131. This universe is governed by laws. At the bottom of everything here there is a law. Things are in this way and not that; we call that a law or condition. All departments have their own laws. By submission to them, you make them your own. Obey the laws of the body: such laws as say, Be temperate and chaste; or of the mind: such laws as say, Fix the attention; strengthen by exercise; and then their prizes are yours—health, strength, pliability of muscle, tenaciousness of memory, nimbleness of imagination, etc. Obey the laws of your spiritual being, and it has its prizes too. For instance, the condition or law of a peaceful life is submission to the law of meekness: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” The condition of the beatific vision is a pure heart and life: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” To the impure, God is simply invisible. The condition annexed to a sense of God’s presence—in other words, that without which a sense of God’s presence cannot be—is obedience to the laws of love: “If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.” The condition of spiritual wisdom and certainty in truth is obedience to the will of God, surrender of private will.2 [Note: F. W. Robertson, Sermons, ii. 101. 1. The source of true obedience is love.—Love and obedience have always been the condition on which the enjoyment of the Divine Presence depended. The sum of the Ten Commandments is, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and strength and mind, and thy neighbour as thyself.” And these words, of course, mean the same thing. They take us back, like the commandments, to His Father’s authority, and they bring into force all those declarations of the Old Testament in which the keeping of the commandments is laid down as the condition of fellowship. “If ye walk in my statutes … I will be your God, and ye shall be my people.” Now it is love, and now it is obedience, that is named as the condition of union and communion with the Most High. The reason is at once apparent. True obedience can spring only from love. “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.” Love is the hidden fountain; obedience is the visible stream. In its truest and highest forms Christianity is a religion of principles. It works from the centre outwards to the circumference. Its language is not “Do this,” and “Forbear from that,” but “Love, and thou fulfillest the law.” That is exactly what distinguishes and lifts the morality of the Gospel above all other systems. The worst man in the world knows a great deal more of his duty than the best man does. It is not for want of knowledge that men go to the devil, but it is for want of power to live their knowledge. And what morality fails to do, with its clearest utterances of human duty, Christ comes and does. The one is like the useless proclamations posted up in some rebellious district, where there is no army to back them, and the king’s authority from whom they come is flouted. The other gets itself obeyed. Such is the difference between the powerless morality of the world and the commandment of Jesus Christ. Here is the road plain and straight. What matters that, if there is no force to draw the cart along it? There might as well be no road at all. Here stand all your looms, polished and in perfect order, but there is no steam in the boilers; and so there is no motion, and nothing woven. What we want is not law but power. And what the Gospel gives us, and stands alone in giving us, is not merely the knowledge of the will of God and the clear revelation of what we ought to be, but it is the power to become it. Love does that, and love alone. That strong force brought into action in our hearts will drive out from thence all rivals, all false and low things. The true way to cleanse the Augean stables, as the old myth has it, was to turn the river into them. It would have been endless work to wheel out the filth in wheelbarrows loaded by spades: turn the stream in, and it will sweep away all the foulness. When the Ark comes into the Temple, Dagon lies, a mutilated stump, upon the threshold. When Christ comes into my heart, then all the obscene and twilight-loving shapes that lurked there, and defiled it, will vanish like ghosts at cock-crowing before His calm and pure presence. He, and He alone, entering my heart by the portals of my love, will coerce my evil and stimulate my good. And if I love Him, I shall keep His commandments.1 [Note: A. Maclaren, Holy of Holies, 72. When the sun rises in the east, the sunflower opens towards its rays, and turns ever eagerly towards the sun, even until its setting in the west; and at night it closes and hides its colours and awaits the return of the sun. Even so will we open our hearts by obedience towards the illumination of the grace of God, and humbly and eagerly will we follow that grace so long as we feel the warmth of love. And when the light of grace ceases to awaken fresh emotions, and we feel the warmth of love but little, or feel it not at all, then it is night, when we shall close our heart to all that may tempt it; and so shall we shut up within ourselves the golden colour of love, awaiting a new dawn, with its new brightness and its fresh emotions; and thus shall we preserve innocence always in its pristine splendour.1 [Note: M. Maeterlinck, Ruysbroeck and the Mystics, 50. 2. The outcome of true love is obedience.—There is no love worth calling love which does not obey. All the emotional and the mystic, and the so-called higher parts of Christian experience, have to be content to submit to this plain test—Do they help us to live as Christ would have us, and that because He would have us? Love to Him which does not keep His commandments is either spurious or dangerously feeble. The true sign of its presence in the heart and the noblest of its operations is to be found not in high-pitched expressions of fervid emotion, or even in the sacred joys of solitary communion, but in its making us, while in the rough struggle of daily life, and surrounded by trivial tasks, live near Him, and by Him, and for Him, and like Him. So the test of love is obedience; and the more overmastering the love, the more will the obedience—not as reluctant, but as eager, not as a yoke or a burden, but as a passion and a life—dominate the whole self. It may be true that obedience which is not love is valueless. It is certainly true that love which does not express itself, perforce, in obedience, is not love. To the natural self the obedience of Christ seems burdensome. It is only experience of obedience that gives the lie to the instincts of the natural self. It is only experience that makes the religious man realize at last that Christ’s yoke is easy, and His burden is light—not indeed because it dispenses with self-denial, but because self-denial itself, as the necessary expression of desire towards God, finds in its own very suffering a gladness which is greater and deeper than the pain. We must begin to love Christ before we can keep His word. Christ is the lawgiver of God’s world, and before we can obey His laws we must be on terms of amity with Himself. This implies that we know Him to be at peace with us; for, as we are made, we cannot love where we dread. God’s friendship must come before God’s service. Now, the very opposite of this is frequently taught—that there is to be service before there can be friendship, and that peace can be purchased only by obedience. We need not so much consult the Bible to see the falsehood of this as look into our own hearts, where we may feel the impossibility of doing anything that will bear the look of service in a spiritual sense until the heart is in it.1 [Note: John Ker.] God’s will is—the bud of the rose for your hair, The ring for your hand and the pearl for your breast; God’s will is—the mirror that makes you look fair. No wonder you whisper: “God’s will is the best.” But what if God’s will were the famine, the flood?— And were God’s will the coffin shut down in your face?— And were God’s will the worm in the fold of the bud, Instead of the picture, the light, and the lace? Were God’s will the arrow that flieth by night, Were God’s will the pestilence walking by day, The clod in the valley, the rock on the height— I fancy “God’s will” would be harder to say. God’s will is—your own will? What honour have you For having your own will, awake or asleep? Who praises the lily for keeping the dew, When the dew is so sweet for the lily to keep? God’s will unto me is not music or wine, With helpless reproaching, with desolate tears, God’s will I resist, for God’s will is divine; And I—shall be dust to the end of my years. God’s will is—not mine. Yet one night I shall lie Very still at His feet, where the stars may not shine. “Lo! I am well pleased,” I shall hear from the sky; Because—it is God’s will I do, and not mine.2 [Note: Sarah M. B. Piatt.] II The Reward is Divine Manifestation Revelation on the part of God presupposes a certain disposition on the part of man. Love to Christ—love to the Son of God, who has brought Himself within the range of human affection—brings to the believer the love of His Father. Then follows that inward, abiding, transforming fellowship in which the Christian sees God more clearly as he reflects His likeness a little less dimly. There is brought to pass that twofold fulness of the spiritual life which unites two worlds: Christ lives in the believer and the believer lives in Christ. God has not set up an arbitrary test of manifestation, He has taken the common course of our life, and given it applications to Himself. I might challenge the worshipper of Nature to say whether his god does not demand precisely the same condition of manifestation. The mountain is saying, If any man love me, I will manifest myself unto him; the sun holds the same language, so does the sea, so does every leaf oi the forest.1 [Note: J. Parker.] Christ will come unto thee, and shew thee His own consolation, if thou prepare for Him a worthy mansion within thee. All His glory and beauty is from within, and there He delighteth Himself. The inward man He often visiteth; and hath with him sweet discourses, pleasant solace, much peace, familiarity exceeding wonderful. O faithful soul, make ready thy heart for this Bridegroom, that He may vouchsafe to come unto thee, and to dwell within thee. For thus saith He, “If a man love me, he will keep my words: and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.”2 [Note: Thomas à Kempis, Of the Imitation of Christ, bk. ii. ch. i.] 1. The manifestation is in union with the Father.—Jesus shows Himself to the obedient heart in indissoluble union with the Father. Look at the majesty, and, except upon one hypothesis, the insane presumption, of such words as these: “If a man love me, my Father will love him:” as if identifying love to Himself with love to the Father. And look at that wondrous union, the consciousness of which speaks in “We will come.” “We will come,” together, hand in hand, if one may so say; or rather, His coming is the Father’s coming. Just as in heaven, so closely are they represented as united that there is but one throne “for God and the Lamb”; so on earth, so closely are they represented as united that there is but one coming of the Father in the Son. This is the only belief, as it seems to me, that will keep this generation from despair and moral suicide. The question for this generation is, Is it possible for men to know God? Science, both of material things and of inward experiences, is more and more unanimous in its proclamation; “Behold! we know not anything;” and the only attitude to take before that great black vault above us is to say, “We know nothing.” The world has learned half of a great verse of the Gospel: “No man hath seen God at any time;” nor can see Him. If the world is not to go mad, if hearts are not to be tortured into despair, if morality and enthusiasm and poetry and everything higher and nobler than the knowledge of material phenomena and their sequences is not to perish from the earth, the world must learn the next half of the verse, and say, “The only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” Christ shows Himself in indissoluble union with the Father.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.] 2. The manifestation is abiding.—That coming is a permanent residence: “We will make our abode with him.” Very beautiful is it to notice that our Lord here employs that same sweet and significant word with which He began this wonderful series of encouragements, when He said, “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” Yonder they dwell for ever with God; here God in Christ for ever dwells with the loving heart. It is a permanent abode so long as the conditions are fulfilled, but only so long. If self-will, rising in the Christian heart from its torpor and apparent death, reasserts itself and shakes off Christ’s yoke, Christ’s presence vanishes. In the last hours of the Holy City there was heard by the trembling priests, amidst the midnight darkness, the motion of departing Deity, and a great voice said: “Let us depart hence;” and to-morrow the shrine was empty, and the day after it was in flames. Brethren, if you would keep the Christ in whom is God, remember that He cannot be kept but by the act of loving obedience.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.] “We will make our abode with him,” i.e. will be at home, as is possible where there is reciprocity of love. Where there is reciprocity of love there is what we call friendship. Lazarus was a friend of Jesus, who loved all, but had His friendships when on earth, and so He has now.2 [Note: R. W. Corbet, Letters from a Mystic of the Present Day, 171. Where He Delights to Dwell Literature Bonar (H.), God’s Way of Holiness, 153. Bourdillon (F.), Short Sermons, 109, 119. Griffiths (W.), Onward and Upward, 65. Humberstone (W. J.), The Cure of Care, 109. McClelland (T. C.), The Mind of Christ, 167. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John ix.–xiv., 350. Meyer (F. B.), The Soul’s Pure Intention, 35. Miller (J.), Sermons Literary and Scientific, ii. 336. Moberly (R. C), Christ our Life, 52. Pope (W. B.), Discourses on the Lordship of the Incarnate Redeemer, 223. Robertson (A. T.), The Teaching of Jesus: God the Father, 117. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, l. (1904) No. 2895. Telford (J.), The Story of the Upper Room, 128. Watson (J.), The Inspiration of our Faith, 179. Westcott (B. F.), Peterborough Sermons, 39. Whately (R.), Sermons on the Principal Christian Festivals, 107. Christian World Pulpit, viii. 148 (Beecher); xii. 298 (Gallaway); li. 244 (Black). Keswick Week, 1905, p. 87 (Sloan). Christ’s Gift of Peace Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be fearful.—John 14:27. Christ is making His parting bequest to His disciples. He would fain leave them free from care and distress; but He has none of those worldly possessions which men usually lay up for their children and those dependent on them. Houses, lands, clothes, money—He has none. He cannot even secure for those who are to carry on His work an exemption from persecution. He does not leave them, as some initiators have done, stable though new institutions, an empire of recent origin but already firmly established. “Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” But He does give them that which all other bequests aim at producing: “Peace I leave with you.” These words, touching at all times, were unspeakably affecting in the circumstances of the Speaker and hearers. We know not but they did more to comfort the dispirited “little ones” than all that had been said before. There is a pathos and a music in the very sound of them, apart from their sense, which are wonderfully soothing. We can imagine, indeed, that as they were spoken, the poor disciples were overtaken with a fit of tenderness, and burst into tears. That, however, would do them good. Sorrow is healed by weeping; the sympathy which melts the heart at the same time comforts it. This touching sympathetic farewell is more than a good wish; it is a promise—a promise made by One who knows that the blessing promised is within reach. It is like the cheering word spoken by David to brothers in affliction: “Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.”1 [Note: A. B. Bruce, The Training of the Twelve, 396. I The Source of Peace Here we are directed to the true Source of peace. Jesus claims that He is the real fountainhead, the author and depositary, of peace. 1. Jesus defines the peace which He was leaving to the disciples as that peace which He had Himself enjoyed: “My peace I give unto you,”—as one hands over a possession he has himself tested, the shield or helmet that has served him in battle. “That which has protected Me in a thousand fights I make over to you.” The peace which Christ desires His disciples to enjoy is that which characterized Himself; the same serenity in danger, the same equanimity in troublous circumstances, the same freedom from anxiety about results, the same speedy recovery of composure after something had for a moment ruffled the calm surface of His demeanour. This is what He makes over to His people; this is what He makes possible to all who serve Him. One can give to another only what one has owned oneself, and as soon as Jesus makes His will and leaves peace to the Twelve, it comes to our mind that He has endowed them with the chiefest good, and has given what, beyond all men that ever lived, He Himself enjoyed. He had neither houses nor lands. One other thing He did not have, unrest. He had shame and suffering. One other thing He did have—rest. With evident fitness and intense conviction He could face a crowd of harassed, overdriven, hopeless people, heavy laden in soul and body, and offer them rest. Never had any one seen Jesus disturbed in soul, save in grief for a friend’s death, or in pity for a doomed city, or for some other reason outside Himself. If a multitude would make Him a King, He was not exalted; if they cried, “Crucify him,” He was not cast down. It mattered nothing to Him what was said of Him, or done with Him; and through accumulated hardships, disappointments, injustices, cruelties, Jesus preserved His high serenity. Whatever storms beat on the outer coast of His life, His soul was anchored in the fair haven of peace.1 [Note: J. Watson, The Upper Room, 96. Two painters each painted a picture to illustrate his conception of rest. The first chose for his scene a still lone lake among the far-off mountains. The second threw on his canvas a thundering waterfall, with a fragile birch tree bending over the foam; at the fork of a branch, almost wet with the cataract’s spray, a robin sat on its nest. The first was only stagnation; the last was rest. For in rest there are always two elements—tranquillity and energy; silence and turbulence; creation and destruction; fearlessness and fearfulness. Thus it was in Christ.1 [Note: Henry Drummond, Pax Vobiscum, 263. 2. How did Jesus come by this peace? By unfaltering obedience to the Father’s will, and by utter self-sacrifice. His peace was the fruit of a hard-won victory. Whatever were His peculiar natural aids of spiritual genius and sensibility, Christ attained His greatness by His own faithfulness to the occasions and intimations which the Father gave Him. If we lose hold of this, we lose the whole value of the Christian life and doctrine. The secret means by which the Almighty Spirit prepares His instruments, the mode and the extent of His intercourse with the soul of Christ—of these we offer no explanation or theory; but the character that grew up under this culture can never by a healthy religion be separated from the personal will of Christ, or be otherwise regarded than as the result of a voluntary faithfulness to the grace of God. Even when a forced flower is made to exhibit summer’s bloom on winter’s bosom, the blossoming is due not to culture only but to the nature on which it was exerted, which here offers no resistance but yields up all its hidden glories to the hand that tends it; surrounded with a special atmosphere, and in special circumstances, the fitness within, the genial nature, repaid the care and burst into beauty. And so with Christ,—if the Father was the Husbandman the Son was the spiritual Vine; if the culture was of God, the harmonious development of all that was in that rich and blessed nature was through the willing obedience that offered no resistance to the heavenly tending; if the influences were of God’s holy grace, the answering faithfulness was of God’s holy Child. And the true distinction of Him who, by reason of a perfect obedience, is as the only Son of God, was that through a holy will the spiritual influences of the Father did produce their righteous fruit; that no Divine soliciting was rejected because it involved Him in awful duties; that to Him the only true life, life eternal, was life in and with God.1 [Note: J. H. Thom, Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ, 175. Lord, I had chosen another lot, But then I had not chosen well; Thy choice and only Thine is good: No different lot, search heaven or hell, Had blessed me, fully understood; None other, which Thou orderest not.2 [Note: C. G. Rossetti, Poems, 123. II The Bestowal of Peace Christ here shares with His people His peculiar secret. He makes a bequest, He bestows a gift. 1. “Not as the world giveth”—not the peace of ease, but of struggle; not of self-content, but of self-sacrifice; not of yielding to evil, but of conflict with it; not of accommodation to the world, but by the subjugation of it. And so He adds, “I have overcome the world.” It is a strange paradox, this peace of conflict; it is the peace of an Imperial Spirit which by its own victory rises above human circumstances. In one of her shorter poems Mrs. Browning asks the question, “What is the best thing in the world?” Various answers are suggested, but the only one which the poetess regards as final and conclusive is this: “Something out of it, I think.” Yes, the best thing in the world is something outside the world, something which the world does not contain, and which it cannot give.3 [Note: J. Law Wilson, Helpful Words for Daily Life, 62. When we look abroad upon the sea, or the silent hills as they sleep in the tranquil folds of the evening light, and say, How peaceful they are! we mean not merely that the wind is down or the air is still, but that Nature rests in her inner central depths. It is such an inward reality—quiet within the soul, a restful life beneath all other life—that Christ gives to them that are His. It is something deeper than sense, or intellect, or passion, or all the shows of that life which we can see, or hear, or touch. It is no mere harmony of natural powers—although it is also this; but it is a positive spiritual endowment—a gift from the Divine—something which at once settles and stays the spirit on a foundation that cannot be moved, though the earth be removed, and the waters roar and be troubled.1 [Note: J. Tulloch, Some Facts of Religion and of Life, 56. 2. Christ gives His peace by bringing us to the same source whence He had it Himself—by bringing us to God, by making us one with God, and so bringing us into harmony with the true law of the Spirit’s life, which is to live, not by the perishing things of earth, but by the unseen and the eternal. As the physician brings peace to the body by bringing it into harmony with the law of its life, with the conditions of health; as the teacher gives intellectual peace by revealing to the mind the truth that it seeks after, so that it can apprehend it and rest upon it—so Christ gives us peace of spirit by bringing us into harmony with God’s will. We are purposed for union with our Lord. The Scriptures resound with this teaching from end to end. Every call in its pages is a call to a rectified communion with our Maker. That union has been broken, and broken by nothing but sin. And if peace is to be regained, the union must be restored. But that union must not be a mere cuticle relationship; not one of words or of ritual, or created by the flimsy ligaments of sects. It must be the union of mind with mind, God’s thought rising into our thought as the sap of the vine into the receptive branch. It must be the union of conscience with conscience, our moral sense scrupulously reflecting the judgments of the Lord, as a clock in direct connexion with Greenwich registers the royal time. It must be the union of will with will, my will lifted like a sail while the breath of the Lord blows upon it, moving my life in the appointed way. It must be the union of heart with heart, God and man Bharing common sorrows and common joys. This is peace: man’s life moving in God’s life in frictionless communion.2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, in the British Congregationalist, Aug. 6, 1908, p. 122. 3. Christ’s peace reaches the heart and conscience. There is only one way for a man to be at peace with himself through and through, and that is that he should put the guidance of his life into the hands of Jesus Christ, and let Him do with it as He will. There is one power, and only one, that can draw after it all the multitudinous heaped waters of the weltering ocean, and that is the quiet, silver moon in the heavens that pulls the tidal wave, into which melt and merge all currents and small breakers, and rolls it round the whole earth. And so Christ, shining down, lambent and gentle, but changeless, from the darkest of our skies, will draw, in one great surge of harmonized motion, all the otherwise contradictory currents of our stormy souls. “My peace I give unto you.” The peace of a quiet conscience, as the great dramatist has told us, is far above all earthly dignities. For the honours of earth may be thick upon a man, and yet he may never know one hour’s happiness. But with the conscience at rest, and its light shining like a very candle of the Lord, the believer’s life is well balanced. He knows no fear of God save filial and holy fear, no fear of man, no fear of the future, and no fear of hell. Where it dwells, the peace of God shuts out all fear.1 [Note: W. J. Armitage, The Fruit of the Spirit, 32. It is told of Dante that after many wanderings he reached a monastery and stood before the door. Thrice they asked him, “What wouldest thou?” and he broke the silence at last with the one word, “Peace.”2 [Note: F. E. Ridgeway, Calls to Service, 220. In the inn of Bethlehem there were many going to and fro, and much hurry and disquietude, while caravans were unlading or making up their complement of passengers, and the divan presented a spectacle of many costumes, and resounded with wrangling, and barter, and merriment. But in a stable hard by there was a tender joy too deep for words, and a stillness of adoration which seemed to shut out the outer world.… The soul of man is a noisy hostelry, full of turmoil and disquietude, and giving entertainment to every vain and passing thought which seeks admittance there. But when Christ comes, and takes up His abode in the heart, He reduces it to order and peace; and though it may move amid the excitements and confusions of life, yet hath it an inner stillness which they cannot disturb or destroy; for the King of Peace is there, and peace is the purchase of His cross, and the last legacy of His love, and His ancient promise to His people.3 [Note: E. M. Goulburn.] How shall I quiet my heart? How shall I keep it still? How shall I hush its tremulous start at tidings of good or ill? How shall I gather and hold contentment and peace and rest, Wrapping their sweetness, fold on fold, over my troubled breast? The Spirit of God is still, and gentle and mild and sweet, What time His omnipotent, glorious will guideth the worlds at His feet; Controlling all lesser things, this turbulent heart of mine, He keepeth us under His folded wings in a peace serene—divine. So shall I quiet my heart, so shall I keep it still, So shall I hush its tremulous start at tidings of good or ill; So shall I silence my soul with a peacefulness deep and broad, So shall I gather Divine control in the infinite quiet of God. 4. Christ’s peace reconciles us to our brother man. Man will not be at peace with man because he is ready to drift with every stream. That is the false peace, the peace of the Vicar of Bray! Peace can never be gained by the surrender of sacred conviction. But a man has gone a long way towards the attainment of peace with his brother when he is willing to think of himself as only a part, and not the whole, of the human race. He has gone a long way towards union when he consistently thinks of himself as a soloist, and not a chorus. There will then be in his life a delicate considerateness, and he will be willing to fit in with other people with courtesy and grace. Peace, then, was made. “I bury the hatchet,” said Callières, “in a deep hole, and over the hole I place a great rock, and over the rock I turn a river, that the hatchet may never be dug up again.”1 [Note: F. Parkman, “Count Frontenac,” Works, viii. 465. III The Potency of Peace Christ bids His disciples realize the potency of their new possession. The citadel of their soul is now invulnerable. “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be fearful.” 1. This peace becomes the antidote to all dismay and despondency.—In the slow sad experience of life a Christian is in no wise exempt from losses and failures. It may be that he will realize that the argosy of his earthly hopes and plans has suffered shipwreck: yet the Lord is faithful who has promised, not “I will give thee success,” but “I will give thee rest.” Or he may find himself bereft and desolate and haunted with the dread of bleak, solitary years to come. Time, the subtle thief of youth, will rob him of most treasures at last, except that peace which the world can neither give nor take away. As we gaze down the shadowy avenue of our own future, who would not quail to think of those dark possibilities which it conceals, if he could not hear the Voice which says, “My peace I give unto you: let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid”? One of the greatest proofs of the blessed and eternal character of Christianity is that it applies to, and satisfies, the very deepest want and craving of our nature. The deepest want of man is not a desire for happiness, but a craving for peace; not a wish for the gratification of every desire, but a craving for the repose of acquiescence in the will of God; and it is this that Christianity promises.1 [Note: F. W. Robertson, Sermons, iii. 138. What rest is to the body, peace is to the mind. Peace internal, peace external, peace eternal, peace with men, peace with God, peace with oneself. “Seek God,” says Fénelon, “within yourself, and you will assuredly find Him, and with Him peace and joy. One word from Christ calmed the troubled sea. One glance from Him to us can do the same within us now.”2 [Note: Lord Avebury, Peace and Happiness, 356. Peace is what all desire, but all do not care for the things that pertain unto true peace. My peace is with the humble and gentle of heart; in much patience shall thy peace be. If thou wilt hear me and follow my voice, thou shalt be able to enjoy much peace. What then shall I do, Lord? In every matter look to thyself, as to what thou sayest; and direct thy whole attention unto this, to please me alone, and neither to desire nor to seek any thing besides me. But of the words or deeds of others, judge nothing rashly; neither do thou entangle thyself with things not entrusted unto thee. Thus it may come to pass that thou mayest be little or seldom disturbed. But never to feel any disturbance at all, nor to suffer any trouble of mind or body, belongs not to this life, but to the state of eternal rest.1 [Note: Thomas à Kempis, Of the Imitation of Christ, bk. iii. ch. xxv.] 2. It is a peace superior to outward circumstances.—The world has tried hard to put an end to the Christian’s peace, and it has never been able to accomplish that. The whole might of our enemies cannot take it away. Poverty cannot destroy it; the Christian in his rags can have peace with God. Sickness cannot mar it; lying on his bed, the saint is joyful in the midst of the fires. Persecution cannot ruin it, for persecution cannot separate the believer from Christ, and while he is one with Christ his soul is full of peace. “Put your hand here,” said the martyr to his executioner, when he was led to the stake, “put your hand here, and now put your hand on your own heart, and feel which beats the hardest, and which is the most troubled.” The executioner was struck with awe, when he found the Christian man as calm as though he were going to a wedding feast, while he himself was all agitation at having to perform so desperate a deed. No harm can come to the least of the little ones who believe in Christ, and are faithful and true to Him. At the centre of the wild cyclone, which bears devastation and ruin in its awful sweep, there is a spot which is so quiet that a leaf is scarcely stirred, where a little child might sleep undisturbed. So in the heart of this world’s most terrific storms and convulsions there is a place of perfect security. It is the place of duty and trust. “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee.”2 [Note: J. R. Miller, Glimpses through Life’s Windows, 132. When winds are raging o’er the upper ocean, And billows wild contend with angry roar, ’Tis said, far down beneath the wild commotion, That perfect stillness reigneth evermore. Far, far beneath, the noise of tempest dieth, And silver waves chime ever peacefully; And no rude storm, how fierce soe’er it flieth, Disturbs the Sabbath of that deeper sea. So, in the heart that knows Thy love, O Saviour, There is a temple, sacred evermore, And all the tumult of life’s angry voices Dies in hushed silence at its peaceful door. Far, far away, the roar of passion dieth, And loving thoughts rise calm and peacefully; And no rude storm, how fierce soe’er it flieth, Disturbs the soul that dwells, O Lord, in Thee. O rest of rests! O peace serene, eternal! Thou ever livest, and Thou changest never; And in the secret of Thy presence dwelleth Fulness of joy, for ever and for ever!1 [Note: Harriet Beecher Stowe.] 3. It is a peace that keeps the heart pure and fresh. A tourist writes of a spring as sweet as any that ever gushed from sunny hillside, which one day he found by the sea, when the tides had ebbed away. Taking the cup, he tasted the water, and it was sweet. Soon the sea came again, and poured its bitter surf over the little spring, hiding it out of sight. Like a fair star, thick buried in a cloud, Or life in the grave’s gloom, The well, enwrapped in a deep watery shroud, Sank to its tomb. When the tide ebbed away, the tourist stood once more by the spring to see if the brackish waves had left their bitterness in its waters; but they were sweet as ever. While waves of bitterness rolled o’er its head, Its heart had folded deep Within itself, and quiet fancies led, As in a sleep; Till, when the ocean loosed his heavy chain And gave it back to-day, Calmly it turned to its own life again, And gentle way. So does Christ’s peace refresh the poisoned heart and jaded spirit. If sin be in the heart, The fairest sky is foul, and sad the summer weather, The eye no longer sees the lambs at play together, The dull ear cannot hear the birds that sing so sweetly, And all the joy of God’s good earth is gone completely, If sin be in the heart. If peace be in the heart, The wildest winter storm is full of solemn beauty, The midnight lightning flash but shows the path of duty, Each living creature tells some new and joyous story, The very trees and stones all catch a ray of glory, If peace be in the heart.1 [Note: Charles Francis Richardson.] Christ’s Gift of Peace Literature Aitchison (J.), The Children’s Own, 37. Armitage (W. J.), The Fruit of the Spirit, 29. Benson (R. M.), The Final Passover, ii. (pt. i.) 418. Bernard (T. D.), The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 184. Darlow (T. H.), The Upward Calling, 49 Knight (G. H.), Divine Upliftings, 51. Landels (W.), Until the Day Break, 93. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John ix.–xiv., 372. Meyer (F. B.), Present Tenses, 9. Nicoll (W. R.), Sunday Evening, 249. Parker (J.), City Temple Pulpit, iii. 2. Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 128. Smith (G. S.), Victory over Sin and Death, 65. Spurgeon (C. H.), New Park Street Pulpit, vi., No. 300. Thom (J. H.), Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ, ii. 172. Thomas (J.), Sermons: Myrtle Street Pulpit, iv. 221. Tulloch (J.), Some Facts of Religion and of Life, 48. Vaughan (J. S.), Earth to Heaven, 94. Watson (J.), The Upper Room, 92. British Congregationalist, Aug. 6, 1908, p. 122 (Jowett). Christian World Pulpit, xlvii. 94 (Cameron Lees); lxxix. 76 (Macfarland). Homiletic Review, i. 305 (Metcalf). The True Vine I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit, he taketh it away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he cleanseth it, that it may bear more fruit.—John 15:1-2. 1. Our Lord here opens the book of nature for the last time to complete the training of the Twelve. It had furnished many illustrations for the parables and discourses of the past three years, but none is more rich in suggestion than this of the vine and its branches. 2. What suggested this lovely parable of the vine and the branches is equally unimportant and undiscoverable. The great truth in this chapter, applied in manifold directions, and viewed in many aspects, is that of the living union between Christ and those who believe in Him, and the parable of the vine and the branches affords the foundation for all that follows. The subject may be considered under three heads:— I. The Vine. II. The Vine and its Branches. III. The Husbandman. I The Vine “I am the true vine.” Two currents of thought are united by Christ when He speaks of Himself as “the true, the ideal vine.” 1. The Hebrew nation and Church in Old Testament times is called a vine. The Psalmist says: “Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt: thou hast cast out the heathen, and planted it.” Isaiah says: “The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel.” Jeremiah says: “I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed: how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me?” Ezekiel says of the kings of David’s house: “Thy mother was like a vine, in thy blood, planted by the waters; she was fruitful and full of branches by reason of many waters.… And now she is planted in the wilderness, in a dry and thirsty land.” The vine was used as an emblem of the Jewish nation under the Maccabees in the second century before Christ, and appears on their coins. But the people of Israel failed to live a life in harmony with the emblem. They did not bring forth fruit to God. They were not the True Vine. Now, the Lord Jesus Christ has been planted in the earth like a great fruit-bearing tree, to do what the Hebrew nation failed to do. He is the “true,” that is, the genuine, the real, the perfect Vine; not a mere shadow of it, but its very root and stem, at once living and life-giving. He has been planted in the world of mankind and in the soil of human nature, that our race may yield fruit to the glory of God. The departure of Israel from God and their ingratitude is illustrated by the comparison with “wild grapes,” “the degenerate plant of a strange vine,” “an empty vine,” “grapes of gall.” Finally, our Lord has selected the vine as the type of Himself in His intimate union with His disciples, who bore fruit through their union with Him: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.” “I am the vine, ye are the branches.”1 [Note: H. B. Tristram, The Natural History of the Bible, 413. 2. But Christ may also have called Himself the true vine in distinction from the material vine, the image of which He had conjured up in the mind of His disciples. The images of the Bible, especially those employed by Christ, are not merely poetic figures. The outward is a real symbol of the invisible world; physical growths are a parable of spiritual growths, the kingdom of nature is a picture of the kingdom of grace, because both come from the same creative hand, are made subject to the same great laws, and are under the same great King. The physical vine is the shadow; Christ is the true, real vine, whom the shadow symbolizes; and it will last when the shadow has passed away. The material creations of God are only inferior examples of that finer spiritual life and organism in which the creature is raised up to partake of the Divine nature.1 [Note: Dean Alford.] II The Vine and the Branches One of the most important aspects of Christ, the Vine, is His relationship to His people, the branches of the Vine, and this aspect is set forth in the fifth verse of the same chapter: “I am the vine, ye are the branches.” 1. There is a personal relation. As in other connexions of thought (“I am the light of the world,” “I am the bread of life,” and the like), Jesus here fixes the eye of faith on His own person; but in the present saying He regards Himself as inclusive of His members, who participate in His own life, and, as it were, complete it. He says, not “I am the root, I am the stem,” but “I am the vine—and ye are the branches,” presenting Himself and the Church as one organic whole. Thus we see in Jesus the Incarnate Son, a new stock of humanity, planted of God in the earth, able to expand His own life over others, and so to include their lives in His own, and (if we may use the language here suggested) to ramify Himself in them. This capacity is the consequence of the conjunction in His own person of the human and the Divine natures; for by the one He enters into union with us in the flesh, and by the other He communicates Himself to us as “a quickening Spirit.” Christ was the Son of God. But remember in what sense He ever used this name—Son of God because Son of Man. He claims Sonship in virtue of His Humanity. Now, in the whole previous revelation through the Prophets, etc., one thing was implied—only through man can God be known; only through a perfect man, perfectly revealed. Hence He came, the brightness of His Father’s glory, the express image of His person. Christ, then, must be loved as Son of Man before He can be adored as Son of God.2 [Note: F. W. Robertson, Life and Letters, 417. 2. There is a vital union. The figure of the vine offers a type of manifold, of combined, of fruitful energy. It presents to us Christ and the believers in Christ in their highest unity, as a living whole. The figure of the shepherd and the sheep does not indicate relationship so close and wonderful. The shepherd has one nature and the sheep another. Shepherd and sheep are separate and independent beings. What the sheep receive is not directly from the shepherd himself, but only through his agency. The unity of the stem and the branches is organic and living. The branch has a nature like that of the tree. It is the prolongation of its tissues and fibres. The sap that is the life of the trunk is the life of the boughs. A relationship very close indeed is denoted. Stalk and limbs have a resembling nature. Stem and branch perform similar vital functions, are animated by a common principle of life, and act together for the attainment of the same identical ends. Some day you go down to the shore. Your dingy lies in a wee reed-fringed inlet of one of the many bays that indent the coast of Long Island. You get into your boat and shove off the yellow sand. You drop your oars in and then pull away, away down the winding inlet, from behind the fringe of reeds, across the little bar, over the rocking waves of the bay, out into the deep, green, long, low swell of the limitless ocean. From the inlet into the ocean! And where did the inlet end, and where did the ocean begin? And what is the difference between the water of the inlet and the water of the ocean? The same elements combine in both; the same winds that blow in from the distances sweep over the surface of both; the same tides which roll in from the middle seas swell the waves of both. The difference is shallow and unplumbed, land-locked and unlimited. But the likeness is more than the difference, the likeness of water, wind and tides which bring the ocean into the reed-fringed inlet, and carry you out of the inlet upon the bosom of the shoreless flood.1 [Note: T. C. McClelland, The Mind of Christ, 55. If we pour a glass of wine into a glass of water, and mix them, the water will be in the wine, and the wine in the water. So in like manner all that we do, while our own acts, should be manifestations of the indwelling Saviour.2 [Note: Hudson Taylor’s Choice Sayings, 1. (1) In this vital union the branches are wholly dependent on the vine. The relation in which the vine stands to the branches in the natural world is, on the part of the vine, a relation of supreme support and nourishment. It provides, it contains, it distributes the life by which the whole tree lives. Without the stem, without the root, the branches are nothing and can do nothing. Instead of bearing fruit they can only wither and perish. A branch is nothing of itself. It is only as it abides in the vine that it has either value or continued existence. And as it is in the natural world so is it in the spiritual counterpart—the kingdom of grace. Jesus Christ, the True Vine, is the supreme and only source of spiritual life to His disciples. Without Him they can do nothing. Without Him they are nothing. It is only as they abide in Him that they can bring forth any fruit, not to speak of bringing forth much fruit. A Christian’s life, in one word, is “hid with Christ in God.” Christ is his life, the source and the sustaining power of his spiritual being. It is impossible to conceive a more complete image of total dependence than that of the branch on the vine. It is not a partial dependence. One tree may give rise to another tree; but the new plant, whether seedling or sucker, becomes a separate individual, and derives nothing more from the original tree. There is dependence at the beginning, but no further. So, for a while, a child is dependent on the parent; but by and by he is cast entirely on his own resources. The living and thriving branch, on the contrary, is always dependent. To be removed from the stem is death and destruction. Without something higher and nobler than yourself you will do nothing good. You must have an aim to evolve yourself to. This is an imperceptible and a natural thing. You do not think about breathing. It is natural. Your mother has thrown a sacredness over your life. Her name brings to you purity and love in their highest forms; you are bound to something higher, and through her you are bound to Christ. Thus naturally you are evolved into the Perfect Man. You reflect Him everywhere—in other words, you are growing like Him. A man at college who reflects Christ is a man who is bound to Christ, and thus the “man” in him rules his life. You must bind yourselves to Christ to get it at first hand; you must become acquainted with the Lord Jesus Christ as your best Friend.1 [Note: The Life of Henry Drummond, 472. Thou art the Vine, And I, O Jesus, am a branch of Thine; And day by day from Thee New life flows unto me. Nought have I of my own, But all my strength is drawn from Thee alone. As, severed from the tree, the branch must die, So even I Could never live this life of mine Apart from Thee, O living Vine; But Thou dost dwell in me, And I in Thee! Yea, Thine own life through me doth flow, And in Thyself I live and grow.1 [Note: E. H. Divall, A Believer’s Songs, 32. (2) The vine is nothing without its branches. It is the branches that bear the fruit, and this is their office. Jesus wants us, and, with all reverence be it said, He cannot do without us. Of course, if He had pleased, He could; but since He has chosen to make us branches in the vine, He requires us each one. All are in the vine, and all are needed. A vine bears fruit—how? Through its branches. On the branches and on their fruitfulness all the vine’s fruitfulness depends. One branch may wither, yet another bear; but if it were possible that all should fail, there would be no fruit. It is a wonderful honour, then, to be called “branches” by Him who is the Vine. It means no less than this: “I entrust My cause to you; I am content to wait for My fruit till you bear it; through you I choose to live My life; with all My yearning for fruit I inspire you; what you bear, I shall own.” 3. The branches are dependent on one another. (1) As we are one with Christ and Christ with us, so we are one with other men. Our own bodies are so transitory, we seem to stand so far apart from one another, the sense of individuality within us is so much stronger and so much more obtrusive than the sense of dependence, that we are apt to lose sight of our intimate and indissoluble connexion with others as men and as Christian men. Here again the image of the tree comes to our assistance. Nothing could show us more clearly that there is a unity between us as we now work together in our several places, and a unity between us and all who have gone before us. We are bound together in the present, even as the tree has one life, though the life is divided through a thousand forms, and we are children of the former time, even as the tree preserves in itself the results of its past life, which has reached, it may be, over a thousand years. These two ideas of a present unity and a historic unity are not equally easy to grasp. We can all see the present unity of the parts of the tree; we can all rise from that to the conception of the unity of men in the nation or in the Church. However imperfectly the idea is worked out in thought, however imperfectly it is realized in practice, yet it is not wholly strange or ineffective among us. But that other unity, the unity of one generation with another which has been and with another which will be hereafter, is as yet unfamiliar to most men. The tree may help us to learn it. Cut down the tree, and you will read its history in the rings of its growth. We count and measure them, and reckon that so long ago there was a year of dearth, so long ago a year of abundance. The wound has been healed, but the scar remains to witness to its infliction. The very moss upon its bark tells how the tree stood to the rain and the sunshine. The direction of its branches reveals the storms which habitually beat upon them. We call the whole perennial, and yet each year sees what is indeed a new tree rise over the gathered growths of earlier time and die when it has fulfilled its work. And all this is true of the society of men. We are what a long descent has made us. Moses was a thinker; Aaron was a speaker. Aaron was to be to Moses instead of a mouth, and Moses was to be to Aaron instead of God. Thus one man has to be the complement of another. No one man has all gifts and graces. The ablest and best of us cannot do without our brother. There is to be a division of labour in the great work of conquering the world for God. The thinker works; so does the speaker; so does the writer. We are a chain, not merely isolated links; we belong to one another, and only by fraternal and zealous co-operation can we secure the great results possible to faith and labour. Some men are fruitful of suggestion. They have wondrous powers of indication; but there their special power ends. Other men have great gifts of expression; they can put thoughts into the best words; they have the power of music; they can charm, fascinate, and persuade. Such men are not to undervalue one another; they are to co-operate as fellow-labourers in the Kingdom of God.1 [Note: J. Parker.] (2) Yet the Christian life—the Christian life, that is, in its widest sense—is manifold. The loveliness and grandeur and power of the Christian life all spring from the infinite variety of its forms. In some respects the Pauline image of the body and its members presents this lesson to us with more completeness; but the image of the vine—the tree—brings out one side of it which is lost there. In the tree we can actually trace how the variety is all fashioned out of one original element. Step by step we can see how the leaf passes into the flower, the fruit, the seed. Each living part of the true vine is ideally the same and yet individually different. Its differences are given to it to fit it for the discharge of special offices in its life. If therefore we seek to obliterate them or to exaggerate them, we mar its symmetry and check its fruitfulness. We may perhaps have noticed how in a rose the coloured flower-leaf sometimes goes back to the green stem-leaf, and the beauty of the flower is at once destroyed. Just so is it with ourselves. If we affect a work other than that for which we are made, we destroy that which we ought to further. Our special service, and all true service is the same, lies in doing that which we find waiting to be done by us. There is need, as we know, of the utmost energy of all. There is need of the particular differences of all. We cannot compare the relative value of the leaves, and the tendrils, and the flowers in the vine: it is healthy, and vigorous, and fruitful because all are there. We cannot clearly define the minute features by which leaf is distinguished from leaf, or flower from flower, but we can feel how the whole gains in beauty by the endless combination of their harmonious contrasts. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living pieces. It is her instinct to say, “Little children, love one another,” rather than to tell one large person to love himself. This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity, that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea.2 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 243. III The Husbandman “My Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit, he taketh it away; and every branch that beareth fruit, he cleanseth it, that it may bear more fruit.” Some readers, and not a few commentators, not noting the distinctive character of the first verse, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman,” treat the whole passage as merely a revelation of the close union of believers with Christ. They overlook the relation to the Father. Overlooking this, they necessarily have an imperfect view of the other; for it is from the relation of Christ to the Father that the relation of believers to Christ takes its character. “What the branches receive by abiding in the Vine is determined by the nature and circumstances of that Vine; by its being the True Vine, and having the Father for its Husbandman. To put this in other words, we lose much if we read here no more than a comparison to the relation which the branches of any sort of tree, good or bad, wild or uncultivated, bear to their stem. The teaching is immeasurably illuminated by the thought that the tree in question is that tree which bears the richest fruit, and that by the thought of the Divine Husbandman tending it, and watching for the fruit, with a view to which He planted it, prunes it, and will glorify it. 1. God is the Husbandman of the True Vine.—Christ ever lived in the spirit of what He once said: “The Son can do nothing of himself.” As dependent as a vine is on a husbandman for the place where it is to grow, for its fencing in and watering and pruning, Christ felt Himself entirely dependent on the Father every day for the wisdom and the strength to do the Father’s will. When Christ came into this world to establish His Church, He did not set aside the Divine claim upon the creature, but He came to enable the creature to fulfil the claims of the Creator. Consequently, in all the acts which He did as Man, He recognized the will of the Father as supreme. He did not cease Himself to possess the fulness of the Divine power, but His acts were to be perfect according to the measure of human morality, although containing the power of God. That power gave them dignity, but did not exempt them from the necessities of created life. He submitted to receive the treatment proper to man, but He never withdrew Himself from the love proper to the Son of God. We may learn from this that God’s moral government of mankind is not fixed by any arbitrary or changeful standard. God rules mankind according to law, and that law is suited to the nature of man. All that God appoints for man is fixed by the inherent requirements of man’s nature. The moral law is not a legislation alongside of the physical law of man’s natural condition, but it is the assertion of what man’s physical nature demands. It interprets those demands for us, which perhaps we might not find out for ourselves. It tends to the development of man’s nature, and now that man is fallen it tends to his recovery. Nothing could be altered in that which God has ordained without a proportionate injury to man’s physical well-being. The Creator is the Lawgiver and His word is the explanation of His works. So the character of a husbandman implies the cultivation of existing powers, not a transformation so that one plant should bring forth different kinds of fruit. God watches over Christ so as to develop by His providence the true glory of the Humanity. He does not seek to make the manhood of Christ fruitful in any way contrary to the nature of man. Christ’s human nature was fitted to germinate in every form of humanity. It possessed the virtues necessary for every individual character, so that His righteousness might really be adequate to all the needs of all times and all ages. The new regenerate Humanity should derive its completeness from the moral nature of Christ, cherished by the providence of God as the great Husbandman.1 [Note: R. M. Benson, The Final Passover, ii. (pt. ii.) 6. 2. The Husbandman is also the Father.—When the vinedresser, in the literal sense, deals with his plants, he finds that they are filled with a life and purpose quite independent of himself. He has to impose his own purpose upon something not wholly suited either for it or for his methods; and so, it may be, he impairs its natural vigour. But God is the Creator as well as the Gardener; and there is not in His creatures any real purpose or meaning other than His own. (1) The Husbandman who cultivates this “plant of the Lord” is the very Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. “My Father.” The relationship does not belong to the vine as a vine, but to the Person of Him who assumes the humanity which the vine symbolizes. Thus is brought out the relation of Christ personally to God as Father, and in His created nature to the Divine Providence as moral governor. While culture is according to law, it is nevertheless a personal watchfulness that is exercised. So God does not merely leave Christ to go through the world anyhow. There was a real fatherly care with which He assigned all the events of His life as He, in His infinite wisdom, knew to be most suitable for the development of His personal predestination. A husbandman cares for the plant as a living thing. The Father cares for the spiritual Vine as having the life of Heaven. As it is the Body of His only begotten Son, He cares for it with all the love which He has for His only begotten Song of Solomon 1 [Note: R. M. Benson, The Final Passover, ii. (pt. ii.) 9. (2) God, the Husbandman, is our Father through Christ. The Father is the source and spring of redeeming grace through Christ. Many people think—at all events, they feel—that Christ is their friend, but that God the Father is stern and unbending, almost resentful, ready to swoop upon them for every offence, like an eagle upon its quarry; if the Son did not restrain Him, He would take a positive delight in visiting condign punishment upon sinners. That is a mistaken conception of the disposition of God the Father. True, He is just, and cannot look with any degree of allowance upon sin; but the Son is also just, as is shown by more than one stern rebuke that fell from His lips. However, the truth we now wish to make clear is that God the Father is wondrous kind, filled with love, moved by compassion, and so desirous of our well-being that the scheme of redemption had its inception in His heart, and that, of His own volition, He sent His Son into the world to bring it back to Himself. Surely, if anything could reconcile us to the culture that the Husbandman imposes upon us it is the name He bears. “My Father,” says Christ; and if Christ’s Father, therefore also our Father. For He Himself has taught us so to think of God: “I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.” Whatever, then, the discipline of Christian life may be—however sharp and hard to bear—of this we may rest satisfied, that it is such, and only such, as a Father’s heart suggests, and as a Father’s hand may execute. Does not Christ Himself always tell us about a Father, not a Judge? Why should you not take His own way of it? “The Father” is the key to God’s character, and to all true knowledge of Him; and it is only when we understand that that we cease to fear, and love becomes possible. Perhaps you have gathered hard thoughts of God from some person whom you have believed to be good and religious; but much religion is harsh in its character, and you should try to get rid of any such impression, and to think of Him as He is in Christ. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”1 [Note: Principal Story, 146. And so, encompass’d with our flesh, He came, Thy Son, Thyself—to make less far and high The distant Godhead. Now Thy heavens declare No far Creator, but a Father there!2 [Note: J. Sharp.] 3. The Husbandman and the Branches.—The vine existed to bear fruit. It was useless for anything else. Ezekiel brought home that thought to the exiles in Babylon. “What is the vine tree more than any tree, the vine branch which is among the trees of the forest? Shall wood be taken thereof to make any work? or will men take a pin of it to hang any vessel thereon? Behold, it is cast into the fire for fuel: the fire hath devoured both the ends of it, and the midst of it is burned; is it profitable for any work?” The sole glory of the vine was its fruitfulness. So God makes fruitfulness the test. Not leaf, not colour, not wood, but fruit. In other words, God’s great test is not profession, not privilege, not apparent power, but the fruit of the Spirit in the life and character. If there is no fruit there is no life. If there is fruit, it is an evidence that Christ is abiding in the soul. He acts, therefore, on the same principle that He laid down for the guidance of His people when He said, “Therefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” We are not created in Christ Jesus out of good works, but unto good works. We do not make ourselves Christians any more than we make ourselves human beings. Works are the fruit of life, not the root. The works of the flesh are uncleanness, hatred, and their bad train; the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, and their good train. Life works from root to fruit; logic argues from fruit to root. We grow from our roots; we are known by our fruits.3 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 10. (1) The husbandman takes away the branches that bear no fruit. Christ’s words are: “Every branch in me that beareth not fruit”; so the question arises, How can a branch be in Christ and bear no fruit? Calvin’s explanation that “in me” is equivalent to “supposed to be in me” is inadmissible. It does not explain Christ’s words, but substitutes others for them. Alford’s explanation is better, but it labours under the serious disadvantage of substituting for Christ’s declaration, “I am the vine,” the very different declaration that the visible Church is the vine. “The vine is the visible Church here, of which Christ is the inclusive head; the vine contains the branches, hence the unfruitful as well as the fruitful are in me.” But to be in the visible Church and to be in living communion with Christ are very different things. We should rather say that Christ here lays down, in a simile, the general law that to him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. If the soul, in the measure in which it has knowledge of Christ, bears Christian fruit, it will grow more and more into oneness with and likeness to Christ; if, on the other hand, it does not realize the fruits of its knowledge in a life fruitful in Christian works, it will gradually lose its knowledge and become separated from Christ. Thus both the grafting into and the separating from the vine are in the spiritual experience gradual processes, and they depend on the fidelity with which the conscious branch avails itself of its privileges, and shows itself worthy of larger privilege.1 [Note: Lyman Abbott.] Life is given to us on probation. Whatever be our outward circumstances, the supernatural life is capable of making them fruitful. The fruitfulness of the spiritual vine may be found in the richest or the poorest soil. It is not dependent upon the soil like the earthly tree, which naturally grows there. It has an indestructible life, capable of bringing forth its fruit in every soil, and the life must assert itself by turning to account every condition of outward accident. Riches and poverty, health and sickness, praise and blame, are equally capable of being used to nourish this supernatural fruitfulness. We may not despise earthly gifts, as if we could do without them. If we have them we are responsible for them. But neither may we desire earthly gifts, as if they would enable us to glorify God better than what He has given. We are to rise superior to them, knowing that God expects us to show His fructification under the conditions of difficulty which that outward lack may occasion. The branch that is in Christ possesses all that is necessary to become fruitful; and if it be unfruitful, the supernatural virtue will be withdrawn. The branch will be left to its natural deadness and will be cut off. There is one vocation common to us all in Christ. We are called to be saints. This is a vocation that we can all of us fulfil, for the grace of God will not be wanting to us if we seek it rightly; but if we do not fulfil this vocation, so as to have our “fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life,” we must be cut off from Christ by the unsparing hand of the Great Husbandman.1 [Note: R. M. Benson, The Final Passover, ii. (pt. ii.) 15. (2) The husbandman “cleanseth” the fruitful branches that they may bear more fruit. The vine is a tree of rampant growth; its branches easily outgrow its power to fill and ripen the fruit. In a fertile soil, and under genial skies, it spreads out its boughs, puts forth a lavish growth of leaves, and forms many a cluster which a wise hand will cut away. If it were allowed to run unchecked, many of the blossoms would never fruit; they would form tendrils instead of clusters; the bunches that might form would be hardly worth the gathering. The husbandman early fixes on the bunches he will preserve, and devotes all his care to the swelling and ripening of these. He stops the branches on which they grow, that the sap may fill the clusters; many a grape is cut out that those which remain may grow large and rich. All the summer through the pruning is continued; the leaves fall that the sun and air may play among the ripening branches, and that the roots may feel the genial warmth in which the tree delights. It seems at first like reckless waste, this constant use of the knife; but it is the prevention of waste, the husbanding of the strength of the vine for fruit that shall be worth the gathering. Thanks to Thy sovereign grace, O God, if I Am graffed in that true vine a living shoot, Whose arms embrace the world, and in whose root, Planted by faith, our life must hidden lie. But Thou beholdest how I fade and dry! Choked with a waste of leaf, and void of fruit, Unless Thy spring perennial shall recruit My sapless branch, still wanting fresh supply. O cleanse me, then, and make me to abide Wholly in Thee, to drink Thy heavenly dew, And, watered daily with my tears to grow! Thou art the truth, Thy promise is my guide; Prepare me when Thou comest, Lord, to show Fruits answering to the stock on which I grow. In deep dejection of spirit, Mr. Cecil was pacing to and fro in the Botanic Garden at Oxford, when he observed a fine specimen of the pomegranate almost cut through the stem. On asking the gardener the reason, he got an answer which explained the wounds of his own bleeding spirit. “Sir, this tree used to shoot so strong that it bore nothing but leaves. I was, therefore, obliged to cut it in this manner, and when it was almost cut through, then it began to bear plenty of fruit.”1 [Note: J. Hamilton, Works, ii. 186. A teacher of music, speaking of his most promising pupil, said, “She has full control of her voice, but she lacks soul. If only something would break her heart, she would be the greatest singer in Europe.”2 [Note: J. Smith, Short Studies, 178. The True Vine Literature Abbey (C. J.), The Divine Love, 246. Benson (R. M.), The Final Passover, ii. (pt. ii.) 1. Bernard (T. D.), The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 209. Blackwood (A.), Christian Service and Responsibility, 46. Bourdillon (F.), The Parables of our Lord Explained and Applied, 289. Davies (D.), Talks with Men, Women and Children, 3rd Ser., 522. Hamilton (J.), Works, ii. 169. Hoare (E.), Fruitful or Fruitless, 1. Holdsworth (W. W.), The Life of Faith, 41. Jerdan (C.), Gospel Milk and Honey, 120. McClelland (T. C.), The Mind of Christ, 51. Mackennal (A.), The Life of Christian Consecration, 32. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John xv.–xxi., 1. Matheson (G.), Times of Retirement, 134. Murray (A.), The Mystery of the True Vine, 15. Pike (J. K.), Unfailing Goodness and Mercy, 89. Ross (J. M. E.), The Self-Portraiture of Jesus, 195. Smith (J.), Short Studies, 173. Telford (J.), The Story of the Upper Room, 155. Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), ii. No. 330. Westcott (B. F.), Peterborough Sermons, 50. Westcott (B. F.), The Revelation of the Father, 119. Williams (T. Ll.), Thy Kingdom Come, 17. Christian World Pulpit, xiii. 235 (Mackennal); x. 196 (Roberts); lv. 171 (Body). Church of England Pulpit, xxxviii. 292 (Reid); lvi. 211 (Hitchcock). Churchman’s Pulpit: Holy Week, vi. 401 (Farquhar); Mission Work, ii. 245 (Copleston); Harvest Thanksgiving, ii. 241 (Bevan). Homiletic Review, xlvii. 357 (Hughes). An Expedient Departure Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I go, I will send him unto you.—John 16:7. One of the most distinctive things in the story of Christ’s earthly ministry is the perfect calmness which He manifested in regard to the future course and fate of the disciples He had gathered round Him and of the work He had begun. He has a clear gaze forward: no weight of disappointment for His own career cut short is permitted to dull His apprehension of what lies beyond the time of His departure: no overwhelming heaviness or consuming fever of regret possesses Him so strongly as to cloud His vision of what would happen when the Cross had brought His earthly labours to a close; and His thought leaps over Calvary’s torture and the sepulchre’s darkness to the wondrous processes of spiritual development which would begin with His death. So untroubled are the clear depths of Christ’s soul, so unruffled is His sacred quietude—even here as He is almost entering upon the last experience of pain and lifting the cup of bitterness to His lips—that He can discern the actual relation between His departure from His disciples and the future Divine visitations which His disciples would know; and He can see that for their perfecting in grace it is expedient that He should go away. Truly, this was the Son of God; for man’s thought grows feeble and his face grows pale and his heart beats so loudly as to drown all whispers of hope, when he stands before the great crisis of his life: only to the Christ was it given to preserve the perfect serenity of His soul when the supreme moment came and the last dark shadows stretched themselves across His way. 1. “I tell you the truth.”