CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
Cornell University Library 
 
 arV15450 
 
 Truths for to-day : 
 
 3 1924 031 246 741 
 olin,anx 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
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 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031246741 
 
Truths for To-Dat 
 
 SECOKD SEEIES. 
 
 By DAVID SOWING, 
 
 Pastor Cekteal Churoh. 
 
 CHICAGO: 
 
 JANSEK, McCLURG AISTD COMPANY. 
 
 1876. 
 
:pjffpirT:^: 
 
 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876, by 
 
 JANSEN, McCLURG & CO., 
 In the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 
 
 PKIIfTBD AT THE LAKBSIBB PRESS, CHICAGO. 
 
C01srTEH"TS. 
 
 SERMON I. 
 
 CHRIST. 
 Job 11 : 7. — Canst thou by searching find out God? 11 
 
 SERMON II. 
 
 THE SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 
 
 Matthew 3 : 10. — And when they saw the star they rejoiced 
 with exceeding great joy - 31 
 
 SERMON III. 
 
 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST ON LETTERS AND ART. 
 
 Matthew 7 : 16. — Ye shall know them hy their fruits - - 49 
 
contents: 
 
 SERMON IV. 
 
 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST ON THE HUMAN SPIRIT. 
 
 Luke 9 : 55. — Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of 67 
 
 SERMON V. 
 
 MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST- - 85 
 
 SERMON VI. 
 
 THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 
 2 Corinthians 6 : 3. — Now is the accepted time - - 103 
 
 SERMON VII. 
 
 AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 Hebrews 11 : 88. — Of whom the world was not worthy - 131 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 SERMON VIII. 
 
 A PLEA FOR THE BETTER CLASSES. 
 
 Matthew 9 : 17. — Neither do men put new wine into old 
 bottles 141 
 
 SERMON IX. 
 
 THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 
 
 Psalms 119 : 130.— The entrance of Thy word giveth light 161 
 
 SERMON X. 
 
 CHRISTIAN HEROISM. 
 Matthew 28 : 19. — Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations 179 
 
 SERMON XI. 
 
 YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 
 JtjCCLBSiASTES, 12th Chapter 19''' 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 SERMON XII. 
 
 A GREAT GOD. 
 
 Psalms 95 : 3. — For the Lord is a great God - 317 
 
 SERMON XIII. 
 
 THE EMPIRE OP LAW. 
 
 PsAiMS 119 : 97. — Oh, how love I Thy law! It is my medi- 
 tation all the day - 237 
 
 SERMON XIV. 
 THE INFLUENCE OP ATHEISM UPON MORALS. 
 
 PsAiMS 90 : 1. — Lord, thou hast been our dwelling- place in 
 all generations 257 
 
 SERMON XV. 
 
 THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 
 
 Ltjkb 9 : 50. — Forbid him not, for he that is not against us 
 is for us 377 
 
OHEIST. 
 
SERMON" I. 
 CHEIST. 
 
 " Canst thou by searching find out God ? " — Job 11 : 7. 
 
 T ET US continue to-day the general reflections 
 -*-^ begun last Sunday over the name of Christ. 
 I shall not ask you to mark more of His minor 
 virtues, but some of the facts in His most wonderful 
 history. Of all divine or presumably divine persons, 
 we may remark, in the first place, that Christ comes 
 nearest to being a fact. The history of religion is 
 a history of incarnations of Deity. The pagan ages 
 surpassed the Christian in the quantity of the divine- 
 human. All the woods, and mountains, and rivers, 
 and seas, were full of beings that were above man 
 and full of the eternal essence. The terrible, and the 
 beautiful, and the good, culminated in some form that 
 could sit upon an Olympus, or could run through 
 the woods with garments flowing about the feet, or 
 that could drive a chariot over the wave. Of all 
 
12 CHRIST. 
 
 these stories so woven into the history of religion, 
 the story of Christ is the one that comes nearest to 
 perfect verification according to all the laws of 
 human evidence. None of the great classic or 
 Asiatic writers pretend to have seen the great super- 
 human ideas in whose name they worshiped. Venus, 
 Juno, Jupiter, Prometheus, Osis, Osiris, were only 
 long-continued dreams of the generations. They 
 were like the toy-bringing god of our Christmas, 
 only the incarnation of the world's wish and infant 
 thought. Once the world was peopled by only a 
 race of infants. As our children believe in the 
 Christmas god, the ancients believed in the group 
 upon Olympus gathered about an ambrosial feast. 
 
 It is evident that when the Creator formed man 
 he placed within him a religious sentiment, a sense of 
 a superior existence, and this being the nature of 
 the subjective mind, the outer realm became at once 
 peopled with supernatural creatures. As the fever- 
 stricken dream of fountains of water, so the religious 
 nature of man dreams of gods. In its ignorant age 
 it sees deity in wood or stone, and sees hundreds 
 or thousands of them. The modern Hindoo says he 
 believes in three hundred millions of gods. This 
 confession is valuable, for it shows the inner religious 
 sentiment looking out of the mind ; and while the 
 
CHRIST. 13 
 
 details are false, there the sentiment stands in its 
 power, and proclaims the presence of divinity in the 
 universe. Paul says there is a law in the spirit that 
 reveals the Infinite One, and that on this account 
 all souls are responsible for the conduct of life. 
 Now this inner sentiment, in its power, which has 
 always surpassed its information, has peopled the air 
 with divinities, crude, feeble, great, or monstrous, 
 according to the surroundings of the brain. A 
 faculty or an instinct does not include the right use 
 of the faculty or instinct. The sentiment of music 
 in the soul did not involve the immediate discovery 
 of the piano or the arrangement at once of a sym- 
 phony, but involved only a long struggle and a long 
 period of littleness. The religious feeling in the 
 soul thus struggled along, and in the first years of 
 its strivings saw gods in every storm, and in every 
 ray of sunshine, and in all the shadows of the night. 
 Paul says God so made the rational world that they 
 should " seek the Lord if haply they may feel after 
 him and find him." All the mythological and theo- 
 logical phenomena of the past are manifestations of 
 this feeling after the true God. Often have the best 
 men given up the pursuit, and have become skeptics 
 or have erected an altar to the unknown God. One 
 of the sages said : " What God is, I know not ; what 
 
14 0HBI8T. 
 
 he is not, I know." One of the classic poets said : 
 " O Jupiter, thy name is all I know." The great 
 Bible rhapsodist, Job, says : " Who, by searching, can 
 find out God ?" Pliny uttered a similar feeling iu 
 the words, " What is God ? If, in truth, he be any 
 thing distinct from nature, it is beyond the compass 
 of man's understanding to know." The utterances 
 from leading intellects of antiquity show that there 
 has always been going forward a great search after 
 God, and that all the religious ideas of antiquity are 
 the fruits of that search. The interminable list of 
 deities, from Odin to Buddha, and Jove and Apollo, 
 are the fruits of the profound study of the old 
 world. 
 
 In the midst of these scenes, Christ stands the 
 nearest of all alleged divinities to any historical 
 fact. I do not forget that there have been claims 
 to divine honors set up by others. Herod pro- 
 claimed himself a god. Others have set forth the 
 same tempting report. But a few years have 
 brought to nothingness these boasting ones all along 
 the path of history. So utter has been the failure 
 of the human aspirants after divine fame, and so 
 hidden by mists of legend has been all the host of 
 pagan deities, that we feel justified in saying that, 
 of all embodiments of the divine, Christ stands 
 
0HB.I8T. 15 
 
 nearest the domain of fact. Above all other super- 
 human ones He stands farthest from myth, and nearest 
 to reality. Mark, then, the superiority of Christ as 
 a fact. The Christian poet can not say, with the 
 classic, "All I know of thee is thy name," and they 
 that erect an altar to him can not write over it, to 
 " the unknown God." The reality of Jesus is as 
 definite, as undeniable, as the reality of Washington 
 or Franklin. All the other incarnations belong to 
 the atmosphere of legend. No twelve disciples 
 gathered daily around the feet of Olympian Jove, 
 or of the beautiful Apollo, nor of the gifted Minerva. 
 No multitude gathered upon the mountain-side to 
 hear and see the Hercules and Aphrodite. If some 
 crowd, acting in the historic period, in the days of 
 language and words, had followed the Apollo along 
 the streets of Jerusalem or Athens, and had even 
 crucified him, then would the Christian Gospel 
 confess a rival in the pagan pages. But it was 
 the misfortune of all that Olympian group that 
 there was no Judas to betray any one of them with 
 a kiss, and no Pilate to order any one of them to 
 the cross. They all lived outside the bounds of 
 evidence, and hence to-day appear only like the 
 pictures of the virtues or the graces, outward 
 expressions of the inner soul. They were the 
 
16 GHBIST. 
 
 efforts of mankind to find the hidden One. In 
 Christ, therefore, the idea of an incarnate God first 
 touched history and passed over from legend to 
 evidence. Even the Jews, the race most hostile to 
 the claims of this Messiah, did not deny His exist- 
 ence, but in the ^^rly centuries said that He 
 performed his wonders by possessing himself of the 
 ineffable name stolen from the holy place of the 
 temple. Many as are the opinions as to the nature 
 of Christ, there is no denial anywhere, from the 
 earliest Christian to the last, that Jesus Christ lived 
 and did almost such as recorded in the Gospel. 
 
 Exhausting no more of your time and, perhaps, 
 of your patience, too, upon a question which no one 
 denies, let us reflect upon our second theme, namely, 
 the quality of the fact. Here is the enigma of the 
 religious world. Confessing the reality of Christ, 
 the multitude of thinkers and toilers out of theology 
 and in it, out of the Church and in it, wonder and 
 wonder just what quality to attach to the Christ- 
 idea. Here we can not come with any perfect peace 
 for the intellect. Not only was there a great search 
 before Christ, a search in which Plato, and Cato, and 
 Cicero, and Epictetus, and Aurelius, and all the 
 great ones engaged, feeling after God if haply 
 they might find Him, but there is a search going 
 
GHBISr. 17 
 
 forward still, as absolute in our day as in the days of 
 the doubting Socrates or praying Aurelius. Christ's 
 advent into the domain of evidence has greatly 
 modified this pursuit after the unknown God, and 
 in the hearts of millions of human beings has put 
 the deep inquiry to rest. For eighteen centuries 
 thousands upon thousands have found in Him a 
 peace that knows no storm. But nothing but death 
 can solve, to all, all the enigmas of earth, and hence 
 to-day the immense seeking for light goes on, and a 
 large multitude asks, " What shall we believe about 
 this Saviour?" I can not speak peace to this troubled 
 sea, I only confess the presence of the storm, and 
 feel that many noble souls are out in the ruffled 
 water. Each one must calmly measure for himself 
 the value of the Christ, and do this " with charity 
 toward all and malice toward none." 
 
 Let me to-day ask you to think of the less 
 questionable elements in this historic fact. 
 
 1. It was a great gain to our race that at last 
 the search for an Incarnation came up to a real, 
 visible being. Man had gone about as far as he 
 could upon a theology of legend and absurdity. 
 There was no valuable religious faith in the world 
 at the time of the Advent. The great Roman Empire 
 could confer upon its scattered states arts and lan- 
 2 
 
18 OH BIST. 
 
 guage and law and pleasure, but was unable to 
 bestow any religion. One of the Roman writers 
 said, " Even our children no longer believe in our 
 divinities." One of the prayers of Pliny was " for 
 a new consolation, great and strong, of which he had 
 not yet heard or read." A Latin sage said, " I need 
 a God who can speak to me and can lead me." Dr. 
 Arnold finds somewhere in the writings of Aurelius 
 " that he was sad and agitated, stretching out his 
 arms for something beyond." Cicero had declared 
 that the "Academy could prove nothing." The 
 Roman Empire had all forms of greatness except 
 religious faith. Weary of legend, cultured beyond 
 the credulity that believes without evidence, the 
 Roman Empire was ready for an advent of fact. In 
 the Man of Nazareth the dim gates of mythology 
 were closed and the gates of evidence were opened. 
 Here was One that could speak to the multitude, 
 and the hem of whose garment might be touched. 
 Here was One who could say "blessed" to the 
 unblessed crowd, and whose feet a Magdalene might 
 bathe with tears. Here was One who could feed a 
 multitude in the wilderness, who could comfort the 
 dying and the living, and could allow a mortal like 
 John to rest against His bosom. That wonderful 
 chain of facts, stretching from the manger to the 
 
0HBI8T. 19 
 
 tomb, was the first entrance of the divine upon the 
 visible, and hence upon the real. The Psalmist had 
 said, " Clouds and darkness are round about Him." 
 What the modern spirit experiences as an occasional 
 flow of melancholy was the constant feeling of all 
 the noble ones of antiquity. Many of the most 
 excellent sought death because it was supposed to 
 be an end of sorrow ; a sweet, dreamless sleep. 
 What our poets dream of in lonely hours, most of 
 the old sages carried about all the while in their 
 hearts : 
 
 Would this weary life was spent, 
 Would this fruitless search were o'er, 
 And rather than such visions, blessed 
 The gloomiest depths of nothingness. 
 
 Such a poem shadows forth the occasional sadness 
 of the present, but the almost universal darkness of 
 classic Rome. 
 
 But as Christ was year by year unfolded in Pal- 
 estine, both during His life and after His crucifixion, 
 the world seemed to say, " What are all those images 
 in the Pantheon compared with this new reality ?" 
 
 Mankind will always exchange legend for history. 
 The development of reason works against myth and 
 in favor of the actual. Myths are welcome only to 
 childish ages. If now the reason of many rise up 
 
20 CHRIST. 
 
 against Christ as being not sufficiently real, not 
 absolutely proven, what must have been the revolt 
 of reason against the chimeras of the classic religion, 
 when such a manifest reality as Jesus was standing 
 at the door of their temples, and even beating against 
 their hearts? To a world that had been once satis- 
 fied with the Olympian gods, the presence of Christ 
 was an overwhelming argument. That era had not 
 been accustomed to proof, only to tradition, and 
 hence Christ must have been to them a perfect 
 surprise, a sudden solution of a mystery. 
 
 But let us examine further the quality of this 
 Christ-idea. It was the first incarnation lying within 
 the field of evidence, and hence, as I have stated, 
 the Nazarene sets forth with peculiar value and 
 charm. But how far was this Christ an incarnation 
 of the divine ? Here we approach the greatness of 
 the fact. Let us avoid the complications that would 
 arise over any study of the Trinity. The recent 
 convention at Bonn, and indeed the whole history of 
 the Christian theological debate, warns us against 
 any effort to weigh fully the divine in Christ, or out 
 of Him. The Methodist journal of this city declared 
 last week, in speaking of Bollinger's "filioque," that 
 attempts to understand the Trinity were utterly use- 
 less. Hence declining all debate over the doctrine 
 
CHRIST. 21 
 
 of the Three-in-One, let us, as free minds unincum- 
 bered by formulas, look at the divine quality of 
 Christ. (1.) It should soften the judgment of us 
 all in this matter, that we do not know the nature 
 of Deity. If we knew the nature of Deity as we 
 know the nature of earth, air, and water, we might 
 become very decided over this question of the Incar- 
 nation, and might declare the heavenly element 
 present or absent as a chemist takes an ore, and 
 after an analysis declares the presence or absence of 
 gold. It is not in human power thus to affirm and 
 deny, over the great crucible of nature in which lies 
 a soul. It is a little illogical, to state it in its 
 mildest form, for any one to approach the historic 
 Christ and declare the utter absence of Deity, for 
 such a decision reposes upon the assumption that 
 man knows what divinity is, as he knows the mate- 
 rial elements. As in the theological kingdom, men 
 are deemed arrogant who presume to know all about 
 God and who will talk incessantly, about Three-in- 
 One, so not wholly free from assumption are those 
 who will hasten to declare Christ to be wholly sep- 
 arated from any element above the loftiest human 
 life. For mark the difficulty of the situation. No 
 one knows what God is. Hence, no one may hasten 
 to affirm His absence or presence. Mark the distin- 
 
22 CHRIST. 
 
 guished pantheists who, with their deep culture and 
 with a logic difficult to meet, have declared all the 
 universe to be Grod. Nature says to them : 
 
 " I wander up and down ; I wander to and fro, 
 and in all the roaring loom of time I weave the 
 living garments of the Deity." 
 
 Another poet says to the soul : 
 
 Dost thou not see 
 
 Thy limitless expanse of destiny; 
 
 Because within thy soul 
 
 There dwells the vision of the whole. 
 
 The fourteenth proposition of Spinoza reads thus : 
 " There is no substance-, but God, nor can any other 
 be conceived." Thus the human intellect in its 
 highest estate has been unable to draw a definite 
 line around man, and thus shut out the supreme 
 soul. It does not follow from this that the doctrine 
 of pantheism is as credible as the doctrine of an 
 Incarnate Messiah; but it does follow that none of 
 us are in an intellectual condition that will justify 
 us in treating with any contempt the idea that God 
 is in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. We 
 are such strangers to the quality of the Infinite One 
 that we dare not declare him absent from the Man 
 of Nazareth. One thing is certain, that if the Creator 
 of the world ever has come or shall come within the 
 
CHRIST. 23 
 
 reach of the human senses, it must have been or mixst 
 be by coming within tlie confines of our world. If, 
 then, the whole human family has been grieving over 
 an absent God, an invisible, inaccessible, formless, 
 voiceless God, and has prayed that he would break 
 through the impenetrable clouds and come near His 
 children, it is a capricious logic that will then reject 
 a Christ because the Deity can not enter a limited 
 world. A strange world, that will pray for a mani- 
 fest God and then reject the idea of a manifestation ! 
 Such are the difficulties that attend a peremptory 
 rejection of the doctrine of the Incarnation, difficul- 
 ties that may well open the heart to what evidence 
 there may be upon the great New Testament shore. 
 I am not ready to confess that God never would 
 become limited by a body for the welfare of His 
 children, nor ready to confess that He ever could 
 become thus limited in a manner better, more im- 
 pressive than in the person of Christ. 
 
 In order to exclude God from Bethlehem I must 
 first know what God is. 
 
 There is every reason for supposing that man was 
 created in the intellectual likeness of God, and hence 
 for God to become manifest in Christ was only a 
 filling to the full of a cup partly filled in the creation 
 of man. Man himself held a part of the divine image. 
 
24 OHSIST. 
 
 Christ held it all. The words which Christ spoke 
 were divine words. The human mind can not dream 
 of any thing more divine. His love was the nearest 
 infinite of any thing we can conceive ; His whole 
 career was just such a career as the divine would 
 need to live if it should condescend to pass a few 
 years upon earth. In fact, the picture of Jesus 
 Christ is the best picture conceivable of a mingling 
 of the earthly and the heavenly. The whole scene 
 is above life and below the infinite. It was God 
 brought down and man lifted up. 
 
 Eighteen hundred years have passed — years of 
 marvelous experimentation and of intellectual pro- 
 gress. We who assemble here to-day will hear no 
 voice from the sky telling us that Christ is above 
 the human. No witnesses will come down from the 
 heavens to tell us that the Jesus who was crucified is 
 sitting at the right hand of God greeting with love 
 His children as they pass up from earth through 
 death's iron gate. We must walk along in the light 
 we possess here — the hght of common evidence, an 
 evidence woven out of history, experience, testimony, 
 and out of the humility that confesses that God 
 may, for aught we know, tabernacle in the flesh. 
 There have been great minds that have felt the 
 Infinite One to be present in the winds and in the 
 
GEMIST. 25 
 
 flowers. They have seen Him in the sun and in 
 the outspread universe. There may be a grand and 
 powerful logic that sees Him in a Jesus Christ. 
 Do not fear that you will believe too much miracle. 
 When man believes in himself, he has broken the 
 spell of reason, for there is no reason that can explain 
 the evidence or nature of man. The Incarnate God 
 is little more wonderful than the incarnate man. It 
 is not of avail to reject the miracle of a Christ and 
 leave the miracle of the universe untouched. I have 
 said that minds, the most careful, the most logical, 
 the most free, may cheerfully accept the Christ-idea. 
 May ! They have so done with perfect joy. Permit 
 me/ to -quote from some who knew no yoke of 
 prejudice, and feared no condemnation of council or 
 sj^nod or pope. The testimony of those who are 
 born into a system, and whose lives are those of 
 servile obedience rather than of manly thought, 
 would be worthless in your presence. Hence, let 
 me repeat the words of a Carlyle : " He walked in 
 Judea 1,800 years ago ; His sphere melody, flowing 
 in wild, native tones, took captive the ravished souls 
 of men, and, being of a truth sphere melody, still 
 flows and sounds, though now with thousand-fold 
 accompaniments and rich symphonies, through all our 
 hearts, and modulates and divinely leads them." 
 
26 0HBI8T. 
 
 Franklin, in a letter to President Stiles, of Yale 
 College, says: "I think Christ's morals and religion 
 the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see, and 
 while, with most of the dissenters in England, I 
 have some doubts about His divinity, it is a question 
 about which I never dogmatize, having never studied 
 it. I shall know about it soon." This Franklin 
 died a month afterward, thus showing us what a 
 longing and tenderness were in that word " soon." 
 
 Charles Dickens, in his will, said : " I commit my 
 soul to the mercy of God, through our Lord and 
 Saviour Jesus Christ, and exhort my children humbly 
 to try to guide themselves by the teachings of the 
 New Testament." 
 
 William EUery Channing says : " Jesus not only 
 was. He is still, the Son of God, the Saviour of the 
 world. He has entered that Heaven to which He 
 always looked forward on earth. There He lives 
 and reigns. With a calm, clear faith I see Him in 
 that state of glory, and I confidently expect, at no 
 distant period, to see Him face to face." 
 
 Such are some of the conclusions reached by 
 intellects the most gifted and the most free. In a 
 world where the mind is limited, and can not find 
 more than half an answer to the question. What is 
 man ? or. What is nature ? it must not wait a full 
 
CHBI8T. 27 
 
 answer to the question, What is Christ ? We must 
 love the grand half-visions of this world. Like 
 Moses, being unable to see the face of the Almighty, 
 we must be content with the rustle of his flowing 
 garments. Unable fully to measure the Christ, let 
 us say, " Here is the only incarnation within the 
 realm of evidence, and here the quality of the being 
 is such that reason may forgive us and faith com- 
 mend us if we say, Truly this was the Son of God." 
 If God were destined ever to draw near the 
 human sense, the best shape of that earthly residence 
 would be such as our Christ. What more impressive 
 Son of God need we await than He of the manger 
 and cross? Do we seek diviner words, or a diviner 
 love or holier life ? Let the superhuman come to us 
 again and again, to attach itself to these years of 
 humility and sorrow, and the being that should carry 
 about this mingled soul and mind would always be 
 a Jesus Christ. Heaven and earth meeting could 
 not but give us the Man of Sorrows and sympathy. 
 The upper purity and the lower sin, meeting, could 
 not but give us the cross. Such upper life wedding 
 the shores of death could not but give us the resur- 
 rection. 
 
THE SUEROU]::^Dn^GS OF OHEIST. 
 
SERMON 11. 
 
 THE SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 
 
 "And when they saw the star they rejoiced with exceeding 
 great joy." — Matthew 3 : 10. 
 
 ~r ET us resume to-day our reflections over Him 
 -*-^ called the Christ. Let us recall some of the 
 political, and moral, and religious, and literary scenes 
 that lay outspread before the new King. 
 
 The first fact I mention is both political and lit- 
 erary. When Jesus entered upon His ministry there 
 was a fact very favorable to the introduction of any 
 new form of truth. The great prerequisite in the 
 matter of thought and the dissemination of thought 
 is the existence of a powerful language. It is the 
 instrument by which great souls can break forth 
 from their own imprisonment and visit the souls of 
 mankind. Language is the chariot in which the 
 soul visits its friends. Many a great mind has lived 
 and died in chains because its ancestors had not 
 wrought out for it, and, dying, willed to it, a wide- 
 
32 THE 8UBB0UNBINQS OF GHBIST. 
 
 reaching tongue that could at once stimulate the 
 brain and stand ready to catch and express its life. 
 Words are the embalmed ideas of the long yesterday. 
 Each separate word is a truth. When, therefore, a 
 genius like old Job is born into the world, and finds 
 about him only the narrow Hebrew tongue, he enters 
 upon a long imprisonment, unconscious, indeed, but 
 real. He can utter some sublime things, but his 
 mind is limited, like the soul of the Swiss child born 
 only among mountains. When a genius like Gothe 
 or Webster is born into such a universe of words as 
 is seen in the German or English, it is the soul's 
 own fault or sin if it does not move out freely and 
 grandly toward the waiting human race. It is said 
 of Dante that he was compelled to make the Italian 
 language while he made his song ; that he was com- 
 pelled to ransack all the domain of Italian thought 
 in order to find words and inflections which he 
 might dare use and that could be woven into poetic 
 melody. It is beautifully said that before he could 
 sing his music he was compelled first to make a 
 harp. What a wonderful inheritance, then, must 
 belong to each young mind in this country, who at 
 birth falls heir to one of the three great tongues, 
 French, English, or German, capable of expressing all 
 the happy and sad feelings, the great and useful 
 
THE SURROUNDINGS OP CHRIST. 33 
 
 thoughts of a human life. The study of the English 
 language alone, the mastery of all its words, would 
 be a grand education in itself, for each word stands 
 for a fact in the discoveries, or pursuits, or deeds, or 
 feelings of society. 
 
 Through all of the thousand years before the 
 opening of our era, the most intellectual race that 
 has perhaps ever lived had built up the Greek lan- 
 guage. ,As the coral rocks arose in the Southern 
 ocean from great depths up to the sunlight, so the 
 Greek language, from depths unknown, unsounded, 
 arose until it came to the great upper sunlight of the 
 poets and orators. Of all the marvels of history the 
 Greek nation is the most wonderful. The seven 
 wonders of the world are insignificant compared with 
 that nation that occupied the little peninsula. Some- 
 thing great was poured into the Greek soul when it 
 came from its Creator. It did nothing upon any 
 humble scale. Its first song by Homer will equal 
 all the songs that will follow it. A nation so many- 
 sided, and so wonderful upon each side, came never 
 before nor elsewhere: wonderful in politics, in phi- 
 losophy, -in poetry, in art, in heroism, and in physical 
 beauty and development. All this greatness was 
 treasured up in language, the image, as one of the 
 Greeks said, of the soul. 
 
 3 
 
34 THE SUBIiOUNDINGS OF 0HBI8T. 
 
 Now the Roman Empire came in by its arms and 
 ambition, and gave this language to all the Mediter- 
 ranean world. Along with its companion, the Latin — 
 a companion who was only a pleasant comrade rather 
 than an equal or a rival — this Athenian tongue that 
 opened the stores of poetry, and law, and philosophy 
 to mankind, was given at once to all the civilized 
 states of that period. The City of Rome itself enjoyed 
 a population of 700,000, and the Roman Empire was 
 administering its government to one hundred millions 
 of people. Rome was equivalent to three republics 
 like our own America. Over such a nation, so great, 
 peace had been falling like a gracious sunshine for 
 almost a half century. But that era of peace had 
 been one of vice and all sensualism, and hence had 
 developed a new human want, the want of a pure 
 and adequate religion. The political state of things 
 may be summed up in a few words : A large em- 
 pire, a comparatively just government, a wonderful 
 liberty of thought, and profound peace. 
 
 It is not ray purpose to seek to-day only the 
 favorable facts and make out by force the readiness 
 of the world for Christ. It is my wish to recall, 
 simply, facts, leaving to you to weigh the bearing 
 and quality of the facts. 
 
 Having alluded to the political surroundings of 
 
THE SUBBOUNDINQS OF OHHIST. 35 
 
 Jesus, let us pass to the literary condition of that 
 classic empire. This theme has already been touched 
 upon as to the presence and greatness of language. 
 There remain other sides of this literary spectacle 
 to be viewed. Christ came just after the literary 
 glory of the old world had passed away. Language 
 can not die suddenl)^ but great voices speaking in a 
 golden tongue may very soon become silent. The 
 Italian tongue remains, but there is no Dante, no 
 Tasso, no Angelo, to speak in its accents. So when 
 Christ appeared, the sun of Roman and of Greek 
 literature had just set. Were we going to make an 
 argument after the common fashion to show that the 
 Advent came just when the world was most ready 
 for it, we should pass by in silence the fact that the 
 great Roman race had for a half hundred years been 
 declining when the star arose in the East. Accord- 
 ing to human ideas the Advent came a generation 
 too late. But when it comes to measuring the 
 times and plans of God, man may well hasten to 
 confess God to be utterly measureless. His ways 
 above our ways. His thoughts above our thoughts. 
 Dismissing the idea of justifying or condemning 
 Providence, I re-state the fact that our Lord saw 
 fit to throw the light of His advent down upon a 
 world which was rapidly retreating into the shadows 
 
36 THE SURROUNDINGS OF OHBIST. 
 
 of a long light. The " golden age " of Augustus 
 ended before the Son of Man appeared. Streaks of 
 the sunset were still upon the sky, but the great 
 day of literature had passed, and night was coining 
 rapidly over the most impressive country and nation 
 which the world ever saw. Only for a moment 
 recall those names so familiar to us all, and as loved 
 as familiar. Julius Caesar, the writer and the orator, 
 had been slain forty-four years before our era began. 
 Cicero was murdered a few years after the great 
 Csesar fell. Virgil died nineteen years before Christ 
 came. Horace was in his grave forty years before 
 Christ began to teach mankind. Sallust had been 
 dead thirty-four years before the Child was born in 
 the manger. Christ was only eighteen years old, 
 was still an unknown carpenter, when Livy died. 
 Ptiblius Syrius, Catullus, Terence, all, all these 
 gifted children of philosophy and song had gone to 
 sleep long before the music of Bethlehem came to 
 the ear of the shepherds. Except Tacitus and Pliny, 
 no great name ever crossed over the line that 
 divided the pagan and Christian periods. Not a 
 single great orator or artist, poet or statesman, was 
 remaining upon the Roman or Greek world when 
 our Lord appeared. It is not within the scope of 
 human reason or analysis to affirm whether this 
 
THS! SUBBOUNBINOS OF CHRIST. 37 
 
 condition of literature was favorable or averse to 
 the triumph of Christ. The plan of the universe is 
 so large, and its outcome and the forces that toil at 
 the outcome are so hidden that man can dogmatize 
 about it only in moments of arrogance. In moments 
 of soberness he must bow in silence and wait for 
 the slow logic of events. If it were lawful for us 
 to indulge in inquiry or conjecture, we should, 
 perhaps, express the feeling that Christianity desired 
 the field to be vacated by the poets and orators and 
 statesmen of the long antiquity, that the human 
 mind might be led along the new path of morals 
 and all spirituality. Who knows but that Cicero, 
 and Virgil, and Livy, and all that long Une of great 
 ones were suffered to pass away that the St. Pauls 
 and St. Johns might appear, bringing the seeds 
 of a new civilization in their hands? Permitting 
 each one to interpret the facts, let us observe this, 
 that there remained for the use of the new religion 
 two unrivaled languages, a vast multitude of people, 
 and a people awakened to mental life by the 
 centuries that had passed away, a people united by 
 law and a people at peace. 
 
 Having marked the political and literary aspect 
 of those times, let us allude to the moral condition 
 of the people. History will fully justify the asser- 
 
38 THE SUBROUNDINOS OF CHRIST. 
 
 tion that the moral condition of the world was 
 most wretched when Christ came with His Gospel 
 of purity. From the great questions of the rights 
 of man to the questions of individual purity, the 
 scene was dark and the darkness was growing more 
 dense. The recent civil wars had left society in a 
 state of peculiar crime, so that to the usual wicked- 
 ness of the age there was added a special disregard 
 for life or any rights of man. The assassin lurked 
 in every shadow ; the poisoner in every prominent 
 family ; the traitor in every council. The times 
 were preparing for the carnival of crime and cruelty 
 which culminated in the atrocities of Nero. From 
 Herod and Herodias, even to the lofty Seneca, all 
 the hands that had power seemed to drip in blood. 
 Herod the Great murdered two of his own sons at 
 the Suggestion of interested parties; murdered his 
 own wife, Mariamne ; ordered the slaughter of the 
 Bethlehem children; and, when about to die, he 
 ordered the execution of the nobles, that his own 
 funeral might be accompanied by a wide-spread 
 mourning. Josephus says, "Never since the world 
 was made was there a time more fruitful of wicked- 
 ness." In every age, however, one may find 
 depraved individuals, and hence the real condition 
 of the Roman Empire may be best learned by 
 
THB SURROUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 39 
 
 calling as witnesses, not its lowest individuals, but its 
 highest. Take, therefore, Seneca, the lofty moralist 
 whom many have mentioned upon the same page 
 with the Christ. Seneca was to the Roman Empire 
 what George Fox was to England, or what Franklin 
 was to the colotiies. Seneca taught the highest 
 precepts of his day, and because he was such a 
 moralist he was appointed tutor of the young Nero. 
 The pupil betrayed the weakness of his guide. 
 When Nero came to power his guardian, Seneca, 
 became the low flatterer of the king, and smiled at 
 all the roj'^al vices. He even went further, and 
 suggested to Nero the murder of a younger brother; 
 and when Nero murdered his mother, Seneca wrote 
 a letter to sanction and explain the crime. Add to 
 these enormities the fact that Seneca had himself 
 been banished for a crime that did not happen to 
 please the powers over him, and you have a picture 
 of Roman morals as seen even in the best of Roman 
 men. Seneca himself confesses that he was a lover 
 of virtue, but not virtuous; not a philosopher, but 
 a student of philosophy. " I am occupied with the 
 study of the vices, but all I require of myself is, 
 not to be equal to the best, but only to be better 
 than the bad." The story of Roman and Greek 
 vice as incidentally given in " Plutarch's Morals," 
 
40 THE 8UBR0UNBINGS OF OHBIST. 
 
 and the "Annals of Tacitus," leaves the reader 
 ready to confess that no age could have been 
 humbler in these virtues that make up purity of 
 home and private life. Under Nero, knights, sena- 
 tors and ladies of the highest rank appeared upon 
 the stage and sang low songs, such an assemblage 
 as would not now be permitted in the basements of 
 New York. Such, then, was the condition of morals 
 when the Sermon upon the Mount began to be 
 repeated by the Apostles in the classic world. It 
 was time for the voice to come saying, "Blessed are 
 the pure in heart." 
 