—One does not wonder that our Lord should feel it needful, for the second time, to assure His bewildered and astounded disciples that He is telling them the simple truth. He had told them of the many mansions of the Father’s house, that He might still the trouble of their hearts at His departure. “If it were not so, I would have told you.” They would feel the force of His appeal to what they knew of His veracity, exactness, and love. And now again: “I tell you the truth. Notwithstanding the sorrow with which My going away has filled your hearts, it is better for you that I should go”—an assertion more difficult to believe than even that about the many mansions. 2. “It is expedient for you that I go away.”—Is not the expression used by the Lord something stronger than we should venture to use if we had not His own authority for it? Literally, “It is profitable for you.” There is no ambiguity in the word. It is found several times in the Gospels, and always with the same meaning. “It is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not thy whole body be cast into hell.” “If the case is so, … it is not expedient to marry.” “Whoso shall cause a little one to stumble, it is expedient for him that he should be drowned in the sea.” “It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people.” Of two possible alternatives, that one is preferable which is introduced by the word, “it is expedient.” And in the phrase before us, the two alternatives are the departure and the visible presence of the Lord. “It is expedient for you that I go away.” It is better for you that I should go and send the Comforter than that I should stay with you in closest earthly fellowship for ever. Better for the world that Jesus should be removed from the eyes of men than that He should lead them to Himself by the magic of His words and the wonder of His works! Why did Jesus go away? We all remember a time when we could not answer that question. We wished He had stayed, and had been here now. The children’s hymn expresses a real human feeling, and our hearts burn still as we read it:— I think, when I read that sweet story of old, When Jesus was here among men, How He called little children as lambs to His fold I should like to have been with them then; I wish that His hands had been placed on my head, That His arms had been thrown around me, And that I might have seen His kind look when He said, “Let the little ones come unto Me.” Jesus must have had reasons for disappointing a human feeling so deep, so universal, and so sacred. We may be sure, too, that these reasons intimately concern us. He did not go away because He was tired. It was quite true that He was despised and rejected of men; it was quite true that the pitiless world hated and spurned and trod on Him. But that did not drive Him away. It was quite true that He longed for His Father’s house and pined and yearned for His love. But that did not draw Him away. No. He never thought of Himself. It is expedient for you, He says, not for Me, that I go.1 [Note: H. Drummond, The Ideal Life, 63. I The Departure of Jesus Christ has to recall His disciples from the contemplation of their own impending loss to the great gift which should follow upon that “going” which they deplored, but which they so little understood. He had shielded them hitherto, and the thought that that shelter was to be removed filled their hearts with sorrow. So full were they of their loss that no one asked how this departure affected Him, and thus they were in danger of missing the abiding significance of His departure for themselves. There are three words for “going away” used over and over again in these chapters, and there is a fruitful study to be found in the changes rung on these “bells of sweet accord.” Let it suffice to say that departure from the point of view of mere separation passes into the idea of a journey, and thence into that of a goal to be reached, a “going home.” 1. It was that parting hour of mysterious thoughts, of agonized affections, which is sometimes experienced when we are sure that death stands at the door and waits; when but a few minutes are given for parting words and loving reciprocations. Only, their Master was in the fulness of life and health. But for this mysterious assurance they could not have thought of His death. He reiterated it in their incredulous ears, and poured out mysterious and lofty consolations—greater thoughts, more spiritual sanctities, more loving sympathies than had ever fallen from His lips before. They were awed and perplexed as well as sorrowful. 2. Then His departure was the disappointment of their greatest hopes. Upon their Jewish standing-ground all their hopes of His Messianic Kingdom were frustrated—they “trusted that it had been he who should have redeemed Israel”; and now He tells them that, instead of sitting upon the throne of His father David, He is about to die. Not only were they losing more than affection ever lost before, but the fabric of their most cherished hopes lay in ruins at their feet. And it seems to have produced in them a stupor of feeling almost approaching to paralysis. “Does none of you even ask Me whither I go? Hath sorrow so entirely filled your heart because I have spoken these things? Nevertheless, I tell you the truth. Whatever sorrow My going away may cause you, it will be to you a transcendent blessing. If I go not away, the Comforter will not come to you, but if I depart I will send Him unto you; and when He is come He will work mightily in men, convincing them of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment. You cannot understand now the things that I have to say to you concerning this great mission of the Holy Spirit. I can only assure you of its truth and greatness and blessing. It will be to you more than even My personal presence with you.” 3. Why, then, was it expedient for them that He should go away? (1) Absence is better than presence under certain conditions.—The influence of the absent is not only sometimes stronger in its degree, it is always purer in its kind, than the influence exerted by presence. Sometimes, dimly, we have been conscious of the truth enshrined in these words. We have recognized the fact that the influence of absence leaves its spirit; and the more we think why we are here, the more we understand it. We are made to be tried, proved, tested, and the conditions of our trial are, or seem to be, whether we will do what is right when we are left to ourselves. When was it that this or that man began to be so increasingly enterprising and energetic, to take a higher range, to produce his best, to be so wonderfully useful? When, perhaps, the outward support, the soothing praise, the popularity he had enjoyed, ceased to be his; when this and that pleasant prop upon which he had rested was removed. How it set free and drew out the forces latent in him, and made him thenceforth the braver, better, more efficient workman that he was capable of being! Many are the instances—more than we know, doubtless—in which greater and higher achieving, or beautiful developments of character and gift, have been largely due to some painful loss. Not seldom has such loss helped to promote superior performance, to give us noble labours and famous accomplishings with which otherwise the world might never have been blessed. And all that we want often, in order to our becoming more useful or more successful, in order to our attaining the heights that remain afar off, and that we vainly wish we could reach—all that we want often, is not that something should be added to us which we have not, but that we should just lose something. While we are crying fretfully, “Oh that such and such things were mine of which others are possessed! then would I conquer and do grandly,” the hindrance is not in what is withheld from us, but in what cleaves to us—in some little indulged weakness, in some infirmity or false habit of ours, simply to get rid of which would be our transformation into new creatures; would leave us armed and equipped for speedy triumph. Have we not known men concerning whom we have thought, What might they not be and do, if only they could lose a little, here and there? As the wind extinguishes a taper but kindles the fire, so absence is the death of an ordinary passion, but lends strength to the greater.1 [Note: Maxims of La Rochefoucauld, 54. Even the holiest influences may deaden spiritual activity. St. Paul himself finds it necessary to detach himself, and though he had known Christ after the flesh, henceforth to know Him so no more. So for those disciples it was worth while to lose Jesus, if they might find for themselves the way into that spiritual world in which they had seen Him moving. For He did not come to be adored by men who could never reach His secret. It was His will that those who had been given Him should be with Him where He was.1 [Note: J. Kelman, Ephemera Eternitatis, 140. (2) But Jesus would be with them still, though not in bodily form.—If we would feel the full force and singularity of this saying of our Lord’s, let us put side by side with it that other one, “I have a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better. Nevertheless, to abide in the flesh is more needful for you.” Why is it that the Apostle says, “Though I want to go, I am bound to stay”? and why is it that the Master says, “It is for your good that I am going,” but because of the essential difference in the relation of the two to the people who are to be left, and in the continuance of the work of the two after they had departed? St. Paul knew that when he went, whatever befell those whom he loved and would fain help, he could not stretch a hand to do anything for them. He knew that death dropped the portcullis between him and them, and, whatever their sore need on the one side of the iron gate, he on the other could not succour or save. Jesus Christ said, “It is better for you that I should go,” because He knew that all His influences would flow through the grated door unchecked, and that, departed, He would still be the life of them that trusted in Him; and, having left them, would come near them by the very act of leaving them. When Christ went up to Heaven the Apostles stayed Gazing at Heaven with souls and wills on fire, Their hearts on flight along the track He made, Winged by desire. Their silence spake: “Lord, why not follow Thee? Home is not home without Thy Blessed Face, Life is not life. Remember, Lord, and see, Look back, embrace. Earth is one desert waste of banishment, Life is one long-drawn anguish of decay. Where Thou wert wont to go we also went: Why not to-day?” Nevertheless a cloud cut off their gaze: They tarry to build up Jerusalem, Watching for Him, while thro’ the appointed days He watches them. They do His Will and doing it rejoice, Patiently glad to spend and to be spent: Still He speaks to them, still they hear His Voice And are content.1 [Note: C. G. Rossetti, Poems, 170. (3) He would be nearer than before.—Our first thought may perhaps be, Who can be so near Jesus now as the Apostles were during all the time that He went in and out among them? Yet these same men found themselves far nearer Him after He had gone away. In the days of His flesh He had sat with them; but after His ascension He not only seemed to hover round them, and brood over them, but He sent His Spirit to dwell within them. And thus believers now, seeing that they possess the indwelling Spirit, are really much nearer the Lord Jesus Christ than Peter and James and John were during the time from the baptism of John, unto that same day that He was taken up from them. But God is never so far off As even to be near; He is within: our spirit is The home He holds most dear. To think of Him as by our side Is almost as untrue As to remove His throne beyond Those skies of starry blue. So all the while I thought myself Homeless, forlorn, and weary, Missing my joy, I walked the earth, Myself God’s sanctuary.2 [Note: F. W. Faber.] (4) And He would be nearer, not to them only, but to all.—Upon Wesley’s tablet in Westminster Abbey may be read that proud word of his: “I look upon all the world as my parish.” The qualifying words have no place on the tablet: “Thus far I mean, that, in whatever part of it I am, I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty to declare, unto all that are willing to hear, the glad tidings of salvation.” Wesley’s heart was as big as the world, but he could only be in one little corner of it at once; even there he could speak only to those that were “willing to hear.” What limitations are these! The Spirit’s parish is the world. Every corner of it, every soul in it, owns His presence, and none can fence himself off from His approach or shut up the avenues by which conviction may come home.1 [Note: J. Telford, The Story of the Upper Room, 184. Suppose Jesus were still in the Holy Land, at Jerusalem. Every ship that started for the East would be crowded with Christian pilgrims. Every train flying through Europe would be thronged with people going to see Jesus. Every mail-bag would be full of letters from those in difficulty and trial, and gifts of homage to manifest men’s gratitude and love. You yourself, let us say, are in one of those ships. The port, when you arrive after the long voyage, is blocked with vessels of every flag. With much difficulty you land, and join one of the long trains starting for Jerusalem. Far as the eye can reach, the caravans move over the desert in an endless stream. You do not mind the scorching sun, the choking dust, the elbowing crowds, the burning sands. You are in the Holy Land, and you will see Jesus! Yonder, at last, in the far distance, are the glittering spires of the Holy Hill, above all the burnished Temple dome beneath which He sits. But what is that dark seething mass stretching for leagues and leagues between you and the Holy City? They have come from the north and from the south, and from the east and from the west, as you have, to look upon their Lord. They wish That His hands might be placed on their head; That His arms might be thrown around them. But it cannot be. You have come to see Jesus, but you will not see Him. They have been there weeks, months, years, and have not seen Him. They are a yard or two nearer, and that is all. The thing is impossible. It is an anti-climax, an absurdity. It would be a social outrage; it would be a physical impossibility.2 [Note: H. Drummond, The Ideal Life, 66. (5) But again, it was expedient that He should go away in order that they might he weaned from thoughts of earthly greatness.—For Christ in heaven is and must be infinitely greater to the soul and heart of men than even He could be, seen by us with our bodily eyes on earth, living with us, and belonging to this earthly state of things which is for the present life—infinitely greater even than if He had been with us in the glorified body which He had after His resurrection, and in which He appeared and conversed with His disciples during the forty days before He ascended. It is because His Kingdom is not of this world—it is because He came to open and draw up men’s hearts to what is infinitely above this world, and anything that ever belonged to it—it is because He came to teach, and to give them what “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard,” of the good things “which God hath prepared for them that love him”—it was for this that, having shown Himself in the world, He did not stay in it. If He had stayed in it, our thoughts would have been towards Him, as still belonging to this world. We see how difficult it was to wean the thoughts of His own disciples from hopes and expectations of earthly greatness. “Wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” was their question when He had risen. How much more difficult it would have been if He had still continued with them, in human form, even though glorified! How could that lifting up of their minds to what was spiritual and eternal have been accomplished? How could they have been taught those great lessons of inner and spiritual religion, if the great Object of their faith was still visibly present with them, and as one of them? How could they have been made to feel as they did, that the Kingdom of God was within them, that man has to deal and commune with his God in the secret reality and truth of his heart and spirit—how could they have been made to unlearn all that was outward and visible in their religious thoughts, and have had the eyes of their understanding opened to eternal truths, and to a religion that was all of heaven and in heaven—if they still could find, and see, and hear on earth the form and voice of the greatest of their teachers? Many of us must recall the parable of an Alpine sunset. We gaze on the vast bare rocks and snow-slopes transfigured in a flood of burning light. In a moment there falls over them an ashy paleness as of death, cold and chilling. While we strive to measure our loss a deepening flush spreads slowly over the mountain sides, pure and calm and tender, and we know that the glory which has passed away is not lost even when it fades again from our sight. So it is with the noblest revelations which God makes to us. They fill us at first with their splendid beauty. Then for a time we find ourselves, as it were, left desolate while we face the sadnesses of an unintelligible world. But as we gaze the truth comes back with a softer and more spiritual grace to be the spring of perpetual benediction.1 [Note: B. F. Westcott, Lessons from Work, 110. (6) He went away that henceforth we may walk by faith, not by sight.—In that one word “faith” we get at the root of the whole matter. If His Presence were not unseen, if we had certainty as to action and a fixed rule with no possibility of deviation, faith would not, it could not, even exist on its higher side, for faith is realization of things hoped for and insight into things invisible; it sees what is out of sight as though it were here—it sees Him in His invisible Presence, and it brings a far greater blessing than sight: “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Faith is the one characteristic which raises man above the animal, above the natural—without which he cannot “please God” or be of any use to men. It sees in darkness, it believes without evidence, it is certain of the impossible, it is the highest reflection of Divine power within men. Faith as a moral faculty puts you face to face with the treasures of the universe; and where others see nothing, you see everything; where others see only bands of Syrians, you see the angels of God; where others see a blind force, you see the workings of a right loving Will, overruling all things. And you are rich for the sight; you grow, you increase, you become more and more conscious of the possibilities of your own life and of the universe, and you grow into the possibilities which you see. But without faith, you grovel through a purblind, naked, starved, diseased existence, seeing emptiness everywhere, because you are so empty; seeing darkness in every noble deed, because you are so dark; seeing all things dead or dying, because you have no life in you, with no soul for greatness in man or in the history of your race, with no enthusiasm, no stirring within you at great and enthralling sights, but dull, barren, poor, weak, and that because you have no faith, no insight, and therefore no goodness.2 [Note: R. Eyton, The True Life, 67. (7) Last of all, He must go that the Spirit may come.—And the Spirit could not come until Christ was glorified. In a comment upon our Lord’s words about the fountains of “living water,” which were to spring up in those who believed on Him, St. John says: “This spake he of the Spirit, which they that believed on him were to receive: for the Spirit was not yet given; because Jesus was not yet glorified”; and this comment is but a brief and explicit statement of a truth which is wrought into the very substance of the New Testament. That a new and higher form of spiritual life has appeared in Christian times than appeared in the times before our Lord, is certain. This life is attributed to the “coming” of the Holy Spirit. Can we discover why it is that the Spirit did not—could not—come, till Christ was “glorified”? What is meant by our Lord being “glorified”? It means infinitely more than we can know; but at least it means this, that when our Lord returned to the Father, His human nature, in all its capacities and powers, was wonderfully expanded and exalted. Even while He was on earth His human life, as it was gradually developed and as it rose, through righteousness and patient suffering, to a higher and still higher perfection, was more and more completely penetrated with the Divine life of the Eternal Word. It still remained human; but, in it and through it, that “eternal life, which was with the Father, was manifested” to men. When He returned to the Father He did not cease to be man, but it would appear that His human life was wholly transfigured by the life of the Eternal Son, who was in the beginning with God and who was God. “It is expedient for you that I go away.” Yes! we understand Him now. It is expedient that perfect humanity should thus be associated on the Throne of Heaven with the Infinite and the Eternal. If we are to give our hearts and wills to the Author and End of our existence, if Christian worship is to be not a coldly calculated compliment, but the outcome of a pure and soul-consuming passion, it is well that on the heights of heaven there should throb to all eternity a human heart—the Sacred Heart of Jesus; and that in the adoration which we pay Him we should know that we are expending the inmost resources of our natures at the feet of the One Being who has upon them the claim, if I may dare speak thus, of relationship as well as the claim of Deity. And thus in the worship of the Church, inspired on the one hand by an awful sense of the inaccessible majesty of God, and on the other by a trustful, tender passion which has its roots in the consciousness of a human fellowship with its awful Object, we find that which we find nowhere else on earth, and understand the words, “It is expedient for you that I go away.”1 [Note: H. P. Liddon, Sermons on Some Words of Christ, 336. II The Coming of the Spirit Christ’s going away was a provision for the future life. The absent Lord prepares a place there; the absent Object of faith educates the souls of the faithful to possess and enjoy it. But He provides for the life that now is. And His going away has to do with the present as much as with the life to come. One day when Jesus was in Peræa, a message came to Him that a very dear friend was sick. He lived in a distant village with his two sisters. They were greatly concerned about their brother’s illness, and had sent in haste for Jesus. Now Jesus loved Mary and Martha and Lazarus their brother; but He was so situated at the time that He could not go. Perhaps He was too busy, perhaps He had other similar cases on hand; at all events, He could not go. When He went ultimately, it was too late. Hour after hour the sisters waited for Him. They could not believe He would not come; but the slow hours dragged themselves along by the dying man’s couch, and he was dead and laid in the grave before Jesus arrived. You can imagine one of His thoughts, at least, as He stands and weeps by that grave with the inconsolable sisters,—“It is expedient that I go away. I should have been present at his death-bed scene if I had been away. I will depart and send the Comforter. There will be no summons of sorrow which He will not be able to answer. He will abide with men for ever. Everywhere He will come and go. He will be like the noiseless invisible wind, blowing all over the world wheresoever He listeth.”1 [Note: H. Drummond, The Ideal Life, 72. 1. The Spirit comes to continue Christ’s ministry. The spiritual and distinctive ministry of the Holy Spirit follows the personal and Messianic ministry of the Christ. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are represented as conditioned upon the mediatorial work of the Christ. The Father purposes human redemption; the Son, by His atoning work, enables the righteous forgiveness of sin; and the Holy Spirit quickens spiritual life in forgiven men. The dispensation of the Father is followed by the dispensation of the Son; the dispensation of the Son by the dispensation of the Spirit. The development of Christian experience, throughout all its changes, depends upon one unchanging personality. The Christ was to depart and the Comforter was to come, but the Comforter was to come as the messenger of the departing Christ. “If I go, I will send him unto you.” There is no real brokenness in spiritual experience, in spite of what seem to us to be variations in its intensity or gaps in its record or occasional hours in which its life has lain in trance: behind it all has been and is to-day the power of the ever-living Christ. And this is the one great fact to which we must come back for security when our faith in Divine things is like to fail because we do not always see them with the same clear sight, and because they do not always thrill us with the same sweeping currents of joy—the fact that in whatever way holy things may touch us, it is Christ who brings them near, that whether they rouse a passion of holy rapture or draw out the quieter sensibilities lying hidden in our souls, it is Christ who orders their attendance upon us; that the outward spiritual ministries which excited the earliest stirrings of our faith, and the inward spiritual ministries by which we live to-day, have all been under Christ’s control.1 [Note: H. W. Clark, Laws of the Inner Kingdom, 68. 2. The outward is changed to the inward. The Divine presence and teaching, and redeeming death of the Son were, so to speak, outside the man. Hence but little spiritual result followed Christ’s personal ministry. He made but few disciples: “the Spirit was not yet given.” Though He had done so many mighty works among them, yet did they not believe on Him. He promised, therefore, a still greater ministry than His own—a life-giving Power, who should quicken religious feeling within them, who should be, not an outward teacher, but an indwelling life-giver and sanctifier; and who should do His mighty spiritual work by taking the things of Christ and showing them unto us. Henceforth the Spirit would work in the hearts of men, not through the partial and imperfect truths of the old Jewish dispensation, but through the new and transcendent truths of Christ’s incarnation and atonement. The Day of Pentecost was simply the special manifestation, the formal inauguration of the dispensation of the Spirit. Henceforth, men were to be taught by purely spiritual ideas, and were to be made holy by purely spiritual forces. Miracles and prophesyings were to cease; the personal teaching and example of Christ were withdrawn; the atoning death was accomplished; and Christ ascended to heaven. The revelation of God’s truth and love was completed; and henceforth only spiritual forces were to work in the hearts of men. At first the inner life depends largely upon stimulus from without: the soul lies to a great extent inactive unless some external influence rouses it from its sleep; and, in the early days of our Christian discipleship, it is often the more public, the more outward, channels through which Christ’s influence comes down that best satisfy our heart’s need and most perfectly fill our craving for consciousness of the Master’s presence. We go back in memory to the far-off time and the distant land which He blest by His benignant life, and we seem to walk with Him then and there, to hear the word of healing or forgiveness coming upon the sufferers who saw His human face; we enter into converse about Him with those who are like-minded, and in that friendly interchange of thought we find our joy quickened and our peace made deeper; and by many outward helps such as these the things of Christ are made more real to us and set into contact with our inner life. But slowly the soul reaches its own vision; the necessity for any outward aids to realize the presence of Christ grows less, because in the new strength of the inward sight we behold Him companying with us; and while the external means which formerly assisted us to a consciousness of His nearness are still there and still to a certain extent useful in their place, yet we no longer depend upon them to wake our spiritual apprehension or to raise our Christian emotion to its needed heat. The old things go away, and it is expedient that they should: the ministry of the Divine works directly upon our deepest lives, without the interposition of any intermediate agencies. We look for our Christ, not to any memories of far-off years, not to any words that others speak, not to any light that breaks upon others’ faces like the out-shining of His glory—not, at any rate, primarily to these things; we find and touch Christ by the immediate out-reaching of the soul.1 [Note: H. W. Clark, Laws of the Inner Kingdom, 64. 3. The work of the Spirit is not only to continue Christ’s work; it is to commend Christ. (1) The disciples did not know Christ till the Spirit came. It is a law of our nature that we lose in the breadth and accuracy of our knowledge by too close and continuous physical proximity to the object of knowledge. This is true as regards both things and persons. We cannot see the beauties of a great painting by standing close to the canvas. The tourist enjoys best the sights which he has seen during his tour as memory and imagination recall them after he has returned home. We learn to appraise our greatest blessings at their proper value—such blessings as health, youth, gospel privileges—only after they have been withdrawn from us. Now, in like manner, the Lord’s absence has brought to His Church the gain of better knowledge of Him. The Apostles knew their Master better, and appreciated Him more, after His departure than they had done during all the time that He went in and out among them. As a vehicle of Christian teaching His presence with them did not after all accomplish very much. For they saw the Son of Man in His personal poverty, in His human weakness, in His extreme humiliation. It was too hard for them to realize that that wayworn and weary Man, who clung to them for sympathy even when He inspired and attracted, was indeed the Mighty God. So long as He was among them, they really did not know Him. They could not understand the simplest truths about Himself which He taught them—for instance, the fact that He was to die as a martyr, and to rise again from the dead. But how different these same men became after their Master had gone away! The Comforter came to them at Pentecost, and all their dulness passed from them. The scales fell from their eyes; or rather, they became full of eyes within. Their language now is: “Though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more.” They knew Him not now in the carnal aspect of Him, but in His new life-giving power. You know that the mother always loves best the child that is dead. It is not because the child that is dead was better than all the children that are living, but because death brings the loved ones nearer to us than life ever brings them. You will never know your wife till she has gone from you. We never realize the meaning of Good-morning until we have said Good-bye. The hand-shake and the sad farewell bring hearts nearest to one another. So the world never knows its great men while they live. We have many illustrations of this. While he lived, Abraham Lincoln was the most hated man of all Americans throughout the South. The moment that man who counted himself Abraham Lincoln’s enemy, but proved unwittingly a friend to his memory, shot him, that moment the South began to recover its reason, and to-day the martyred President is honoured South as well as North.1 [Note: L. Abbott, Signs of Promise, 44. (2) They did not understand His teaching till the Spirit came and interpreted it. When He went away, the blessing that He promised as more than compensation for His presence was that they should enter into the significance of His past companionship with them, that the Spirit should bring to their remembrance whatsoever He had said unto them, and, in the light of His death and exaltation, become the Interpreter of all the deeper things which in their natural intercourse with Him their eyes had not been open to perceive. When the Comforter came, all things were brought back to their remembrance. Old truths and perplexing memories received their true solution. Words they had mused upon in doubt were interpreted; sayings they had thought already clear were seen to have profounder meanings; a fountain of light sprang up within them, an illumination cast from an unseen teacher unfolded to their consciousness the deep things of God and of His Christ. Their very faculties were enlarged: they were no longer pent up by narrow senses and by the succession of time, but were lifted into a light where all things are boundless and eternal. A new power of insight was implanted in their spiritual being, and a new world rose up before it; for the Spirit of truth dwelt in them, and the world unseen was revealed. The great truths are never apprehended while the great teachers of those truths are living to expound them. The death of a great teacher deepens and disseminates the knowledge of the truth. It was so with the death of Christ. It has been so with the death of every great teacher since Christ died. For the truth is always greater than the individual expounder of it—deeper, higher, broader, larger. The death of the teacher deepens the knowledge of the truth. While he lives, multitudes of men are attracted by his own personality, by the peculiar form in which he puts the truth, by the amplitude of illustration, by the vehemence of utterance and strength of conviction, by qualities that are in himself; and those qualities, while in one sense they interpret, in another sense they obscure, the truth. No man realizes this like the man who is trying to interpret a great truth to mankind. In him it dwells; in him it burns as a fire. He seeks to fling open the doors of his heart that men may look in and see, not him, but the truth that is the power within himself; and he is perplexed and humiliated and distraught and sorrow-stricken that men will not see the truth, but will look only at him, at his words, at his figures, at his illustrations, at his genius, at his gestures. But when he has gone, and these outward interpretations and semblances begin to fade from their memory, that which they really obscured, but which they seemed to interpret,—or for the time did really though imperfectly and obscurely interpret,—that begins to dawn upon them. The truth grows larger, deeper, in their apprehension; they look beyond the man to feel that the utterance was made eloquent by the truth within him; that the truth was the real inspiration.1 [Note: L. Abbott, Signs of Promise, 45. 4. The Spirit conies to make us able to witness for Christ. The work of the Spirit is wrought through Christians. His work is our work; and because He works through us, and not in ourselves only, our work becomes possible. We are called upon to make known in act and word that men are made for fellowship with God; that even in the tumults and disorders of life the Divine law can be fulfilled and alone brings rest; that Christ and not the Evil One is the rightful sovereign of all. This is the interpretation of Christ’s life which the Spirit gives through the Church, through us. Is not the trouble with most of our witnessing for God that it is inconstant and inconsistent, lacking unity as well as continuity? What is our hope but the indwelling Spirit of Christ, to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, to inspire every word and deed by His love? Then will “broken lights” blend in steady shining, the fractional be summed up in the integral, and life, unified and beautified by the central Christ, radiate God’s glory, and shine with Divine effulgence.2 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 9. An Expedient Departure Literature Abbott (L.), Signs of Promise, 41. Allon (H.), The Indwelling Christ, 187. Bernard (J. H.), Via Domini, 199. Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, 3rd Ser., 163. Clark (H. W.), Laws of the Inner Kingdom, 57. Dale (R. W.), Christian Doctrine, 124. Davies (J. P.), The Same Things, 126. Drummond (H.), The Ideal Life, 61. Eyton (R.), The Glory of the Lord, 36. Eyton (R.), The True Life, 61. Holdsworth (W. W.), The Life of Faith, 71. Jerdan (C.), For the Lord’s Table, 323, 333. Kelman (J.), Ephemera Eternitatis, 138. Liddon (H. P.), Sermons on Some Words of Christ, 325. Maclaren (A.), The Holy of Holies, 267. Manning (H. E.), The Teaching of Christ, 181. Murphy (J. B. C.), The Journey of the Soul, 100. Telford (J.), The Story of the Upper Room, 181. Thom (J. H.), Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ, 2nd Ser., 380. Tipple (S. A.), Sunday Mornings at Norwood, 284. Westcott (B. F.), Lessons from Work, 96. Westcott (B. F.), Peterborough Sermons, 85. Wilmot-Buxton (H. J.), Mission Sermons for a Year, 235. The Spirit and the World And he, when he is come, will convict the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: of sin, because they believe not on me; of righteousness, because I go to the Father, and ye behold me no more; of judgment, because the prince of this world hath been judged.—John 16:8-11. 1. Sin, righteousness, judgment, are three of the greatest terms in the vocabulary of men. And they stand for tremendous spiritual realities by which our state is conditioned and our destiny determined. The words that stand for these realities are to be found in all languages; and in some languages (and particularly in the language of the New Testament) the terms are characterized by intellectual precision and beauty. Yet in the time of Christ they had come to stand for lost ideas. The terms were there, but the meaning had faded out of them. They had been lowered and belittled; they had suffered deterioration generation after generation; they had received into themselves foreign and alien significations by which their meaning had been still more obscured and perverted; and though they were still in the speech they failed to convey to the understanding and to the conscience of men the tremendous realities for which they stood. And nothing could have arrested the decline of these terms; nothing could have prevented their gravitating into the region of dead speech, speech from which true vitality had gone; nothing could have prevented that consummated deterioration but the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and the mission of the Holy Ghost. It was by Christ that sin was reproved and righteousness revealed and judgment assured; and it is by the Holy Ghost that sin, righteousness, and judgment are continually revealed, attested, and brought home to the hearts and consciences of men. 2. Did Jesus Christ, then, come to give the world a new thought about sin? Did He come to reveal to men a different pattern of righteousness? Did He come to say a new thing concerning judgment? No. It is remarkable that Jesus said very little that was new. Every truth He uttered we may find in the Old Covenant; but He picked up the truths that were partially seen and imperfectly understood, shrouded in the mists and mysteries of man’s finite conception. He put them into simplicity, into plainness, into proportion and perspective, and He gave us a fair and perfect temple of truth. This is what He has done for the race concerning these three great thoughts which break in upon a man when he is awakening to spiritual being. The message of Christianity to the world is this: that sin has now a new centre, righteousness a new possibility, and that judgment is wholly altered by this new sin centre and this new possibility of righteousness: “of sin, because they believe not on me; of righteousness, because I go to the Father.” 3. Let us take the three together before we examine them singly. (1) To know what sin is we must know what righteousness is. To be quite sure of righteousness, we must be sure how it will stand at the end in relation to sin. It must stand over sin, and judge it, and destroy it. Judgment is not primarily punishment, nor is it a mere declaration of the state of the law, but it is the actual final establishment of righteousness upon the wreck of sin. The stroke of sin upon sanctity can only evoke judgment, which by the grace of Christ becomes salvation. In the world it is sin that judges righteousness, and does with it what it will. In the Kingdom of God it is righteousness that judges sin, and does with it the will of God—it destroys it. (2) With the awakening of the spiritual consciousness in man there always comes a threefold conviction, conviction concerning sin, concerning righteousness, and concerning judgment. When the earliest consciousness of a man’s spiritual nature breaks in upon him, the three facts that he faces, immediately and necessarily, are those referred to in the text,—sin, righteousness, judgment,—and the consciousness concerning each is a double consciousness of the spiritual realm that lies beyond, and of his own personal relationship to that spiritual realm. The words suggest to us the three moral ingredients of healthy public opinion in a Christian country. Every society, every nation, has its public opinion, its common stock of hopes, fears, prejudices, likings, enthusiasms, repugnances, tastes, points of view,—the common stock to which all contribute something, and by which in turn all are influenced. The old-world cities, each of them had a public opinion of its own—Rome, and Athens, and Jerusalem; and now too, wherever men meet and exchange thoughts, and know themselves to be bound to each other by the ties of race, or of common interests, or of historical associations, there grows up inevitably a common fund of thoughts and phrases which may be barbarous or enlightened, as the case may be, but which is always influential. Like the smoke and vapours which hang visibly in the air over every large centre of human life, to which every hearth contributes something, and by which every window is more or less shaded, so in the world of public thought and feeling there is a like common product of all the minds which think and feel at all, which in turn influences more or less all the contributors to it. And what I am now insisting upon is, that this inevitable product and accompaniment of human society,—public opinion,—if it is Christian, must contain a recognition of the three solemn facts—sin, righteousness, judgment.1 [Note: H. P. Liddon, Sermons on Some Words of Christ, 351. I Sin “He will convict the world in respect of sin.” Now the world as such knows nothing of sin; and yet it is the root of all that from which it suffers. It is the root, it is the explanation of all the numberless forms of damage and deterioration that human character suffers. Sin is the source whence all the ills of human life and human society arise. Many terms are needed to describe the manifestations or results of sin. The world is well aware, for example, of defects of human character, and it can describe them in detail. It says of a man that he is unjust, or that he is cruel, or proud, or sensual, or covetous; and yet these are but minor terms to specify this or the other manifestation of a deep, central, fundamental evil of the world, the very existence of which, as a fundamental evil, the world has never understood. It is very touching and very pathetic to observe that while the world had large, immense experience of sin it had little or no sense of sin. Mr. Gladstone once spoke of the absence of the sense of sin as perhaps the greatest peril of modern society. And I think it is not too much to say that, apart from the person of Christ and the mission of the Holy Ghost, we not only have no guarantee that the sense of sin would be maintained, but we have every reason to believe that it would again die out; and that while men would be irritated and angered by this and the other evil and wrong in society, their conscience concerning the mystic and root evil would as before show itself utterly inadequate to the exigencies of the case.1 [Note: F. W. Macdonald.] 1. The world must be convinced of sin. Let us take due account of the fact that conviction of sin is a profoundly intelligent matter, and worthy, in that view, to engage the counsel of God in the gift of His Son. If we have any such thought as that what is called conviction of sin is only a blind torment, or crisis of excited fear, technically prescribed as a matter to be suffered in the way of conversion, we cannot too soon rid ourselves of the mistake. It is neither more nor less than a due self-knowledge—not a knowledge of the mere understanding, or such as may be obtained by philosophic reflection, but a more certain, more immediate sensing of ourselves by consciousness; just the same as that which the criminal has, when he hides himself away from justice; fleeing, it may be, when no man pursueth. He has a most invincible, most real, knowledge of himself; not by any cognitive process of reflection, but by his immediate consciousness—he is consciously a guilty man. All men are consciously guilty before God, and the standards of God, in the same manner. They do not approve, but invariably condemn themselves; only they become so used to the fact that they make nothing of it, but take it even as the normal condition of their life. (1) It is not easy to convince men of sin.—Confucius is said to have once exclaimed, in an outburst of despondency, “It is all over! I have not yet seen one who could perceive his fault and inwardly accuse himself.” Confucius is not alone in that verdict upon human nature. The lament is suggestive. It implies the enormous difficulty of bringing an average man to admit his fault. It implies also that, with his many virtues and excellences, Confucius did not achieve a character of such ideal perfection that his contemporaries felt themselves smitten with shame by his transcendent example. And it implies that the common conscience needs to be reinforced with supernatural influence and vitality before it can assert itself and compel confession and repentance. A friend told me this tale, a few years ago, as we paced together the deck of a steamship on the Mediterranean, and talked of the things unseen. The chaplain of a prison, intimate with the narrator, had to deal with a man condemned to death. He found the man anxious, as he well might be—nay, he seemed more than anxious; convicted, spiritually alarmed. The chaplain’s instructions all bore upon the power of the Redeemer to save to the uttermost; and it seemed as if the message were received, and the man were a believer. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the chaplain had come to think that there was ground for appeal from the death-sentence; he placed the matter before the proper authorities, and with success. On his next visit, very cautiously and by way of mere suggestions and surmises, he led the apparently resigned criminal towards the possibility of a commutation. What would he say, how would his repentance stand, if his life were granted him? The answer soon came. Instantly the prisoner divined the position; asked a few decisive questions; then threw his Bible across the cell, and, civilly thanking the chaplain for his attentions, told him that he had no further need of him, nor of his Book.1 [Note: Bishop Moule, From Sunday to Sunday, 190. (2) Conviction of sin is necessary.—“He shall convince the world of sin.” The first outstanding characteristic of the whole Gospel message is the new gravity which it attaches to the fact of sin, the deeper meaning which it gives to the word, and the larger scope which it shows its blighting influences to have had in humanity. Apart from the conviction of sin by the Spirit using the Word proclaimed by disciples, the world has scarcely a notion of what sin is, its inwardness, its universality, the awfulness of it as a fact affecting man’s whole being and all his relations to God. All these conceptions are especially the product of Christian truth. Without it, what does the world know about the poison of sin? And what does it care about the poison until the conviction has been driven home to the reluctant consciousness of mankind by the Spirit wielding the Word? This conviction comes first in the Divine order. I do not say that the process of turning a man of the world into a member of Christ’s Church always begins, as a matter of fact, with the conviction of sin. I believe it most generally does; but without insisting upon a pedantic adherence to a sequence, and without saying a word about the depth and intensity of such a conviction, I am ready to assert that a Christianity which is not based upon the conviction of sin is an impotent Christianity, and will be of very little use to the men who profess it, and have no power to propagate itself in the world.1 [Note: A. Maclaren, The Holy of Holies, 274. I remember seeing, in my early childhood, the dear and beautiful subject of the following incident, the aged widow of a farmer in my father’s parish. My mother took me to visit Mrs. E. one day in her farm-kitchen. It was, I think, in 1849. I still see the brightness, the sweet radiance, of that venerable face; it shone, as I now know, with Jesus Christ. At the age of about eighty-one, after a life of blameless kindliness, so that to say she had “never done harm to any one” was from her no unmeaning utterance, she was, through the Holy Scriptures, convinced of sin. “I have lived eighty years in the world,” was her cry, “and never done anything for God.” Deep went the Divine work in the still active nature, and long was the spiritual darkness. Then “the word of the Cross” found its own way in her soul, and “believing, she rejoiced with joy unspeakable.” Three or four years of life were yet given her. They were illuminated by faith, hope, and love in a wonderful degree. To every visitor she bore witness of her Lord. Nights, wakeful with pain, were spent in living over the beloved scenes of His earthly ministry: “I was at the well of Samaria last night”; “Ah, I was all last night upon Mount Calvary.” In extreme suffering an opiate was offered, and she declined it; for “when I lose the pain I lose the thought of my Saviour too.” At last she slept in the Lord, gently murmuring, almost singing, “Rock of Ages,” with her latest breath.2 [Note: Bishop Moule, From Sunday to Sunday, 191. 2. The sin of which the world has to be convinced is the sin of unbelief. The Spirit convinces men of sin “because they believe not on me.” He shows them that unbelief is sin. It is the root of sin. The greatest sin that men can commit is the rejection of Christ. The message of the Gospel is so framed that no apology shall be able to extenuate the act of refusing it. Men shall never say that it is too hard to be understood; for its sublimest revelations have in them a simplicity that makes them intelligible even to illiterate persons, and appreciated by children. They shall never say that the doctrines of the Gospel are unreasonable; for the light which it throws upon intricate social problems, the complete and unanswerable replies that it gives to questions unsettled before, the plain and sober goodness and the eminent reasonableness that lie at the root of its laws, all of which qualities men can understand, shall prove to them that they ought to accept those supernatural features which are beyond their comprehension. They shall never say that its purpose is unnecessary; their own hearts and life shall tell them, and the condition of the world around shall cry aloud in their ears, that sin is an unconquerable power; that the sources of crime, disorder, and social debility are as prevailing as they are pestilent; that no remedy of human preparation has ever succeeded in effectually checking them; and that it is the business of all men, unitedly, personally, and constantly, to endeavour to remove them; when, therefore, the Gospel of Jesus presents itself to a despairing world as another hope of deliverance, a last hope, men shall never be able to object to it as unnecessary. Finally, they shall not decline to accept it because it can point to no witnesses or examples of its power. These shall always be at hand, comprising a mighty and ever-accumulating argument, a vast “cloud of witnesses,” spreading themselves over the world, not like distinct and eccentric meteors to dazzle and perplex, but like a dawn coming from that quarter of the horizon where men expect the day—a mild, genial, useful glory, the luminous ordinance of God Himself. So convincing did the Holy Ghost make the Gospel, and does still make it, defending it by every proof that can tell upon the convictions of men. Wherever Christ is preached, hearers shall be condemned because they believe not on Him. Possibly they may not be convinced, certainly they shall be convicted. Men say they understand that cruelty, treachery, and lust bring their punishment sooner or later. But what they cannot understand is that the mere fact of refusing to believe is the sin of sins. A typical writer of the period says: “Science is but a new way of applying the mind to everything. It has affirmed the right and duty of investigation and verification. It has set up a new kind of intellectual morality, which has substituted the duty of inquiry for the duty of belief. The immediate result has been in England a sudden and amazing diminution of intolerance, a wonderful and wholly unexpected increase of mental freedom.” In other words, conscience may speak about other sin, but in the case of unbelief the thing forbidden does not appear to be in its own nature wrong, and “Don Worm” refuses to bite. The appeal must be to what is elemental in human nature and experience. Content to be judged by that appeal, we maintain that the conscience bears witness that unbelief is the sin of sins. If ever conscience speaks out it is when this sin is committed on the levels of human life. As Bunyan puts it, they shut up Mr. Conscience, they blind his windows, they barricade his door, they cut the rope of the great bell on the housetop which he is wont to ring, that the town of Mansoul may not be disturbed. But sometimes Mr. Conscience escapes and rings his bell. For the sin of all sins to which the conscience bears witness is the sin of mistrusting and despising love. There is so little love in this world, and there is such a hard need of it. Multitudes have to go through life famished for lack of love. Even the most favoured have very few really to love them. If we have no love, human or Divine, then indeed life ceases to be worth living. “I would rather,” said one, “be condemned to be led out and hung if I knew one human soul would love me for a week beforehand and honour me afterwards, than live half a century and be nothing to any living creature.”1 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, 21. 3. Unbelief is always seen at last to be want of belief in Christ. The Spirit, says Jesus, will convince the world of sin, “in that they believe not on me.” He will show the real nature of sin. “How shall we work the works of God?” it was asked; and it was answered by Christ, “This is the work of God, to believe on him whom he hath sent.” Sin is not measured by a law, or a nation, or a society of any kind, but by a Person. The righteousness of God was not in a requirement, system, book, or Church, but in a Person, and sin is defined by relation to Him. He came to reveal not only God but sin. The essence of sin is exposed by the touchstone of His presence, by our attitude to Him. He makes explicit what the sinfulness of sin is; He even aggravates it. He rouses the worst as well as the best of human nature. There is nothing that human nature hates like holy God. All the world’s sin receives its sharpest expression when in contact with Christ; when, in face of His moral beauty, goodness, power, and claim, He is first ignored, then discarded, denounced, called the agent of Beelzebub, and hustled out of the world in the name of God. What is the belief that saves? We are asking the question in order that we may discover the unbelief that is sin. The belief that saves is that conviction which produces the abandonment of the whole life to the King. When I have believed that He is able to do all that I want, and I have ceded to Him all my life, then have I believed. A man does not believe the truth he holds, to borrow a very popular phrase, but he believes the truth that holds him. You have never yet believed on Jesus until you have abandoned your whole life to His Lordship, and trusted your soul to His Saviourhood, and never a man so believed but He “broke the power of cancelled sin, and set the prisoner free.”1 [Note: G. Campbell Morgan.] 4. What means does the Holy Spirit use in order to convince the world of the sin of unbelief in Christ? (1) He puts an environment of new ideals before the mind.—He testifies of Christ, and in so doing makes us see how in His humanity all Divine excellences have come down into the midst of men and made themselves a new law to the conscience. We are not, after all, in a universe dominated by avarice, envy, falsehood, animalism, but by unselfishness, sanctity, truth, spiritual principle. Some little time ago I was passing through a country lane, and saw a flock of sheep feeding on the hillside. They seemed to be milk-white, justifying the Scriptural metaphor, “He scattereth the hoarfrost like wool,” and fit to be welcomed as pets into a drawing-room. In comparison with the green pastures in which they were feeding, their fleeces seemed bleached into spotlessness. Not long after, a snowstorm came, and I had occasion to pass by the same field. But the sheep did not seem to be the same creatures at all. The background had changed as if by magic, and they were in a new world, the conditions of which served to bring out their griminess. They looked speckled, dingy, piebald, and anything but clean in comparison with the glittering snows in which they were nestling. The collier, rising out of the pit into the sunshine after a night of toil, scarcely looked grimier than those spotless sheep of yesterday. The stainless and dazzling snow served to bring into view all the dust from the roadside, all the bits of blackthorn from the hedges, all the carbon flakes ejected from the chimneys of the adjoining town that had been caught in their fleeces.1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Holy Spirit and Christian Privilege, 53. (2) The Spirit comes with a new atmosphere of sympathy and graciousness, unlike that which exists in the world and provokes to ingenuous self-justification. He who comes under this ministry feels almost instinctively His right to search the heart and bring every delinquency before a Divine tribunal. It is useless to attempt concealment, for the Spirit knows us more thoroughly than we know ourselves, and can constrain the most reluctant natures into a consciousness of their own evil. Indeed, the desire to cloak or dissemble silently disappears, for we instinctively recognize that His revelations, however unwelcome, are benevolent in motive. Whilst the full revelation of Divine love cannot be vouchsafed at this stage, we see at once that the attempt to convict us is not that of some competitor who is trying to smite us down. He acts upon us, not like the angry storm which leads men to bar their doors and close their shutters, but like the soft south wind, which opens every labyrinth of the heart and life to the light. It is no treachery or ill-will or unrelenting antagonism that is bringing home to us the unwelcome facts of the past, but helping and healing beneficence. In the most vivid revival of the half-forgotten sin there is no malicious exaggeration. His enforcement of the fact of our guilt is recognized as a gentle and tender effort to teach us those forgotten realities of law with which we have to reckon, and to put us into a better position for dealing with them. Whatever pain He inflicts, it is inseparable from the cure of a dire disease, and from the process of arousing faculties marked hitherto by ominous numbness and dormancy. He brings the hard rebel world, ever on the alert to justify itself, into an atmosphere that is something more wonderful than even the essence of compassionate fatherhood. (3) A new power of moral discernment is aroused.—In what is called Christendom, there has been a manifest uplifting of the moral standards, and a correspondent quickening of the moral sensibilities, both of individual men and of whole races and peoples. In the people of the old dispensation and of the great pagan empires long ago converted to the Cross, moral ideas have now taken the place, to a great extent, of force; the coarse blank apathy of sin is broken up; the sense of duty is more piercing; and it is even as if a new conscience had been given respecting the soul in its relations to God. It is as if men had seen their state of sin glassed before them, and made visible in the rejection of Christ and His cross. Jews and pagans had before been made conscious at times of particular sins; we are made conscious, in a deeper and more appalling way, of the state of sin itself, the damning evil that infects our humanity at the root—that which rejected and crucified the Son of God, and is in fact the general madness and lost condition of the race. Immediately after the departure of Christ from the world, that is, on the day of Pentecost, there broke out a new demonstration of sensibility to sin, such as was never before seen. In the days of the Law, men had their visitations of guilt and remorse, respecting this or that wrong act; but I do not recollect, even under the prophets, those great preachers of the Law and sharpest and most terrible sifters of transgression, a single instance where a soul is so broken or distressed by the conviction of its own bad state under sin as to ask what it must do to be saved—the very thing which many thousands did, on the day of Pentecost, and in the weeks that followed, and have been doing even till now.1 [Note: Horace Bushnell, Christ and His Salvation, 115. II Righteousness “He will convict the world in respect of righteousness.” The Gospel of the Son of God is not the Gospel of forgiveness merely. It is also the Gospel of life and power, a great message, declaring that to the man who believes on Him, the living Lord, there comes new life-force, a new dynamic of virtue; and therefore the sin that ruins is the sin of unbelief. Merging into that first statement is necessarily the second statement of the text. “Of righteousness,” said Jesus, “because I go to the Father.” Who else could have uttered these words? If we can say that we shall go to the Father, our going is through the merit and for the sake of another, but none introduced the Man of Nazareth to the Father. He asked no mercy; when He ascended on high He did not appear in Heaven’s court in virtue of what another had done, but stood unafraid in Heaven’s light, in the perfect light of His victorious manhood. He says, “I go to the Father,” and in His going to the Father He has vindicated the possibility of the perfection of righteousness as an ideal life. And yet He did infinitely more by going to the Father. He received that Spirit which, poured out, becomes the life-force for others. 1. The Spirit convinces the world of the existence of righteousness.—The world as a world has but dim and inadequate conceptions of what righteousness is. A Pharisee is its type, or a man that keeps a clean life in respect of great transgressions—a whited sepulchre of some sort or other. The world apart from Christ has but languid desires after even the poor righteousness that it understands, and the world apart from Christ is afflicted by a despairing scepticism as to the possibility of ever being righteous at all. Those who know this earth only can make nothing of righteousness. They try various definitions of it, such as equality of exchange or of condition and what is good for the greater number; but these accounts, besides failing to satisfy the idea of justice, carry no constraining authority to the individual conscience. In the New Testament age, whilst there was a strong tradition amongst the Romans in favour of orderly administration, thinking men were at a loss how to understand justice or righteousness in itself, and the general mind was not dominated by any clear conception of its nature or its authority. What was justice? What was a just man? Why was any one bound to be just? To such questions no answer was found. Our Lord says, the Spirit will bring the world to the knowledge of righteousness, because I go to the Father, and ye behold Me no more.1 [Note: J. Ll. Davies, Spiritual Apprehension, 47. 2. The Spirit convinces the world of the righteousness of Christ.—Jesus Christ, the Son of God, took on Him our flesh, and in the flesh condemned sin. Every thought, and word, and deed of His life was, in the highest sense, right. He lived amidst the ordinary surroundings of men, exposed to the same temptations, corruption, and weakness, a thoroughly Divine life, which could not fail to heighten the standard of the world. He was God manifest in the flesh. Of Him, alone, of all those born of woman, it could be said in the fullest meaning of the words: “He hath done all things well.” Here, then, was the world’s need supplied by the living Model of a perfectly holy life. But the world was by no means willing to receive and act upon the heaven-sent Light which penetrated its darkness. Just as a person long accustomed to the foul atmosphere of a dirty, unhealthy room, will resent with indignation any attempt to let in a breath of purifying air, so the degraded human race arose with one accord to reject the example of righteousness God had sent into their midst. This was the condemnation that light had come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. Jesus Christ never thought of Himself: their whole thoughts were centred on self. His heart was set on things above: theirs on the gratification of their own needs, desires, and pleasures. They were covetous and filled with worldliness: He had no earthly possessions, not even a place where to lay His head. They were proud and self-willed: He was meek and lowly, and His daily endeavour was to do His Father’s will. So, because it was clear that one or other of these standards must be wrong, it seemed an easier plan for mankind, instead of reforming its own habits, to determine that the Lord Jesus was an impostor. Accordingly, they banded themselves together and agreed that He was blaspheming God when He declared that He was the Divine Life—that He, the friend of publicans and sinners, was indeed the Son of the Most High, the heaven-sent Pattern of eternal righteousness. On this pretext they condemned Him to death, and nailed Him to the Cross; and then, when they had laid a great stone at the mouth of the sepulchre, sealed it, and set a watch, they trusted His witness was silenced for ever. But God’s voice is not so easily silenced as sinful men desire. Jesus Christ was content to be led as a lamb to the slaughter because it was part of the eternal counsel that His blood must thus be shed for the sins of the world; but He declared most clearly, alike to friend and to foe, that His life was the only one with which God was well pleased. He set forth also most emphatically the test to which His words were to be subjected: “If I rise from the dead on the third day, and after showing unmistakable proofs of having been nailed to the cross, I ascend into heaven, then you must acknowledge that My record is true. If I thus go to My Father and you see Me no more, then you will be compelled to admit that I have spoken truth, that you have failed in convincing Me of sin, and that I am indeed the Holy One of God.” The world that had slain Christ as unrighteous would own His righteousness when He had gone to the Father and they had seen Him no more. In all the literature of love and sorrow—and the two are never disjoined—we have this interpreted to us. It is in the withdrawal, in the departure to eternity, in the time of the lost vision that we know the righteousness we denied, or imperfectly recognized, when it was with us in its human dress. In Browning’s great poem he tells us how the murderer and ruffian husband, Guido, whose cruelty and malignity to the pure and trustful Pompilia passed all bounds, discerned her at last when she was with God. The procession entered his cell to lead him away to death, and he called out in an agony of fear— Abate—Cardinal—Christ—Maria—God … Pompilia! Will you let them murder me? Pompilia, the sweet child, saint, martyr, was, in the man’s thought, exalted even above God in the power to save. In all the paths of life, even the highest, the same holds true. The background of death is needed to bring out the full meaning and force of life. The highest we have known may indeed shine upon us through the semi-opaque routine of daily duties. But we feel as if we had never known them when they go to the Father, and the thought clutches the heart that we shall see them no more. One illustration is in every reader’s mind. Queen Victoria was loved and reverenced as perhaps no monarch ever was before her death, with a love and reverence that grew with time. But how infinitely the devotion of her people was enhanced when she went to the Father and they saw her no more! In what a new way the nation perceived how she had given them all her strength and tenderness through these long, brave, faithful, constant years!1 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, 208. 3. The Spirit convinces the world that only in Christ is righteousness to be found.