 Our last inquiry was to be as to the religious 
 phenomena that lay around the feet of the new Lord. 
 As I stated last Sunday, there was no valuable reli- 
 gious faith, no faith universal enough, and pure 
 enough, and firm enough, to be of any value to the 
 soul. The conception of God had been frittered 
 away in the long attempt to make gods of the 
 Caesars. You may imagine the state of the religious 
 sentiment when Herod desired the people to declare 
 him a deity. One of the kings of the time declared 
 his dead wife a divinity, and ordered the empire to 
 worship her, and he encircled his own head with 
 steel points or rays, that when the light flashed upon 
 them he might seem to wear the halo of the Deity. 
 
THE SUMBOUNDINGS OF CHBISr. 41 
 
 It was in this era the simple people concluded that 
 Paul and Barnabas were deities just from heaven, 
 and hence along came the crowd with oxen and gar- 
 lands for a sacrifice to the new candidates for 
 homage. 
 
 Such, briefly, was the political, the literary, the 
 moral, and, the religious surroundings of the world's 
 Christ. Into such an empire did the Son of Man 
 come. There was a vast state, that represented the 
 world, to be reformed; there was a marvelous lan- 
 guage to be the vehicle of the new truth; there was 
 a decay of the Roman religious faith; there was a 
 decadence of political and aesthetic forms of thought ; 
 there was a mental vitality remaining for new guid- 
 ance ; there was a condition of morals that demanded 
 the Sermon on the Mount; there was a dark night 
 setting in that appealed loudly for the mercy of 
 Heaven. Two nations, the greatest that had yet 
 come from the mind of man — the Greek that dazzles 
 the world yet with the memory of its poetry and 
 art, and philosophy and oratory ; the Roman with its 
 law, and military skill, and ambition, and with its 
 unrivaled temples and palaces — had been merged 
 into one, and with all their combined riches of mind 
 and soul were descending to ruin together. One 
 hundred millions of the best human beings of earth 
 
42 THE SUBBOUNBINGS OF 0ERI8T. 
 
 had been deserted by all their great kings that had 
 once ruled over them in love and wisdom ; had been 
 deserted by the orators that had once instructed the 
 multitude in the theater and the forum ; had been 
 deserted by the poets who had sung the sweetest 
 songs in the sweetest languages; had been deserted 
 by the artists who had once wrought upon canvas 
 and in marble ; had been deserted by the " grand old 
 Romans" who would do nothing dishonorable. The 
 grave had recalled all the throng of great and gifted 
 souls, and the cradle offered no more inspired chil- 
 dren to fill the widening void. 
 
 Before that Mediterranean world lay the gloom 
 of night — a night of vice, of ignorance, of sorrow. 
 It was then that Christ arose. His star appeared in 
 the East and men went to worship Him. Mark, 
 therefore, that Christ thus became a turning point in 
 history. The old was dying. The new breathed in 
 Him its first breath of life. Oh, what an immense 
 work was to be "done to carry that classic world 
 across from paganism to a spiritual religion ! If you 
 will go to India or China now, and note what little 
 power the European possesses to turn those old relig- 
 ions and customs along Christian channels, you will 
 form some idea of what a work lay before Christ 
 and His Apostles when they stood upon the confines 
 
THE 8UBB0UNDIN&S OF 0HSI8T. 43 
 
 of the Roman empire. The work would have para- 
 lyzed any heart less divine than that of the Son of 
 God. Looking out upon the scene, he said, " The 
 harvest is indeed vast, but the laborers are few," 
 and yet, rising to the height of prophecy, He said, 
 through his servant, "Every knee shall bow and 
 every tongue confess." 
 
 The Roman religion crumbled rapidly. Porphyry, 
 who wrote almost a score of books to stay the pro- 
 gress of Christianity, complained bitterly that under 
 the sound of the Gospel the old gods had become 
 dumb. This lament of a disappointed pagan, Milton 
 elaborated into verse : 
 
 The oracles are dumb; 
 
 Nor voice nor hideous hum, 
 Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving. 
 
 Apollo from his shrine 
 
 No longer can divine. 
 With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving 
 
 No trance or breathed spell 
 Inspire the pale-eyed priest from his prophetic cell. 
 
 The lonely mountains o'er 
 
 And the resounding shore, 
 A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament; 
 
 Prom haunted spring and dale, 
 
 Edged with poplar pale. 
 The parting Genius is with sighing sent; 
 
 With flower-inwoven tresses torn, 
 The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thicket mourn. 
 
44 THE SUMBOUNDINGS OF CHRIST. 
 
 But not at once is a religious world to be 
 reformed. The works of religion, as indeed all the 
 works of human progress, reach out like the forma- 
 tion of the glaciers or the deltas, over long periods. 
 It saddens the human heart and baffles the intellect 
 to think of the slowness of God's mercy toward His 
 children. The Psalmist anticipated the world's sor- 
 row, when he said : " How long ! Oh, Lord ! wilt 
 thou hide thyself forever?" But complaints are 
 vain. A thousand years are as a day with the great 
 Hand that made and moves the universe. 
 
 Christ and His Apostles, first twelve and then 
 seventy, began their mission in the world. The 
 pagan multitude could no more realize the meaning 
 of a spiritual religion than the African of the Niger 
 can discern the meaning of Bacon's philosophy, or 
 the beauty of the fine arts. Hence, the Roman 
 Empire under the first Christian kings, and under 
 all the popes, combined in various quantities the 
 superstition of the past and the Christianity of the 
 future. Plato and Christ were combined. The 
 incense of Jupiter's altar was burnt before the cross, 
 and the deified heroes of the former age were 
 excluded by the deified Mary and the deified saints 
 of the latter. That pageantry which once filled the 
 streets around the temple of Jupiter or the pantheon 
 
THE SUIiBOUNDINGS OF 0HBI8T. 45 
 
 could not die at once ; it languished along to repeat 
 itself in the temples of Christian saints, in presence 
 of a half-redeemed, half-pagan throng. 
 
 Slowly, indeed, comes the redemption of the 
 human race, but, notwithstanding this painful halt- 
 ing, looking back we behold Christ to be a turning 
 point in the history of our earth. He was the 
 revelation of a new God; the One who proves to 
 be the true God, the only Lord and Father of us 
 all. He was the revelation of a morals that makes 
 the sages of old hang their heads in humility. He 
 did not, like Seneca, teach virtue without being 
 virtuous, nor was he content by being worse than 
 the best, but better than the worst. All compro- 
 mising, all comparative goodness, terminated at 
 Nazareth. A sinful thought became a stain upon the 
 soul, and the enmity that said, "Thou fool," became 
 a confessed ruin or sorrow in that heart. 
 
 At the touch of this new Saviour the principles 
 of law underwent great change, and slowly passed 
 from darkness to light. Christ was especially a 
 great crisis in the history of the soul. The body 
 became the casket, the soul the gem. The soul 
 being thus thrown forward, its home had to be 
 enlarged, and its career extended. The home 
 became enlarged into Heaven, and its career into 
 
46 THE SURROUNDINGS OF OHBIST. 
 
 immortality. The current of thought, and love, 
 and hope, having been thus changed, as a river 
 that strikes a wall of adamant is hurled back, it 
 gathers volume and velocity as it runs. It receives 
 other streams into its bosom. Every century widens 
 and deepens this river. Defective as the Church 
 still is, it is wise and powerful compared with what 
 it was when Augustine was its theologian, or Leo X. 
 was its pope. Grandly it moves away from material 
 symbols and dead forms toward spirituality, and 
 from the study of the divine records brings forth 
 each generation a better conception of God. As 
 our earth in a long period moved from chaos to its 
 present harmony of water and field and sky, sunlight 
 and starlight, as its chief occupant man moved out 
 from his first home until he filled the continents and 
 its islands with his presence, his acts, his labor and 
 his love ; so Christianity, having entered the world 
 by the gateway called Christ, has widened, and is 
 widening, in power and beauty, contemplating no 
 result less than the loving conquest of a world, and 
 the transfer of its millions at last to the happy fields 
 of Heaven. 
 
II^FLUEI^OE OF OHEIST O^ LETTEES 
 AI^D AET. 
 
SERMON III. 
 
 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST ON LETTERS 
 AND ART. 
 
 "Ye shall know them by their fruits." — Matt. 7: 16. 
 
 TT is my desire to continue, this morning, thoughts 
 -*- about Christ. To-day let us briefly observe His 
 influence upon letters and art. The history of man 
 is the history of influences. He was not made 
 great by the Creator, but was made small in all 
 directions, mental and moral, and then was subjected 
 to a long line of influences. The Bible account of 
 man represents him as only a large child. He had 
 not learned to distinguish between the voice of God 
 in one part of the garden, and the voice of Satan 
 in another part ; nor did he know which one of 
 those contending parties would exert the better 
 influence over his existence. Giving the matter a 
 hasty survey, he finally concluded that the serpent 
 in the tree knew more about the possibilities and 
 successes of the garden than was known by the 
 
50 INFLUENCE OP OHBIST 
 
 other potentate called Jehovah. Hence, the first 
 man hastened to cast his lot into the general lot of 
 the evil one. Thus, as a piece of clay is taken up 
 by the potter, and is shaped by his hand, his foot 
 meanwhile turning the rapid wheel, so man was 
 cast upon the arena of action, a piece of flexible 
 soul, and upon him many hands began to press, and 
 many feet began to turn the wheel. When the 
 potter's clay first falls upon the board it is only a 
 lump ; an hour afterward it is seen standing forth 
 an elegant vase, with lines the most graceful con- 
 ceivable in human taste. So man set forth in life 
 only a lump of mind; the subsequent years point 
 out to us a noble Greek or German or Englishman. 
 To bring about such results, the wheel has been 
 turned a long while, and the molding hand has 
 for centuries pressed heavily and lightly by times. 
 War and peace, climate, the presence of great 
 individuals, the longings of the soul, self-interest, 
 vanity, ambition, the love of money, the love of 
 man, and the love of God have all entered into the 
 great pottery, and have given the shape and then 
 changed the shape of all the clay children that have 
 come and gone on the world-stage. So pliant have 
 the body and soul been, so dependent have they 
 appeared upon the external touch of climate, food, 
 
ON LETTERS AND ABT. 51 
 
 law, and all association, that some have concluded 
 that there may be a science of history, and that 
 some day a philosopher may sit down and compose 
 a future history of his country, using as data the 
 causes that are at work, making his history out of 
 the inevitable results. The theory is confessed to 
 be good, but it is objected that the time will never 
 come when any one can count, or in any manner 
 detect, the agencies that exist or shall spring up in 
 a wide world. Unexpected famines or earthquakes, 
 or wars, or conflagrations will come and change a 
 nation's drift. Or a single individual like a Luther, 
 or a Savonarola, or a Dollinger, or a Napoleon, will 
 come along, and by himself alone change the page 
 of history for a hundred or five hundred years. 
 Goldwin Smith says beautifully that the scientific 
 minds will always be able to analyze the sunlight 
 and to explain the formation of clouds, but they 
 will never be able to paint a sunset in advance, 
 and tell us how the clouds will marshal them- 
 selves, or from what urns the colors will be poured 
 out. 
 
 Let us then content ourselves with the remark, 
 that all we children of earth are here for a few 
 years to be molded for good or ill, molded by 
 agencies known and unknown, till at last we shall 
 
52 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST 
 
 all pass into eternity in the shape received here on 
 this rapid wheel. 
 
 It is my wish in this and other sermons to ask 
 you to observe the action of Christ upon the 
 centuries, to mark how that hand has helped to 
 shape the thinking and loving clay called man. To 
 observe all the fruits of Christianity would consume 
 all the Sundays of the year, but to gather specimen 
 fruits from the bending tree is the easy and useful 
 task of a few brief discourses. 
 
 Let us not be guilty of the rashness that ascribes 
 all the good of earth to the Christian philosophy. 
 There are those who, in a zeal without knowledge, 
 will declare all our arts and sciences, our compass, 
 telegraph, and steam-engine, to have come to the 
 world through the evangelical religion. But all 
 such generalities damage the cause they are designed 
 to support. The youth drilled in this kind of 
 declamation subsequently find that the Greek and 
 Roman worlds were wonderful in science, art, 
 literature, law, and inventions before our era began; 
 that they had grand things which we boastful ones 
 of the nineteenth centiiry can not equal. Four 
 thousand years before Christ came, God, the Father, 
 declared the world to be " very good," and, having 
 such a Creator, the goodness poured into man at his 
 
ON LETTEB8 AND AJRT. 53 
 
 creation burst forth from the soul all along from 
 Adam to Socrates. As the lilies bloomed before the 
 Saviour pointed out that group of blossoms to His 
 followers, so the mind and soul of man began to 
 bloom in the old world where Hiram worked in 
 gold, where Miriam sang, where Job and David 
 wrote, where the Greek orators thundered and the 
 Greek poets sang. It is safe to say that the great- 
 ness of earth began, not with Christ, but with God. 
 We need not take the garlands from the Father to 
 bestow them upon the Son. The grandeur of earth 
 began when God said, "Let us make man in our 
 image." Let us never set up such rash claims for 
 Christianity that when our youth pass from child- 
 hood to manhood and womanhood, and begin to read 
 books, they will need to remodel their opinions and 
 unlearn the lessons of early life, and thus run the 
 peril of falling from a once childlike faith into the 
 dreary land of infidelity or doubt. To view the 
 world as having all come from an infinite God, and 
 hence as having bloomed and blossomed always as 
 God's flowers bloom along the lonely Amazon, and 
 as His ocean ripples in smiles always, before the 
 Christian classified any flowers or sailed any ships, 
 and then to behold Christ as having been sent to 
 urge the world more rapidly forward along the path 
 
54 INFLUENOE OF OHBIST 
 
 of greatness, seems the better line of thought; a 
 path most free from pitfalls, and lying under the 
 sweetest, purest light. The world of God was good, 
 the world of Christ only better. 
 
 The first great fruit of the Christian tree is cer- 
 tainly the better path of salvation it brought. It 
 brought no wholly new method ; but it perfected 
 the ideas that lay only in outline. The idea of sac- 
 rifice can never go beyond the death of Christ. 
 After God came with His Lamb there was no more 
 need of the flocks and herds of a thousand hills. 
 And after Christ taught His ethics there was room 
 for nothing more ; His hope. His penitence. His 
 virtue. His love, were all the zenith of those moral 
 heights. 
 
 Let us pass by these fruits and go to fields less 
 familiar to all our thoughts. It is a great injustice 
 to Christianity if one views it only as being an 
 escape from hell hereafter to a heaven also beyond. 
 The real truth is, Christ has blended himself with all 
 the annals of Christian lands, and has given new 
 color to all the days of the great era that wears His 
 name. As the setting sun shining through a watery 
 air makes all things — fence, hut, log, forest, and field 
 — to be gold like himself, so Christ blends with the 
 rich and the humble details of society, and sheds 
 
ON LETTERS AND AMT. 66 
 
 His heavenly blush upon the great pageant of human- 
 ity marching beneath. If we dare not say Christianity 
 invented the steamboat and the railroad, we may say 
 that it reshaped literature and all the arts, and has 
 deeply affected law and the whole moral aspect of 
 civilization. There is an art which Christianity 
 created almost wholly, asking little of outside aid. 
 Music is that peculiar child. The long-continued 
 vision of heaven, the struggle of the tones of voice 
 and of instrument to find something worthy of the 
 deep feelings of religion, resulted at last in those 
 mighty chants that formed the mountain springs of 
 our musical Nile. There could have been no music 
 had not depth of feeling come to man. The men 
 who went up to the pagan temples went with no 
 such love, with no sorrow of penitence, with no 
 exultant joy. It was necessary for Jesus Christ to 
 come along and transfer religion from the form to 
 the spirit, and' from an "airy nothingness" to a love 
 stronger than life, before hymns like those of Luther, 
 and Wesley, and Watts, could break from the heart. 
 The doctrine of repentance must live in the world a 
 while before we can have a "Miserere," and the 
 exultant hope of the Christian must come before the 
 mind can invent a " Gloria." As no religion but 
 that of Jesus could have given us a penitent Magda- 
 
66 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST 
 
 len, so no other creed could, have wrought out for 
 us a "Lord be merciful," or a "Nearer, my God, to 
 Thee." An art is the effort of a cultured soul to 
 express itself. When the soul has developed into a 
 love of mountain or field, then it invents the paint- 
 er's art that it may tell to others and to itself its 
 wondrous feeling. When the soul has developed a 
 love of form, it invents the sculptor's art, that its 
 love may become incarnate and be held on imperish- 
 able marble. Thus each art is the outbreaking of a 
 gifted soul. But there must be something within 
 that wiU burst the prison walls and make this beau- 
 tiful escape. The religion of Jesus Christ placed in 
 the human heart those ideas and feelings which at 
 last burst forth into the sublime and plaintive music. 
 There could be no music until the soul had become 
 full. Therefore, when John drew his picture of 
 Heaven, when Magdalen shed her tears, when Christ 
 died on the cross, when the Christian martyrs began 
 to die for their faith, when Paul astonished the 
 word with his self-denial and heroism, when the relig- 
 ion of Jesus began to picture the immortality of 
 man, then the foundation of music began to be laid, 
 wide, and massive, and deep. Thus you may glance 
 over all the arts and find that the great ideas and 
 emotions of the new religion affected them all — the 
 
ON LETTBB8 AND AJRT. 57 
 
 paintings of Raphael and Angelo, and the architecture 
 of all the great middle centuries, great in the con- 
 struction of temples. Christianity helped to make 
 Angelo and Raphael by furnishing them with grand 
 themes. As no lips can be eloquent unless they are 
 speaking in the name of a great truth, so no painter 
 can paint unless some one brings him a great subject. 
 Heaven and hell made the poet Dante. Christianity 
 made Beatrice. Paradise made John Milton. The 
 mother of our Lord and the last judgment made 
 Angelo. It is the great theme that makes the 
 orator, the painter, the poet. The great theme lifts 
 up the soul and makes it the revealer of a new 
 world. Great minds were sleeping in every age in 
 some cradle in city and village, or lonely cottage, 
 but they passed through manhood and on to the 
 tomb unheard, because no great theme had come 
 along to wake them into a broad, infinite life. What 
 Gray wrote in his elegy possesses as much of phil- 
 osophic truth as of poetic sweetness : 
 
 Perhaps in tliis neglected spot is laid 
 Some heart once pregnant with celestial Are; 
 
 Hands that tlie rod of empire might have swayed 
 Or waked to ecstacy the living lyre. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 Their lot forbade: nor circumscribed alone 
 Their growing virtues but their crimes confined, 
 
58 INFLUENCE OF GHBIST 
 
 Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne, 
 And shut the gates of mercy on mankind. 
 * * * * 
 
 Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife, 
 Their sober wishes never learned to stray; 
 
 Along the cool sequestered vale of life 
 They kept the noiseless tenor of their way. 
 
 Gray's elegy points out, not the beauty of man, 
 but one of his lesser sorrows, a calamity «weet in its 
 pensiveness. 
 
 There is truth rich and touching in those lines, 
 but this truth that for the hour lent such softness 
 to the poet's heart, and which has made immortal 
 the churchyard where "the curfew tolled the knell 
 of parting day," points out also a solemn fact in the 
 history of man, namelj'', that if the soul is born into 
 an era when no great ideas are passing along — ideas 
 of liberty, or religion, or art — that soul is doomed to 
 the life of only a child, and to die without ever 
 having felt any powerful or divine throbbing of the 
 spirit. Into such a world it was the province and 
 glory of Christ to come, bringing with him the 
 theme of a great hixman life. Children of genius 
 coming up from the cradle did not find a realm in 
 which " along the cool sequestered vale of life " 
 they must keep " the noiseless tenor of their way," 
 but they stepped forth into a land all glorified by 
 
ON LETTERS AMD ART. 59 
 
 the ideas and passions of the Christian religion. 
 You all know that Tennyson could not have written 
 his "In Memoriam" had he lived in the days of 
 Homer or Virgil. Then he would have followed the 
 flag of the Ajaxes and the Achilles, and have told 
 us how the body of Hector was dragged around the 
 streets behind the chariot of a savage conqueror. 
 But Christ carried the modern poet away from the 
 dust-cloud of battle and made him sing a loftier 
 song. Great as Homer is, his poetry has only the 
 attractiveness of ambition and of the emblazonry of 
 arms, of the marshaling of troops on a battle-field, 
 and the whole pomp and circumstance of war. 
 Great as Homer was, he could not have written one 
 verse of the " In Memoriam," in all his gifted life. 
 The Christ had not yet come to empty the urns of 
 love, and purity, and immortality, into the human 
 heart. 
 
 No military poems have been composed since the 
 coming of Jesus Christ. Before His day the most 
 gifted brains busied their muse with the battles of 
 Agamemnon, Achilles, and JEneas. But when after 
 Christ the highest forms of literature began to come 
 back to the world, the battle-cry, the mad career of 
 ambition, the rolling chariot, the cloud of arrows, had 
 disappeared from poetry, because under the banner 
 
60 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST 
 
 of Christ the Alexanders, and Csesars, and Nerosj 
 and Napoleons, had been at once assigned a lower 
 seat, and the poet, wishing to write for the new 
 world, had to turn from the fields of battle to the 
 fields of the soul. Even the war psalms of David 
 have been silenced by the Christian religion. Things 
 once so noble became only events of calamity and 
 regret. We esteem Washington, and Wellington, 
 and Grant, to have been brave, but our great poets 
 dreamed not of building poems out of these bloody 
 names, because war is no longer the brilliant destiny 
 of man as it was in the classic era, but it is the 
 calamity of time, the misfortune of a half-savage 
 race. Christ has carried our poets away from the 
 old themes, and has asked them to look at all life 
 here and hereafter. He has recalled the God of 
 battles, and has placed the God of love upon the 
 empty throne. 
 
 One of the members of the bench of this city 
 has just published an address in which the learned 
 and sincere thinker combats the idea that Christ 
 arose from the dead on the third day, as alleged by 
 the Gospels. There is quite a large number of per- 
 sons in the world who join in this belief or doubt. 
 But even over these isolated hearts that can not see 
 the body of Christ rising from the tomb of rock, 
 
ON LETTERS AND ART. 61 
 
 Christ does yet shed a light of immortality, for in 
 the perfection and marvel of His character they see 
 a destiny of the soul that reaches beyond earth. 
 Hence when some one misunderstood the argument 
 of Judge Booth, and accused him of denying the 
 future life of the soul, he comes forward and says 
 he should be very unwilling to deny or doubt the 
 future life of man. Thus while the judge denies 
 the exceptional raising of Christ, he casts himself 
 fully upon the future life of the soul, of Christ, and 
 of all souls. Thus Christ shapes even the literature 
 of doubt. Thus there is blowing all over the intel- 
 lectual world, in its most logical hours even, a wind 
 of paradise that fans all the temples that throb with 
 being. That this universal hope comes from the 
 matchless character of Christ, more than from all 
 other sources combined, I have not a shadow of 
 doubt. All the ideas and emotions we carry in our 
 hearts have come to us from fountains dripping far 
 away from ourselves. So invisible are these foun- 
 tains, so unconscious are our spirits of being fed by 
 any such springs, that we pass along through life 
 often as though we were independent thinkers, and 
 were elaborating all our ideas out of our own minds, 
 as the sun hurls, forth light out of its own bosom. 
 But there is little truth in such consciousness. Out- 
 
62 INFLUENCE OF CHBI8T 
 
 side ,of us there is some great potency shaping our 
 thoughts and emotions, as the sunlight colors the 
 woods, and while here and there a mind is standing 
 denying the literal, immediate resurrection of Christ's 
 body, over that very soul hover the character, the 
 teachings, the vision of the same Jesus, making the 
 skeptical mind willing indeed to believe that earth 
 is but the border of a paradise. Thus while a 
 learned judge is battling against a specific shape of 
 the resurrection, or a specific time and place of it, 
 on the one hand, on another hand the same rejected 
 Christ is filling the same acute mind with a blessed 
 vision of a heaven beyond earth. The painter may 
 toil over a landscape without knowing that Chris- 
 tianity has withdrawn the low, and the bloody, and 
 the cruel, from his art ; the sculptor may carve at a 
 Madonna or an ideal forehead without being con- 
 scious that Christianity has forbidden him to carve 
 a Jupiter or a Laocoon, and so Whittier and Bryant 
 may write without feeling the heavy hand that 
 forbids them to celebrate the glory of the bloody 
 field. Just thus a doubting mind like Judge Booth 
 may even write against Christ without knowing that 
 all the dream and hope of life, lying like white lilies 
 in that embattling soul, were planted chiefly by that 
 lofty Nazarene. The love of Christ gives to those 
 
ON LETTEE8 AND AMT. 63 
 
 even who deny the resurrection of his body a firm 
 hope of immortal life. 
 
 Far be it from me to claim too much for the 
 Christian religion. I am ready to throw aside any 
 proposition that must be sustained by loud assump- 
 tion or by pious fraud. There is nothing valuable 
 in this world but the truth. The vision of St. 
 John says the gates of Heaven were shut against 
 "whosoever loveth and maketh a lie." Against all 
 untrue things, against all unfair arguments, the gates 
 of earth also should be closed, for there is nothing 
 at last valuable but the good, the beautiful, and the 
 true. With this principle fully in memory I claim 
 that Jesus Christ has entered deeply into all the 
 lines of emotion and intellect that now so adorn our 
 century. You Christians meet to-day to commune 
 with Him ! It is well. But He communed with 
 your country and your literature and your arts long 
 before you came upon the scene of action. He 
 began to shine into the human heart long ago and 
 re-shape it. He fashioned the holy hymns which our 
 fathers sang. He stood by when the Catholics 
 created the Gregorian chant, and where the Cove- 
 nanters sang their psalms in the wilderness. He 
 invaded the realm of poetic thought, and turned 
 divine genius away from the adulation of bloody 
 
64 INFLUENCE OF 0HBI8T ON LETTERS AND AST. 
 
 generals to the study of nature and its Creator, the 
 soul and its destiny. He has communed with all 
 the centuries since His Advent, and has penetrated 
 them with a purer, loftier spirit. Mother and child 
 
 •have knelt in prayer by His example and request; 
 the mightiest intellects have shaped their philosophy 
 
 • in the light of Christ, and the old and the dying 
 have tried to go away from earth with some of this 
 
 . Saviour's words upon their trembling, blanching lips. 
 
ESTFLUEl^OE OF OHEIST OlsT THE 
 HUMAJ^ SPIEIT. 
 
SERMON IV. 
 
 INFLUENCE OE CHRIST ON THE HUMAN 
 SPIRIT. 
 
 " Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of." — Imlce 9 : 55. 
 
 rr^HE Disciples, indignant that a certain Samaritan 
 --*- village would not receive their Master, asked 
 permission and power to rain down fire upon the 
 unbelieving nation. Christ refused their request, 
 and informed them that they were disgracing their 
 own souls by uttering or cherishing such a wish. 
 They were ignorant of the unworthiness of the 
 nature that could exult in such a rain-storm of fire. 
 In the mind of Christ there lay a different ideal of 
 man's duty and pleasure. In our task of viewing 
 the results of the life of Christ let us come, to-day, 
 to what may be called The Influence of Christ 
 upon Man's Spirit. 
 
 By common usage the word "spirit" is used to 
 designate something different from the mind, and 
 something different from the soul. Inasmuch as the 
 
INFLUBNGE OF CHRIST 
 
 mental world is invisible, and in all ways unknowable, 
 except in the vaguest manner, the words that repre- 
 sent what ideas exist in this department must them- 
 selves remain vague, only shadows of other shadows. 
 And yet the word spirit conveys to us an idea, 
 indefinite though it be. When any one alludes to 
 the career of the Prince of Orange, and says he 
 revealed greatness of spirit, what a flight there is of 
 small men and things from our listening heart, and 
 what a rush into it of feelings of nobleness ! When 
 some orator declares our century to possess a broad, 
 lofty spirit, we see in an instant a hundred years 
 that would not soil their record with coliseums, or 
 martyrdoms, or inquisitions, or ignorance, or witch- 
 craft, or perpetual slavery. We know not the 
 meaning of the word, and yet when it comes to us 
 the heart turns about toward it, as the sunflower 
 toward the sun. The words "spirit of man" convey 
 to us the idea of a general drift of all the thoughts 
 and feelings of the man. We say the father of 
 waters runs southward. All its rivulets and tribu- 
 taries point toward the south, and be they in the 
 farth north, or murmur they on the western side of 
 the Alleghany mountains or the eastern slope of the 
 Rocky range, they all murmur toward the noon-day 
 sun, and sigh for the Mexican gulf over their pebbly 
 
ON THE HUMAN 8PIBIT. 69 
 
 and mossy beds. The spirit of man must mean the 
 great drift or current of his life. If he is said to 
 have a great spirit, it must be that all the days and 
 hours of his life, rising in the hidden recesses of 
 the soul, among the unseen hills of its adamant or 
 jasper, at once set forth upon a long journey toward 
 the noon of love and light, that infinite gulf, sweeter 
 than Mexican sea, murmuring in hymn and benedic- 
 tion as they flow. It is said that Fenelon revealed 
 a lofty spirit. This is afHrmed of Chalmers. The 
 world says the same of Joan d' Arc. It thinks the 
 same of L'Ouverture. Of such mighty souls the 
 pages of history hold just enough to help us in the 
 study of this word " spirit." As history marches 
 along it will meet with more of these noble children, 
 and when at last the Son of Man shall come in His 
 final glory He will find all the children of earth 
 standing before Him happy in a greatness of spirit. 
 
 Leaving the words before you in all their vague- 
 ness, I will ask you to mark the influence of that 
 one Nazarene upon the human spirit, the real, 
 though slow, tendency of society to escape from 
 the chains of the small and to fly to the freedom 
 of greatness. 
 
 1. These addresses must all begin with the 
 assumption of man's primitive barbarism. No one 
 
70 INFLUENCE OF GHBIBT 
 
 will deny the assumption. The only remaining 
 debate is over the question whether this barbarism 
 began, as the Bible affirms, with Eden, or whether, 
 with the rational scientists, it began millions of 
 years back. All consent that man began humbly. 
 Passing, then, from this thought, it is evident that 
 man has risen only as rapidly as has arisen some 
 ideal outside of himself. As fast as the intellect 
 and soul of the world grew and stored away its 
 growth in its literature, and its great exploits and 
 great men, so rapidly did the next generation come 
 up and read the record and rise to the new shape 
 of daily life. Adam and Eve fell because no gener- 
 ations had gone before them to teach them by high 
 written ideals nor by an impressive example. The 
 shaping of life becomes easier the moment the 
 outside world becomes full of guiding thought and 
 guiding conduct. The best Persian king, Darius, 
 suffered no bad conduct and not any wicked conver- 
 sation to exist around his palace, because he said 
 the atmosphere of royal children must be purer than 
 the common atmosphere of those not born to rule. 
 Thus all life assumes the color of its surroundings, 
 and the Faustine who was a poor, weak queen in 
 the palace of Aurelius, might have been a Mme. 
 Guyon in the seventeenth century, or a Victoria in 
 
OiV THE HUMAN SPIBIT. 71 
 
 the nineteenth. But Faustine lived before woman 
 had become great in her personal independence and 
 virtue, She lived when woman was great only in 
 beauty. 
 
 Opening our era and looking into its spiritual 
 secrets we behold Christ surpassing all other agencies 
 in molding the great hours of the soul. The roar 
 of trade and the carnival of vice, indeed, go forward, 
 but so far as the multitude has good hours of reflec- 
 tion and virtue, Christ stands largely responsible for 
 these better moments of mankind. I do not speak 
 now of that spiritual condition alone which we find 
 in the confines of the Church. Beyond the Church, 
 even, all through the length and breadth of society, 
 there are plain indications that there is a lofty One 
 — a great Son of Man — standing up in the world's 
 sight — a source of new light and sentiment. Let 
 me illustrate my meaning. One of the favorite ideas 
 of the age is that of boundless human brotherhood. 
 It glories in the fatherhood of God and the brother- 
 hood of man. This latter lies at the basis of the 
 new government that is creeping like a morning 
 sunshine over the world. Haughty kings and queens 
 have had to step down from their thrones. The 
 man with a soul in him has become equal to the 
 man with a scepter. The " Dairyman's Daughter," 
 
72 INFLUENOE OF CHRIST 
 
 because of the heart in her bosom, is equal to Queen 
 Bess, or Queen Ann, or Caroline, with a diadem on 
 her forehead. When Christ lived His sublime life, 
 and passed by the purple robes of a Pilate and a 
 Herod, and loved such characters as John and Luke; 
 when He passed by those mighty in violence and 
 gave His hand to those beautiful in soul, the world 
 began to become a brotherhood of which the soul 
 was to -be the only essential element, the condition 
 of full membership. All this crumbling of thrones 
 which we behold in our day, this sinking of crowned 
 heads to the level of the multitude, has not come 
 without a cause. The thrones of earth were founded 
 upon the deepest principles of selfishness. Millions 
 of bayonets have stood in frightful lines for the 
 king's support. The history of the last hundred 
 years has been the history of attempts to keep up 
 the same old despotisms. But the equality of man- 
 kind has, at the close of each battle in which kings 
 have triumphed, come back to begin its secret 
 abrasion of the flinty rock. No sooner have the 
 kings exacted peace than the voice of human broth- 
 erhood has begun, like Abel's blood, to cry up from 
 the ground ; and the kings, flushed on yesterday with 
 victory, must begin at once to invent new arms and 
 draft new mercenaries for a fiery conflict. In seek- 
 
ON THE HUMAN SPIBir. 73 
 
 ing the cause for such a change, come and coming, 
 we must not rest in climate, or food, or race, or mere 
 fickleness of taste, but must, if possible, find some 
 powerful idea or sentiment invading the human 
 mind. We feel free to affirm that no one influence 
 can any where be pointed out that will equal the 
 power that Christ has brought to bear upon the 
 republican principles in society. The whole soul of 
 His religion is broad. It is man — man, not rich or 
 poor, not crowned, not chained, but man who figures 
 in the great Christian drama of life and death. In 
 the religion of Jesus the rich are humiliated if riches 
 be their idol ; in the same religion the poor are 
 exalted if they are in the paths of righteousness. 
 Here it was the widow with two mites outranked 
 the Dives of purple and fine linen. Here it was the 
 first began to be last and the last first. Those whom 
 birth, or riches, or force, had set up in high places, 
 began to sit uneasy on their pedestals of vanity, and 
 slowly up rose Magdalen and all the penitents till 
 forehead of king and forehead of subject found the 
 level of kindred drops. In this transformation scene 
 of the New Testament, children came to the front, 
 and, for the first time on man's world, were made 
 the equals of kings, orators, or philosophers. Of such 
 is the kingdom of heaven. 
 
74 INFLUENCE OF 0EBI8T 
 
 Many fail to read the bearing of Jesus Christ 
 because they look only at the sectarian agencies at 
 work in the generations. They behold the caste in 
 churches; the difference there between the high and 
 the low ; they perceive that most churches are built 
 by the rich for the rich ; and in presence of such a 
 spectacle they fail to mark the drift of the abstract 
 Christ. But a church is often only something that 
 conceals Christ, as language is often used to conceal 
 thought. We confess the naturalness of the failure, 
 the perfect logic of the inference. I am not pleading 
 to-day on behalf of any sectarian shape of Christian- 
 ity. I ask you to get away from human infirmity 
 and look only at Christ. Thus looking, you will see 
 that He is a power leaping over sectarianism and 
 church vanity, as waves leap over the play-houses of 
 children on the sandy shore. In the face of the 
 caste of church. His beautiful equality runs on and 
 penetrates politics, and poetry, and philosophy. When 
 Robert Burns wrote his little poem "A Man's a Man 
 for a' That," he did not draw the inspiration from 
 the Catholic or Calvinistic or Established Churches. 
 Looking at them intently he would never have 
 reached the idea that " hamely fare" and " hodden- 
 gray" weighed nothing against the value of him that 
 ate the "fare" and wore the "gray." Churches 
 
ON THE HUMAN SPIMIT. 75 
 
 are places where the glory of Christ is blended with 
 the depravity of man ; and is stained dreadfully in 
 the blending. Above and beyond, and also through 
 the churches, the spirit of Christ flies, like the angel 
 that went to and fro over the heavens in St. John's 
 vision. There is a spirit of brotherhood in Christ 
 that even while the Church was holding slaves and 
 was glorying in bondage, was upon the outside of the 
 Church pleading for equality and liberty. When it 
 could not touch the pulpit it touched a Wilberforce. 
 When the communion table would not confess it, it 
 spoke in music through Sumner and Stuart Mill. 
 Jesus Christ has always been larger than any exist- 
 ing sect, or all sects, and as the sun shines upon the 
 earth, and besides pours his flood around it and 
 beyond it, touching other planets and emptying- 
 oceans of light into the great formless void, so Christ 
 has blessed the Church so far as it would receive 
 His gifts, and then has poured His love around it 
 and beyond it, where the statesmen have sat in 
 council without any creed or any prayer. 
 
 It was a great event in the history of the human 
 spirit when the Christian religion came with only one 
 rite for all, and for all only one condition of salva- 
 tion. Be the forehead crowned with jewels, the bap- 
 tism for it is the same as the baptism of the beggar. 
 
76 INFLUENCE OF GHlilBT 
 
 The brow white as the snow and the brow dark 
 with toil in the sun receive the same sprinkling in 
 the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy 
 Ghost. And through the gates of salvation, all who 
 pass in thereat pass by one name and by one faith. 
 The great and the humble form only one company 
 when Christ makes the human race pass before Him 
 in grand review. And when the estimate of God is 
 thus seen, the old human estimates all fail. As when 
 the Ville de Havre was sinking, all human distinc- 
 tions failed, and mistress was as servant, and scholar 
 and sailor, the distinguished and the unknown, were 
 all one because earth was disappearing, and eternity 
 was pressing up against dying hearts, so in the world 
 of religion men become all one because all the van- 
 ities of earth fade on account of the great God 
 coming, through Christ, into the world. 
 
 When one of our generals (General Custar) was 
 making a march, not long since, in the Rocky 
 Mountain solitudes, one of his humblest soldiers, 
 having become separated from the regiment, was 
 found in a lonely ravine with the fatal arrows 
 sticking in his breast. Comrades brought the body 
 into camp. There it was discovered that so humble 
 and obscure was the soldier that his real name was 
 unknown. As he lay upon the ground, there was 
 
ON THE HUMAN SPIRIT. 77 
 
 no one who could mention the name of any being 
 that had ever loved him, or of the mother who had 
 once pressed him an infant against her heart. But 
 mark now the divine grandeur of religion. When 
 the good general desired a simple service to be held, 
 the Bible refused to utter any other words over the 
 poor dead than those that are read at the burial of 
 presidents and kings. The words, " I am the resur- 
 rection and the life; he that believeth in Me, 
 though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whoso- 
 ever Uveth and believeth in Me shall never die," 
 are the only ones Christ will whisper over the tomb 
 of man. The ritual of the Episcopal Church, of 
 the Roman Church, of the Bible direct, in such an 
 hour, uttered over that humble body the same 
 words which Bossuet read when the mighty Cond^ 
 passed from the splendor of France to the quiet 
 tomb. The words that resounded over the beautiful 
 daughter of Charles I., Henrietta, were read here in 
 the lonely hills over a face that had no one to love 
 it. and that revealed no beauty except the sublimity 
 of death. 
 
 Eighteen hundred years of this kind of assault 
 against the vanity of man; centuries of those 
 heavenly whisperings about the greatness of the 
 soul and the insignificance of all else; those cent a- 
 
78 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST 
 
 ries of warning to the lofty, and of consolation for 
 the . poor ; those centuries that baptized high and 
 low in the same three-fold name ; those centuries in 
 which the mighty and the weak have knelt and 
 received the same communion in memory of one 
 Lord — have silently made human hearts flow to- 
 gether, and have made uprightness of life, the only 
 jewel that can confer distinction upon man. When 
 Christianity came along with its unfolding of 
 Heaven; when it placed our feet, not upon the 
 borders of ambition, or riches, or fame, but upon 
 the borders of eternity, it sunk the distinctions of 
 society and set up new praises on the far off shore. 
 I do not mean by this that there is no longer 
 any individual vanity remaining upon earth. Would 
 it were possible to announce this blessed condition 
 of things this day. But it is not our privilege to 
 exult over a redeemed earth. There remain in the 
 world millions to whom a man is great in the purple 
 and fine linen he wears, and in the servants that 
 follow him, or in the dead creed that he shouts in 
 public places. Thus Henry the Eighth moved about 
 in a religious pomposity and with hands stained 
 with innocent blood. We speak not of individuals, 
 but of wide and deep influences, and seeking these, 
 we declare that Christ has poured around the 
 
ON THE HUMAN SPIRIT. 79 
 
 human spirit an atmosphere into which the thinking 
 soul, passing, becomes full of humility and tender- 
 ness. All its egotism and loud vanity fall off like 
 rags when it passes from the scenes of men into 
 this temple of the Man of Nazareth. There are 
 millions of spirits that are growing lofty in this 
 warm light of eternity 
 
 If, now, you will follow out this begun inspection 
 of the heart, you will find that not only is Christ 
 pouring- into the soul the great democratic idea that 
 is blooming now into new and beautiful rights of 
 man, but that Christ has waked in the bosom a 
 group of other feelings scarcely visible when the 
 world was young. Religion has passed from the 
 terrible to the joyous, from the horrid to the beauti- 
 ful. The heathen tortures himself with knives ; the 
 Christian of our day sings words and music, the 
 sweetest that the two arts can produce. The 
 Chinese and all the pagans kill at times innocent 
 little ones as an act of worship ; the Christian 
 mother clasps her infant to her bosom and whispers 
 prayers over it, mingling prayers and tears. The 
 heathen philosopher doubted and steeled his heart 
 to his fate ; the Christian philosopher beholds 
 the city that hath foundations, and walks calmly 
 down life's decline. At no time in the world's 
 
80 ' INFLUENCE OF CHRIST 
 
 career so long as death shall come as now it comes, 
 in garments of mystery, will the human mind 
 approach it with joy, except in cases where the 
 feelings outrun the reflection, or in cases where 
 long sorrow has broken the heart and made 
 Heaven a perpetual longing. But Christ has sur- 
 passed all influences in sweetening the heart in its 
 relations to the world to come. The immense 
 hymnology of this era, the voices of the outside 
 orators and writers from Burke to Webster, from 
 Franklin, who entreated his daughter never to omit 
 her prayers, to Lincoln, whose spirit was full of the 
 life beyond, all these voices of man in his highest 
 estate, show us that all the souls of our generations 
 are marching along to a music first sounded within 
 the spirit of Christ. Be our fellow men in the 
 Church or outside of it, around them pours this 
 pensiveness of immortality, crowding into the soul 
 like life-blood pouring through the heart. In calm, 
 Christ comes as the eternal beauty ; in storm, He 
 comes as the eternal peace. A Christian in mid- 
 ocean wrote as follows : 
 
 Borne upon the ocean's foam, 
 Far from native land and home, 
 Midnight's curtain dense with wrath 
 Hanging o'er our venturous path 
 
ON THE HUMAN SPIRIT. 81 
 
 "While the mountain wave is rolling, 
 And the ship's hell faintly tolling. 
 Saviour! on the stormy sea, 
 Bid us rest secure in thee. 
 
 The same sentiment follows us on both land and 
 ocean. It has become a part of the consciousness 
 that makes up human life. It is true many seem to 
 possess it not, but we seek not a sentiment perfectly 
 universal. Not all the human race loves beauty, not 
 all love the pursuit of truth, yet the love of truth 
 is a sentiment that impresses us with its universality 
 and power. So there may be spirits living and 
 dying unaffected by the Son of Man, but when we 
 seek for an influence that is molding deeply the 
 heart, we find it here in Nazareth. Whether Mr. 
 Lincoln repeats his poem. 
 
 Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud ? 
 
 whether Macaulay, dying, wishes to take the sacra- 
 ment, whether Payson prays, or Bunyan dreams, 
 whether a child commits itself to God at night, or a 
 Cranmer sees Heaven through the light of the fagot, 
 it is all one scene — that of Jesus Christ affecting 
 deeply the inmost spirit of man. 
 
 Look into this soul, gradually becoming Christ- 
 like, and find in its beauty the best argument of im- 
 
82 INFLUENCE OF CHRIST ON THE HUMAN SPIRIT. 
 
 mortality. As the approaching day in June tips first 
 the mountain tops, and then by slow advance reveals 
 the leaf upon the highest branches of the tree by 
 your window, so the light of immortality, falling 
 down from the sky, strikes first the loftiest hearts, 
 and though they be few in number, and though a 
 sinful multitude lie in ignorance and vice at their 
 feet, yet, upon these lofty ones you may see falling 
 the white light of immortal life. Let us call it 
 Heaven, and place Christ in the midst of the 
 approaching scene. 
 
MII^OE QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 
 
SERMON V. 
 MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 
 
 rpHE influence of Jesus Christ is so varied in its 
 -^ character that we are in danger of overlooking 
 the lesser results. The atonement may hide other 
 facts, as the great sparkling planets seem, at night, 
 to dwarf the fixed stars. He who would do the 
 great heavens justice must study also the distant 
 Orion and the obscure nebulae. It is probable that 
 the Roman Church has deeply injured itseK by its 
 long, fixed gaze at Christ in only two lights, as a 
 sacrifice for sin and as a ruler of nations. He is 
 thus made an ambitious prince, adding state after 
 state to His empire ; and an apologist for sinners, by 
 making perpetual compensation for their daily sins 
 in the offering up of His body in the mass. Men 
 come to this Christ with their sins to be forgiven, 
 not to be cured; and even the dead are brought 
 before Him to be pardoned rather than transformed. 
 Hence that Church comes to us to-day great in its 
 
86 MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 
 
 political power because it has seen Christ as king, 
 and great in its absolution of sinners because it has 
 seen Christ only as a pardoner of the guilty. Here 
 and there a heart has seen Christ in some other 
 light, and has become a Sister of Charity or a self- 
 denying missionary of the cross. 
 
 Christ is a wide, deep, moral world. He who 
 finds only one idea or one beauty in Christ, is one 
 who should find upon earth only one plan, and in 
 the heavens only one fount of cloud or light. It is 
 an injurious human weakness if we say Christ is 
 divine, and then feel that we have found all this 
 divinity in the atonement or in the resurrection. 
 Thus have we put Deity into a narrow cell, too 
 narrow to be even fally human, much less divine. 
 That which we call divine must overflow. It must 
 not run like a rivulet, but roll like the sea. There 
 are myriads of persons who can not accept of Christ 
 as an atonement, but who are drawing the guidance 
 and the hope of life from His words and actions. 
 There are others who identify Christ and the Father, 
 and are blessed with this nearness of God; while 
 there are others who feel that Christ is only a 
 super-human being, but who undergo an exaltation 
 of character by following this lofty ideal. Little 
 children find in Christ an image of their own spirit ; 
 
MINOR QUALITIES OF GHBI8T. 87 
 
 the Sister of Charity finds in Him the attributes of 
 a woman ; the devoted missionary to the wilds of 
 the Indian finds in the same Christ the attributes of 
 a hero. This comes not to pass because the human 
 heart can see in the world only what it wishes to 
 see, and nothing more and nothing less, but sees all 
 this variety of moral worth because it is all in Christ 
 just as there is a fullness in God's material world. 
 There will always be more in Christ than any heart 
 can get out of Him. It is my wish this morning to 
 ask you to look at some of the minor qualities in 
 this great Son of Man and God. 
 
 1. He possessed a simplicity of mind that gave 
 Him at once to all conditions of men. He was 
 divorced from all speculative philosophy and wedded 
 to universal practical life. The deep inquiries and 
 unusual language of philosophers create a gulf 
 between them and the people. The world at large 
 cares nothing about Aristotle, and Plato, and Des- 
 cartes, and Kant, because these names are entangled 
 amid the unusual verbiage and the final arguments 
 of abstract thought, and seem to stand thus afar off 
 from the real world of man. Christ moved amid all 
 the great ideas that have concerned all the philoso- 
 phers from Greece to England, but He moved along 
 with the assumptions of one who depended not 
 
88 MINOR QUALITIES OF OllSISr. 
 
 upon argument, and with the simple language of 
 common life. Christ did not pass by the realm of 
 debate, but He moved through it with a faith, and 
 eascj and naturalness, and simplicity, that made Him 
 the voice not of a few scholars, but of the world's 
 vast majority. His words were the simplest in 
 speech and His laws the most acceptable to reason. 
 The obscure arguments of the abstract philosophers 
 are more the world's misfortune than its delight. 
 They may be a necessity, but they are not a popular 
 shape of intellectual action. At last the world 
 becomes weary of the terms and the arguments, and 
 the dust of the ages bears witness to the world's 
 neglect. 
 
 It is now well known that the highest education 
 itself tends to a simplicity of words and thought. 
 Youth and romantic years may love obscure dream- 
 ings, and there are conditions of intellect that 
 delight in the unfathomable of thought, but the 
 world as a vast body of rational beings delights in 
 truths the clearest and language the simplest. As 
 the open sunlight is dear to all, so men love to sit 
 down in the best light of truth. And if this is not 
 true of all the days of men, it is true of their best 
 days at least, the days of most sincerity and 
 solemnity. To all who live in lands that know the 
 
MTNOM qXTALITIES OF 0HBI8T. 
 
 history of Christ, His words come in the last days, 
 the most sober days, and alone satisfy the heart. 
 Dying hours utterly despise the stately language of 
 philosophy, theological or metaphysical, and betake 
 themselves to simplicity. There is no pomp in the 
 chamber of death. The greatest statesman or the 
 greatest scholar whispers his final words in the 
 language of perfect simplicity. This comes not 
 because the physical organism has passed from 
 power to weakness, but because the solemnity of 
 the hour has utterly displaced vanity. Coming into 
 the world as little children, thus we also pass out 
 of it. Now, the matchless simplicity of Christ fits 
 Him to these last hours of man, and those who have 
 all their life long dealt in magnificence of words 
 and theory, at last say, "Read me the words of 
 Jesus. Thejr alone are clear, sweet and sublime." 
 Had Christ enveloped Himself in the drapery of a 
 stately eloquence, or in the obscure arguments of 
 the theologians; or had He sought the associations 
 of scholarship, and burdened His text with a world 
 of quotation and allusion, what a mighty throng, 
 not only of earth's humble ones, but even of 
 earth's great, would have been compelled at last to 
 turn away from Him and seek elsewhere the 
 simplicity that seems so full of peace. There is a 
 
90 MINOB QUALITIES OF CUBIST. 
 
 place in the world for all the splendor of rhetoric, 
 and music, and art, and for all the jewels of gold 
 and the fabrics of velvet and silk; we decry none 
 of these things, but there are times when all these 
 splendid things count as naught. There are times 
 when the spirit asks, not for a great chorus of 
 music, but for a soft strain, a subdued song from 
 one voice, or an air from an instrument where a 
 hand rests upon the strings. There was an hour 
 when Mozart wished to hear only the Requiem. 
 Thus in the vast world of thought there are times 
 in the life of each being, however educated and 
 great, when the soul asks not for argument, but for 
 food; not for magnificence of sound, but for simple 
 words of life and hope. Christ is fortunate in that 
 he uttered words just such as men need in their 
 best hours, words not noisy like a military band 
 cheering men onward to ambition and bloodshed, 
 but sweet like a harp, helping the soul to pass 
 resignedly from these shores. In our days of vigor 
 and success and world-worship, there may come 
 moments when we may wish Jesus had left behind 
 Him masterpieces of eloquence, such as we can now 
 read over the graves of Sumner and Burke, those 
 giants of argument and passion and language, but 
 these hours are rather the children of temporary 
 
MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 91 
 
 vanity than of true greatness. Do not permit these 
 proud days to deceive you. The time is not far 
 away when you will feel that it is not in the power 
 of rhetoric or passion to add any thing to the words 
 of Jesus Christ. The metaphysician may secretly 
 regret that the Nazarene did not discourse like a 
 Plato or a Locke ; the poet may wish that the Son 
 of Man had said more about land, sea, and sky, 
 about opening spring-time or the falling leaf ; the 
 Calvinist and Trinitarian may wish they could find 
 in the Lord's discourse a system that should more 
 fully shadow forth their own ; and devotees of 
 science may feel at times that the Cosmos of 
 Humboldt surpasses the simple story of the Gospels ; 
 but these longings and complaints are only the 
 result of narrow specializations. Christ spoke for a 
 whole world, for the times of its greatest need, and 
 the wish of the specialist is engulfed in the wide, 
 infinite wish of mankind. Our wishes are the style 
 of time : Christ's manner the style of eternity. 
 
 2. Let me ask you now to mark the attractive- 
 ness of Christ. What a calamity to mankind, had 
 Christ not spoken from an affectionate heart. 
 Suppose He had stood apart from society like a 
 peripatetic, or had spoken from the icy retreat of 
 the stoic, or with the vanity of a schoolman. The 
 
92 MINOR QUALITIES OF CSSIST. 
 
 words, unattended by friendship, would have died 
 like seeds in the earth where there falls no sunshine. 
 The words of a father differ all the world over 
 from the words of a mother. In later years, young 
 men fallen into temptation have remembered the 
 words their mothers had spoken. The counsel of 
 the father may have been wise and good, but the 
 mother's words are transformed into eloquence by 
 the love that envelops and penetrates them. The 
 father^s advice is rhetoric ; the mother's, a sword, a 
 flame, a hymn. The former is language for the 
 intellect, the latter an arrow in the heart. Thus 
 Christ breathed into His language such a solicitude, 
 such an affection, that he does not speak to us as 
 an orator, but as our friend. He spake as never 
 man spake; not simply with a higher wisdom, but 
 with a warmer sympathy. Did Plato, did Zeno, did 
 Seneca ever so love the people and so cling to them 
 as a mother to her children ? When we recall the 
 teachings of the Saviour, and then around them, 
 such as they were, throw that affection for man 
 which finally led Him to endure the cross, we have 
 the elements of a power which shall hand those 
 words along to the end of human history, though 
 ten thousand years shall intervene. Words are of 
 themselves empty vessels. They are only so many 
 
MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 93 
 
 cups of silver and gold. They await equally the 
 poison of the flatterer, or the boastings of the 
 egotist, or the romance of the lover, or the wisdom 
 or solicitude of a divine soul. Eloquence is nothing 
 but the filling of these cups with the earnestness 
 and vital love of the soul. Words from the garrul- 
 ous are chalices full of air put to the lips ; words 
 fidl of such love and pity as were in the sacred 
 heart are cups full of crystal water offered us in a 
 burning desert. Language depending wholly upon 
 the quantity and quality of soul crowded into it, 
 the intercourse of Jesus with the world, will always 
 stand clothed with a wonderful power. His words 
 will charm the living and the dying to the end of 
 man's career. His words were urns of gold that 
 carried His soul. 
 
 3. Next to this sympathy which secured the per- 
 petual attractiveness of Christ, let us observe the 
 general breadth of His mind and spirit. All the 
 statements of this Son of Man are broad statements. 
 His baptism, His faith. His atonement. His maxims, 
 His ethics, are all set forth in the widest terms 
 known in language. He is .the way, truth, and life, 
 but the particulars of the way, the details of the 
 truth, the manner of the life, are omitted. He says, 
 " I am the resurrection and the life," but there is 
 
94 MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 
 
 no commitment to the idea that these particles of 
 flesh will ever come back to the soul again, or to 
 the idea that a new body will be given man in the 
 new world. He calls HimseK " Saviour" but He 
 waits not to place Himself upon the platform of the 
 various theories regarding the manner of the great 
 price paid or to be paid for the soul. He seems to 
 love the broad name of " Saviour " or leader of the 
 soul, that all, of whatever age, child or father, of 
 whatever condition, learned or unlearned', may take 
 the grand word to heart, and draw life and peace 
 from its merciful, elastic breath. On account of this 
 tendencv of Christ to deal in universals. He has 
 stood forth in beauty and light even when around 
 those who pretended to follow Him has roared the 
 storm of debate. The long and bloody conflict that 
 has often made the Christian Church resemble the 
 arena of Nero's gladiators, or the orgies of the 
 painted Indians, arose out of these limited intellects 
 which emerged from cells and convents and inquired 
 whether the atonement was limited or general, 
 whether the halo about the Christ was derived or 
 underived, and whether the Holy Ghost proceeded 
 eternally from the Father alone or from both the 
 Father and the Son. Even the great and progressive 
 Dbllinger, in his recent convention, has drawn up 
 
MINOli QUALITIES OF OHRIST. 95 
 
 some new articles about the Holy Ghost's proceed- 
 ing " patre filioque," thus showing how difficult it 
 is for a man or an age to divest himself or itself of 
 the theological fantasy, that deep-seated hallucina- 
 tion. Little of the world's religious turmoil arose 
 around Christ. But from the human mind, full of 
 darkness and vanity — a sad combination — rolled the 
 smoke and fire, as from an infernal Vesuvius, that 
 have buried in ashes and death cities and homes 
 which under Christ alone would have been Edens of 
 happiness. Above all things religion is a science of 
 generalities. It lies broad and deep like the expanse 
 of heaven, and like the same heaven will utter few 
 particulars. Astronomers tell us Saturn lies within 
 beautiful rings, and that Jupiter has equal day and 
 night, and that one season runs through all its year, 
 but here these wise men pause. Whether beings 
 like man dwell there, and gather wild flowers, and 
 hear bird songs in eternal spring, and whether they 
 sail ships upon oceans that know no wild storm, they 
 are all silent as those awful depths. Religion surpasses 
 even astronomy in the breadth and vagueness of its 
 generalizations. The theologians, misconceiving its 
 genius, have loaded it down with particulars from 
 which it will now take them all their remaining life 
 to retract. From their lofty mount of egotism they 
 
96 MINOR QUALITIES OF OHRIST. 
 
 must work their way down to the valley of humilia- 
 tion. Unable any longer to tell the multitude just 
 when and how God made the universe, thej' must part 
 with old statistics and go to the generality that "In 
 the beginning God created the heavens and the 
 earth." So all through the Christian system where 
 the theologians have been most specific they must 
 suffer the deepest humiliation and make the most 
 marked retreat. 
 
 To illustrate further the breadth of Christ, the 
 safeness of His generalizations, mark the flow of 
 His thoughts about heaven and hell. In the hands 
 of this Christ there is an indignation of God indeed, 
 but it is so reasonable and lofty that the human 
 mind accepts of it and feels its mysterious power. 
 The theologians sought to know the Infinite most 
 fully, and hence they beheld the wrath of God 
 moving toward the non-elect, or the non-baptized, 
 and from all eternity compassing the destruction of 
 the vast majority of earth's throngs ; but in the 
 philosophy of the Lord the indignation of God 
 moves out against the impure, the deceitful, the 
 drunken, the cruel, the murderous, the willful 
 offenders against God and man. There is a vast 
 sentiment of justice in the human heart. We all 
 know that God is just. Hence in Shakspeare all 
 
MINOR QUALITIES OF GHMItiT. 97 
 
 the mighty ones that did wrong, from Othello the 
 Moor to the dazzling intellect of Lady Macbeth, 
 move all toward the bar of justice, and the reader 
 of those dramas, or the spectator before the curtain, 
 feels that something within is gratified when death 
 overtakes all of Avon's evil ones. Endure earth 
 ever so long, this sentiment will remain in the 
 human heart as eternal as its love of friends or its 
 appreciation of the beautiful. But in the hands of 
 many of the theologians this deep sentiment of 
 right and wrong, and of good or ill desert is so 
 outraged, it is so compelled to take in foreordained 
 wrath, and wrath suffered , for sins, in which the 
 sufferer took no part, and of which he has not the 
 feeblest consciousness, that it ceases almost to believe 
 in God, and in a maze so dark says : " Come what 
 may, I can only await a doom that seems alike 
 destitute of reason and terrible in power." The 
 hope of the world lies in the possibility that the 
 multitude will read its destiny more and more in 
 the teachings of Jesus Christ. In His Gospel this 
 indignation is the holy indignation of a just God^ 
 It is not a malicious flame shooting out like the 
 tongue of a serpent toward those who sinned in 
 Adam before they lived, shooting out from eternity, 
 with the hiss of a perpetual and infinite rabies, but 
 
98 MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRIST. 
 
 it is the justice which the human mind knows 
 should follow all willful sin. The justice of Jesus 
 Christ is that justice of which the tragedies of 
 Shakspeare are a faint image, and which has been 
 reflected in the laws of states, and has always been 
 imbedded in the soul. Oh, sad day for the Church 
 and for human virtue when the teachers of Christi- 
 anity turned away from the broad and simple Christ 
 and asked the metaphysicians, and monks, and 
 fatalists, to give them a detailed map of the Infinite 
 One. A Roman priest not long since permitted a 
 convert from Protestantism to bury his infant along 
 with the Protestant dead if he would inclose in the 
 little coffin a lump of consecrated earth, to guard 
 the little Catholic soul from sharing in the Protes- 
 tant hell. So the little holy earth was placed in 
 the coffin to come between the infant and the 
 divine wrath. And a few weeks since Archbishop 
 Purcell, in speaking of a railway workman killed in 
 an accident, who had, being a Protestant, lived 
 happily with a Catholic wife, said that the children 
 of that poor widow were not only fatherless, but 
 were doomed to perdition at last, for Heaven could 
 receive only the families of the purely Catholic. 
 
 I mention these caricatures of the Creator because 
 ■they have transpired most recently, and hence can 
 
MINOR qUALITIBS OF OHRIST. 99 
 
 not be charged upon the sixteenth century ; but I 
 could, in a few moments' reading, have found, away 
 from the Roman Church, notions of God's justice as 
 injurious and as disgraceful. From him who studies 
 the Son of Man, all this desecration of the divine 
 disappears, and the righteousness of the Father in 
 Heaven becomes the preventing fear and the dear 
 hope of every heart. That God will approve of 
 nothing wrong, is the hope of the world as to virtue. 
 That He will reward those who love Him is the 
 refuge of peace for each soul. In presence of the 
 God unveiled by Christ, the mother may in perfect 
 hope lay down her infant in the grave. She needs 
 place no holy earth in its coffin, no baptism upon its 
 forehead ; she need read no ambiguous words from 
 the rubric or the confession, for the God in Christ 
 is a great God, and none but the consciously and 
 willingly sinful need tremble at His wrath. As 
 for the children in their tombs, they need no inter- 
 vention of holy water or holy ground. All the mal- 
 edictions of earth, all the condemnatory laws of all 
 the bishops, all the anathemas of a thousand popes, 
 could not detain one of those little souls a moment 
 from the bosom of God. 
 
 Now, these are some of the minor tones in that 
 sublime symphony called the Christ. And if these 
 
100 MINOR QUALITIES OF CHRiaT. 
 
 are only a few notes from the masterpiece, what 
 must the whole diapason be to the soul that shall 
 listen to the music as it rolls along from the human 
 to the divine ? Lending your ear at times to this 
 harmony of love and truth, you will at last beg the 
 children of men to cease their clamor, to terminate 
 their discord, and leave you to fill your longing, 
 hoping spirit with this ravishing requiem from the 
 sky. 
 
THE FUTUEE OYEEWOEKED. 
 
SERMON VI. 
 THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 
 
 "Now is the accepted time." — 3 Oor. 6:3. 
 
 "TF it be true, as the optimist teaches, that every 
 -*- evil has its good, it is also true that every good 
 carries its own evil. One statement is as true as 
 the other. The meaning of all such statements must 
 be that life is full of conflicting forces, physical and 
 spiritual, and that to balance these in such a manner 
 that usefulness and happiness may result, is the 
 problem and 'duty of man. 
 
 Among the supposed virtues of this world, men 
 have assigned a high place to its great law of pro- 
 gress. It is the consolation of all hearts that we 
 are all moving forward to all that is noble in intel- 
 lect and sentiment. The privilege of this forward 
 movement is at least supposed to be offered to all^ 
 and there are many who contend that not simply 
 the privilege but the destiny of progress rests upon 
 all. This at least is true, that a grand law of 
 
104 THB FUTURE OVERWORKED. 
 
 advance pervades the universe, and reveals itself in 
 the seed of the oak, in the development of animal 
 life, and in the unfolding of the human intellect. 
 We look back and at once pity our fathers, for our 
 boat has floated away from their barren, wintry 
 shore, far down to what seems to us the land of 
 spontaneous harvest and perpetual spring. Progress 
 is real and beautiful, a great law of man full of 
 present happiness and of hope. Of this great good 
 what now is the evil side ? What is the drop of 
 poison in this cup ? It is found in the fact, that 
 this coming glory of the future is always drawing 
 the heart away from the present. In our inability 
 to see two objects at once, we gaze at the future 
 and sit down and wait for it to come. Thus the 
 great outlook of the soul is suffered to neutralize 
 the idea of doing with one's might what the hand 
 finds to do. 
 