—There are three requisites which must be fulfilled before man, as a sinner, can feel the possibility of his righteousness. The sins of the past haunt and terrify him; they bind him with cords of fear and self-condemnation, which prevent his rising;—here, then, the sense of forgiveness is the first requisite. But the sense of sin awakens the sense of immortality, and clothes it with fear. He dare not look onward, for his sin has peopled the worlds of the future with terrors, and for his justification he needs a Deliverer who shall have explored the future worlds, and illuminated their mystery; here is the second requisite. But he needs yet more. It is not enough for the past to be forgiven, and the future brightened; he himself must possess the germ of a new, righteous, God-like life; he must be a new man, rising into that revealed immortality. These three necessities: the assurance of forgiveness of the past; the removal of the terrors of the future; the creation of a new manhood in the present, are all met by the truth that Christ has gone to the Father; and when that is revealed by the Comforter, we have the conviction of righteousness. Newman, in a very remarkable passage, says of the saints that their lingering imperfections surely make us love them more without leading us to reverence them less, and act as a relief to the discouragement and despondency which may come over those who in the midst of error and sin are striving to imitate them. That is to say, if their lives were beautiful before God we do not ask that they should be stainless, for even the stains show us that we, too, though we fall, may rise again. But let us ask how it would have been if any speck had fallen on the life of our Lord Jesus? How would it have been with us if He had spoken one rash word, if He had cherished in His mind one single unjust thought, if one arrow of the enemy had pierced His armour? If that had been, the prince of this world would be still in power, and all our hope were dead. But He kept innocency and took heed to the thing that was right from the beginning to the end. Wherefore God hath highly exalted Him and given Him a Name which is above every name, even the saving Name. By His righteousness so dearly wrought out, we too may be made righteous. His righteousness is our beauty, our glorious dress, proof against the fires of the Last Day. We are redeemed by that voluntary substitution of the Innocent for the guilty with which the Father is well pleased.1 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, 214. (1) “Because I go to my Father.” What is the meaning of “because”? It is this: If He had not been right in the claims He made He could not have gone to the Father when He died. If He went to the Father, if His Spirit convinced men that He was there and was acting from there, then He had been right in the claims He made about His relations to the Father and about His judgment of the world, and especially of Israel’s sin. The apostolic fact of His resurrection was proof that Israel’s God confirmed the claim of Christ, and gave judgment for Him against Israel. That was what settled the matter for St. Paul. As soon as He was convinced that God had raised up Christ and set Him at His right hand in glory, the whole fabric of his Judaism gave way. God would not raise a fanatic, impostor, or blasphemer. The Spirit convinced St. Paul that Jesus was the Holy One and the Just—nay, the very Righteousness of God; that the sin of sins lay with the people who thought themselves the best of the good. (2) “And ye see me no more.” We are often like His disciples among these deep mysteries—we cannot tell what He saith. And yet the Holy Spirit makes the meaning as clear as it can be made to mortals. We are to lose the earthly vision that we may gain the heavenly. We are to lose the vision after the flesh that we may win the vision after the Spirit. Even in the highways of earthly love this may be understood—the more excellent glory of the spiritual love. “Love,” says our greatest poet, “is not time’s fool,” and perhaps the finest love-line in our language was written by another poet, hardly less great, to his wife:— To you who are seventy-seven. III Judgment “He will convict the world in respect of judgment.” We miss the note of judgment in our day. Our convictions do not start from a sense that we are convicted. We want to be convinced by evidence where we should be convicted by the Spirit. This is an element that has dropped out of our view of the Cross, and therefore out of much Christian life; Christ crucified, we think, took the pain of sin but not its penalty, its sorrow but not its curse. We have of late done justice to the idea of sacrifice in connexion with the Cross; but in the same proportion we have lost the idea of judgment. We have revived the ethical idea of the Kingdom of God, but we have not grasped the idea, which fills both Old Testament and New Testament, that it could be set up only by a decisive act of holy judgment upon the kingdom of the world. The Cross was indeed the Divine sacrifice, but sacrifice is not a final idea without judgment. It is not an end in itself,—except to the ascetics,—it is a means. But judgment is an end, it is final in its nature, because it is the actual vindication of holiness and the establishment of righteousness, and beyond holiness and its victory we cannot go. 1. He will convince the world that there is judgment in the earth.—It is evident that if by the enlightening operation of the Holy Spirit sin is known, and righteousness is known, the ground is then laid for judgment, because judgment is only the just, and proper, and true estimate of righteous men and wicked men. The Holy Spirit, therefore, convinces the world of judgment—that is to say, He brings out in prominent and living characters the whole idea of judgment; of there being a division in the world; of there being two kinds of people in the world, good and bad, righteous and wicked. There stands up everywhere in Scripture the pillar of fire and of cloud, and it comes between the camp of Israel and the camp of the Egyptians, and gives light by night to the one, but cloud and darkness to the other. The Gospel is especially penetrated by this idea of judgment; it declares the enmity of the world to God, and distinguishes between the world and those who are not of the world; it separates the followers of Christ from the world; it announces that Christ will manifest Himself to His disciples and not unto the world. It says, “Woe unto the world because of offences”; it says that “we cannot serve two masters”; that we cannot have the treasure of our heart in earth and in heaven at the same time. Our Lord Jesus Christ is Himself described as the Judge who thus separates between the righteous and the wicked, who places the sheep on the right hand, and the goats on the left; “Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”1 [Note: J. B. Mozley, Sermons, Parochial and Occasional, 164. (1) Judgment is yet to come.—It is very hard on the lower planes of life to convince the world of judgment, to persuade men that there is an infallible reckoning for all transgression, that no sin can be permanently concealed, that in the end the hidden things of darkness will come to light, and will receive their just reward. It is hard to bring this home even in the case of offences that come within the province of criminal law. A man will commit a murder and believe that he will never be found out, that the blood will not speak. He will cover over the body with sand, not thinking that one day the skeleton arm will push itself through and appeal to the sky. And yet the vast majority of people have been so convinced of judgment in the realm of criminal law that they never put themselves within its reach. How are they convinced of judgment? There is only one way. They are convinced by the judgment of an actual transgressor, by the manifested sin of a criminal. People read in the newspapers day by day of the strange ways in which the dead are avenged, and they are convinced of judgment. And yet there is always an obstinate remnant that fixes its eyes on the crimes not yet expiated, and thinks that it may sin and escape. (2) Judgment is now.—It is evident that Christ referred to a judgment that had then and there commenced, for the words have a present meaning. “The prince of this world has been judged.” We can most easily understand this by referring to a precisely similar utterance in the 31st verse of the 12th chapter: “Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out.” The Saviour had just declared that by His death He should give life to the world. He had just glanced into the awful struggle that was approaching, and His soul was troubled. He had just received from heaven the assurance of final victory, and then He declared, with the glory of the triumph already brightening, “Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out.” The judgment, therefore, to which He pointed was that conquest which He had already commenced of the dominion of evil, and the final victory over it which He should gain on His Cross. And the same meaning must be attached to the word “world” here, so that the verse may be rendered thus: “He shall convince the world that evil is conquered, overthrown, and shall finally pass away.” “The last judgment” is a phrase which we have almost robbed of its effect because we have used it chiefly for a remote and pictorial future. We have dwelt on the final date of judgment, and lost sense of a state of judgment, a judgment always there, and always final in its nature. We have pictured it in ways which have emptied it of spiritual awe, and reduced it to little more than physical terror and moral impotence. We do not realize that the prince of this world has been finally judged, and that we live in a saved world only because we live in a judged world. Either with the orthodox we have made judgment a cosmic catastrophe (and astronomy is full of them, and geology has made them too familiar), or we have reduced it, with the liberals, to the historic process on its ethical side, with its moral crises, and jail-deliveries, and fresh starts, from time to time. We have lost the note of judgment from the Cross, and so from our moral world. And we have lost it, with the orthodox, in a distant judgment scene, or with the liberals, who made it the mere Nemesis of history, which is too slow and subtle to curb the pushing hour. “The world’s history is the world’s judgment,” says Schiller. He wished to recall the last judgment from its remoteness to be a power in the heart of present things and living conduct. But there is something more true than Schiller’s famous phrase. It is not the world’s history, but Christ’s history that is the world’s judgment. And especially is it Christ’s Cross.1 [Note: P. T. Forsyth, Missions in State and Church, 72. 2. “Because the prince of this world hath been judged.” Who is the prince of this world? The phrase “this world” is frequently used in the New Testament to express the collective forces that are on this earth opposed to God; and in speaking of a Prince, Christ manifestly implies that evil forces are not separated, but combined and connected things; that they form a great living power, a kingdom of wrong. But the phrase means more than this; it points to a personal Evil Spirit as lord of that evil kingdom. Not in the sense that he is the cause of it all, but that he is representative of it, as being the greatest and the first. According to the teaching of Christ and the Apostles, evil began far back in the spiritual world, and came from thence to man. Interpreting the phrase thus, we have the idea of evil as a power mysteriously connected with the invisible world, and of an Evil Spirit as its representative. Do you think of the prince of this world as one who holds in his tyranny a world of victims who are miserable because they struggle in his yoke? That is not the conception here at all. He represents here all that is most congenial to the world’s way. He is the personalized spirit of a willing and admiring world. He is the organ of a world proud of its representative. He has its confidence. He is the agent of methods which the world thinks essential to its prosperity and stability, which make its notion of eternal life. The world he represents has no idea that its moral methods can be bettered or its principles overthrown. To its mind the moral is an impertinence and the spiritual is a superstition—feeble, but capable of becoming dangerous. It must therefore be fought. And its antagonist is just as sensible of the antagonism. There is no compromise possible. They were destined to meet in a struggle which is inevitable and a judgment which is final—and that meeting was in the Cross.1 [Note: P. T. Forsyth, Missions in State and Church, 71. (1) The Spirit will convince the world that the prince of this world has been judged by showing that Christ has conquered sin through obedience to the will of God. And where was this so perfectly accomplished as in His life and death? All forces were in action to turn Him from submission. From first to last He was perpetually tempted to forsake Him chosen path of obedience. The cold, the hunger, and the lonely temptation of the wilderness formed but the prelude to the long struggle with the Evil One, which culminated on Calvary. It was the same temptation throughout to assert His own will against His Father’s will. It opened with the challenge in the wilderness, “If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread”; “If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down”; and closed with the last taunt, “If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross.” But the cry, “It is finished,” was the herald of conquest—the proclamation to the world that one Man had stemmed the tide of evil and broken its force. The moment of seeming defeat was the moment of mightiest victory. (2) The Spirit will show that by this victory the perpetuity of evil is shattered. The darkest lie of the Evil One is this—that evil is an eternal power. Before the advent of the Gospel, the world was beginning to believe in the omnipotence of wrong. The slavery wrought by sin was so complete that men were losing faith in anything that could conquer evil, and were sinking into a dreary and hopeless fatalism. Just note the two great facts which, as the results of sin, lay at the root of this state: (a) Suffering. Men felt the pressure of its mystery. It seemed to belie the goodness of God, to darken the heaven of His love, and prove sin to be irresistible. Its shadow rested on the ages of the past, and projected itself with a grim certainty into the future. Now suffering, in all its deepest dreadfulness, Christ endured. He became the High Priest of sorrow. He grew glorious through it. “He was perfected through sufferings,” and thus revealed it to man as the education of a Father. (b) Death. The great mystery, the spoiler of human hopes, the divider of friend from friend, the sign-manual of sin’s dominion. He became subject to its power. It seemed to conquer Him. It seemed to divide Him from the Father, but really it was the pledge of their eternal union. Rising from the grave, He ascended to the heavens, thus consecrating death for all men as a pathway to the Father’s home. Such was Christ’s conquest. It was the crisis of earth’s history, the judgment and overthrow of the “prince of this world.” All hail! dear Conqueror! all hail! Oh what a victory is Thine! How beautiful Thy strength appears! Thy crimson wounds, how bright they shine! Thou camest at the dawn of day; Armies of souls around Thee were, Blest spirits, thronging to adore Thy flesh, so marvellous, so fair. Ye heavens, how sang they in your courts, How sang the angelic choirs that day, When from His tomb the imprisoned God, Like the strong sunrise, broke away!1 [Note: F. W. Faber.] The Spirit and the World Literature Bushnell (H.), Christ and His Salvation, 98. Davies (J. Ll.), Spiritual Apprehension, 40. Forsyth (P. T.), Missions in State and Church, 51. Hull (E. L.), Sermons preached at King’s Lynn, 2nd Ser., 14, 29. Jenkins (E. E.), Life and Christ, 143. Liddon (H. P.), Sermons on Some Words of Christ, 342. Maclaren (A.), The Holy of Holies, 279. Moule (H. C. G.), From Sunday to Sunday, 188. Mozley (J. B.), Sermons Parochial and Occasional, 160. Nicoll (W. R.), Sunday Evening, 3, 21. Selby (T. G.), The Holy Spirit and Christian Privilege, 43. Wilkinson (G. H.), The Invisible Glory, 233. Christian World Pulpit, lvi. 120 (Macdonald); lxii. 395 (Campbell Morgan). The Day of Knowledge and Power And in that day ye shall ask me nothing. Verily, verily, I say unto you, If ye shall ask anything of the Father, he will give it you in my name.—John 16:23. 1. Our Lord here sums up the prerogatives and privileges of His servants in the day that was about to dawn and to last till He came again. There is nothing absolutely new in the words; substantially the promises contained in them have appeared in former parts of these discourses under somewhat different aspects and connexions. Many such promises there are in the Bible: “Ask and ye shall receive”; “All things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive”; “If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you”; “If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.” Many such promises there are, but our Lord brings them together here, in this condensed repetition, in order that the scattered rays, being thus focused, may have more power to illuminate with certitude, and to warm into hope. 2. Now it is to be noticed that the two askings which are spoken of here are expressed by different words in the Greek. Our English word “ask” means two things, either “to question” or “to request”; to ask in the sense of interrogating, in order to get information and teaching, or in the sense of beseeching, in order to get gifts. In the former sense the word is employed in the first clause of our text, and in the second sense it is employed in the central portion of it. Christ does not distinguish between two epochs in Christian experience; in the earlier and more imperfect one, prayer being offered to Christ, in the later and perfected one, prayer being offered directly to the Father. There is not in this verse a contrast drawn between asking the Son, which shall cease, and asking the Father, which shall begin; but the first half of the verse closes the declaration of one blessing, namely, that hereafter they shall be so taught by the Spirit as to have nothing further to inquire; the second half of the verse begins the declaration of a new blessing, that whatsoever they shall seek from the Father, He will give it them in the Son’s name. There are then two things here as the marks of the Christian life all through the ages: the cessation of the ignorant questions addressed to a present Christ, and the satisfaction of desires. These may be conveniently studied under the headings given by Godet:— I. Fulness of Knowledge. II. Fulness of Power. I Fulness of Knowledge “And in that day ye shall ask me nothing.” When our Lord went in and out among His disciples, He was their Prophet and Teacher in this way, that, if they wanted to know anything, the meaning of a place in Scripture, the right and wrong of what was being done, or the like—anything, in short, concerning their duty—they might go straight to Him and ask Him a question about it, as the Jews of old asked the prophets who were among them. And so in the Gospel history we find them continually doing this. Now what a great and unspeakable privilege this was, we all in some sort understand and feel at once. We know what a loss it is, when we are forced to part from some parent or friend, a frail mortal like ourselves, only a little better and wiser. How much more, when they had to part from Him who is perfect and infinite Goodness and Wisdom. The state of things which was passing was the old familiar intercourse, the questions and the answers of the daily life. The relation of the Lord to His followers, as that of teacher and disciples, made the asking of questions the most natural thing in the world. As a matter of fact, we find in the Gospels that this is what the disciples were constantly doing. It might be a question of failure on their part: “Lord, why could not we cast it out?” It might be a moment of danger, as on the lake, when the disciples did not fall to prayer, but awoke their sleeping Lord: “Master, carest thou not that we perish?” It might be some far-reaching question: “Lord, are there few that be saved?” It might be some suggested limitation of their loyalty: “Lord, why cannot I follow thee now?” Especially in the last discourses recorded by St. John do we find such questions, implied or expressed. There was the question of St. Thomas, who wanted to tie our Lord down to definiteness of statement: “Lord, we know not whither thou goest; how know we the way?” There was the implied question of Philip, echoing the world-wide difficulty that besets the government of the world: “Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us.” There was the question of the other Judas, with its shadow of the agelong perplexity, as to election and predestination: “Lord, how is it that thou wilt manifest thyself unto us, and not unto the world?” And even as our Lord was speaking there was a question, as to the meaning of certain words of His, which was in the hearts, and almost on; the lips, of the whole body of the Apostles: “Jesus perceived that they were desirous to ask him, and he said unto them, Do ye inquire among yourselves concerning this, that I said, A little I while, and ye behold me not; and again a little while, and ye shall see me?” And then the Lord gave them for answer the assurance that though they should be sorrowful, their sorrow should be turned into joy. Thus were the disciples constantly in the habit, as was natural, of asking questions. Often the Lord’s answers seem to be purposely indirect and even evasive, but they always had reference to the particular difficulty that had been expressed. Now, the old privileged state of things, the easy, natural intercourse, was to cease. No longer would the disciples be able to turn to a present Master in time of perplexity or moment of danger. No longer would they hear the familiar accents speaking in answer to their questionings. It would be strange if the passing away of the old intercourse did not seem to the disciples to be all loss. For what condition of things could possibly seem to them better than the old?1 [Note: A. E. Coulthard, in The Record, 1908, p. 508. It is under these circumstances that Christ pronounces the words: “In that day ye shall ask me nothing.” Are we, then, to understand the words as words of discouragement to the already depressed disciples, or may we take them as words of the deepest comfort: “In that day ye shall ask me nothing, because everything will be revealed to you”? 1. “In that day.”—That day broke at the Resurrection and attained its settled light at Pentecost. Then “the hour came” from which things would be as they are here described. In the occasional intercourse of the forty days the disciples did ask something and hear something as of old, yet the former day of living and conversing together was over, and the new day had begun. Only there was granted an intervening period of twilight in which the Presence, shown at unexpected moments and vanishing from sight, and sometimes rather felt than seen, prepared them for that other kind of seeing and for that other kind of intercourse which were to ensue and to endure. Christ would no longer be with the faithful as a personal earthly Teacher. He had been with the Apostles, but He could teach them only in proverbs. The spiritual meaning of His words lay hidden from them. They had brought to Him many a question which He had to set aside, because they were incapable of receiving the answer. When He was risen from the dead, He would open their understanding to understand the Scriptures. They should not look to Him then for details of accidental difficulty, but would recognize the illumination of Divine Sonship, the power of the Holy Ghost, speaking within their hearts. Then would the prophet’s word be fulfilled: “They shall be all taught of God.” The day of the new dispensation is while Christ is with the Father. It begins to dawn when the heavens open to receive Him. It has no ending. It is the day which is as the light of seven days, the perfect illumination of grace. Christ is with the Father. The Father’s Wisdom is the Head of the Church. The Spirit of Wisdom is the Life of the Church. The supernatural consciousness is the light which fills the souls of the regenerate as “the children of the day.” It is a light which is at once moral, intellectual, spiritual. That day is a day of moral power, such as the world has never known before. Christ is Himself the Light of the conscience, shining within the heart, lifting up the faithful to delight in that which is worthy of man. No civilization previously had elevated mankind as the brightness of this light elevates. It elevates all of every class, for all are invited to walk in the light of the Lord. It is a day of intellectual light. Earlier ages witnessed the brute strength of human nature, leaving monuments behind which should endure for ages. The day of Christ would see man raised to a mastery of mind over matter. The secrets of nature would be unfolded. The elements of science were to be learnt as never before, under the discipline of the Christian Church. The spiritual light of the coming day would, however, be its true glory. God would be known in His personal Sovereignty, and in His relation to the world as Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier. Man would be conscious of himself as belonging to a higher order of existence than could find a home within this present world. The faithful would find their true joy in that God lifted up upon them the light of His countenance.1 [Note: R. M. Benson, The Final Passover, ii. (pt. ii.) 276. 2. “Ye shall ask me nothing.”—Christ’s promise to His disciples in this place is that a time shall come to them when they shall no longer be questioners; when they shall have no necessity to be questioners; when they shall know all things, and not need any man to teach them. Christ was proclaiming progress and not retrogression when He said: “In that day ye shall ask me no more questions.” It is better for a boy to puzzle out the meaning of a Latin book by his own brains and the help of a dictionary than lazily to use an interlinear translation. And, though we do not always feel it, and are often tempted to think how blessed it would be if we had an infallible Teacher visible here at our sides, it is a great deal better for us that we have not, and it is a step in advance that He has gone away. Many eager and honest Christian souls, hungering after certainty and rest, have cast themselves in these latter days into the arms of an infallible Church. I doubt whether any such questioning mind has found what it sought; and I am sure that it has taken a step downwards, in passing from the spiritual guidance realized by our own honest industry and earnest use of the materials supplied to us in Christ’s word, to any external authority which comes to us to save us the trouble of thinking, and to confirm to us truth which we have not made our own by search and effort.2 [Note: A. Maclaren.] (1) In place of the former questioning, we have a completed revelation.—Great and wonderful and unspeakably precious as were and are the words of Jesus Christ, His deeds are far more so. The death of Christ has told us things that Christ before His death could not tell. The resurrection of Christ has cast light upon all the darkest places of man’s destiny which Christ, before His resurrection, could not by any words so illuminate. The ascension of Christ has opened doors for thought, for faith, for hope, which were fast closed, notwithstanding all His teachings, until He had burst them asunder and passed to His throne. Breezes of spring, all earth to life awaking,— Birds swiftly soaring through the sunny sky,— The butterfly its lonely prison breaking,— The seed upspringing, which had seemed to die,— Types such as these a word of hope have spoken, Have shed a gleam of light around the tomb; But weary hearts longed for a surer token, A clearer ray, to dissipate its gloom. And this was granted! See the Lord ascending, On crimson clouds of evening calmly borne, With hands outstretched, and looks of love still bending On His bereaved ones, who no longer mourn. “I am the Resurrection,” hear Him saying; “I am the Life; he who believes in Me Shall never die,—the souls My call obeying, Soon, where I am, for evermore shall be.” Sing Hallelujah! light from Heaven appearing, The mystery of life and death is plain; Now to the grave we can descend unfearing, In sure and certain hope to rise again!1 [Note: Jane Borthwick.] (2) We have an inward Teacher.—We have a Divine Spirit who will come to us if we will, and teach us, blessing the exercise of our own faculties, and guiding us, not, indeed, into the uniform perception of the intellectual aspects of Christian truth, but into the apprehension and the loving possession, as a power in our lives, of all the truth that we need to mould our characters and to raise us to the likeness of Himself. Only, let us remember what such a method of teaching demands from us. It requires that we honestly use the revelation that is given us; it requires that we loyally, lovingly, trustfully, submit ourselves to the teaching of that Spirit who will dwell in us; it requires that we bring our lives up to the height of our present knowledge, and make everything that we know a factor in shaping what we do and what we are. If we would know truth, we must not expect to advance by intellectual certainty, but by spiritual power. The truth must be a life. As we live true to His ascended Being, we find the power of that life. The Spirit of Truth is the Spirit of Life, so that, as we live by His inspirations, we are taught the fulness of His mysteries.1 [Note: R. M. Benson, The Final Passover, ii. (pt. ii.) 280. Up, and away! Thy Saviour’s gone before, Why dost thou stay, Dull soul? Behold, the door Is open, and His precepts bid thee rise, Whose power hath vanquished all thine enemies. In vain thou say’st Thou art buried with thy Saviour, If thou delay’st To show by thy behaviour, That thou art risen with Him. Till thou shine Like Him, how canst thou say His light is thine? Open thine eyes, Sin-seized soul, and see What cobweb ties They are that trammel thee; Not profit, pleasure, honours, as thou thinkest, But loss, pain, shame, at which thou vainly winkest. All that is good Thy Saviour dearly bought With His heart’s blood, And it must then be sought, Where He keeps residence, who rose this day; Linger no longer then; up, and away!2 [Note: G. Herbert.] II Fulness of Power “Verily, verily, I say unto you, If ye shall ask anything of the Father, he will give it you in my name.” The second feature of the apostolic illumination mentioned by Jesus in the text is unlimited influence with God through prayer. The Apostles were to have at command the whole power of God; the power of miracles, to heal diseases; of prophecy, to foretell things to come bearing on the Church’s interest, which it was desirable that believers should know; of providence, to make all events subservient to their well-being, and that of the cause in which they laboured. Except the miraculous elements, which most Protestants agree in regarding as peculiar to the apostolic age, this magnificent promise of Jesus is made to all who aspire to Christian manhood, and is fulfilled to all who reach it. 1. The security of the promise.—It has been remarked, and with much truth, that whenever our Lord would declare some very important fact or doctrine, such as might be considered a fundamental truth of Christianity, or a law of His spiritual kingdom, He invariably prefaced His declaration with the emphatic words, “Verily, verily.” If, when we read the New Testament, we note the passages in which these reiterated words occur, we see that they are always in connexion with some important Christian truth. In point of fact, it is no exaggeration to say that we might condense the distinctive teaching of Christianity in the few verses which are prefaced with these particles of speech, and draw up from them a succinct summary of those essential verities of the Christian creed which we hold to be necessary to our salvation.1 [Note: Dean F. Pigon, Faith and Practice, 246. Shortly before His ascension to glory, when He would comfort His disciples in their sorrow at the prospect of His near departure, when He would encourage them to brave all the tribulation through which they must pass for His sake, Christ, in revealing to them the truth of His mighty intercession for them at the Throne of Grace, and for all prayerful Christians in all ages, emphasizes His declaration concerning prayer, and thus seems to give it a prominent place in the system of Christianity. He confirms His promise by an oath, that by these two immutable things which cannot be broken, His promise and His oath, we might have the strong consolation that our prayers penetrate through the clouds into the ears of the Lord of hosts. We are to pray, building our heart’s trust on the word and oath of the Lord, and not doubting that our prayers are heard. To doubt Christ’s words, spoken with so much solemnity, as the culminating word of admonition before He returned to the Father, is to plunge into a miserable unbelief from which nothing can extricate us. There was that about Christ’s “Verily, verily I say unto you” which seemed to carry conviction and allay the spirit of controversy. The way in which the early Church used to “remember the words of the Lord Jesus” speaks volumes for the vividness of the impression which those words made on those who first heard them. We cannot now reproduce that impression or even imagine it with any great success; but if we wish to do full justice to the situation, we must allow for the result produced, and give to it the weight which it deserves.1 [Note: W. B. Selbie, Aspects of Christ, 163. 2. The comprehensiveness of the promise.—Christ’s words are: “If ye shall ask anything of the Father, he will give it you in my name.” (1) God is not only able but willing to give all that is asked of Him. It is nothing for Him to give. He delights to give. It is the joy of the Divine life to be giving all the while. The most delightsome day in the life of the Empress Josephine, as she wrote in one of her letters, was when, coming through the Alps with her husband, she was left for a little while to rest in a humble cottage. She saw that the eyes of the lonely woman there were stained with tears and asked her trouble. The woman said it was poverty. “How much,” asked Josephine, “would relieve it?” “Oh,” she said, “there is no relieving it; it would require four hundred francs to save our little vineyard and our goats.” Josephine counted out of her purse the four hundred francs into the woman’s lap, who gathered them together, and fell down and kissed her feet.2 [Note: D. J. Burrell, The Verilies of Jesus, 141. (2) The promise to prayer is not limited to any special class of subjects. It includes all things, both temporal and eternal, material and spiritual. The objects of the outer creation are not unworthy to be the gifts of God, for they are the creatures of God. He created them for us. He created us and them for His only begotten Son. No created object has any end short of the glory of Christ. Consequently there is nothing that is beyond the circle of legitimate prayer. We are too apt to doubt whether we may pray for temporal mercies. The real reason is that we doubt whether all created things are really worthy of God as their Creator. He who created them with a purpose can use them for the highest of all purposes. The universe is one, but manifold. It has unity of purpose, from God in Christ. It has unity of purpose, for God in Christ. We must be careful to remember that we cannot take anything out of its place in creation. It will work for the glory of Christ; and if we will use it for Christ’s glory, we shall share in its blessing. If, however, we suppose that these meaner things are just created for our indulgence, and use them for the purposes of our sin, then we set them apart from the dispensation of God’s love, and must get them how and whence we can; and instead of finding a blessing if we do acquire them, we shall find that they have turned to be to us a curse. If only the necessities of earth drove us to live more conscientiously for the glory of God, we should find that the weariness of earth, instead of dragging us down, would urge us to efforts more worthy of heaven. A prayer of the Athenians: “Rain, rain, O dear Zeus, down on the ploughed fields of the Athenians, and on the plains.” In truth we ought not to pray at all, or we ought to pray in this simple and noble fashion.1 [Note: Marcos Aurelius.] Prayer can obtain everything; it can open the windows of heaven, and shut the gates of hell; it can put a holy constraint upon God, and detain an angel till he leave a blessing; it can open the treasures of rain, and soften the iron ribs of rocks, till they melt into tears and a flowing river: prayer can unclasp the girdles of the North, saying to a mountain of ice, “Be thou removed thence, and cast into the bottom of the sea”; it can arrest the sun in the midst of his course, and send the swift-winged winds upon our errand; and all those strange things, and secret decrees, and unrevealed transactions which are above the clouds and far beyond the regions of the stars, shall combine in ministry and advantages for the praying Man 1:1 [Note: Jeremy Taylor.] 3. The conditions of the promise.—There are no absolute conditions laid down in the text, but there are two conditions implied. (1) It is by the next word in His promise that Christ brings us to the full meaning and the very heart of prayer. God will give those things which we really ask of Him as God: “Whatsoever things ye ask the Father.” If prayer be, as the Intercessor of our race always teaches, nothing but the going of the children to the Father to ask of Him what they need, it is an action of faith and self-sacrifice. “Our Father” must be the beginning of it. “Thy will be done” must be its centre. In the Divine relationship of the members of a family to one another we have the standing parable of prayer. Could there be any character attributed to God in which we would rather approach Him? What attribute would so well imply His love and regard for our interests as His paternal relation to us? Earthly fathers give not their sons stones when they ask for bread, or a serpent instead of a fish; if, then, they “being evil know how to give good gifts unto their children, how much more shall our heavenly Father give good gifts to them that ask him?” From Him all Fatherhood in heaven and earth gets its name. And fatherhood at its best, as we know it, is but a faint adumbration of what it means in its perfection in God of love and solicitude, will and power to help the children who are His own. And that is what men and women are, not mere intricate inventions, mechanical toys playing their little part in this great machine, the world, but God’s children with points of affinity in their nature with His own, and capable of fellowship with Him. And so to understand the relations of God to man and man to God, you have not to go to the models in the pattern shop, or to the factory with its operatives, or to the court-house with its laws, or even to the palace with its rooms of state and subjects in obeisance before their monarch. But go to the home, go to the nursery; see a father with his children, ay, better still, a mother with her prattling little ones with a thousand requests a day, and learn there what God is.2 [Note: R. J. Drummond, Faith’s Perplexities, 183. Our soul is so specially loved of Him that is highest, that it overpasseth the knowing of all creatures—that is to say, there is no creature that is made that may fully know how much and how sweetly and how tenderly our Maker loveth us. And therefore we may with grace and His help stand in spiritual beholding, with everlasting marvel of this high, overpassing, inestimable love that Almighty God hath to us of His goodness. And therefore we may ask of our Lover with reverence all that we will.1 [Note: Julian the Anchoress.] (2) Our petitions are answered “in the name of Christ.” The reading, “He will give it you in my name,” is preferable to the reading of the Authorized Version, “Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name.” We could make no claim to the smallest gift of God if Christ had not died, if Christ had not risen again—died for our sins, risen again for our justification; if Christ had not ascended to the right hand of the Father; if He were not there even now, our Mediator, our Intercessor, our Advocate, our High Priest. We must recognize that in Christ, and only in Christ, God is perfectly well pleased; and in us only so far as we are found in Him; that all our acceptance with God, all our right to be heard by God, rests solely and exclusively on the work for sinners which Christ once accomplished on Calvary, and is evermore pleading in heaven. But the fact that the Father gives in the name of Christ, by whom He made, sustains, and governs the world, and through whom all His redeeming love is manifested to His earthly children, presupposes that they present their requests through Him as their Mediator—that is, in His name. Our prayer goes up through the same channel through which God’s gifts come down. He who would receive from God in Christ’s name must pray Christ’s prayer, “Not my will, but thine be done.” And then, though many wishes may be unanswered, and many weak petitions unfulfilled, and many desires unsatisfied, the essential spirit of the prayer will be answered, and, His will being done in us and on us, our wishes will acquiesce in it and desire nothing besides. To him who can thus pray in Christ’s name in the deepest sense, and after Christ’s pattern, every door in God’s treasure-house flies open, and he may take as much of the treasure as he desires. The Master bends lovingly over such a soul, and with outstretched hand says, “What wilt thou that I should do unto thee? Be it unto thee even as thou wilt.” We all know with what confidence the clerk of a business house goes to a bank with a draft “in the name” of his firm. If he were to present it in his own name, that would be a very different affair. The demand made on behalf of the firm is instantly honoured. We can see that there is all the difference in this instance between acting in a private, and acting in a public capacity. To ask as belonging to a business corporation for the purposes of that corporation is one thing. To ask as a private individual, with merely personal ends in view, is quite another thing.1 [Note: A. W. Robinson, The Voice of Joy and Health, 68. The Day of Knowledge and Power Literature Baring-Gould (S.), Village Preaching for a Year, 2nd Ser., i. 243. Beanie (J. N.), The Eternal Life, 84. Benson (R. M.), The Final Passover, ii. (pt. ii.) 276. Bernard (T. D.), The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 303. Burrell (D. J.), The Verilies of Jesus, 137. Drummond (R. J.), Faith’s Perplexities, 175. Gordon (A. J.), In Christ, 135. Hall (A. C. A.), The Christian Doctrine of Prayer, 72. Hall (J. V.), The Sinner’s Friend, 43. Hull (E. L.), Sermons preached at King’s Lynn, 2nd Ser., 40. Hutton (R. E.), The Crown of Christ, ii. 133. Kuegele (F.), Country Sermons, New Ser., ix. 321, 340. M‘Kinney (J.), The Tree of Life, 42. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John xv.–xxi., 140. Martin (S.), Fifty Sermons, 207. Murray (A.), The Ministry of Intercession, 129. Murray (A.), With Christ, 186, 196. Pigou (F.), Faith and Practice, 246. Rogers (J. H.), The “Verily, Verilys” of Christ, 231. Scott (M.), The Harmony of the Collects, Epistles, and Gospels, 127. Shore (T. T.), Some Difficulties of Belief, 25, 43. Smellie (A.), In the Hour of Silence, 180. Smith (D.), Christian Counsel, 132. Trench (R. C.), Sermons preached for the most part in Ireland, 288. Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), New Ser., xix., No. 1167. Wilmot-Buxton (H. J.), Life of Duty, i. 244. Christian World Pulpit, xii. 68 (Roberts). Contemporary Pulpit, v. 291 (Hancock). Record, 1908, p. 508 (E. N. Coulthard). Life in the Knowledge of God And this is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.—John 17:3. 1. The prayer of Christ from which this text is taken is in some respects the most precious relic of the past. We have here the words which Christ addressed to God in the critical hour of His life—the words in which He uttered the deepest feeling and thought of His Spirit, clarified and concentrated by the prospect of death. Even among the prayers of Christ this stands by itself as that in which He gathered up the retrospect of His past and surveyed the future of His Church; in which, as if already dying, He solemnly presented to the Father Himself, His work, and His people. Recognizing the grandeur of the occasion, we may be disposed to agree with Melanchthon, who, when giving his last lecture, shortly before his death, said: “There is no voice which has ever been heard, either in heaven or in earth, more exalted, more holy, more fruitful, more sublime, than this prayer offered up by the Son of God Himself.”1 [Note: Marcus Dods, The Gospel of St. John, 247. 2. The essence of eternal life is here defined and represented as consisting in the knowledge of the only true God, and of Jesus Christ His messenger, knowledge being taken comprehensively as including faith, love, and worship, and the emphasis lying on the objects of such knowledge. The Christian religion is described in opposition to paganism on the one hand, with its many gods, and to Judaism on the other, which, believing in the one true God, rejected the claims of Jesus to be the Christ. It is further so described as to exclude by anticipation Arian and Socinian views of the Person of Christ. The names of God and of Jesus are put on a level as objects of religious regard, whereby an importance is assigned to the latter incompatible with the dogma that Jesus is a mere man. 3. It may seem strange that, in addressing His Father, Jesus should deem it needful to explain wherein eternal life consists; and some, to get rid of the difficulty, have supposed that the sentence is an explanatory reflection interwoven into the prayer by the Evangelist. Yet the words were perfectly appropriate in the mouth of Jesus Himself. The first clause is a confession by the man Jesus of His own faith in God His Father as the supreme object of knowledge; and the whole sentence is really an argument in support of the prayer, Glorify Thy Son. The force of the declaration lies in what it implies respecting the existing ignorance of men concerning the Father and His Son. It is as if Jesus said: Father, Thou knowest that eternal life consists in knowing Thee and Me. Look around, then, and see how few possess such knowledge. The heathen world knoweth Thee not—it worships idols; the Jewish world is equally ignorant of Thee in spirit and in truth; for while boasting of knowing Thee, it rejects Me. The whole world is overspread with a dark veil of ignorance and superstition. Take Me out of it, therefore, not because I am weary of its sin and darkness, but that I may become to it a sun. Hitherto My efforts to illuminate the darkness have met with small success. Grant Me a position from which I can send forth light over all the earth. I Life Eternal 1. What is the meaning of “eternal”? The answer of the ordinary man would be, “Something that lasts for ever.” With him eternity would simply mean endless time; it would mean duration, or permanence, or endless succession, or unalterability; it would mean adding so much time together that you could add no more. And so the sort of metaphors that people have used to express eternity have been the metaphors of the circle or the sand on the seashore. We have all been told that if we tried to count the sand on the seashore we should never reach the idea of eternity. Now, that sort of language is eminently misleading. “Time shall be no more.” That “phantom of succession of time” is wholly inapplicable to the life of God. With God there is no time—no past, no future; all is the everlasting now. It is only in consequence of our present limitations, only in consequence of that great condition of time under which we live, that we are unable to think of God as living out of time, and that we are compelled to think of Him as living only in endless time. The life eternal is the real life; it is the life that is life indeed. The Greek word bios and the Greek word zoe both mean “life” and are translated by “life”; but they are words of entirely different significance in the Greek. The first word signifies chiefly animal life—the brief space of time, the brief space of life through which we have to pass; bare existence is the word used, for example, in such passages as “What is your life? It is even as a vapour.” But the other word zoe belongs to an entirely different and higher conception. In the New Testament, it is used almost, if not entirely, for the inherent principle of life which is involved in the very being of God Himself, so that the first word means conscious existence; the second word means the sort of life of which God is capable, and we have it in all such passages as “should not perish, but have eternal life.” “I am the resurrection and the life,” saith the Lord. “I am the bread of life.”1 [Note: Archbishop W. Alexander.] Even so is man: No matter how well he may know the law governing his animal personality, and the laws governing matter, these laws do not give him the least indications as to how he is to act with that piece of bread which he has in his hands—whether to give it to his wife, a stranger, his dog, or eat it himself; whether to defend this piece, or give it to him who asks for it. But the life of man consists only in the solution of these and similar questions.2 [Note: Tolstoy, Works, xvi. 281. 2. There would be little worth or significance in the mere endless prolongation of life, apart from the question of the kind of life that is to be lived for ever. The life that Christ promises us is of an order altogether higher than the life of ordinary experience. It is a life that lifts us up to a new region above the cares and meannesses of this world, that makes us indifferent to most of the ends and ideals for which the mass of men live, and at least independent of the pleasures to which they are so wedded. Eternal life, in fact, is spiritual life. When the spirit, the highest part of our nature, is called forth unto full activity and matured to its full stature, and when it subdues and regulates the whole man, then we have entered on this new plane of existence. 3. This spiritual life may be ours here and now. It is an error to connect the thought of eternal life exclusively with the future. If we are of God’s elect, we are now living this eternal life. At this very moment the eternal life of God is throbbing in our hearts. Every act of prayer and communion with God, every effort after righteousness and truth, every enterprise of love and mercy, is a manifestation of this life. The gift of eternal life is a present possession, not merely a future expectation. We have all been baptized into this life, we have all been made partakers of this life, we are all exhorted to show forth this life. Too often is eternal life regarded as the reward of a life of active virtue, as the far-off hope which stimulates the fainting heart to “patient continuance in well-doing”; too often is it supposed that only when the battle is over and the victory won shall we pass beneath the dark gateway of death into the bright peace of the heavenly Kingdom. But, on the other hand, the herald of Christ came with the cry, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand,” a cry which Christ Himself confirmed by proclaiming to His hearers, “The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you.” Eternal life, then, is not set before the world as the prize of patient purity, the reward of long-continued well-doing, or the stimulus to incite men to a life of holiness. It is not a glory which only after death will crown the successful endeavours of the faithful; it is the purity, the well-doing, the holiness itself. It is the knowledge of God and Christ, with all the spiritual virtues which attend it—knowledge which, if the rational nature of man be no delusion, may be ours now; virtues which, if the life of Christ have any significance, if His blessed example and exhortations have any meaning for us, may adorn our present earthly life.1 [Note: A. Semple, Scotch Sermons (1880), 333. II Eternal Life as Knowledge of God in Christ 1. It is knowledge.—Knowledge is a word of more than one meaning, and that knowledge of God which is eternal life has very little in common with that knowledge of Him which is called theology. For there is a difference, and that a fundamental difference, between knowing a thing and knowing about it; there is a difference, and that a fundamental difference, between the knowledge which we gain from books and that which comes through feeling. Those who “know God” most worthily are not the intellectually powerful, but the spiritually sensitive, and very often such are found among the “poor of this world.” To them is given the higher vision. The husband knows his wife, not by keen intellectual estimates of her character, but by the insight of a close and intimate fellowship. In this way the mother knows her child, and adjusts all her relations by the knowledge. The friend could not tell us why he loves his friend, or recount those elements of character which he admires. Heart knows heart, and love knits bonds. And the innermost secret is that we must feel God, and by the feeling gain our knowledge of Him.1 [Note: R. T., Light for Life’s Even-tide, 79. The mere knowing of the understanding is never life, but only the instrument or tool of life. That which my understanding, my logical faculty, knows is, so far, outside of me. I may build my life on it. But of it I cannot build my life. I know that twelve times twelve are a hundred and forty-four, that London lies nearly two hundred miles from Liverpool, and that June is likely to bring warm days and December cold. And on each of those bits of knowledge I build up now and again fragments of my life. They are useful to me in my planning and contriving; but they are not life. But I know the remorse that is the fruit of sin, the pleading of the Holy Spirit in my conscience, the look of love in my friend’s eyes, the bliss of the summer sunshine, the chill pain of a great bereavement; and that knowing is itself of the very texture of my life. If you could take this strange abstract thing, my life, and divide it up into its several elements, you would find it all made up of knowings such as these. They are of its essence. For these knowings in me are not information given me by others, not inferences reached by syllogism, not even convictions grasped by closest reasoning, but immediate realizations, instant experiences. And so these are not the furniture of life, but life itself. And if the eternal life consists in knowing certain objects, then the knowing must be of this immediate kind, facts of the soul, realizations woven into the very structure of the self.2 [Note: R. C. Armstrong, Memoir and Sermons, 253. Comrades, I said, who to the West Have through a thousand dangers pressed, Let not the little space Remaining to our race Run out before our senses find Experience of the world behind The courses of the Sun, Where people there are none. Consider what hath been your lot: Not for brute life were ye begot: But that ye might pursue Virtue and knowledge too.1 [Note: Dante, Inferno, xxvi. (trans. by Shadwell).] 2. It is knowledge of God.—The one thing needful for men, the great cry of our nature, in which all other cries are swallowed up, is for knowledge—the knowledge of God. To know the true God has been the deep desire of living souls through all time. Wearied by the changes of a fleeting world, finding no repose in the best that the finite can give, men of earnest minds long to know the Eternal that they may rest in Him. An old mystic has said: “God is an unutterable sigh of the human soul.” With greater truth we may reverse the saying, and affirm that the human soul is a never-ending sigh after God. In its deepest recesses there lives or slumbers inextinguishable longing after Him, and the more we consider the nature of that longing, the more we discover that what it aims at is not a mere intellectual apprehension of God, but a personal relationship to Him. It is essentially of a practical nature. It is an impulse to draw nigh to God, to place ourselves in personal fellowship with Him from the conviction that He hath made these hearts of ours for Himself, and they are altogether restless till they find their rest in Him. And thus the cry of the earnest has always been that of the disciple: “Shew us the Father and it sufficeth us.” The dream that has haunted the earnest of the world has ever been this—to live the blessed life man must know the true God, and Christ proclaims that dream to be a fact. What does knowing God mean? It does not mean knowing Him by name, knowing about Him, knowing Him as a stranger and foreigner, whose speech and ways we have not been accustomed to; it means knowing Him in the sense in which we know a father, or mother, or friend, whom we love and value above every one else; whose ways and thoughts we are thoroughly acquainted with; and who, we feel, knows us thoroughly, feels with us, cares for us, and longs for our being happy.1 [Note: R. W. Church, Village Sermons, 143. 3. It is knowledge of God in Christ.—The great want of humanity is the knowledge of God. This want is met by Jesus Christ whom God has sent. Christ has power over all that He might give eternal life. It is He that gives eternal life: it is He that gives the knowledge of the only true God which is eternal life. There is nothing that tends to life in the knowledge you have apart from Him. For the knowledge of the true God and for eternal life we are utterly and entirely dependent on Jesus Christ. Christ came to give us this knowledge, and how did He give it? Not simply by telling us certain truths or teaching certain doctrines about God, but by living among us, as God-man in the flesh breathing our cerulean air, and speaking our human speech, loving us with a human heart, and healing and helping us with human hands, and then telling us that he who had seen Him had seen the Father. This is eternal life, that we should see the glory of God—the love of God—in the face of Jesus Christ. The latest taken away of those who made the happiness of my Oxford life was Robert Gandell, who ended his days at Wells, of which cathedral he was Canon:—but who was chiefly known at Oxford (where he had passed all his time), first, as Michel Fellow of Queen’s; then, as Tutor of Magdalen Hall and Fellow of Hertford College; but especially as Hebrew Lecturer, and Professor of Syriac and Arabic. I have never known a man who with severe recondite learning combined in a more exquisite degree that peculiar Theological instinct without which an English Hebraist is no better than,—in fact is scarcely as good as,—a learned Jew.2 [Note: J. W. Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men, i. p. xxii.] “Jesus Christ whom thou didst send.” He is the key to the difficulty which we all must feel more or less when we speak of knowing God. For us men in this human life the knowledge of the Father is the knowledge of the Son, the knowledge of God is the knowledge of Jesus Christ. We have before us in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ the satisfaction of this need of a divinity which is, if not nearer, at least more apparent, to our human life, and more possible for mortal men to approach. We have before us in the Gospels the picture of God clothed with humanity—treading the streets of an earthly city, living that very life of struggle which seems at first sight to be at the very opposite pole of existence from God. Again and again, through the prison bars of that humanity, there flashed forth the light of the divinity that was in Him; but His life was a human life—a life like yours and mine; a life which felt pain and disappointment and temptation, and a life consequently which, though at far distance, it is possible for us to know and to imitate.1 [Note: E. Hatch, Memoirs, 187. 4. What is it to know Christ? Is it to trust Him? Not simply that, if we trust only in something He did long ago. Is it to love Him? Not simply that, if we love Him only as He stands far back in the past, for the redemption He achieved then. What is it to know Him? It is to have Him pressing Himself, with all the power that ever was in Him still in Him, upon our hearts to-day. It is to be conscious that He is for ever taking my life afresh and impressing Himself upon it afresh. It is to hear Him calling to me, not down the centuries from long ago, but from here—close at my side, with a voice that is newly lifted to-day, an invitation that is newly given to-day. It is not to be inspired by what He was, but to feel His power now coming straight from the living heart of Him to me. It is to experience, not the reflex influence of what He did far back in the history of mankind, but the direct influence of what He does. It is to discern, amid the figures which crowd the canvas of our life, that One Figure moving ceaselessly to and fro. The Real Presence, if you like. To know Christ in this sense—that every moment He comes with a new ministry to snatch me out of my littleness into His greatness—that is eternal life. To know Christ in this sense—that He gives the secret of life newly to me ever and ever again—that is eternal life. To know Christ in this sense—that He repeats to-day every blessing He bestowed in other days, changing the form of it to meet the changing need, answering to every hour’s requirement with grace newly-born out of His great and loving heart—to know Him so is to take life from Him now, is eternal life.2 [Note: H. W. Clark, Meanings and Methods of the Spiritual Life, 21. Knowing Christ makes us live as God lives, so far as that can be for us. Knowing Christ makes us live as God lives—that is the miracle—sets us into worlds where limitations and sorrows and dyings cease to have any meaning. Know Christ, and the wearinesses and weaknesses by which an unceasing cry is wrung out from the world cannot touch your true life to harm it any more than they can touch God’s; for Christ gives you eternal life. Know Christ, and you cannot die any more than God can die; for Christ gives you eternal life. There is nothing partial about the blessing Christ bestows. Eternal life is a thing others dare not speak of; but He gives that because He Himself possesses it, and, in giving that, gives all. One may look on this trial of humanity and another may look on that; one voice may speak a word to make this struggle lighter, and another may possess some secret to strengthen the soul in that conflict—Christ, when we know Him, does not patch and mend life so, but just lifts us away out of all these things into the eternal worlds, so that trial and struggle and conflict are to us no more than they are to Himself, to God. One has the secret that will make life worthier, he thinks; and another speaks the word to make life happier, he thinks: Christ bids us just know Him, and all is done.1 [Note: H. W. Clark, Meanings and Methods of the Spiritual Life, 24. (1) Knowledge of Christ implies obedience.—“To know Jesus”—what does it mean? Here is a guiding word from the Apostle John: “He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar.” Then how many of us know Him? “He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not.…” Then knowledge implies obedience. There can be no knowledge of Christ without obedience. Without obedience we may have a few ideas about Him, but we do not know Him. If we are destitute of obedience, then that which we assume to be knowledge is no knowledge at all, and we must give it another name. Obedience is essential. What is obedience? Confining our inquiry strictly to the human plane, what is essentially implied in obedience? When one man obeys another it is implied that he subjects his will to the will of the other, and works in harmony with its demands. The oarsmen in our university boats have to subject their wills to the will of the strokesman, whose stroke determines and controls the rest. The oarsmen have but one will. That is obedience, a will attuned to the will of another, and without that attuning of the will no knowledge of Christ can ever be gained. And once when he was walking with Francis and came to a cross-way where one could go to Florence, to Siena or to Arezzo, and Brother Masseo asked, “Father, which way shall we take?” Francis answered him, “The way God wishes.” But Brother Masseo asked further, “How shall we know God’s will?” And Francis answered: “That I will now show you. In the name of holy obedience I order you to start turning round and round in the road here, as the children do, and not to stop until I tell you to.” Then Brother Masseo began to whirl round and round as children do, and he became so giddy that he often fell down; but as Francis said nothing to him, he got up again and continued. At last as he was turning round with great vigour, Francis said, “Stop and do not move!” And he stood still, and Francis asked him, “How is your face turned?” Brother Masseo answered, “Towards Siena!” Then said Francis, “It is God’s will that we shall go to Siena to-day.”1 [Note: J. Jörgensen, St. Francis of Assisi, 110. (2) Knowledge of Christ means love.—“He that loveth not knoweth not God.” Then how many of us know Him? No love: no knowledge! May we not slightly alter the former word of the Apostle, and read it thus—“He that saith, I know Him, and loveth not, is a liar.” It would be just as reasonable for a man without eyes to claim that he sees the stars as for a man without love to claim that he knows the Lord. Without love we cannot know Christ. What is love? It is indefinable, as indefinable as fragrance or light. Our descriptive words are at the best only vague and remote. Though we cannot define a sentiment, we can sometimes suggest it by its effects, and this will suffice for our immediate purpose. Love is “good will toward men.” Observe, good will toward men, not merely good wish; willing good, not only wishing it! To wish a thing and to will it, may be two quite different things. Wishing may be only a sweet and transient sentiment; willing implies effort, active and persistent work. Wishing dreams; willing creates. Love is good will, the willing of good toward all men, the effort to think the best of all men, and to help them on to the best. That is love. The path of the intellect is not the path that brings the soul into that Sacred Presence which it seeks. He is reached by another means altogether. What is it? Let the soul take to itself the “wings of love,” and the distance between it and Him will be covered in a moment. The mountain will become a plain, and He who seemed to be afar off will be found to be nigh at hand. Or, to use the figure which Browning employs, love is the single “leap” that gains Him, which leap the mere intellectual faculty is powerless to take.1 [Note: J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 145. (3) Knowledge of Christ is likeness.—Knowledge necessitates likeness. Have we not abundant proof of its truth? Two unlikes cannot know each other. Two men who are morally unlike each other may live together, and neither can possibly know the contents of the other’s life. How would you describe pain to a man who has never experienced it? He cannot know it. He cannot even imagine it. Pain is known only by the pain-ridden. Knowledge implies likeness. The principle has a wide application. To know we must be. To know music, we must be musical. To know art, we must be artistic. To know Christ, we must be Christlike. “This is life, … to know Jesus.” To know Jesus is to share His life! His life is eternal. Life eternal is just Christ-life. This is life eternal, to have life like Christ, to know Him in spirit and in truth. All grows, says Doubt, all falls, decays and dies; There is no second life for flower or tree: O suffering soul, be humble and be wise, Nor dream new worlds have any need of thee! And yet, cries Hope, the world is deep and wide; And the full circle of our life expands, Broadening and brightening, on an endless tide That ebbs and flows between these mystic lands. Not endless life, but endless love I crave, The gladness and the calm of holier springs, The hope that makes men resolute and brave, The joyful life in the great life of things. The soul that loves and works will need no praise; But, fed with sunlight and with morning breath, Will make our common days eternal days, And fearless greet the mild and gracious death.2 [Note: W. M. W. Call.] Life in the Knowledge of God Literature Allen (T.), Children of the Resurrection, 72. Armstrong (R. A.), Memoir and Sermons, 248. Barry (A.), Sermons preached at Westminster Abbey, 3, 71. Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, i. 140. Clark (H. W.), Meanings and Methods of the Spiritual Life, 14. Crump (W. W.), A Buried Sphinx, 1. Eyton (R.), The Apostles’ Creed, 195. How (W. W.), The Knowledge of God, 3. Jowett (J. H.), Thirsting for the Springs, 114. Kingsley (C.), Sermons for the Times, 14. Lambert (B.), Memoir, Sermons, and Lectures, 129. Lonsdale (J.), Sermons, 162. Lyttelton (A. T.), College and University Sermons, 1. McLeod (M. J.), The Unsearchable Riches, 93. Pearce (J.), The Alabaster Box, 70. Sandford (C. W.), Counsel to English Churchmen Abroad, 194. Sinclair (W. M.), Christ and our Times, 91. Swann (N. E. E.), New Lights on the Old Faith, 159. Walpole (G. H. S.), Vital Religion, 1. Christian World Pulpit, xxxiii. 21 (Brooks); xxxviii. 291 (Leitch); lxviii. 259 (Horne); lxxiii. 153 (Horne); lxxx. 81 (Alexander). Churchman’s Pulpit: Easter Day and Season, xi. 314. Scotch Sermons (1880), 324 (Semple), 365 (Stevenson). Treasury (New York), xiv. 759 (Scudder). The Master’s Consecration And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth.—John 17:19. The richest, fullest life our earth has ever known was the life of Jesus Christ. No one ever had within himself such complete satisfactions, such assured convictions, and such settled peace as He. Rich and full as His life was to Himself, it was the richest, fullest life to others that has ever blessed humanity. Wherever He went He was the source of helpfulness. Even the hem of His garment had power in it, and from His lips, His hands, His heart went out an unceasing, abounding inspiration to the souls of men. Jesus Christ was a great fountain whose waters of comfort welled up like a flood within His own heart, and then flowed forth full-volumed to cheer the world. His life had more in it and gave more from it than any other life since time began. What was the secret of it? He sanctified Himself. When Augustine Thierry, after withdrawing himself from the world, and devoting himself to study, that he might investigate the origin, causes and effects of the successive German invasions, spent six years in poring with the pertinacity of a Benedictine monk over worm-eaten manuscripts, and deciphering and comparing black-letter texts, at last completed his magnificent History of the Conquest, he found he had lost his eyesight. The most precious of his senses had been sacrificed to his zeal in literary research. The beauties of nature and the records of scholarship were thenceforth shut out from him; and yet did he think the sacrifice too great? In a letter, written to a friend long afterward, he said: “Were I to begin my life over again, I would choose the road that had led me to where I now am. Blind and afflicted, without hope and without leisure, I can safely offer this testimony, the sincerity of which, coming from a man in my condition, cannot be called in question. There is something in the world worth more than pleasure, more than fortune, more than health itself. I mean devotion, self-dedication to a great end.” There is a higher end than scientific research, and to that end Jesus Christ dedicated Himself. In the instructive and profound book on The Religion of the Semites, Dr. Robertson Smith quotes, as containing the deepest conception of the Atonement, these words of our Lord, uttered as He knelt in prayer by the altar of the supreme sacrifice: “For their sakes I consecrate myself, that they themselves also may be consecrated in truth.” Besson writes in his spiritual letters, “It is in His passion that the Saviour shows Himself, like the sun at midday, in all the ardour of His love.” And in the shadow of the cross, He who had schooled Himself daily to the repression of feeling spoke the secret of His life and death. He interpreted His whole work as a consecration in the power of love. On the Cross He consecrated Himself as the atoning sacrifice—the absolute oblation for the sins of the whole world. Here is the first aspect of the Cross; its witness to the deep necessity of expiation, to the completeness of Christ’s offering for sin. But this doctrine may be stated with a narrow correctness which leaves a world of unknown feeling behind. Before the death of Christ came His life, and that was a long self-sacrifice. It was willingly surrendered hour by hour till all the years were full. Then it was completed—consummated in death.1 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, Ten-Minute Sermons, 235. I The Act of Consecration The word “sanctify” is used in the Bible with two distinct significations. The original meaning of the word is to consecrate, to dedicate, to set apart to God and to God’s service; and this is its ordinary meaning in the Old Testament. We commonly intend by it, to make holy: sanctity and holiness are the same; sanctification is the growing completeness of the Christian character, the hallowing of the personal life: in this sense the word is often used in the New Testament. Sanctification, in brief, may describe either the purpose or the process of the Christian life. It is not hard to trace the connexion between these two meanings of the word; to see how the first meaning passes naturally and necessarily into the other. Perfect consecration would be complete and absolute holiness. No purity would be wanting to the motive, no elevation to the character, of one who should be devoted to the Lord his God, with “all his heart, and all his soul, and all his mind, and all his strength.” We must lay aside any thought of a native holiness, in man or angel, apart from conformity to God’s character and obedience to His will. God alone is holy, in and of Himself; the source of our sanctity, like the spring of our life, is in God. The charm and energy of the personal holiness even of Christ lay in His constant devotion to His Father’s will. This is at once our Lord’s life-purpose, and an ideal for us. “I sanctify myself.” I am set apart, consecrated, devoted to Thee and to mankind. Consecrated in thought, word and deed: devoted in motive and in action. I am near Thee in my daily life, in my going out and coming in, in my trials as in my triumphs, in my death as in my life. I am like Thee, revealing Thy character; having Thy image stamped on me. 1. He concealed His greatness and glory.—The natural dignities of the Son of God had to be hidden from us. John, the beloved disciple, he who knew the Lord more intimately than any other, he who saw most clearly into the depths of that soul, who leaned upon the bosom of the Lord, tells us that he beheld the glory of the Son of God, His face like unto the sun in its strength, His eyes like unto flames of fire;—and John fell at His feet as dead. Thus was it on the Mount of Transfiguration, when for a moment the innate glory of the Son of God shone through the veil that hid it, and His robes were white and glistering, and again His face was like the sun, and again His eyes were like unto flames of fire, and the disciples, blinded and bewildered by such splendour, hid themselves, afraid, and shrank from that excess of light. Think of Him, then, for our sakes setting apart His glory that He might become our Blessed Brother and Friend, and that all might draw near to Him and be at home with Him; sitting down with lowly fishermen, welcoming the outcast, gathering to Himself the little children, drawing around Him all the sad and needy of the earth. Out of this comes the other great temptation that assails Him. “If Thou art the Son of God, if Thou art not bound by these laws of humanity, if Thou canst dismay and bewilder Thine enemies by the manifestations of Thy glory, put forth Thy power, assert Thine authority.” Think of Him as He stands with outstretched hand rebuking Peter there in the shadow of Gethsemane, in that night, the full moon of the Passover high in the heavens, about Him the rough crowd gathered with swords and staves! Judas has betrayed his Lord with a kiss, and the soldiers step forward to lay their hands upon the Saviour, when Peter draws his sword to fight for the Lord. “Thinkest thou,” said Jesus, “that I cannot now pray to my Father and he will presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?” But He sanctified Himself, setting Himself apart for our sakes. Think, again, how it met Him on the Cross. From out the crowd that gathered about the city walls, there rings the fierce derision, “If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross.” Others have suffered perhaps as cruel a martyrdom, others have hung in anguish, mocked and derided; but of all that ever went forth to die, He alone could say, “I lay down my life. No man taketh it from me.” This is the glory and triumph of Christ that, conscious of a power which could have achieved so sublime and instant a triumph over all His foes,—His cross transformed into a throne, about Him all His holy angels, and He seated amidst the terrors of judgment summoning these His murderers to His feet,—for our sakes He Bet Himself apart and hung upon His cross and sunk until there came the final cry, “It is finished.” Is humiliation easy? Was it easy for Christ to humble Himself? Is it easy for us? “There are certain animals,” says George Eliot, “to which tenacity of position is a law of life—they can never flourish again, after a single wrench: and there are certain human beings to whom predominance is a law of life—they can only sustain humiliation so long as they can refuse to believe in it, and, in their own conception, predominate still.”1 [Note: George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss.] Manin, the last doge of Venice, was compelled to swear allegiance to Austria in the name of his compatriots. With a broken heart he made ready for the ceremony, but as he stepped forward at the appointed time to pronounce the fatal words, his strength and his faculties gave way together. He fell senseless at the feet of his foes, and died not long afterward.2 [Note: W. M. Sloane, Napoleon Bonaparte, ii. 24. 2. He made an absolute surrender of Himself.—There are times when Egoism can reach its best development only by what would be called a complete surrender of itself to the help of others. There is a tradition that one who desired to produce a fine kind of pottery always failed until he threw himself into the fire that was baking his work, and lo, the effort was now a success, the pottery came forth as he had desired. Egoism submerged in Altruism became perfected Egoism and perfected Altruism at once. So Christ reached an hour in His life when He could not be the most that He ought to be unless He actually laid down His life for others. He would have been a renegade to His own high ideas of nobility of character if He had not been willing to die for mankind. Egoism for its own development needed a prodigal Altruism. The fulness of His own life demanded an outpouring of that life. I heard sometime since of an oculist who was very fond of cricket. But he had given it up, much as he enjoyed it, for he found that it affected the delicacy of his touch; and for the sake of those whom he sought to relieve he sanctified himself and set himself apart. That is what we want—that there shall come into our lives a force that prompts us always to be at our best and readiest for service, our fullest and richest to help, a tree that is always in leaf and always in bloom and always laden with its fruit, like the orange tree, where the beauty of the blossom meets with its fragrance the mellow glory of the fruit.1 [Note: Mark Guy Pearse.] There are two great pictures, each of them by a famous artist. One picture represents a woman in a hospital. The woman is a princess, fair and beautiful to look upon, but the hospital is most loathsome, because it is the home of a number of dying lepers, and this fair and beautiful woman is represented as wiping the face of a dying leper. That picture is a symbol of the dignity and the beauty of social service. But there hangs by its side another picture by another great artist. It represents a woman in her oratory. She is in the attitude of prayer. Beside her stands an angel. She is looking over the open pages of the Holy Bible, which are illuminated. And the legend tells us that while she knelt there in that place of prayer, seven times she was interrupted. Seven times there came a call at her door, a demand upon her love, upon her charity—a sevenfold recognition of the needs of her brother man. And seven times, with a patience and with a moral beauty beyond all description, she goes to the door, relieves these cases of necessity, and returns to her knees, to her attitude of prayer. This is a picture of the supreme dignity and the great worth of personal sanctification.1 [Note: O. W. Whittaker.] II The Aim of Consecration “I sanctify myself,”—that is the starting-point of redemption. “For their sakes,”—that is the end, the common good, the social welfare. The beginning is individual, the aim is social. The way to make a good world is, first of all, to be good oneself. First character, then charity; first life, then love;—that was the way of Jesus Christ. He does not stand in history as the great organizer or reformer of the social world. He stands primarily as the witness of the capacity for social service offered to each human soul. The Kingdom of God, which is the end of endeavour, is to come through the personal sanctification of individuals for the sake of others. The Christian paradox is the paradox of the solar system. An isolated soul, like an isolated planet, means instability and chaos. The stability of each part is found in its steady orbit round the larger centre, and the integrity of the whole vast order hangs on the adjustment of each single part. That is what is known in the world of nature as the law of attraction, and what Jesus calls in the spiritual world the Kingdom of God. The mother consecrates herself for her infant. She devotes herself in self-forgetting love. The motive is strong, the strongest we know—mother-love. This emotion throbbing in the mother-heart finds expression in a thousand acts of loving care; but the child grows up and needs a mother’s care less; still the care subsists. Some mythical relation arising out of motherhood seems to grow up in the mother’s heart which delights in self-giving. The average mother has it, without any special gifts of intellect. The exceptional mother controls this natural emotion by foresight and educated taste. It is only the unnatural mother that has it not. And yet, though it is common, it is never learned from the outside. It springs up instinctively in answer to the infant’s need. It is spontaneous and almost unthinking, and yet it is the most beautiful love in life, for it gives all and asks nothing. What a lyric life becomes to the mother in her joy! Her thoughts run to poetry and her horizon is filled with her helpless child. It is all the world to her. Something of this mother-love there must be in all consecration. We must love some one, some community, some race, in self-abandoning, self-effacing love before we can consecrate ourselves for their sakes. This is one standard of our capacity for such an enterprise. Can we love others better than ourselves so as to serve them? Otherwise the service will at the moment of pressure seem to us less important and less demanding than our own comfort and we shall throw it up in petulance or despair.1 [Note: Alexander Tomory, 66. Dante, writing his poetry, never forgot Beatrice. He perfected that poetry in thought, in word, in spirit, in movement, hoping that it would receive public recognition and bring him honour. But he perfected it and sought recognition and honour because burning in his soul was love for his idealized Beatrice, at whose shrine and to whose praise he intended to offer all the recognition and honour that he might possibly win. Beatrice was a vision beckoning him on to industry and skill. In a far holier, higher way Christ had His beckoning vision. It was the whole world that beckoned Him to endeavour and development. Perhaps from that hill behind Nazareth He watched the ships of all nations going up and down the Mediterranean, and the world with all its kingdoms stood out before His thought. Certain it is that when the hour of temptation came to Him, and all the kingdoms of the world were made to pass before Him, He recognized them, and they appealed to Him because He had thought of them so often, so lovingly, so devotedly. Yes, the supreme vision of Christ was “others.” Never at any period of His life was He without it. He unrolled the scroll of the Scriptures, and what He read was that He should open the door to the imprisoned, should bind up the broken-hearted, and should give deliverance to the enslaved. He used saw and hammer in the shop, making box, wheel, or door, and His eyes, His thought, His being, could not stop with them; His vision was peering far out into all the earth, and He was seeing thousands upon thousands of hearts appealing to Him for help.2 [Note: James G. K. McClure, Loyalty, 214. 1. For us, as for Christ, sanctification is separation for use.—It is in this sense that our Lord immediately goes on to say, “For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth.” To sanctify is to set apart. “The Lord hath set apart him that is godly for himself” (Psalms 4:3). In this sense the vessels of the Temple and of the Tabernacle were sanctified when they were set apart for a holy use. In this thought of separation the idea of the intrinsic character of the person or thing sanctified does not come into view in the first instance. Our Lord Himself, being perfectly holy, needed no moral renovation, but He did need to be set apart, to be devoted to the performance of the Father’s will. “For their sakes I sanctify myself,” that is, I set myself apart to do always the things that please Him. He came upon earth as a servant. “I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me” (John 6:38). He came as separated unto God, not in any spirit of Pharisaism, but in the spirit of whole-hearted devotion. He came to do but one thing—“My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work” (John 4:34), and this high aim is certainly, by virtue of his calling, also set before every Christian. In the wonderful system of the telephone the whole complex communication depends at each point on the little film of metal which we call a transmitter. Take that little disk out of the mechanism, and it becomes insignificant and purposeless: but set the transmitter where it belongs, in the wonderful mechanism of the greater system, and each word that is spoken into it is repeated miles and miles away. So stands the individual in the vast system of the providence of God. He is a transmitter. Taken by himself, what can be more insignificant than he? Yet, at each point the whole system depends on the transmissive power of the individual life. It takes its place in the great order, saying to itself, “For their sakes I sanctify myself”; and then, by the miracle of the Divine method, each vibration of the insignificant but sanctified life reaches the needs which are waiting for its message far away.1 [Note: F. G. Peabody, Sunday Evenings in the College Chapel, 250. 2. The next element is purification.—It follows almost without saying that if you set apart a person or a thing to the service of an absolutely holy God, anything that defiles that person or thing renders it unfit for God’s use, and hence, though the first meaning of the word is separation, it speedily “acquires,” as Archbishop Trench in his work on the New Testament synonyms points out, “a moral significance”; thus the thought of purification is added to the fundamental idea of separation. If I want to separate a cup to God’s service, and that cup is polluted, I must not only set it apart for God’s use, I must separate it from the pollution that is in it. Thus separation involves the idea of the removal of a defilement which is inconsistent with holy use. If I am to he separated to God, and sanctified for God’s service, it is not enough that I should be set apart without any reference to my intrinsic character. The character itself must be purified from the defilement which makes it unfit to be used in a holy service. “If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the master’s use, and prepared unto every good work” (2 Timothy 2:21). Thus we see that the deeper thought of the moral and spiritual renovation follows close upon the first great meaning of separation, and in fact springs out of it. Henry Drummond never said a truer thing than when he declared that what God wanted was not more of us, but a better brand. We need the perfecting of holiness for the perfecting alike of our usefulness and of our happiness. According to the Divine ordination, holiness and happiness are evermore inseparable. This is the secret of the bliss of heaven. And in proportion as holiness is cherished in the heart and practised in the life, will the new Jerusalem come down from God out of heaven. The men of grace have found Glory begun below, Celestial fruits on earthly ground From faith and hope may grow.1 [Note: P. S. Honson, The Four Faces, 226. 3. Transformation.—The purification is followed by a gradual transformation into the image of Christ. “Sanctify them in the truth.” “The truth” is not only the element in which we are to live, but the element into which we are to be transformed. The purposed end of the truth is not that we may find wisdom, but that we may gain holiness. That is to be the Christian distinctiveness; we are to be clothed in the garb of truth, and the world is to recognize, by our moral garments, that we are the kinsmen of the Lord. And in order that we may attain to this spiritual beauty, it is needful that we take our individual powers and deliberately separate them and dedicate them unto the truth. We must have a consecration service, and devote our reason to the truth. And we must have a consecration service, and devote our affections and our will. And the powers of the second rank must not be allowed to remain in assumed inferiority or defilement. Our imaginations must be devoted to the truth, and so must our language, and so must our humour. Every faculty and function in our life must be set apart to the clean, beautiful, beautifying truth, as revealed to us in our Saviour by His promised Spirit. A Connecticut farmer came to a well-known clergyman, saying that the people in his neighbourhood had built a new meeting-house, and that they wanted this clergyman to come and dedicate it. The clergyman, accustomed to participate in dedicatory services where different clergymen took different parts of the service, inquired: “What part do you want me to take in the dedication?” The farmer, thinking that this question applied to the part of the building to be included in the dedication, replied: “Why, the whole thing! Take it all in, from underpinning to steeple.” That man wanted the building to be wholly sanctified as a temple of God, and that all at once. “Know ye not that ye are a temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?”1 [Note: H. Clay Trumbull, Our Misunderstood Bible, 115. (1) We reach our best by devoting ourselves to the interests of others.—I am my best, not simply for myself, but for the world. Is there anything in all the teachings that man has had from his fellow-man, all that has come down to him from the lips of God, that is nobler, that is more far-reaching than this, that I am to be my best not simply for my own sake, but for the sake of that world which, by being my best, I shall make more complete, I shall, according to my ability, renew and recreate in the image of God? That is the law of my existence. And the man that makes that the law of his existence neglects neither himself nor his fellow-men; he neither becomes the self-absorbed student and cultivator of his own life upon the one hand, nor does he become, abandoning himself, simply the wasting benefactor of his brethren upon the other. I watch the workman build upon the building which by and by is to soar into the skies, to toss its pinnacles up to the heaven, and I see him looking up and wondering where those pinnacles are to be, thinking how high they are to be, measuring the feet, wondering how they are to be built, and all the time he is cramming a rotten stone into the building just where he has set to work. Let him forget the pinnacles, if he will, or hold only the floating image of them in his imagination for his inspiration; but the thing that he must do is to put a brave, strong soul, an honest and substantial life into the building just where he is now at work. David Livingstone longed for knowledge and for purity of soul. He sought to be an astronomer, and a chemist, and a botanist, and a geographer. He surveyed lands and built houses and steered boats. He laboured to know languages and obtain power among barbarians. How glad he was of recognition in England, and how he valued everything that men called success! But why did he value them? That he might heal that open sore of the world, Africa; that he might be able to call attention to Africa, and bring beneficent aid to Africa, and sanctify Africa. The more he sanctified himself, yes, the larger man he became in his possession of truth, power, and purity, the more Africa lay upon his heart and the deeper in his soul rang the needs of the dark continent. When, with the early daylight, his servants coming into his room found him dead upon his knees beside his bed, they saw the perfected sanctification of Livingstone expressed in his actually dying for others.1 [Note: James G. K. McClure, Loyalty, 223. (2) We remain at our worst by dedicating ourselves to self.—A man may dedicate himself to a hundred things, but there is one thing to which he must not dedicate or re-dedicate self. He must be sure that he is not dedicating self to self. If he dedicates self to self he will not so soon awake, as we are sometimes told a man will, to bitter disappointment. For the more remarkable the powers are which he once dedicates to self, the more remarkable will he make the self to which they are dedicated, the more apparently worthy of the dedication will he become both to himself and to others. We do not see self-admiration diminish with years, with disappointments, or with knowledge of the world. It may, indeed, continue along with such high gifts and noble qualities that it seems the one fault in the man. But it is fatal. It was to Croesus that Solon said, in the midst of all Croesus’s wealth and power and wisdom (and powerful and wise Croesus was as well as wealthy), “Count no man happy before he dies.” And it was the same Croesus who on his own funeral pyre, having lost children and kingdom and home, called out the single word “Solon! Solon!” and thus declared that Solon was right, and that happiness could not be secured by things selfish. Christ Himself could not have been happy even in being spotless, except as He used His spotlessness for the benefit of others. (3) The spring of all our activities must be devotion to Christ.—“For their sakes,” said Jesus. “For His sake,” say we. That is our inspiration. The life of complete surrender is in Him and in Him alone. To know Him, to commune with Him, to rest in His love, to have and hold it as our own—that is the secret of the surrendered life. Just to give up, and trust All to a Fate unknown, Plodding along life’s road in the dust, Bounded by walls of stone; Never to have a heart at peace; Never to see when care will cease; Just to be still when sorrows fall— This is the bitterest lesson of all. Just to give up, and rest All on a Love secure, Out of a world that’s hard at the best, Looking to heaven as sure; Ever to hope, through cloud and fear, In darkest night, that the dawn is near; Just to wait at the Master’s feet— Surely, now, the bitter is sweet.1 [Note: Henry van Dyke.] III The Instrument of Consecration 1. The Truth is the great sanctifier. There is no ray of truth that ever came from the Father of lights that does not hallow the heart on which it falls. It is not make-believes that will give you sanctity. There is a falsetto character about all piety resting upon make-believes. But Truth—every ray of it, is blessing. See God, the infinite Father, the Alpha and Omega of whose being is Love, love so infinite and inconceivable that it embraces every individual soul of man, with a desire to save and bless it; see Him in the graciousness of His providence, in the majesty of His rule, and every attribute you behold engages your love, quickens your trust, brings you near, makes you wish to serve Him, makes you His and like Him. The truth in God sanctifies. The truth in Christ, in His work, love, patience, humanity, Godhead, intercession, the everlasting purpose of His heart, is all of it quickening. The truth in man is a sanctifying thing. Fear no truth. All nervousness that dreads inquiry, all apprehensiveness of the result of modern investigations, is unbelief and mistake. Nothing that is true will displace a quickening influence for good without giving a more quickening influence still. “Sanctify them through thy truth.” Every error of life springs from an error of thought. A lie is the root of all evil—some misconception or misunderstanding. Truth of providence, truth of the rewards of goodness, truth of grace, truth of immortality, truth of God and man—every ray of it is quickening. In the truth, and not simply through the truth. The Truth is, as it were, the atmosphere, the element, in which believers are immersed and by which they are sustained: and we must think of the Truth in the widest sense in which we can conceive of it. Such Truth, which Christ is, and which Christ reveals, is everywhere about us: it corresponds with the whole range of present experience: it is realized in a personal communion with its Source. Its function is not simply to support but to transfigure. Its issue is not knowledge but holiness.1 [Note: B. F. Westcott, The Incarnation and Common Life, 176. 2. “Thy word is truth.”—This leads us directly to the Bible and the Bible tends to make men saints, because it describes the lives and experiences of many who have lived near to God, and who have cared intensely for men. And we take fire by the things we read; as it has been said, “If you read Shakespeare, after a while you think Shakespeare and you talk Shakespeare.” “Thy word is truth.” Thy word, written and unwritten, Thy word in the Bible, in nature, in history, in experience. We dare not limit either the time or the manner of His utterance. Forms of thought, the organization of the State, the relations of the sciences vary, and He meets our changing position with appropriate teaching. His message comes to each age and to each people as it came at Pentecost, in their own language. It comes to us through the struggles of the nations and the movements of society, through every fact that marks one least step in the method of creation or in the history of man. It is this message, given to us in our language, that we have to welcome and to interpret now. Only so will our personal consecration be perfected: only so will our social office be fulfilled.1 [Note: B. F. Westcott, The Incarnation and Common Life, 187. (1) The Word has a discovering and enlightening power. It is a mirror in which we see reflected our failures and sins; it is a searchlight discerning the very thoughts and intents of the heart. A late postmaster in London gave a poor Roman Catholic woman a Testament. The priest visiting her on her dying bed found it beneath her pillow as she passed away, and took it with him, intending to destroy it. But it was found beneath his pillow likewise when he died, not long after.2 [Note: Homiletic Review, xxi. 158. (2) It has a cleansing and purifying power. We are very much influenced by what we read. We are informed that the wretched man who took the life of President Carnot lived an apparently harmless, decent life for a good many years, until he came into contact with anarchist publications, which so saturated his mind with evil thoughts, schemes, and ideas that at length he was capable of the awful crime he committed. He was defiled, ruined, and destroyed by the word of falsehood which he read. It has again and again been shown in courts of justice that thieves and robbers have had the thoughts of such a life put into their heads by the tales of highwaymen and the like which are sown broadcast in print. The same principle holds true conversely, and it holds good with regard to the Word of God. The Bible has a sanctifying influence: it is a holy book—it sets before us holy examples, it exhorts us to a holy course of life, it furnishes us with holy doctrines, it points us to a holy Saviour.3 [Note: E. Moore, Christ in Possession, 74. (3) The Word has a nourishing and strengthening power. We are told that as new-born babes we are to desire the sincere milk of the Word that we may grow thereby. And the Apostle says, “I commend you to God, and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up” (Acts 20:32). There is a vital link between the written word and the Living Word, and when the word of God dwells in us, Christ comes and dwells in us too. The secret of sanctification is an indwelling Saviour. No distant Lord have I Loving afar to be; Made flesh for me, He cannot rest Until He rests in me. Brother in joy and pain, Bone of my bone was He, Now,—intimacy closer still, He dwells Himself in me. I need not journey far This dearest friend to see, Companionship is always mine, He makes His home with me.1 [Note: Maltbie D. Babcock.] The Master’s Consecration Literature Benson (E. W.), in Sermon Year Book, ii. 209. Bernard (T. D.), The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 367. Brooks (P.), Addresses, 11. Carter (T. T.), The Spirit of Watchfulness, 239. Darlow (T. H.), Via Sacra, 157. Hoare (J. G.), Life in St. John’s Gospel, 62. Hopkins (E. H.), The Law of Liberty in the Spiritual Life, 397. Ingram (A. F. W.), The Mysteries of God, 246. Keble (J.), Sermons Academical and Occasional, 251. Knight (G. H.), Divine Upliftings, 75. Lang (W. C. G.), in A Lent in London, 186. Lyttelton (A. T.), College and University Sermons, 50. Mackennal (A.), The Life of Christian Consecration, 17. McClure (J. G. K), Loyalty, 205. Moberly (R. C.), Problems and Principles 397. Nicoll (W. R.), Ten-Minute Sermons, 235. Peabody (F. G.), Jesus Christ and the Social Question, 76. Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 81. Peabody (F. G.), Sunday Evenings in the College Chapel, 233. Pearse (M. G.), The Gentleness of Jesus, 89. Rainsford (M.), The Lord’s Prayer for Believers, 343, 356, 364, 378. Skrine (J. H.), Sermons to Pastors and Masters, 58. Stone (D.), The Discipline of Faith, 41. Temple (F.), Five of his Latest Utterances, 7. Tomory (A.), Memorials, 63. Trumbull (H. C.), Our Misunderstood Bible, 108. Watts-Ditchfield (J. E), Here and Hereafter, 27. Welldon (J. E. C.), The Fire upon the Altar, 69. Welldon (J. E. C.), The Gospel in a Great City, 114. Williams (C. D.), A Valid Christianity for To-day, 201. Examiner, June 1904, p. 584 (Jowett). Environment and Character I pray not that thou shouldest take them from the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil one.—John 17:15. 1. The last words of Christ to His disciples, clustered round Him in that solemn hour when He took leave of them before He died, were words of prayer. It was a prayer, as reported to us, which threw into pregnant words the meaning of His whole work, but it was also steeped in the tender thought which fills the heart of one who parts from those he has long loved. As He prayed for those around Him, who were to spread among men the good news of God, commending them to His Father’s care, every word was touched with the human tenderness of separation. “Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one”—one in love, one in that will of God which is the bond of love. Keep them from the world, not from the outward world, but from the evil of the world. With that prayer, Christ defines the position of His followers in their life among men, and the meaning of it is our subject. 2. This does not mean that Christ wished His followers never to die—always to be in the world. It is appointed for us all to die. But our Lord did not wish His followers to die before their time. “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” All, indeed, do not reach this fulness of years; and Christians as well as others are cut off by illness and accidents. Death claims all ages for his own. Many also die from loyalty to duty and to love. Blessings dearer than life may be in danger; evils worse than death may be threatened to our country and ourselves. Now Christians, like others, may have to fight even to the death for national life and liberty. And loyalty to love and loyalty to duty may bring an early death on the followers of Christ as well as on others. They may see dear ones sinking into a watery grave, or surrounded by consuming fires, and they may risk and sacrifice their lives in seeking to rescue them from death. When Jesus’ followers give up their lives either in loyalty to duty or in loyalty to love, they give them up in accordance with the will of God; but Jesus knew there was a real danger that Christians would be taken out of the world when they should continue to live in it, and it was not His wish that this should be. The danger arose both from the hatred of Christ’s enemies and from the mistaken beliefs and actings of Christ’s followers themselves. I The Sphere The world was to be their sphere. “I pray not that thou shouldest take from the world.” What is Christ’s meaning for the term “world”? It is this passing scene of time, with its transient pleasures and sorrows, pursuits and loves; and the mass of men that live for these alone. There is the world of men, of business, of politics, of labour for wealth and fame—the storm of life in which we sail. Pray, men say, to be taken out of that; out into the deserts or the quietude of our retired rooms; in solitary meditation to live the life of God. I do not pray, said Christ, that you should be removed from that—only from its evil. 1. Christ could not ask that they might be taken out of the world, for that was the scene of their witnessing and labour. However keenly they might wish to escape from its hate and opposition, it was necessary for themselves, for the world, and for their Master, that they should stay as the salt and leaven of human society. But He prays that God would “keep them from the evil one.” Divine grace is to surround these simple souls so that Satan’s fingers may not defile their lives. They also must learn to say, “He hath nothing in me.” This is a great thing to ask, but it is the path to victory. “The problem of the necessity of living in the midst of earthly influences and yet of escaping from their evil is difficult with an exceeding difficulty. Yet it is not without solution. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego in the court of Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel in the court of Darius, are the likenesses “of the small transfigured band whom the world cannot tame.” Some devout men in spite of the prayer of Jesus, thought it best to renounce the world, and lived in dens and caves of the earth. The Pillar Hermits of Syria lived long years on the tops of pillars set up in the open air. The earliest and most famous of this class of solitaries, whose example the others followed as well as they could, was Simeon, a Syrian monk. In his boyhood Simeon had been a shepherd. He spent nine years of his youth in a Syrian monastery, without ever moving outside the walls of his narrow cell. After this he became dissatisfied with the convent, as giving him too few means of self-denial, and presently invented the new form of penitence which has become associated with his name. He withdrew about the year 423 a.d. to a mountain near Antioch, and fixed his abode upon the top of a pillar which he caused to be erected for himself. The height of it was at first six cubits, but this was gradually increased to thirty-six, or nearly sixty feet. The diameter of the top was only four feet; but it was surrounded with a railing which secured the poor man from falling off, and allowed him the relief of leaning against it. Here Simeon spent the last thirty or more years of his life. He clothed himself with the skins of beasts, and wore also an iron collar round his neck. He preached twice a day to the crowds that gathered at the foot of the column to witness his persevering devotions. Simeon died on his pillar at the age of seventy-two, and was buried with great solemnity at Antioch. Lord Tennyson has a poem about him with the title, “Saint Simeon Stylites,” that is “Saint Simeon of the Pillar.” It consists of a solemn prayer to God and address to the people by the hermit on the last day of his life. The words which the poet puts into his mouth show a curious mixture of deep penitence for sin and great spiritual pride in his long career of penance. Here are some of them,— Bethink Thee, Lord, while Thou and all the saints Enjoy themselves in heaven, and men on earth House in the shade of comfortable roofs, Sit with their wives by fires, eat wholesome food, And wear warm clothes, and even beasts have stalls, I, ’tween the spring and downfall of the light, Bow down one thousand and two hundred times, To Christ, the Virgin Mother, and the saints; Or in the night, after a little sleep, I wake: the chill stars sparkle; I am wet With drenching dews, or stiff with crackling frost. I wear an undress’d goatskin on my back; A grazing iron collar grinds my neck; And in my weak, lean arms I lift the cross, And strive and wrestle with Thee till I die: O mercy, mercy! wash away my sin.1 [Note: C. Jerdan, For the Lambs of the Flock, 122. (1) We are in the world for our own sake. We are placed here to be trained for another and a higher life. A certain time and certain trials upon this earth are necessary to develop us into the likeness of God’s character. The aloe takes a hundred years to make a flower, the primrose a few spring days; some trees reach maturity in half a century, others weave their strength of folded fibres out of the rain, and wind, and sunshine of a thousand years. Each has its own period. It is so, also, with us, the planting of the Lord. A few trials, a few years, and some of us flower into all the perfection we can attain on earth. Many long years’ bitter and protracted trials are the lot of others, before a single blossom can spring upon their lives; but—and it is a law which ought to console us—in proportion to the length of time and the greatness of the trial is the fitness of the character for work, and the greatness also of the work that it has to do. The primrose is beautiful and cheers the heart of the passing traveller, and rejoices the Maying children who weave it in a wreath for their queen—and that is useful and lovely work and has its place. But the oak shelters a thousand herds, and plants a forest; and builds the bulwark of the coast, and the fleets that unite the nations. We have no right to be impatient if God is making us into the heart of oak, which will, when the woodman, death, has felled us, give shelter and bring blessing to thousands in the other world. Not an hour of the time, not a single agony of the trial is lost; everything that we suffer here is transmuted otherwhere into strength and usefulness, into greatness and beauty of character.2 [Note: S. A. Brooke, The Ship of the Soul, 43. (2) It is Christ’s mind that His people should abide for a season in the world for the sake of others. He has purposes to accomplish in His people, and by them, which render it necessary that they should, in all ordinary cases, pass a time of sojourn amid the cares and temptations of the world. We are not left in doubt as to the reason of our Lord’s declining to pray that His saints should be taken out of the world. He explains it Himself in John 17:18 : “As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world.” We know what Christ was sent into the world to do. It was that He might save it. “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” In like manner Christ’s people are sent into the world for the world’s good. In the humbler fashion, which alone is competent to men, Christ’s people are like Christ Himself, the light of the world. Christ’s plan is to do the work of His Kingdom on the earth by means of His own people. He does not send angels from heaven to preach the Gospel, or to minister food and raiment to the poor, or to comfort mourners, or to put evildoers to shame by their holy life. These honourable functions it is His will and pleasure that His own people should discharge. When the world shall have been converted to Christ, it will be found that the instruments employed have been men of like passions with others. And this being so, it is easy enough to understand why Christ does not desire that His people should be at once taken out of the world. The world needs their example, their prayers, their good deeds, their instructions; and, for the world’s sake, they must abide here for a season, and not only abide on the earth, but throw themselves heartily into the throng and turmoil of life in the world, according as God may call them. For thousands of years there lay before man all the possibilities of insulating an electric current, and so of confining it within certain bounds, and of directing its energy into a definite channel, and yet the thing never dawned upon his mind until the time of Stephen Gray. And since his day the development of electrical science has been proportionate to the progress made in the knowledge of insulation. In all the advance made in the arts and sciences by the nations of antiquity, we have no evidence that any one of them ever discovered that a wire could be so covered that it would be insulated, and so retain and transmit a current; and without this knowledge of insulation no progress in electricity was possible. An induction coil could not be constructed, and so there could be no dynamo or electric motor. In short, there could be no transmission of electrical energy in any form. Insulation is as much a matter of necessity in things spiritual as in things electrical. This does not mean, however, the insulation which is found in isolation so much as that which is the product of life. It is not secured by separating one’s self from his fellows, whether in the cell of the monastery or in the religious retreat. It is rather the possession of life that shields a man from his hostile environment, and enables him to triumph over it.1 [Note: C. H. Tyndall, Electricity and its Similitudes, 114. 2. The spirit of Christ’s prayer was the habit of His life. If He was not of this world, it was not because He left it to itself, or wrapped Himself in any mystery, or was without sympathy for any human condition, or untouched by any cry of emotion. He lived as a man among men. He assumed no special sanctity, no signs of separation. He sat at rich men’s tables. He associated with those of evil repute and of no repute. He said of Himself that He came eating and drinking. It was charged against Him that He was “gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner.” He gave currency Himself to the coarse reproach that He was “a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber,” not fearing to take it up, and only adding, “Wisdom is justified of all her children.” For he who cannot pass blamelessly through the common conditions of our life, taking them as they are, and evading none of them, is no saint of God and no saviour of men. It is not being above any human necessity, but meeting it fully and purely, that tests spiritual power. If the Son of Man was not of the world, it was not because His spirit was not large enough to take in both earth and heaven; it was because this earth was a sacred place where God was unfolding His providence and men were fulfilling their preparatory destinies; and when He looked upon them in the light of their immortality, His tenderness flowed out even in tears—not the tears that lie near to the eyes, but out of the anguish of His spirit—for those who, in the crisis of the world’s opportunity, were rejecting the counsel of God against themselves, not knowing the time of their visitation. It is said of every painting that has no clear outlook to the sky, that it leaves a stifling impression on the mind of confinement and limitation. And so of every human life that has no natural outlet to the infinite: it is then of the world, and of the world only. Yet we have no external measurements for such states of the spirit. Only the individual conscience, and He who is greater than the conscience, can tell where worldliness prevails, with the heavenly outlook closed. Each heart must answer for itself, and at its own risk. That our souls are committed to our own keeping at our own peril, in a world so mixed as this, is the last reason why we should slumber over the charge, or betray the trust. If only that outlet to the infinite is kept open, the inner bond with eternal life preserved, while not one movement of this world’s business is interfered with, not one pulse-beat of its happiness repressed, with all natural associations dear and cherished, with all human sympathies fresh and warm, we shall yet be near to the Kingdom of heaven, within the order of the Kosmos of God in the world, but not of the world—not taken out of it, but kept from its evil.1 [Note: J. Hamilton Thom, Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ, 311. If It was a true inspiration of the artist who depicted a monk at his desk in the monastery cell, with pen in hand, and eyes looking upward for illumination, and the Holy Spirit descending in the form of a dove to bring the light and guidance he sought. That was a true inspiration; but it was equally true to depict a foul spirit speaking from beneath, seeking to engage the monk’s attention, that he might whisper in his ear the corrupt and corrupting counsel of the world. In convent and in the busiest highway the two voices call, and no withdrawal of the body will deliver us from the subtle and ensnaring influence of the evil world.2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, Apostolic Optimism, 57. 3. The more we make of this life, the more credible another life becomes. The greater this life is made, the easier to believe in the next. No one would infer Paradise from the vast African desert. It is when the traveller visits European zones, sees their magnificence of verdure and bloom and the grand creations of man, that the soul readily believes in God and eternity. A noted novelist has said that when the great and pure souls of earth were beheld it was easy to believe in immortality. We have suffered from two causes—from religious zealots disparaging this world, and from infidel minds underrating the next. The former take from this beautiful world its purpose, while the latter deprive it of the mystery and the hope of Heaven. Christ has delivered us from both. For He stood forth emphasizing the value of this life and assigning to His disciples their place in it as His servants. He taught them their obligation to ornament and develop this world. This earth is the first stage in the soul’s career. Only a grand human life can bear any adequate testimony to the truths of Christ’s Gospel. Here it is given to those accepting it to show its relation to the State; to the social charities human misery makes so needful; to the school, with its eager young life to be trained; to the home, wherein are to blossom the graces and amenities that alone can perpetuate it and make it “sweet home”; to politics, that they may be cleansed and reveal the spirit of that patriotism whose renaissance is the hope of the hour. It is at such points as these, where Christianity has touched this earth and made it better, that it finds its protection from the ice of unbelief and the attacks of ridicule.1 [Note: M. M. G. Dana.] II The Enemy 1. The Greek word that ends the text is an adjective, preceded by an article, and being in the genitive case the custom is to supply a substantive. Hence the rendering: “that thou shouldest keep them from the evil one.” The statement then points to “the prince of this world,” the author and embodiment of evil. Not that the word “Satan,” or the word “Devil,” must always be taken to mean one spirit in the Scriptures: “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven,” means that Christ saw evil spirits discomfited. “The devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour,” means, not one fallen spirit merely, but many fallen spirits seeking whom they may influence for evil. 2. What, then, is this evil (or “evil one,” as the R.V. has it) from which our Lord prays we should be kept? Does it consist in outward tribulation, in the trials and troubles of life, in poverty, bereavements, bodily sufferings? Obviously not. Christ knew that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. He Himself, as Perfect Man, underwent all these, leaving us the one perfect example of patient submission to God’s will. It was indeed for this purpose that He left His Father’s throne to come and live amongst us on this earth, that there might be no thorny path or barren wilderness of trouble which He as our great Leader had not passed through before us, no fierce temptation which He as Perfect Man had not experienced and triumphed over, thus leaving us an example that we should follow His steps, and in all these things be more than conquerors. So then this evil from which He prays God to keep us is not an outward one, but one far more deadly and subtle—an inward and spiritual enemy. He prays that we may be kept from the wiles of the evil one, who, as a roaring lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour, from any indulged sin that would come between us and God, from any earthly care or pleasure that may deaden our spiritual faculties and separate the soul from the enjoyment of God’s love. (1) There is virtue in environment. In the region of the Natural Sciences we find the botanist and the biologist arguing that any peculiar formation or growth in plant or animal which maintains itself and becomes persistent must be accounted for by something in its environment. There must be something there to justify it, to make it worth while that it should exist, otherwise it would not have maintained itself, at least in vigour. They argue thus from the organism to its environment, and set to work to verify their argument by finding that hitherto unsuspected element or process in external nature with which the peculiar formation brings the plant or animal into advantageous correspondence. There is no reason why the argument should not apply with equal force to the invisible spiritual faculties and developments of human nature; the only difference is that in this region it does not from the nature of the case admit of ocular verification. You have seen a lily floating in the black sullied waters of a foul bog in the country. All about it are foulness and impurity; but amid all the vileness the lily is pure as the white snowflakes that fall from the winter clouds. It floats on the surface of the stained waters, but never takes a stain. It ever holds up its pure face towards God’s blue sky, and pours its fragrance all about it, like the incense from the censer of a vestal priestess. So it is possible for a true soul to live in this sinful world, keeping itself unsullied, and breathing out the fragrance of love.1 [Note: J. R. Miller, Glimpses through Life’s Windows, 186. (2) But there is peril in environment. Christ does not make light of the dangers which beset His disciples in this world. He had met the tempter and defeated him, but He knew the craft and cunning with which he lies in wait to deceive, and this prayer is a cry of warning. St. Paul does not underrate our peril: “For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” The noble and the good of former days unite in declaring that this world is to the servant of Christ an enemy’s country. There are the god of this world, the powers of this world, the men of this world, the things of this world—all in their degree fighting against the man who believes in Jesus. As an old writer has said, this world is like a chess-board, you cannot make a move in any direction but the devil instantly sets out some creature to attack you. Long ago I made a change of habitat from the hill country of western Carolina to what was regarded as a malarious district near the eastern coast. I was warned of the probable consequences to my health, but I laughed at the fears of my friends. I protested that there was nothing in the world the matter with the air. Was I not a chemist? At least, I was so accounted in those days when I filled that chair in a humble college. The air had just the same constituents as were to be found in the hill country—oxygen, nitrogen, vapour of water, and a trace of carbonic acid. And so for two years I laughed at chills and fevers, and then I shook for two months. There was something baneful in the air, even though chemical analysis failed to detect its presence.1 [Note: P. S. Henson, The Four Faces, 233. III The Keeper “That thou shouldest keep them.” What a wealth of quiet experience there is in the phrase, “The Lord shall preserve thy going out.” It is worth while at the beginning of any day to pause to gather so precious a promise. But like many another fair promise it is at the same time a challenge. The God who waits at the door with the offer of companionship, scrutinizes our going forth. We have, as it were, to pass Him to get into the street. He is the sentry who must know our business, and why we go out, before He can give us safe conduct. The assurance of protection can be tasted only by the man whose daily purpose is in accordance with the will of God, who can give the answer of his Master, that he is about the Father’s business. In China men have conceived of a sleeping Deity. There, lying on his side, with calm face, closed eyes, and head resting upon his hand, is a gilded wooden figure, 30 feet long, and well proportioned. But he does not mind his worshippers. His left arm is resting upon his body, and his bare feet are placed one upon the other. This Buddha is sleeping, while the world goes on. Standing about him are twelve crowned and beautifully dressed images, and in front are the symbols of sacrifice and incense. How unlike Him who neither slumbers nor sleeps! O strange and wild is the world of men Which the eyes of the Lord must see— With continents, islands, tribes and tongues, With multitudes bond and free! All kings of the earth bow down to Him, And yet—He can think on me. For none can measure the mind of God Or the bounds of eternity, He knows each life that has come from Him, To the tiniest bird and bee, And the love of His heart is so deep and wide That it takes in even me.1 [Note: Mary E. Allbright.] 1. The disciple cannot keep himself.—The Saviour did not turn to those who stood round Him and bind them by strong vows to remain faithful when He was gone. He knew their weakness, and He looked away from them to God’s strength. It is well for us to know our weakness. We cannot keep ourselves. We have no strength to meet the attack, and no skill to evade it. How will you do? Will you resolve sternly to resist when next you are tempted? Such resolves have been made, as in a soul’s agony they have been made, and they have gone down before the fierce onslaught like lead before the blow-pipe, or they have yielded to the gentle wooings and insinuations of the evil one. Be not too confident, that is, not self-confident. St. Peter’s brave challenge to man or devil to make him desert his Master was but the prelude to his fall. 2. We are kept by outward restraints, by commands and prohibitions and providences. It is told of one of the great painters of Italy, that, being engaged upon a fresco inside the dome of a lofty cathedral, and standing on a platform hung more than a hundred feet from the floor, he paused to look at the effect of his work, and, absorbed in his art, kept walking backward for a better view, till, forgetful of danger, he had almost reached the platform’s edge, unconscious that two more backward steps would hurl him down to death. A brother artist seeing his danger, but afraid to speak lest a sudden shout should precipitate the fall he was anxious to prevent, seized a brush full of paint and hurled it against the face of the brilliant figure on the dome, completely spoiling the labour of many days. But that saved the painter’s life; for, resenting what he thought an insult, and springing forward with a cry, he only then discovered that that had been a friendly act to save him from an awful death. And when God, with a seemingly cruel hand blots out our beautiful visions, and spoils the life-picture that we thought so fair, till we cry out in surprise and anger too, He may be saying with a tender voice, “It was to keep you from falling.” “Don’t you think, sir,” said a very sincere but simple man, to me, one Sunday, as I was leaving the pulpit of a chapel filled chiefly by the poor, “don’t you think that you repeat the Lord’s Prayer the wrong way? Don’t you think you had better repeat it as our minister repeats it? He always says, ‘Leave us not in temptation.’ You don’t think that God ever leads us into temptation, sir, do you? Had you not better follow our minister’s way, sir?” “No,” I replied; “I don’t think I had better follow your minister’s way. I think he had better follow Christ’s way and repeat the prayer as Christ taught it. Listen, my friend,” I said; “the prayer is clear enough and forcible enough if you will read it through. But you are like some other people that I know, you insist on reading the Bible with your thumb-nail instead of your brains. You stick your thumb-nail into one word on a page and will not see any other word, even on the same page. When you read any other book you allow it to explain itself. You read all adjoining passages, as well as the immediate context; and, above all, you do not ignore the context. You let the book explain itself. Do the same with the Lord’s Prayer.” “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”; that is, lead us not into temptation that shall overpower us, expose us not to overmuch trial, trial under which our weakness may sink. Christ does not mean that we are to pray never to be tempted, but only that we may be shielded from temptations too great for our strength; and that we may be delivered from the sin of yielding to the temptation.1 [Note: T. Cooper, Plain Pulpit Talk, 205. 3. We are kept by the vision of pure things.—In ascending the lofty peaks of the Jungfrau and Monte Rosa, the guides are said to resort not infrequently to the artifice of endeavouring to interest the traveller in the beauty of the lovely flowers growing there, with a view to distract his attention from the fearful abysses which the giddy path overhangs. By a similar device of wisdom and love are the saints preserved as they pursue their perilous way. God establishes their steps by charming their eye with things of beauty, interest, and delectableness, and by filling their heart with the love of them. Home, sweet home, with its pleasantness and pathos; the charm of literature, the miracles of science, the spell of music, the visions of art; the daily round, with its ever fresh solicitudes and satisfactions; the calls of patriotism, the demands of duty, the glow of love, the pleasures of friendship, social service, the abandon of pastimes—these, and many other similar things pertaining to the natural life, when accepted, exercised, and enjoyed in the sunshine of the Lord, constitute our strength and guarantee our peace, despite all the visions of sin, all the allurements of world, flesh, and devil. We are not saved by some unknown magic, but God draws our heart to Himself through the sanctified gifts, situations, and activities which go to the making up of human life. 4. We are kept by God’s strengthening grace in our hearts.—Not abstraction from the world, but protection from the evil! The deliverance is to be effected, not by the removal of the body, but by the reinforcement of the spirit. Our redemption is to be accomplished, not by changing our locality, but by changing the condition of the heart. The purpose of our Saviour is to perfect us in holiness, not by withdrawing us from all infection, but by making us proof against all disease in the endowment of invincible health. The ideal of aspiring discipleship is to be found not in innocence, with an environment destitute of temptation, but in holiness, despite the menacing advances of infection and disease. “In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” “I pray not that thou shouldest take them from the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil one.” As the diver in his bell sits dry at the bottom of the sea, and draws a pure air from the free heavens far above him, and is parted from that murderous waste of green death that clings so closely round the translucent crystal walls, which keep him safe, so we, enclosed in God, shall repel from ourselves all that would overflow to destroy us and our work, and may by His grace lay deeper than the waters some courses in the great building that shall one day rise stately and many-mansioned from out of the conquered waves. A writer tells of going with a party into a coal mine. On one side of the gangway grew a plant which was perfectly white. The visitors were astonished that there, where the coal dust was continually flying, this little plant should remain so pure and white. A miner took a handful of black coal dust and threw it upon the plant but none adhered. The visitors repeated the experiment, but the coal dust would not cling. There was a wonderful enamel on the folds of the white plant to which the finest perceptible speck would not adhere. Living there, amid clouds of black dust, nothing could stain its snowy whiteness. 5. We must co-operate with God.—Indeed the Apostle Jude says, “Keep yourselves in the love of God.” God’s love to us—that is the element within which the keeping of ourselves becomes real keeping, safe keeping, happy keeping. That is the overarching firmament, with its height and breadth of bright infinitude, within which our keeping is kept. We ourselves are to abide within our own poor keeping: yes, and our own poor keeping is to abide within God’s tender might of love. The flower is to be environed by the frail globe of glass: the frail globe is to be environed and to be penetrated by the sweet warm sunlight, that comes across the tracks of worlds to illumine our dark atmosphere with safety and life. If I feel that I am enclosed by the strong ramparts of a fortress-home, there is animating reason why I should guard myself from the lesser hazards that may still encompass me within that home; my keeping of myself is not at an end, but is only reduced to manageable dimensions. If I be on board a steam-liner, which holds her head before the wildest weather with undaunted majesty, and only fills the air above her bows with the smoke of billows she is shattering in the strong tremor of her power, I have still to care how I mount the companion-way, and pace the deck, and stow my valuables in my cabin. Indeed, it is only when I am secure from wreck or foundering, that all this minor care is of much account.1 [Note: J. A. Kerr Bain, For Heart and Life, 85. I rest on Thy unwearied mind; Thy planning and Thy love go on, Nor dost Thou leave me far behind; I’m carried to another dawn. The new day breaks. From earth’s old mould Fresh flowers grow along my way. New life is flashed on problems old; On ancient life new forces play. O wondrous, wakeful Warden! When The last great nightfall comes to me, From that deep slumber rouse me then, That I Thy tireless child may be.2 [Note: Archibald Haddon.] IV The Intercessor “I pray.”—Jesus assumes the rôle of Advocate. To St. Peter He said, “I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not.” And He says the same to every disciple who is being sifted by the wicked one. Our great High Priest lifts up the voice of continual intercession for us. His own Passion is His Plea. Those five red-lipped wounds plead eloquently with the Father; and nothing that they ask is ever refused. Look, Father, look on His Anointed Face, And only look on us as found in Him; Look not on our misusings of Thy grace, Our prayer so languid, and our faith so dim. For lo! between our sins and their reward We set the Passion of Thy Son our Lord. I remember a wonderful mural painting. It depicts the Jews brought into subjection to the heathen. To the left stands Pharaoh, exquisite, effeminate, deadly cruel. In one hand he lifts the scourge, and with the other he grasps the hair of the captives. On the right is the Assyrian king, duller, heavier, with knotted limbs. He presses down the yoke on the poor prisoners. But supplicating hands are raised up to heaven, and Jehovah lends His ear to the cry of His people. The cherubim fly before Him, their wings a glowing crimson. They hide His face; but from behind the wings issue His arms. The slender Pharaoh He represses by the mere impact of His fingers. The brute force of the Assyrian He holds in a grasp of tremendous power. Fear not, O trembling heart: when Jesus presents your prayers before the throne, no enemy can prevail against you.1 [Note: A. Smellie, In the Secret Place, 34. Environment and Character Literature Alexander (S. A.), The Mind of Christ, 418. Benson (R. M.), The Final Passover, ii. (pt. ii.) 457. Binnie (W.), Sermons, 171. Bramston (J. F.), Fratribus, 164. Brooke (S. A.), The Ship of the Soul, 31. Carter (T. T.), Meditations on the Public Life of our Lord, ii. 298. Cooper (T.), Plain Pulpit Talk, 196. Dods (M.), Footsteps in the Path of Life, 70. Gibson (J. M.), Glory of Life on Earth, 1. Gray (W. H.), The Children’s Friend, 202. Gregg (D.), Individual Prayer as a Working Force, 125. Hiley (R. W.), A Year’s Sermons, iii. 234. Jerdan (C.), For the Lambs of the Flock, 121. Jowett (J. H.), Apostolic Optimism, 47. Lidgett (J. S.), Apostolic Ministry, 215. Rainsford (M.), The Lord’s Prayer for Believers, 286, 301. Spurgeon (C. H.), Christ’s Relation to His People, 351. British Weekly Pulpit, iii. 473. Cambridge Review, i. No. 21. Christian Age, xlvi. 13; liii. 325. Christian World Pulpit, li. 316 (Gibson); lv. 136 (Jowett); lxxi. 268 (Rushbrooke). The Kingdom of Truth Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end have I been born, and to this end am I come into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate saith unto him, What is truth?—John 18:37-38. 1. Jesus was on trial for His life on a charge of sedition in claiming to be a king. The charge was expressed in the question, “Art thou a king then?” His answer to this charge was a puzzle to His judge. His kingdom was not of this world, and yet it was to be supreme and universal. Pilate could understand an authority which was enforced by Roman legions, and maintained by Roman bribes, but could not comprehend his prisoner when He rested His claims simply upon the truth to which He was to bear witness. “ ‘What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.” The severe assurance of the prisoner brings into bold relief the frivolous scepticism of the judge. It would almost seem that in the two were represented the extremes of modern thought and character. 2. They were standing face to face in the splendid hall of a palace in Jerusalem. It was adorned with vessels of gold and silver: the floor was of rich mosaic, the columns were of many-coloured marble. The speaker was a Roman Governor, seated on his tribunal in all his pomp. On either side were the Roman soldiers, in full armour, with spear and shield. Behind his gilded chair stood the lictors with their fasces. Politically, he represented the mightiest power on all the earth—the power of Imperial Rome. Personally, he wielded an almost irresponsible despotism. Before him, worn and wasted, His visage marred more than any man—the agony of long hours of struggle, and torment, and sleeplessness in His eyes, the marks of blows and insult on His face—stood a Jewish prisoner. His hands were bound behind His back; His garb was the humble dress of a Galilean peasant. The burning sunlight of an early Syrian spring streamed through the lattices, and the deep silence which hangs over an Eastern city at early dawn would ordinarily have been broken only by the plashing of fountains in the green spaces of the garden, or by the cooing of innumerable doves which sunned their white bosoms over the marble colonnades. It was broken now by far other sounds. The voices of the two speakers were almost drowned by the savage yells of a Jewish mob—all raging against that toil-worn prisoner, all demanding that the Roman Governor should shed His blood. On the north-east of the Temple in Jerusalem, in menacing attitude, stood the great Herodian Citadel called, after Mark Antony, Turris Antonia. The perpendicular sides of the hill on which this palatial fortress was reared were faced with polished marble so as to defy all attempts to scale its walls. On the platform immediately above this impregnable rampart was planted the square-built Citadel itself. At each angle of it there shot up a tower, the one to the south side being conspicuous by a turret from which the Roman garrison, much to the annoyance of the priests, could command an unbroken view of the interior of the Holy Temple. To render this marble camp an abode suitable for the Roman Governor in times of danger, Herod had built, on a lower platform hewn out of the living rock, a sumptuous residence, embodying Grecian taste and Oriental luxury. The praetorium, of which the Gospel speaks, was approached on its western side through an open court or forum, leading to a noble Roman archway flanked by two others on a smaller scale. This triple archway opened into an area paved with red flagstones, called by Greeks, Lithostrotos, and by Jews, Gabbatha. Here at right angles with the archway stood the white marble Tribune or Bema from which the Governor was wont to administer justice. Beyond it sprang a grand staircase sloping up to the balcony or loggia sweeping to the right and left of the Governor’s hall. From this point Pilate probably surveyed the accusers of Jesus.1 [Note: B. Vaughan, Society, Sin and the Saviour, 89. I The Kingdom of Truth Truth is a kingdom. It is the kingdom of the Spirit. Its Divine authority was distinctly enunciated by Jesus in reply to Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world,” therefore its sway is inevitable, its passage cannot be prevented. Men may try to distort its outlines, but its essential power they cannot control. It does not change with the political boundaries or military dominance of earth’s kingdoms. “If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight.” Kings cannot prevent its growth. Your Cæsar shall be forgotten, and his throne overturned—while My Kingdom shall be spreading over the world and absorbing all other kingdoms. Priests cannot defile it, however much they may seek to interpret truth for their own ends. When the ecclesiastics brought Jesus to Pilate, they would not enter into the palace themselves, “lest they should be defiled”—and the Passover was yet to be eaten. It was an admission from false ceremonialism of its own weakness. The living truth had gone out of their system; they had only the outward forms to rely upon, and they did not dare relinquish one of these, for they had no other authority. The answer Christ gave to Pilate suggests the best reply to the question, “What did Christ mean by the Kingdom of God.” He was king, He said, in the kingdom of the truth, meaning thereby not a mere dogma, but the truth of God and the truth of man. The kind of power which He here claims is spiritual power, and that is the greatest that can be swayed. For it is spiritual power—true or false—that determines history, shapes the character of society, directs the tendencies of life, the movements of the world. There are uncrowned kings who have swayed the destinies of mankind as no leaders of armies have been able to sway them. There have been poets and teachers who have inspired enthusiasms and kindled hopes that have moved the world, for they have reigned over the domain of human thought and so determined the actions of mankind. There have been kings on other thrones than those of State who have been the real monarchs of humanity,—Gutenberg with his printing-press, Bacon with his inductive method, Isaac Newton, James Watt. What a wide domain of conquest the very mention of these names suggests. May we not say with truth that if we are to find the influences which have given power to any of the great epochs of the world, we must look not to the brute force which was called into exercise, but to the ideas which gave nerve to the arms that wielded the force? Wherein, for example, lay the power of the armies of revolutionary France? Not surely in the number of her soldiers or in the genius of her commanders alone. These countless battalions marched with songs of joy against a world in arms because every heart there was stirred with the sense of a grand cause. It was the charmed words Liberty, Equality, Fraternity that excited their enthusiasm into a fierce world-conquering fanaticism. So is it that the true kingdoms which govern men are not those which strike the eye. They do not excite observation. They are the kingdoms of human conviction, thought, aspiration, passion. It is in the sphere of ideas, in the domain of the affections, in the faiths, the hopes, the loves which sway humanity, that we discover the real forces of the world. And so it was that Christ touched the true fountain of all power when He refused to use the forces which the world imagines omnipotent, when He left Cæsar on the throne and Pilate in the praetorium, and said, “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight but my kingdom is not from hence. For this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.” 1. The kingdom of truth is wide in extent.—The truth to which Christ bore witness at the first was the truth which concerned His person, and His claims to the love and obedience of men. On the cross He bore witness to the love of God for sinning man. By rising from the dead, and ascending to His Father, He testified that He was indeed the Son of God. By His present spirit He has witnessed ever since for the living God as against the godlessness and self-worship to which man is prone. To the truth which enforces the duties of men, Christ also bore witness, first by His spotless and inspiring life, by His penetrating and faithful words, and then by the long succession of obedient disciples who have imitated the one and exemplified the other. There is, however, truth of other descriptions than the truth which we call religious and ethical. There is the truth of science, which is expanded every year into grander proportions; the truth of letters, which is more and more abundant and instructive; and the truth of the imagination, which is more and more varied and inspiring. Has Christ any testimony to give concerning these kinds of truth? Does Christ hold any relations to Science, Letters, or Art? And, if so, what are these relations? We believe that they are many and important. We also hold that the spirit of earnest discipleship to Christ always favours, and often inspires, the highest achievements in every one of these forms of truth. We hold not only that Christianity satisfies the wants of which the scholar is conscious as a man, but that it is equally efficient and equally essential in stimulating and guiding him rightly as a scholar. In other words, we contend that allegiance to Christ is a favouring, and in one sense an essential, condition of the best human culture and education. I notice that among all the new buildings which cover your once wild hills, churches and schools are mixed in due, that is to say, in large proportion, with your mills and mansions; and I notice also that the churches and schools are almost always Gothic, and the mansions and mills are never Gothic. May I ask the meaning of this? for, remember, it is peculiarly a modern phenomenon. When Gothic was invented, houses were Gothic as well as churches; and when the Italian style superseded the Gothic, churches were Italian as well as houses. If there is a Gothic spire to the Cathedral of Antwerp, there is a Gothic belfry to the Hôtel de Ville at Brussels; if Inigo Jones builds an Italian Whitehall, Sir Christopher Wren builds an Italian St. Paul’s. But now you live under one school of architecture, and worship under another. What do you mean by doing this? Am I to understand that you are thinking of changing your architecture back to Gothic: and that you treat your churches experimentally, because it does not matter what mistakes you make in a church? Or am I to understand that you consider Gothic a pre-eminently sacred and beautiful mode of building, which you think, like the fine frankincense, should be mixed for the tabernacle only, and reserved for your religious services? For if this be the feeling, though it may seem at first as if it were graceful and reverent, at the root of the matter, it signifies neither more nor less than that you have separated your religion from your life.1 [Note: Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olives (Works, xviii. 440).] 2. It is a conquering kingdom.—“Magna est Veritas et praevalet.” Like the magnificent palace of the Incas of Cuzco, the ancient imperial city of Peru, whose ponderous stones were united by seams of melted gold, the whole social fabric is cemented by this pure and durable element, without which the noble structure would soon totter to its fall. Falsehood makes war with God’s grandest attribute, as manifested in heaven and earth, but this attribute must ultimately triumph to vindicate the glory of His reign. Truth, crush’d to earth, shall rise again, The eternal years of God are hers: While Error, wounded, writhes in pain, And dies amid his worshippers. Many moral victories that we want to see won in the world can be won only when we are gone; but let us make our contribution, and others will carry on the struggle. Captain Urquhart, dying in the Battle of Atbara, in the Soudan, said to the men who were attending him, “Never mind me, lads, go on!” Inspired with the worth of the cause and the importance of his army’s victory, he could forget his pain and give up his life, and tell the others to go on. We have a more important battle to fight—we must carry on the war of God against all wrong—and every soldier that falls must inspire the others to go on.1 [Note: T. R. Williams, God’s Open Door, 56. 3. Its progress is secured by sacrifice.—Christ’s throne is a Cross. The throne of this king was not like that of Solomon, with its golden lions and ivory steps; not like the jewelled throne of Byzantium, or the peacock throne of the Moguls. It was the throne of sorrow; it was the throne of awful self-sacrifice. “By this conquer” gleamed around that Cross in the vision of Constantine; and it was before this implement of a slave’s shame and a murderer’s punishment, that the eagles of ancient, the dragons of later Rome gave way. It was before this Cross, woven on the Labarum, that the Pagan armies of Maxentius were driven into the panic which Raphael has so grandly pictured in his Battle of the Milvian Bridge. When upon one occasion the Emperor Justinian was about to surrender to the clamorous claims and the harsh and violent demands of the mob, his wife Theodora is represented to have said to him that it was better to meet and go down to death as the avowed ruler of all than purchase life for a little while by yielding to the unworthy exactions of the unrighteous few; and empire, she tells him, “is the best winding-sheet.” Empire, universal empire, throughout all the world, throughout all the ages, is the winding-sheet of Jesus Christ. Victorious in the wilderness, victorious in Gethsemane, before that worldly-minded Governor in the judgment hall, victorious on the Cross, because His eye looked not upon the unworthy demands of the immediate occasion, but upon the everlasting years, upon all future times, and wrapped around in the winding-sheet of empire does He die.1 [Note: D. H. Greer, From Things to God, 36. II The King of Truth 1. Jesus claimed Kingship.—Pilate asked our Lord plainly, “Art thou a King?” Jesus answered, “Thou sayest it,” an expression which in Oriental language was equivalent to an affirmative, “Yes, I am what thou sayest.” But Christ took no place or rank among the acknowledged world-kings. All forms of world-dominion He refused. Throughout His life He repressed every attempt to gain for Him an earthly royalty, even as at the beginning of His ministry He repelled the devil’s offer of the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. The only royal robe He ever wore was the scarlet robe of mockery and insult; the only crown that ever encircled His brow was the crown of suffering and plaited thorns; the only sceptre He ever bore was the reed with which cruel hands smote Him. This does not seem kingly; yet, could we but understand and appreciate it aright, there is a grandeur and moral splendour about it such as never circled round the marble throne, and gorgeous draperies, and jewelled crowns of any mere world-king. World-kings are kings of wealth, and genius, and lands, and people, and armies. The Christ-King, crowned with thorns, is yet the King of the suffering, King of the patient, King of the spiritual, King of souls, King of the eternal, King of truth. 2. Jesus is the embodiment of truth.—Milton says of truth: “Truth indeed came once into the world with her Divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on.” Milton looks upon truth as one who comes with Christ into the world. Would it not be better to say that Christ Himself is the Embodiment of truth, for He says, “I am the truth”? Christ’s own testimony is proof of this, for three times in the Gospel according to St. John He speaks of Himself as the True One. He is the True Vine for reproduction (John 15:1), in contrast to Israel, who proved to be the false vine (Jeremiah 2:21). He is the True Bread for satisfaction (John 6:32), in contrast to the manna in the wilderness, which only met the present necessity of the people; and He is the True Light for illumination (John 1:9), in contrast to the false wrecker-lights of men. 3. Jesus bore witness to the truth.—This was the purpose of His mission. “To this end have I been born, and to this end am I come into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.” He is now before Pilate and nearing the close of His earthly life. The unity of His life, we see as we study it, is the following out to the minutest detail of the principle which He says has been and is His controlling purpose—to testify to the truth. In the events which are to follow, Jesus is true to the conception of His mission, even though His persistence in bearing witness to the truth leads Him to the ignominious death upon the cross. Fidelity to His mission He carried to the extent of yielding up His own life rather than cease to bear witness to the truth. (1) He bore witness by His character.—It is nothing more than a simple truism to say that, apart from the metaphysics of His Person, which opens a wide field for speculative controversy, Jesus is the supreme revealer of God. The character of the invisible and omnipresent Deity, whom no eye can fully see, and no life can adequately express, who is without an equal in wisdom and power and goodness, is focused, as it were, in the personality of Jesus. That which overwhelms us by its mystery and vastness, as we look into the universe around us—of which we are a part—is brought within the range of our vision, and the reach of our love, by Jesus of Nazareth. Not only is there revelation in its loftiest compass, and in its most unveiled expression, but there is something special and unique in the form of it. (2) He bore witness by His Ministry and Passion.—There are groups of pines on the crag-ledges of Umbria which strike the eye against the clear still sky when the autumn night is coming. Each tree alone is weird, it is gnarled and twisted, bared by the tempest, or distorted and tortured by the pitiless wind; but the group they form together has nothing but dignity, the dignity of support and endurance in a lonely world. So it is essential life, together with unparalleled pain leading up to a voluntary and a dreadful death, that gives to the witness of the Passion the emphasis of extent and intensity. When in the fifth century the Byzantine Empire was sinking into the decrepitude of a merely nominal Christianity, St. Chrysostom saw some converted Goths, with their clear blue eyes and yellow hair, kneeling to worship in one of the Basilicas of Constantinople, and he prophesied that that bold and hardy race should snatch the torch of truth from the more faithless and more feeble hands. They had laid down their barbarism, they had broken their idols at the feet of Him whom they called “The White Christ.” Their own fierce chieftains they chose from the boldest soldiers, and lifted them upon their shields, amid shouts of warriors and clash of swords; but they bowed before the royalty of a crucified Redeemer. Of their race in part are we. And if we fail in our allegiance to Christ, He will never lack other soldiers and other servants; for though the heart of men be full of evil, though for a time they may say, “We will not have this man to reign over us,” yet when the last appeal shall come to them, whether they will have Christ for a king, at last they will fall upon their knees in agonies of penitence, and in dust and ashes, with tears and with misereres, with beaten breasts, with uplifted hands, they will sigh back their answer—“Christ is King!”1 [Note: F. W. Farrar, True Religion, 200. III Allegiance to the Truth 1. Jesus before Pilate is the Truth making its appeal and waiting for judgment. (1) Pilate was indifferent to the truth.—It was said of a distinguished American jurist that he finally retired from the bench because he could not there escape making decisions. Pilate was this kind of man. The French statesman, Talleyrand, writing in his old age of the qualities of a Minister of Foreign Affairs, said: “He ought to be gifted with a kind of instinct which prevents him from committing himself.” Pilate was a good example of the school of Talleyrand. Here was this young enthusiast who had so stirred the people by the kingly declaration of His mission, “To this end was I born, that I should bear witness unto the truth”; and Pilate, the consistent neutral, looked down on Him with serious pity and answered, “Ah, my young friend, what is this illusion for which you want to die? Die for it, then, if you will! I find no fault in you; I wash my hands of blame. You bring your fate upon yourself.” And so dismissing this case of an alien, he retired into his palace, well content with himself because he had been neither ensnared by the enthusiasm of the reformer nor misled by the bigotry of the mob. (2) Pilate turned away from the truth.—The Prisoner before him had accepted the title of a king. He based His claim to this title on the fact that He had come to bear witness to the truth. He declared that those who were themselves of the truth would acknowledge His claim; they were His rightful subjects; they were the enfranchised citizens of His Kingdom. Strange language this in the ears of a cynical, worldly sceptic, to whose eyes the most attractive type of humanity was a judicious admixture of force and fraud. “Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out.” The altercation could be carried no further. Was not human life itself one great query, without an answer? What was truth, what else, except that which each man thought? Truth! This helpless Prisoner claimed to be a king, and He appealed, forsooth, to His truthfulness as the credential of His sovereign rights. Was ever any claim more contradictory of all human experience, more palpably absurd than this? Truth! When had truth anything to do with founding a kingdom? The mighty engine of imperial power, the iron sceptre which ruled the world, whence came it? Certainly it owed nothing to truth. Had not Augustus established his sovereignty by an unscrupulous employment of force, and maintained it by an astute use of artifice? And his successor, the present occupant of the imperial throne, was he not an arch dissembler, the darkest of all dark enigmas? The name of Tiberius was a by-word for impenetrable disguise. Truth might do well enough for fools and enthusiasts, for simple men; but for rulers, for diplomatists, for men of the world, it was the wildest of all wild dreams. Truth! What was truth? He had lived too long in the world to trust any such hollow pretensions. (3) Pilate was surprised and judged by the truth.—He found himself unexpectedly confronted by the truth, and he could not recognise it. His whole life long he had tampered with truth, he had despised truth, he had despaired of truth. Truth was the last thing that He had set before him as the aim of his life. He had thought much of policy, of artifice, of fraud, of force; but for truth in any of its manifold forms he had cared just nothing at all. And his sin had worked out its own retribution. Not truth only, but the Very Truth itself, Truth Incarnate stood before him in human form, and he was blind to it. He scorned it, he played with it, he thrust it aside, he condemned and he crucified it. “Suffered under Pontius Pilate” is the legend of eternal infamy with which history has branded his name. 2. Those who are in sympathy with the truth will pay it homage. A very good illustration of this will be found in the methods of scientific inquiry as it is now prosecuted. For the man of science seeks nothing in his researches into nature but Bimply to discover the truth. For this purpose he toils, working hard by day, and watching long by night, if that should be needful. He spares no pains to verify his facts and observations. He multiplies experiments to rectify possible errors. If these show that he was before on a wrong track, he gives it up, and follows the line suggested by the later results of his inquiries; for his object is not to establish a foregone conclusion, but simply to find out the truth. That truth, when he finds it, may startle many folk, may unsettle former opinions, may seriously affect many interests and recognized authorities. He cannot help that. It is his business simply to find what the facts are and what they plainly teach; and when he has done that he says: “There is the truth, and that is the way by which I reached it, step by step. As for all else, I have nothing to do with it whatever. A lie has no vested interests that I can respect: nor will any authority make it anything but a lie. Truth, too, is always, in the long run, wholesome and best for all. And if this be true it is at your peril that you reject it. Be sure that, in so doing, you shall be the losers.” Thus, in his own province, he seeks the truth diligently and fearlessly; and one of the noblest results of his researches is the state of mind which he thus helps to produce, with its loyalty and courage and persistent love of truth. Out of his own province, indeed, he is often very much like other men, hasty, not over careful about his facts, and jumping to ill-considered conclusions. But in prosecuting his proper work, his methods and his spirit afford a good illustration of what it is to be sincerely “of the truth.” “I say,” broke in one of the boys, who was just emerging from the tenderfoot stage, “o’ course that’s in the Bible, ain’t it?” The Pilot assented. “Well, how do you know it’s true?” The Pilot was proceeding to elaborate his argument when Bill cut in somewhat more abruptly than was his wont. “Look here, young feller!” Bill’s voice was in the tone of command. The man looked as he was bid. “How do you know anything’s true? How do you know the Pilot here’s true when he speaks? Can’t you tell by the feel? You know by the sound of his voice, don’t you?”1 [Note: Ralph Connor, The Sky Pilot, ch. xxi.] (1) Sometimes the truth comes to us at once. It dawns upon us, shines on us, without any conscious effort of our own or immediate seeking on our part: Think ye ’mid all this mighty sum Of things for ever speaking, That nothing of itself will come, But we must still be seeking? This is intuition: but it does not come miraculously; there has been a long preparation for it in the race and often also in the individual. There are other truths that have to be long and earnestly sought for, in the quest of which all our intellectual powers must be employed, and the endeavour strenuously made to free the mind from all personal bias and unwillingness to believe. We often go without the truth because we are too indolent or indifferent to seek it earnestly, or because we are prejudiced against it and unwilling to receive it. There is certainly a moral element involved in the search for and the reception of truth. We have ears that hear not and eyes that see not. Truth reveals itself to those who love it; it comes to those who will give it a home. (2) And sometimes we reach it gradually. In ascending the mountains of Switzerland, the climber begins his journey by a disappointing contradiction. He descends from some sheltering châlet, by the light of the waning moon; he has to go over a broken path, and with a stealthy step; there are before him real tracts of trouble; the dim light alters proportions, and deceives as to distance, and so, plunging onwards, he hurts his feet. Onward he goes; he must cross the interspaces of gloom, where the shadows fall in blackness on the bases of the mountains, thick, with no shading of pity, but dusky and cruel as the hangings of Death. Onward, onward, the grasp of darkness is at last relaxing; the sky is clearer; there is a promise of the coming day; he struggles higher; around him are rising innumerable peaks, sheathed in the frost-sheets of diamond, and with the glint of the mingling glitter of the moonlight and the morning. It is an ice-world of splendour,—mountaineering made glorious,—for the light is increasing, there is a feeling of freshness, a sense of security, an exhilaration of joy; the dimness is dying, the severest of the struggle is distanced, he feels, and, with a sense of triumph, he has his feet on the track of Dawn. (3) But our eye must always be single. The seeker after truth must fulfil one condition: he must lead a true life, a life of moral rectitude at least. A false life can never come to the truth, for truth is revealed only to truth. “Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life,” was advice founded on a melancholy experience. “Blessed beyond all earthly blessedness,” said one who came through the fiery ordeal not scathless, and is now enjoying the peace he hardly found on earth,—“blessed beyond all earthly blessedness is the man who, in the tempestuous darkness of the soul, has dared to hold fast to those venerable landmarks of morality. Thrice blessed is he who, when all is drear and cheerless within and without, when his teachers terrify him and his friends shrink from him, has obstinately clung to moral good. Thrice blessed, because his night shall pass into clear bright day.” We may call to mind the experience of Columbus, when he found himself entangled in the Sargasso Sea in the midst of the ocean, to the westward of the Canary Islands. As far as eye could see the surface was thickly covered with weed, through which it seemed hopeless to seek to penetrate. To his sailors the attempt seemed even impious; the Almighty had shown His anger at their endeavour to peer into His secrets. Columbus himself feared that these weeds might indicate the proximity of dangerous rocks on which his vessel might be wrecked. But, strong in his faith in an undiscovered land, he steered right onward, carefully sounding from time to time, till in a few days they got clear of the weeds, out again into the free ocean, and in due time reached the western shore he was seeking. So it ever is in the search for truth, if we are in earnest and will but persevere, with our minds open to such guidance, Divine and human, as we can find, carefully taking soundings as we proceed, but never losing faith in the reality and attainability of truth. We shall not indeed reach all truth, or even the whole truth on any particular subject; but we shall find what we need for mental rest and true practical life.1 [Note: W. L. Walker, The True Christ, 12. In the bitter waves of woe, Beaten and tossed about By the sullen winds that blow From the desolate shores of doubt,— When the anchors that faith had cast Are dragging in the gale, I am quietly holding fast To the things that cannot fail: I know that right is right; That it is not good to lie; That love is better than spite, And a neighbour than a spy; I know that passion needs The leash of a sober mind; I know that generous deeds Some sure reward will find; That the rulers must obey; That the givers shall increase; That Duty lights the way For the beautiful feet of Peace;— In the darkest night of the year, When the stars have all gone out, That courage is better than fear, That faith is truer than doubt; And fierce though the fiends may fight, And long though the angels hide, I know that Truth and Right Have the universe on their side; And that somewhere, beyond the stars, Is a Love that is better than fate; When the night unlocks her bars I shall see Him, and I will wait.1 [Note: Washington Gladden.] The Kingdom of Truth Literature Abbey (C. J.), The Divine Love, 296. Bain (J. A.), Questions Answered by Christ, 229. Burrell (D. J.), The Spirit of the Age, 61. Campbell (L.), The Christian Ideal, 236. Chadwick (G. A.), Aids to Belief, 1. Chadwick (W. E.), Christ and Everyday Life, 191. Clark (H. W.), Laws of the Inner Kingdom, 32, 84. Greenhough (J. G.), The Cross in Modern Life, 14. Greer (D. H.), From Things to God, 26. Johnston (J. B.), The Ministry of Reconciliation, 54. Lightfoot (J. B.), Sermons in St. Paul’s Cathedral, 91. Little (W. J. K.), Sunlight and Shadow, 218. Little (W. J. K.), The Witness of the Passion, 1. Macintosh (W.), Rabbi Jesus, 1. M‘Intyre (D. M.), Life in His Name, 49. Macleod (D.), Christ and Society, 95. Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in Tlie College Chapel, i. 159; iii. 185. Peabody (F. G.), Sunday Evenings in The College Chapel, 197. Porter (N.), Yale College Sermons (1871–1886), 34, 76. Ragg (L.), Christ and Our Ideals, 93. Ridgeway (F. E.), Calls to Service, 223. Smith (W. C), Sermons, 182. Vaughan (B.), Society, Sin and the Saviour, 89. Walker (W. L.), The True Christ, 9. Williams (T. R.), God’s Open Doors, 47. The Saviour’s Easter Greeting When therefore it was evening, on that day, the first day of the week, and when the doors were shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. And when he had said this, he shewed unto them his hands and his side.—John 20:19-20. 1. It is the evening of the first Easter Day. In an upper chamber in Jerusalem—in all probability in the upper chamber which had been the scene of the institution of the Holy Eucharist, and was to be the scene of the baptism of the Church by the descending Spirit, and then to be the place of the first of Christian assemblies, the mother of all Churches—it is in this upper chamber that we see gathered together a band of men and women. They are in a position of restlessness up to the point of fear. They feel the restlessness of men whose lives are in great danger. The tomb of the Master whom they loved was found empty. The foes of Jesus imagined that this was by the connivance of the disciples themselves. His disciples had come, they said, and stolen the body whilst the guards placed to keep watch over it slept. The disciples accordingly anticipated that that fury of the Jews which had burst with such force upon their Master would now descend upon their heads. But they were not only in this bodily fear. This bodily fear would not have been in them if they had not been restless in mind. They did not know what to believe, they were in perplexity. The tomb of Christ was empty. By a resurrection? They could not believe that. True, their Lord again and again had tried to prepare them for that mystery of His resurrection, but they could not understand it. How then was it empty? Not by any act of their own, they knew very well. And the perplexity was increased in this way—some people said He was risen; some women said they had seen Him. Were these but women’s stories after all? If they were not true, what was true? Was He risen or was He not? Jesus came, unannounced and unexpected, into the midst of these perplexed disciples. Their very fear drew Him to them. They wanted Him: He knew it, and could not keep away. It was “the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut.” They wanted the old familiar times back again. If He would come and bring them how much more faithful they would be to Him than in the past. But He was gone, and they dare not keep the door ajar, for they had no courage and much fear. And then, lo! He was there, standing in the midst of them, with the old kind smile upon His face, and the calm strong greeting on His lips. “Peace be unto you,” He said, and showed them His hands and His side. 2. This was the greeting He would naturally have given them on any occasion on which He came to them in the days of His earthly life in the body. Those who have lived in Eastern lands seem to hear the Lord’s voice when they read His salutation, the sound of which from the lips of all visitors they know so well. But we must believe that the words “Peace be unto you” had a more than ordinary significance on this occasion. They were intended to convey a real inward comfort, and to produce, in the mind of those who heard them, the assurance that a new and blessed influence had entered into them. In the darkest hour of their earthly companionship, when the deep shadow of approaching separation was resting upon them, the Lord had said “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.” Their hearts were too sad at the time to receive any comfort from the saying, sweet and soothing though the sound of the words must even then have seemed. But now, in the very first words He speaks to them after His Resurrection, He fulfils His promise, and proves to them the reality of His own gift. Then, having allayed their terror, He certifies them of His bodily identity by showing them His hands and His side. There was no longer any possibility of doubting the truth of His Resurrection, and feelings of gladness at once dispelled the former doubts and apprehensions. For those disciples that day had been a very restless one. They had been troubled by what the women said, and by their own many questionings and thoughts. Sin came back on Peter and on others, and the very thing they needed most was that He should stand and say, “Peace be unto you; see my hands and my side.” And do we not realize that very often at the end of the day Christ comes to us, when we are troubled with a sense of sin? And those of us who are trying to live nearest the true Light are most conscious of sin and imperfection. There never was a day we ever lived in which there were not many things that came short of the glory of God, and there is never an evening in which we do not have to say, “Forgive us our debts,” our shortcomings, even if we do not need to say, “Forgive us our trespasses,” our transgressions. There is always the coming short of His glory, even if there is not voluntary transgression of His will. And so there never is a time when we do not need that He should show us His hands and His side, and say, “Beloved, there is the guarantee that your sin is put absolutely away, that there is nothing between God and you but one clear heaven of love.”1 [Note: F. B. Meyer, in The Keswick Week (1900), 132. I happened to drop into a house where there was a large family, and I found the mother very busy about the room. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Oh, when the children have gone to bed I have to tidy up after them, and I make straight what they have left amiss.” And there she was, just going over all the broken fragments of the children’s work, and taking up the stitches that her little daughter had put all across the piece of work she had given the child to do. I could see quite well the big cross stitches, and how the mother was taking them up and making them good. I said to myself: Yes, that is just what Christ does. He comes into the day’s life and work, when all the mistakes have been made, and the poor sermons have been preached, and the mis-statements have been uttered, and one looks back with such a sense of infinite regret and failure, and He says: “Peace be unto you. I am going over all the mistakes to put them right, and help to make powerful that which you left impotent and useless.”2 [Note: Ibid.] I The Appearance Behind Closed Doors “When the doors were shut.” 1. Barriers are often raised unwittingly against Christ. When the disciples shut and locked the doors of the upper chamber, they never meant to bar them against Jesus. They were afraid of the Jews, and acted only in self-defence. And there are lines of conduct in common life we may pursue, and we never dream that we are raising barriers between ourselves and the highest and the best: but in the end of the day for us, as for the disciples, it will be found that we have done more than we imagined—we have closed the door unwittingly on Christ. It is the tragedy of many a life that its doors are shut. Sometimes it is engrossment in pleasure, in business, in friendship, that bars the door against the ingress of the Saviour. All these things, lawful in themselves, and having indeed a right and necessary place in any life, may gain such an ascendancy as to become its masters, demanding all thought, all energy, all strength of life, until the man over whom they have gained control is himself behind closed doors. Sometimes it is by selfishness of joy or sorrow that the doors are closed. There is a joy which is regarded as incommunicable, or a sorrow which is regarded as unshareable, and He who is the Author of each is excluded from life by His own providences misreceived and misinterpreted. Often, too, it is with us as with these His earliest disciples, fear of the consequences of identification with Him causes the door to be tightly barred. We are afraid of the disfavour of men, and in shutting out the Jews we really shut out Jesus. But chiefly it is sin that excludes the Son of God from the life in which He seeks to be known and served. And this, too, may be of unintentional beginning. For sin at its commencement is often merely thoughtlessness. Persisted in, however, despite the correcting light which God is unceasingly shedding upon us, it becomes actually wilful—the rebellious barring of the door against the Son of God. Every morning that we rise, every day that we go forth, our choices make us or our choices mar us. Some day a choice more momentous than usual comes. We are face to face with one of life’s great decisions. And we have not been living on high levels, and so we choose amiss, for a man’s whole life is in every choice he makes. Then the days pass, and the issues show themselves, and the choice works itself out in life and character, and a hundred glorious things are tarnished and are tainted as the result of one disastrous choice. We never meant to shut out power and purity, but they have receded into the dim distance ever since. We never thought to grow heart-weary and world-weary, but that may follow from one mismanaged choosing. Like the disciples, beset by some poor fear, unwittingly we have closed the door on Christ.1 [Note: G. H. Morrison, The Unlighted Lustre, 115. And Life with full hands came, Austerely smiling. I looked, marvelling at her gifts— Fortune, much love, many beauties, The deed fulfilled man ponders in his youth, Gold of the heart, desire of the eyes come true! And joyously “With these,” I said “with these, indeed, What spirit could miss delight?” And paused to dream them over. But even then “Choose,” she said. “One gift is yours—no more,” And bent that grave, wise smile Upon me, waiting.2 [Note: M. M‘Neal-Sweeney, Men of No Land, 107. 2. He came; they knew not how; they knew only that the chamber was strongly secured against intrusion or surprise. No bolt was withdrawn; no door was opened; no breach was made in the wall of their place of assembly; there was no visible movement as from without to within, or from point to point. One moment they were, as they thought, alone; and the next, they looked, and lo! an outline, a form, a visible body and face, a solid human frame was before them, as if created out of the atmosphere which they breathed. “Jesus came and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.” They gazed at Him; they gazed at each other in bewilderment and terror. They supposed that they had seen a “spirit”; they were with difficulty reassured—so St. Luke’s report seems to imply—by the means which our Lord took to convince them that a body of flesh and bones was before them. At last they were glad when they saw the Lord. Christ is inevitable, unavoidable; you cannot stop or stay Him. That is the first great lesson of the Resurrection. No one can follow the story of His life, without feeling that Christ is inevitable. It is the key to the whole record. We are swept into a movement which we realize is irresistible, and the secret of its power is the irresistible Christ. We feel this not merely because Christ exercised an extraordinary influence and became the centre of a unique attraction, but because of what He was. His words and His works alike are significant first and chiefly of what He is in Himself; they are the revelation of a Person who more and more completely wins our absolute trust. When the Cross comes into view, crowning the path up which He is moving, we follow Him, knowing that, though it seems to be inexplicable, it comes within His purpose of redemption, and He fully understands it, however blind we may be to what it means. “I lay down my life for the sheep. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.” It is all a complete unity, the one perfect whole in a world of fragments. And when we hear the “It is finished” ring out through the gloom of His death-hour, we are ready for the glory which will soon be breaking from the opened grave. And as at last we see Him coming to the disciples on Easter evening, though the doors are shut against Him, we know that always and everywhere He is and must be resistless. Always and everywhere He is the inevitable Christ. For weal or woe, whatever walls you raise, Christ passes through them all and gets to you. There are deeds that we did long since, perhaps twenty years ago, but to this hour unexpectedly they rise and meet us. There were moments of exquisite happiness in our past, and even to-day their memory is like music. You cannot shut out the thought of intense hours: no change of years will prevent them winning through. And like the ineffaceable memory of such scenes is the presence and the beauty of the Lord. Christ is inevitable. Christ is unavoidable. Sometimes He comes through the closed door, just because all life is penetrated with Him. We talk of the Christian atmosphere we breathe, but the atmosphere is more than Christian, it is Christ. This is the Lord’s day—who then is this Lord? We may have closed the door on Him, but He is here. We cannot date one letter in the morning, but we mean that more than one thousand nine hundred years ago Christ was born. He meets us at every turn of the road, in every newspaper and in every problem. Our life is so interpenetrated with Christ Jesus that to avoid Him is an impossibility.1 [Note: G. H. Morrison, The Unlighted Lustre, 119. Men who lived and fought for Napoleon have told the world how they gradually came to believe him to be resistless. He had only to appear before His troops on his white charger, and down the lines of French bayonets flashed an electric confidence which made them mighty, as soldiers had seldom been mighty before, and enabled them to carry all before them. So with “the Captain of our salvation.” In the New Testament Christ goes forth “conquering and to conquer,” and He intends His Church to live in the power of that inspiration. It is nothing to Him that doors are shut, and men are weak and helpless. You may as well try to stifle the springtide or struggle to fetter the feet of the summer morning as strive to bar out the coming of Jesus risen. You will draw a curtain over the dawn and shut down the sunrise behind the darkness before you will banish the inevitable Christ.1 [Note: F. B. Macnutt, The Inevitable Christ, 8. Francis Thompson has told with marvellous beauty of imagery and breadth of expression the story of the pursuit of the soul through all its manifold experience by “the Hound of Heaven,” which will not let it escape Him. I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter, From those strong Feet that followed, followed after. But with unhurrying chase And unperturbèd pace, Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, They beat and a Voice beat More instant than the feet … “Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me.” So the foolish soul perseveres in flight from its Saviour, and on and on after it come those persistent feet which will not be denied. It tries to hide in strange and distant places; it rings itself in with forbidden pleasures; it lavishes its love upon tender and beautiful human affections, and still Fear wist not to evade as love wist to pursue— till at last the chase is ended, and the Voice is “round him like a bursting sea.” Halts by me that footfall: Is my gloom, after all, Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly? Ah! fondest, blindest, weakest, I am He whom thou seekest! Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me. 3. But while Christ forces Himself thus upon our attention He never compels our submission. It is always a matter of choice and will with us as to the reception He receives when He appears. For when once He has secured our ear and engaged our thought He subjects Himself to our will. The crowning pathos and tragedy of life is to close the door more closely when we have been made aware of His Presence. Its crowning glory is to open it wide that the King of Glory may come in. A Sunday spent at Cambridge in order to preach before the University came to Creighton as a welcome break. He chose as the subject of his sermon “Liberty.” Some years before at breakfast at Lambeth Palace, he had propounded the question what was the most important object of pursuit, and had maintained amidst the friendly and animated contradiction which never failed in that circle, that liberty was the most precious possession of man. This conviction only deepened as the years passed. But he felt also increasingly the tremendous responsibility of liberty, and said that, instead of snatching at it as a prize, it would be more true to speak of the burden of liberty. In this sermon at Cambridge he said: “If we try to grasp the meaning of progress as it is shown in the history of the past, it is to be found only in the growing recognition of the dignity of man, which is another form of expressing human freedom, and is the ground of its calm.”1 [Note: Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, ii. 320. II The Message of Peace “Peace be unto you.” This invocation of peace, at beginning or ending of intercourse, was already ancient. In our Lord’s day it had become just as much part of the social habits of the people as the custom of saying “Good-morning” is among ourselves. All the Semitic peoples, the Syrians, the Arabians, and, as we know from the Talmud, the Jews of the Dispersion, used it as a matter of course. In earlier days, no doubt, men had invoked peace from heaven with the utmost deliberation and seriousness. In the age of the kings and prophets the phrase had still a living meaning: the speaker actually prayed for the blessing of peace on the person whom he addressed. It is a gradual process by which the real fresh language of primitive times is stiffened into the unmeaning forms of the society of a later age; but as far as this expression is concerned, the process was already complete in our Lord’s day. And yet He did not scruple to avail Himself of the conventional phrase. But this was not merely the familiar greeting of friend to friend—though it was that—in that strange moment when two worlds met. Nor was it merely a kindly word—though it was that, too—to pacify their terror, as this apparition from another world stood silently and suddenly before them. It was a word of larger, more majestic scope. Spoken to men who had met in fear, and who looked forward to troubled days, it had a wonderful power to soothe, coming from the lips of the Lord, fresh from His victory over death. “The disciples, therefore, were glad when they saw the Lord,” glad with a great gladness which we cannot know till we have fathomed the depths of their sorrow and despair as they saw Jesus taken from His cross and laid in Joseph’s tomb. Jesus is strangely earnest about this peace. Those worn, hunted men need it; and He will not leave them till He has made them sure of it. “Jesus therefore said to them again, Peace be unto you.” A great soul can redeem his words from triviality. He takes the most conventional expressions, the small change of ordinary courtesy, which on the lips of other men mean nothing, and in his mouth they have such heart and substance that you go on cheered and bettered by his greeting. “Peace” is one of the anointed words which hold rank in human speech by native dignity, but in Palestine it had been degraded to the level of a customary civility, with which the most indifferent acquaintances met and parted. And Jesus takes the word, humbled and impoverished, and makes such use of it that it is no longer trivial but has the force of a command for their hearts.1 [Note: W. M. Macgregor, Jesus Christ the Son of God, 165. Professor Johnston Ross relates that he once visited a furniture-dealer’s shop in West London. The man was a Jew, and, noticing that his visitor wore clerical dress, he began to talk on religious matters. After an interesting conversation the Professor mounted his bicycle, saying, “Good-bye,” when the dealer called out in Hebrew, “Peace be unto you”—using the plural form. The Professor’s curiosity was aroused, and he asked: “Why do you put it so? Is there another that you wish peace to?” “Yes,” replied the Jew, “Peace be to you and to the angel over your shoulder.” 1. The first gift that Jesus had for them was a high confidence in their cause. Without that a Christian life cannot well be lived. He does not mean that we should live by sufferance, creeping timidly under the shadow of men’s example; we are to have eyes and a conscience to know the truth, and courage to maintain it. The Christian Church has been built up by the fidelities of true men, and it gains no strength from those who have not courage to be faithful. These will come in thousands when the fashion once is set, but they bring nothing with them. They, certainly, can never be described as the city set on a hill which cannot be hid. Jesus Christ is the Lord of all the brave, and His gift is the high heart which sees its course and does not reckon odds. Peden, the Covenanter, speaks for all right Christians when he says, “For my part, I seek no more, if He bids me go.” And in one of his sermons the refrain is this: “They sought no more than His commandment; they went and He carried them well through.”1 [Note: W. M. Macgregor, Jesus Christ the Son of God, 173. 2. But the deepest hurt in the life of a man is not the ill his neighbour threatens; there is a controversy behind that, a war in his own conscience, a sense that his own life is wrong, and that God and he are somehow not at one. And “Christ preached peace.” He brought forgiveness to men, the assurance of God’s forgetfulness. To the most faulty He declared the goodwill of God, assuring them of a place in His heart from which all their sin and folly have not banished them. There are powers in God to part us from our sin, so that it can never rise against us any more; and these powers are centred in the Cross of Christ, in which right was done to justice by Him who came to rescue men from what they had deserved. Christian peace, the peace which Christ gives, the peace which He sheds abroad in the heart, is it aught else than a glorified harmony; the expelling from man’s life of all that was causing disturbance there, all that was hindering him from chiming in with the music of heaven, in which now shall mingle for ever the consenting songs of redeemed men and elect angels?1 [Note: Archbishop Trench, in The Literary Churchman (1892), 167. I couldn’t live in peace if I put the shadow of a wilful sin between myself and God.2 [Note: Maggie Tulliver, in The Mill on the Floss.] The realization of our peace with God, which constitutes or causes peace with ourselves, presupposes the reality of that peace with God; it does not create it. The fact must precede the knowledge of the fact, it cannot result from it. The ear does not discourse sweet music, or the eye produce a pleasant picture; in each case the organ of sense embraces an already existing reality. The rule holds good in the spiritual creation. That perfect harmony of will and reason and religious emotion which we denominate peace of conscience is not the cause of the sinner’s reconciliation with an offended God, neither is it identical with it; it is the result.and product of an actual reconciliation. For the condition of our own minds is as it were the shadow and reflection of the relation in which we stand to God. So long as we are at enmity with Him, so long as we feel ourselves to be exposed to His most righteous indignation, there is strife and war and tumult in our hearts. Only out of peace with God, and the conscious realization of that peace, can flow quiet of heart and peace of conscience.3 [Note: W. B. Jones, The Peace of God, 360. Perhaps no Christian, since the days of the Apostles, has illustrated the true peace of the soul, which Jesus Christ gives, so fully as the great St. Augustine. Read his “Confessions.” What a restless life his was before his conversion. His intellect was tossed on the waves of speculation, and he could grasp no reassuring truth. His heart was distracted by the ideals of false philosophy and sensuality in its various Protean forms. His conscience was profoundly stirred by conviction of sin; he was hurried along by a very tempest of passions, and there was no peace. Then came his conversion. Jesus “rose in the soul.” There was a change, which brought peace. Tolle, lege, “Take it up and read,” were the words he heard in his agony; and he took up the scroll and read, “The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness”; and those words of St. Paul fell on the ear of his soul, and there was peace. His intellect surveys the vast realms of revelation and nature, and sees Christ—the Divine Logos—everywhere. His heart turns its undisturbed and enraptured gaze on the Eternal Beauty—all ancient and all young. His will is redirected, the problem of duty is simplified, and he does it with all his heart. His conscience is calmed, for there is no longer any sense of feud between himself and holiness of life. All is pardoned through the cleansing Blood. All becomes possible through the grace of the Redeemer, and Augustine became the greatest saint the Catholic Church has produced since the time of the great Apostle himself.1 [Note: M. Fuller, In Terrâ Pax, 79. 3. How did the peace of God, passing understanding, come to them that night? By the manifested presence of Him who first said, “Peace be unto you,” and then showed them His hands and His side. He came as His own supreme Evangelist, in His own utterance of “peace.” He let them see Him as His own supreme Evangel, in His finished sacrifice and that glorious sequel of it, His living Presence. So it is for ever. There is no substitute, nor ever can be, for personal relations with Christ, crucified and risen. Would we taste a “peace” which is indeed “of God”? It must be “through our Lord Jesus Christ,” as not a principle only but a Person. Faith must see His wounds; faith must hear His benediction, nothing between, resting direct on Him. Only so will our life have banished out of it the bewilderment, the misgiving, which lie at the troubled heart of half-religion. Wilt Thou not visit me? The plant beside me feels Thy gentle dew; And every blade of grass I see, From Thy deep earth its quickening moisture drew. Wilt Thou not visit me? Thy morning calls on me with cheering tone; And every hill and tree Lend but one voice, the voice of Thee alone. Come, for I need Thy love, More than the flower the dew, or grass the rain Come, gently as Thy holy Dove; And let me in Thy sight rejoice to live again. I will not hide from them When Thy storms come, though fierce may be their wrath But bow with leafy stem, And strengthened follow on Thy chosen path. Yes, Thou wilt visit me, Nor plant nor tree Thine eye delights so well, As when, from sin set free, My spirit loves with Thine in peace to dwell.1 [Note: Jones Very.] III The Confirmation of the Message “He shewed unto them his hands and his side.” Our Lord first convinced them of His identity. The deep shadows of evening were around them; a solitary lamp, perhaps, cast a glimmer of light through the large upper room, and made the darkness visible, while they were standing in a group and eagerly discussing the news of the Eesurrection, which, first Mary Magdalene, then Peter, then the two disciples from Emmaus, had in turn brought in. And casually some one glanced aside into the darkened room, where all was vacancy; and surely the air was not seen to move—but it did move—and he looked again, and it moved again, and now a dim outline was seen. The disciple held his breath, and touched his neighbour and whispered. And they looked again, and the shadow had grown in distinctness, and others saw the shape. At length it was plainly visible to all, and it stood out in the very midst in the full proportions of a man, although a moment before they could neither see, nor feel, nor hear any one besides themselves. Well might they be filled with fear, and think that they had seen a spirit. Great need had they of hearing those soothing words, “Peace be unto you!” And now, to show them not only that it was a true material organism, but the very body that had been crucified, He showed the ghastly gashes made in the crucifixion. Luke says, “He shewed them his hands and his feet”: those hands and feet that had always been about His Father’s business; hands that had waved away the powers of darkness; hands that had been placed on the heads of little children; hands that had broken the bread of miracle; feet that had walked the stormy waters; feet that had carried Him to the weeping sisters, and the tomb of Lazarus; feet that had climbed the mountain stair into the midnight holy of holies, where He prayed; feet that had hastened to the side of the wretched, had stood near the most forlorn; feet that took Him down to Gethsemane, and failed Him there under the load of our sorrow; feet that with weak, fainting, yet resolute steps, came out of Jerusalem, while the hands assayed to hold upon His shoulder the cruel cross—the hands and the feet that were nailed to that cross. One time when David Livingstone was engaged in his civilizing work in Africa, he was attacked by a huge lion of the jungle. The ferocious beast grasped the hand of the missionary in his powerful jaws, and broke the bone. Livingstone was rescued by two friends who had accompanied him, but for a long time he was obliged to keep his arm in a sling. He carried the scar of the wound all his days, and when the faithful natives brought back his dead body to his native land, this scar on the arm once broken was one of the means by which the remains of the great missionary were identified by his friends. 1. He confirmed His former word of peace.—“My peace I give unto you.” He had said, and the word lived in their ears like deep irony. And now, when they sat in gloomy silence, with their sorrow, and their peril, and thoughts of the empty future making peace impossible, He comes again with His former word. It was a time when the common greeting might well have sounded like a wrong; peace—when there is no peace and cannot be! But Jesus Christ, whose words are living, calls them back from all such petulance. In its fullest latitude He meant His word, and thus made trial of their faith; for peace was there, indeed, within their reach, if only they had courage to lay hands upon it. And in our disquiet the Lord speaks to us in the same way, and we shall gain or miss the help of His presence according as we deal with the promise of His word. 2. He showed them the proofs of His victory.—His appearance was more significant than any word He spoke. He appeared to those men time after time in order that, when He had withdrawn from their sight, they might know the truth, the reality concerning Him, and know it for ever; that all doubt, all hesitation, might be gone from their minds. He showed Himself to them that they might have His image in their hearts, and send on that image into our hearts through all the ages. Just as on earth in the days of His mortality He revealed Himself, so now in the days of His resurrection power He does but reveal Himself. Is there a halo? There is none. Are there the robes of royalty? They are not mentioned. Is His advent into the room heralded by the acclaim of the archangels? No. But we are told in both records—it is the very central point of the narrative—that He showed them His hands and His feet. We are told that on the next Sabbath He saw Thomas, and He said, “See my hands; see my side.” The marks of the suffering were upon Him. His body was changed strangely. It was raised to a condition of existence entirely different from the old condition; but there was something that was not changed. “When you think how much was changed, that which was not changed is all the more significant. Instead of the halo there were the wound-prints, and it was those wound-prints that won for Him the name “My Lord and my God.” Our Lord bought peace with His Passion. It is to the Passion that He ascribes the Peace. He comes back with the signature of that treaty of peace written in His hands and side. There did not seem to be much peace in the Passion, rather it was the breaking of the storm. The old man in the Temple looked across the sky of the Child-life to where the clouds were gathering for Him and His Mother; and on the Cross the storm broke. But the vessel, lost to sight in the storm, again appears, though with rigging torn and battered hull, creeping back to port with the dignity of a struggle that has found the goal.1 [Note: F. E. Ridgeway, Calls to Service, 219. The Saviour’s Easter Greeting Literature Buckland (A. R.), Text Studies for a Year, 119. Davies (J. Ll.), The Work of Christ, 331. Deshon (G.), Sermons for the Ecclesiastical Year, 182. Farningham (M.), In Evening Lights, 104. Fotheringham (D. R.), The Writing on the Sky, 77. Fuller (M.), The Lord’s Day, 256. Fuller (M.), In Terrâ Pax, 56. Gutch (C.), Sermons, 184. Hankey (W. B.), The Church and the Saints, 55. Holden (J. S.), The Pre-Eminent Lord, 101. Hutton (W. R.), Low Spirits, 48. Jones (W. B.), The Peace of God, 355. Lewis (F. W.), The Work of Christ, 147. Liddon (H. P.), Easter in St. Paul’s, 217. MacArthur (J.), Sermons for the People, New Ser., iv. 57. McFadyen (J. E.), The Divine Pursuit, 67. Macgregor (W. M.), Jesus Christ the Son of God, 165. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John xv.–xxi., 382. Macnutt (F. B.), The Inevitable Christ, 3. Morrison (G. H.), The Footsteps of the Flock, 288. Morrison (G. H.), The Unlighted Lustre, 112. Moule (H. C. G.), From Sunday to Sunday, 95. Reynolds (H. R.), Lamps of the Temple, 184. Salmon (G.), Cathedral and University Sermons, 213. Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 80, 81. Smith (D.), Christian Counsel, 54. Stone (D.), The Discipline of Faith, 107. Telford (J.), The Story of the Upper Room, 245. Thomas (J.), The Mysteries of Grace, 89. Wilkinson (G. H.), Some Laws in God’s Spiritual Kingdom, 281. Keswick Week, 1900, p. 131 (Meyer); 1905, p. 95 (Pierson). Christ’s Mission and Ours As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you.—John 20:21. 1. It was the evening of the greatest day in history, and the little company of the disciples sat watching anxiously within locked doors. They had waited all day for Jesus, but Jesus had not come. And now it was evening, and their hopes had perhaps dwindled with the setting of the sun, when suddenly, silently—without the sound of footfall or the warning of opened door—He was there. “Jesus came and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. And when he had so said he shewed unto them his hands and his side.… Jesus therefore said to them again, Peace be unto you; as the Father hath sent me, even so send I you.” 2. What an astonishing statement it is! Christ makes Himself co-ordinate with the Father. He associates in indefeasible unity “the Father “and “I.” He tacitly claims the right to do what the Father does. He makes Himself equal with God. He was either incarnate God, or He was incredible blasphemer; there is no escape from the alternative. It is in such implications that we see our Saviour’s Deity. These subtle claims of Christ are irresistible arguments for His absolute divineness. 3. Quite as astonishing are these words from another point of view. Not only does the Lord associate Himself uniquely with God, but in a wonderful way He associates Christians with Himself. What an honourable vocation He assigns to His people! He sends us as He Himself was sent. He classes His disciples with Himself. He who said “the Father—I,” says, “Me—you.” Ours is a task analogous to His. What He thus declares to His disciples He expressly declares to God the Father, in that high-priestly prayer of His: “As thou didst send me into the world, even so sent I them into the world.” This immutable word which puts such honour upon Christians Christ asseverates alike to God and to man. “What a word is this!” 4. What is the real and permanent value of that message? It reveals His conception of the meaning of our mission; it unveils before us the truth concerning the responsibility of the Church of Jesus Christ, the truth concerning the responsibility of all the Churches of Jesus Christ, the truth concerning the responsibility of every individual member thereof. I The Son and the Disciples 1. There is a series of remarkable utterances, found only in St. John, in which our Lord draws a parallel between the relation He bears to the Father and the relation the believer bears to Himself. In these passages our Lord asserts that He is the central and connecting link in a dual relationship the upper and lower sides of which exactly correspond to each other. What the Father is to the Son, that Christ is to him who believes in Him. And thus Jesus Christ stands midway between the Father and us, and the lines of communication between earth and heaven pass through Him. All that the Father has to communicate is first received by Him and then transmitted to us, while on the other hand He receives the love and trust and obedience of His disciples and passes it all on in turn to the Father. (1) “As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father; so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me” (John 6:57). The whole series of utterances now under consideration is cast in this parallel form. There is something more than similarity of relationship implied in these words; they also imply that the great principle of life is an identical principle both on the upper and on the lower side of this relationship. Life is the same in us as in God; and wonderful as the thought may be, it is nevertheless true that when we believe in Christ and through Him are made partakers of spiritual life, we enter into communion with the life of God Himself. When one thinks of life in man as one thing and life in God as another, one has lost the key to the science of life. Spiritual life is not a series of isolated springs, but an ocean laving every shore. (2) “As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you” (John 15:9). Here again we have the same passing on from the Father to the Son and from the Son to the disciple. The love of the Father to the Son is beyond human comprehension. It is frequently referred to in the Gospel narratives, but always as a sacred and mystical thing which it is almost a sacrilege to unveil to the common gaze. Christ Himself says, “Thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.” But love, like life, is the same throughout the universe; the same bond that unites God and Christ unites Christ and the disciple, and the disciple and his fellow-disciple, and the heart of the humblest believer thrills with the same love that dwells in the heart of God. “I have declared unto them thy name,” says Christ, “that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them.” (3) “I know my sheep, and am known of mine, even as the Father knoweth me, and I know the Father” (John 10:14-15). These two verses belong to one sentence, and must not be separated as in the Authorized Version. They are two sides of a comparison. Christ is speaking of Himself as the Good Shepherd, and of the perfect understanding there is between Him and His sheep. There is an instinctive recognition by which the sheep know the shepherd, and the shepherd knows the sheep. And our Lord declares that this reciprocal knowledge and intimacy is of the same kind as that which exists between Him and His Father. (4) “If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love” (John 15:10). That obedience is the true test of love is a commonplace of Christian thought; Christ has taught us this in His familiar admonition, “If ye love me keep my commandments.” But here our Lord shows us how this principle runs up into the higher sphere, and forms the basis of the love which exists between Him and God. It is a law that operates universally, in heaven as well as on earth; it is not peculiar to the sphere of earthly discipleship but rules also in the heavenly places; an ordinance whose sway is felt throughout the whole circle of being. Christ lived in the love of the Father because He always did the Father’s will; His perfect obedience was the soil out of which the flower of love grew; His oneness of will and desire with the Father formed the harmonious environment in which alone love can subsist. “I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love.” And now our Lord takes that exalted experience of His—the life which He lived toward the Father—and turns it earthward, as the pattern of our relation to Him. Obedience is the royal law that binds the Father, the Son, and the disciple in one fellowship of love. (5) “As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world” (John 17:18). Christ thus links the mission of His disciples to that which He received from the Father, and makes their work the outcome and continuation of His own. The purpose which brought Christ into the world runs through the whole service and ministry of the Church, and the work in which Christian men and women are employed to-day is a continuation of the purpose of the Incarnation. The commission which the Father placed first in the hands of Jesus Christ, Christ has handed on to His disciples, thus raising them to the position of co-workers with Himself, to share in the honour and privilege of carrying out the redeeming purpose of God. (6) For a final instance of this special form of expression let us turn to Revelation 3:21. Though we go outside the Gospel for this passage, we do not quit the circle of St. John’s writings; nor is there any change in the person of the speaker. And the fact that these words were spoken from heaven, after our Lord’s exaltation to the right hand of God, makes it all the more significant that they should assume the same parallel form as those we have already examined, which were spoken while He was on earth. “To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne.” Here we see that this twofold relationship runs right through to the end, and is completed in the final triumph and glory of Christ’s people in heaven.1 [Note: J. T. Hamly.] The beginning of the Gospel is to be found in the thought and love of God. We may cast our lines back as far as we can through the ages of eternity, and we shall never be able to find the point at which God’s concern for the welfare of the universe that was to be first began, and yet the Lamb of God is said to have been slain from before the foundation of the world. The sacrifice of Christ was not an afterthought on the part of the Divine Being; it was, so to speak, part of Himself, an element of His very Godhead and of His very existence. So that, if we are really to go back to what may be termed the beginning of beginnings, we shall have to search the depths of the Divine existence, and follow all the wonderful and infinite course of the Divine thinking and purpose and love. There, of course, we are lost. Our hearts can only point, as it were, towards that great solemn mystery. Explanation we have none. Special indication is entirely beyond our power. We are lost in wonder, and our wonder is lost in speechlessness. The second beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is found in the Incarnation of God’s Son. We begin the next time at Bethlehem. We were lost when it was a mere question of unuttered and in speech unutterable love. We only begin to think and to feel and to understand in part God’s meaning, when He utters His love not in speech, but in the person, the flesh and blood of God’s dear Son. We can begin there—little children can begin at that point; our love can commence its study at the cradle of our Lord Jesus Christ. Creatures like ourselves need alphabets, beginnings, sharp lines, visibilities. We are not all pure mind; we cannot dwell upon the abstract, the unconditioned, the absolute, the infinite, in matters of this kind. We need some one to look at, to speak to, to go up to quite closely, and to hear speak the language of the love of God. This is what may be termed the second beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Where, then, are we to look for the third beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God? We look for it in the Church. As He was, so are we to be in the world. We are to be “living epistles, known and read of all men.” When men ask, “Where is Christ?” we are to show them Christianity. And when they ask, “What is Christianity?” we are to show them the Church—meanwhile, indeed, an incomplete representation of the truth, yet Jesus Christ Himself claims it, and devolves upon the Church the responsibility not only of bearing His name by exemplifying His life, but of interpreting His doctrine and living upon His love.1 [Note: J. Parker.] 