 There is no way for abating the evil, so far as 
 all the world is concerned, but the evil is grave 
 enough to merit notice, and then there may be here 
 and there an individual heart that will perceive the 
 evil and fly from it. It would be a great gain to 
 our store of practical philosophy and religion if we 
 could learn to feel that the future does not create 
 nor bring progress: it only receives it. It is only a 
 
THE FUTURE OVEBWOMKED. 105 
 
 storehouse into which the present empties itself. If 
 the present be barren, the future remains empty also, 
 and, moving itself further away, waits for a laborious, 
 patient present to precede it. The future is only 
 the final estimate, the summing up of all the former 
 days. There is no honor, or learning, or salvation, in 
 it, except so far as the present is busy over the 
 learning, or honor, or salvation. 
 
 It is to be regretted that we make bad use of the 
 virtues of the soul. God implanted hope and expec- 
 tation in the breast to cheer it, to make it able to 
 bear dark hours, and as such .it is one of the noblest 
 virtues of the soul. Paul places it down among the 
 divinities of earth, between Faith and Charity. But 
 this virtue planted in ' the bosom to cheer it, is per- 
 verted from its office and is transformed into the 
 thing hoped for. Hope is metamorphosed into actual 
 riches, actual goodness, actual religion. Instead of 
 toiling at a new world, we think hope is busy fixing 
 it all up for us. Years pass by in dreamy indolence 
 because that great thing called progress seems to be 
 out in the advance preparing all the forms of bless- 
 edness, earthly and heavenly. We have personified 
 hope and progress until they have become actual 
 laborers, going on before us, making paths and build- 
 ing homes for us. And so well are they doing this 
 
106 THE FUTURE OVEBWOBKED. 
 
 world-work that nothing remains for us but to 
 dream and wait. Wonderful and essential as the 
 demand of expectation is in all the days of man, yet 
 it seems that at all times man should look into the 
 face of the present and see what meaning there may 
 be in its quiet countenance. The present is the 
 eventful day. The future is only the summing up 
 of that which has gone by. 
 
 In the discussion of our theme to-day, all the 
 issues of life are alike interested. Religion, and edu- 
 cation, and business, and home, and the uncounted 
 details of a busy life, are all affected by this potency 
 of the future. They are all liable to be cheered by its 
 proper use or blinded by its bad application. All 
 the passions of the soul need regulation. Man can 
 not, like a brute, follow nature. In food, and drink, 
 and work, and play, and sleep, man dare not follow 
 the simple desires of his physical organism. If a 
 man sleeps to the uttermost from boyhood up to 
 middle life, his mind weakens and he becomes an 
 idiot from too much sleep. 'He may, also, fail and 
 die from too little. So all through the catalogue of 
 physical and mental tastes and tendencies man can 
 not follow nature. He was destined to follow 
 another guide called reason, a being appointed of 
 heaven to discriminate, to impel and impede, to cheer 
 
THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 107 
 
 and to warn. Thus ambition, and the love of 
 knowledge, and the love of money, and all the appe- 
 tites of the body and soul, are to come to the bar 
 of reason and receive their orders for the day, — 
 orders of advance or retreat. 
 
 To cultivate reason is, therefore, one of the 
 highest duties, because then her wise orders are 
 issued to all the other impulses of the soul, and a 
 varied world passes from chaos into harmony. Is 
 there any thing then in which we can trust nature 
 alone? Are there any hours that are independent 
 of this reason ? It appears not. But there are 
 hours into which it has not been the world's custom 
 to bring reason into play. There are hours in which 
 we all act like so many little children, and know 
 no law but nature. Among these hours are those 
 of hope and fond anticipation. To-morrow is loaded 
 down with the things we intend to do and to have. 
 There is no faculty of the soul so overworked as 
 this faculty of expectation. If all shall come out 
 of the future which we are all pouring into it, we 
 shall have a marvelous world before long. The 
 tame, sad facts of these days will soon give place 
 to islands of milk and honey, and to palaces of 
 Aladdin. 
 
 The influence of the future is, like the love of 
 
108 THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 
 
 ambition or gold, to be regulated. If we suffer this 
 beauty of futurity to run wild in our breast, it 
 makes us sickly dreamers, who will die at last as an 
 infant. What God gave us as a consolation in 
 sorrow, men transform into a reason of existence, an 
 object of life. The morrow thus neutralizes the 
 present, and to-day is empty and worthless. When 
 a young man lives in the^ expectation of a fortune, 
 to come to him in middle age, how for the most 
 part it utterly ruins his youth. Books, professions, 
 industry, ambition, self-culture, are all robbed of 
 worth by this powerful expectation. The young 
 man is thus slain by his future. But by his side a 
 companion who is doomed to a life of toil finds in 
 books and ambition and culture and profession a 
 . daily power and happiness, and by them he rises in 
 mind and soul. To the former the future was over- 
 loaded. It was too rosy, too certain. It eclipses 
 the present. Expectation often surpasses poverty 
 and sorrow as a blight of life. In the early years 
 of life there is nothing but the future before the 
 mind. The young are excluded from the great 
 fields of usefulness, of bar, and pulpit, and author- 
 ship, and trade. Hence, the first twenty years are 
 years of only expectation. This may be a reason 
 why, in our mature period, all still look at the 
 
THE FUTURE OVEBWOSKED. 109 
 
 morrow. Having spent twenty years in the service 
 of this kind of romance, perhaps it becomes a part 
 of our nature difficult to escape. Be the cause this 
 or that, the fact remains that here we all are to-day 
 still loading the morrow down with our intentions. 
 We can not put away childish things. 
 
 It is not the province of the pulpit, perhaps, to 
 point out what injury this habit is working in 
 business, and politics, and culture, and to home life 
 and general happiness. The whole field is, at least, 
 too large for our hast}' survey. Let us limit our 
 thoughts to the great paths of philanthropy and 
 religion. The evils which the rosy future brings to 
 those departments are subject of thought large 
 enough and painful enough for one hour. 
 
 It would not be beyond the truth were I to say 
 that there are a thousand persons in this city who 
 intend to bless mankind by gifts of benevolence. 
 When a little more gold has been gathered, and a 
 few more gray hairs have come, and the dear future 
 shall have come a little nearer, they are going to 
 found asylums, and art-galleries, and libraries, and 
 colleges, and, bursting the chains of self, love the 
 large suffering world. These intentions are the most 
 solemn and noble of their hearts. Nearly every 
 clergyman has conversed with these good men, and 
 
110 THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 
 
 can bear witness to their sincerity. These are good 
 people at heart. But we come, now, to the defect 
 in their scheme — a defect that hides itself, and, like 
 Satan, will deceive the very elect. The calamity of 
 these well-wishing hearts, and the calamity of the 
 long-waiting public is simply this, that there is no 
 such future any where as that one pictured in the 
 dream of these benevolent men. The day when 
 they shall feel that they have heaped up enough of 
 gold; the day when they will be willing to part 
 with it; the day when they will love the poor com- 
 munity, and will desire to lay down great offerings 
 at its feet, and when the future so long dreamed of 
 will come down in golden colors out of the sky, 
 will never come. The morrow is only to-day carried 
 forward. Of the thousands of persons who to-day 
 fully intend to spend their money for God and 
 society, only one or two will find the future what 
 they thought, and, perhaps, that one or two will be 
 the humblest of the thousand, both as to the power 
 to give and the scope of the benefaction. The 
 future, to a man in middle or mature life, will 
 contain very little not to be found now in his soul. 
 To-morrow is only a point in the river a little 
 nearer the sea. The same water flows there that 
 flowed a hundred miles above. It is a sad thing 
 
TEE FUTURE OVERWORKED. Ill 
 
 when one must point to these passing hours, and 
 must remind his neighbor and confess for himself 
 that they are the photograph of the remainder of 
 life. To-morrow will only be to-day rolled on. 
 While we are passing along through the early years, 
 it is lawful for us to load the times to come, for 
 then the body and the mind are strengthening for 
 work, and the school house stands between us and 
 the great duties of the world; but when manhood 
 has fully come, this worship of to-morrow should be 
 given up, and the full significance of the present 
 should burst upon the intellect and soul. All the 
 dazzle of to-morrow, after that, is only an ignis- 
 fatuus. 
 
 There are colleges about this city that have been 
 waiting twenty years for the good intentions of rich 
 men to ripen. There are many forms of public 
 beneficence that have been reposing in manuscript 
 for a quarter of a century, waiting for the future to 
 evolve for them a reality from the generous and 
 promising heart. But the real truth is, there is 
 nothing in the morrow that was not in the yester- 
 day, and one by one these designing, promising hearts 
 have fallen asleep without having come up to the 
 golden days when benevolence would be a pleasure 
 and money would no longer enslave the soul. The 
 
112 THE FUTUBE OVEBWOBKED. 
 
 time for action is in the full noon of life. As that 
 is the time when orators utter their best orations, 
 and poets write their best poems, and painters spread 
 their most truthful colors — the time when all life 
 blooms — that is the time for the works of benevo- 
 lence and religion. What use to make of one's 
 property, is a question that demands the highest 
 powers of the mind. To bring to that problem the 
 weakness of old age is to insult reason, and to peril 
 one's own name. Mankind is doubly robbed by the 
 romance of the future; robbed in that many die 
 without having remembered mankind, and in that 
 many others remembered the world foolishly. They 
 left second childhood to dispose of their fortunes. 
 If there is one phrase which should be graven upon 
 the heart, it is the Bible phrase, " Now is the day 
 of salvation." The divine words apply on all sides. 
 Not only Heaven, but also all the great objects this 
 side of Heaven, are depending upon man's realization 
 of the meaning of the word now. Man has been 
 successful only in these circumstances where he 
 could not wait. When events have hemmed him in, 
 when his ships have been burned behind him, when 
 his enemy has pressed him closely upon the field of 
 battle or of the intellect, then, when the gates of 
 the future have been closed, and those of the 
 
THE FUTURE OVERWORKED 113 
 
 present thrown open, man has always been a hero. 
 Some of the most biting aphorisms of the great 
 writers have been uttered against the spirit of delay 
 that broods over the soul. One says, " We pass our 
 life in deliberation, and die in it."' "Delays have 
 dangerous ends," says Shakspeare. " To-morrow is 
 a satire on to-day," said Young. But Cervantes 
 states well the folly of feeding eternally upon hope. 
 He says : " By the street called By-and-by, you 
 reach a house called Never." Thus in the literature 
 of all ages, from the Bible to the page of the Span- 
 iard, you find that mankind early learned the impo- 
 sition that expectation was playing upon it, and 
 sought out biting words to warn us against its snare. 
 The great mission of hope is to inspire the present. 
 The dazzling glory of the future is only to make 
 the present all light around the foot. But if man 
 sits down and waits till he shall come to the dazzling 
 morrow, the morrow at once becomes dark ; it takes 
 back every banner of light, because the gazing soul 
 has not read aright its significance. As the past 
 throws its light upon the present, tells us what 
 thinkers, and toilers, and singers, said and sang, and 
 what the patriots fought for in those long years, so 
 the future pours its inspiration out upon the present, 
 that, aroused by the world past and the world to 
 
114 THE FUTURE OVEBWOBKED. 
 
 come, the soul may realize the supreme greatness of 
 life, and rise to deeds worthy of the hour. A 
 promise to be or do in the far future is a kind of 
 airy, dreamy lie. It should seem that our politics, 
 our acts, our love to our neighbor, our acceptance of 
 Jesus Christ, are all to be slaughtered by this new 
 enemy called " expectation." We are all intending 
 to live. All the varied good of earth, from kindness 
 to the poorest mortal to a profound worship of the 
 Almighty, is lying in our intention. But the scene 
 is delusive. It is a mirage in a desert. When we 
 have moved on we shall find that no river or lake 
 was really before us ; it was all burning sand. 
 
 We have all set up a new divinity. We have 
 richly decorated her shrine, and our worship is regu- 
 lar and passionate. And this divinity is not money. 
 It is not pleasure. It is a beautiful, ethereal being 
 called The Future. To her care we are committing 
 politics, art, home-life, and religion. This goddess is 
 coming to us after a few years with her arms full 
 of all kinds of salvation. We need only worship and 
 wait. 
 
 Was there ever such a false worship along the 
 Niger or the Ganges? The future is not an actor; 
 it is only a result. It adds up the transactions of 
 to-day. 
 
THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 115 
 
 When, after an absence of twenty years, you visit 
 the old homestead and find the old orchard gone, 
 and the old house dismantled, its door-side moss-cov- 
 ered, you say, hastily, " What changes time has 
 wrought !" But it was the agencies acting in time, 
 the daily storms, the frosts, the winds, the worm, 
 that slowly transformed the old home into decay. 
 Thus the Future has no potency. The present is 
 working all sad changes, and the future is only the 
 point at which the heart must break. 
 
 When hope cheers the present, and acts as an 
 inspiration to its toil and goodness, then hope is a 
 good angel ; but the moment hope acts as an opiate 
 upon the present, it becomes a poison of the soul. 
 Rather than worship her, one would better deify the 
 present and come each morning with new homage. 
 " Now " is an idea that should be more deeply 
 studied by those capable of any usefulness. The 
 money-makers alone have fathomed its depths. They 
 alone " never put off till to-morrow what can be 
 done to-day." But the moralists, and religionists, 
 and possible benefactors, have not studied enough 
 the little word. All the good ideas of earth, even 
 the invitations of Jesus Christ, are postponed, and- 
 postponed until these great " hopes deferred make 
 the public heart sick." The arguments in favor of 
 
116 THE FUTURE OVERWORKED. 
 
 " Now " are short and sharp. 1. The morrow is 
 uncertain. The only sure thing for the future is a 
 tomb for each one. It may come next autumn, next 
 winter, next spring. It may come by a sinking ship, 
 or a burning church, or a fever that shrouds the 
 intellect, or a paralysis that strikes the heart. The 
 probability that you will approach death slowly, and 
 that your good schemes will come up before you in 
 that hour for final and wise adjustment, is only one 
 in fifty. 2. The soul needs in these years the edu- 
 cation, the noble consciousness, that comes from duty 
 already done. The intention to do right things and 
 beautiful things is poor food for the soul. But 
 when one in the noon of life can already see good 
 works back of him, then his present is free forever 
 from emptiness, and the nobleness of yesterday 
 becomes a part of the soul's essential character. 
 
 What the mind needs in the last part of life is 
 the consciousness of having lived the former part 
 well. Dryden says : " To-morrow, do thy worst, for 
 I have lived to-day." The heart that intends to do 
 good deeds is in great peril. If any thing comes 
 between it and its deeds it becomes at once a zero. 
 It is like the Persian prince who divided his life 
 up in decades — the first decade for travel, the 
 second for government, the third for friendship, the 
 
TUE FUTURE OVEBWOBKED. 117 
 
 fourth for God. A magnificent appointment, but 
 overthrown by an incident — he died in the first ten 
 years. But suppose life to run along, and death to 
 be far away ; what man most needs is that the large 
 part of his life should come first, that all the subse- 
 quent years may be lifted up and held up by the 
 strong arms of the past. It is melancholy to have 
 the soul realize the greatness of earth when it is 
 just leaving it forever. 
 
 But time fails us. Let me remind you that the 
 great outside world needs your benevolence and 
 religion now. In twenty years the countless chil- 
 dren and the countless poor- of this city and the 
 land will have passed beyond the valley of blessing. 
 There is a multitude which no one can bless but 
 you, and you can do that service only now. The 
 good that shall come a score of years hence will 
 come to a different throng. Those that now swarm 
 around you will have passed away, uneducated, 
 uncheered, unloved. Some poetess, sitting in a 
 lonely room and reading about the tears of love and 
 pity that had fallen over some orphan's grave, wrote 
 a touching rebuke in the poem, "Love me before I 
 die." After our friends have gone from us, we love 
 them. With such a land as we possess, full of lib- 
 erty and wealth, with such multitudes around that 
 
118 IHE FUTURE OrEBWOBKED. 
 
 need all things for mind and soul ; with such a 
 leader as Jesus Christ, and with the morrow all 
 wrapped in uncertainty, and the tomb not far away, 
 the words that should most burn in the heart are 
 these : " Now is the accepted time." 
 
 If any further argument were needed to convince 
 you what an empty thing that "future" of the 
 heart is, I would find it in showing you that future 
 itself. It can be seen and measured. Ten years ago 
 you promised certain good deeds after the next ten 
 years were out. All was decked in the hues of the 
 rainbow. The profession of religion would be easy, 
 and all the details of a noble soul would come easily 
 then. What an outlook it was ! But to-day those 
 ten years have ended, and this is that very future 
 once seen as being near to Heaven. Oh, how its 
 flowers have faded ! It was a mirage, and here is 
 the same dreary, lifeless sand. 
 
 Be wise to-day; 'tis madness to defer; 
 Next day the fatal precedent will plead; 
 Thus on, till wisdom is pushed out of life. 
 ***** 
 
 Of man's miraculous mistakes this bears 
 The palm. " That all men are ahout to live." 
 
AMOS'G THE rOUI^rDATIOI^S. 
 
SERMON VII. 
 AMONG THE TOUNDATIONS. 
 
 " Of whom the world was not worthy." — Hebrews 11 : 38. 
 
 ~r ET us recall to mind some of the great men of 
 -*-^ the Bible. Each institution, be it state or 
 church, or college or school of philosophy or art, 
 sets forth from the bosom of some man or men like 
 a river rolling down from the mountains. All these 
 great outward things, from the Porch at Athens to 
 the Academy of France, are the image of certain 
 human spirits. As lightning leaves its marks upon 
 the granite chffs, so great minds, passing through 
 their three-score years, mark deeply that part of 
 society in which their feet fell as they marched. 
 The flying steamer and the flying train tell us that 
 Watt and Stephenson have passed by just in advance 
 of the steamer and the car. The telegraph tells us 
 that Morse has been and has passed on. The prac- 
 tical industry of the world, the abandoning of old 
 implements, the rapid appearance of new machines 
 
122 AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 and new tools, tell us there must have been a Lord 
 Bacon some where, leading reason away from folly, to 
 place it in the path of usefulness. Coming to poli- 
 tics, we see on all sides in the new free govern- 
 ments of earth, footprints of the Barons fighting with 
 King John, and of Washington and Lafayette strug- 
 gling in the wilds of the new world. The broad 
 earth, with all its mental and emotional contents, 
 with all its truth and beauty, is only a place where 
 man in some form of greatness has been. In the 
 old red sandstone of New England, rocks are pointed 
 out upon which great birds ran thousands of years 
 ago. Perhaps before the human race lived those 
 birds spread their half-made wings and hurried along 
 on foot before the coming storm. And in those days 
 the storms were terrific. The clouds swept hot and 
 low, and the whole earth trembled with the thunder. 
 Along the great western river there are cliffs a 
 thousand feet high, and between them a valley five 
 miles wide, the scene telling us what a mighty river 
 flowed in that vale before man came to the Garden 
 of Eden. Thus the moral earth bears evidence of 
 its mighty past, and in all its learning, and politics, 
 and art, and religion, says to us: "Here the giants 
 have been. These are the paths trodden by their 
 heavy feet." 
 
AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 123 
 
 In Africa, hunters seeking large and noble game 
 (more noble than the murderous, avaricious creature 
 that seeks the ivory spoils), come at last to places where 
 the wild rice is all beaten down, where a road lies 
 as though the army of Xerxes had passed that way. 
 The wild huntsmen are full of delight, for they feel 
 the presence of the great ivory-bearing brutes. Thus 
 in the higher world of the intellect and soul we 
 come upon great paths that tell us in a moment 
 that some mighty ones passed along there yesterda3% 
 But these paths are not a desolation. They are 
 hedged in on both sides by flowers ; the air above 
 is redolent with incense, and both before and back 
 of the discoverer there seems a paradise. 
 
 What is our varied world now but a rich piece 
 of work from the hands of the gifted minds in all 
 former times? Our whole world is the photograph 
 of all past genius. 
 
 Such being the nature of this scene of human 
 life, we should expect our Christian religion to be 
 also the remains of some old commotion in the mind 
 and bosom of man. Such greatness could not have 
 come from nothing any more than philosophy came 
 without any Bacon or Cousin ; any more than lib- 
 erty could have come without any Washington or 
 any heroes of the battle-field. Out of nothing comes 
 
124 AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 nothing. (JEx nihilo nihil fit.') Hence, opening 
 the Christian Book and reading its strange page 
 from Moses to St. Paul, we are bound to say, 
 " Here some moral giants have passed by." For the 
 wild rice is all beaten down, and branches of broken 
 trees strew the way, and the wild region looks as 
 though horsemen and chariot had gone by with a 
 shout. Looking at the Decalogue for an hour — a 
 reading will not answer the demands of the Ten 
 Thoughts — studying for an hour, or a day, that 
 digest of principles, and remembering in what an 
 age that generalization was made, when slaves were 
 flying from bondage and scarcely knew which was 
 the better, bondage or freedom, the heart must be 
 lost to reason if it does not say over those laws, 
 here a huge intellect has been hurling around him 
 the large ideas of life, standing amid the ideas of 
 •sin, like Samson between the columns of the temple, 
 needing only to reach out his arms and the whole 
 fabric tumbles. 
 
 Pass from the Decalogue to the political career 
 of Moses, and there the same vastness appears, only 
 it is not a vastness of intellect, but of love. He 
 led a large multitude tenderly, as though they were 
 his children. By day he advised, and cheered, and 
 guided them ; by night he wept and prayed. Not 
 
AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 125 
 
 often do great intellect and great love combine in 
 one soul. Generally the one draws away the life- 
 blood of the other. The perpetual thought abates 
 the love, or the perpetual sentiment abates the 
 thought. But here and there in human history 
 comes the divine soul, and is equal to the two 
 destinies, and as the sun in the heaven can burn up 
 a Sahara on the one hand, and paint the lining of a 
 daisy on the other, so along comes a mortal here 
 and there who can hurl forth great thoughts with 
 his brain, and then sit down and weep for the 
 humblest beggar or little suffering child. Moses was 
 one of these. The greatness of law, of politics, of 
 freedom, was upon him. His mind rejected the 
 pomp of Egypt's palaces that it might be free. All 
 the learning of that powerful empire crystalized in 
 his brain. He drank in wisdom as a sponge drinks 
 water, and yet, in all the subsequent years of his 
 career he was tender-hearted as in the days when 
 Pharaoh's daughter took him first in her arms. He 
 was a union of power and meekness. 
 
 Pass from the law-giver to the poets of the 
 Bible, and here re-appear marks of human greatness. 
 The man who wrote the book of Job was no 
 ordinary intellect. Imagination is one of the highest 
 faculties. It alone is able to rise to some conception 
 
126 AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 of the universe. The common practical mind knows 
 nothing about God's world. It moves about in the 
 market place, and stands in its shop all day and all 
 year, utterly incapable of thinking of the whole 
 heavens and the whole earth. It knows the num- 
 bers of its own family and the value of certain 
 articles in the market. But along comes the man 
 with imagination, and lo, the universe opens its 
 gates to his foot. His heart wanders off into the 
 eternity past and to come. He becomes a Newton 
 or a Herschel in astronomy, or a Humboldt in 
 science, or a Cousin in morals, or a Milton in 
 poetry. Among these place the men who wrote the 
 book of Job or the Psalms, or the glowing rhapso- 
 dies of Isaiah and Ezekiel. Who in our day could 
 surpass these voices in the richness of their 
 imagination and in the sublimity of their song? 
 
 What we call civilization is not the human 
 condition that speaks always the most intense 
 spiritual words. In a broad age the heart may 
 love so many things that it loves nothing deeply. 
 When the authors of the book of Job and of the 
 Psalms wrote, there was nothing grand in the world 
 but religion. There were no arts, no politics, no 
 sciences, no romance. The greatest theme of poet 
 and harpist was God. Hence, in the early history 
 
AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 127 
 
 of our Bible there came to toil at its pages men 
 like Daniel and Isaiah and Ezekiel, who knew of 
 nothing great in the world except the Great 
 Jehovah. In poverty came all these men, rich only 
 in their dreams of the King of kings. To them 
 earth was remarkable not for its arts and sciences, 
 but as being the temple of God. 
 
 Beneath the Christian's Book there stands a 
 wonderful group of illustrious mortals. Pronounce 
 the name of John, James, Paul, and then descend 
 into the details of their lives. I can not now do 
 it. The task were too long. But at all your steps 
 in such a review you will come upon the varied 
 manifestations of greatness. As in the tropic world, 
 turn where the traveler may, new charms greet his 
 sense, the charm of morning or evening, noonday or 
 midnight, charm of colored birds or colored flowers, 
 because there the gigantic sun works in unfettered 
 liberty through long summers that have no destroy- 
 ing winter freezing the aroma from plants and the 
 colors from flowers, so in the religious realm 
 whence the Bible came, there was an unfettered 
 belief in God and in Christ that lifted upward the 
 Apostles' hearts and made them as full of divineness 
 as the plants are full of aroma where the rich sun- 
 light falls for ever and ever. Paul and John's heart 
 
128 AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 were steeped in religion like the white wools steeped 
 in Tyrian purple. Those souls were golden all 
 through and through. The world of fashion and 
 riches and fame had disappeared and left them the 
 world of religion. 
 
 But there is in those Bible worthies one element 
 of greatness to which I have not yet alluded. It 
 should come last because it should stand freshest in 
 our memories and deepest in our love. Not simply 
 were those Bible-makers from Moses to Paul all 
 intellectually gifted, but they were almost sublime 
 in the heroism of their conduct. We are all by 
 nature worshipers of heroes. Heroism is the sub- 
 jection of self to the interest of a multitude or of 
 a principle. One of the largest .and weakest 
 qualities in man is his egotism. Egotism is an 
 emotion that makes other people unimportant com- 
 pared with self. It is the willingness that others 
 should bear the burden of toil and of poverty, that 
 others should die on the battle-field, that others 
 should care for the poor and sit by the bedside of 
 the dying. Egotism is the nomination and the 
 election and coronation of self as king. Heroism is 
 the opposite sentiment. By as much as the former 
 is contemptible, the latter is sublime. As the world 
 hates the one, it loves the other. We are all hero 
 
AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 129 
 
 worshipers by nature, just as by nature we love the 
 beautiful of art. Heroism is indeed the beautiful 
 in the soul. It is the old image of God coming to 
 the surface again as when in scraping off a dingy 
 wall in Florence the workmen came upon the por- 
 trait of Dante. Often there come men who throw 
 aside the rags of self, the tattered vestments of 
 beggars, and let out the image of God within. Into 
 no institution of man, into no philosophy, into no 
 school of art, has there entered such a band of 
 heroes as is seen filing down into this book of God. 
 It seems perfectly wonderful that each page of the 
 Christian's book should have been composed by one 
 of these children of heroism. The Bible is a 
 "Westminster Abbey where none but the great sleep. 
 There are two painful exceptions, David and 
 Solomon. These are the only two characters of the 
 sacred group that pass before us destitute of any 
 beauty that need long detain us. David and 
 Solomon are mighty ruins lying in the midst of the 
 Bible. In them self was greater than society. 
 Either one of them would rather overthrow all the 
 laws of man than confess that self must have 
 boundaries of passion or ambition. Rare in their 
 mental endowments, able to compose a lofty psalm, 
 or to write proverbs of matchless wisdom, they 
 9 
 
130 AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 descended again and again into the lowest condition 
 of morals and left their thrones of gold stained with 
 dishonor. But there may be a lesson in these ruins 
 as valuable as the lesson of heroism that ornaments 
 the remainder of the great book. The lesson may 
 be particularly valuable in our age. It so happens 
 that David and Solomon were the only ones of the 
 saored roll who held in their hands power and 
 riches. They only possessed gold and sat upon 
 thrones. All the other leaders in this book of 
 thought stood forth' only as common men. But 
 here came two who held in their arms the world's 
 empire and boundless longings. It is, therefore, a 
 most impressive lesson of life, if of all the great 
 names in this record, those rank the lowest who had 
 found the most of riches and the most of power. 
 Sitting down by those disgraced thrones and recall- 
 ing the murder of Uriah, and the low sensuality of 
 those once noble kings, the modern student may 
 mark how riches and authority often destroy the 
 high impulses of the soul, and transform into a 
 tyrant and sensualist hearts that were once morally 
 beautiful. In these two men a genius above that of 
 the multitude was diverted from intellectual and 
 moral paths and sent out into the haunts of reckless 
 ambition and brutal vice. Had some so-called 
 
AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 131 
 
 calamity come and stripped David and Solomon of 
 their riches and crowns, and sent them, like Isaiah, 
 to find a home in the desert, they would have 
 sought communion with truth and with God, and 
 would have sunk to their tombs as the sun sinks in 
 the West, not to be for ever quenched, but to shine 
 on upon other times and shores. What, then, are 
 riches but an eclipse of the soul? 
 
 Away from these two names, the soul comes to 
 the front and maintains its divine rights in the 
 lonely mountains with Moses and in the exile of St. 
 John. No riches nor office came to divide the 
 heart. Nothing remained to Moses, to Isaiah, , to 
 Paul, James, and John, but to serve God and man 
 faithfully and then die and go to heaven. All 
 through human history the mind and heart have 
 evolved the most power only when most of the 
 avenues of common pleasure and common pursuits 
 have been closed, and when no gate has stood open 
 but the gate of thought. When the banks are 
 taken away from a river its waters spread out and 
 the current ceases, and instead of an Amazon or a 
 Danube we have only a marsh. The waters lose 
 their clearness and their purity. So with mind. 
 When, as in the history of the two Hebrew kings, 
 all the restraining walls are taken away, the soul 
 
132 AMOXG THE FOUSBATIONS. 
 
 loses purpose and power, and lies only a sluggish 
 marsh. When, however, there are marked and iron- 
 like banks within which the mind must run, then 
 we have a soul that pours along, clear, and bright, 
 and deep. Withiu a definite and beautiful channel 
 moved all the heroism of the Old and New Testa- 
 ments. It was a part of the Divine Providence 
 (the whole of which we call inspiration), that gave 
 these men their isolation, and through it their 
 spiritual power. The poverty of the prophets, their 
 half-wild Ufe, their perfect concentration upon 
 religion, were natural agencies that helped lift their 
 souls up toward Deity. Their heroism was not that 
 only of a soldier who dares the chance of battle, 
 but it was also that of a philosopher who despises 
 the pleasures and applause of the fashionable world. 
 If you ask the wide world in all its high civiliza- 
 tion, from old Babylon to Athens, and onward to 
 London and Paris, wherein lies the success of man, 
 that broad, flashing world wUl teU you, by actions 
 if not by words, that riches, and feasting, and power, 
 and palaces, and titles, and the beauty of woman, 
 the hilarity of wine, the romance of song, make up 
 the significance of human life. In such a many- 
 colored light society has always moved along in its 
 dance of life and death. To oppose this dazzling 
 
AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 133 
 
 scene, and live such a life as Paul lived, is a sort of 
 heroism that reminds us of a shore beyond earth 
 and of a race above man. To pass by such a 
 magnificent scene as earth presents in its palaces, 
 and gaze out into the abstract truth of religion, is a 
 heroism like unto that of the soldier who bares his 
 bosom that the truths of liberty may live after him. 
 When we remember what doubts hang around the 
 > idea of God, and around the idea of Christ ; what 
 an uncertainty about the fact and quality of the 
 future life, — an uncertainty that has followed the 
 human heart in all times, — and then behold the 
 Apostles giving up all else for this dream of eternity, 
 forever parting with home and riches and honor and 
 daily pleasures, it would seem that that is a dead 
 heart which can look upon this Bible picture without 
 tears. 
 
 Could all the worthies, from Isaiah to St. John, 
 have drawn aside the veil of the future, and have 
 seen what a mighty part in far-off nations their 
 words were to play ; could the prophet have heard 
 the Christians of the nineteenth century reading his 
 word picture of the Redeemer, and could St. John 
 have seen millions in the coming America poring 
 over his fourteenth chapter, they might easily have 
 endured all possible sorrows in view of the harvest 
 
134 AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 in religion to wave on far-off shores. But before 
 them lay the clouds that always shut off the future. 
 They saw not the sublime reality. They walked in 
 the solemnity of darkness, and as one by one they 
 came to death, their mighty souls fed not upon sight, 
 but upon the heroism of a lofty faith. As Washing- 
 ton's heart often sunk in the dark days of the Rev- 
 olution, and as another President in our more recent 
 trials often found the heavens dark above him and 
 piteously prayed for help, so we know that at times 
 the saints of the New Testament must have looked 
 with sadness into each other's faces and have won- 
 dered whether just beyond the tomb Jesus would 
 indeed come with His Paradise. And especially 
 must these solemn thoughts have come crowding 
 into the heart when upon the next day death was 
 to come by the fagot or the axe. Death has always 
 been a deep solemnity. 
 