2. “As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you.” Mark the deep significance of that resounding “as” and “even so.” The parallel involves disparity. He is God, and we are but men. He came to atone, and we but preach His sovereign atonement. This and much more is implied in the fact that in this text two different Greek verbs are used, which are translated by the common word “send.” The sending of Jesus was a grander sending far than the sending of us. He represents God more intimately and vividly than we can ever represent Him. But if there be this disparity there is in many respects a wonderful identity between His mission in the world and ours. The tenses of the verbs in the original indicate this in a very generative manner. “As the Father hath sent me”—the tense shows that the commission is still in force—“even so send I you.” The idea is that our commission is but a continuation of His in another form. The duty of the Christian is practically equivalent to the mission of the Christ. “As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you.” The word “send” which He uses concerning Himself is not the same word “send” as that used concerning His disciples. He speaks of Himself as the Apostle of the Father; He says, in effect, “My Father hath delegated authority to Me,” but He never delegated authority to His disciples. The word used concerning them was simpler, and merely indicates that they are His messengers. He dispatches them under authority, but He holds the authority within His own grasp. Thus the commission of Matthew harmonises with the declaration of John: “All authority is given unto me; go ye, therefore,” and be My messengers and preach My Gospel. Jesus has never delegated His authority either to man or to men, to synods or to conferences, or even to unions; He holds it still Himself. This is not to degrade the office of the Church; it is to indicate the fact that He brings the Church into such union with Himself that she is to exercise His authority. She is to be the instrument through which He carries out the purposes of God. God delegated all authority to His Son; and His Son calls into living and vital union with Himself all believers, and they become the instruments through which He carries out the work of God. And I think the same meaning is found in the words He used on another occasion, when He said, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work”; and then, presently, He brought into association with Himself all His disciples when He used the plural and said, “We must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day.” If this be the meaning of the text, then the mission of the Church in the world is the mission of Christ. He is the Sent of the Father, still the living and present Worker; but the Church is His Body—bone of His bone, flesh of His flesh. “He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit.” And as the Church of Jesus Christ realizes her actual and vital union with Christ, she becomes the instrument through which He moves to the accomplishment of His work.1 [Note: G. Campbell Morgan.] But to be a true disciple is to think of the same things as our prophet, and to think of different things in the same order. To be of the same mind with another is to see all things in the same perspective; it is not to agree in a few indifferent matters near at hand and not much debated; it is to follow him in his farthest flights, to see the force of his hyperboles, to stand so exactly in the centre of his vision that, whatever he may express, your eyes will light at once on the original, that whatever he may see to declare, your mind will at once accept.2 [Note: R. L. Stevenson, Lay Morals.] II The Mission of Christ and Our Mission The Mission of Jesus Christ to the world may be expressed by three great words—Revelation, Redemption, Salvation. 1. It is a mission of Revelation. He came to declare the love of the Father’s heart. The Father entrusted to the Son the manifestation of His love. “Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” The love of the Father to a guilty and dying world was the substance of the Redeemer’s message. “God so loved the world,” it began. How it would have gladdened that poor prodigal in the parable if he had heard in the midst of his hunger and loneliness that his father tenderly cherished his memory still. He would not then have waited till the pangs of insatiate hunger drove him to his father’s presence, if perchance it might yet be open to him, as the only alternative with death. Had a message from the father found him and called him home again, full joyously would he have trodden the homeward path. And so God loved the world in its rebellion and misery—shameful rebellion, no doubt, and merited misery; but they were His children who were groaning in bondage, and the meaning of their anguish reached and touched His heart. And God gave His only begotten Son, that the world should not perish, but have everlasting life. Now as the Father required for the expression of His own mind and will and love to the world, and by the very nature of the case, a sufficient and adequate image, organ, hand, word, and mediatorial ambassador; so Christ required—when He was about to return clothed in our humanity to the bosom of the Father, to the midst of the throne—a corresponding agency. We are not the direct representatives of the Invisible God, of Him who fills eternity and space with His glory; but we are sent by Christ to be the image, the messengers, the hands, the mediatorial representatives of His Divine humanity to the world in which we live. Therefore, first of all, in order to realize the grandeur of our calling, let us keep ever in mind that Christ sends us to men, that by our character, by our growing sanctification, by our holy living, by our entire walk, by our habits, our spirit, we may make Him known; He was and is the light of the world, but light itself is invisible unless reflected or refracted by the medium on or through which it vibrates. We may be able to reflect some one ray of the perfect beam of unsullied light. I am very glad that you asked me your question. May I put it this way? The contents of the Christian revelation is the Person of the Lord Jesus. Scripture is the record of that revelation. The Church is the witness of that revelation. In early times, amongst a rude and semi-barbarous people, the Church was greatly engaged in considering how she was to discharge her function as a witness. But this process was largely concerned with mechanism. Just as the State was striving at the same time to embody the idea of justice; the method was imperfect, but the idea existed nowhere else. Still, at the present day, the State embodies that idea imperfectly; but we do not doubt about the idea itself. So with the revelation of which the Church is the guardian. That revelation is immediate to each human soul; and the attempts to express it in the forms of outward organisation—their partial success, their conspicuous failure—only make the eternal meaning of the revelation itself clearer and more precious.1 [Note: The Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, i. 416. One of the last acts of Henry Ward Beecher showed the true greatness of that great man. He was leaving Plymouth Church on the last Sabbath evening of his ministry, just as the strains of the organ were dying away, when he saw two little pauper children, who had come inside from the storm to listen to the music, startled with childish fright as he drew near, as though detected in some wrong; but the warm-hearted preacher spoke lovingly to them, and, kissing them, soothed away their fears, as he went out with them into the wintry cold and sleet, with his arms thrown around them to shelter and shield. And, doing this act of lowly love, he went home to die.1 [Note: T. F. Lockyer, The Inspirations of the Christian Life, 121. 2. It is a mission of Redemption. (1) Christ came into the world to express God’s absolute hatred of sin, and to extirpate it from the heart of man, by taking upon Himself all its curse and shame, bearing these to the bitter end. He came on a sacrificial and redeeming mission, to do what no angel or man could accomplish. He came to set forth what was eternally present in the Father’s heart, to bring to a climax the expression of perfect holiness and boundless mercy, to bring righteousness and love with infinite travail and peerless joy into absolute unity, to justify by remission of sins past, present, and to come, and to prove that when men realize this awful and glorious fact, when little children can sob themselves to rest in the arms of Jesus, then full reconciliation, repentance, submission to the will of the Father supervene, and there is the beginning of a new and eternal life. My blood so red For thee was shed, Come home again, come home again! My own sweet heart, come home again! You’ve gone astray Out of your way— Come home again, come home again! (2) Now if we are sent at all, we are sent to take a share in the very ministry of our Lord Himself. Our service represents and continues His service. Our labour is indissolubly joined to His. We are actually brought into a partnership with Him who “came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” And what a tremendous obligation does that fellowship lay upon us! We remember, with shame for ourselves, how utterly Christ gave Himself. Of Tissot’s 365 drawings of His life, no less than 310 are concerned with the ministry and Passion: and yet even that proportion is inadequate to express the place which service occupied in the life of the Great Pastor. Why, surely His every act, His every word and thought, was service. The whole of His life was one long sacrificing of Himself for others. And when there was nothing further that His life could give, He gave the life itself a willing sacrifice in death. Well might our Lord, looking into the eager faces of His Apostles, ask, “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?” Well may He put to us that question now! Scarce had she learnt to lisp the name Of Martyr; yet she thinks it shame Life should so long play with that breath Which spent could buy so brave a death. She never undertook to know What death with love should have to do; Nor has she e’er yet understood Why to shew love, she should shed blood. Yet though she cannot tell you why, She can love, and she can die.1 [Note: Richard Crashaw.] 3. It is a mission of Salvation. (1) In order to save the world He began with loving care showered on little children, with sympathy extending to the outcast and excommunicate, to the publican, the harlot, the devilridden, and the dead. He healed men one by one. He felt the special agony of the widow of Nain and of the family at Bethany. He had saving words for rulers and priests, for Pilate and Caiaphas, for His executioners, and for the dying brigand. (2) Now in all this He was sent to unveil the righteousness and love of the Father, and He sends faithful souls who have learned His secret to carry out the plan of which He sets the example, the first beginnings of which He wrought alone. When a missionary, with patience, persists in saving one drunkard, one idolater, one cannibal from his otherwise inevitable doom, pursues the proud rebel with the calls of pity, or urgently plies any one despairing soul with the great consolation; when a missionary of the cross knows that his Master’s order is, “Go, preach to every creature, compel the vile and the most ignorant, the most bewildered, to come into the light, and accept the conditions of salvation,” he shares the burden of Jesus, takes His cross upon his shoulders, and hears and accepts His commission as certainly as if it had been thundered to him from the skies, “As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you.” Wherever I see a young man teaching the Gospel to half-a-dozen children, I recognize a living branch of the Church of Christ.1 [Note: The Life and Letters of John Cairns, 588. The late Bishop Simpson relates a remarkable instance of the work of a young man in America, who started an institution for the care and improvement of poor imbecile children. Among those brought him was a little boy, five years of age, who had never made an intentional act, had never spoken a word, and had never given any look of recognition to a friend. He lay on the floor, a mass of flesh, without even ability to turn himself over. Such was the student brought to this school. The teacher made effort after effort to get the slightest recognition from his eye, or to produce the slightest voluntary movement; but in vain. Unwilling, however, to yield, he had the boy brought to his room, and he lay down beside him every day for half-an-hour, hoping that some favourable indication might occur. One day, at the end of six months of unavailing effort, he was unusually weary, and did not read. He soon discovered that the child was uneasy, and was trying to move himself a little. The thought flashed across his mind: “He misses the sound of my voice.” He brought his mouth near the child’s hands, and, after repeated efforts, the little one succeeded in placing his fingers on the teacher’s lips, as if to say, “Make that sound again.” The teacher felt that from that moment his success was assured. And, as the narrative goes on to relate, only five years after that time, the child stood on a platform, in the presence of interested spectators, and answered with ready accuracy the questions of a public examination. The patience of love had conquered.2 [Note: T. F. Lockyer, The Inspirations of the Christian Life, 122. Yes, the ugly old church!—at first such a failure that Bishop Blomfield was wroth at its appearance,—though it cannot raise its head among the handsome churches of the metropolis, yet it has been the nursery of babes in Christ and the home of thousands who have reached a fuller age in Christian experience. I can say this without incurring the charge of egotism, for I am speaking of what the church had become before I knew it. The material fabric was the ugly, uninteresting building I have described. The church which was built up within it was a church of simple, honest souls, whose outlook on life had been raised to such a level that piety had discarded the temptation to be a sham, and a deep, earnest conviction of the reality of spiritual life had laid hold npon their hearts. They formed a society of true-hearted men and women who loved their Lord, and who strove, severally and unitedly, to do His will. The very atmosphere of the church and parish brought me a message which helped, while it humbled me. They were so much better than I—those devout and simple-minded souls to whom I was sent to minister. Whence had this atmosphere come? Under God, it was owing to the untiring and unique work of one man—the Rev. William Bell Mackenzie—my predecessor, and the first vicar of the church. Fidelity and fixity marked his life. He lived till he was sixty-four years of age. He had been ordained thirty-six years, and in that time he served but one curacy, St. James’, Bristol, and one incumbency, St. James’, Holloway. The thirty-two years at St. James’, Holloway, were devoted to building up his flock in faith and love—a generation’s work for the regeneration of the people. Slowly he gathered round him, not only an attached and appreciative congregation, but a band of trusty and faithful men and women, genuinely interested in the good of the parish and neighbourhood, and keenly alive to missionary responsibility.1 [Note: W. Boyd Carpenter, Some Pages of My Life, 158. Christ’s Mission and Ours Literature Bardsley (J. W.), Illustrative Texts, 29. Benson (R. M.), The Final Passover, ii. (pt. ii.) 479. Brown (J. B.), The Divine Life in Man, 309. Coyle (R. F.), The Church and the Times, 35. Dudden (F. Homes), Christ and Christ’s Religion, 217. Gurney (T. A.), The Living Lord, 256. Henson (H. H.), Preaching to the Times, 174. Hort (F. J. A.), Village Sermons in Outline, 246. Knight (G. H.), Divine Upliftings, 73. Lockyer (T. F.), The Inspirations of the Christian Life, 120. Macfarlaud (C. S.), The Infinite Affection, 63. Mackennal (A.), The Life of Christian Consecration, 17. Maolaren (A.), After the Resurrection, 40. Marten (C. H.), Plain Bible Addresses, 208. Rainsford (M.), The Lord’s Prayer for Believers, 343. Reynolds (H. R.), Lamps of the Temple, 82. Young (D. T.), The Enthusiasm of God, 62. Cambridge Review, i. No. 7 (Perowne). Cliristian World Pulpit, xxxii. 312 (Glover); lxx. 257 (Morgan). Church of England Pulpit, lxii. 237 (Hitchcock). Literary Churchman, xvi. 184. Preacher’s Magazine, xii. (1901) 352 (Hamly). My Lord and My God Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God.—John 20:28. It was a strange confession this, to be addressed by a pious Jew, who knew the meaning of his faith, to the man Christ Jesus, with whom as man he had companied, with whom he had eaten and drunk, whom he had heard speak in human words through human lips. The Jew believed in a God who had created men, who worked through them and ruled them, who was conversant with all their ways, who spoke to them and had spoken through them. But it was a God who was more immeasurably distant than imagination could bridge, whose ways were higher than men’s ways, and His thoughts than men’s thoughts, as high as the heaven is from the earth. He had spoken through men, but it is in that very consciousness of the prophets that the distance between God and man becomes most significant. It emphasizes just where man is highest; for in proportion to man’s goodness does he become conscious of his own sinfulness in the presence of the high and holy God. “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts”—that had been the cry of Isaiah. “Ah, Lord God! behold I cannot speak: for I am a child”—that had been the confession of Jeremiah’s weakness. There was not one of these holy men of God who, if we had proposed to offer him the sort of reverence that is due to God, would have hesitated for a moment to rebuke it in the language of St. Peter, “Stand up; for I myself also am a man.” The last of the prophets, he who is called greater than the prophets, is conspicuous for this self-effacement in the presence of God, though in his case he took off the glory of his prophetic crown to cast it at the feet of Christ. Truly a strange confession this, to see one who knew the meaning of his belief in the one and only unapproachable God, and hear him speak to One who was truly Son of Man, truly Jesus of Nazareth, in the words “My Lord and my God.” 1. The text forms the climax of the Fourth Gospel. It is St John’s answer to the question, “Who then is this?” That question was asked by the people when Christ stayed the storm on the Sea of Galilee. They were astonished without measure, we are told, and said one to another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” Four answers have been given to that question. (1) First there is the answer which the people themselves gave. “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” they said. He was one of themselves. He had been born in Bethlehem; He had followed His father’s trade; He had lived amongst them, and they believed that they knew Him. They knew Him and all His kindred: “Is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas? And his sisters, are they not all with us?” He simply made an addition of one to the population of the town of Nazareth. And this answer is given still. In our day there is scarcely a more popular answer than this. Jesus is a man; He makes an addition of one to the population of the world. He is a man, it is added, of supreme ability, originality, and earnestness. He is a man of most exceptional goodness. Those who make this answer have a little difficulty in agreeing as to just how good He was. Some go so far as to say that He seems to have been sinless, or at any rate that nothing sinful is reported of Him. But most will not go so far as that. They cannot believe that any man whose father and mother we know could be sinless. In the shop of Nazareth Pungent cedar haunts the breath. ’Tis a low Eastern room, Windowless, touched with gloom. Workman’s bench and simple tools Line the walls. Chests and stools, Yoke of ox, and shaft of plow, Finished by the Carpenter, Lie about the pavement now. In the room the Craftsman stands, Stands and reaches out His hands. Let the shadows veil His face If you must, and dimly trace His workman’s tunic, girt with bands At His waist. But His hands— Let the light play on them; Marks of toil lay on them. Paint with passion and with care Every old scar showing there Where a tool slipped and hurt; Show each callous; be alert For each deep line of toil. Show the soil Of the pitch; and the strength Grip of helve gives at length. When night comes, and I turn From my shop where I earn Daily bread, let me see Those hard hands—know that He Shared my lot, every bit; Was a man, every whit. Could I fear such a hand Stretched toward me? Misunderstand Or mistrust? Doubt that He Meets me in full sympathy? “Carpenter! hard like Thine Is this hand—this of mine: I reach out, gripping Thee, Son of man, close to me, Close and fast, fearlessly.” (2) The second answer is made by God. “This is my beloved Son.” The people of Nazareth claimed Him as theirs. He is one of us, they said. God’s answer is, He is not yours, He is Mine. The time may come when He will be yours also; He is not yours yet. He will be yours when you know that He is not simply an addition of one to the population of Nazareth; He will be yours when you know that He is not merely a man, but the Son of man. Meanwhile He is Mine; He is the Son of God. This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. This answer is not so popular in our day. It is not so comprehensive; it is said to be not so comforting. The great merit, we are told, of regarding Jesus as simply one of us is that we can then be sure of His sympathy. But is it enough to be sure of His sympathy? Must we not also be sure of His power? It is one thing to know that He is willing; is He also able to help us in every time of need? He who is the beloved Son of God has all the sympathy for us that the kindest-hearted man could have; and, much more than that, He is able to succour them that are tempted. When our Lord Jesus Christ became Man, He identified Himself with humanity, in all its weakness, in all its sorrow, and (in a figure) in all its sin. An unflagging outpouring of sympathy, an untiring energy of benevolence, a continuous oblation of self-sacrifice—that was the life of the Son of Man upon earth. Many a man has borne his poverty more bravely because Jesus Himself was poor; again and again it has helped men in the furnace of temptation to think that He knows what sore temptations mean, For He has felt the same. And the mourner in dark and lonely hours has found comfort in the remembrance that Jesus wept at a human grave, and knows all the bitter longings of his soul.1 [Note: S. C. Lowry, Lent Sermons on the Passion, 55. His question still, to every sufferer who needs relief, to every sinner who needs pardon, is, “Believest thou that I am able to do this?” And the reply still is, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” (3) The third answer is again the answer of the people—“This is indeed the Saviour of the world.” It was the answer given by those Samaritans who had discovered for themselves that Jesus could both sympathize and deliver. It was the answer of those who had had personal experience of His saving grace and power. “Now we believe,” they said to the woman of Samaria, “not because of thy speaking: for we have heard for ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world.” They had taken the answer of the inhabitants of Nazareth and the answer of God the Father and had put them together. He was both the carpenter and God’s Son. And this is the final answer. There is no possibility of going beyond it. The answer of the inhabitants of Nazareth is shortsighted and very partial. God’s answer is partial also, since it has to wait our response before it can be made complete. But it is not short-sighted. It has within it the promise, as it has the potency, of the salvation of the world. It is God’s own expression of the momentous fact of history: “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” It only waits for that fact to have its fulfilment—“that whosoever believeth on him may not perish but have everlasting life.” The answer of the people of Samaria is complete and it is final. All that has yet to be done is to have its contents declared and appropriated. What does Saviour involve? And how is the Saviour of the world to be recognised as mine? (4) Thomas declared its contents. The Saviour of the world is both Lord and God. He is Lord, for He is a man. The inhabitants of Nazareth knew that. He is also the supreme man. They did not know that; and when He claimed it they took Him to the brow of their hill to cast Him down headlong. Thomas had discovered that Jesus is Son of man, the representative Man, the Man to whom every man owes obedience. But He is also God. The people of Nazareth did not know that He was God: but God the Father knew—“This is my beloved Son.” That also was contained in the title which the Samaritans gave Him—“the Saviour of the world”—though they did not bring it out, and probably were not aware of it. Thomas brought it out, knowing as he did that no man, if he is only man, can save his brother or give to God a ransom for him. But Thomas not only declared the contents of the Samaritans’ confession, he appropriated them. He said, “My Lord and my God”; from which we see that he was led along a path of his own, through his own personal experience, to this appropriation. 2. Now this is the confession to which the Fourth Gospel has been leading up. St. John began with the statement that the Word was God. He showed at once that he identified the Word with Jesus of Nazareth, for he said that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Then he proceeded with the rest of the life of Jesus, selecting his incidents in order to show that he was right in identifying Jesus with the Word. He came quite early to the people of Samaria, who said, “This is the Saviour of the world.” But that was not definite enough; it was not individual enough. He proceeded with the life, recording its wonderful words and wonderful works, till he came to the death and the resurrection of Jesus. He reached his climax and conclusion in the confession of Thomas, “My Lord and my God.” Then he brought his Gospel to an end with that frank expression of the purpose of it—“These are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in his name.” 3. Is it not a remarkable thing that this confession was made by Thomas? We speak of Thomas as the doubter. Is it not astonishing that the doubting Thomas should have been he that rose to that great height of faith, and was able to say “My Lord and my God”? It may be that we are not so much astonished at it as our fathers were. Tennyson has taught us to believe that doubt may not be undesirable. At least he has taught us to repeat comfortably his words— There is more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds. But even to us it is surely a surprise to find that that man whom we have looked upon as most reluctant of all the Apostles to make the venture of faith, makes at last a venture which must, we think, have startled the rest of the Apostles as they heard it, calling this Jesus with whom they had companied all these days not only Lord but also God. But let us see if Thomas was the common doubter we have taken him for. We know very little of his history. Almost all we know from the Gospels is contained in four sayings. (1) The first saying was uttered on the occasion of the death of Lazarus. Jesus and His disciples had left Judæa for fear of the Jews when word reached them in their seclusion that Lazarus was dead. Jesus announced His intention of returning to the neighbourhood of Jerusalem. The disciples remonstrated. “The Jews of late sought to stone thee; and goest thou thither again?” When Jesus persisted, “Let us also go,” said Thomas, “that we may die with him.” These are not the words of a vulgar doubter. They are the words of a man who counts the cost. If he errs in counting the cost too deliberately, at any rate he falls into fewer mistakes than the impulsive Peter. And it is the more creditable to him that, counting the cost so carefully, he makes so brave a decision as this. (2) The second saying is spoken in the Upper Room. Jesus was trying to prepare the disciples for the impending separation. He was going away. They knew where He was going, did they not? “Whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.” But they did not know; and it was Thomas who uttered their ignorance: “Lord, we know not whither thou goest: and how can we know the way?” There is neither doubt nor conspicuous caution in the words; there is simply the mind of the practical man who is willing to go where he has to go but would like to see the way. (3) It is from the third saying that Thomas has obtained the name of doubter. Jesus had risen from the dead, but Thomas could not believe it. No more could the rest believe it until they had evidence before them. Thomas happened to be absent when they had it, and he said, “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” With such an expression of determined disbelief to his credit, it is not to be wondered at that Thomas has received the name of doubting Thomas. Yet these are scarcely the words of a man who doubts habitually. They are rather the determination of a cautious and practical man to make sure that he has evidence enough to go upon. And God never refuses any man sufficient evidence. A few days afterwards Jesus offered Thomas the very evidence that he demanded. Thomas was wrong in relying so entirely on the evidence of the senses, and he was rebuked for that. “Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” But it is to the glory of Thomas that when he did obtain sufficient evidence he believed with all his heart. As soon as he understood, he trusted; as soon as he knew, he loved. He needed no more than the evidence of the Resurrection to prove the Divinity. He made the great leap of faith and threw himself personally into the arms of a personal Saviour—“My Lord and my God.” (4) “My Lord and my God.” This is the fourth saying of Thomas that we know. Thomas the doubter has left his doubt behind. He has outstripped his fellow-disciples. He has outstripped even the impetuous Peter, whose great confession,” Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,” lacks the personal appropriation that marks the difference between insight and faith. Men have generally passed on Thomas a very severe judgment. The Church, for ages, has branded infidel on his brow. But this judgment is one that is not justified by the facts, and cannot be entertained by us. At all times and even to this day people are quite ready to scatter such epithets about with an open hand. It is an easy and complacent way of disposing of men. But it is often a shallow enough device. We show thereby but little insight into the nature of men or of God. If we could look into the hearts of those whom we so fling away from us, we should often find deep enough sorrows there, struggles to which we ourselves are strangers, wrestlings for truth and light without receiving it, and yearnings pent up and hidden from the general eye.1 [Note: A. B. Davidson, The Called of God, 322. There is not one believer who is not assailed by moments of doubt, of doubt of the existence of God. These doubts are not harmful: on the contrary, they lead to the highest comprehension of God. That God whom I knew became familiar to me, and I no longer believed in Him. A man believes fully in God only when He is revealed anew to him, and He is revealed to man from a new side, when He is sought with a man’s whole soul.2 [Note: Tolstoy, Works, xvi. 418. They bade me cast the thing away, They pointed to my hands all bleeding, They listened not to all my pleading; The thing I meant I could not say; I knew that I should rue the day If once I cast that thing away. I grasped it firm, and bore the pain; The thorny husks I stripped and scattered; If I could reach its heart, what mattered If other men saw not my gain, Or even if I should be slain? I knew the risks; I chose the pain. O, had I cast that thing away, I had not found what most I cherish, A faith without which I should perish,— The faith which, like a kernel, lay Hid in the husks which on that day My instinct would not throw away!3 [Note: Helen Hunt Jackson.] 4. How did Thomas reach his great confession? He reached it through the Death and the Resurrection. These are the two events which have occurred between the time when Thomas with the rest of the disciples forsook Him and fled, and the time when he said, “My Lord and my God.” (1) He obtained “My Lord” first. The resurrection of Jesus gave him that directly. For Jesus had claimed the mastery, and to that claim God had now set His seal by raising Him from the dead. It was the simple confession of the Messiahship. His death seemed to show that He had made the claim unwarrantably, but the resurrection proved that He had made it with the approbation of God. The title “Lord” as used at the time, had little more significance than the title “Sir,” as we use it in addressing men to-day. But as it fell from the lips of this man, I think I am right in saying that it came with a full and rich and spacious meaning. I do not think for a moment you can differ from me when I say that when Thomas on that occasion said, “My Lord,” in that word he recognized the sovereignty of Christ over his own life, and did by that word yield himself in willing submission to that sovereignty.1 [Note: G. Campbell Morgan.] (2) But “Lord” alone may be useless. “Ye call me Master and Lord,” said Jesus, “but ye do not the things which I say.” And again, He warned them that many would say to Him “Lord, Lord,” to whom He would have to make the reply that He never knew them. To “My Lord” it is necessary to add “My God.” Thomas obtained “My Lord” from Jesus’ resurrection. He found “My God” in His death and resurrection combined. We are apt to think that he must have found “My God” in the power which Jesus possessed or in the authority which He wielded; in His miracles or in His teaching. But His life and work could do no more than show that Jesus might be God. What proved Him to be God indeed was His suffering and death followed by His resurrection. For now it was evident that He need not have suffered and need not have died. It was evident that He had suffered and died purely out of love. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” It needs the love of God to lay down one’s life for one’s enemies. “God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” “God is love,” and the Man who could not save Himself as He hung upon the cross could be nothing less than God. If the conclusion that Jesus was God was based merely upon the fact of resurrection, I declare that it was not justified. Resurrection did not demonstrate deity. The Hebrew Scriptures told of resurrection of certain men from the dead. Put these out of mind if you can. Thomas had seen three dead ones come to life during the ministry of Jesus. He had seen Him raise the child of Jairus; he had seen the son of the widow of Nain given back to his mother after he had been laid upon the bier; and he had seen the raising of Lazarus, but he did not stand in the presence of Lazarus and say, My Lord and my God, because Lazarus was alive from the dead. If the confession was merely the result of resurrection, then I declare it was not justified. The fact that Christ was risen from among the dead is not enough to base the doctrine of His deity upon. But, as a sequence to all that had preceded it, I claim that he was justified. In that hour when Thomas became convinced that the One he had seen dead was alive from among the dead, there came back again to him with gathered force, focused into one clear bright hour of illumination, all the facts in the life and ministry that had preceded that resurrection.1 [Note: G. Campbell Morgan.] Faith is not belief in fact, demonstration, or promise; it is sensibility to the due influence of the fact, something that enables us to act upon the fact, the susceptibility to all the strength that is in the fact, so that we are controlled by it. Nobody can properly define this. All we can say is that it comes by the grace of God, and that failure to see the truth is not so lamentable as failure to be moved by it.2 [Note: Mark Rutherford.] My Lord and My God Literature Aitken (W. H. M. H.), What is Your Life? 148. Bellett (J. C.), in Sermons for the People, i. 95. Benson (R. M.), The Final Passover, iv. 536. Bernard (J. H.), From Faith to Faith, 261. Buckland (A. R.), Words of Help, 105. Burrows (H. W.), Parochial Sermons, iii. 122. Davidson (A. B.), The Called of God, 319. Davies (T.), Sermons, ii. 220. Hodge (C.), Princeton Sermons, 370. Hutchings (W. H.), Sermon Sketches, ii. 134. Jeffrey (J.), The Personal Ministry of the Son of Man, 276. Lawlor (H. J.), Thoughts on Belief and Life, 84. Little (J. A. S.), Salt and Peace, 162s. Manning (H. E.), Sermons on Ecclesiastical Subjects, i. 197. Mortimer (A. G.), Jesus and the Resurrection, 184. Pearse (M. G.), The Gentleness of Jesus, 77. Smith (J.), Short Studies, 236. Speer (R. E.), The Master of the Heart, 56. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxx. (1884) No. 205. Stanford (C), From Calvary to Olivet, 157. Telford (J.), The Story of the Upper Room, 245. Webb (A. B.), in Sermons for the People, i. 80. Christian World Pulpit, lvii. 257 (Gore); lxxvii. 241 (Morgan). Church Pulpit Year Book, vii. (1910) 81. Keswick Week, 1905, p. 95 (Pierson). Believing Without Seeing Jesus saith unto him, Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.—John 20:29. 1. These words of our Lord to Thomas add one more beatitude to those with which the Sermon on the Mount began. He had already taught to men the blessedness of humility, of meekness, of purity, of peace, not only in the beautiful phrases which we know so well, but chiefly by the example of His life. “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.… Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.… Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called sons of God.” And now, when His earthly ministry is over, and when He is about to return to the majesty of His glory, He leaves as one parting benediction to those who love and follow Him, even to all who love and follow to the best of their powers the things that are good: “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” The benediction of faith; it is one of the last messages of the Risen Lord to His Church, and it brings fresh consolation and strength from age to age in correspondence with the varying needs and perplexities of mankind. 2. What is blessedness? It is spiritual happiness. It is that deep calm of gladness which is spiritual in its origin and in its maintenance. This is the heritage of those who, not having seen, yet have believed. And it is the higher blessedness. It is contrastive. Thomas had insisted on sight as an aid to faith. The concession was granted to him. He saw the Risen One, and believing, cried in a passion of adoration, “My Lord and my God!” And he was blessed. Every one who believes is blessed. But his was not the supreme blessedness. “Jesus saith unto him, Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” That is the crowning blessedness. They have the noblest beatitude who have not seen, and yet have believed. When Dr. Arnold was suddenly stricken with his mortal agony, he was seen, we are told, lying still with “his hands clasped, his lips moving, and his eyes raised upwards, as if engaged in prayer, when all at once he repeated, firmly and earnestly, ‘Jesus saith unto him, Because thou hast seen thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.’ ”1 [Note: B. F. Westcott, The Revelation of the Lord, 102. I The Seen and the Unseen That sense perception is at the basis of all our knowledge is one of those axioms with which we are all familiar, even though we have never read a word of philosophy. In the common language of daily life we are accustomed to assertions of assured knowledge, by a reference to the experience of one or other of our five senses. Two of them, those of sight and touch, are indeed the criteria which we apply to knowledge of all kinds. “It is evident,” or, “It is palpable,” are the two chief phrases which, through many variations, are the signs we use for certitude. If we wish to describe the illusory or doubtful, we invariably deny in some form or another that they can be seen or felt. They are imperceptible or intangible, unseen by the eye or unfelt by the hand, and as such are viewed with suspicion or rejected with incredulity. Tennyson has expressed a common conviction when he says, “Knowledge is of things we see,” and contrasts it with faith. To many the difference between faith and knowledge is the difference between the unknown and the known, and much of the agnosticism of the present day is largely due to this conception that the senses are not a means, but the only means of obtaining assured knowledge. To certain types of mind, however, the limitations of sense perception are as remarkable as the range of their operations, and the conception of limiting knowledge to the impressions of sense, and the mind’s working on those impressions, is one which presents insuperable difficulties. They are quite conscious of the inestimable debt the mind owes to the senses, but they refuse to believe that the mind cannot pass into regions which are for ever beyond the reach of the senses, or that it cannot arrive at truth except as the object is presented to it by means of the senses. They are conscious that there is a region which is essentially metaphysical, in which the mind moves, not as it is guided or impelled by the senses, but by the laws of its own being, and that the goal at which it arrives by strict obedience to those laws is knowledge in the highest and best sense, even though inaccessible to sense perception. In some cases the goal arrived at can be tested by the senses, but whether tested or untested, the reality is the same. The discovery of the planet Neptune by the mind before it was brought within the range of telescopic vision, affords an illustration of what is here meant. It was the operation of the mind, working according to its own laws, that established the existence of Neptune, before the telescope discovered it. The mind, in fact, in this case aided the senses, instead of being aided by them. It is true that the mind was here working only on the data presented to it by the senses, but its working was based upon the assumption that a previous intelligence had been at work in the constitution of the universe, and that the working of that Mind was in harmony with the laws of our own minds. This, in fact, is scientific faith as distinct from scientific knowledge. It has been arrived at by means of sense perception, but it is none the less faith, as distinct from knowledge. Our great advance in knowledge is due to our walking by faith as well as by sight. Experience has shown us that what is conforms to reason, and we therefore conclude that whatever conforms to reason exists, whether it has come within the range of sense perception or not. If the senses have not yet discovered it, we search for it with the belief that sooner or later we shall find it. The atomic theory prophesies the existence of elements which have never come within the range of sense perception, and recent discoveries have simply filled up the places which were vacant, and revealed what faith had already perceived. Science has shown us that what is ought to be, and it cannot escape creating the suspicion that what ought to be actually is, whether we perceive it or not. The distinction between faith and knowledge, therefore, is imperfectly described as the difference between the unknown and the known; it is more accurately described as the difference between anticipated and realized knowledge. Knowledge is not only of things we see, but of things we foresee. The mind may anticipate the senses and believe even where the senses cannot see. If this is true in the sphere of the physical, the presumption is that it is equally true in the metaphysical sphere. 1. What is the value of the evidence of the senses? (1) The best answer is to consider what must have been the impression left upon the mind of the Jew when for the first time he saw Jesus of Nazareth, with His attendant followers, passing through the streets of Jerusalem. To answer this we must try to place ourselves in his position. Let us, for example, suppose that we were to see passing through one of our streets an excited crowd of men, women and children of the middle and lower classes. Let us imagine ourselves listening to the discordant acclamations of a multitude, many of whom we might perhaps know to be ignorant, and some to have led immoral lives. Let us dismiss from our fancy all those picturesque surroundings of eastern buildings, of palms and of flowing coloured garments, with which the magic of Christian art has invested such a scene. These representations of the past, so far as they are real, have for us of the present day a certain charm—just because of their strange and foreign aspect—which they could not have had for those whose lives were spent among such scenes. Let us eliminate from our conception of such an incident the majestic harmonies in which Christian musicians have rendered the Hosannas of the crowd. In other words, let us suppose ourselves looking at and listening to something unhallowed by those associations which of necessity give fascination to the far-off past, and let us consider ourselves face to face with the bare, unadorned, unsensational realities of the present. Let us go a step further. Let us imagine the central figure in such a scene to be one not distinguishable by his dress or, it may be, by any special form or comeliness from those about him—one whose place of birth and station in life and opportunities for education are known to us, and are not in our opinion such as to warrant us in looking for any special refinement of manner or display of learning on his part. And, lastly, let us suppose that all we have ourselves heard of his teaching has led us to regard that teaching as, to say the least of it, an innovation on the divinely-given statutes of the past. Let us try then to put ourselves in the position of the Jew of our Lord’s time, and we must, in all fairness, confess that there was much in his special surroundings that was not favourable to a ready belief in the Divine mission of the Galilean peasant. (2) And yet the evidence of the senses has its value, and it is no light one. The change that came over the Apostles after the Resurrection has an ever accumulating force, ceaselessly advancing. As we read the Epistles, does it not strike us that the writers are living in what the world may count a dream, but is to us the opening of a new view of human life, a realization of what prophecy had foretold? They who went about the world preaching the Gospel to every creature, having given up everything that the world counts dear, facing danger of every sort, tempests, cold and hunger, prisons and suffering, and death, did they not show an intense conviction, such a conviction as has never in the world’s history been surpassed, and a conviction lasting for long, long years, showing itself in their every act and deed? Now this conviction rests on what they had seen. The evidence of things seen is always evidence. I was asked this question in the city a few days ago: There stands the Cross on the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral. How did it get there? It is a question you had better ask your sceptical friend next time he argues with you. I would far rather have to uphold the position in a free debate that the reason why that Cross, the old gallows—and it was nothing more than the old gallows—is brandished in triumph over the biggest city in the world was because the Person who died on it rose again than have to defend any other explanation in the world, for, as a matter of fact, there is no other explanation. Why did a body of Jews, the most conservative race in the world, change their sacred day from Saturday—not to Friday—oh no, not to Friday—but to Sunday? There is no explanation, except that the Person who died on the Friday rose on the Sunday. Why did a body which called themselves “The Christians” celebrate for nearly two thousand years in their Eucharist, which is their thanksgiving service, the tokens of a shameful death—“body broken, blood shed”? There never has been any explanation except that something happened so glorious, so transfiguring, that it changed the shameful death into a badge of glory.1 [Note: Bishop A. F. W. Ingram, Secrets of Strength, 57. (3) But the evidence of the seen goes only a certain way. For what is sense but the medium through which we converse with this visible and lower world, with its phenomena, its motions, its operations, and its changes? The sphere and ken of sense is scanty and limited; it reaches only to the outer surface, beyond which sense cannot penetrate. Sense needs the reason to be its interpreter and guide; for, with all its confidence, sense is blind. Without the higher light of reason, the laws, principles, causes, and conditions of all it sees, handles, and knows, are unknown. And yet the reason in its sphere is bounded too. A world of intellectual objects, the phenomena of a higher but not the highest sphere, are within its ken. The unseen and the Eternal are beyond its gaze: and of these, except by another faculty higher than sense or reason, supernatural in its substance and its acts, which comes in to perfect both, we know nothing. It is not by sense or by reason, but by faith, elevating both, that the truths of the Kingdom of God are known and believed. There is no slight amount of peril in matters of religion in demanding more evidence than can actually be given. Men formerly used to say, “Write the Gospel—the Divine message—in letters of fire along the sky, and I will believe.” They say now, “Give me mathematical demonstration—make the whole thing as plain as a problem in geometry—and then it will be impossible for me to withhold my assent.” But this has to be considered, that we have hardly the right to require the Creator to give us the amount of evidence that we think fit to ask for. What He will do in this way, is surely for Him and not for us to settle. And if He should give, as He does, sufficient evidence to make unbelief inexcusable—sufficient evidence to enable us to believe, if we are not determined to disbelieve—I do not see what we have to complain of.2 [Note: G. Calthrop, In Christ, 213. To a man who wrote to him saying that he was dying of an incurable disease, and could not accept the Christian faith, Bishop Creighton replied: “There can be no convincing proof of anything that affects our inner character. What ‘convincing proof’ have you that your wife loves you or your child? Yet you believe it, and that belief is more real to you than anything that you know or can prove. Religion must be a matter of belief, not of proof. It depends on a consciousness of the relation between our soul and God. Immortality depends on the knowledge of the meaning of our soul’s life which we obtain from looking at it in the light of God. The more we find our soul, the more readily do we see God in the person of Jesus Christ. Look back upon your own life, your growth, the traces of Providence, the presence of God’s love. Do you think that all this wonderful process can come to an abrupt end?”1 [Note: Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, ii. 253. (4) The evidence of sense is not always applicable. Religion is not a proposition to be proved like a problem in Euclid. As to mathematical demonstration, the subject, in the nature of things, is not capable of it. Were it a matter for the head alone it would be different; but the heart is concerned in the matter. You have the two factors—the head and the heart—to deal with; and in the case of religion, there is no possibility of so binding the heart down, by any conceivable process whatever, that it should not be capable of resistance if it should choose to resist. The following is from the pen of a well-known London physician and scientist of the present day, one who for many years was a Catholic:—“What men of science ‘want’ in order to believe in the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus Christ is this. In one word, it is proof, or evidence—what we can prove by experiment, inductive reasoning, and verification that we know. As Bithell says, ‘The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification, therefore he nurses no illusions, does not say he knows when he does not and cannot know and follow the evidence whithersoever it leads him.’ If I had been St. Thomas I should have wanted (1) the death-certificate of a medical man who had watched the case to the end; (2) proof that the doors were not only ‘shut,’ but locked and bolted on the inside; and (3) I should have carefully examined the wound in the side to ascertain whether heart, lungs, liver, or any other vital organ had been perforated, and whether what I saw was an apparition, or a spirit, or a body with ‘flesh and bones,’ and if the latter, I should have said, ‘This was never a dead body.’ It is seriously doubted by some writers whether either Lazarus or Christ was really dead, and some believe that, in the case of Christ, restoratives were administered by the women in the sepulchre. There is no evidence that would satisfy a lawyer or scientist either (1) that Jesus Christ raised Lazarus from the dead, or (2) that Jesus Christ Himself rose from the dead, and that afterwards His crucified body, with its wounds, entered a room the doors of which were shut.”1 [Note: M. Fuller, In Terrâ Pax, 94. 2. After all that the senses can do there remains the unseen, and faith must make its venture. All the greatest works of man have been works of faith; and those who have had most insight, and have followed the guidance of that insight till it led them to great truths, are the men who have taken the leading part in the history of our race. It is faith that incites the soldier and sailor to noble acts, faith in their commander. Perhaps the grandest discovery made by man was the opening of a vast continent; and it was faith that led Columbus across the untried and unknown seas. This is the natural view of faith, and St. Paul, tracing the history of the saints of old, marks how the animating principle of life to them was faith. And what led God to choose the Israelites as the nation through which He would reveal Himself to the world was the readiness of their faith, their adherence to the promises and their continued trust, through all the ages of countless trials—the long years of their waiting, ever filled with the “great cloud of witnesses,” who without seeing yet believed, into whose possessions we have entered, as the children of a higher faith, and disciples who have learnt at the feet of a greater Master—of the ever-growing host of which it may be truly said in the words of the text, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” From the soft south the constant bird comes back, Faith-led, to find the welcome of the Spring In the old boughs whereto she used to cling, Before she sought the unknown southward track: Above the Winter and the storm-cloud’s wrack She hears the prophecy of days that bring The Summer’s pride, and plumes her homeward wing To seek again the joys that exiles lack. Shall I of little faith, less brave than she, Set forth unwillingly my goal to find, Go home from exile with reluctant mind, Distrust the steadfast stars I cannot see, And doubt the heavens because my eyes are blind? Nay! Give me faith, like wings, to soar to Thee!2 [Note: Louise Chandler Moulton.] II Faith in the Unseen Faith in the unseen is not an abrupt experience, unconnected with the experience of the senses. It is true that morality and religion cannot be treated in the same way as the physical sciences. They have their own data, which are not material but spiritual. If they are realities, however, they must be intelligible; they must follow similar laws to those which reign in the material realm, or at any rate they must follow law, and not be the result of chance. In the sphere of morals the good must be the reasonable; actions must be justifiable. In the sphere of religion, beliefs must be reasonable; the data upon which they are founded must be consistent with the working of the Divine mind, as that is already known to us in other spheres. 1. Faith in the unseen is belief in more than we can see.—It is quite true that “faith cometh by hearing.” Faith, that is to say, is the proper correlative of testimony. But the evidence of testimony is not sufficient to command assent, even in the affairs of this world, unless the mind brings something of its own to co-operate with it. In belief it is at least approximately true, that “we receive but what we give.” The element which the mind contributes to the formation of religious belief must be sought for in the depths of our moral being. Faith, then, may be described as the product of the outward evidence on which it rests, and the inward conditions which dispose us to admit it. It follows that if the product be constant, the two factors will vary in an inverse ratio; or, in other words, that the moral element requisite to produce religious conviction must be at least strong enough to supply the deficiencies in the external evidence. “Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed.” So spake our Lord. What, then, did Thomas believe? He believed much more than he saw. Had he merely believed in the resurrection, there would have been no blessing attaching to such faith. “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” It is the vision whereby faith contemplates the unseen that is the real source of blessing. When St. Thomas heard the words which showed how Jesus had all along been reading his heart, he at once accepted the fulness of the Divine truth. He exclaimed, “My Lord and my God!” St. John illustrates this higher condition of mind that believes without seeing. When he came to the grave of Jesus, whither Mary Magdalene had summoned him and Peter, “he saw and believed.” Apparently all that he saw was the empty sepulchre, and the place where the dead body had lain. No vision of angels greeted him, nor did the Lord of death appear. A form rose up before him, as he looked, but it was the Lord of life with the light around Him of the days that had gone. The empty sepulchre could have told him little, but Jesus coming thither through the years told him much. Words that had bewildered found their explanation now. The enigma of the life and death found their solution at last. Not thus could he have seen, had not the habits of his mind prepared him. Candid, gracious, pure, truth-loving, sympathetic with the Divine purpose, free from prejudices and open-minded, the perceptive capacity was able to take the place of sight. And so thought, reflection, reasoning, imagination, all blended in a process at once mental and spiritual, by which, as by a higher vision, he saw what the eye could not see, yet not less clearly and distinctly. His work [The Grammar of Assent] included an analysis of the mind of believer and unbeliever and of the differences between them. He drew attention to the subtle personal appreciation, on the part of the religious mind, which made it find so much more evidence for Christianity in the acknowledged facts of its history than the irreligious mind could see. The general outcome of this portion of the book was to show the important place held by antecedent conditions among the reasons convincing the believer. And among these conditions were the experiences and action of the individual mind. The religious mind instinctively and by degrees accumulated evidences of which the irreligious mind—reasoning on different principles—remained wholly or partially unaware. The action of the will and of moral dispositions was gradual. Moral defect must in the long run lead the mind to miss the deepest grounds of belief. But this was something very different from insincerity. To quote a sentence written by Newman on the subject to the present writer, “The religious mind sees much which is invisible to the irreligious mind. They have not the same evidence before them.” Newman did not deny that one reasoned rightly, the other wrongly. He did not deny that there might be responsibility for the false principles which led to unbelief—for the failure of the unbeliever to recognize the deeper principles which a Christian thinker adopts (as he phrased it a little later) “under the happy guidance of the moral sense.” But he did away with the old contrast to which Protestants as well as Catholics had long been accustomed, between believer and unbeliever as men looking at and apprehending precisely the same evidence, which was so obviously cogent that only a man whose will was here and now perverse could disbelieve. He substituted a far subtler analysis in which circumstances and education played their part in the power of mental vision on the particular subject: in which the appreciation of reasons was personal, and gradual; religious earnestness aud true principles being necessary not only to the acceptance of the reasoning for Christianity, but to its adequate apprehension.1 [Note: Wilfrid Ward, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman, ii. 247. One must have King-recognizing eyes To recognize the King in mean disguise.2 [Note: Jalaluddin Rumi, in A Little Book of Eastern Wisdom , 19. My soul, do not pray for too little. Do not imagine that mere things will make thee blessed. No outward contact with any visible beauty would satisfy thee for an hour. The unseen alone will content thee. The things that belong unto thy peace are not worlds of space. They perish but thou remainest, they all wax old as a garment, and as a vesture shall they be folded up, but thou art the same. Ask that which is invisible, eternal, commensurate with thyself—love, sacrificial love, love even for the loveless. Ask the pain of beholding pain, the joy of seeing joy, the hope of bringing hope. That is to touch the print of the nails, for that is to bear in the spirit the marks of the Lord Jesus.3 [Note: G. Matheson, My Aspirations.] 2. Faith in the unseen is believing what we have never seen at all.—“Now faith is the substance (the assurance, R.V.) of things hoped for, the evidence (proving, R.V.) of things not seen.” That is to say, it is the faculty which reaches to that which is beyond the sense, yet which apprehends it as certain—as being as certain as the things which we see. Men have never seen God. The astronomer said, “I have swept the heavens with my telescope, and I have not found God.” He looked for God as for a star, and could not find Him. A voice spoke from those heavens which the astronomer did not hear, and it said, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” And thousands upon thousands of trustful souls who would never look for God through a telescope have found Him with their hearts, and they face the fight of life every day bravely, knowing that He goes down to the battle with them; they lie down to rest at night feeling there is One who neither slumbers nor sleeps; if they are out in the raging tempest they sing, “The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms”; if they go through places of danger and terror they hear a voice say, “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee”; and while the learned astronomer says he cannot find God, these simple souls say, “’Tis blessed to believe.” One of the most interesting and romantic discoveries of last century in the realm of astronomy was the detection of the planet Neptune, the outermost of those “wanderers” which circle round the sun. Until the year 1846 the furthest planet known was Uranus, discovered by Sir William Herschel some fifty years before this date. Study of the movements of Uranus showed variations from the path which, on the known data, it ought to follow; and these variations could not be accounted for by the attraction of any of the inner planets upon its mass. Two astronomers, one in England, and one in France, began almost simultaneously to investigate the problem presented by its perturbations. By long and arduous calculations involving profound mathematical research, they found that the facts presented by the variations of the known planet could be explained by the presence of an unseen neighbour beyond it, of a certain mass and following a particular path. They knew that nothing else could account for the phenomena with which they had to deal. Although they had not seen another planet in the telescope or demonstrated its existence beyond doubt until their researches were confirmed: yet they believed in its existence. They saw it “as Columbus saw America from the shores of Spain.” They “felt its movements trembling along the far-reaching line of their analysis.” And when they finished their calculations and indicated the spot in the heavens where the new member of the system would be found, the observers pointed their telescopes to the skies: and at the very place foretold the “new planet swam into their ken.”1 [Note: See Ball, The Story of the Heavens, ch. xv.] We have none of us seen Christ in the flesh. At times we judge ourselves disadvantaged thereby. But no! Christ says we are supremely advantaged. We are blessed with a distinctive blessedness. We have really lost nothing by not being alive when Christ was incarnate here. Oh, how we should like to have seen Him! If we could have basked in His smile, or heard His voice, or even felt the rustle of His seamless robe as He flitted past us on the highway! Had we seen we would indeed have believed! Ah! so we reason. But it is a meaner faith which is so inspired. “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” What is true of believing Christ is true concerning all the spiritual objects of faith. God. The heavenly home. Any spiritual truth. The quality which draws down beatitude is a faith which is independent of materialistic props.1 [Note: D. T. Young, The Crimson Book, 55. Faith is—not sight, It boasts not of the sun at noonday bright, While groping in the starlight haze of night. Nor Dogma proud, Fierce vaunting of all Truth in accents loud, Beguiling with bold words th’ unthinking crowd. Nor Science known, Seated in queenly rubes upon her throne, Meting the boundless with her clasped zone. Nor Certainty, The overweening claim that Truth must be What we forecast from what we hear and see. Faith does but muse With heed upon the data she must use, Nor Likelihood’s fair claim durst she refuse. Faith does but think That walking on the Infinite’s dread brink, She dare not mete its chain by one small link. Faith does but feel That what she deems all dimly, may be real, On her blind guess she will not set Truth’s seal. Faith doth but hope She shall see clear—whereas she doth but grope— When earth’s dark vistas widen to heaven’s scope. She doth but will The healthful impulses she would instil May, by heaven’s prospering, all good fulfil. She can but trust Her wistful craving for the True and Just, Not only may be realized but must.1 [Note: John Owen.] 3. Faith may even be believing that which seems contrary to sense.—For there is in the heart of every human being an eternal opposition between the merely sceptical understanding and the spiritual faculty, between that which demonstrates and that which believes, between the mind which we share with the animal and the spirit which we believe we specially derive from God. These two are opposed one to the other. And that in us which says, “This must be so, this shall be so!” is a higher faculty than that which says, “How is this so? Why is this so?” and the act of faith on which our morality, our religion, our higher forms of being and living rest, is that by which we assert the supremacy of the one of these above the other. No help in all the stranger-land, O fainting heart, O failing hand? There’s a morning and a noon, And evening cometh soon. The way is endless, friendless? No; God sitteth high to see below, There’s a morning and a noon, And the evening cometh soon. Look yonder on the purpling west Ere long the glory and the rest. There’s a morning and a noon, And the evening cometh soon.2 [Note: J. V. Cheney.] III The Blessedness of Faith in the Unseen Our Lord does not tell us why they are blessed who believe without seeing. He simply says they are blessed. This makes a marked difference between this blessing and those others which form the preface to the Sermon on the Mount. There in each case reasons are given; a specific reward is spoken of as bestowed upon each grace. The merciful are blessed, for they shall obtain mercy. The pure in heart are blessed, for theirs is the Vision of God, the All Holy and Pure. The peacemakers are blessed, for they shall be called the sons of God, who is the true Author of peace. The meek are blessed, for they shall inherit the earth; what has been called “the harvest of a quiet eye” is theirs; it is a reward that no man can take from them. And so on all through. But no special reward of faith is spoken of in the text. It is not said that the faithful and trusting soul is blessed, for it shall receive the consolations of hope and of assurance. We might, indeed, have expected that our Lord would have given us some such promise. The Psalmist had sung of the blessings of trust with no uncertain voice: “Delight thyself also in the Lord; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass.” More than one of the beatitudes take up the words of the Psalms, and fill them with a larger and a more gracious meaning; but there is no exact counterpart in the words of our Lord for the words of the Psalmist about faith. The blessing of faith in the New Testament is something higher than the temporal prosperity of which the pious Hebrew poet spoke as the lot of the faithful and the just; it is rather that abiding and deepening sense of God’s mercy and truth for which we daily pray. “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Faith is its own reward; and the law of faith is this: “Whosoever hath, to him shall be given.” But it is possible to suggest certain advantages which belief without sight confers. 