 When we read the Bible remembering the quality 
 of life these men lived and the quality of death they 
 died, all criticism of words and phrases seems utterly 
 childish, for their grand life was of itself an inspira- 
 tion. To seek contradiction of little terms, or 
 variation of narrative, or discord of incident, is like 
 objecting to the effulgence of the sun on account of 
 its spots. It is a law of criticism that no error of 
 
AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 135 
 
 grammar or of metaphor may weigh any thing against 
 the writer who deals in powerful thought. As a 
 false pronunciation or a rude syntax did not so much 
 as mar the impetuous eloquence of a Patrick Henry 
 or even a Henry Clay, all these infinitesimal things 
 counting naught in the mighty current of the true 
 and the good, so in these divine men of religion the 
 errors of language, of time, of place, are in the midst 
 of the high truths of the writers only as autumn 
 leaves borne along by a river. The time will per- 
 haps come when mankind will not look for inspira- 
 tion in the geology or astronomy of the Bible, nor 
 in the machine-like exactness of part to part, but 
 will seek for it in that vast religion- of time and 
 eternity that lies in the sacred page like a continent 
 upon the bosom of an ocean. The inspiration of a 
 St. Paul or St. John lies not in the minute details 
 of grammar or history, but in the Christian doctrine 
 of life that flashes up from their souls like the 
 columns of light streaming up from the northern 
 horizon. "When you, my friends, find your minds full 
 of the critical, even the captious, spirit over the 
 writings of these men, move a few paces away from 
 your measuring-rules, and stand by the block where 
 Paul is bowing to yield up his life, and hear him 
 saying, " God forbid that I should glory save in the 
 
136 AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 
 
 cross of Christ," and the stillness and solemnity 
 of the event, and the sublimity of the words, will 
 make you recall all your objections, and wish that 
 into your own heart might come such a presence of 
 God. You will feel that inspiration is the transfig- 
 uration of a soul so that it reaches the true, the 
 beautiful, and the good. A transfiguration not of 
 the little, but of the great. 
 
 The heroes of the Bible make up such a group 
 of pearls as never before in history were strung upon 
 one string. Christianity is the only queen that ever 
 wore such a collection of gems. But she wears 
 them right along, and has thus been unapproachable 
 for thousands ^of years. And she will remain match- 
 less in the quality of soul that lay beneath her 
 thought. It does not seem possible that earth can 
 ever reproduce a St. Paul or a St. John. And now, 
 when to these beings you have added just one more 
 whom I need not so much as name ; a Being who 
 emptied an ocean of love and hope upon the world, 
 and who has transformed the earth, making it roll out 
 of darkness into light, you will conclude that here 
 in the Christian records mighty souls have passed in 
 a strange vision before us. Here are tremendous 
 foundations, broad, deep, vast. And as though man 
 might come some day in the vanity of the subse- 
 
AMONG THE FOUNDATIONS. 137 
 
 quent centuries and mock at the impulse or charac- 
 ter of these men, they all died heroic deaths that 
 the feeble critics of the nineteenth century might 
 feel their own littleness when they should behold 
 the thrilling ending of these lives. Paul was put to 
 death in Rome. John was tortured and sent to die 
 an exile. James was hurled from a battlement in 
 Jerusalem and crushed to death. Simon Zelotes was 
 put to death in Persia, where also Jude was tortured 
 to the death. Matthew was slain by a mob in 
 Abyssinia. Thomas was killed in Coromandel. Philip 
 was hanged upon a pillar in Hierapolis. Andrew 
 was crucified at Patraca, and James the Less in Asia. 
 As for the one Name towering above all, He was 
 crucified on Mount Calvary between two thieves. Into 
 such holy hearts did God pour the truths, the hopes, 
 the joys, and sorrows of our religion. 
 
A PLEA FOE THE BETTEE CLASSES. 
 
SERMON VIII. 
 A PLEA FOR THE BETTER CLASSES. 
 
 "Neither do men put new wine into old hottles."— Matt. 9:17. 
 
 A LL men are born to equal rights, but not to 
 -*--*- equal conditions. The outcome of life is so 
 affected by health, by industry, by virtue, by laws, 
 by natural ability, by accidental association, that 
 society can never be made up of men living in uni- 
 form circumstances. As the bits of glass in the toy 
 fall differently and make different forms, now a 
 triangle and now an octagon, so the conditions of 
 life fall out after a varied fashion, and place before 
 us no two souls of one image. The Roman Church 
 and the despotism of England transformed Ireland 
 into an image of sorrow, and all 'her children are 
 born into a sad career, in making which they had 
 no voice. It is commonly rumored that some swift, 
 secret couriers, stationed at relay points, rode and 
 ran, and sailed, after the battle of Waterloo, and, 
 reaching the stock market, laid the foundations of 
 
142 A PLEA FOR TEE BETTER CLASSES. 
 
 the Rothschild fortune. Thus out of a riding horse- 
 man came a family that manages the money of a 
 continent, and that continent Europe. Incidents thus 
 may found a caste in society. Hence society is full 
 of caste. Along comes a lad with more brains than 
 is enjoyed by his brother, and while one Beethoven 
 proudly signs himself " Land-owner," to keep the 
 world from confounding him with his poor musical 
 brother, the brother signs himself " Brain-owner," 
 and the balance is fully struck. Thus out of the 
 strange laboratory of nature issue two tribes, " land- 
 owners," and "brain-owners," and then a third tribe 
 that are neither. Very busy is this earth, all 
 the while dividing its children up into parcels, say- 
 ing to some of them " Take beauty ;" to others, 
 " Take genius ;" to others, " Take money and go 
 your way ;" and by divers paths, they all go away 
 to the far country. In one of his poems Dr. Holmes 
 passes beyond the visible influence of earth and finds 
 a fatal hand reaching down out of the unseen and 
 shaping destiny. 
 
 From the same father's side, 
 
 From the sanle mother's knee, 
 One journeys toward a frozen tide, 
 
 One to a peaceful sea. 
 
 This verse, quoted only from vague memory, 
 
A PLEA FOB THE BETTEK CLASSES. 143 
 
 reminds us that unknown causes enter into the 
 career of man, and, combining with known agencies, 
 make earth a place where humanity falls into many 
 shapes, and beats around against itself like the waves 
 of chopped seas. As the world advances, as the 
 unifying power of education and republicanism ad- 
 vances and increases, the distinctions of society will 
 not only diminish in quantity, but the quality will 
 be less painful. The prayer of the Saviour, " That 
 all may be one," is an ideal toward which all are to 
 toil, but which will be fully overtaken only in the 
 fields of Heaven. 
 
 Here, then, the world lies to-day with different 
 classes upon its surface, and even here in democratic 
 America stand two classes side by side, the educated 
 and the untaught. We need not recall the rich and 
 the poor, the beautiful and the ugly, the high and 
 the low by the verdict of gold, but only those two 
 armies called the learned and the unlearned, for our 
 remarks have reference only to those two multitudes. 
 A hundred times at least in my life have T spoken 
 on behalf of the slave in the cotton-field, the Indian 
 in the forest, the masses in India and China, and the 
 swarms of wretched ones in our streets. Hence you 
 will grant me a swift forgiveness to-day if for once 
 I shall enter a plea in behalf of people who, gifted 
 
144 A PLEA FOB THE BETTER CLASSES. 
 
 with good sense by fate, have, by reading, and hear- 
 ing, and reflection, added a little to the original 
 moral momentum of their souls. This multitude is 
 not large, but it is immensely powerful, and this 
 multitude is daily expanding, and their power for 
 good or ill upon a rapid increase. 
 
 Each class of mankind needs its own peculiar 
 treatment. When a new form of human soul comes 
 along, a new school-house, new politics, a new relig- 
 ion, must be made for this new soul. The laws of 
 Persia would not be obeyed by Americans. Our 
 upper classes would not tend a Roman theater. Our 
 soldiers would not go into battle as the Persians 
 went, with a driver and a lash behind each squad. 
 As fast as new men come, their surroundings must 
 become new, just as Paul, when a child saw as a 
 child and spoke as a child, but passing into manhood 
 he put away childish things. While a child, Paul 
 saw the sky as a blue arch within a stone's throw 
 of his hand, but when he became a man his mind 
 pushed back the canopy and made it the far-off 
 encampment of God. Thus, as a class of men or a 
 whole age moves forward, the scenery changes as 
 around a flying train, and what was passes away. 
 Thus the Roman religion, with its temples, and 
 candles, and holy coats, and with its pageants of 
 
A PLEA FOM THE BETTER 0LA88B8. 145 
 
 marching priests with gorgeous robes, fitted well the 
 wants of an age when Roman, and Goth, and Vandal, 
 were to be carried across from barbarism to civiliza- 
 tion. As a child learns language first through the 
 eye, by seeing the object represented by the word, 
 and, indeed, as language itself began in the names of 
 things that had length, breadth, and thickness, so 
 Christianity passes through its materialized period 
 with the individual or the age, and then swells out 
 into spirituality, as the man or the time changes its 
 need. 
 
 Since, then, Christianity must be flexible in its 
 method and doctrine, we all err perhaps in over- 
 looking the upper, educated class and in devoting 
 our whole time to the effort to fit religion to the 
 great democratic populace. The genius of our 
 country turns the attention of publicists (and the 
 preacher too is a publicist) toward what is called 
 the masses. The uprising of charity as a virtue 
 makes us seek out the object of that great love. 
 It has come to pass that we weep over nothing but 
 a ragged orphan or a slave. The pulpit upbraids 
 the rich, and defies the educated, and ridicules the 
 scientific, and frantically declares for the outcast, the 
 ignorant, the chimney-sweep, and the newsboy. It 
 is not probable that the Church will overdo any 
 10 
 
146 A PLEA FOB THE BETTER CLASSES. 
 
 shape of benevolence. We would not abate its 
 work or its prayer along any of these divine paths. 
 But let us not forget that there is another class of 
 human beings, educated, moral, often rich, and 
 always powerful, who need some thought and some 
 love from those who pretend to be carrying the ark 
 of the Lord along through the wilderness. If any 
 one will look into the churches of the land of a 
 Sunday he will find a wonderful scarcity of the 
 intellectually great. But, if the same observer will 
 visit the mission Sunday-schools, or will go 
 to the meetings of the great evangelists toiling 
 over the world, he will find throngs of what the 
 world calls the middle or humbler class. This 
 comes to pass because the religion of the day has 
 been all shaped to suit them. There is a wonderful 
 attractiveness to the multitude in some of the 
 modern forms of evangelism. The month upon 
 month of meetings, the simple exposition of simple 
 passages of scripture, the thousands of anonymous 
 requests for prayer, the wandering about of "Holi- 
 ness Bands," composed of persons who have given 
 up all for the Master, are religious phenonema 
 that meet the need of many. At least let us 
 suppose that some good is about to flow down from 
 such fountains. But meanwhile what is the Church 
 
A PLEA FOB THE BETTER CLASSES. 147 
 
 doing for that multitude of persons who need a 
 Christianity of a different shape ? Tliere are 
 thousands who have become dissatisfied with the 
 Adventists and with the " Holiness Bands," and 
 with the domestic economy that prays for money 
 and a barrel of flour, that supports life by prayer 
 instead of by industry. There is a mighty throng 
 of statesmen,- of lawyers, of doctors, of scientific 
 men, of readers and thinkers, who have quite 
 deserted the church of the age, a throng mighty in 
 their power over not only the present, but over the 
 future. 
 
 Not in the least should the zeal of the pulpit be 
 abated toward the lower multitude, but toward the 
 educated class it is high time there were flung out 
 some kind of invitation that might touch their 
 intellects and their very souls. 
 
 It is very difficult indeed to state what should 
 be done in this great crisis of religious affairs. It 
 can not be denied that while upon one side a 
 multitude is seen coming toward the sanctuary, a 
 large and valuable company may be seen on the 
 other side going away. This picture, to me at least, 
 is so plainly seen that it assures me that the Church 
 has come to a crisis. In such an hour many should 
 speak, that by the mouth of many witnesses the 
 
148 A PLEA FOB THE BETTER CLASSES. 
 
 truth may be established. I can submit only my 
 own reflections. 
 
 1. It is evident that only the least possible con- 
 cession should ever be made to the humblest classes. 
 As they should not be treated to poor music and a 
 spectacular drama because they are unable to 
 appreciate good music and , the high histrionic art, 
 so religion should never bend much downwaM, but 
 should stand calm and divine upon its lofty 
 mountain, and entice the multitude upward. It is 
 marvelous how soon a crowd will rise to the level 
 of its leader. Moses dashed to pieces the golden 
 calf, and steadfastly lifted up the true God. In a 
 few years the Israelites arose from the idol to the 
 living Jehovah. There is a limit to the usefulness 
 of the law of accommodation. There is a law of 
 ideals which makes it necessary that each individual 
 and each group of individuals should be held by 
 the vision of something above self. In the career of 
 Christianity only those leaders can conduct the 
 Church to success who are able, and who are brave 
 enough to stand above the people and to invite 
 them to higher seats. The idea of a miraculous 
 call into the ministry has let loose into the world 
 hundreds of teachers who, instead of leading the 
 people upward, have helped them back toward a 
 
A PLEA FOB, TUB BETTER CLASSES. 149 
 
 superstition that would almost shame a monk of the 
 dark ages. Many are now preaching what they call 
 the Gospel, who possess only a highly-wrought 
 emotional nature, and an extreme ignorance of the 
 history and principles of religion. If the Church 
 could realize that the only call to the ministry 
 possible to be heard on earth is made up of common 
 sense, learning, and piety, all joining into one invi- 
 tation, great and substantial would be the religious 
 progress of the land in the next generation. But 
 as things now are, there are hundreds of agents 
 busy in reducing Christianity down to the condition 
 of a weak superstition. 
 
 2. There should be every where confessed and 
 promulgated a reform of doctrine. There are many 
 noble men now carrying in their bosoms religious, 
 even Christian, sentiments, who are still told that 
 these feelings are not religion, but are only deceptive 
 states of mind, blinding those who hold them to their 
 utter depravity ; that by some new and strange man- 
 ner (perhaps at some public meeting in the middle 
 of Winter), these persons must become converted. 
 Now I believe man's heart is changed by the Infinite 
 Spirit, but I believe the Church has long erred by 
 daring to decide upon the manner by which, or the 
 person to whom, such new life comes. It should 
 
150 A PLEA FOB THE BETTER CLASSES. 
 
 seem that the Church can wait only for the moral 
 life, and finding in the soul the fear of God and a 
 love toward Christ, must assume that there the 
 transforming power of God has been. A righteous 
 man must be confessed to be a converted man. The 
 Church possesses no analysis by which it can open 
 a heart and find that morality is not regeneration, 
 and that the prayers and hymns of a "moralist" do 
 not issue from the Holy Spirit, who, imaged as a 
 dove, flies back and forth forever over the ocean of 
 soul. There are hundreds of men in this city and 
 every where, who, loving the New Testament, and 
 bowing in reverence before its central character, and 
 living an upright life, are yet viewed as heirs of 
 perdition, because they have not passed through an 
 "experience" defined by mistaken fathers, who 
 seemed to be able to analyze the workings of the 
 spirit both of man and of God. In closing its doors 
 against "mere moralists," in waiting for only those 
 who should come through the gate of miracle, 
 though the tumult of an "experience," the Church 
 has shut out a large upper class, and has not only 
 deprived itself of power, but has done an injustice 
 toward some of the noblest members of society. 
 The presence of the religious sentiment and an up- 
 right life are the only evidences of conversion we 
 
A PLEA FOR THE BETTER CLASSES. 151 
 
 dare expect. Hence we of the Church should always 
 hail every upright, religious man as a brother, not 
 simply by language, or country, or by humanity, but 
 a brother by the sweet association of religion. In 
 the former centuries it was well enough to combine 
 inseparably salvation and forms, salvation and bap- 
 tism, or salvation and a church, or salvation and a 
 certain " experience," for then all were ready to 
 believe any thing, and the more ceremony there was 
 the more welcome the religion. Even such a proud 
 and lofty king as Louis XIV., said in his dying 
 moments, " I have done whatever my Church has 
 told me to do. I know nothing of Christian duty 
 except as directed by my bishops. If I have done 
 wrong the blame rests upon them." In all former 
 times it mattered not if Heaven and trifling forms 
 were bound together. But in our age there has 
 come to the surface a new class of persons. Issuing 
 from a new world of literature, of developed reason, 
 of deep, sober reflection, they demanded a Christian- 
 ity purified. They will not, like Louis XIV., say, 
 " I have done whatever my priest has told me to 
 do ;" but, cutting loose from these human masters, 
 and passing out into the new world of light and 
 liberty, they will place their hand upon their heart, 
 and, looking up to God, say, "What wouldst Thou 
 
152 A PLEA FOB TEE BETTER CLASSES. 
 
 have me to do ?" These great children of earth will 
 no longer suffer you and me to define conversion for 
 them, nor to philosophize for them about free-will or 
 decrees, nor about " baptismal regeneration," but, 
 standing in the presence of an Infinite God, and in 
 the more visible presence of Jesus Christ, they will 
 push away all our little vestments, and candles, and 
 formulas, and will, with sublime power, say with the 
 Saviour, "Blessed are the pure in heart." The time 
 is rapidly coming when none of us will dare contra- 
 dict such a profession of religion. The government 
 of our land, the church of our land, the homes of 
 our land, will be compelled at last to seek shelter 
 in an upper multitude whose conscience, and culture, 
 and doctrine, of an upright life shall become the 
 best anchor of society. A cultivated gentleman 
 remarked to me recently, " When you draw up a 
 creed for your ' Central Church ' I hope you will 
 make righteousness a very prominent doctrine." 
 
 But we can not delay longer upon this point. 
 Let me repeat that Christianity must study anew 
 the times, and, if possible, must confess the upright 
 man to be the converted man, and must gather into 
 its sanctuary thousands whose religion has been 
 simplified by the generations of reflection that have 
 separated the true from the false, and the valuable 
 fjom the foolish and the incidental. 
 
A PLEA FOB THE BETTER GLA8BES. 153 
 
 3. The educated class demand a modification of the 
 popular religion to this extent, that it must be made 
 to meet the wants of this life. As men progress in 
 education and thought, earth with all its interests 
 becomes larger instead of smaller. The " ever 
 unrolling web of life " expanding out into youth, 
 manhood, womanhood, into homes by the hillside, 
 into cities by the lake and sea, into nations covering 
 continents, into vast literatures and arts, grows more 
 wonderful as the human mind gathers power to 
 grasp the great spectacle. Had we all ten times the 
 power to perceive the greatness of our world, we 
 should weep to-day over the sublimity of this great 
 wave of human life. To us so far away from the 
 planet Jupiter it twinkles only as a large dew-drop. 
 But could we be carried to within a few miles of its 
 shores we should be filled with amazement at the 
 gigantic world into which that twinkling star should 
 expand. Perhaps to our eye would come the vision 
 
 of fields. 
 
 Where everlasting Spring abides, 
 And never fading flowers, 
 
 and to our ear would come, as to the Italian poet 
 in paradise, "the rolling melody of bird-song." 
 Thus, could our minds be so aroused by some divine 
 inspiration that they might draw near this flowing 
 
154 A PLEA FOB THE BETTER CLASSES. 
 
 stream of earthly life and see it in all its wonder 
 of to-day and to-morrow, our hearts would almost 
 break in presence of the scene. A public man 
 recently wrote to a friend, " Oh, that I had been 
 born twenty-five years sooner or twenty-five years 
 later, that either I might have died before this 
 generation had come, or else that now I might hope 
 to go with it onward to its greater hours." 
 
 Thus, as the mind advances, the proportions of 
 this life increase, and that which was a twinkling 
 dew-drop to childhood becomes to the higher intel- 
 lect a marvelous world bearing an Infinite God and 
 an unfathomable humanity on its great bosom. 
 
 Now, up to the very present the popular religion 
 has too much taught the multitude to sever all the 
 ties of earth and wait for Heaven to come. This 
 suits the slave, for he longs to escape bondage ; and 
 suits the poor, for to him Heaven is riches. The 
 religion of the humbler classes is always a melan- 
 choly. Their hymns are wails of desolation; their 
 sermons a philosophy not of life but of death. The 
 time has come for a new phase of Christianity. 
 We need no longer, and never did need, the fanatical 
 teachings that declare the world about to end, and 
 that nothing human can ever carry mankind forward 
 to good government, and good homes, and high 
 
A PLEA FOR THE BETTER GLASSES. 155 
 
 personal character. Those who have dared teach 
 such a doctrine have only separated those who 
 loved God and the Christ from the sacred interests 
 of earth; have made them treat with contempt the 
 polls where the votes are cast which shape the 
 destiny of the state ; made them despise the men 
 who make laws and study justice ; made them treat 
 with disdain the arts that refine, the literature that 
 enlightens, the pleasures that cheer. Among the 
 doctrines to be discarded let us rank first all this 
 Adventism. There are tens of thousands of Chris- 
 tians who have taken no part in this world's 
 stupendous business, but while their fellow men 
 have been toiling amid the duties and the sorrows 
 of society, they have consulted the ambiguous words 
 of poetry to find whether or not this is the year 
 when the earth is to pass away in whirlwind, cloud, 
 and fire. It will answer for the poor African to 
 feel that earth is not his dwelling-place. He may 
 sing a song woven out of the chains that once held 
 him and his children. 
 
 Oh, swing low, sweet chariot, 
 Oh, leave me not behind; 
 
 for to him death is a chariot passing over a 
 flowery road drawn by horses of light. And so out 
 
156 A PLEA FOB THE BETTER GLASSES. 
 
 of the persecutions and desolations of the former 
 centuries, where a million people went hungry and 
 barefoot, that one king or one prince might be 
 arrayed in splendor; out of the persecutions that 
 made religion mean martyrdom, — came a melancholy 
 which we pity and forgive. But here our charity 
 terminates, and now we behold a period when a 
 new world lying before the Chur.ch asks it to put 
 aside its indifference and gird itself for the welfare 
 of this great encampment on the shores of time. 
 The lawyers, the statesmen, the patriots, the philan- 
 thropists, all demand a religion that shall blend 
 with these days of earth, and help it in its liberty, 
 in its law, in its arts, its letters, its honors, its 
 pleasures. These noble ones believe in immortality, 
 but they believe that a good earth is the best 
 stepping stone to Heaven. They believe God loved 
 earth, or He would not have made it and have 
 caused to pass over it such a procession of souls. 
 They believe that the children of this world will 
 be called one by one to eternity, but they believe 
 that for thousands of years yet earth will remain 
 the arena of human life, and that as a mother 
 lovingly provides for her children, though she may 
 be on the morrow to leave them forever,' so all noble 
 souls will toil for mankind present and to come, 
 
A PLEA FOB, THE BETTER 0LAB8E8. 157 
 
 though there be a grave for the toiler near by in 
 the grass. Here upon earth God is sitting upon a 
 throne of ages, and by our deeds done here we 
 weave for ourselves the chaplets of immortality. 
 Hence, man demands a religion that shall be full of 
 faithfulness to these years, a religion which utters to 
 earth the poet's words, with high adaptation: 
 
 " Oh, grand world, being about to die, we salute thee." 
 
 Morituri salutamus, 
 
 " Ye halls in whose seclusion and repose. 
 Phantoms of fame like exhalations rose 
 And vanished, we who are about to die 
 Salute you; earth, and air, and sea, and sky, 
 And the Imperial Sun that scatters down 
 His sovereign splendor upon grove and town." 
 
 Thus, must the Christianity of our day refit itself 
 to the new era. It can count no longer upon a 
 childhood that loves forms, nor upon a public 
 ignorance that drinks in all doctrines. It should 
 not remain neglectful of the fact that there is 
 rising up a class powerful in education and in 
 reason and in virtue, a class that does not fill our 
 jails, but that makes our laws, that sits upon the 
 judge's bench, that shapes our literature, that molds 
 our social life, a class which neither clergyman nor 
 
158 A PLEA FOB THE BETTER CLASSES. 
 
 theologian will dare pass by in his effort to plant 
 Christ in the human soul. To them Christianity 
 must come in a wonderful simplicity, in all the 
 moral splendor of Jesus Christ; come chanting the 
 beatitudes ; come not longing, like the African, to 
 escape earth, but come with the impulse of heroes 
 loving the education of duty done, and feeling that 
 the best immortality is that which springs up out of 
 the most honorable tomb. The best resurrection 
 awaits him who dies, not as a worm, but as a hero. 
 
THE BIBLE A:NI) THE OOMMO]^ 
 PEOPLE. 
 
SERMON IX. 
 THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON" PEOPLE. 
 
 " The entrance of Thy Word giveth light."— PsaZms 119 : 130. 
 
 rr^HE Sunday having come upon which this con- 
 -^ gregation has been accustomed to contribute 
 toward a wider circulation of the Bible, my remarks 
 this morning will be upon " The Bible and the 
 Humbler Classes." The Bible Society does not 
 pretend to exhaust its money and solicitude upon 
 * those who stand high in either riches or education. 
 Its work is among the lowly, and hence we may 
 well inquire into the relations of the Book to the 
 people. This Church has, in that ten years of its 
 life known to me, shown a deep interest in this 
 branch of Christian beneficence, and may I not hope 
 that its last contribution under this pastorate may 
 be marked by the old generosity and by the old 
 faith in the Book of books? 
 
 Inasmuch as the Bible is destined soon to be 
 omitted from the list of books taught in the public 
 11 
 
162 THE BIBLE AKB THE COMMON PEOPLE. 
 
 schools, tlie work of disseminating the truths of the 
 Scriptures will soon devolve wholly upon the 
 Church, and this fact will make the Bible Society a 
 greater instrument of good in the future than it 
 has ever been in the past. We can not hope much 
 from any compulsory reading of morals. While the 
 Bible held its place in the schools by power of 
 conscience, or by a cheerful public consent, all was 
 well. Its lessons fell on good ground like seed 
 sown upon rich soil in the sunshine of Spring. 
 When these divine lessons at last need the strong 
 arm of law, and of doubtful or unjust law, to 
 sustain them in public schools, then they cease to 
 fall upon the heart as dew from Heaven, but come 
 to the ear more as orders from a powerful despot 
 whose potency is to be found in the police. In a 
 New England village, two weeks ago, in a school 
 where half were Catholic and half were Protestant 
 children, the village schoolmaster and village priest 
 fell to fighting in the school room as to the reading 
 or the not reading of the Sermon on the Mount. 
 
 It is said that much of German infidelity has 
 come from an enforced religion. Compulsory Bibles 
 and compulsory prayers have never proven a valu- 
 able element in the spread of religion. Much less 
 can they prove valuable in a land whose great 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 163 
 
 motto is liberty, and of which liberty religious 
 freedom is a most conspicuous part. An enforced 
 reading of the Bible would only make its pages 
 absolutely hateful to Catholic and Jew and skeptic, 
 and thus as legal power should come to the support 
 of the book, its intrinsic moral power would pass 
 away. For many reasons the Bible will be withdrawn 
 from the public schools as rapidly as any religious 
 opposition may demand such a withdrawal, and in a 
 few years the Church will remain the chief moral 
 hope of the country. 
 
 Religion, from its very nature, must work its way 
 forward only by love. Its power lies not in legis- 
 latures, but in persuasion, and the more gently the 
 Bible comes to people's homes and to the children, 
 the more divine will the book appear. 
 
 Among the peaceful agents in the instruction of 
 the humbler classes we must to-day mention the 
 American Bible Society. The society is composed 
 of all the denominations of Protestants, and it 
 distributes the book without note or comment. 
 There is in such a society something broad that 
 ought to captivate the heart of this congregation 
 that glories in broadness, and that cordially hates 
 the fog that hangs over the low coast of religious 
 sectarianism. 
 
164 TEE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 
 
 1. Permit me to remind you, first, that the cold- 
 ness toward the Scriptures now existing in the world 
 is limited to certain classes. There are thousands of 
 scientific minds who have been led by their studies 
 to feel that there is a discord between the Book of 
 Revelation and the Book of Nature. In this dilemma 
 they cling to their idol, nature, and look with 
 CQntempt upon the book of paper and ink. Not 
 being able to serve two masters, and assuming that 
 the masters disagree, they naturally confess their 
 allegiance to the world of hill and vale, and ocean 
 and rock, and air and light; and neglect the world 
 of St. John, and St. Paul, and Magdalen, and Christ. 
 What causes may have led to this defection on the 
 part of science we can not here inquire. We may 
 accept of the defection as a fact, as a temporary 
 fact, and thus pass it by. 
 
 2. There is a second sedition or rebellion existing 
 among the more highly educated, be they scientific, 
 or metaphysical, or philosophic, or simply well- 
 informed minds. This rebellion against the Bible is 
 very extensive, and is, perhaps, somewhat on the 
 increase. It has come in its wide and sad extent 
 not from any fault of the Scriptures themselves, but 
 from the bad company the Bible has been compelled 
 to keep in its journey along through the generations. 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE COM MOW PEOPLE. 165 
 
 Not only is a man known by the company he keeps, 
 but all things and all men are exposed to the good 
 or ill of association. God alone can look through 
 incidents or accidents and see the intrinsic worth 
 beyond. The human mind can not penetrate the 
 universe, but it must look at the externals and there 
 locate its love or hate. The New Testament has 
 been compelled to keep some very bad company in 
 its day. It had to live awhile with Augustine, who 
 was as much Pagan as Christian, and who was as 
 obscure as midnight. It suffered from partnership 
 with TertuUian, and then from the long dark ages 
 which taught all the follies possible to human imagi- 
 nation, and quoted God's word in their support; and 
 then from even Luther and Calvin, who added as 
 much of the false and the terrible to the Bible as 
 they drew from it of the true and beautiful. Thus 
 all the way of its march the divine book has suffered 
 from the badness of the company it has kept. At 
 best the Bible would have had a difficult task, that 
 of winning the love of wicked hearts. Under more 
 favoi-able circumstances it would have met with 
 many an enemy ; but when, to the natural unpopu- 
 laiity of a book that commands virtue one adds the 
 cruelties of conduct and the monstrosities of doctrine 
 which the olden time deduced from the Testaments, 
 
166 THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 
 
 it is scarcely to be wondered at that a widespread 
 doubt came into the world whether such a volume 
 ever came from the wise or merciful One. God's 
 Bible and man's Bible are very different books. 
 
 3. Having thus confessed the existence of two 
 large classes of skeptics, classes that may be called the 
 scientific and the moral skeptics, let us now mark a 
 more cheering fact, namely, that there is a vast mul- 
 titude of persons to whom these clouds of doubt and 
 storms of wrath have not come. There are millions 
 of good citizens living in good quiet homes, leading 
 industrious and often sorrowful lives, to whom the 
 Bible comes in that moral beauty which it wore when 
 the world was young. 
 
 We can not but assume that the modern revolt 
 against the Bible is unjust. It results from an 
 imaginary antagonism between science and religion, 
 and from the unwillingness of men to distinguish 
 between the Roman Church and the simple Church 
 6f Christ, or between the Institutes of Calvin and 
 the four Gospels. I believe this rebellion is so badly 
 founded that it will soon pass away. Having this 
 feeling, may we not rejoice that there are millions in 
 this land who have not yet come to this scientific 
 or intellectual doubt, and to whom the Bible comes 
 as a bles=ed volume from God to man ? Perhaps by 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 167 
 
 the time this throng o£ common people shall have 
 reached a higher intellectual condition, the present 
 public unbelief will have passed away, and a har- 
 mony , will have been found between learning and 
 the Christian faith. Such a harmony will come. 
 The Bible may be a closed book to many modern 
 philosophers and casuists, but to the multitude at 
 large it lies an open book, with a light better than 
 than that of the sun upon its page. In fact, in 
 order to learn the value of the Bible, we must repair 
 to the multitude, for they make up that vast 
 audience to- whom its words were spoken, and they 
 make up a jury that interprets the Word without 
 prejudice. If the Bible had been composed for the 
 highest order of purely intellectual men, then they 
 would be indeed the only commentators we should 
 dare consult. In seeking for the meaning of Puffeti- 
 dorff, we may willingly consult all the learned mor- 
 alists, and one may well read a learned commentator 
 upon a learned Blackstone ; but when one comes to 
 read letters from his mother or his friend, or the- 
 poems of Cowper or Burns, he may dispense with 
 Augustine and Calvin, and may go to the writings 
 in his own mind and soul. The Bible is God's word 
 to the people, and the average truth and impulse 
 which the people secure from that book will he the- 
 
168 THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 
 
 only truth worthy of being called a Biblical cvetid. 
 As the modern commeutators upon Shakspeare are 
 loading that bard down with ideas of which his brain 
 never dreamed, and are now making that great poet 
 a wareroom into which all kinds of specialists are 
 emptying their loads of discovery, and invention, and 
 plunder, so the long line of theologians have made 
 the Bible the helpless victim of all their marvelous 
 theories and fabrications. Upon the Bible the high 
 churchman hangs his vestments and sets his candles. 
 There the Catholic finds his pope and his hloy 
 water. There the schoolmen found the bases of 
 their debates about the size and weight of angels. 
 There the old students found fifty confessions of 
 faith. There Luther found the nothingness of man's 
 free agency. There Calvin found his five points and 
 the death warrant of Servetus ; and there, in a word, 
 the world's wise men have found all imaginable 
 notions from the damnation of an infant to the 
 hanging of a witch. 
 
 Frederick the Great is reported to have said that 
 if he had a province which he wished to punish for 
 disloyalty, he would suffer it to be governed a few 
 years by some abstract philosophers. We do not 
 know why. one may not apply this anecdote more 
 widely, and declare that if the world wishes to get 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE: 169 
 
 wholly clear of its Bible it should leave it a little 
 longer to the tender mercy of the theologians. It is 
 evidence of the diviueness of the book that it has 
 survived the ravages of all these ancient and modern 
 schoolmen. 
 
 With the great public heart for its interpreter, 
 that book stands to-day all glorious in its kindness 
 and light. The common people come to it not v^^ith 
 their elaborate systems, but with their sins that 
 need forgiveness, and their sorrows that need a cure. 
 The theoretic scholars approach the Bible as critics, 
 desiring to build up a theory or tear down one, and 
 the skeptical world at large reads it only as a 
 lawyer weighs evidence ; but what we call the 
 humbler classes, scattered all through the wide land, 
 living here in a cabin, there in a cottage, or acting 
 as servants of the rich, or sailing in ships upon the 
 sea, or swinging the axe in the forest, come to the 
 Book at times because the issues of life and death 
 are there. By the time this numerous multitude 
 shall have reached a higher intellectual development, 
 the present form of skepticism will have passed 
 away, perhaps, and there will be thousands of 
 citizens who will never have suffered from its blight. 
 The basis of doubt is always changing. Unbelief 
 attaches itself now to scientific inquiry, now to 
 
170 THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 
 
 historical research, now to internal defects of morals; 
 the stream is always changing its bed like the 
 Mississippi, leaving dry to-day the shore against 
 which it was pouring a flood on yesterday. Back of 
 this changing criticism the great book re-appears 
 again, not only not injured, but improved, and the 
 common people will find the Scriptures richer and 
 better at last, without themselves having passed 
 through the furnace by which the Word became 
 purified. It is a comforting thought that there are 
 thousands in the land who are reading the Bible 
 away from the scientific and theological confusion of 
 tongues. 
 
 To the multitude the sacred volume tells a 
 straight-forward story. They see in it the picture 
 of the human heart in all its sinfulness and in all 
 its divineness, too. They see the dark destiny of 
 sin, and the bright destiny of virtue. One is called 
 hell, the other heaven. They do not descend into 
 particulars about the region of sorrow or the region 
 Qi joy. They feel that the one is to be dreaded, 
 ihe other loved. There on the open page lies the 
 doctrine of repentance, far more impressive in Peter 
 and in Magdalen than in any system of abstract 
 doctrine. There lies the doctrine of faith in Christ 
 sweeter in the group around Jesus, in the apostles 
 
TEE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 171 
 
 and martyrs, than in any confession of any Church. 
 There in the Gospels lives and moves and dies and 
 rises again the Redeemer, in a charm and power to 
 which the learning of commentators can add nothing. 
 In fact, one may perhaps be glad that there is an 
 army of earth's inhabitants, old and young, white 
 and black, hidden away in the obscurity which 
 ignorance and poverty bring, to whom human wisdom 
 in the form of "eternally begotten," and "eternally 
 proceeding," and " limited atonement," and " ina- 
 bility," has never come, but to whose hearts the 
 Bible tells its simple story as a mother talks to her 
 confiding child. When learning so mistakes its 
 calling and becomes only the overgrown egotism of 
 vain hearts, then ignorance is bliss. Much of 
 modern theology is only great banks of cloud 
 rolling up between the human family and the moral 
 sun. As the damp vales of earth and the bitter 
 ocean are always exhaling vapors that keep our sky 
 clouded and that expose the beautiful earth to 
 perpetual storm, so from the intellect, in its extrava- 
 gant vanity, clouds arise that hide both Creator and 
 Saviour from the upturned faces of mankind. Upon 
 Goat Island in the Niagara, upon a Sunday, years 
 ago, I found, hidden away at the root of a tree, a 
 Servant from the hotel, reading in his Testament 
 
172 THE BIBLE AND TEE COMMON PEOPLE. 
 
 about the crucifixion. He was an old emancipated 
 slave. Upon being questioned as to whether he 
 loved that passage above all, he said he always cried 
 over the idea that for even black men a Christ 
 should have died. I wonder whether any of the 
 formulas of men about that death could ever entice 
 from a slave's heart such ■ a tribute of weeping. 
 Here a humble fugitive slave came to fulfill the 
 image of Tennyson : 
 
 All subtile thought, all curious fears, 
 Borne down hy gladness so complete. 
 
 He bows, he bathes the Saviour's feet 
 With costly spikenard and with tears. 
 
 Thus, doubt it not, the common people glean 
 from the sacred page the very golden sheaves which 
 the Lord let fall for man. They find them in all 
 the wide field reaching from Abraham to St. John. 
 Not the entire multitude will thus be found extract- 
 ing honey from this great field of flowers. Man 
 will never move in a solid phalanx toward any 
 form of good. Many are called but few are chosen. 
 The downward path is always broad, the upward 
 path narrow. Faeilis descensus averni. Hence, 
 when I speak of the blessings which the common 
 people draw from the Bible I am not dreaming of 
 an unbroken host poring over a divine book, but of 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 173 
 
 many souls, many indeed, which in youth and in 
 old age, in joy and in sorrow, in darkness and in 
 light, are at times taking up the Bible to trace in it 
 the path of hope for time and eternity. Could you 
 call all these together this day from all the corners 
 of our land, and from the lonely ships on our seas, 
 they would come in such a multitude, and so 
 pressing the Book to their hearts, that even were 
 you an infidel you would bless God that so many 
 souls were drawing so much happiness from the two 
 Testaments. The hardest heart might weep for joy 
 that so many had found infinite peace. 
 
 It is wonderful (at least to myself) what use the 
 unlearned make even of the enigmatical pages of 
 Isaiah and Ezekiel and the Apocalypse of St. John. 
 In the humble house of the freeman and the slave 
 you will find the Bible soiled and worn where Eze- 
 kiel parades his images of the Almighty, and where 
 John paints the catastrophe of earth. What means 
 this, that the children of ignorance are drawing 
 nourishment from pages from which the calmer 
 minds of both the skeptical and the faithful have 
 often turned silently away? It must mean that true 
 religion is an emotion of the soul rather than a 
 clear action of the intellect. Religion is an uprising 
 of the heart. A religious newspaper of this city 
 
174 THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 
 
 whicli two years ago exhausted all its columns each 
 week against an "emotional religion," did last week 
 so far forget itself as to state that "Around the 
 Mercy Seat the heart always rises above the mists 
 of the head," and over some Unitarian hymns it 
 expressed the hope that "May there be more of this 
 rising above the narrow house of the intellect toward 
 the Son of Righteousness." Religion, worship, 
 prayer, is a deep feeling rolling over the heart, as 
 a wave upon the shore. Hence, amid the indefinite 
 ideas of Ezekiel and St. John the intellect indeed 
 does not see clearly, but the soul is borne along by 
 its own consciousness of the grand and even the 
 thrilling in religion. Mathematics alone speaks 
 exact words. Poetry and prophecy come with a 
 wonderful vagueness, but the human heart flies to 
 them because it is not information it seeks, but a 
 new light or shadow for the heart. No one may 
 declare what Ezekiel saw in his vision of an advanc- 
 ing Providence moving upon wheels within wheels 
 and with wings of cherubim, but toward the scene 
 the human spirit turns and feels that somewhere in 
 the great cloud of mystery is the being of God. So 
 neither the learned nor the unlearned know what 
 definite ideas lay in the mind of John when he 
 wrote out his great dream, but yet the poor and the 
 
THE BIBLE AND TJELE COMMON PEOPLE. 175 
 
 humble repair to his page because as they read it 
 the great mystery of immortality springs up afresh 
 in their hearts, and to their ears comes the voice of 
 harpers harping upon harps, and through their spirits 
 roll the thunders of eternitj^. Music is not the only 
 indefinite art. Music is almost matchless in its 
 power to awaken the slumbering feelings of the 
 soul. It has no definite language. The same piece 
 will carry new life to one and will seem like a 
 dance of happy spirits, and to another will come as 
 in the pensiveness of a dying hour, and will cause 
 to come before us the faces of the loved dead, and 
 will make one wish to be with the dead beyond the 
 tomb in the grass. Music is an urn into which 
 each heart empties<fits own self. But it is not alone 
 in this. Religion is its sister, only more gifted in 
 mind and soul. Hence, into the words of St. John, 
 into his graceful vases of language the heart of the 
 humblest man may go and pour its own hopes and 
 sorrows, and while yet upon the shores of earth in 
 body may be carried away to paradise. The Apoca- 
 lypse is only the solemn music of futurity sounding 
 for us all. The words are indistinct, but we 
 remember now that the most impressive music is 
 written wholly without words, leaving the soul to 
 wander off into realms where no language has ever 
 
176 THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE. 
 
 gone. In the best hours of the soul language 
 becomes vague or else wholly perishes. 
 
 Let me conclude by re-stating the thought that 
 the Bible Society may, if it will rise to its work, 
 reach a multitude to which the chilling unbelief of 
 our day has not yet come ; that this multitude, 
 living now in obscurity, will come forward and be 
 the children of a deeper faith when we children of 
 doubt shall have become dust; and this multitude 
 can gather from the Bible itself a better idea of 
 Jesus Christ and of the whole way of life than they 
 can gather from the elaborate systems of man ; and 
 that before their strangely-made heffrts, hearts full 
 of responsive religion, even the prophecies and the 
 Apocalypse turn into prayers, an<^ fears, and longings, 
 and hopes, lifting their spirits upward as by a. 
 melody written sublimely, but without words. 
 
OHRISTIAI^r HEEOISM. 
 
SERMON X. 
 OHEISTIAN HEROISM. 
 
 " Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations."— ifaW. 38 : 19. 
 
 npHE approaching meeting of the American Board, 
 -*- a meeting which honors always the city where 
 its sessions are held, should, for the week, at least, 
 make the subject of missions a theme of reflection. 
 We are all by nature sluggish of intellect. The 
 easiest path is the favorite. Idleness is one of the 
 shapes assumed by our original sin. To think 
 correctly is not the only act that depends upon 
 long effort, but to be willing to think at all, is a 
 state of mind that comes by civilization, and not by 
 nature. When a man has become so willing to 
 think that he will not dismiss with a shudder any 
 of the great or minor questions of the day, he has 
 made no little progress away from the degradation 
 of Adam's full. All public speakers have at times 
 seen the hearts of their audiences sink when the 
 theme of remark has been announced, all the 
 
180 GHBI8TIAN HEROISM. 
 
 multitude in the seats feeling that they could not 
 endure to climb such a hill of dead argument as lay- 
 before them. But this sinking, this fainting of the 
 soul in presence of mental work, is not the result 
 of human greatness, but human littleness, it being 
 the struggle of the old "natural man" to find still 
 in the nineteenth century the sleep and languor 
 which so delighted him when the world was young 
 and the day and night were not vexed \>y any logic 
 or any art. It will require in us all great effort 
 and great will-power to enable us to study betimes 
 the varied phenomena of man's life. As merchants 
 we are willing to study man's commerce at home 
 and abroad; as doctors we are willing to read the 
 medical journals of the old and new worlds ; as. 
 politicians we are ready to mark what the papers 
 said yesterday, and what this or that caucus did 
 East or West; as ladies of fashion all are willing to 
 study the latest forms of raiment, and to combine 
 desire with the study; but to get out of these 
 channels, and while merchants to care for law, or 
 while doctors to care for theology, or while lawyers 
 to give any thought to a missionary, this is the 
 crucial test which few can survive. It should be 
 the deliberate and stubborn purpose of each mind 
 to free itself from the infatuation of a hobby, and 
 
HEIST I AN HEROISM. 181 
 
 to stand forth in the breadth of the world. Like 
 the ancient accused of a selfishness, we should reply, 
 " I am human, and no human interest is beyond the 
 range of my heart." 
 
 The greatness of earth is many-sided. Be your 
 own calling great indeed, law or science, or art or 
 merchandise, the world is immensely large outside 
 your calling, and it would be sad should you die 
 without having seen something of that vast beyond. 
 It has been thought the calamity of Moses that he 
 was not permitted to pass over into the better land; 
 but there are millions in our day who can show a 
 sadder record, for instead of rising to the top of 
 Pisgah and stealing a sweet prospect of the widen- 
 ing world, they remain at the mountain's base and 
 die without even a glimpse of "the sweet fields 
 arrayed in living green." The tears of pity shed 
 for Moses would well be distributed over the crowd 
 that does not enjoy even a Pisgah view of far-off 
 things. 
 
 Assuming, therefore, that we should struggle to 
 get away from the narrowness that cares for only 
 one thing, and from the inclination of barbarism to 
 pass life in sleep, let us confess that the missionary 
 movements of the Christian era are a fact that 
 demands the attention of student and ordinary 
 
182 OHBISTIAN HEROISM. 
 
 citizen and philanthropist. A material age will daily 
 invite us away from such lines of reflection. It 
 asks us to study the strata in the ground and the 
 stars in the sky; asks us to find the shores of old 
 lakes and the craters of extinct volcanoes; asks us 
 to gather the bones of fossil birds and fish, and 
 store up a cabinet of shells out of which some 
 worms died a million years ago; but it heeds little 
 the men that have sailed all stormy seas to carry 
 love and light to their fellow pilgrims in this vale. 
 Science is often full of cruelty. It studies the little 
 things of the universe, counts the birds and the 
 trees, measures the footprints of the great mammals 
 that beat around in the forests that afterward made 
 our coal, weighs the fossil tusks and teeth of extinct 
 mastodons, but looks coldly toward the ship that 
 carried St. Paul about, and toward the block where 
 the blood was drawn from his heart. To science 
 the bark canoe and the stone tomahawk of the 
 savage are things greater and more charming than 
 the pleading at Mars Hill or the movements of the 
 apostles. 
 
 All the facts of the earth are impressive and 
 valuable, and at the feet of natural science we may 
 all cast garlands of good will, but it is with ideas 
 as Paul says it is with bodies: there are ideas 
 
0HBI8TIAN HEROISM. 183 
 
 terrestrial and ideas celestial, and the glory of the 
 terrestrial is one and the glory of the celestial is 
 another. There is one kind of flesh of man, another 
 flesh of beasts, another of birds ; and so there is 
 one glory of the sun, and another glory of the 
 moon. In the realm of ideas there is a glory on all 
 sides, a beautiful, captivating glory ; but the glory 
 of the birds and the fishes is one, and the glory of 
 a Xavier, or a Duff, or a Judson is another. Dear 
 to us all, both as a study and as an inspiration, 
 should be the lives of men who helped Christianity 
 and all our civilization when it lay helpless in the 
 midst of savages. When the storm may have 
 occurred that changed the old ocean into prairies, or 
 which transformed forests into beds of coal, is a 
 question interesting indeed, but not so vital, so 
 sublime, as the study of that awful tempest of 
 destruction and creation that gave us Christ and His 
 ardent followers. The penitence of Magdalen, the 
 self-denial of the poor widow, the kindness of St. 
 John, are stories that have affected the human race 
 more than it has been affected by botany, chemistry, 
 and astronomy. As of all things upon earth the soul 
 is the greatest, as "there is nothing great in the 
 world but man, and nothing great in man but his 
 soul," according to the confession of Sir William 
 
184 OHBISTIAN HEROISM. 
 
 Hamilton, hence there can be no study higher than 
 the reflection over the atmosphere in which the soul 
 lives and advances in its marvelous career. To look 
 out in the evening toward the West and see the 
 saffron ether poured out of invisible urns, is only 
 one-half as sublime an act of the spirit as the 
 retrospect of the heart that looks back and sees 
 that atmosphere of human love and truth that 
 rolled down upon the world from the great 
 hearts of Jesus and His missionary children. As 
 when the ministering priest at the altar used, in 
 Aaron's day, to wave the burning censer until the 
 colored smoke and the delicious perfume filled the 
 whole temple, and from the fretted windows floated 
 out toward Heaven, so Paul, and Peter, and James, 
 and John, standing afar off at the holy altar, have 
 swung their lighted vessels to and fro, until we, in 
 this remote century, are enveloped by the pillar of 
 cloud and fire, and to-day breathe in the sweet- 
 scented air. 
 
 St. Paul, Xavier, Judson! These three names 
 will stand for a class, and from/ one we may learn 
 all. (J.6 uno disce omnes.) The splendor of learning 
 and the temptations of office and fame counted 
 nothing to Paul's arithmetic after he met the great 
 Christ. After that meeting at the gates of Damas- 
 
CHBISTIAN HER0I8M. 185 
 
 cus, Paul, like William Hamilton, saw nothing 
 valuable upon earth but man, and nothing great in 
 tnan but his soul. Paul passed from the career of a 
 harsh ruler, or rather brutal underling, over to that 
 unbounded charity that pities all, and loves all, and 
 helps all. The Jewish nation was too limited to 
 satisfy his love. He became the apostle to the 
 Gentiles because the Jews were only a little sect. 
 The Gentiles were a great world, hundreds of 
 millions strong. Paul is the first being in history, 
 after Jesus Christ, that took into his love the human 
 race. The rest of the human history is uncheered 
 by any instance of a self-denial that had all man 
 for its object. Some of the Greeks wrote about the 
 oneness of man, and one of them boasted that he 
 was a " citizen of the world." But the theory of 
 nobleness found its earliest realization in Judea. 
 The Greeks loved their own state to such a degree 
 that citizens thought it a matter of reproach to visit 
 any outside land. To the polite Athenian foreign 
 travel was a disgrace, unless the journey were made 
 on some business account. To go abroad was to 
 confess the imperfection of home. That magnificent 
 breadth of brain and affection that grasps a whole 
 human race, bond and free, high and low, is first 
 seen in the great missionary to the Gentiles. All 
 
186 CHRISTIAN EEBOISM. 
 
 the elements of human greatness were visible in 
 Paul. The insignificance of his body and whole 
 presence perhaps made him concentrate, even from 
 boyhood, upon the work of mental development. 
 The gates of fashionable life and pleasure were 
 closed, and hence the greater flow of life through 
 the gates of the spirit. When a man stood up in 
 the physique and health of an Apollo, the games, 
 the general pride of life, came into daily conflict 
 with great mental progress and with the highest 
 ends of being. Nature compelled Paul to pursue an 
 intellectual life, for it closed against him the voices 
 of pleasure and the flattery of society. His thorn 
 was not in the flesh, but his whole body was a 
 thorn in the . soul. The body is generally the 
 decoration of the mind : his was the mind's mortifi- 
 cation. At last Paul must have been a rare 
 spectacle of soul standing upon its own mind alone. 
 The infidels of the day ridiculed his personal 
 appearance. He was of low stature and stoop- 
 shouldered ; his forehead bald and his nose crooked 
 as though it had been broken. He was so delicate 
 that much of the time in his missionary travels he 
 was almost blind with headache. In Lucian and 
 Jerome, enemy and friend, you will find the 
 evidence that the great soul of the apostle was set 
 
CHRISTIAN HEROISM. 187 
 
 among thorns of the flesh. But God's roses bloom 
 among thorns. 
 
 It is wonderful that the people received with so 
 much affection a man so unprepossessing. And yet 
 no man that has ever journeyed upon earth ever 
 found in his fellows a deeper friendship. Paul him- 
 self says that, notwithstanding his infirmity, he was 
 received "as though an angel from God." The 
 explanation, after all, is easy. The heart and mind 
 make up the man. A great cause acting in the 
 soul illumines the face and sheds a halo around the 
 body that transforms it into angelic outline. Thus 
 Paul moved around transfigured by his grand charity 
 and piety; and as, in a certain condition, Heaven's 
 light on the horizon takes up the village on the 
 shore and transforms it into palaces in the upper 
 air, so there is a condition of virtue and love often 
 in man that will make a homely face radiant, and 
 make the life and memory of a Paul too vast and 
 beautiful to be caught upon a page of history. In 
 the holy atmosphere of missions Paul was trans- 
 figured. 
 
 Look far onward in Church history and behold 
 Francis Xavier, " the apostle of the Indies." Let 
 me ask you not to permit your feelings as Protes- 
 tants to act as a prejudice against the claims of the 
 
188 CHBI8TIAN HEROISM. 
 
 Catholic Xavier to your love and admiration. The 
 proverb that no good could come out of Nazareth, 
 once met with a wonderful rebuke. Out of a land 
 so unpromising came a Christ. Out of the Roman 
 Church, notwithstanding the dark stains upon its 
 character, there have in all the old centuries shone 
 forth at times rays of beautiful light, as when the 
 sun gleams out from among the clouds. From that 
 Church came Fenelon, Massillon, Guyon, names that 
 would not by comparison disgrace the holiest ones 
 of the human race. And particularly in this 
 department of missions did the old Catholic Church 
 reveal a spirit wonderfully like the spirit of the 
 Saviour. All over this land, from the Gulf to the 
 Canadas, have the holy fathers trodden when other 
 hearts quailed before the dangers and the depressing 
 solitudes of this once desolate world. The Indians 
 of the Canadas differ to-day from the blood-thii-sty, 
 brutal Sioux, because, led by the Catholic priests, 
 the Northern tribes, before you and I were born, 
 learned to look at the crucifix and bow in prayer. 
 Out of the old Catholic Church came Xavier. Rich 
 in gold, but richer still in spirit, high by titles of 
 rank, but higher still by that manhood which Christ 
 confers, nothing offered him happiness but the wide 
 search for souls. He was the Christopher, the 
 
CHBISTIAN HEROISM. 189 
 
 Christ bearer, of the sixteenth century. In that 
 century no theologian found Christ: only the 
 missionary knew the heart of Jesus. Entering a 
 village in the Indies, he walked through the middle 
 of the streets ringing a little bell, calling men, and 
 women, and children around him ; his dress was 
 simplicity itself ; his face benignant ; his eloquence 
 that of righteousness and love. When a ship's crew 
 was attacked with disease he became " all things to 
 all men;" as physician he prescribed for the sick; 
 as a nurse he washed the clothes of the men ; as a 
 minister of religion he pointed the dying to the 
 cross. He penetrated almost all the Eastern lands, 
 and was drawing near the Chinese millions when 
 death carried him from the field of battle, to the 
 land of eternal peace. I can not forbear repeating 
 here a second time before you the farewell hymn of 
 Xavier when his friends would dissuade him from 
 his noble conception: 
 
 Hush you! close your dismal story; 
 
 What to me are tempests wild? 
 Heroes on the way to glory 
 
 Heed not pastimes of a child, 
 For the souls of men I'm sailing, 
 
 Blow, ye winds, north, south, east, west, 
 Though the storm he round me wailing, 
 
 There '11 he peace within my hreast. 
 
190 CHBISTIAir HEB0I8M. 
 
 The name of Judson may serve to illustrate the 
 same spirit bursting forth from the Protestant world; 
 but with this difference of scene, that at last the 
 beauty and impressiveness of any one star is lost in 
 the grandeur of a whole heaven bestudded in all its 
 blue. Judson led in the mighty works of this 
 century, a kind of morning star running before its 
 great sunshine. For about forty years he toiled for 
 his fellowmen, and repeated in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury what Paul had done in the first, and Xavier in 
 the sixteenth. It is all one story — love, labor, 
 suffering, and heroic death. If you will study these 
 three lives until your heart can see these three 
 heroes going forth each day to their toil, you will 
 have in your possession something that will keep 
 ever before you the sublime attributes of man, and 
 will make you feel that perhaps humanity was made 
 in the image of God. 
 
 When profane history spreads out before you the 
 bloody page of Alexander, and Caesar, and Nero, 
 and your heart feels faint and sick, turn away and 
 look upon these missionary faces that have gone 
 from earth to heaven, and your eyes will dim with 
 tears of gratitude that God made man so noble in 
 feelings and in destiny. Guizot and Hallam and all 
 the philosophers of history tell us what good influ- 
 
CIIIilSTIAN HEROISM. 191 
 
 eiices came from the knights-errant that wandered 
 for a few generations over Europe. We are assured 
 that they rode to and fro with helmet and sword 
 and armor in the interest of equity. It is possible 
 that they developed military prowess and some new 
 conception of personal honor. But whenever the 
 world's civilization shall desire to see the heroes 
 that laid the deep foundations of our age and of 
 the coming more golden time, it will have to pass 
 by the glittering mail of knights and see the Pauls, 
 and Marquettes, and Elliotts, and Duffs moving 
 around wearing the sword of the spirit and the 
 richly jeweled helmet of salvation. 
 
 And mark the excellence of these names above 
 other names than these written in heraldry. 
 Pronounce the beloved words that recall the 
 philanthropists of the past, Wilberforce, Bright, 
 Garrison, Sumner, all that long array of lofty ones, 
 and yet the missionary spirit of Paul and Xavier 
 outranks them all, for the reforms of Sumner and 
 Wilberforce were but the border of the garment; 
 not the whole realm of riches and hope and faith 
 and piety, but only the civil liberty of mankind. 
 Hence, when our slaves became free some of the 
 great souls which for years had plead for that 
 freedom sunk within their bosoms as though the 
 
192 ORRISTIAM HEROISM. 
 
 work of life had been done. One of these confessed 
 that it remained only for him to die and find rest. 
 But the missionary spirit begins afresh when the 
 statesman casts his work down. It includes the 
 philanthropy of Charles Sumner as the light of the 
 sun includes the light of the moon, and the twilight 
 of morn and eve. Sumner, and Howard, and Night- 
 ingale are satellites that revolve around that great 
 blazing center of love in which the Paul and the 
 Christ acted out their careers. Christianity included 
 freedom and then rushed still on. 
 
 In reflecting, this morning, over the missionary 
 spirit can we escape observing the fact that whether 
 it was Paul rising up in the first century, or Xavier 
 in the remoter time, or Judson in our era, the scene 
 is the same? Between those three souls there is no 
 discord ; and for this reason : their spirits came 
 from one fountain — Christ. The schools may furnish 
 theologians and preachers and send them forth out 
 of all harmony and able to throw the world into 
 discord, but it is Christ alone who creates the 
 missionarj'. All these illustrious children of the 
 wilderness, these preachers under the trees, and 
 among the wild men of the East and West, drew 
 nothing from man, but all from God ; and hence, 
 come when and where they may, they are all one 
 
ohristIjW heroism. 193 
 
 picture within. By the principle of geometry, that 
 things equal to the same thing are equal to each 
 other, these widely separated heroes are alike because 
 they are like to the same original of Nazareth. 
 Theology fights the more the farther it is from Christ. 
 O, loftiest spirit of earth, the soul of a Paul, or 
 a Xavier, or a Judson! What want there may seem 
 of beauty comes from our inability to rise high 
 enough in our feelings to see and measure this 
 grandeur. It is said that men throw their offerings 
 down at the feet of the gods because the human 
 eye is unable to see and the human arm too short 
 to enable the worshiper to place his garlands upon 
 the forehead of Deity. With similar weakness and 
 humility we all, of a mercenary and infidel age, 
 being unable to see and reach the divine forehead 
 of this missionary spirit, that loftiest shape of soul, 
 can not do otherwise than come to-day and whisper 
 our words of homage at her feet. The ancients saw 
 in their sacred vales and woods three graces, and at 
 times, in poetic moments, nine muses; but this 
 single grace, the spirit of love, this wandering virtue 
 of missions, surpasses all the old fabled ones of 
 history. Setting forth from Bethlehem, this love of 
 man for man has journeyed over all continents, and 
 to-day seems to be only beginning the development 
 13 
 
194 CHRISTIAN HEROISM. 
 
 of her divine plan. Continents that lie in darkness 
 shall see light, and the wilderness that has no 
 beauty shall soon bloom like the rose. Here in the 
 noise and dust of traf3&c and under the shadows of 
 "^sin, you and I fail to see these divine features, but 
 should it ever be our happiness to pass within 
 heaven's gate, oh, how these earthly hearts that 
 turned many to righteousness will, m that upper 
 sky, shine as stars for ever and ever. 
 
YOUTH: 
 ITS DUTIES A^D PRIVILEGES. 
 
SERMON XI. 
 YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PEIVILEGES. 
 
 JEcclesiastes, 12th ehoupter. 
 
 XF, as is commonly supposed, this chapter was 
 -'- written by Solomon, our boasting century must 
 award him the honor of having penned a passage 
 not to be surpassed for beauty and wisdom and 
 pathos by any thing in modern literature. Upon the 
 theme, "Youth, its Duties and Privileges," Solomon 
 ought to have written well. If, as is often said, no 
 eloquence can come from an empty heart, from 
 Solomon's heart, full of final failure and bitterness, 
 there should have come easily just such an eloquence 
 of sadness and penitence as appears in this address 
 to the young. The great king had wasted his 
 gifted hfe. He had loosed the silver cords ; had 
 broken the pitcher at the fountain. The windows 
 out of which he had once seen a beautiful world 
 had become darkened. We may confess that 
 Solomon must have written the chapter, for only out 
 
198 YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEaES. 
 
 of his full heart could such eloquence have poured. 
 What a sublime multitude was in his mind when 
 he called up before his imagination all the young 
 men of his empire! But the multitude was sublime 
 beyond the vision of the writer, for hundreds of 
 years after Solomon and his throne had perished, 
 those words were to pass from Hebrew to Greek 
 words, from Greek to Latin, from Latin to German 
 and English, and be read and loved by millions in 
 continents then unknown. Strange things happen 
 in the world of mind. When the poor, blind Homer 
 was singing his songs in old villages three thousand 
 years ago, his poverty-stricken heart could not have 
 dreamed that in all the subsequent ages the greatest 
 men of all nations would read his verses with inex- 
 pressible delight. Solomon may have written this 
 chapter in his chamber, only for his own instruction 
 and relief, just as a full heart will often weep in 
 secret, but unawares Solomon addressed the whole 
 world. The walls of his chamber were taken away 
 and all the centuries saw the weeping thinker and 
 the sad thought. 
 
 Let us leave now the old unhappy king and 
 spend our half-hour beside that great stream of life 
 called "youth." No science has yet told us when 
 youth terminates. This must come from the fact 
 
YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AMD PHIVILEGES. 199 
 
 that there is no definite boundary to that beautiful 
 state. It begins indeed at the cradle, but just 
 where its precious period ends and where middle 
 life begins no one has been able to announce. 
 Perhaps God has mercifully hidden the dividing line 
 that we may not weep as we pass over it, but may 
 go onward with a light heart, not knowing that the 
 light of the spirit is becoming mingled with shadow. 
 Let us then accept of the indefiniteness of nature 
 and declare youth to be a period reaching from the 
 cradle out into the area of life, but without exact 
 confines. As day fades into night, thus youth fades, 
 and after a time the soul looks up and says, "Night 
 has come." While these boundaries are indefinite, 
 yet there are hundreds here to-day who know that 
 they are living in this period declared as golden, not 
 only by poets but by philosophers. They know it 
 not only by the mere count of j'ears, but by the 
 buoyancy and hope ' of their hearts. As yet the 
 world lies not back of them, but before them. Like 
 children of a Christmas, they are happy not because 
 the day has come, but because its light is about to 
 dawn. The human heart is great only when it is 
 capable of great inspiration. When those years are 
 upon man in which the morrow is wreathed with 
 splendor like the nimbus around the foreheads of 
 
200 YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 
 
 the old saints, then the mind and whole soul are 
 passing through their period of greatest power. 
 When the heart is so susceptible that all the winds 
 of earth, even the softest whisper, waken music 
 amid its strings, then the greatest days of this life 
 are passing. They may not be the most powerful 
 days in actual events. Events come slowly. But 
 they are the most powerful days in all those 
 qualities that produce events. The actual harvest is 
 always far away from the sowing time. Indeed, the 
 harvest comes toward the fall of the year. It 
 stands close by the autumn leaf. But the days that 
 made the harvest began far back in the March and 
 April rains. So the noble events of life come, 
 perhaps, in full or late manhood, but they are only 
 the ripened fruit of a tree that put forth its leaves 
 and blossoms long before, when the noble atmos- 
 phere of youth lay around the spirit. The young, 
 looking at all the illustrious ones of the world, and 
 marking that they are standing in middle life, feel 
 that they can hope little from the present, as it still 
 is too far away from great action. Fatal mistake ! 
 That middle life so full of honors is only the place 
 where the stream of youth empties all its long-borne 
 treasures. Middle life is the place where the torrent 
 of the heart tumbles into the sea. Coleridge says, 
 
YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 201 
 
 "No one ever became a poet after he had passed 
 his twenty-first year." The meaning of such words 
 must be that such a beautiful fabric as verse can 
 be woven only out of moments full of life's early 
 enthusiasm and early colorings. Indeed, the most 
 remarkable men of all history have achieved their 
 greatness by the time the thirtieth year had come, 
 for up to that period the idealism, the dreams, the 
 vehemence of the mind, the inspiration of the soul, 
 sweep along in all the majesty of a heavy wave or 
 a rushing storm. As the Cumean sibyl raved when 
 the spirit of prophecy was upon her; as the old 
 prophets seemed half frenzied when their lips sang 
 those stately strains of destiny, so the utterances and 
 deeds of middle life are only the final language of 
 that sibyl that raves in the bosom all through the 
 inspired hours of life's morning. 
 