1. It gives us the assurance of a Risen Christ. Forty years ago a poet of genius, a man to whom this story of St. Thomas must, I think, have been almost as dear as it was to his great master, Dr. Arnold, conceives of a sudden awakening to the new and authentic tidings, “Christ is not risen.” He speaks in lofty but kindly pity to the sad dupes of the now discredited faith; to the poor women who wept beside His tomb; to the daughters of Jerusalem who wept as they saw Him pass to His Cross; to the simple men of Galilee who had stood gazing up into heaven as they fancied He ascended, and are now bidden to return to their boats and their nets; to humble and holy men of heart in ages yet to be who have surrendered their souls to a gracious-seeming lie: Eat, drink, and die, for we are souls bereaved: Of all the creatures under heaven’s wide cope We are most hopeless, who had once most hope, And most beliefless, that had most believed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, As of the unjust, also of the just— Yea of that Just One too! It is the one sad Gospel that is true, Christ is not risen! This vision of the poet, awful as it is to a serious Christian, may set us all thinking to some purpose. It may lead us to commune with our hearts in our chamber, and be still. Let us probe our hearts, even if it pain us, with the question, What is the difference to me and to my friends or my children whether the Creed of Christendom is true or baseless; whether the morning greeting of Easter Day is, as throughout the vast Russian Empire, “Christ is Risen,” or “Christ is not risen”; whether Jesus is or is not the Christ; whether the death on the Cross was the unjust execution of a good man or the sacrifice of the Incarnate God; whether the cry “It is finished” was His last, as it was certainly His dying word; whether, if He now speaks to us, He speaks, like any other of the departed, by His example and by His genius, or, with a claim which would be blasphemy if it were put forward by any other, speaks as a living King to the world, to the Church, and to each believing soul, “I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore.”1 [Note: H. M. Butler, University and Other Sermons, 51. 2. It gives us the enjoyment of a living present Christ. For He has not, as some affect to think, left His people in this world of peril and trial, and taken His seat on the throne of His Father above, there enjoying a peerless but solitary glory—blessed in the full enjoyment of all heaven’s honours and glory, but little concerned as to the happiness of His followers on earth. Far from it. His parting words are “Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the ages.” So He is ever in the midst of His Church, and with His own in this world. He walks in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks and holds their ministry in His right hand. He is the light, power, and healing virtue of the gospel. He enters with His people into all their trials and tribulations. He so overrules the divergent affairs of their lot, that all things work together for their good. He has been lifted up on the cross and to the sky, that He might attract all men unto Him. He is the great moral and spiritual magnet drawing the world of mankind from the serving of sin to yield to the power of grace. And as the magnet converts those bodies on which it lays hold into magnets, which in turn draw others, so does Christ magnetize men that they in turn may transform others, imparting to them like power. So by a power extending beyond the range of His actual presence and visibility we receive blessing from Christ, though we see Him not. Here, then, lies the central lesson of this revelation of the Risen Lord, the revelation of His spiritual presence, the revelation of man’s spiritual sight. The truest, serenest, happiest faith is within our reach. We have not lost more than we have gained by the removal of the events of the Gospel history far from our own times. The last beatitude of the Gospel is the special endowment of the later Church. The testimony of sense given to the Apostles, like the testimony of word given to us, is but the starting-point of faith. The substance of faith is not a fact which we cannot explain away, or a conclusion which we cannot escape, but the personal apprehension of a living, loving Friend. And Christ still makes Himself known in His Church and in each believer’s heart by words of peace. He is still with us the same as eighteen hundred years ago, unchanged and unchangeable, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. A manifold enjoyment of Christ is a large component of this blessedness. The believer draws such pure delight from the Lord in whom he trusts. How grandly St. Peter states it: “Whom having not seen ye love.” The loving of Christ is such unalloyed pleasure. None can know the rapture save only they who experience it. “In whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice” And how splendid the quality of the joy; “with joy unspeakable and full of glory.” Joy in Christ! Joy that cannot be spoken! Joy shot through with glory! Is not this blessedness? The so-inclusive enjoyment of Christ is a rich element in the believer’s blessedness.1 [Note: D. T. Young, The Crimson Book, 63. 3. It gives us the light and power of the Holy Spirit. We have not only an outward testimony; we have an inward witness beyond all that was ever bestowed on man before the day of Pentecost—the full illumination of the Kingdom of God. Before the ascension of our Divine Lord, we read that even Apostles knew not the Scriptures. Cleophas and his fellow “hoped that it was he which should redeem Israel”; and the eleven, at the hour of His ascension, asked, “Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” They knew Christ after the flesh, and their faith was as yet obscure. Therefore our Lord said to them, “It is expedient for you that I go away”; for you the withdrawal of My visible presence is needful. “For if I go not away, the Paraclete will not come unto you; but if I go, I will send him unto you; and when he is come, he will teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance.” “The spirit of truth shall be with you and in you” for ever. And on the day of Pentecost the Holy Ghost fell upon them, and His illumination filled their inmost soul: their whole intelligence was enlightened, a fountain of light sprang up from within, and truths already known were unfolded with new and deeper meanings. They saw the full mystery of the Kingdom of God, of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; of the love of the Father in the gift of His Son, of the Son in giving Himself to be made man to suffer and to die; of the Holy Ghost, who was already upon them and within them. They perceived that their Divine Master had ascended to sit down upon His Father’s throne, crowned with power, to possess His Kingdom; and the whole earth to them was lightened with His glory. “Where is your God?” they say;— Answer them, Lord most Holy! Reveal Thy secret way Of visiting the lowly: Not wrapped in moving cloud, Or nightly-resting fire; But veiled within the shroud Of silent high desire. Come not in flashing storm, Or bursting frown of thunder: Come in the viewless form Of wakening love and wonder;— Of duty grown divine, The restless spirit, still; Of sorrows taught to shine As shadows of Thy will. O God! the pure alone,— E’en in their deep confessing,— Can see Thee as their own, And find the perfect blessing: Yet to each waiting soul Speak in Thy still small voice, Till broken love’s made whole, And saddened hearts rejoice.1 [Note: James Martineau.] 4. It transfigures our character. The sense of transfigured character goes far to constitute this blessedness. He who believes thereby gains the secret of holiness. Faith is evermore the root of noble character. The man who believes becomes. His nature, already regenerated, is eternally being “changed from glory to glory.” Is not this a large portion of Christian blessedness? Belief in manifested God secures Godlikeness. All faith is incomplete that is the confession of our want of knowledge and our need for help, but the most complete faith is that which lifts the whole nature, vibrates the whole man, which is felt at heart, and shown in action. When faith begins with the easy acceptance of some statements, or from admitting certain arguments, there is danger that it ends there; but when one is guided upwards by a wish for higher life and help, when the spirit is crying out for a living God, and when the yearning is so strong that we are willing to dispense with proof, and to reach out our inward hand humbly to take a gift from God, there is very little danger that any part of our life shall escape from our religion. We cannot take the mind and leave the heart in sin, nor can we take these two and leave the conduct of our daily life; and that complete sacrifice is what has value before God. Those Christians are blessed who need to leave their simple views of childhood’s faith no more than the field-lark does her nest—rising right over it to look at God’s morning sun, and His wide, beautiful world, singing a clear, happy song, and then sinking straight down again to their heart’s home. But those are not less blessed who, like the dove, lose their ark for a while, and return to it, having found no rest for the sole of their foot save there. They have a deeper experience within, and carry a higher and wider message to the world. The olive leaf in the mouth, plucked from the passing flood, is more than the song at coming daylight. It is as Paul’s “Thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory,” compared with the children’s “Hosanna.”1 [Note: John Ker, Thoughts for Heart and Life, 24. What, after all, is this “faith” which above all things we who have even a grain of it must desire to hold forth to others? “This is the victory which overcometh the world, even our faith.” It is a power, not a mere belief; and power can be shown only in action, only in overcoming resistance. Power that shall lift us one by one above temptations, above cares, above selfishness; power that shall make all things new, and subdue all things unto itself; power by which loss is transmuted into gain, tribulation into rejoicing, death itself into the gate of everlasting life;—is not this the true meaning of faith?2 [Note: Caroline Emelia Stephen.] Yes, Master, when Thou comest Thou shalt find A little faith on earth, if I am here! Thou know’st how oft I turn to Thee my mind, How sad I wait until Thy face appear! Hast Thou not ploughed my thorny ground full sore, And from it gathered many stones and sherds? Plough, plough and harrow till it needs no more— Then sow Thy mustard-seeds, and send Thy birds. I love Thee, Lord; and if I yield to fears, Nor trust with triumph that pale doubt defies, Remember, Lord, ’tis nigh two thousand years, And I have never seen Thee with mine eyes! And when I lift them from the wondrous tale, See, all about me hath so strange a show! Is that Thy river running down the vale? Is that Thy wind that through the pines doth blow? Could’st Thou right verily appear again, The same who walked the paths of Palestine, And here in England teach Thy trusting men In church and field and house, with word and sign? Here are but lilies, sparrows, and the rest! My hands on some dear proof would light and stay! But my heart sees John leaning on Thy breast, And sends them forth to do what Thou doth say.1 [Note: George MacDonald.] Believing Without Seeing Literature Bernard (J. H.), Via Domini, 165. Bramston (J. T.), Fratribus, 104. Butler (H. M.), University Sermons, 43. Calthrop (G.), In Christ, 205. Carpenter (W. B.), The Son of Man among the Sont of Men, 117. Carter (T. T.), The Spirit of Watchfulness, 111. Gibbon (J. M.), Evangelical Heterodoxy, 106. Hardy (E. J.), Doubt and Faith, 104. Henson (H. H.), The Value of the Bible, 182. Hoare (E.), Fruitful or Fruitless, 110. Ingram (A. F. W.), Secrets of Strength, 52. Jeffrey (J.), The Personal Ministry of the Son of Man, 276. Jones (W. B.), The Peace of God, 138. Little (J.), The Day-Spring, 146. Macnutt (F. B.), The Inevitable Christ, 35. Magee (W. C.), Growth in Grace, 107. Manning (H. E.), Sermons on Ecclesiastical Subjects, i. 197. Martyn (H. J.), For Christ and the Truth, 128. Pearse (M. G.), The Gentleness of Jesus, 77. Ryle (H. E.), On the Church of England, 125. Stanford (C.), From Calvary to Olivet, 157. Stone (D.), The Discipline of Faith, 131. Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), ii. (1862) No. 337; New Ser. xiii. (1876) No. 1001. Williams (T. R.), Belief and Life, 99. Wright (D.), Waiting for the Light, 34. Young (D. T.),The Crimson Book, 53. Christian World Pulpit, xxviii. 180 (Frankland); lii. 52 (Gore), 307 (Barton); lv. 230 (MacEwen); lix. 243 (Scott Holland); lxii. 428 (Henson); lxvi. 262 (M‘Murtrie); lxix. 102 (Mackintosh), 140 (Lyttelton). Church of England Pulpit, lvii. 218 (Inge). Church Pulpit Year Book, ix. (1912) 82. The Chief Purpose of the Gospel Many other signs therefore did Jesus in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in his name.—John 20:30-31. These words describe the chief purpose of the Gospel according to St. John, considered as a narrative of the life of Jesus. In their effect, though not by their position, they form the author’s explanatory preface to the whole book, because they assert the reason why he wrote, and indicate the kind of result he anticipated for the readers of his work. This text, then, is nothing less than St. John’s own statement and summary of the object of his Gospel. We read the Gospels; page by page, verse by verse, we profit by their Divine teachings; but it is a blessed thought to have been told in one single verse the central intent why the last and most spiritual of them was written. That intent, the Evangelist tells us, was to produce in us a twofold conviction, and to enable us to enjoy the life which springs from its continuous power. The first conviction which he aims at forming in us is that Jesus is the Christ; the second, that Christ Jesus is the Son of God; and the fruit of that twofold conviction is the eternal life which is inspired by such a faith. The living testimony of one who has “seen and touched and handled,” retains its unique charm and value across the flight of time. The custody of the museum at Bologna, in which are preserved the relics and trophies of the “Risorgimento,” is committed to an old Garibaldian veteran, who loves his charges with a real fatherly love—the torn uniforms and rusted and battered swords, the little scraps of writing, stained and crumpled, proclamations, letters, sonnets. But, above all, he loves the relics of Ugo Bassi—the devoted Barnabite, who inspired this national crusade as Peter the Hermit had fired men centuries before to fight the battles of Christendom. The priest who was content to stand apart from his fellows, and toil and suffer and die for the cause of Truth and Justice: the man whom the heroes of ’48 revered and loved, as St. Francis of old had been revered and loved—almost like Christ Himself come down again. One may read in books, or one may hear from the lips of a young professor who has studied history more widely and scientifically, a fascinating account of the events of ’48 and ’49. But there comes a peculiar thrill, a peculiar feeling of real touch with the facts, when the relics of Ugo Bassi are shown by one who as a boy heard that voice ring out in the Piazza, and saw a whole city stirred, as the light of those wonderful eyes pierced through them, and they stood in the grip of a soul that spoke in face and gesture as well as in the music of audible appeal. The martyrdom has a new meaning for us, as such an one relates how he saw the wearied form drawn through the streets and out at the gate of Sant’ Isaia amid the hated white uniforms; and heard the shots fired which proclaimed that the last agony was over. No; one who can say, “I saw, I touched, I handled,” even after the lapse of many years, still draws us, still makes the past live for us as none other Song of Solomon 1 [Note: Lonsdale Ragg, Christ and Our Ideals, 15. I The Omitted and the Recorded Signs St. John has recorded only a part of what he knows, and he has recorded this for a special purpose. He and his friends have lived through a great experience; they have been forced to consider what it really meant, and they have come to certain conclusions. Among all the events which passed under their eyes there were some that seemed specially significant. They were not merely events, they were signs; and that means that they had, as it were, two sides. On the one side something happened in the world of sight and sound—there was an historical occurrence. The Man Jesus did certain things in the world, just as Pontius Pilate the Governor, or Caiaphas the High Priest, or one of the Apostles themselves might have done. In a sense, of course, all such action has a significance, is, in some degree, a sign. Pilate, no doubt, has means of showing that what he does has behind it the force of the Roman Empire, which he represents. Perhaps Caiaphas revealed his high-priestly prerogative when, with the very last flicker of the old light that once shone upon the high priesthood, “he spake not of himself” of the necessity that one man should be sacrificed for the sake of the whole nation. Though the old gift was so sadly misused, it was still the High Priest in that predestined year who noted, cynically and brutally enough, the necessity of the sacrifice. And so Jesus did signs in the presence of His disciples, acts which carried meaning. Those who lived with Him gradually came to interpret these signs, and they drew from them the conviction that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing we have life in His Name. They commend their faith to others. It is their mission to go and make disciples throughout the world, and they use for the groundwork of their appeal not argument, not philosophical construction, but a recital of the events, which they had come to know as signs. 1. The signs of Jesus are largely unrecorded. “Many other signs therefore did Jesus in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this bonk.” What is our first thought on being told this? Is it not this: Oh if we could only know them; if only they had been written down, what a priceless boon; they would be just what we most need, they would clear up so many points that are now tangled in dispute. For, indeed, the recorded doings and sayings of the Lord are so pitifully, so terribly, short—just a few rapid incidents thrown together in the Synoptics, mainly out of the very last year of His life—only twenty days of all His earthly career touched upon in St. John! How scanty, how partial, how unsatisfying! Was ever so tremendous a venture as the Christian creed made on so slight a foundation as this? 2. The unwritten is, and ever must be, more than the written. You cannot transcribe with pen all deeds and achievements, or tabulate the work of a life or even that of a year. Divine things cannot be compressed within the limits of a book. That which can be written can be circumscribed, and that which can be circumscribed has limits. Man looks for the unlimited, which may here be used for the infinite; and who would think of cramming the infinite into a report? There are always the “many other signs which are not written” in all God’s works and in all our works for God. In examining and preparing the statistical returns for the year I was much struck with the thought of the “unwritten.” I looked at circuits where I know a pure Gospel has been preached and special services have been held, and yet I noticed that the number of those “admitted during the year” might be counted upon the fingers of my right hand. I am certain such a tabulation does not fully express the work or the fruit of a year. The other day I received a handbill as a specimen of “invisible printing.” On it were two blank spaces. I was instructed to hold the bill to the fire, and legible type would appear in the “blanks.” I acted upon the said instructions, and lo! there was the type perfectly readable. Brethren, in making up your returns I doubt not you mourned over the blank spaces; but when the record of our life and work shall be held up to the light and warmth of heaven we shall be cheered by seeing many a space “filled in” with the record of souls saved and saints succoured through our ministry. If all the signs of Christ’s ministry are not written, let us not complain if some of ours remain unrecorded.1 [Note: M. Brokenshire.] 3. We are not on the track of St. John’s mind, when we begin by craving for an indefinite accumulation of Gospel material. He does not consider that that is what we need. He has another purpose in view, as he writes, than that of recording everything that he could recall or discover about our Lord, and this purpose of his is better served by a selection than by an accumulation, and therefore he spends his energy and experience not in gathering, but in sifting. His effort lies in singling out from the swarm of memories those special and typical moments which will best convey the impression he desires. How different from such a man as Papias in the later days, who had never seen the Lord, but would go about all over the world asking everywhere for some one who could tell him some new story about the Lord. That is not the Apostle, his long tarrying has taught him through the selective working of the Holy Spirit, under the pressure of daily circumstances what to keep in store, what to drop and prune, if the image of Christ is to transmit itself with faithful emphasis to those who are to come after. To secure this he depends, not on the quantity, but on the quality, of the matter chosen. We know, even in his own case, that the years as they pass over him have taught him the same lesson—to pare down rather than to expand. Fewer and fewer words, we are told by St. John, have become necessary to him; he would rather repeat and repeat those familiar phrases, into which he had concentrated all his love, than search about for other and more varied expressions. To get at the heart and the mind of a person we turn to the characteristic deeds and words which come from him at the most cardinal and critical moments of his life. We can afford to omit, forget, a thousand details if only we can single out and fasten upon those peculiar, those unique, expressions which have upon them the special stamp of his individuality. It is the typical facts that we require when the fullest secret of His being emerged and flashed. To know Him, then, at such vivid moments, is to know Him for ever, for it is to know Him as He is. A multitude of minor events and records would be full of interest, no doubt, but they would not be essential, they would not really add to our knowledge, they would but corroborate and confirm it. Take the case of a dear friend passed away from us in death. What is it that lives in our faithful memory of him, what is it we love to bring up in imagination and brood over and caress, as it were, with an affectionate recollection? Not, I think, a quantity of details, but rather, I think, the few singular and intimate and memorable characteristics which marked him out from all others, the things which gave him his personal uniqueness, the things which no one else could have done or said, the points at which his innermost nature shot up to the surface, and looked out at us with a sudden intensity, before it fell back again under the veil of ordinary existence. Certain single moments there have been that abide in our mind when he turned his face full upon us—the man himself; certain actions there were that stand out clear from all others as stars in the night. They may be great or little, but they were the windows through which we saw into his soul. Perhaps it is the ring of his voice on a certain phrase that will haunt us; or the turn of his head, as he looked back and smiled; his gait, as we caught sight of him some day, that we remember so well; or that way he had of laying his hand on our arm, and we can feel it warm there to-day; or the sort of word he used, that was a favourite one on his lips, the word that was the key to so much in him in which we delighted; or some one happy day, when the blessed home was full of his delightful presence; or, above all, the tune of his laugh when he was merry, or the look in his eyes at the time of some deep sorrow—these are the things that we cling to, and to these and no more than these.1 [Note: H. Scott Holland.] 4. But, besides the fact that a selection of signs is more impressive than an accumulation of them, there is another reason why St. John selects the few signs and omits the many. Because Jesus Christ is still alive and at work; Jesus Christ is a living Person, ascended to the right hand of God, reigning in the midst of His Church. He, through His Spirit, is here ready to meet difficulties as they arise, ready to answer the questions suggested by His words, ready to lead His believers on and on in the path on which they have set out. All the Christian religion lies in that; it lies in the actual communion between the living soul and the living Christ, not in reading about Him, not in hearing about Him, not in remembering things that He did, or being convinced that He really did them, or in admiration for His historical character, or in approving the excellence of His teaching, or in a touching sentiment from the beautiful drama once enacted by Him “who for us men, and for our salvation came down … and was made man”—not in any of these does the religion of Christ consist. It begins and ends wholly in an active and energetic contact between the Person of Jesus Christ and the person of His followers. If we have not the realized presence of Christ, nothing can bring us together; if we have it, nothing can keep us apart.2 [Note: Charles A. Berry, 127. “Who is it that is passing by?” A personal presence? It is enigmatical enough; it is bewildering, it amazes, it says but few things plainly. But there it is; we cannot escape it; it is a presence which is not to be put by. That is its challenge: it stands there delivering the challenge by its sheer existence—not by arguments, not by explanation, not by persuasion. Not by those weapons does it make its attack; no, but by being simply what it is. “I am what I am, I am that which I have been telling you.” “Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?” That is the voice that speaks through the written records, speaks as none other ever spoke. And it is the voice of a living man, not of a book, using a book through which to speak, but Himself the key of the written word, Himself the power in the book; Himself the argument, the appeal; Himself the soul of the record! Though all the books that the world could contain were written about Him the situation would still be the same. At the close when you have read them all, the one question would still remain to be answered: “After all you have read, after all you have heard, will you follow Me? Will you obey Me? Will you trust Me? Will you put your souI in My hands?”1 [Note: H. Scott Holland.] II The Purpose of the Signs St. John tells that having selected certain signs for record he has written his Gospel for a purpose. The purpose is twofold: first, that we may believe that Jesus is the Christ or Messiah and the Son of God; and then that, so believing, we may have life in His name. Let us consider (1) what we are to believe—that Jesus is the Christ, and that He is the Son of God; (2) how the signs enable us thus to believe; and (3) the effect of our belief—life in His name. 1. What does the Apostle, in writing this Gospel, want us to believe? He brings before us One Jesus, and he desires to prove that He is the Christ or promised Messiah and the Son of God. (1) Jesus.—Who can narrate all that that name has been, all that it is, to those who have known it? “Jesus” is the subject of the four Gospels. Their one subject is the Life of Jesus. It is the Lord’s human name; the name by which His mother called Him, when He lay as an infant in the manger cradle, when He played as a little child on the cottage floor of Nazareth; the name of Him who was the village carpenter; the name of Him who wont to stray A pilgrim on the world’s highway, Oppressed by power, and mocked by pride, The Nazarene, the Crucified. As we utter it we recall the scenes in the Synagogue and the Temple; the sermon on the hillside among the lilies of the field; the boat stirred gently by the silver ripples of the lake; the feeding of the multitudes as they sat in their many-coloured Eastern robes on the green grass; the woman sobbing at His feet and wiping them with the hairs of her head at the banquet of the Pharisee; the long night of prayer upon the lonely hill; the life as an excommunicated fugitive with a price upon His head; the madness of priests and scribes against the only human life ever lived of perfect love and sinless innocence; the fury of the mob; the last supper; the disciple who became the traitor; the agony in Gethsemane; the cross; the garden grave. The designation “Jesus” gives Him a place in the history of the world, allocates and identifies Him with men, and forms a useful starting-point for all inquiries concerning His character. At once we meet with Him on the plane of human life, in the midst of the known and the knowable, a man like ourselves, grafted on the stock of common humanity, and in most essential respects identical with us. His name was not an unfamiliar one at the beginning of the present era. There was nothing strange in it to the ears of His companions in the streets of Nazareth. Betokening Him through whom Jehovah sends salvation, it had passed into common circulation, and was often represented by the Greek Jason. In the list of seventy-two commissioners sent by Eleazer to Ptolemy, it is found twice. One of the books of the Apocrypha is attributed to Jesus the son of Sirach. A companion of St. Paul’s at Rome was Jesus, surnamed Justus. According to St. Matthew the name was given to the Son of Mary because it fitly described the work He was destined to accomplish for men. Certainly events have justified the prophecy uttered in the name. St. John regarded it, as appears from his First Epistle as well as from this Gospel, as fixing the real human personality of his Lord. It chronicled and reported the fact that He was made a little lower than the angels, that He had a manhood as veritable as our own. His name was not Gabriel or Michael, but Jesus—a common, human, historic name, fitting well the man whose place in the successions of the race of men it registers. “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” “He was made of a woman, made under the law.” His human nature was real. There was nothing simulated or abridged about Him. He was the fulness of humanity in its depth and height, length and breadth. No one was ever more human than Jesus. Never was one so completely and thoroughly man as He!1 [Note: John Clifford, The Christian Certainties, 165. (2) Christ.—The object of the Gospel was to teach us that this Jesus was the Christ—that is, the Anointed, the promised Messiah of the Jews. As He is the strength of all the present, so was He the fulfilment of all the past. God, who loved His human children unto the end, loved them from the beginning. The Incarnation was no sudden thought; no second-best plan. It was the consummation of that love of God of which He had not left Himself without witness from the foundation of the world. We have an Old Testament as well as a New Testament. We are one in hope, one in promise with all the forefathers of our race. When men fell, the promise was given; when the Deluge came, it was renewed; it was confirmed to Abraham and to his sons; it gleamed through the thunder-smoke of Sinai; it brightened the De profundis of the Jewish people in the Psalms; it is the divinest tone in the grandest utterances of all the prophets. The object of the Evangelists in teaching that Jesus is the Christ is to convince us that this Son of man was the promised seed of the woman who should bruise the serpent’s head; that He was the true rainbow of the Covenant; that in Him were all the nations of the world to be blessed; that He was the Prophet greater than Moses of whom Moses spoke; that He was the true Star of Jacob, the Sceptre of Israel; the King of David’s line; the branch of the stem of Jesse; the oppressed and afflicted but not for Himself; the King upon His throne; the Priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek. From the beginning of His ministry the Nazarene was familiar with the idea of His Messiahship as involving service and suffering, and gave no indistinct signs of the force with which it possessed Him. He is a true Hebrew in hope and faith. He reads the Law, sings the Psalms, and is fired by the Messiah hope. On His acceptance of the office of Scripture-reader in the synagogue of His native village He appropriated the Messianic words of Isaiah as descriptive of Himself. To the Samaritan woman He made known His character, and affirmed that He was the Messiah expected by the people; and such was the beauty of His life and the power of His words, that after He had been but two days in Sychar many said to the woman, “Now we believe, not because of thy speaking: for we have heard for ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world.”1 [Note: John Clifford, The Christian Certainties, 174. (3) Son of God.—We must advance one step further. Jesus is the Son of God. He who could claim to be in so supreme and distinguishing a sense the Son of Man without deserving the charge of insanity or overweening self-conceit, and to be the Messiah, the anointed prophet-king of the Most High, without refutation from the cleverest and bitterest of His foes, need not hesitate to urge His right to be regarded as the Son of God. This is the fundamental fact in His consciousness. Directly and intuitively He knows His own Sonship, and speaks and acts by the final and supreme authority of that unique relation. We must, therefore, complete the synthesis of facts grouped in the words “Jesus” and “Christ” in another and higher designation: and what can that be but the Son of God the Father! The circumstances of the case demand and fully justify the triple name for the Galilean Teacher, our Lord Jesus Christ. When Jesus named Himself the Son of God before the religious Jews, the only interpretation they could put upon His words was, that He was setting Himself up as a rival God, “making himself equal with God.” It is interesting and instructive to observe how Jesus passes by the word equal, in order that He may expound and dwell upon His perfect filial unity with His Father. He entirely disavows the equality in the sense in which the Jews meant it; and so St. Paul says of Him, that He did not think equality with God a thing to be grasped at. It was impossible to imagine a more complete subordination than that of the Son of God to the Father. Mark once more those wonderful sayings of Jesus: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do.” What language could more explicitly repudiate any independent equality of the Son with the Father? But then our Lord adds the assertion, “What things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.” Such a relation as this might not unnaturally be expressed by the term equality. But if we follow our blessed Lord’s own teaching, we shall make sonship—sonship in its most perfect idea, eternal sonship—the key to what He was and is at the side of the Father. Jesus did not shrink from saying that it was the Father’s purpose that “all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father.”1 [Note: J. Ll. Davies, The Manifestation of the Son of God, 46. They come to Thee, the halt, the maimed, the blind, The devil-torn, the sick, the sore; Thy heart their well of life they find, Thine ear their open door. Ah! who can tell the joy in Palestine— What smiles and tears of rescued throngs! Their lees of life were turned to wine, Their prayers to shouts and songs! The story dear our wise men fable call, Give paltry facts the mighty range; To me it seems just what should fall, And nothing very strange. But were I deaf and lame and blind and sore, I scarce would care for cure to ask; Another prayer should haunt Thy door— Set Thee a harder task. If Thou art Christ, see here this heart of mine, Torn, empty, moaning, and unblest! Had ever heart more need of Thine, If Thine indeed hath rest? Thy word, Thy hand right soon did scare the bane That in their bodies death did breed; If Thou can’st cure my deeper pain, Then art Thou Lord indeed. 2. Now, how do the signs which St. John has selected enable us to believe that Jesus is the Christ and the Son of God? (1) What is belief? There are two words in this Gospel which are very frequently used. The first is the word “believe,” and the second the word “witness.” Men are asked to believe in Jesus. “To those that believe” is the promise of the Gospel given. The writer does not say that the mystery of Jesus Christ is made manifest to the clever and the wise; he does not say that the secret of Jesus Christ is declared even to those who simply seek it; but he does say that it is made manifest to him who believes. That is the challenge which the Person of Jesus Christ still throws out. It is “whosoever believeth.” That with us has become almost a cant phrase. It is an easy kind of thing to say in a sermon or at a revival meeting, but there is a meaning behind it, and we need to get back to the original and true meaning. To believe in Jesus Christ is to do something more than think about Him and to have an opinion concerning Him. It means to bow before Him in reverence; to take Him at His word; to do His will; to begin walking in His way; to make the great surrender; to accept His teaching as though it were true, and prove it true by practising it. The man who so deals with Christ is the man who in the end finds out His secret and is able to say, “My Lord and my God.” He then becomes a witness to His name. What he has found in Jesus Christ for himself, he is constrained to make known to others. “He believes and therefore also he speaks.” It is sometimes asked, Why can I not be saved without faith? I answer, Look to this text and see the reason. Is a man saved who knows nothing of Christ and of God in Him, who indeed refuses this knowledge? It is an impossibility. Salvation lies in the very thing that you seek to get without it. Knowledge of Christ, likeness to Christ, sympathy with Christ: this is salvation; and how can it exist without knowing Him and believing in Him? Go and get health without wholeness, sanity without being sane, and fulness without being filled, and you may have salvation without faith, i.e. salvation without salvation. Faith makes all the difference between Heaven and Hell, not by a mere act of God’s will, but by the very nature of the case. You must enter at this strait gate, if you are ever to enter at all; for there is only one Heaven, that where Christ is believed in, loved, and glorified; and you cannot think of any life for sinners there, which is not through His name.1 [Note: John Cairns, Christ the Morning Star, 304. Faith is no common word as the embodiment and expression of a Divine principle, and I do not think we have reached by far its lofty heights, or barely touched even the fringes of its sacred mantle, or caught the breath of its pure life, or felt the charm of its healing touch. I should like to be able to explain the full, deep meaning of this word, but I cannot. I look at it subjectively and objectively. Subjectively, it is God’s gift to man and in man; yes, but it is more. It becomes a part of our best life, and a ruling, purifying part, for it controls and permeates the whole man. Do I err in suggesting that faith is the human counterpart, or that which answers in man, to omniscience in God? As omniscience is the eye of Deity, so faith is the eye of the soul; hence knowledge and life come by a look. God has no faith because He knows all things and needs it not; we do not know all, but the point or power in us which reaches nearest to the all-knowing is faith. Sight has limitations in the objective as well as in the subjective. Faith is limited in the subjective only—it has an infinite objective. Sight has to do solely with the material, faith with the spiritual. Sight is of the body, faith is of the soul.1 [Note: M. Brokenshire.] (2) How do the signs of Jesus produce faith in Him? St. John felt that the life of Christ had a perpetual value for men. The Lord Jesus was not an ordinary person, had not an ordinary career, and therefore ought not to have an ordinary fate. He was not a simple mortal with common relations to the past, and without any legacies for posterity; but One who gathered into Himself all the nobility and worth of preceding times as into a focus, and was fitted to become the fountain of strength and life for men through succeeding ages. The Son of Man had touched with His sympathetic hand and unrivalled powers the whole circle of human life, and invested every object therein with unfading beauty and exceeding grace. His “signs” spoke to the sorrows and griefs of men, and are eminently worthy of the opportunity of repeating their messages to the care-burdened heart as long as man may open his ears for words from the Unseen. His “sayings” contained truths so original, and yet so pertinent to all that concerns the true progress of man, that no age ought to be without their illuminating presence. His perfect goodness, embodying in the fullest degree the Christian idea of holiness which He had created, was such that it would have been an irreparable injury to have been bereft of the story which enshrined His portrait. The redemptive work He accomplished was so freighted with the best gifts of our heavenly Father to His erring children that to bring it into human literature, and make it contemporary with every age, was to set wide open the door of Heaven and lead men to walk therein; therefore these things were written, that men may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing they may have life in His name. John the Baptist having been in prison for several months, and becoming anxious concerning the establishment of the visible dominion of which he supposed he had been the pioneer, sent two of his disciples to Jesus with the question, “Art thou he that should come, or look we for another?” The reply of Christ claimed the Messiah’s office and character on incontestable grounds. “Tell John,” said He, “My miracles are wrought amongst the poor in spirit and in goods. I give gladness to the desponding, and joy to the sad. I am the messenger of glad tidings to the people, and blessed is he who is not offended at the mode in which I work, or repulsed by the strongest evidences of my anointing of God.”1 [Note: John Clifford, The Christian, Certainties, 175. In the Synoptic Gospels our Lord deals mainly with great moral and spiritual principles. He interprets the aim and inner meaning of the old law, deals with the nature of religion, and scarcely touches on His own personal claims. In St. John the prevailing subject is Himself, His relations to God, to His disciples, and to the unbelieving world. It is in St. John alone, for example, that we read of Christ’s sayings, “I am the bread of life”; “the light of the world”; “the door”; “the good shepherd “; “the resurrection and the life”; “the true vine”; “the way, the truth, and the life.” No reader fails to feel the difference. There is a difference also in the object of the miracles recorded. Not only is there in St. John’s Gospel what Dr. Sanday calls “an enhancement of the miraculous,” but their object is different. In St. John the miracle appears to be a manifestation of Divine power in order to induce belief, rather than, as in the others, a work of compassion, contingent on faith in the person healed.2 [Note: J. M. Wilson, The Origins and Aims of the Four Gospels, 89. Our Lord, during the three years of His ministry, had given extraordinary signs of omnipotence as credentials of His Divine mission. St. John makes a judicious and characteristic selection of seven of them, five of which are peculiar to his Gospel. He apparently designed to supplement the Synoptic Gospels by these additional supernatural details, although his main purpose throughout was to put in prominence the Divine side of the Person of Christ, “The Lamb of God.” Note attentively the symbolic import of these seven “signs.” (1) At Cana He turned the water into wine, figuring to spiritual minds the transformation of the old and weak into the new and strong, the transfiguration of earthly things and relationships by the new spirit of grace. (2) At Capernaum, Christ’s power of life was declared, whilst the beauty and virtue of faith was illustrated in the nobleman who at the Saviour’s word believed in his son’s cure. (3) The real perennial fount of life was further shown by the cure of the impotent man at the pool of Bethesda. The Father, the absolute soul, communicates all healing and life-giving powers to men by the Son, who is thus the proximate source. “As the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself.” (4) By the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, Jesus manifested Himself to be the sustainer and nourisher of man’s life. This miracle gives point to the pregnant words, “Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life,” and to His discourses upon the manna, the type and symbol of Himself, “the true bread which cometh down from heaven, of which if a man eat he shall live for ever.” (5) The winds and waves, too, are here, as in the Synoptic Gospels, represented as obeying His nod. As the Lord of the forces of nature He treads upon the wings of the storm, to the consternation of His disciples. (6) A man blind from birth who receives sight, to the delightful amazement of his friends and to the confusion of enemies, presents symbolically an illustrious concrete demonstration of the fact that Jesus Christ is the Giver of light, “the light of every man coming into the world.” (7) The raising of Lazarus, already in a state of putrefaction, fitly sets the Lord forth as “the resurrection and the life.” Hear His own words, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour cometh, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live.” Again, “marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.” The succession of these seven characteristic signs leads up to the crowning tragedy, and the Lord’s own glorious victory over death.1 [Note: J. Miller, Sermons Literary and Scientific, 1st Ser., 20. 3. What, finally, is the ultimate effect of believing that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God? St. John’s answer is, that we may have life in His name. The name of Christ, of course, stands for the power of Christ. We express that even in our hymns. His name the sinner hears, And is from sin set free, ’Tis music in his ears, ’Tis life and victory. New songs shall now his lips employ, And dances his glad heart for joy. (1) It is worthy of notice that even the lowest kind of life, that which is merely physical and earthly, is helped by the history, example, and influence of Jesus Christ. He Himself blessed men’s bodies, as a kind of image of, and preparation for, the deeper blessing He had in reserve for their souls. Now the Church continues this work and, though not armed with His power of miracle, is doing more at this day than ever was done before to preserve, enlarge, and bless the mere physical life of man. It is doing more than all other remedial agencies to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, and to strike at the very roots of all the sins and vices which wear out life and induce decay and death. Take Christ away, out of the Gospels and out of the world, and you see how, as He goes out, death comes in. In heathen lands you light again the widow’s pile, and restore infanticide; and nearer home you give a new license to intemperance and to lust; you break down the law of the Sabbath, and doom the millions to be ground in endless labour. You give a fresh lease to war, with no Christ-like face to come between the combatants and stay their fury. You urge on suicide by making life more miserable and less sacred. You introduce at every point some element of death, and your gospel is simply “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” Such is the best hope of unbelief, such the millennium which secularism in its blindness and against its will is seeking to introduce. I ascribe my long life under God to my abstaining from the use of intoxicating liquors, and general observance of the laws of health. No doubt my habitual state of mind has had a great influence on my bodily health. My strong confidence in my God and the peace and joy I have felt, springing from an abiding evidence of my acceptance with Him, have tended to promote health and length of days.1 [Note: C. Chiniquy, Forty Years in the Church of Christ, 476. (2) But while Christ thus retrieves, conserves, and exalts the life that now is, His greatest blessing is the life that is spiritual, begun here and gloriously prolonged in the life to come. There is the life of knowledge, according to Christ’s own words, “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” There is the life of pardon, where the condemned sinner receives a legal title to live, through the Lord our Righteousness. There is the life of regeneration and sanctification, whereby those who were dead in trespasses and sins rise with Christ and walk in newness of life. There is the life of eternal blessedness, which is the consummation of all the rest, according to the promise, “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.” I do not think we mark sufficiently the traces of autobiography in the sacred writers. The favourite word of St. John is “life.” He dwells upon it more than on any other conception. And it seems to me that there is great appropriateness in the selection. To the men of his generation he was essentially the man of life. He had so much vitality about him that his contemporaries said he would never die. He says himself that if a man had in him the Spirit of Christ he would have in him the spirit of immortal youth, or what he calls Eternal Life. Where did he get that conception? From his own experience. He felt every morning as if he were born afresh into the world. He felt something within him like the springing up of living waters. Nay, he felt as if he had already passed the rubicon of death and had even now entered the world of the immortals. I think if you and I had met St. John the thing that would have impressed us above all other things would have been the vitality of his spirit. We see this manifestation exhibited in some of our fellow-men. There are those whom we describe as “full of life”; and if you ask the source of this life you will find that in every case it is originated by something outside. St. John says that in his case the flow of vitality came from the name of Jesus. The flow of vitality always comes from a human interest, and is generally awakened by a name. The names “liberty,” “equality,” “fraternity,” stimulated the French Revolution—a vital force that shook the world. Many a heart has been vitalized by a name. You sit in a crowded drawing-room and hear a buzz of inarticulate voices. Suddenly, a voice not louder than the rest becomes articulate; it pronounces a name, a name you love. “Have you heard he is coming home?” Before that name broke upon your ear you were listless, apathetic, dead. But when you heard the prophecy of its owner’s advent, a new life rose within you. The eye sparkled; the cheek mantled; the pulse quickened; the room became radiant; the languor vanished; the hours received wings. Even such to the beloved disciple was the mention of the name of Jesus. It made him young again—nay, rather it kept him from ever growing old. It constituted him an evergreen; it gave him life eternal. It not only prolonged his years; it made them perpetual spring—elastic with energy, bounding with hope, buoyant with the promise of to-morrow. It retained within him the heart of a child.1 [Note: G. Matheson, Messages of Hope, 73. The Chief Purpose of the Gospel Literature Cairns (J.), Christ the Morning Star, 290. Clifford (J.), The Christian Certainties, 159. Davies (J. Ll.), The Manifestation of the Son of God, 32. Drummond (J.), Spiritual Religion, 40. Farrar (F. W.), Truths to Live By, 1. Hall (E. H.), Discourses, 78. Ragg (L.), Christ and Our Ideals, 1. Selbie (W. B.), Aspects of Christ, 95. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxvii. No. 1631. Stalker (J.), The Two St. Johns, 169. Stryker (M. W.), The Well by the Gate, 43. Wilson (J. M.), Studies in the Origins and Aims of the Four Gospels, 85. Christian Commonwealth, March 1, 1911 (Campbell). Christian World Pulpit, xxxvi. 168 (Brokenshire); xli. 339 (Scott Holland); lxiii. 262 (Mitchell). Guardian, June 16, 1911 (Strong). Literary Churchman, xvii. 454. Treasury, xxii, 263 (Welcher). Love and Service So when they had broken their fast, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of John, lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my lambs. He saith to him again a second time, Simon, son of John, lovest thou me? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Tend my sheep. He saith unto him the third time, Simon, son of John, lovest thou me? Peter was grieved because he said unto him the third time, Lovest thou me? And he said unto him, Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee. Jesus saith unto him, Feed my sheep.—John 21:15-17. Who that takes any delight at all in the Bible does not take delight in the twenty-first chapter of St. John? Who has not felt the benignant spell of that narrative, in its indescribable simplicity and depth, its gracious beauty and its soul-penetrating power? Willingly we follow the last Apostle as he recounts to us, in his uttermost age, with the photographic precision of an old man’s recollection of his prime, that wonderful memory. He leads us as if into the very landscape of the Syrian lake. We embark with him in the boat, as if we heard the rattle of the oars, and the lap of the ripples on the sides. We “ply the watery task” with him and his comrades, as if we saw the vernal stars reflected under our eyes in the dusky mirror of the deep. Their weariness and disappointment, as the night wanes and they have taken nothing, are as if our own. And then comes up the morning over the dark hills of Moab, and there stands a Figure on the solitary beach, and there are callings to and fro between beach and boat; and the nets are full and heavy on a sudden, and the disciple plunges into the water, to swim and wade to his master’s feet. The whole group soon gathers round the fire of coals; the fast is broken; and then there is a colloquy about love, and labour, and martyrdom, and following. We have seen it, heard it, shared it all. It was my happiness a few years ago to set eyes upon the Lake of Galilee, gazing with strange emotions upon the waters and the mountain-shores from the garden of the Scottish Mission Hospital (scene of a noble work for God) at Tiberias, and afterwards from a boat, built probably on lines unaltered for two thousand years, and worked by fishermen, clad probably in the very fashion of the Apostles. Wonderful was the charm of the thought that this was indeed the scene of the Gospels; the eyes of the Son of Man knew just those outlines of cliff, and field, and shore, and that snowy dome of Hermon looking on from the northern horizon. His feet trod this shell-wrought strand, aye, and the waves too into which those smooth waters can be tossed so soon. Somewhere yonder, on the further side (for surely it was on that more solitary margin), this last scene of St. John’s narrative was enacted; there was kindled the ruddy fire, there the water flashed into silver as Simon Peter wrestled his way through. Along that shore, whose line lies so distinct between lake and hills, he followed the steps of Jesus, and turned to see John following too. It was a moving thing to look thus with waking eyes on the region as it is. Yet, such is the power, the artless magic, of the narrative of the Apostle, that I know not whether the actual gain to realization was very great. The Gospel had created so visible a landscape that the eyes had less to add to the picture than I had hoped.1 [Note: H. C. G. Moule, The Secret of the Presence, 144. 1. The occasion.—The time is morning; morning so full of memories, so full of hope and high resolve. The mists are clearing from the lake and shore: the darkness is passing away, stirred by the fresh breeze of dawn. There are together those whose names are so often found associated; Simon Peter, and Thomas called Didymus, and Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, and the two sons of Zebedee. They are on the sea of Tiberias, fishing just as before Christ called them to be fishers of men. The fruitless night-toil, and their success when in obedience to Christ they cast their net on the right side of the ship, were fitted to remind them of His former miracle, and of their former call. John marks, as significant of a difference between this and the former miracle, that for all the fishes were so many, yet did not the net break—a hopeful difference, promising that their new mission should be better than the old. Called anew to draw men to Christ, they shall be better preachers than they were; they shall not “catch men” for the Kingdom, they shall be enabled to bring them all in and retain them in the Kingdom. The months that have gone by, seemingly so fruitless—months during which they made so many blunders, months which appeared to come to so entire a close in the death of their Master—have not gone by for nothing. Their past experience, their blunders and anxieties and sorrows, all will be seen to have fitted them for their new work, when again the Lord shall bid them to it. This, at least, we shall see to be true of St. Peter; three times reminded of his weakness, three times made to feel the pains of penitence, he is each time bidden to tend the flock. He will be better able to tend the flock because of what he has learnt of his feebleness and folly. The narrative seems to me full of subtle suggestions. It illustrates our Christian life, which is ever new, yet ever old; full of strange events, the meaning of which becomes, as we muse upon them, familiar and intelligible. Every daybreak shows us the old world under new aspects; the objects which loom so strangely in the obscurity, we see, as we gaze on them, to be quite familiar. In the dim morning light, the disciples knew not that it was Jesus who stood on the shore; perhaps some mysterious change had passed upon Him in the grave, the risen Saviour not appearing quite like the Master whom they had followed; but the miracle revealed that it was He. It was a new call with which He presently bade them, but it was the fulfilment of His first bidding, “Follow me.” It was a new miracle He wrought, a new experience through which they were passing now; but how thoroughly was it the same as what had gone before! It is this constant freshness and changeless identity of life, this novelty of circumstance having in it the old meaning of love and grace, the new duty which is but a repetition of the old call, which makes us rejoice in the one purpose we perceive ever enlarging and fulfilling itself. It is as we recognize, “I am the same, and God is the same amid all changes,” that we rest amid ceaseless variation, and learn the lessons to which, day by day, God is opening our ears.1 [Note: A. Mackennal, Christ’s Healing Touch, 174. 2. The language.—The passage is marked in the original by a variety of language which does not appear in the English translation. There are two different Greek words for each of the English words “love,” “know,” and “feed,” and three Greek words for “sheep” or “lambs.” And there is significance in other words besides these. Take them separately— (1) “Simon, Son of John.” The Master’s use of the old name “Simon,” instead of the new name, “Peter,” was suggestive of much. It was not to imply that he had forfeited all right to the new name; but it was a gentle reminder to him of the weakness which had led to his denial; and it would recall to him the Master’s words before his fall, when He purposely abstained from giving him the name that implied firmness and strength, but used instead the old name, “Simon,” which bore to “Peter” the same relation as “Jacob” (the “supplanter”) bore to “Israel” (the “prince of God”)—“Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat, but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not.” Very lovingly had Jesus already assured the penitent disciple of His forgiveness. One of the first messages He sent as the Risen One was a message specially to Peter. One of the first private interviews He gave to any disciple was given to Peter; and from that interview he must have come away knowing himself to be a fully pardoned man. Still, the use of the old name here again must have gone to Peter’s heart, making him think, with new shame and sorrow, of his old self-confidence and pride. (2) “Lovest thou me?” The distinctions between the two Greek verbs used are various and delicate; but they may all be traced to the radical difference between them. It is not a difference in the warmth, but in the character, of affection. The one signifies the love based upon appreciation of another; the other simple personal attachment. The one word would express the love that would give itself up for another; the second word that which gives itself up to another. The one would be a confident, the other a confiding love. In this narrative the one might be represented if, in English, we said, “I am thy friend”; the other, if we said, “Thou art my friend.” It is the former of these words that Christ here uses: “Simon, son of Jonas, esteemest thou me more, art thou more my friend, than thy fellow disciples?” This was just what Peter had professed, “Though all men shall be offended because of thee, yet will I never be offended.” “I am ready to go with thee, both into prison, and to death.” “Though I should die with thee, yet will I not deny thee.” We can now understand Peter’s reply. Once he would have said, “I know that I am Thy friend.” Once he did assert his knowledge of himself against Christ’s knowledge of him; he was sure he was to be trusted. But he has lost his self-confidence. He cannot compare himself with others now. He will not even assert himself to be a friend, ready to devote himself for Christ’s sake; he will not profess esteem for Jesus. He chooses the humbler, trustful word: “Yea, Lord, thou knowest that I love thee.” Again, Christ asks him, “If not more than these, yet art thou my friend at all? Is there any of the active devoted love in thee? any of the passion that will assert itself on my behalf?” And still the same humble, clinging answer comes from Peter. Even this he will not affirm. How can he profess what he is ready for? How can he be confident who has so painfully learnt that there is nothing for him but meekly and gratefully to trust in Jesus? “Yea, Lord, thou knowest that I love thee.” Now, Christ takes Peter’s own word: He will not wound him by reminding him of his past boastful professions; let it be as Peter would have it, the trusting affection of the disciple. “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me?” “Peter was grieved because he said unto him the third time, Lovest thou me?” Surely Jesus cannot doubt that. He must know that the disciple clings to his Lord. Christ must know that He is all in all to Peter. He saith unto Him, “Lord, thou knowest all things; Thou seest my heart, Thou knowest what sort of a man I was and am, how vain my self-confidence; Thou knowest me to be weak, rash, changeful; but Thou knowest, too, that under all my boasting, all my mistakes, there was love for Thee, and that it remains. Lord, Thou knowest that I cannot make professions, that I am heart-sick of professions, but Thou knowest that this is true; thou knowest that I love Thee.” And this confession Christ accepts; this confession He ever will accept. Distinguish between the profession of love to Christ and the confession of it. In profession the person most prominent in our thoughts is “I, who make it”; in confession, “He, whose name I am confessing.” The confession of love to Christ is the sweetest language that can fall from human lips; it shows that the life has found its rest and meaning. Christ is known, and He will keep faithful to all eternity; He will solace in all tribulation, and succour in all difficulty; He will guide with His counsel, and afterwards receive to glory, every meek soul that utters it. The profession of love to Christ is painful to hear. It is full of danger; it is boastful, self-confident. He who makes it will have, by many a sore trial, through many a bitter experience of failure, to come to a humbler mind. It is not in what we are to Christ, but in what Christ is to us, that our rest and security lie. Observe the period of Peter’s life when this confession is made. It is not his earliest confession; he has been brought to it through painful self-knowledge; it is the utterance of a tried maturity. It is a custom among many Christians to demand this as a pass-word to Christian fellowship; to refuse the recognition of discipleship to all who cannot utter it. I cannot think that this is wise. To set young converts on an estimate of their feeling towards the Saviour, instead of encouraging them to trust in Him, is full of peril. Christian discipleship sometimes begins with love to Christ; and singularly blessed are they with whom it does. But in other ways souls are drawn to Christ: the weary go to Him for rest, the guilty for pardon, the helpless for succour; the dissatisfied, who long for a better life, seek the life that is in Christ. Such will say, “I trust in Christ,” “I have found Christ,” “I am following Christ”; but the words, perhaps, halt on their lips, “I love Christ.” It is not for us to insist on their utterance. They are not for our ears, but for His. And He knows how, from the trusting, the obedient, and the earnest, to draw at length the full confession, “Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee.”1 [Note: A. Mackennal, Christ’s Healing Touch, 178. (3) “Feed my lambs.” There is variation in Christ’s thrice repeated charge—” Feed my lambs,” “Shepherd my sheep,” “Feed my little sheep.” All were to be cared for, and all modes of watchfulness and help were to be displayed. Fold as well as feed them; guide and guard and heal them; keep them from straying, strengthen the feeble, bind up the bruised, bring again that which is driven away, seek that which is lost. 3. Three questions, three answers, and three commands.—In this story St. Peter has been already three times the foremost. To him the Lord speaks, now not for the first time singling him out. (1) The first question is, “Lovest thou me more than these?” These words refer to an earlier time, the time when He had said to the disciples, “All ye shall be offended because of me this night,” and St. Peter had replied, “Though all men shall be offended because of thee, yet will I never be offended.” Yet he had fled with the rest. And when he came back to the house where his Lord was being tried, he three times denied Him. Was this like loving Him more than the rest? Yet, again, his recent act might be looked at as a sign of his character, his leaping from the ship into the sea, and dragging the net alone. These words therefore did not convey a real reproach, but a lesson: the love might be the greatest, yet also the least to be trusted. There was a good beginning, but it had not ripened into its proper nature. St. Peter had learnt something by those humbling days. He answers “Yea”; he could do that unflinchingly; but he dares not claim to be above his brethren; he drops, in answering, all allusion to them. Christ simply replies, “Feed my lambs.” He craved no personal cleaving to Himself, as man cleaves to man. He spoke only as the shepherd of the sheep, whose whole care was for the sheep for whom He had died. Such also must be the care of those who love Him. Henceforth St. Peter must show his love by his anxiety to sustain the life of other men; that was to be the test of his love. (2) A second time Christ repeats the question; but now He needs not to recall the old boast; He leaves out the words, “more than these.” He would ask, putting aside all comparison with others, “Canst thou say that thou lovest me?” The answer is the same as before—a full acknowledgment that He is Lord, a firm persuasion that his Lord knows him. Again Christ replies, slightly altering the expression, “Tend my sheep.” Not only the lambs, the weak and ignorant, had to be fed, but even the strong and wise ones, the full-grown sheep, had to be ruled and guided. Mere pity for the helpless lambs was not enough. St. Peter must not think that there were any to whom he owed no duty. (3) Once more Christ renews the question. Three times St. Peter had denied Him, and three times his love is to be proved. St. Peter’s impatience breaks out. He thought it enough that Christ should try him once or at most twice. “He was grieved”; he exclaimed at the seeming needlessness of the question: “Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee”—Thou canst find out whether I love Thee or not. This is but a small thing, a part of the Lord’s all-embracing knowledge. But Christ will not let go the former command; He repeats, “Feed my sheep”; all alike need support as well as guidance. The reiteration in the interrogation did not express doubt as to the veracity of the answer, nor dissatisfaction with its terms; but it did express, and was meant to suggest to St. Peter and to the others, that the threefold denial needed to be obliterated by the threefold confession; and that every black mark that had been scored deep on the page by that denial needed to be covered over with the gilding or bright colouring of the triple acknowledgment. And so thrice having said, “I know him not!” Jesus, with a gracious violence, forced him to say thrice, “Thou knowest that I love thee.”1 [Note: A. Maclaren, After the Resurrection, 78. How pleasant to me thy deep-blue wave, O Sea of Galilee! For the glorious One who came to save Hath often stood by thee. Fair are the lakes in the land I love, Where pine and heather grow: But thou hast loveliness far above What Nature can bestow. It is not that the wild gazelle Comes down to drink thy tide: But He that was pierced to save from hell Oft wander’d by thy side. It is not that the fig-tree grows, And palms, in thy soft air, But that Sharon’s fair and bleeding Rose Once spread its fragrance there. Graceful around thee the mountains meet, Thou calm, reposing sea; But ah, far more! the beautiful feet Of Jesus walk’d o’er thee. And was it beside this very sea The new-risen Saviour said Three times to Simon, “Lovest thou Me? My lambs and sheep then feed”? O Saviour! gone to God’s right hand! Yet the same Saviour still, Graved on Thy heart is this lovely strand, And every fragrant hill. Oh, give me, Lord, by this sacred wave, Threefold Thy love divine, That I may feed, till I find my grave, Thy flock—both Thine and mine!1 [Note: R. M. M‘Cheyne.] 