 There are many melancholy scenes on earth. The 
 millions of poor in Ireland might well touch all 
 souls with pity. All over the world there are 
 strewn great calamities of mankind. A journey 
 among men is much like passing through a forest 
 after a tornado has just passed by, or like passing 
 through Calabria on the morning after the earth- 
 quake had shaken it ; but more painful than all these 
 scenes is the spectacle of millions of youth daily 
 
202 TOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 
 
 exhausting upon low pursuits, or childish pursuits, 
 an enthusiasm and an inspiration of soul implanted 
 by the Creator for the purpose of creating and deco- 
 rating a world. Every young heart of man or 
 woman carries within it a vitality that may make, 
 and a genius that may beautify, a vast empire. As 
 God implants in the young bird a power that makes 
 rt at last spread its wings and cast itself upon the 
 soft air, so into the young bosom, which He loves 
 more than He loves the sparrow. He has emptied 
 an urn of enthusiasm, of hope, of sentiment, of love, 
 of ambition, which are to become the wings of all 
 subsequent flight. Trusting yourselves, my young 
 friends, to these wings, the great air of the world 
 will softly and sweetly bear you up. But to permit 
 this holy vitality to exhaust itself in a saloon beneath 
 the pavement, to compel the inspiration of a young 
 heart to spend its divine resources upon a drunken 
 song, or to study only the shape and colorings of a 
 toilet, to turn away such a gifted spirit from the 
 intoxication of learning, of art, of culture, of religion, 
 and make it beat its bright wings only in the foul 
 cages of vice, is the most painful of all the pictures 
 seen in the drama of man — most painful because so 
 vast and so influential for wretchedness. 
 
 The classic books which nearly all of you have 
 
YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRiriLBQBS. 203 
 
 read (thanks to that public education which has 
 given the world's literature to all the rising genera- 
 tion,) told you of a lake called " Avernus." "Aver- 
 nus" means birdless. Located in the desolate crater 
 of an extinct volcano, a poisonous air issuing from 
 the infernal depths hung over the dark water, and 
 stupefied the sense of the eagle or the nightingale 
 that tried to pass from shore to shore. Suddenly the 
 wing became powerless, and the eagle with his pride 
 and the nightingale with his song fell into the river 
 of death. Let us bless the classics that they have 
 handed down to us such a figure of human life. 
 There is a lake of pleasure, of folly, of sin, lying 
 near the homes of the young. A deadly air hangs 
 over it. The young, forgetful or ignorant of its fatal 
 vapors, spread their wings upon its hither shore — 
 those wings made in Heaven, and good enough for 
 angels. But at last their flight is checked, and be 
 the heart once proud like the eagle's, or sweet with 
 song like the lark's, alike it falls into the dark flood. 
 Thus all ye young be assured that the wonderful 
 activity within, and the rosy imagination of these 
 days, are a power that should be busy constructing 
 the future. A happy middle life does not spring up 
 out of itself. The eloquence of Henry Clay did not 
 come to him in 1830 or 1840, when he stood in the 
 
204 YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PBIVIIEG-ES. 
 
 height of power, but came in that rosy light of 
 oratory that hung over liis cradle in 1777 and in 
 that longing of the soul that made the corn-fields of 
 Virginia the audience of his recitations and solilo- 
 quies. Thus all greatness comes from permitting the 
 inspiration of youth to pour itself along some sacred 
 path. At twenty-five the trickling drops have be- 
 come a stream ; at thirty the streamlet has become 
 a majestic river. The heart will never become as 
 powerful again as it was when it was young and 
 possessed the power to enlarge the future, and, 
 like the sun, draw up sweet water from that out- 
 spread sea. The sadness of old age lies partly in its 
 inability to paint any longer in brilliant colors. 
 Unless old age finds itself full of the poetry and 
 rapture stored up in life's morning, it becomes only 
 a solemnity, a face turned downward. The blessed- 
 ness of young life lies in its privilege of singing : 
 
 There is a fount about to stream, 
 There is a light about to beam, 
 There is a warmth about to glow, 
 There is a flower about to blow. 
 
 Let us now ask the question, How shall the 
 young make the most of life ? The most general 
 answer and the most valuable one is, "By common 
 sense and by will power." What keeps you from 
 
TOUTS, ITS DUTIES AND PBIVILEOES. 205 
 
 throwing yourself into the lake, or into a fire, or 
 from the roof of the house ? This simple quality of 
 man called common sense is the nearest and best 
 guardian angel of each mortal. Others believe in 
 other guardian angels. But inasmuch as God has 
 given you all this will-power and this common sense 
 it is almost an impertinence in us to demand addi- 
 tional guardian angels from the same heaven. 
 
 Some declare that religion will save the young, 
 and that alone. But this reply is too superficial — 
 for what will set religion before the mind in the 
 proper light ? What shall unfold its value ? At the 
 foundation of all safety lies, therefore, " common 
 sense," that forbids you to hurl yourself into the 
 sea or down the precipice. Into this God-made bal- 
 ance place the good and ill of earth and weigh 
 them, and then hold fast to that which is good. 
 
 The young of the past have been deeply injured 
 by a philosophy which informed them that they 
 possessed no power, that they must seek some day a 
 divine overshadowing that would in an instant 
 change their natures and set them out upon the new 
 career of saints. Under the influence of this blight 
 our youth have assumed themselves to be powerless, 
 and have drifted along in every folly and weakness, 
 expecting the Deity to come and remake them at 
 
206 YOUTH, ITS BUTIE8 AND PEIVILEGE8. 
 
 some later day. The tens of millions of ruined 3'outli 
 in the world now show that God does not often 
 come to a life that has neglected itself. God sent 
 His angel of human will and human judgment before 
 Him, and He loves to enter the heart, not that 
 rejected His messengers, but that received them. 
 
 Hence, the first law of reform or of protection 
 is that we dare not think the thought or do the 
 deed of a fool. Castelar says that Alexandre Dumas 
 failed of greatness because "he was willing to tell 
 a lie in his books." Literature reposes upon truth- 
 So a good life reposes upon common sense, and can 
 not stand upon a basis of folly. Why should God 
 send other angels if we despise the first? 
 
 Second law of success : This intelligence must 
 busy itself chiefly in keeping always before the 
 mind " high ideals." Life must not be projected 
 upon a scale of simple amusement, or of riches, or 
 ease, but upon a plan of high spirityal nature. 
 This thought has already been involved in what we 
 have said about the beautiful outlook of youth. 
 Setting forth in his career, each human being living 
 in our land and century perceives a light on the 
 far off horiz m. Before us in early years this light 
 is white and charming. To compel the will to look 
 always toward it, and to persuade the heart always 
 
YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 207 
 
 to love it, is the highest duty of early life. This 
 ideal will be found composed of two things — an 
 integrity toward man and God, and then some idol 
 of this life. Follow it, and you will find religion as 
 to God, and a glorious life pursuit as to earth. 
 Byron held to only one-half the vision. But he 
 made a gigantic world out of that half. His ideal 
 never moved from its place. The Scotch reviewers 
 could not extinguish or eclipse the star. Wherever 
 the unhappy lord went, his harp was in his hand, 
 and all the world of beauty, all the seas, all the 
 mountains, all the joys and griefs of mankind, came 
 to him to be blessed with the immortality of song. 
 Before Franklin stood the dream of wisdom and 
 knowledge. Before all who have ever reached a 
 valuable distinction there has stood a future full of 
 a light that has never once gone out. With these 
 two lofty heights before the eye, the height of 
 morals and of personal development, life can not be 
 a failure, end where it may, in middle years or in 
 old age. 
 
 But these thoughts bring us now to one of the 
 most powerful enemies of the young. There is a 
 foe on the field that is vanquishing many a gifted 
 brain. Of the power of sin and folly I have already 
 spoken. Let us confess, now, the hunger for riches 
 
208 YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 
 
 to be one of the most injurious appetites that gnaws 
 at the modern heart-strings. It is all the more to 
 be dreaded because it comes backed by the phil- 
 osophy of the whole century. The philosophy 
 of Plato and the Bible turned men toward 
 spirituality, and forth came the thinkers, the poets, 
 the philosophers, and the apostles. The philosophy 
 of Bacon came and turned man toward things. 
 Railways, and ships, and carriages, and houses, and 
 farms, and stores, and all the million of things 
 poured out of the new shape of reason like sparks 
 from a conflagration. Whereas once the world was 
 full of beauty or chivalry, it is now overflowing 
 with things. Money represents all these things. It 
 will buy any thing from a diamond to a railway. 
 Hence, money stands for almost all the world 
 material, and dust made and perishable. In other 
 times it might have stood for religion, or knowledge, 
 or culture. But our philosophy being material, 
 money follows the genius of the times and stands 
 for things and not for soul. Thus before the 
 millions of the young shines a star unworthy to 
 guide the spirit, a yellow star lurid as Mars, sickly 
 as the Dog star in August. The Astor who has 
 just died, the great millionaires about to go from 
 earth, have written over their own pursuits, " All is 
 
YOUTH, ITS DUTISa AND PRIVILEQES. 209 
 
 vanity." If only a few men in a generation were 
 struggling for gold, the world could bear the strain, 
 but when the public philosophy is material, and all 
 the sweet infants are born into the passion for 
 money as they are born into liberty and language, 
 the outlook seems draped with clouds. 
 
 Such being the weakness of the age, the youth 
 in whose bosom there remains some of the spiritual 
 power accustomed to shed over nature something 
 of a divine light must battle against the sin of his 
 day, and set up again some ideal holier than money. 
 He must open the hearts of all the great dead that 
 lie dreaming in the silent past, and find how feeble 
 in all of them was the love of money, but how 
 powerful the love of the true, the beautiful, and the 
 sood. He must lift the shroud from the forehead 
 of all, from the Sappho of old Greece and the 
 Terence and Virgil of Rome to the last great soul 
 that has left earth and there see that for none of 
 them did riches weave a single wreath. Humility 
 of property and of soul inserted all the flowers in 
 their chaplets. 
 
 It is the custom now of those who have hved 
 
 for money alone to be urged in their last days to 
 
 make large bequests to schools, colleges, libraries; 
 
 and some of them, less perfectly ruined by the 
 
 u 
 
210 YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PBIVILEQEa. 
 
 passion than others, do surrender at last the riches 
 that can not follow them. This dying act we call 
 charity. And such it is. But such a final adminis- 
 tration of the effects of the dead only shows that 
 our little money, before we come to the grave, 
 should take these spiritual paths confessed to be so 
 noble. The wills of the rich are thus only 
 penitential tears falling over a misspent life, telling 
 us not how gold should be employed after one has 
 gotten a million and stands by a grave, but how it 
 should be administered when one's cheek is still in 
 bloom and the star of the soul shines out in its first 
 magnitude. 
 
 The young man tells me that his ideal of life is 
 high, but he has not the means of reaching it. Well, 
 wealth is not often the means. The highest ideals 
 are best reached from the humble home. 
 
 Almost the whole column of great names stands 
 upon the bed-rock of humble property. Our states- 
 men, our thinkers, our writers, our judges on the 
 bench, our orators, have all been born poor. In all 
 the history of man the pursuit of gold has warred 
 against the development of self. The rock of pov- 
 erty seems hard and cold, but within it is jasper. 
 
 The pursuit and the possession of money clip the 
 wings of the soul. All through literature, all through 
 
TOUrii, ITS DUTIE8 AND PRIVILEGES. 211 
 
 art, the plain cottage, the unpretending home, stands 
 for the triumph of earth. The poets, the painters, 
 the orators — all these sensitive souls — know where 
 human happiness has been found in all the long ex- 
 perience of man. They read the book of fate for 
 us and tell us its true meaning. And yet these 
 inspired brains, when they have wished to show us 
 the beauty of life, have never led us up to the door 
 of a palace, but always to some place where the 
 rose blooms by a quiet spot, and where the song of 
 the birds and the light of the sun meet in the same 
 interlacing leaves, the waves of light an^ the waves 
 of sound flowing together toward the heart. The 
 magnificent kings have wished often for the peace 
 of humble life. ■ The court of Charles X., sickened 
 by splendor, repaired to the country and dressed as 
 shepherds and toiled for a time, that they might 
 touch life, not in its cares, but in its sweetness. In 
 the novel of Auerbach it was not Irma in the palace 
 that was so blessed, but Irma in her mountain home 
 that gave the writer such a picture of spiritual and 
 physical beauty. The care of large property injures 
 the soul by turning it away from those mental and 
 moral paths along which grow the sweetest and most 
 imperishable flowers. This is no new view. It is not 
 the telling of a secret. The world knows that the 
 
212 TOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 
 
 highest happiness is found in the constant pursuit 
 of an ideal, and that the chase for riches is only an 
 intoxication like the fascination of the goblet of wine 
 or the cup of flattery. We all drink these cups, not 
 because they are valuable, but because we are weak. 
 What is called " moderate property " or even 
 "humble means," is the best condition of success. 
 An educated book-keeper has within his reach a 
 triumph which the owner of the "bank" or the 
 " business " may never reach. Emerson says, " Give 
 me health and a June day, and I will make the 
 pomp of kings ridiculous." It is necessary only to 
 throw down the god Money from his pedestal, to 
 trample that senseless idol under foot, and to set up 
 all the higher ideals — a neat home, vines of one's 
 own planting, a fevr books full of the inspiration of 
 genius, a few friends worthy of being loved and able 
 to love in return, a hundred pleasures that bring no 
 penitence, a devotion to the right that will never 
 swerve, a simple religion empty of all bigotry, full 
 of faith and love, and to such a philosophy earth 
 will give up what joy it knows. With these sublime 
 images around one, the heart will rest in the center 
 like the sun in the midst of his attendants, with all 
 the bright planets around, radiant in light and sweet 
 in harmony. 
 
YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AJVB PRIVILEGES. 213 
 
 This, my young friends, is not my philosophy ; it 
 is a theory of life drawn from all the world's ex- 
 perience. Not a generation has lived upon earth 
 which has not, after having tried all the paths of 
 action, bowed at last to the philosophy that it is the 
 steady light of noble ideas that makes life pass in 
 blessedness and in peace. Home, industry, education, 
 friends, honor, and religion, are the ministering angels 
 that alone are worthy to wait upon the human soul. 
 In their arms they shall bear you up. 
 
 To the young this philosophy comes with peculiar 
 power. There are many persons in this house to 
 whom all this glowing theory of life is in vain. 
 They are far along in years. It is too late for them 
 to think of placing before their eyes a star that shall 
 guide them and never grow dim. They must com- 
 pose their hands for death, crossing them upon the 
 breast. But to you, young men and young women, 
 this divine philosophy, wrung from the tears of for- 
 mer times, comes like the song of the morning lark. 
 It greets you as you rise from your couch. This 
 morning hymn, sung by the world, is for you. To 
 us older ones come only evening hymns, the misereres 
 of memory and sorrow. Before you the world lies 
 to-day greater in its power and beauty than ever 
 before any young souls, since it rose from the sea of 
 
214 YOUTH, ITS DUTIES AND PRIVILEGES. 
 
 chaos. Remember, then, that you must grasp this 
 life while the inspiration of youth is pouring like a 
 torrent through your heart. You will not dare 
 exhaust upon sinful or trifling pursuits a nerve-power 
 that is, indeed, the first vibration of the strings that 
 should make immortal music. Use not the harp of 
 God at a dance of Bacchanals. Trample under foot 
 the new idol called Riches, and remember that out 
 of humble life the mightiest souls have come, and 
 on the threshold of a cottage the holiest sunlight 
 has always fallen. 
 
A GEEAT GOD. 
 
SERMON XII. 
 A GREAT GOD. 
 
 " For the Lord is a great God."— Psalms 95 ; 3. 
 
 "TTXONDERFUL as the unfolding of the natural 
 world is the unfolding of the world spirit- 
 ual. The natural world is the school house in 
 which we may, if we will, learn the higher truths 
 of the moral universe. But as children often sit 
 in the school room all through their early years 
 unwilling to learn the lessons, longing for play or 
 idleness, so we older ones pass our time in the 
 great academy of nature with our idle eyes 
 wandering far away from the valuable page. Let 
 us try to-day to study one lesson, if for only an 
 hour; perhaps, as we all grow older, we may pass 
 from page to page, and find all the book richer 
 and more valuable the more we hang over its varied 
 contents. 
 
 The first idea in this morning's study is that as 
 the floral world is developed out of itself, as the 
 
218 A GREAT GOD. 
 
 animal world is evolved from the less to the greater, 
 so ideas grow, and from humility pass on to great- 
 ness, from cloud roll out into light. As the moon 
 at night often remains partly concealed, and leaves 
 the traveler or the poet or the lover uncertain as 
 to where the loved satellite may be, but as 
 presently the great silver ball moves out into the 
 clear sky, so the ideas of man are only half visible 
 at first, and pass out into the cloudless azure only 
 after the eyes 'of earth have watched long and 
 faithfully. There is a perfect harmony between 
 the world of plants and animals and the world of 
 ideas. Once there was a wild dog moving stealthily 
 through the old forests back of the Aryans and the 
 Greeks. It was the color of the ground, that more 
 powerful enemies could not see it readily, and that 
 in its own ambush it might be invisible. It did 
 not bark. It did not recognize in man its coming 
 friend, nor did man six thousand years ago see in 
 that creature of the forest the brute that was to 
 come nearest of all the wordless animals to being 
 a companion. Thousands of years have passed, and 
 now a hundred or more species exist of this once 
 wild beast of night and of prey. Once the plain 
 wild rose bloomed in the woodland. But the toil 
 and the science and affection of man stood by this 
 
A GREAT GOD. 219 
 
 " sweet briar " for hundreds of years, and now all 
 the civilized world is filled with roses of every 
 size and every color and every perfume. Thus the 
 material kingdom widens under the influence of 
 intelligence and industry, passing from the small to 
 the great as the spark of fire kindles into a 
 conflagration. 
 
 Just such is the growth of ideas. Man reaches 
 a physical maturity at the age of thirty or forty, 
 but there are ideas which will grow steadily for 
 thousands of years without having reached any 
 perfect stature, and without having found a resting 
 place. There are other notions that are born 
 complete. When the first human intellect declared 
 that two and two are four, it exhausted the formula. 
 The idea was finished. But when man for the 
 first time pronounced the word " mother," or 
 "liberty," or "friend," or "God," he began the 
 construction of an object that should turn into a 
 world, and from a world into a universe. The 
 word "mother" did not mean much in the earliest 
 tribes, for they would often put to death parents 
 too old to work. In Abraham's day the word 
 " sister " did not imply much beyond the meaning 
 of woman or slave. And in Lot's day the home- 
 names, now so full of sacredness, had little 
 
220 A GREAT GOD, 
 
 significance. Father and daughter were sounds 
 that scarcely rose one shade above the terms male 
 and female ; and the word man differed little from 
 the word brute. But along came the mighty 
 stages of development pouring around these ideas 
 the light of new thought and the warmth of new 
 love. As the foliage of each Summer, and the 
 riches of the elements fall upon the earth each 
 year and make its soil deeper and richer, so the 
 successive generations cast their thoughts and 
 affections and actions down upon the world of 
 ideas, and these ideas grow more and more luxuriant 
 under this long lasting care. Behold the Greeks 
 adding to the import of the word "art"! Under 
 their care how the word "beauty" expands! And 
 there Antigone came along, born out of poetry, and 
 by her pure and infinite affection put to shame 
 that estimate of sister seen in the history of 
 Abraham and Lot. Look into the nineteenth 
 century and mark how it has enlarged these terms. 
 Ask Cowper the meaning of that word "mother" 
 that runs along through so many languages. He 
 gazes at the portrait and says, with tears, 
 "O that those lips had language." 
 
 The word "mother" comes down through thirty 
 languages and through thirty centuries, but each 
 
A GREAT GOD. 221 
 
 age pours more of love and reflection into tlie 
 beautiful urn. Our word "grace." once in Sanscrit 
 represented the prancing horses that drew the 
 chariot of the sun, but the deeper spirituality of 
 subsequent eras has made the word mean the easy, 
 yielding friendship of a God. The sun's chariot 
 passed away to make room for Christ. 
 
 Among the ideas of earth that are most restless 
 and most progressive and most infinite, let us con- 
 fess the idea of God. As the first geographers 
 made our earth so contemptible that a man or a 
 turtle was an adequate foundation for its mass, so 
 the first theologians saw God as only a hero or a 
 sleeping, dreaming Oriental king. Compared with 
 the nations around, the God of the Hebrews marked 
 a wonderful progress, and looking into the darkness 
 around him David truly sang his song, " For our 
 Lord is a great God;" but even his picture was far 
 below the reality, and the world hastened to move 
 on. Christianity came and gave the idea of the 
 Heavenly Father a new and wonderful impulse. 
 The actions once attributed to Deity were repudiated 
 by Christ, and out of that New Testament era there 
 came a new Creator, a new Father. An idea 
 marched rapidly forward. 
 
 You perceive now, my friends, the method of my 
 
222 A GBEAT GOB. 
 
 argument, and. it need not be pursued further. It 
 is time to apply it to the religious faith and practice 
 of our day. The lesson that comes to us from the 
 argument is simply this: We must take the words 
 of the past, "Our Lord is a great God," and empty 
 into them the light and sentiment of the present, or 
 else there will be no psalm for our hearts. One 
 thing that chills modern worship may be found in 
 the attempt of modern hearts to worship the God 
 pictured in the far-off yesterday. If you would love 
 your child you will not dare ask old India to define 
 the word child for you. If you are to fight for 
 liberty you will not dare ask an old Persian king to 
 define the political idea in your behalf. No heroism, 
 no sacrifice, will spring up in your bosom oxA of his 
 thought. But if your own day tells you that liberty 
 implies the freedom of all, even women, and implies 
 the freedom of the mind from ignorance, and of the 
 soul from degrading vice, then you can go to the 
 battle-field with divine calmness and power. It can 
 not be otherwise in the act of worship. It will be 
 perfectly vain for you to attempt laying flowers of 
 affection upon the altar of the Hebrew God, or 
 Calvin's God, or the Papal God. 
 
 One of the first preludes of worship must be the 
 gloria, "Our God is a great God," for unless the 
 
A GBEAT GOD. 223 
 
 soul feels that it is approaching a being of infinite 
 beauty, a being without spot, the worship will all 
 turn into mockery, notwithstanding the upturned 
 face and bended knee. As a fact, no age will ever 
 be able to find an exact image of the Creator. But 
 the world is cumulative, and will, as a general rule, 
 give in its later estimate more truth in religion than 
 it found in all former meditations. Hence, you who 
 feel ever the impulse of worship, the sweetness of 
 it, the solemnity of it in the spirit, must be careful 
 to kneel at the altar of a great God, that you may 
 yourself be transfigured on the holy mount. It 
 often comes to pass that the best worship comes 
 into the soul when it is out under the heavens at 
 night, or in the forests in Summer, because there the 
 infinity of the sky, that host of stars whose light 
 has come to us only by falling a million years, or 
 the sweet solitude of the forest where every leaf 
 seems written upon by the finger of the Omni- 
 present One, fills the human spirit with such a 
 consciousness of a great God that the worshiper 
 bursts forth in tears. Coleridge, in the valley of 
 Chamouni, betrays the secret of all deep worship: 
 
 Awake, 
 Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake! 
 Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn. 
 
224 A GBMAT GOD. 
 
 Thou first and chief sole sovereign of the vale, 
 Oh, struggling with the darkness all the night 
 And visited all night by troops of stars. 
 
 Thus that immense phenomenon of nature be- 
 came a voice eloquent; proclaiming the greatness of 
 that Being before whom the human soul is wont 
 to kneel. Whatever thus exalts the Creator exalts 
 Him not only as a power, but as a love, and hence, 
 in the sublimity of that mountain there came not to 
 the religious mind only the feeling of nearness to 
 One who made the world, but in the magnificent 
 light, alnd in the whispering of the pines there came 
 full persuasion of Heaven's tenderness toward man. 
 We can not love a contemptible human being. All 
 the beloved ones of history stand forth in some 
 alluring atmosphere of genius, or truth, or beauty, 
 and without much admixture of meanness or sin. 
 Never can we carry our worship to a defective God. 
 He must rise up before us in such a holy and 
 alluring form that the heart will ask all the world 
 to join it in its anthem. Actions, ideas, persons, 
 creeds that once were the symbols of religion, and 
 marred the divine idea by the blighting power of 
 association, must be carefully removed from the 
 temple that the worshiper may bow before something 
 that he may deeply love. 
 
A GREAT GOD. 225 
 
 Men come to the minister of religion and ask 
 him how he explains this and that dark page of 
 history, this or that dogma. Oftentimes the best 
 reply would be, " Turn aside from all that record 
 and go ask this age, these scenes, the wants of 
 to-day, the longings of your soul to give you back 
 the lost or injured God." Much that is called 
 theology is only the place where men have trampled 
 down the ground in their own mad conflicts. In 
 India devout heathen move in procession through 
 the streets saying "ram," "ram," and the spectators 
 bow because those who thus run are priests of 
 religion ; but the Infinite God is not there. Those 
 fakirs that cut their bodies with knives are all 
 theologians. Thus the religious history of the world 
 marks not the place where God has been, but only 
 the places where human hope and human madness, 
 human darkness and light, met and struggled and 
 bled. When the poor heretic was burned at Geneva, 
 when the covenanter girl was tied to a stake where 
 the tide would slowly rise over her, when the 
 witches were burned, when infants were damned — 
 God was not present; religion was not there. 
 Those places were spots where contending men met 
 just as old Carthage and old Alexandria were places 
 where opposing vandals came together, and where, 
 15 
 
226 A GREAT GOD. 
 
 between sword and spear, warm life became death, 
 and brilliant cities a desolation. 
 
 When looking back you behold these harrowing 
 scenes reaching along over the centuries, remember 
 God was not there. For our God is a great God. 
 The sufferings of the martyr, the tears of the exile, 
 the children lost because unbaptized, the men con- 
 demned from all eternity, the auto-da-fes of earth, 
 are not ideas to which ever God drew near ; but rather 
 paths where the feet of man trampled when he was 
 just emerging from the night of perfect barbarism, 
 when women loved the amphitheater of death, and 
 when heroes drank from the skull of an enemy. 
 Before the modern soul can become a true worshiper 
 it is often necessary to approach God, not upon the 
 side of old history, but upon the side of new nature. 
 Give us Jesus Christ and the great spectacle of the 
 universe, that Being and these heavens, and we can 
 find a God, to worship whom will ever be a joy. 
 The moral splendor of Christ and the parallel infin- 
 iteness of creation give the mind a Deity so great 
 that all the universe becomes his temple, and all 
 winds, and thunders, and bird-songs, combine in a 
 hymn of adoration. 
 
 Religion has been wrought out in its details from 
 two different points of observation. A strange geo- 
 
A GREAT QOD. 227 
 
 grapher, from some star, landing upon earth in the 
 northern regions, would go back saying he had found 
 a world of ice ; landing at the equator, he would 
 declare he had found a planet covered with flowers. 
 Thus religion has been described from two stand- 
 points, but chiefly from the stand-point of man. The 
 survey of it from the modern idea of God has yet 
 scarcely been made. The world's heart has not 
 toiled under the sublime watchword of the psalm, 
 " Our Lord is a great God," and from that lofty 
 statement made up all the essential parts of its wor- 
 ship ; but rather the human family has said, " Man 
 is a great man," and has drawn its creeds and cere- 
 monies out of the human bosom. When you perceive 
 candles burning by the altar and a pageant of bow- 
 ing priests, whose robes are bespangled with gold, 
 you may chant the words, " Great is man," but you 
 must reserve for some other hour the higher chant, 
 " Our God is a great God." You must keep back 
 these higher words until either the vastness of the 
 universe, or the great wave of human life, or the 
 awful mystery of death, has led you away from the 
 wax tapers, and brought you into the presence of 
 the Inflnite. The great sanctuaries of man, from the 
 mighty St. Peter's of Rome to the great Abbey of 
 Westminster, were for hundreds of years places where 
 
228 A QBEAT aOD. 
 
 the little children of religion played their sacred 
 games around the altar of a God for whom they had 
 no measurement. Could the real Deity have come 
 down from the invisible home and poured Himself 
 into those vain hearts, all the toys and ceremouies 
 of the hour would have been overwhelmed by the 
 glory of the Heavenly Father. When John Rogers 
 or Servetus was suffering in the flames, could the 
 great God of Heaven have revealed Himself, could 
 that wretched throng around the kindling fire have 
 had their souls enlarged until the true idea of God 
 could have found entrance, that company would have 
 plucked the victim from the stake and have begged 
 to be forgiven for an error so weak and for a crime 
 so cruel. They would have wept for days over such 
 an injustice to a brother, and for engaging .in such a 
 satire upon the Almighty. 
 
 Much of the indefiniteness of the Bible comes 
 from the fact that God cares nothing for the mi- 
 nutiae of human worship. There is nothing definite 
 in the Bible except the picture of Christ leading 
 man to virtue, because the greatness of God forbids 
 that He should care for aught beside. To suppose 
 the Creator of the universe to have a choice between 
 immersion and sprinkling, to suppose the Almighty to 
 be partial to a posture in prayer, to suppose Him to 
 
A GREAT GOD. 229 
 
 have a choice between a government of bishops and 
 a government by all the clergy, to inquire whether 
 the Infinite One loves better the robes of the priest 
 or the plain dress of the citizen — this is to degrade 
 the name of God and to drag worship down to the 
 level of a court etiquette. Tlie Bible is the most 
 indefinite of books in the delineation of forms, and 
 the most definite of all books in pointing out the 
 reward and punishment of virtue and vice. Its 
 baptism is obscure ; its righteousness is most 
 evident. Only a most precise and trifling argument 
 can find Presbyterianism or the Episcopacy in the 
 Bible ; but a broad, visible, noble argument points 
 out the Saviour of mankind. It is only a micro- 
 scopic analysis that can find in that book the world's 
 " Confessions of Faith," but the human soul can 
 not read a page in the book without hearing a 
 whole sky-full of angels saying, " Blessed are the 
 pure in heart." The manner of baptism, the time, 
 the manner of the Trinity, the last analysis of 
 Christ, the presbyter or the bishop, all these and a 
 thousand more ideas lie in the Bible in utter neglect 
 because the God whom we worship has no prefer- 
 ence here. He cares not what man finds in the 
 holy writings if only he finds virtue. I should as 
 soon ask of God whether I should plant my flower 
 
230 A GREAT GOD. 
 
 bed with pinks or with violets as to inquire of Him 
 whether my baptism must be in much water or by 
 a few drops. 
 
 Taking your stand close by the greatness of 
 God, not only does the smallness of much of man's 
 creed appear in a strong light, but also much of its 
 falseness falls with a thrilling pain upon the heart. 
 Who is this God that any age or any individual 
 should ever have debated the destiny of a dying 
 infant? What is there in the Infinite One, what is 
 there in that Being whose throne is in the center 
 of the universe, in that Being whose sunlight is 
 only a feeble emblem of His love, that should make 
 the mother hasten to have her dying child baptized, 
 lest it might fall from her bosom into a world of 
 torments? What has God done that his name 
 should suffer such long and painful degradation? 
 God has done nothing to merit such a creed. But 
 religion has been wrought out, not from the being 
 of God, but from the being of man. Man has come 
 to us in all ages, and offered us a Deity fashioned 
 after the nearest king or despot, and millions of 
 children, old and young, have gone to bed at night 
 whispering their prayers to a Deity not so kind or 
 sweet or just as the mother who has just bidden 
 them " good night ! " In those days it used to be a 
 
A GREAT GOD. 231 
 
 dreadful fear that perhaps we might that night go 
 from the kingdom of our mother to the kingdom of 
 Grod. Our mother was always more beautiful than 
 God! 
 