4. Thus Jesus thrice addressed the same question to St. Peter with apparently slight and yet significant variations. To that question he always received the same answer, only again with apparently slight modifications. And with equally slight changes the replies were followed up by seemingly the same injunctions. Yet, trifling as the variations appear to be—the questions slightly differing, the answers slightly differing, the counsels also slightly differing—there is a touching spiritual story in them, full of evangelical meaning and of deep spiritual interest. The truths contained in the text are these— I. Love is the Inspiration of Service. II. Service is the Fulfilment of Love. I Love as the Inspiration of Service Love, love to Christ, which is the one sure spring of love to men, is the foundation of service. It is the first condition of the Divine charge, and the second, and the third. It is the spirit of the new Covenant which burns not to consume but to purify. In the prospect of work for others or for ourselves we can always hear the one question in the stillness of our souls, “Lovest thou me?” Love may not, can not, be attained in its fulness at once; but the Person of Christ, if indeed we see Him as He is presented to us in the Gospels, will kindle that direct affection out of which it comes. If our hearts were less dull we could not study the changing scenes of His unchanging love, or attempt to describe them to others, without answering the silent appeal which they make to us in St. Peter’s words: Lord, thou knowest that I love thee; yes, and still more those who are Thine and not mine, those who fall under my influence in the various relations of life, for Thy sake. 1. Love is first and fundamental.—How significant and beautiful it is that the only thing that Jesus Christ cares to ask about is the man’s love! We might have expected: “Simon, son of Jonas, are you sorry for what you did? Simon, son of Jonas, will you promise never to do the like any more?” No. These things will come if the other thing is there: “Lovest thou me?” Jesus Christ desires from each of us, not obedience primarily, not repentance, not vows, not conduct, but a heart; and that being given, all the rest will follow. This is the distinguishing characteristic of Christian morality, that Jesus seeks first for the surrender of the affections, and believes, and is warranted in the belief, that if these are surrendered, all else will follow; and love being given, loyalty and service and repentance and hatred of self-will and of self-seeking will follow in her train. No other religion presents anything which resembles this invitation to give God the heart. Give me thy observances, says the God of Pharisaism. Give me thy personality, says the God of Hegel. Give me thy reason, says the God of Kant. It remains for the God of Jesus Christ to say, Give Me thine heart. He makes it the essence and the glory of His doctrine. With Him to give the heart to God is not merely an obligation of piety; it is its root, its beginning, its middle, its end.1 [Note: Adolphe Monod.] “Lovest thou me?” It is a question that goes down very deep; for it goes down to the eternal springs of all life. It is God’s and Nature’s great secret; and man’s only hope. Love is life, hatred is death. Love, in its essence, is attraction, combination, sympathy, blending. It is so even in what we call the unconscious world of matter. God’s immense laboratory, the Universe, so far as we know it, is the ceaseless arena of love-attractions and blendings. There is never an atom that is content alone; never a molecule that is at rest in its isolation; never a crystal that is not flashed into form by aspiration; never a leaf or bud or blade of grass that does not reach out after its beloved; never a throb that is not responded to throughout all space. Gravitation itself is like the ceaseless infinite breathing of an all-pervading Lover—attracting all things to itself. Throughout the Universe, so far as we can penetrate, every atom is crying to every other, “Lovest thou me?” Science calls it “affinity.” We might just as well call it “love.” Everywhere, too, Nature—the great patient Mother—stands waiting for the lover’s appeal. It is true that we can capture many of her treasures without affection; but never her joys and benedictions so. She is very wonderful in her teachings, and very gracious in her consolations to her lovers; but there must be love if there is to be communion. You will only be miserable in her solitudes if you are without love. Night and day she whispers to the wanderer, “Lovest thou me?” Emerson was right. We get her stare—not her music—because we love her not. You accuse Nature of cruelty; you say, Nature has miscarried wholly Into failure, into folly. Alas! thine is the bankruptcy Blessed Nature so to see. These young atheists Who invade our hills Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names. The old men studied magic in the flowers, And human fortunes in astronomy, And an omnipotence in chemistry, Preferring things to names, for these were men, Were unitarians of the united world, And, wheresoever their clear eye-beams fell, They caught the footsteps of the Same. Our eyes Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars, And strangers to the mystic beast and bird, And strangers to the plant and to the mine. The injured elements say, “Not in us”; And night and day, ocean and continent, Fire, plant and mineral say, “Not in us”; And haughtily return us stare for stare. For we invade them impiously for gain, We devastate them unreligiously, And coldly ask their pottage, not their love. Therefore they shove us from them; yield to us Only what to our griping toil is due; But the sweet affluence of love and song, The rich results of the divine consents Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover, The nectar and ambrosia, are withheld; And, in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves And pirates of the universe, shut out Daily to a more thin and outward rind, Turn pale and starve. We praise the “strong men,” the empire-makers, the remorseless soldiers, the commercial pioneers; and, indeed, they have their mission, and some of them deserve their meed of praise; but these are not the great instruments of nature and of God. The poets, the artists, the moralists, the idealists, the Buddhas, the Christs, the lovers, are the saviours of the world. “Lovest thou me?” is the question which determines every stage of evolution. From beast to man, and from the beast-man to the angel-man—all is a question of love. Until love comes, no high manhood comes, and, by so much as love lingers, the beast lingers. “Lovest thou me?” is the preliminary question which is the secret of that Divine Shekinah, that symbol of the Divine Presence—the Home. “Lovest thou me?” whispers about all the subsidences of family feuds, and tribal isolations, and clannish spite, and class pride, and national greed. It is the mightiest factor in true nation-making; it is the life and soul of sane and sober patriotism; it is the advance-guard, the evangel, of the great ideal—the Brotherhood of Man. In fine, it is that which determines all the upward evolutionary stages of the race.1 [Note: J. P. Hopps, Sermons of Life and Love, 7. In simple and homely ways see how true it is that love is life and joy and progress. It is nothing to accumulate treasure, and to surround yourself with splendid defences against the intrusions of the careworn world, if you have a loveless and careworn heart. There is profound truth in Hood’s quaintly humorous but pathetically serious lines concerning Love that sweetens sugarless tea, And makes contentment and joy agree With the coarsest boarding and bedding; Love that no golden ties can attach, But nestles under the humblest thatch, And will fly away from an Emperor’s match, To dance at a Penny Wedding.2 [Note: Ibid. 12. It is amazing to find how Christ simplifies religion and morality and reduces them to their elemental terms. He deliberately stakes everything on this single qualification. “Lovest thou me?” is His sole test for discipleship. It seems as if nothing else seriously mattered in His judgment, compared with this one master passion of the soul. “Lovest thou me?”—will there be any other question for us to answer at the last assize?1 [Note: T. H. Darlow, The Upward Calling, 322. What is the beginning? Love. What the course? Love still. What is the goal? The goal is Love on the happy hill. Is there nothing then but Love, search we sky or earth? There is nothing out of Love hath perpetual worth: All things flag but only Love, all things fail or flee; There is nothing left but Love worthy you and me.2 [Note: C. G. Rossetti.] Let me take this as my Master’s question to myself; and see how deep it goes, not only into my feelings, but into my life. For it is not,” Believest thou Me?” or “Understandest thou Me?” or “Confessest thou Me?” or “Obeyest thou Me?” or even, “Servest thou Me?” It goes closer home. It is, “Lovest thou Me?”; and all these other things may be where love is not. Again, He does not ask, “Lovest thou My word?” or “Lovest thou My work?” or “Lovest thou My brethren?” He asks, “Lovest thou Me?” And yet again, He does not ask, “Art thou in the company of those that love Me?” He will not let me shelter myself by losing myself in a crowd who all profess to love Him. He brings me out into the light, to stand alone, and asks, “Lovest thou Me?”3 [Note: G. H. Knight, The Master’s Questions to His Disciples, 355. 2. Love is a personal affection.—From our own experience we know that love, as the best and utmost expression of our own personality, can find a worthy object only in another personality. No person can really love a thing. In easy-going speech a man talks of loving his family or his country. But it is never strictly true. What he really loves is each individual person belonging to his family or nation. There is no more difficulty in loving six than in loving two. But he can by no possibility love even one, unless that one be, like himself, a living person,—or at least potentially such, as is the new-born babe,—capable first of appreciating and then of reciprocating the self which, as with outstretched hands, a person offers when he loves. Nothing else, nothing less than this, is meant by Christ’s doctrine of the love of God. Its true significance and expression are for ever found in what St. Paul said concerning Christ Himself—“Who loved me and gave himself up for me.” That Divine love should be thus truly focused, without mistake and without difficulty, in each individual human being, is the distinctive, wonderful, awful assertion of the Christian gospel alone of all the religions upon earth. 3. Love is reciprocal.—Jesus was not thinking only of Simon Peter when He asked him, “Lovest thou me?” He was as truly thinking of Himself, and He was revealing to His denying and yet true servant the longing his Lord and Master had for his love. Indeed, this yearning for a return of affection is of the essence of all true love. We cannot love any one very dearly without desiring that our love should find an answering response in the heart thus loved, and it is because Jesus loves His own disciples so deeply that He seeks for their love as the one sweet requital for His own to them. It is this longing of the loving heart for love that explains, in part at all events, the first great commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.” The love of God for man goes forth to seek the answering love of man for God; and the sin and guilt of a cold and loveless heart are never fully and rightly felt until we realize that want of love to God is not only an injury to ourselves, but is an injury done to God. Love that is centred in a personality can be satisfied with nothing less and nothing else than the reciprocating love of that person. On our own little human scale this is at once the glory and the tragedy of life. Its default is even more dreadful than death, as numberless poor pitiful suicides have testified. The old word is as true and tender, as fierce and insatiable as ever, “If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would be utterly contemned.” If, as we sit in peace and comfort at the sweetest feast, or the liveliest entertainment, or the most solemn service, a voice that we could not doubt whispered in our ear that the one we loved most felt towards us no love in return, then the poet would be bitterly, crushingly true who wrote— The night has a thousand eyes, And the day but one, Yet the light of a whole world dies With the setting sun. The mind has a thousand eyes, And the heart but one, But the light of a whole life dies If love be done.1 [Note: F. Ballard, Does it Matter what a Man Believes? 76. 4. Love is unselfish.—“Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me?” I do not doubt your love. I did not doubt it even in the moment of your sad fall, but it was not that supreme affection to which I was entitled. You loved Me, but you really loved yourself better, and put your own desires before My will. Events, however, have been teaching you, experience has been leading you to truer views of Me and of yourself; tell Me now do you love Me? Is your love prepared now to sacrifice everything for Me, and in the event of others coming into a competition with Me, are you willing to give Me the preference, to yield to Me the first place in your heart? That is the only love Jesus can regard with complacence. A German mystic in the fifteenth century, John of Goch, thus stated the relation between love and self. “What wings are to a bird, love is to us. They seem to add weight to the body: in reality, however, they elevate it into the air. In like manner the yoke of love, when imposed upon our sensuous nature, not only does not weigh it down, but lifts the spirit with the senses to heavenly things. Take from them their wings, and you take from birds the power of flying. Even so, separate love from the will, and the will is made incapable of every act that transcends nature.” Nevertheless how rarely we reckon those Christians to be in the front rank of the Church who are distinguished by nothing else except their immense power of affection. We still reserve the chief seats in our synagogues for the eloquent speakers, the munificent givers, the superior spiritual personages, who may fall far below others in simple, unwearying, self-forgetful tenderness.2 [Note: T. H. Darlow, The Upward Calling, 320. II Service as the Fulfilment of Love The presence or absence in us of the love of Christ is not only an index to our present state, but a prophecy of all that is to be. The love of Christ was that which enabled and impelled the Apostles to live great and energetic lives. It was this simple affection which made a life of aggression and reformation possible to them. This gave them the right ideas and the sufficient impulse. And it is this affection which is open to us all and which equally now as at first impels to all good. Let the love of Christ possess any soul and that soul cannot avoid being a blessing to the world around. Christ scarcely needed to say to Peter, “Feed My sheep; be helpful to those for whom I died,” because in time Peter must have seen that this was his calling. Love gives us sympathy and intelligence. Our conscience is enlightened by sympathy with the persons we love; through their desires, which we wish to gratify, we see higher aims than our own, aims which gradually become our own. And wherever the love of Christ exists, there sooner or later will the purposes of Christ be understood, His aims be accepted, His fervent desire and energetic endeavour for the highest spiritual condition of the race become energetic in us and carry us forward to all good. 1. Service is the natural outlet of love.—The right conduct of the life is a consequence and fruit of the Incarnation. Incarnation is a name for nothing at all unless it be the name not only of the historic event but also of a personal experience, the entry of the Divine into the human energies of the man who declares that he believes rightly the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Accordingly to say that a man has the love of Christ is to say, in humaner and more concrete speech, that the Incarnation has been actualized in particular life, that Christ is born in him, that the power of the life from heaven has been poured into this channel. For him who would take on him the office of a pastor, the question is suggested, Why do you undertake the office? Is it from love of Christ, and from a sense of the obligation to show your gratitude for what He has done for you, in the way which He has commanded—namely, by services to His sheep? If any are actuated by lower motives they have reason to fear that they lie under the woe which, through the mouth of Ezekiel, God denounced against the shepherds who feed themselves and not the flock; who allow the flock to wander through the mountains, and on every high hill, and to be scattered on the face of the earth, while none searcheth or looketh after them.1 [Note: G. Salmon, Cathedral and University Sermons, 55. 2. Service is love’s evidence.—In giving St. Peter the charge, “Feed my lambs; feed my sheep,” Christ was guarding him against a danger to which he was at this moment liable, the danger of sinking down into an indulgence of sentiment, of dwelling upon the words, “Thou knowest that I love thee,” and forfeiting in this sweet humiliation his calling as an Apostle, and its prize. There is a subtle charm in self-humiliation, an ensnaring luxury of penitence. We feel it in a self-assertive world. From the blare of trumpets, from the strife for mastery, from the restlessness of ambition, and the constant temptation to self-seeking, how blessed to retire to self-abasement before the Lord; how sweetly then from lowly lips falls the confession, “Thou knowest that I love thee.” To cherish this life alone is very dangerous. Hence comes the pride that apes humility; hence self-pleasing under the garb of lowliness. Worse than the hypocrisy which disfigures its countenance that it may appear unto men to fast is the subtle insincerity that disfigures itself that it may appear unto itself to fast. Christ sends St. Peter from confessing, as He sent Mary from adoring Him, to do His work. The world is the true sphere for lowliness; loving labour among others is the school of self-humiliation; love of Christ is perfected in the activities of a human sympathy. What Christ wants from me is a practical expression of my theoretical love, an expression in act, as well as on the lip; and though it may be a hard, it will always be a blessed, answer, if I can give it, “Lord, thou seest all things, Thou seest that I love Thee.” And others ought to see it too. My love to Christ ought to be a visible love. Let me ask myself, therefore, what proofs of my love to Christ I am giving in my daily life. From my demeanour and conversation in my home would any one gather that I love my Lord and Saviour with an ardent love? If I never talk about Him as worthy of love, how can others believe that I regard Him so? If I never boldly take His part, when His laws are despised, or His authority is contemned; if I see, and do not rebuke, the sins that dishonour and grieve Him, how can I make good my profession of loyal love to Himself? If I never think of Him or speak of Him as a dear friend, who is gone away for a time, but is soon to come again; if my heart never thrills with joy in the hope of His “glorious appearing,” so that I am setting everything in order to meet His eye, how can I prove my possession of that love to which separation is a sorrow? Do I make my love to Him as plain and incontrovertible as He makes His love to me? I have never to ask Him, “Lovest Thou me?” If I did, He would answer in a moment, by pointing to the proof He gave of that, and say, “Behold my hands and my feet.” He bears in His glorifled body the “print of the nails,” proofs of His wonderful love to me. But what a contrast between that love and mine! His so strong, and mine so weak; His so changeless, and mine so fickle; His so active, and mine so indolent; His so open, and mine so secret; His so ardent, and mine so cold!1 [Note: G. H. Knight, The Master’s Questions to His Disciples, 357. 3. While service is for all, it is also for each.—Let us recall the variety of words used—“lambs,” “sheep.” Under Divine Providence we have each a work to do for God, each a station and duties in the Divine society; some, sheep to feed, some, lambs to tend. The sheep must be fed individually—milk for the lambs and strong food for the sheep. One of the great intellectual pleasures of the ministry is preaching the same Gospel in many different ways; the boys’ brigade wants it put in one way, the men’s lecture in another, and the mothers’ meeting in another. (1) The Lambs.—No other book recognizes the place of children so fully or so kindly as the Bible. The great books of the world are somewhat deficient in this. Their writers have had no time, found no occasion to dwell on children, and, perhaps, sometimes have been afraid to do so. The Bible does deal with children because of the infinite love of God, and His knowledge of human destiny. Our Lord Jesus Christ set the child in the midst of the stormy disputers, and made him the type of entrance into the Kingdom of heaven. How can any deeper interest gather around their life and their claim than that which is poured upon them by the words of the Risen Christ, “Feed my lambs”? The Rev. Harry Venn has recorded this experience,—“The great danger is from surfeiting children with religious doctrines or over much talk. Doctrines they are too young to understand; and too frequent talking wearies them. Many parents err in expecting that the religion of a child should be the same as their own. I did not give mine formal instruction till they were eight years old, and then chiefly set before them the striking facts in the Old Testament, or the miracles in the New. I also laboured much to set before them the goodness of our God in things which they could understand, such as the comforts which we enjoyed together. Watching providential occurrences, I made use of them to give a body and substance to spiritual truth. One method used to affect them much—carrying them to see an afflicted child of God rejoicing in tribulation, and speaking of His love. To this day they tell of one and another whom they saw happy, though poor and in pain.”1 [Note: Memoir and Correspondence of Henry Venn, 429. It is a beautiful tradition of the Jewish Rabbis that when Moses was a shepherd under Jethro in the land of Midian, a little lamb went frisking from the flock and strayed into the wilderness. Moses, full of the spirit which loveth all things—both man, and bird, and beast—and faithful in little deeds as well as in great, pursued the lamb over rocks and through briars, and after long hours of weary search recovered it; and when he had recovered it he laid it in his bosom, saying, “Little lamb, thou knowest not what is good for thee; trust me, thy shepherd, who will guide thee aright.” And when God saw his tenderness, and the straying lamb, He said, “Thou shalt be a shepherd to My people Israel.”2 [Note: Dean Farrar.] (2) The Sheep.—“Feed my sheep” comes next; feed the middle-aged, the strong, the vigorous; they also need to be directed in their Christian course, and to be guided to some field of earnest service for Christ, therefore shepherdize them. Do not try to govern these, but feed them. They may have far more prudence, and they certainly have more experience, than you have, and therefore do not rule them, but remind them of the deep things of God, and deal out to them an abundance of consoling truth. There is that good old man, he is a father in Christ; he knew the Lord fifty years before you were born; he has some peculiarities, and in them you must let him take his own course, but still feed him. His taste will appreciate solid meat, he knows a field of tender grass when he gets into it; feed him, then, for his infirmities require it. Not to priests only is this said, but to every one of us also, who are also entrusted with a little flock. For do not despise it because it is a little flock. For “My Father,” He saith, “hath pleasure in them.” Each of us hath a sheep; let him lead that to the proper pastures.3 [Note: St. Chrysostom.] We find the best interpretation of the three commands given by our Lord to St. Peter, by tracing their fulfilment in the Apostle’s life. In the early chapters of the Acts we find St. Peter standing forth as the spokesman and leader of the Church; yet the doctrinal content of his sermons is extremely simple, just such as we should teach to little children: St. Peter was feeding the lambs. Then another Apostle comes to the front; the Church needs a more developed doctrine, for the lambs have grown into sheep and now require the “strong meat” of the Word; St. Paul feeds the sheep, St. Peter aids the work by tending the sheep. In the First Epistle of St. Peter we find him again the leading exponent of Christian doctrine: it is now a fully developed doctrine, a great advance upon the simple teaching of his early days; now, under the guidance of God, he is feeding the sheep.1 [Note: H. O. Cavalier.] Love and Service Literature Ballard (F.), Does it Matter what a Man Believes? 63. Barrett (G. S.), Musings for Quiet Hours, 61. Beeching (H. C.), The Grace of Episcopacy, 163. Broughton (L. G.), Table Talks of Jesus, 85. Campbell (J. M.), Bible Questions, 110. Campbell (R. J.), The Making of an Apostle, 113. Carpenter (W. B.), The Son of Man among the Sons of Men, 93. Darlow (T. H.), The Upward Calling, 319. Furse (C. W.), The Beauty of Holiness, 32. Gibbon (J. M.), The Children’s Year, 261. Gray (W. H.), The Children’s Friend, 17. Hammond (E. P.), Early Conversion, 61. Harris (J. R.), Memoranda Sacra, 61. Harrison (W.), Clovelly Sermons, 62. Hopps (J. P.), Sermons of Life and Love, 1. Hort (F. J. A.), Village Sermons in Outline, 257. Howatt (J. R.), Jesus the Poet, 278. Jeffrey (J.), The Personal Ministry of the Son of Man, 288. Knight (G. H.), The Master’s Questions to His Disciples, 353. Lewis (Z. H.), Petros, 143. Mackennal (A.), Christ’s Healing Touch, 171. Maclaren (A.), After the Resurrection, 77. Mortimer (A. G.), Jesus and the Resurrection, 236. Moule (H. C. G.), The Secret of the Presence, 143. Murray (A.), The Children for Christ, 328. Rigg (J. H.), Scenes and Studies in the Ministry of our Lord, 178. Roberts (W. P.), Law and God, 76. Salmon (G.), Cathedral and University Sermons, 50. Skrine (J. H.), Saints and Worthies, 1. Skrine (J. H.), Sermons to Pastors and Masters, 192. Smith (W. C.), Sermons, 295. Stone (D.), The Discipline of Faith, 155. Watson (J.), The Inspiration of our Faith, 167. The Individuality of Duty Jesus saith unto him, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou me.—John 21:22. 1. This is the last recorded dialogue between Peter and Christ, and it has a special and a touching interest from the fact that it is so. How many and how varied these dialogues had been, and how rich and how vivid the instruction they contain! They form a magazine of truth in themselves, and had we no other fragments of Christ’s life handed down to us than the narrative of His dealings with Peter, we should still have a tolerably full indication both of the doctrine He intends us to believe and of the duty He commands us to practise. And now the revelation was wound up, and the interviews themselves were to cease. Whatever further talk the Lord had with Peter, “something sealed the lips of the evangelist”; for with these words before us his record ends. Could there be a more fitting and consistent close to the whole? It is the same Peter who speaks, tender-hearted and impulsive as ever, with a trace of the old leaven not yet purged. It is the same Christ, too, who answers him, true to the message and unaltered in the character He had revealed from the very first. “Follow me,” He said three years before by the lakeside where Peter was plying his toils, unaware of the destiny that awaited him. And now, after all that had come and gone, when faith had been strengthened by experience, and the cord of love that had first drawn the heart after Christ had become a fast firm cable, wrought through long days of fellowship and common toil, there, at the self-same spot where Christ called His disciple before, He calls him again, reminding him, as He does so, that the omega of his life is the same as its alpha, even the duty of personal discipleship, the word “Follow me.” 2. When Jesus had said “Follow me,” Peter turned about and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following. At once he put the question, “Lord, and what shall this man do?” Christ’s answer is our text. Now it is not easy to determine with any certainty the spirit in which that question was asked, or the meaning of the answer it received. Some have imagined that Peter, fancying from Christ’s silence regarding the beloved disciple, that his course would be free from those fiery troubles which had just been foretold for himself, inquired, with a kind of envious dissatisfaction, respecting the destiny of John. This explanation, however, seems incredible. We must remember that the thrice-repeated question, “Lovest thou me?” had only just thrilled on his ear, awakening solemn memories of his thrice-repeated denial. We must remember that Christ had suddenly revealed the future, and indicated a martyr’s death as his lot in the day of his old age. We must bear in mind that Peter possessed that generous impulsive nature which would prompt a man under excitement to forget his own sorrows in unselfish devotion to his friends. And then, remembering that from the recent conversation with Christ, his heart must have been quivering with the emotions of love and sorrow, it is hard to conceive that one feeling of jealous discontent could have suggested this inquiry. Most probably the question sprang from earnest anxiety regarding John’s destiny. It may even be that Peter, having at length learned the glory of sharing the Saviour’s cross, was concerned lest his brother disciple should not have the honour of following so closely in his Master’s sufferings as himself. Mingled with that would be the anxious feeling which men of Peter’s ardent and unselfish nature ever cherish regarding the future of a friend. It is easier for such impetuous souls to trust their own lot in God’s hands than that of their brother; they can accept sorrow more calmly for themselves than view its advent for another. And in this spirit of unselfish devotion—rising even to restless curiosity regarding the Divine plan—it probably was that, gazing on the beloved disciple Peter forgot the picture of his own martyrdom in his solicitude for John. 3. Christ’s answer contains three statements— I. The duty of following Him lies on every one of us—“Follow thou me.” II. The manner of the following rests upon His will and our individuality—“If I will that he tarry till I come.” III. We are warned against needless curiosity or anxiety—“What is that to thee?” I Following is for All “Follow thou me.” This is the Lord’s command to each of His disciples. We have heard His voice saying “Come unto me,” and now He says, “Follow thou me.” 1. Notice how comprehensive is this command. It includes every other requirement and precept of the Gospel, and it calls into action every power and faculty of our renewed being. (1) It means follow with the heart.—This is no mere external compliance, no mere outward conformity to our blessed Master’s will. It is the service of the heart. The force that is brought to bear on the disciple is not that of compulsion, but of attraction. “Draw me, we will run after thee” (Son 1:4). No man can follow Christ whose heart has not been won by Him. “Whereas ye were servants of sin, ye became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching whereunto ye were delivered” (Romans 6:17, R.V.). It is neither the terrors of the law nor the fear of a judgment to come that enables us to respond to this command. It is the attraction of Divine love that is the power. The Lord Himself must be the loadstone of our hearts. Every question was among some of his friends an open question. Strauss and Comte, Mill and Bentham, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Maurice appear as factors again and again in the discussions of that time. But nothing seems to have disturbed his balance; “his heart stood fast.” His habit of obedience to his mother, and his intense affection for her, had insensibly passed into strict obedience to conscience. Perhaps one of the chief lessons of his early life is that this affectionate obedience is the soil in which faith flourishes.1 [Note: Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, i. 54. (2) It means follow in faith.—Following is often like stepping out on the unseen. It is often like walking on the water. We could never venture out without a Divine warrant. But He who granted it to Peter when He said “Come!” gives us the same warrant when through the darkness and the trial He says, “Follow thou me.” This needs the courage of faith. Without faith we could not take a single step, for it is an impossible walk except to him that believeth. The stepping-stones of faith are the promises of God. “But supposing I have no faith,” says one; “what am I to do?” Don’t think of believing at all. Think of Him who bids you follow Him. Hearken to His voice. In other words, listen to His written Word: “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17). Can you picture it at all? The church is built by the natives—walls of nipa palm spines, and thatched roof of palm leaves, floor of bark—two doorways on each side, and one at each end, and plenty of square openings for windows. We have no church members here yet, but we think of the Moffats, and feel encouraged. They were fifteen years working at one station and not one member, and yet she asked a friend to send her a communion service, and directly after it arrived they needed it.1 [Note: James Chalmers, 337. (3) It means follow with the will—Our wills must be in this following, or it means nothing. All true obedience begins, not in the outward action, but in the inward spring of all activity; that is, in the will. We must will to do His will, if we would follow Christ. We become obedient within, before we are obedient in the outward act. The moment for action may not have arrived, but the time for willing to be obedient is always present.2 [Note: E. H. Hopkins.] The wish to disobey is already disobedience; and although at this time I was really doing a great many things I did not like, to please my parents, I have not now one self-approving thought or consolation in having done so, so much did its sullenness and maimedness pollute the meagre sacrifice.3 [Note: Ruskin, Praeterita, i. 424. 2. Notice how difficult it is. Against us are the efforts of our great spiritual adversary. He is constantly on the watch with a view to hindering God’s children in their progress. But this, let us never forget, is not without God’s permission. It is His will that our following of Him should be, not apart from obstacles, but in the midst of them, in spite of them. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.1 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World.] (1) There are alluring attractions—earthly objects and pursuits that appeal to our natural inclinations. Some of them are perfectly harmless in themselves, but when they are yielded to, we discover afterwards that they have lowered our spiritual tone, and robbed us of our strength. And so we have been impeded in our progress. Progress is marked by stations left behind. If we follow Jesus, we go somewhere, which means leaving some place. Journeying with the breast to the East means with the back to the West. The disciples left their boats and nets when they followed Jesus. What has our following cost us? What selfish plans, worldly projects, doubtful amusements, dangerous companionships, are behind us for the King’s and the kingdom’s sake? We sing, “Jesus, I my cross have taken, all to leave and follow Thee,” but another hymn brings the thought to a sharp point, “Have I left aught for Thee?”2 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 25. “As for the pleasures of this Life, and outward Business, let that be upon the bye. Be above all these things, by Faith in Christ; and then you shall have the true use and comfort of them,—and not otherwise.” How true is this; equal in its obsolete dialect, to the highest that man has yet attained to, in any dialect old or new!3 [Note: Carlyle, Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, ii. 136. (2) Then there are perplexing problems.—Perhaps we are troubled as we look around upon the sufferings of our fellow-creatures. We think of the multitudes living in darkness and degradation, not only in heathen lands, but in our own Christian England. We are unable to fathom the mysteries these questions suggest. Or, it may be, we are perplexed by the objections of sceptics to the truth of Holy Scripture. We are unable to find an answer to these things. What is the remedy? Look to the Master, who says, “What is that to thee? Follow thou me.” We must rest in His wisdom, we must confide in His faithfulness, and, without waiting to question or to speculate, we must be prompt in our obedience, and follow Him. All the great mysteries are simple as well as unfathomably deep; and they are common to all men. Every Christian feels them less or more.1 [Note: Memoir of John Duncan, 403. (3) Then there are distracting cares—the things that belong to the ordinary business of daily life. Some of these are very common matters, and perhaps very trivial, but God’s children, when they carry them, find them a serious hindrance to their progress. It is quite possible to be so overburdened by care that we cease to follow Christ. We must learn the secret of committing all into His hands daily if we would know what it is to follow the Lord fully.2 [Note: E. H. Hopkins.] “Acts of obedience are not perfect, and therefore yield not perfect Grace. Faith, as an act, yields it not; but ‘only’ as it carries us into Him, who is our perfect rest and peace; in whom we are accounted of, and received by, the Father,—even as Christ Himself. This is our high calling. Rest we here, and here only.” Even so, my noble one! The noble soul will, one day, again come to understand these old words of yours.3 [Note: Carlyle, Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, iii. 190. There is a beautiful old tradition, done finely into verse by one of our poets, that, during the demon-raging fury of the Neronic persecution, Peter, visiting the harried flock at Rome, who nevertheless were undaunted in their brave stand for the Name of Christ, was one day waited upon by the threatened Christians, who urged him to leave the city of death, that he might continue, in less dangerous places, to carry on his apostolic work. Not in yon streaming shambles must thou die; We counsel, we entreat, we charge thee, fly! The Apostle protests that his place is the place of danger, and that, come what may, in Rome he will remain. One by one they plead—for the sake of multitudes who will be as sheep without a shepherd, for the Kingdom’s sake, for Christ’s sake—that Peter, though for himself not caring, yet, as caring for others, may seek safety in flight. At last he yields—yields to their importunity. He goes forth, in the night-time, through the Capuan gate. Stealthily, swiftly, he pursued his way To the Campania glimmering wide and still, And strove to think he did his Master’s will. But he fights with pursuing doubts. Is his flight cowardice? or is it for the sake of longer-continued testimony? Is he still true to the voice which said, “Follow thou me”? Soon shall he have his answer. What is that vision of the night? Lo, on the darkness brake a wandering ray: A vision flashed along the Appian Way. Divinely in the pagan night it shone— A mournful Face—a Figure hurrying on— Though haggard and dishevelled, frail and worn, A King, of David’s lineage, crowned with thorn. “Lord, whither farest?” Peter, wondering cried. “To Rome,” said Christ, “to be re-crucified.” Into the night the vision ebbed like breath; And Peter turned, and rushed on Rome and death.1 [Note: T. F. Lockyer, Seeking a Country, 101. II The Manner of Following is for the Individual “If I will that he tarry till I come.” The first thought is that it is the duty of us all to follow; the second is that the manner of following rests upon His will and is made to suit our individuality. To the anxious Peter, Christ declared that John’s course was to be different from his own. By the words, “What is that to thee,” He emphatically indicated a distinction—implying by them that he should go his own way and leave his brother’s cause in His hands. The one was to labour, the other to wait. The one was to preach the Gospel throughout the world, and be summoned to heaven by the sufferings of martyrdom, the other was to watch in long banishment the coming again of the unseen Saviour when the old economy should fall, and then in peaceful old age to pass to the eternal home. All this marked difference of destiny by which they were each to follow the Saviour is contained in the reply, “If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?” 1. Christ appoints a separate experience for each of His followers. “Lord, what shall this man do?” “What is that to thee?” No words could mark more emphatically the great difference which was henceforth to exist between the paths of those two men who had hitherto followed Christ side by side. They seem to express a kind of impassable solitude in which each man was to live. John could not lead the life of Peter; Peter could not fulfil the destiny of John. In different and lonely ways they were each to travel till the end should come. The life of Peter was to be action crowned by suffering, the life of John a patient waiting for the manifestation of Christ—there, in the difference between labouring and watching, lay the difference in their respective courses. Now, if we contemplate the distinctive characters of these two men, we shall find its Divine meaning. Each course was beautifully adapted to train their individual characters, and to fit them for their individual work. What could be more appropriate as a close to the life of Christ than such a picture as this, which opened out such a view of the Church’s mission, as waiting and yet working, as suffering and yet serving? The great difficulty in the mind of Peter was how to reconcile the two, so that they might live and act harmoniously together. This difficulty was to be solved in course of time, when the days of trial and persecution came on the Church. Then it was seen that something more was needed than suffering and service; they would have to “tarry” or wait in patient expectation for the coming of Christ. In this way, the waiting spirit, the spirit of John, came to be more and more developed in the Church; and in proportion as it becomes developed, so ought the active spirit, the spirit of Peter, to make a corresponding advance. And thus the two sides of the Church’s life will advance in harmonious union, until, by the discipline of suffering, and service, and patience, it is perfected in every part.1 [Note: D. Merson, Words of Life, 223. 2. The discovery of our own particular path is found in the revelation of His will which God makes to us. “If I will that he tarry.” To follow Christ is, like Him, to obey whenever God’s will is clear; to be patient like Him when it is dark. And this is a rule which applies to all circumstances, and one which can be obeyed in defiance of all results. There are circumstances to which no other law applies; under which no experiences of other men can help us. The only course at such times is to act at once under such light as we may possess. Do the duty that is nearest to you. Follow Christ in His perfect, unmurmuring obedience, and as you follow, a fuller light will come. It may be that your duty is not to act, but to be patient: if so, forget not that “they also serve who only stand and wait.” And to follow Christ is to do God’s will and challenge results. When that will is clear, we have no right to look at consequences. The command to Peter was a command to challenge all issues, although “another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not, follow thou me.” There is one way for thee; but one; inform Thyself of it; pursue it; one way each Soul hath by which the Infinite in reach Lieth before him; seek and ye shall find: To each the way is plain; that way the wind Points all the trees along; that way run down Loud singing streams; that way pour on and on A thousand headlands with their cataracts Of toppling flowers; that way the sun enacts His travel, and the moon and all the stars Soar; and the tides move towards it; nothing bars A man who goes the way that he should go; That which comes soonest is the thing to do. Thousand light-shadows in the rippling sand Joy the true soul; the waves along the strand Whiten beyond his eyes; the trees tossed back Show him the sky; or, heaped upon his track In a black wave, wind heaped, point onward still His way, one way. O joy, joy, joy, to fill The day with leagues! Go thy way, all things say, Thou hast thy way to go, thou hast thy day To live; thou hast thy need of thee to make In the hearts of others; do thy thing; yes, slake The world’s great thirst for yet another man! And be thou sure of this: no other can Do for thee that appointed thee of God; Not any light shall shine upon thy road For other eyes; Thee the angel calls, As he call others; and thy life to thee Is precious as the greatest’s life can be To him; so live thy life and go thy way.1 [Note: Richard Watson Dixon.] III Be Not Too Curious or Anxious “What is that to thee?” In these words there seems to be conveyed to us a warning against unnecessary curiosity or anxiety about the lot of others, and in general about the providence of God. Peter’s anxiety typifies the impertinence of curiosity, the impatience of ignorance, in things sacred, which has been the temptation of Christians in every age. The rebuke is the Master’s protest against indulgence in this spirit. Energetic work in the present, not idle speculation about the future, is the parting charge which He gives to His chief disciple, and through Him to His whole Church so long as time shall be. There are several occasions in the Gospel narrative on which a temper near akin to this was checked and corrected by our blessed Lord. Two of them are recorded in the thirteenth chapter of St. Luke. “Tell me not” (He would there say) “of those Galileans whom the cruel Pilate ordered to be massacred while they were engaged in sacrifice; or of those eighteen inhabitants of Jerusalem, upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell, and slew them; tell me not of these, as though you would seek to pry into the judicial dealings of God’s providence towards them; but look rather to yourselves, and be assured of this, that except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” And again, “Ask me not, in a spirit of unprofitable curiosity, or of self-righteous estimate of your own condition, whether there be few, or many, who are to be saved; but ask this rather of your own consciences—are ye striving to enter in at the strait gate? for many, I say unto you, shall seek to enter in and shall not be able.” 1. Our Lord did not mean to arrest the spirit of legitimate inquiry.—Curiosity is the parent of knowledge. Peter’s question concerning the future reserved for his friend seems to have been prompted partly by affection, but partly also by curiosity. Both instincts belong to our essential human nature. When God created man, He breathed into him an inquiring spirit, and made him eager to explore the mysterious world which spreads round about him, and to search out whatever things are hidden and unknown. Urged by this great impulse, the captains of adventure forced their way through forest and wilderness, and steered by the stars across an uncharted sea. And every lad who is worth his salt still tingles at times with the ancient longing to wander in strange lands, that he may discover for himself what treasures they conceal. It is the same imperious desire that has gathered the facts of science and framed the systems of philosophy. As Cudworth quaintly puts it: “The sons of Adam are now as busy as ever himself was, about the tree of knowledge of good and evil, shaking the boughs of it and scrambling for the fruit”: and people who pride themselves on being neither philosophical nor scientific betray this elemental instinct of curiosity in double measure in regard to everything which is human or which deals with humanity. I am reminded, by one who was present, of a scene when some Americans were announced, seeking an interview, “What is it you want?” she [Jenny Lind] asked, standing very erect. “Oh, Madame Goldschmidt, we hoped to have the pleasure of seeing you, and making your acquaintance.” “Well, here is my front!” Then (with a whisk round), “There is my back. Now” (with a deep curtsey) “you can go home, and say that you have seen me!” After her visitors had crept out abashed, she was very penitent for having been at all rude. But she could not endure any impertinent curiosity; and it was always a perilous experiment to introduce a stranger to her, lest she should suspect some motive in the introduction, when her coldness would be freezing.1 [Note: H. Scott Holland, Personal Studies, 23. 2. Jesus did not desire to discourage sympathetic interest in the welfare of others.—It would be strange indeed if He did, He, who in word and act preached the principle, “Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.” Yet it may be one thing to say, “What shall I do for this man?” and another, and a very different one, to ask, “What shall this man do?” In the first case, the question turns upon present duty, in the second it turns upon future events. The former word raises the thought of a responsibility that is mine, the latter intermeddles with a care which is really not mine, but God’s. And in every such case, as we pass from what is practical to what is curious, and let the thoughts turn from the matters of personal duty to the mysteries of Divine administration, the Saviour refuses to lift the veil, saying, “Hitherto shalt thou come and no farther. The secret things belong unto God, but the things that are revealed belong unto thee to do them. Askest thou, What shall this man do? What is that to thee? Follow thou me.” We are not to suppose that the doctrine of altruism is a gospel peculiar to the enlightenment of more modern times; there is a Christian altruism that is far more ennobling and radical than anything to which infidel ethics has given the name. Here, as elsewhere, the ideas with which it is hoped to supersede the Bible have been drawn from the Bible itself, as if the voice could be silenced by the echo, and the substance be banished by its own pallid shadow. We grant it all. But if the question be a question of what is spiritual, if it be a question between the keeping of your own soul unspotted on the one hand, and the doing of some imagined service for your neighbour on the other, then remember that Christ says, “What is that neighbour’s state unto thee?”—what is it, that is to say, in these particular circumstances, under these particular conditions?—“Follow thou me!” Personal holiness is the main thing, personal discipleship, personal salvation. It is your first duty to save your soul, and that not for your own sake merely, but for the sake of a God who has given you the trust, and asks it back from your hands by a right which is peculiarly His own. Why do I say these things? Because there is a class of literature and of sentiment at the present day that exalts the doctrine of love and self-sacrifice towards our neighbour to the extent of attempting to enlist admiration when love and self-sacrifice lead to sin for his sake. No, in the matters that pertain to the soul, its welfare and safe-keeping, one’s own cares come first. And to give them anything else than the first place is to become practical idolaters by the preference of a neighbour’s claim to God’s.1 [Note: W. A. Gray, The Shadow of the Hand, 149. Men speak too much about the world. Each one of us here, let the world go how it will, and be victorious or not victorious, has he not a Life of his own to lead? One Life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us forevermore! It were well for us to live not as fools and simulacra, but as wise and realities. The world’s being saved will not save us; nor the world’s being lost destroy us. We should look to ourselves: there is great merit here in the “duty of staying at home!” And on the whole, to say truth, I never heard of “worlds” being “saved” in any other way. That mania of saving worlds is itself a piece of the Eighteenth Century with its windy sentimentalism. Let us not follow it too far. For the saving of the world I will trust confidently to the Maker of the world; and look a little to my own saving, which I am more competent to!1 [Note: Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship, 163. Thomas à Kempis tells us that If you could let men go their way, They would let you go yours; and he adds: We might have peace, great peace, If we would not load ourselves with others’ words and works, And with what concerns us not. How can he be long at rest Who meddles in another’s cares, And looks for matters out of his own path, And only now and then gathers his thoughts within him?2 [Note: Lord Avebury, Peace and Happiness, 342. 3. We must be concerned for others but we may be over-anxious.—Some men, of ardent, energetic temperament, seem to have very exaggerated ideas of the extent of their responsibility. They seem to live only to keep all other people straight. No heresy can anywhere be broached, but they must rush to the front and expose it. No iniquity can anywhere be practised, but they must drag it into the light to condemn it. God made them keepers of their own vineyards, but they spend all their time in looking after other men’s vines. Unquestionably there is something noble in this temper; but there is something quixotic too; and Christ seems here to teach that He imposes upon no man such a responsibility. The world is sadly full of evil, scepticism, infidelity, superstition, immorality, on every side. What, then, am I as a Christian to do? Simply to obey my Master’s command, “Follow thou me,”—protest assuredly, where a protest must be made to clear oneself of all complicity with sin; protest where a protest is needed to save a brother, and to put a wrong-doer to shame; but before all that, be thou a true disciple, whoever may be false; be thou thyself a holy example of justice and mercy and purity and truth, though all the world should be only a sweltering mass of impiety, and impurity, and wrong.” I was once sitting in a room where I had to wait for half an hour before a meeting, and by the fire was sitting a poorly clad, rather wretched-looking, old man, gently moaning at intervals. I asked him if anything was the matter, and he said, “No; I was only just thinking what a deal of trouble it takes to get the world right and to keep it right.”1 [Note: Sir Wilfrid Lawson, 222. One man is a missionary perhaps in some foreign land; he is alone, one Christian among thousands of heathen, and he would fain know what will become of all these. Another is labouring single-handed as a parochial minister in the midst of a thronging town population whom his words never reach and never can reach; and he asks in dismay what shall be the end of all these. If he picks up one soul here and another there out of the seething mass of ignorance and vice, it is all that he can hope to do. To his faithless questioning the rebuke is addressed, “What is that to thee? Thou hast a work to do; thou hast a message to deliver. Thou knowest that thy message is truth, and because it is truth, therefore it is salvation. This is enough for thee. Execute thy task to the best of thy power, and leave the rest to Me.”2 [Note: J. B. Lightfoot, Ordination Addresses, 165. 4. Peter’s question is often the question of vain speculation about the purposes of God.—It cannot be otherwise than that His deep purposes should be hidden, for He is God, and His designs cannot be scanned and measured by human wisdom. “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God; how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out,” said one very near to the heart of God. So does He manifest His independence to the will and the counsel of His creatures. It is the glory of God to conceal His purposes. “Who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor?” Such concealment is adapted to our condition. By it He trains us to submission; He promotes within us humility, He awakens us to constant ceaseless vigilance; He inspires diligence in our daily living; by gradually removing the cloud from His throne, He makes a constant revelation of truth. Well said Robinson, “There is a new light in God’s word that is yet to break out.” Who knows all the mysteries contained in this volume? Eternity will not be long enough for the full development of all that was in God’s thought, God’s heart, when He inspired this Book. But still there are among us men who are curiosity-mongers about the purposes of God. They will have all God’s depths to be shallows rather than confess their own inability to fathom all mysteries with their own reason. In my student days I had a very intimate friend, who was pre-eminently successful in gaining prizes by written competition. So surely as he went in for any particular subject, whether classics, philosophy, or mathematics, he came out first. In the general work of the classes and in the recitations he did not appear to be any better than his neighbours; but at a written examination he was “facile princeps.” At the end of our course I asked him to explain this to me, and he revealed his secret thus: “You take the questions in the paper as they come; hence, if the first question is a very hard one, you spend, perhaps, the whole time allotted for the paper upon that; but when I get a paper into my hand, I read over all the questions, pick out those that I see I can answer at once, and then having disposed of them, and made sure that they will count, I go on to the harder ones. I pass through the plain ones to the difficult, and I take care always to do the one before I attempt the other.” There was great wisdom in the plan, and in the college of life more of us, I imagine, would come out prizemen at the last, if we were to let the hard things of speculation alone, at least until we have performed the plain duties which our Saviour has set before us. But if this be so with the “hard” things, how much more does it hold of those things which are insoluble by mere human reason. Yet how many there are among us who make difficulties, for the existence of which they are not responsible, and for the removal of which they are incompetent, a reason either for their refusing to follow Christ, or for following Him only afar off.1 [Note: W. M. Taylor, The Limitations of Life, 66. (1) There are the mysteries of God’s Providence. How often are we completely at our wits’ end what to make of them. When we begin to inquire into the meaning of this or that occurrence, we get no reply. We meet with things that baffle explanation in our everyday life. The good are taken away, and the wicked left; strong men are cut down in the midst of their days and usefulness. We see communities visited with the most appalling calamities, young and innocent lives taken away in one fell disaster. We see the rising hope of a happy home laid low by the ravages of death, and the weak and feeble spared to a lingering old age. We can scarcely open a newspaper without reading of sufferings and fatalities that make the heart bleed. These things are mysteries to us. We try to explain them, but our explanations are often as perplexing as the mysteries themselves. That old debate which waxed so hot between Job and his friends in the far land of Uz has emerged anew in some form or other in every individual heart and in every successive generation. It has never received fuller or more exhaustive treatment than it had at the hands of these Eastern sages. Yet virtually they left it where they found it. Jehovah appeared to them at the close asserting His sovereignty, and claiming His right to veil Himself in clouds and darkness. He asked them to confide in His wisdom, and to leave the matter in His hands. And what farther can we get than that? We are not responsible for the government of the world. It is not ours to sit upon the throne. We may well leave the vindication of God’s workings to God Himself. He will take care of His own honour. Meanwhile for us there is the lowlier province of working out our own salvation with fear and trembling, under the assurance that “it is God who worketh in us, to will and to do of his good pleasure.” To us the gospel has been preached, and for the use we make of that we shall be held to account. To us the Saviour has said, “Follow me,” and for the answer we give to that earnest call we shall be responsible. The saintly Robert Leighton—sometime Bishop of Dunblane (of whom, as I am his unworthy successor in the Episcopate of that See, so I would wish to be indeed his follower, even as he was of Christ)—that holy Bishop has a sermon upon this text—preached before the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, November 14, in 1669—in which, speaking of the state of things as it existed in this country two hundred years ago, he exclaims: “Ah! my brethren, the body of religion is torn, and the soul of it expires, while we are striving about the hem of its garment.” Alas! there is too much reason still for the same complaint. We are still far too much inclined to place speculation before practice, to place knowledge before virtue; to be curious about the future rather than to be careful for the present; to be inquisitive about others rather than to be well acquainted with ourselves. How few of us are there, it is to be feared, who could appeal to God in those beautiful sentiments expressed in the 131st Psalm: “Lord, I am not high-minded; I have no proud looks; I do not exercise myself in great matters, or in things which are too high for me. But I refrain my soul and keep it low; like as a child that is weaned from his mother; yea, my soul is even as a weaned child.” To say this, and to say it truly, would be indeed to follow Christ.1 [Note: C. Wordsworth, Primary Witness to the Truth of the Gospel, 166. All that we can safely gather from his conversation at St. Helena is that his mind turns greatly on these questions of religion. He ponders and struggles. A remark which he lets fall at St. Helena explains probably his normal state of mind. “Only a fool,” he says one day, “says that he will die without a confessor. There is so much that one does not know, that one cannot explain.” And as he spoke of the mysteries of religion, we may speak of his frame of mind with regard to them. “There is so much that one does not know, that one cannot explain.”2 [Note: Lord Rosebery, Napoleon, the Last Phase, 173. (2) There are difficulties connected with doctrines of the faith, which rest upon unrevealed mysteries behind them. If we are perplexing ourselves with such things as the fall of man, the sin of the angels, the salvability of the heathen, the locality of heaven, and of the spirits in prison, the decrees of God that seem to destroy the free will of man, or that great problem that presses with equal force on the brain of the wisest philosopher and the heart of the little child, why God permitted the entrance of evil into the world at the first, and why He permits its dominion still; we can not only calm ourselves by the reflection that probably these are depths that no created mind can sound; but still more by the voice of our heavenly Lord, who does not explain any one of them, but says, “Leave mysteries to God, and do thou thine own work of following Me.” I read Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Coleridge, Philip Van Artevelde, for views of man to meditate upon, instead of theological caricatures of humanity; and I go out into the country to feel God; dabble in chemistry, to feel awe of Him; read the life of Christ, to understand, love, and adore Him; and my experience is closing into this, that I turn with disgust from everything to Christ. I think I get glimpses into His mind, and I am sure that I love Him more and more.… A sublime feeling of a Presence comes upon me at times, which makes inward solitariness a trifle to talk about.1 [Note: Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson, 152. “As to what you may think of my beliefs I have no fear; they need not be discussed and they cannot be attacked.” “——But your church has its dogmas.” “There is not a dogma of my church that I have ever thought of for a moment—or of any other church.” “How can you remain in your church without either believing or disbelieving its dogmas?” “My church is the altar of Christ and the House of God,” replied Gabriella simply. “And so is any other church.” “And you believe in them all?” he asked in wondering admiration. “I believe in them all.”2 [Note: James Lane Allen.] I have a life with Christ to live, But, ere I live it, must I wait Till learning can clear answer give Of this and that book’s date? I have a life in Christ to live, I have a death in Christ to die;— And must I wait, till science give All doubts a full reply? Nay rather, while the sea of doubt Is raging wildly round about, Questioning of life and death and sin. Let me but creep within Thy fold, O Christ, and at Thy feet Take but the lowest seat, And hear Thine awful voice repeat In gentlest accents, heavenly sweet, Come unto Me, and rest: Believe Me, and be blest.3 [Note: John Campbell Shairp.] (3) Then there are mysteries in the future that we should like to have cleared up. We should like to know the times and the seasons, and we are told that it is not for us to know the times and the seasons, which the Father has placed in His own hands. There are many questions respecting the life to come that press for an answer, such as the nature of the punishment in reserve for the wicked, the occupation of the redeemed, the appearance of the Saviour, the recognition of friends, and the nature of the intercourse in the next life. Regarding these questions, we are left in comparative ignorance, and so their solution cannot be of much practical importance. It is unimportant to know the nature of future punishment; but it is all-important to avoid it. It is unimportant to know the character of the heavenly state; but it is all-important to prepare for it. It might satisfy our curiosity to know if there will be recognition of friends in the next life; but it is of eternal moment to strive to enter in at the strait gate. A veil is drawn over these questions, and our prying into them can do no good. We have been told enough for the practical guidance of life, and whatever interferes with that should be let alone. What is it to us? Let us use to the full the knowledge that God has given us respecting the duties of the present, and the mysteries of the future will be cleared up in due time. Let us act up to our present light, and when we are in a position to benefit by more, more will be given. Meanwhile, let our desire be to follow Jesus; and as we follow Him the light will brighten, our vision will widen, until, amid clearer light than that of the sun, we shall read all mysteries plain, and know even as also we are known. The Archbishop was spending the day here, and preaching for me. After lunch we went into my study, and he let me talk to him. He was so exceedingly fatherly that day, that I was led on to talk to him about the great problems and mysteries of life, and told him of a certain matter which weighed upon me at times with an almost insupportable weight. It was connected with the hereafter. I may as well say it was the notion of endlessness of time. He listened patiently, and suggested certain lines of thought—and asked if I did not think Hegel’s philosophy helped over such a matter. Then I said, bluntly enough—“My Lord, have you never had any of these troubles? Don’t you ever feel the mystery of that other life?” He turned in his chair, put his hand up to his chin, looked at me a moment in his steady way, and then said—“Yes, I think I know what you mean. But I believe so entirely that God is my Father, and that He loves me, and that He will make me perfectly happy in the other life, that I never worry myself over what that life will be.”1 [Note: 1 Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, ii. 655. Experience bows a sweet contented face, Still setting-to her seal that God is true: Beneath the sun, she knows, is nothing new; All things that go return with measured pace, Winds, rivers, man’s still recommencing race:— While Hope beyond earth’s circle strains her view, Past sun and moon, and rain and rainbow too, Enamoured of unseen eternal grace, Experience saith, “My God doth all things well:” And for the morrow taketh little care, Such peace and patience garrison her soul:— While Hope, who never yet hath eyed the goal, With arms flung forth, and backward-floating hair, Touches, embraces, hugs the invisible.1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti.] The Individuality of Duty Literature Aitken (W. H. M. H.), The Highway of Holiness, 126. Ballard (F.), Does it Matter what a Man Believes? 63. Bickersteth (C.), The Gospel of Incarnate Love, 106. Burrell (D. J.), God and the People, 167. Darlow (T. H.), Via Sacra, 125. Dix (M.), Christ at the Door of the Heart, 158. Gray (W. A.), The Shadow of the Hand, 133. Harper (F.), A Broken Altar, 50. Hopkins (E. H.), Hidden, yet Possessed, 19. Hull (E. L.), Sermons, iii. 230. Knight (G. H.), The Master’s Questions to His Disciples, 360. Lightfoot (J. B.), Ordination Addresses, 149. Lockyer (T. F.), Seeking a Country, 94. Merson (D.), Words of Life, 213. Mortimer (A. G.), Jesus and the Resurrection, 248. Myres (W. M.), Fragments that Remain, 20, 28. Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, i. 25 Pearson (J. B.), Disciples in Doubt, 113. Pope (W. B.), Discourses, 343. Power (P. B.), The “I Wills” of Christ, 283. Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, viii. 383. Rendall (G. H.), Charterhouse Sermons, 149. Stanley (A. P.), Sermons and Essays on the Apostolical Age, 234. Stevens (W. B.), Sermons, 78. Stone (D.), The Discipline of Faith, 167. Taylor (W. M.), The Limitations of Life, 63. Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), vi. No. 648. Westcott (B. F.), Social Aspects of Christianity, 197. Westcott (B. F.), Peterborough Sermons, 255. Wordsworth (C.), Primary Witness to the Truth of the Gospel, 155. American Pulpit of the Day, i. 448 (Tyng). Christian Age, xliii. 242 (Abbott). Twentieth Century Pastor, xxix. 132.