 It is now complained by public men, men full of 
 fear for our country overrun by all forms of vice, 
 that religion is doing little to purify the atmosphere 
 that hangs like a cloud of doom over our nation, 
 How far the Church at large merits such words of 
 half sorrow and half reproach, no one can tell ; but 
 we feel fully ready to say that the more the altars 
 of human worship draw their light and inspiration 
 from the character of God alone, and linger less 
 around the ideas that come only from man, the more 
 rapid will be the ascent of the nation toward a 
 higher life. Many an altar now exists to which the 
 worshipers repair, not that they may find holiness, 
 but may keep alive some ideas held by their fathers. 
 A large part of church life is only a rivalry about 
 systems instead of a humble worship of God. Oh, 
 had we all the wings of piety that could carry us, 
 and the breadth of mind for such a flight, and 
 should we fly to the throne, and instead of deducing 
 religion up from man bring it down from the realm 
 of light, we should return to earth with a piety 
 that would dispel the fears of the statesmen and 
 
232 A GREAT aOD. 
 
 make radiant the future of the great nation and 
 the poor mortal heart. How can an altar reform 
 earth when it is itself a part of earth? How can it 
 lift us to God when its God is already upon the 
 ground and is himself partly clay? Altars enough 
 there are along the paths. And when the patriot 
 counts them he may well wonder that good citizens 
 do not come marching forth in holy multitudes out 
 of such a cloud of incense. But it is not numbers 
 of altars that most save men. All depends upon 
 the idea to which the holy stones are heaped up. 
 It will be ages upon ages before an altar to Presby- 
 terianism, or Methodism, or to Romanism, or to 
 Independency, or to Eloquence, or to Genius will 
 bless the world like an altar to the Living God. 
 The running to and fro of men full of anxiety lest 
 their Church may not be visible enough, the 
 acrimonious warfare of sects over their childish 
 properties, will never enter the world's great life 
 and form a part of its goodness and piety. In 
 presence of such a Church our nation can march 
 right along to destruction, just as Rome sunk in 
 vice while the temples were full and a thousand 
 priests were intoning psalms at the altar. The altar 
 was inscribed to man, not to God. The sanctuary 
 of the Great God, with Christ as the High Priest, 
 
A GREAT GOD. 233 
 
 is the only one from which the present century can 
 come forth with a soul whiter than it carried into 
 it. Our age must part company with the baleful 
 associations of the old theology. A theology that 
 unconsciously degraded the God it loved; it must 
 define religion to be, not a belief, but a piety ; it 
 must look up to God and from the Father, Son, ana 
 Spirit draw down a religion with the greatness of 
 God written all over it. It must hear that voice 
 that created all things by the word of its power 
 repeating the deep laws of his temple — a righteous- 
 ness that loves the true and good ; a faith that 
 guides ; a penitence that washes white ; a love that 
 embraces the world ; a hope that adds eternity to 
 time, paradise to earth, and a Christ the leader and 
 inspiration in the midst of these doctrines, and then 
 upborne by ideas so vast and so true the age may 
 soon cease to weep that its temples do not bring it 
 a higher civilization. We dare not make God a 
 party to our petty warfare of creeds. We dare not 
 employ Him in our inquisitions or in our debates 
 over transubstantiation or legitimacy. He must be 
 seen only as the Great God sitting upon the throne 
 of justice, so lofty, so infinite, that a soul passing 
 into His temple will feel that nothing but a pure 
 heart can fit it for so sublime a worship. 
 
THE EMPIEE OF LAW. 
 
SERMON XIII. 
 THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 
 
 " Oh, how love I Thy law! It is my meditation all the day." 
 —Psalms 119:97. 
 
 rr^HERE is not much that is accidental in the life 
 -^ of an individual or a nation. One of the 
 facts that the modern times are establishing is that 
 the whole universe is under the reign of law. From 
 the most immense and most remote sun to the 
 smallest atom of dust, law is forming and retaining 
 and guiding all things at all moments. Nothing is 
 independent. Things and events once referred 
 directly to God are now referred to the laws of 
 God as to the invariable agent of the Almighty. 
 This great inference affects not in the least the 
 idea or providence of God, for here as among human 
 actors the principle applies that what one does 
 through an agent he does through himself. 
 
 Some declare that the world seems less sacred 
 and charming to them since science has brought in 
 
238 THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 
 
 such an array of second causes between them and 
 the marvels of nature, filling up with physical or 
 mental forces a place once full of the Heavenly 
 Father. But this disappointment is destined to be 
 only temporary, for as soon as the mind can become 
 fully acquainted with the conception of a universe 
 of law, it will find the old world of accident or 
 miracle a poor, small thing compared with a universe 
 all moving under law. When God was supposed to 
 be in the thunder or in the quick lightning, or in 
 the pestilence, or in the conflagration of cities, or in 
 the earthquake, he was taken from all other events 
 and places so as to be employed in one flash of 
 lightning or in one material crash. The philosophy 
 of law exalts God into the infinite and occupies 
 Him at once with all the worlds and all their 
 contents. He no longer comes and goes, one day 
 alarming by a calamity and then leaving society to 
 feel that He has gone away and may not return for 
 years, but He is always in us, and with us, and 
 around us, not intermittent, but everlasting. This 
 fact is not an argument for atheism, but rather for 
 pantheism, for in such a world God is omnipresent 
 indeed. 
 
 We dwellers in such a methodical planet may 
 therefore rest assured that the outcome of our lives 
 
THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 239 
 
 will depend upon what rules we break and what 
 rules we regard. If we are law-abiding children, 
 then shall we find success ; if we are law-breaking, 
 then shall we suffer defeat A human soul is sent 
 into being just as is sent a tree, or flower, or a 
 planet, or an empire. Its laws are around it, the 
 ministering angels to bear it up. 
 
 History is full of the ruins of empires and cities. 
 Could you sit down by each ruin and find the 
 causes that brought it, only one report would come 
 from Palmyra, or Thebes, or Babylon, or Athens, or 
 Alexandria : " We violated the laws of life and are 
 dead." Within their once-living hands and hearts 
 the laws of industry, of morals, of social life, of 
 political well-being, were broken and death came. 
 If from any cause the law of gravitation should be 
 broken for an hour by our earth, it would fall away 
 never to run her beautiful circle again. The sun's 
 fieiy ocean would, in a brief period, receive the 
 falling, unfortunate star. But the law of gravitation 
 is only one upon the great statute book. The old 
 nations have all fallen because they regarded not 
 the mighty decalogue written upon their rocks, their 
 fields, their palaces, their homes, their hearts. The 
 story of Moses is perpetual and universal. Encamp 
 where men may, at Sinai or in America, there is 
 
240 THE EMPIRB OF LAW. 
 
 always a Moses coining with shining face carrying 
 in his arms the laws of God. The soul that sinneth 
 it shall die. But it shall be well with the righteous. 
 From this thought, that man is set down in the 
 midst of laws, let us pass to a second reflection, 
 that "law-abiding" is a term that blinds many a 
 soul to the real significance of life. The word 
 "law" has become so associated with only the 
 prohibitions of God and nature that many a soul 
 thinks itself a saint when it simply has not broken. 
 the few prohibitory statutes of its Maker. " Law- 
 abiding" is a term that points out only the harmless 
 soul. It shows us one who has never been wicked, 
 not one who has been or shall be great. The Ten 
 Commandments keep the soul from the gallows or 
 from contempt, but they make no great character. 
 As well might the philosopher Franklin, or the poet 
 Bryant claim that their success had come from being 
 obedient to the laws of New York as for a soul to 
 point to the Ten Commandments as the basis of the 
 halo of a saint. When the young man told Christ 
 he " had kept all these from his youth up," Christ 
 informed him that he lacked one thing yet — he 
 lacked not the simple abstaining from sin, but an 
 ardent espousal of some virtue. The decalogue 
 saves weak souls from sin and vice, but it makes no 
 
THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 241 
 
 heroes. The martyrs, the inventors, the missionaries 
 from Paul to Xavier, the mighty men that have 
 shaken the world and then made it come to their 
 tombs to, weep, have all woven their imperishable 
 wreaths from the laws of industry and love, and 
 faith and hope which they loved and fulfilled, and 
 not from the criminal laws which they did not 
 violate. If not to kill, not to steal, not to worship 
 an idol, made great men, the road thitherward would 
 be easy. Not here amid these criminal statutes can 
 you and I find, therefore, the path to the best 
 existence. We must obey them easily and always, 
 and then seek new worlds to conquer. 
 
 Perhaps the religious world wronged all us 
 children when we were young by leaving us to feel 
 that God had passed for us only laws against vice. 
 We know not where to lay the blame. But this 
 we know, that God hovered around all these laws 
 of sin, and when we stood away from them we 
 seemed to stand away from any commandments 
 which came from the Creator. All other truths of 
 the world seemed only the ideas of philosophy or 
 science. The holy voice of Heaven did not seem 
 to sound through them. We thought that the laws 
 of economy came from Poor Richard's almanac; 
 that the freedom of slaves was a thought coming 
 
 16 
 
242 THE BMPIBB OF LAW. 
 
 from Wilberforce ; that the study and love of 
 nature had been recommended by the poets. But 
 now science has joined hands with religion, and has 
 helped, us find a God whose laws are underlying all 
 things and pervading all things, as light shines all 
 through the morning dew-drops. It is not probable 
 that science intended so to magnify the office of the 
 Creator, and often it has not consciously done so, 
 but many are the religious hearts to-day which bless 
 science for making the universe so large and for 
 filling it every where with the presence of the 
 Heavenly Father. The scientific minds have so 
 pursued the theme of " law," " law," and with such 
 wonderful success, that now we feel that there is 
 no chamber of the soul, no hour of existence, into 
 which the divine wish does not come. As the blood 
 circulates in all the atoms of the body, making 
 roses on the face of youth and painting the little 
 fingers of the infant, and then filling the hero's 
 heart, so the laws of the Infinite follow us, not in 
 pitiless wrath, but in the tenderest love. They 
 follow us when we eat, making the table a joy; 
 they follow us in happy hours, opening the heart to 
 friendship ; they are present in all the tears of this 
 pilgrimage ; when we go to sleep we commit our- 
 selves to the commandments of the universe, and 
 
THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 243 
 
 they wake us when the measured hours have passed. 
 All around us is law, like a sea rolling around an 
 island. The admiration of the psalmist, who cried 
 out, " How I love Thy law ! " should undergo great 
 enlargement in a century that has found how vast 
 and sublime is the empire of this beneficent 
 legislation. 
 
 If, now, these reflections are founded upon fact, 
 then we must mark what a.re some of these great 
 laws that so environ us, obedience to which will 
 render us such good citizens. Take a single example 
 — the law of the human will. The (will is located 
 in the soul, to be the impulse and governor of 
 action. The law of the carrier-pigeon is an instinct. 
 The law of migrating birds is also an instinct, like 
 the infant's hunger for food. Instinct will do but 
 one thing, and in but one way. The carrier-dove 
 will fly only to one city. Infinitely above such a 
 sense is the human will, for it sees before it a 
 thousand paths and a thousand actions. It stands 
 among events like a child in the flowery fields, 
 at liberty to cull any of the beautiful, sweetly- 
 perfumed blossoms on either hand. As God moves 
 about in the middle of His universe, so man stands 
 in the center of his realm, the disposer of events, 
 the weaver of destiny. His is not the single motion 
 
244 THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 
 
 'of the messenger-l)ird in only one straight line to 
 only one village, but it is His to manage a myriad 
 of details, and arrange them into all forms of utility 
 and beauty. Hence, the largest faculty of man is 
 his will, that power that hurls the heart and mind 
 along an orbit as magnificent as the path of a 
 planet. This is the one of the Ten Command- 
 ments that no one can disregard and live. When 
 a young man draws near the confines of life and 
 can not look at its noble possibilities and say, " I 
 will," when he stands without resolve in such a 
 crisis, all the mountain trembles with the thunders 
 of wrath ; and hot lightnings carve the rocks because 
 at the mountain's base there is taking place such 
 a breaking of law. He is a harmless citizen who 
 does not kill, and does not steal, and does not break 
 a Sabbath day. But to be harmless, is to be only 
 an infant. He is the lofty mortal who can give 
 his soul to a great mode of action and can say, "I 
 will," in life's morning and forever keep the vow. 
 Some European philosopher said, a few years ago, 
 that "the universe is an enormous will rushing 
 into life." Beautiful statement of the fact! God 
 was full of power and beauty. His infinite soul 
 filled all space. But He desired to see embodied 
 in outer form the divine ccnception, and as the 
 
THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 245 
 
 fabled goddess saw her figure in the lake, so the 
 true Deity made a universe that held the image of 
 Himself. Having done this He created intelligent 
 beings who could come and see the picture. Thus 
 all that we behold, from the deep heavens to the 
 colored violet, is the will of God rushing into life, 
 as the dream of Angelo arose in the arches of 
 St. Peter's, or the thought of Raphael burst forth 
 in the Madonna. That very spiritual, intelligent 
 potency which gave us the creation was bestowed 
 upon man, and though not infinite in power, yet it 
 does wonderful things in this seventy-year circle of 
 life. It wakes up the sleeping spirit. The tendency 
 of man is to repose. In southern climates the will 
 grows weak and all the days pass as though sleep 
 were the best form of immortality. But northward 
 the will rises and awakes all the dreaming 
 chambers of the soul. It shouts its orders, and all 
 the sleeping troops in the soul rise as though the 
 long drum-beat were sounded. Few are the men 
 who are standing in the front by accident. The 
 faces of the impressive ones were all marked faces. 
 The forehead and the cheek were carved where the 
 will struggled for mastery over the passions of the 
 flesh. People are amazed- when they see the 
 pictures of the old worthies ; amazed at the rude 
 
246 THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 
 
 features, the furrowed forehead, the knotted chin 
 and eyebrows. But the pictures we possess are 
 gentler than reality, for art has a tenderness that 
 makes it tone down and soften the rugged subject. 
 Art forgets that the beauty of graceful lines is not 
 half so impressive as the beauty of that marked, that 
 homely face, where the God-like energy of the soul 
 fought the great battle of politics, liberty, or science, 
 or religion. When we remember what mighty works 
 they have done and at what a cost of purpose, we 
 desire no longer to have the old heroes come to us 
 in the likeness of, girlhood, but in the deep lines of 
 power and solemnity. 
 
 Write down, my young friends, as a law of God 
 worthy of your love, this potency of the human will. 
 Guided by the right, the right of public and private 
 life, and the right in religion, it will take these years ' 
 and shape them as the potter shapes clay into an 
 Etruscan vase. But, this law neglected, all these 
 years sink into a sleep that knows no waking. 
 
 While seeking for some of these laws not 
 gathered up in the first decalogue, may we not 
 include faith and hope? When Christ told the 
 multitude that if one had faith as a mustard seed 
 he could move a mountain, He announced a law of 
 the spirit. A positive belief in the progress of man 
 
THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 247 
 
 and the presence of God will be to the heart like a 
 breeze to the sailing ship. Faith and hope are a 
 great motive power of the world. Along with a 
 powerful will they cast the heart forward. But 
 without faith and hope the will has no path for its 
 mighty action. A large ship must have a sea to 
 sail in. How shameful to launch an ocean-palace in 
 only a stagnant pond! So the will-power seen in 
 man begs for the ocean of faith and hope. Such 
 machinery, such masts, such canvas, demand that the 
 sea be deep and the voyage long. Life has always 
 been compared to the sea. Accepting the figure, let 
 us declare that faith and hope are the winds that 
 blow over it, not only carrying our vessels to all the 
 ports of the mighty nations, but ruffling the waters, 
 making them sweet and beautiful. Faith comes into 
 Christianity from the general outside experience of 
 mankind. It did not originate in Christianity any 
 more than eloquence originated in politics, or color 
 on the painter's canvas. Eloquence journeyed into 
 the political life because great themes lay there to 
 be developed, and colors lingered with Titian and 
 Paul Veronese because they held in their brains the 
 subject and in their souls the taste that could weave 
 into matchless beauty the gaudy pencils of light. 
 Thus, faith entered Christianity because the scene 
 
248 THE EMPIRE OP LAW. 
 
 before the Christ was sublime. The lofty purity of 
 the soul, the infinite love of man for man and for 
 God, the vista of endless life, were allurements 
 which faith could not resist, and into Christianity 
 she moved like a happy queen ascending for the 
 first time the steps of her throne. The moment 
 any thing — country, or pursuit, or love, or virtue, or 
 heaven — can lift up large ideas before the soul for 
 faith and hope to seize upon, then is one's destiny 
 secure, for the mind becomes full of inspiration and 
 the spirit of music. This is that faith which Christ 
 beheld up-rooting trees and moving mountains from 
 place to place. 
 
 There is one ill of life not often found in the 
 catalogue of human calamity. It is not poverty. It 
 is not humble parentage. It is not failure to find 
 office or troops of friends. It is that languor which 
 comes from the absence of an energetic will rushing 
 forward through the gates of faith and hope. There 
 is a kind of palm-tree in the very top of which, 
 amid the leaves opening like a rosebud, there is an 
 inner bud still. It is sweet to the taste. But 
 travelers say that when one has plucked out this 
 central bud, the tree at once withers and dies. It 
 seems to be the tree's heart. Man seems to repeat 
 in the spirit-world this phenomenon of the world of 
 
THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 249 
 
 matter ; for whatever plucks the faith out of the 
 opening leaves of life makes the stately soul all 
 wither. Happy day for earth when such a being as 
 Jesus Christ came to stand in the center of religious 
 belief to transform faith into a passion. Out of that 
 new and infinite outlook came the new purity of 
 the human heart ; came the tenderness that abol- 
 ished the Coliseum ; came the heroism that made 
 martyrs ; came the spiritual power that gave us 
 new literature and new arts; came the new high 
 and solemn music ; came the equality of man that 
 gave us liberty; came the pure worship that leads 
 to Heaven. Where Christ has gone and has been 
 deeply loved, languor, that withering of the soul, 
 has been delayed or averted. The missionary has 
 sailed out upon every sea ; the Elliotts and Mar- 
 quettes have traversed the pine forests and the 
 prairies; the Henry Martyns have prayed in Persia; 
 every where the heart of man has moved out toward 
 his fellow, because this faith and hope have beaten 
 like a glorious midsummer storm upon the barren 
 heart, and have transformed it into an Eden. Faith 
 alone touches the strings of the soul and makes 
 music. 
 
 Such are some of the great laws that surround 
 us in this world. Add them to the decalogue of 
 
250 TEE EMPIRE OF LAW. 
 
 Moses and feel that if you break one of these com- 
 mandments, of the will, or of faith, or of hope, in 
 that hour the clouds of sorrow are gathering upon 
 your sky. There are criminal laws which having 
 been respected, you will escape the doom of a felon, 
 but you will not by them be made useful, or noble, 
 or happy. There are, physical laws which, if 
 observed, will save you from Aveakness and sickness 
 and premature death, but they will give you only 
 the success of an organism, of a machine. Then 
 come the spiritual laws, above all as God is above 
 dust, and into these man casting himself, he becomes 
 a living soul, with the days too short for his high 
 duties and the years too few for his happiness. It 
 is here, in the midst of these laws, God dwells. 
 Certainly God is every where. When the prohi- 
 bitions of the moral law are read to us, God is 
 indeed there. 
 
 But God is not like a human throne set only for 
 the punishment of offenders. " Thou shalt not " is 
 not the favorite language of the Blessed One, but 
 rather, "Thou mayst." His laws of denial are few, 
 of permission, infinite. Pass ye all from the God 
 on Mount Sinai to the God on Mount Sion. 'Not by 
 the lightnings, but by the sunshine of the latter, read 
 the new tables of divine enactment. Read not only 
 
TEE EMPIRE OF LAW. 251 
 
 the whole story of Christ, that old, old story, till 
 you hold it all in your heart, but read on until you 
 behold the Infinite One in the human will laden 
 with energy, in the faith that fills the future with 
 ideals, in the philanthropy that enables one heart to 
 love a world, in even the soul's perceptive power 
 that drinks in the world's music and perfumed 
 zephyrs. "Oh, how I love thy law!" Yes! love it 
 in its written and unwritten forms ! Love it when 
 found by the theologians, and, when unseen by 
 them, it was found by philosophy and by science ! 
 
 The evil of a destructive skepticism must lie 
 chiefly in that arrest of spiritual power which it 
 must bring. There is a rationalism which, while it 
 is busy destroying some ideas, is pouring tenfold 
 love upon other thoughts. It moves away from a 
 desert that it may build up a home in a paradise. 
 This is a glorious rationalism. But there is an ultra 
 logic which, instead of moving away from the 
 desert, declares all other places to be also a sandy 
 waste, and it sits down to perpetual stoicism or 
 perpetual sorrow. Such a skepticism is a withdrawal 
 of the supplies of life. For many of the springs of 
 life can not be discovered and esta;blished by logic. 
 The Nile may be followed and its sources found, but 
 there are streams in the soul to whose fountain- 
 
252 THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 
 
 heads our science can not come. It must be 
 assumed that they come from the alpha of life, a 
 personal God. The critical inquiry that denies this, 
 has repealed in this overthrow of faith a law that 
 has been the intense life of man. 
 
 It already is becoming evident that the skepticism 
 of our century is sending to the closet, or else to a 
 life of indifference, many gifted brains which in a 
 warmer age would have battled for man on the field 
 of right or of religion. By as much as we grow in 
 the number of our philosophers we seem to decline 
 in the number of our heroes. Crusades that should 
 rescue the tomb of Christ were possible in the 
 eleventh century, because then enthusiasm swept 
 through the human heart like a gulf stream. The 
 nations were ruled by passion and romance. But 
 crusades of heroes to redeem either the Church or 
 the government, the tomb of Christ or the tomb of 
 Washington, would seem impossible in the nineteenth 
 century. It may be that a wide skepticism is 
 already withdrawing great spiritual forces which 
 once impelled and allured the armies of politics and 
 religion. 
 
 If, however, unbelief has not become a national 
 evil, if it is beyond our power to enter the soul of 
 a nation and discover what is checking the current 
 
THE EMPIRE OF LAW. 253 
 
 of its once powerful life, we can at least go to the 
 individual and tell him that unless he loves and 
 obeys these spiritual laws that lie all around him 
 like a spider's web, his heart will become empty, 
 and day will change to night. Read upon tables of 
 rock the laws of industry, of will, of faith, of love, 
 of justice, and cry out with the ancient worshiper, 
 " Oh, how I love Thy law ! " He that erases one 
 of these commandments makes of your soul a 
 deserted house. It is full of joy and language and 
 music no more. I speak not simply in the name of 
 religion. All the hours and years of this life ask 
 you to confess the supreme power of the will, of 
 faith, of hope. You can not despise the mighty 
 forces without becoming " as a house without inhab- 
 itant." Often have we seen within the boundaries 
 of a single heart an image of that "deserted 
 village" of the poet. 
 
 Sweet smiling village! loveliest of the lawn, 
 Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn, 
 Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen 
 And desolation saddens all the green. 
 
THE Il^FLUEl^OE OF ATHEISM 
 IJPOI^ MORALS. 
 
SERMON XIV. 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OE ATHEISM UPON 
 MORALS. 
 
 "Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations." 
 —Fsalms 90:1. 
 
 T ET us inquire, this morning, into the probable 
 -*-^ influence of atheism upon morals. Although 
 there has always existed among men individuals who 
 have avowed their non-belief in any Creator, yet the 
 present is perhaps, beyond the custom of the world, 
 full of the atheistic spirit. More than is customary 
 has our generation studied the material causes of 
 things. It has, in a peculiar manner, inquired, into 
 the development of animal and vegetable life, and 
 in this long study has come upon causes not 
 formerly seen or even dreamed of in the old 
 philosophy. In former times the word God was 
 called upon to do an immense service. When a 
 glutton died of apoplexy, or a drunkard of a sudden 
 spasm of the heart, the verdict was "Death from 
 17 
 
258 THE INFLUENOE OF 
 
 visitation of God." The word God was used to 
 atone for indolence of inquiry or poverty of thought. 
 Also superstition loaded down the sacred idea and 
 kept the Deity before the world as the performer of 
 all sorts of high and low tragedy and comedy. The 
 modern study into natural causes has affected not a 
 little the relation of a God to an event, and hence 
 has perhaps given to the present a little more than 
 its share of the materialistic spirit. I need not 
 pause to argue the question whether absolute atheism 
 is possible. I do not believe that the mind can ever 
 reach a perfect assurance that there is no God. But 
 there is a practical, or rather influential, atheism 
 possible, and not only possible, but in our day such 
 a non-belief seems passing beyond its former limited 
 proportions. In view of the approximative atheism 
 we now witness, it seems timely we should all ask 
 ourselves and each other what would be the effect 
 upon morals of a widespread disbelief? To inquire 
 into the logical relation between atheism and morals, 
 is a task worthy of the hour. 
 
 The inquiry is difficult. Had there ever been a 
 century in the past from which the idea of a God 
 had been excluded, then should we possess some 
 data of undoubted worth. Then our atheistic 
 friends could not complain that their form of 
 
ATHEISM UPON MORALS. 259 
 
 thought had never enjoyed the advantage of an 
 experiment. We are aware of the falseness of the 
 logic virhich infers the inferiority of woman from her 
 actual history, because, never having been free, 
 always having been the victim of the superior brute 
 force, she stands to-day in the situation of a case 
 that has never been tried, where for six thousand 
 years the witnesses of one side and the lawyers of 
 one side only have addressed the court. Had 
 woman been permitted a full and free experiment of 
 six thousand years, we should be competent to-day 
 to pass judgment upon her relative power of mind 
 and spirit. So with atheism. We are aware of the 
 difficulty under which it labors. All the nations 
 have been in the hands of the theists. The God- 
 idea has possessed the laws, the literatures, the arts, 
 the home-life, the school, and the Church. In this 
 case our argument can only be made up of prob- 
 abilities, and can not expand into a demonstration. 
 Only an ex parte statement has been heard. 
 
 1. It should weigh somewhat against the claims 
 of atheism that the belief in God has always 
 hastened to take possession of the human heart. 
 The ideas of God and of no God stood upon an 
 equal footing when the human race set forth upon 
 its career. There were no churchmen standing by 
 
260 TEE INFLUENCE OF 
 
 to prejudice primitive man in favor of that form of 
 thought called religion. According to the theory of 
 man's origin accepted by the scientists, this race was 
 as free to keep away from the belief in a Creator 
 as to approach it. Hence, it should weigh some- 
 thing against the materialists that man every where, 
 in continent or island, fell into the arms of a divine 
 philosophy. It amounts almost to a presumption 
 against atheism that the human family has granted 
 it no nation, and no hundred years even, in which 
 to conduct its experiment of unbelief. How came 
 the statement to be so ex parte ? 
 
 2. Our second reflection is that the world's 
 morals have as a fact descended from a belief in a 
 God. However far back we look, the development 
 of conscience and virtue is only a form assumed by 
 the development of the idea of a Supreme Ruler. 
 The human race has always placed in the heavens a 
 standard of right and wrong, and has gazed upward 
 as if to read there the path of duty. In the oldest 
 records of Homer, or Moses, or Zoroaster, of Chaldea, 
 Egypt, or India, there is to be seen a Being, above 
 human, standing as the supreme right of the uni- 
 verse. The Vedas of the old Hindoos all overflow 
 with this consciousness of a God. One of these 
 sacred books says: "The great Lord of these worlds 
 
ATHEISM UPON M0BAL8. 261 
 
 sees as if He were near. A man may think he 
 walks by stealth, but the gods know it. If a man 
 stands, or walks, or hides ; if two persons whisper 
 together, God Varuna knows it. He is there as a 
 third. He who should flee far beyond the sky, even 
 he would not escape Varuna the king." Such is the 
 religious spirit of a literature which two thousand 
 years before Christ lay in ten large books spread 
 out before an almost countless multitude of souls. 
 While Abraham and his followers were looking up 
 to Jehovah by faith, influenced by a celestial city 
 that had foundations, while Jacob, in a dream, was 
 beholding a ladder reaching from earth to sky with 
 divine messengers upon the steps, the Aryans were 
 moving across India with their hearts as full as 
 Jacob's soul was with the presence of God and His 
 angels. 
 
 While the Indian millions and Chaldean millions 
 were thus drawing their morals from the assumption 
 of a God, the Greeks and Latins were preparing to 
 take up elsewhere the same belief, and to express it 
 both in song and in philosophy. Homer's poem 
 opens with the picture of a holy prophet walking 
 upon the seashore praying for a justice above human 
 justice. The Achilles, whom no battle-field could 
 alarm, feared the wrath of the king of Olympus. 
 
262 THE INFLUENCE OF 
 
 In the old poems of the Greeks there is no one 
 impulse more powerful in the bosom of all those 
 dramatic characters than the impulse of religion. In 
 some of its details religion was false ; in many 
 details childish; but there it stood the great power 
 that bent the knee of Achilles and Agamemnon and 
 the stormy Ajaxes. Even the beautiful Antigone, 
 that ideal sister, confessed that she feared not 
 man, for there were laws of sisterly affection above 
 the laws of man, laws issuing from eternity. In the 
 Greek drama, the chorus marched in between acts 
 to chant the solemn strains of the deities. All 
 through the classic literature there runs a religious 
 spirit that shows how the public and private ' mo- 
 rality of that long period was associated as cause 
 and effect with the ideas of religion. Some of the 
 most powerful passages in the unrivaled oratory of 
 that period occur when the Cicero or the Julius 
 Caesar appeal for justice to the "immortal gods." 
 An old Greek says : " There is no swiftness by 
 which one may escape God ; no darkness that may 
 conceal from Him." From Virgil and Horace come 
 maxims of religion which one might suppose stolen 
 from the Psalms of David or the Wisdom of 
 Solomon. Epictetus said: "Relation to Caesar gave a 
 sense of freedom and security void of all fear ; shall 
 
ATHEISM UPON MOSAICS. 263 
 
 not, then, the idea of having God for our Maker 
 and Father deliver us from all terror or grief?" 
 The same pagan says : " Above all pleasures place 
 the consciousness that you are obeying God." 
 
 It would require days, even weeks, to quote irom 
 antiquity all it has uttered about God. One would 
 as well attempt to convey to you an idea of the 
 tropics by bringing you a leaf or flower or an 
 imprisoned song-bird, as by a word or a phrase 
 attempt to show you how the idea of God filled the 
 atmosphere of that old but half-forgotten world. 
 You err greatly, my friends, if in pondering over 
 the relation of morality and religion you follow 
 only that branch of religion that has come down 
 from Bethlehem. An argument based upon Chris- 
 tianity alone would indeed be powerful ; but why 
 look upon a class of men when all the human 
 family marches before you in one solid army? Why 
 gaze at an island only when before you lies a 
 magnificent world? The simple fact is that as far 
 back as we can look we find wicked men fearing 
 the shadow of God, good men loving it; we see by 
 every stream the altar of worship, and thither 
 repairing not only children and vestals arrayed in 
 white, but the wisest and greatest also repairing 
 thither in the garments of philosophy. 
 
264 THE INFLUENCE OF 
 
 The stream of public morals having thus poured 
 down through all history from the mountains of 
 religion, from what source will atheism draw morals 
 when it shall have abolished these fountains? It is 
 necessary that a river like the Nile should have an 
 adequate source. Such a stream overflowing all 
 Egypt, changing itself into a sea once each year, 
 must possess some where a reason for that uprising 
 of waters. No rains fall in Egypt. Under skies 
 that are never clouded that mysterious stream begins 
 to rise, and day and night for weeks its waters 
 creep over the banks and widen out over the wide 
 plains. Science for three thousand years sought the 
 solution of the mystery, and at last found it in the 
 wonderful rainstorms that beat at the fountains of 
 the river four thousand miles away. 
 
 The stream of public morals has thus come down 
 from far-off influences. It has overflowed the vales 
 of human life. This sacred water has flowed to the 
 altar where the bride has stood, where the child has 
 received baptism, where the dirge has been chanted 
 for the dead. It has given spiritual life to the 
 statesman, images to the poet, eloquence to the 
 orator, joy to the honorable, fear to the wicked. 
 With the fear of God removed, whence shall come 
 any more this great overflow of a stream so grand 
 
ATHEISM UPON MORALS. 265 
 
 and life-giving? What mountains can atheism rear 
 that can equal these mountains of religion's holy 
 feelings and holy faith? What rain-storm can it 
 cause to beat that shall equal that great storm of 
 divine justice and love that falls from the windows 
 of Heaven upon the springs of piety ? Whence 
 is atheism to draw its mighty Nile of virtue and 
 peace? 
 
 It has two replies ready so far as we know. It 
 may, indeed, possess others, but they have escaped 
 my attention or memory. 1. The respect and love 
 of mankind are motive enough and reward enough 
 of a virtuous life. This is the plea of the French 
 atheists. They confessed humanity to be God 
 enough. While we confess the dignity of such an 
 affection, and that it has inspired many a heart to 
 noble action, yet it would seem unable to produce 
 a morals beautiful enough, or universal enough, or 
 powerful enough, or cheerful enough, to meet the 
 wants of society. In the day of its trial it did not 
 meet the expectation of its advocates. The French- 
 men who cast themselves upon this worship of man 
 did not rise up as under the spell of a new and 
 superior religion, but they sunk as though their 
 hearts had been emptied of a once powerful inspira- 
 tion. The days of the French revolution and the 
 
266 THE INFLUBNGE OF 
 
 half century following showed that the worship of 
 humanity could not lift the spirit upward as it was 
 lifted by the harp of Isaiah, or by the prayers of 
 Epictetus, or by the holy cross of our Lord. The 
 songs of the Red Republicans were a poor spiritual 
 food compared with Zion's songs, which broke the 
 hearts of Judah's daughters in a strange land, or 
 which echoed in the "misereres" and "glorias" of 
 the seventeenth century. 
 
 The worship of humanity became a worship of 
 food, and drink, and pleasure; and handed over to a 
 merciful oblivion those who turned away from 
 Heaven's God to fling their offerings upon man's 
 altar. The votaries of this new morals never soared 
 up to eloquence. They failed to become Pauls, 
 ready to die for virtue; they failed to imitate 
 Savonarola as missionaries against vice ; they found 
 no French eloquence on their lips such as had made 
 kings penitent in the days of Bossuet and Massillon. 
 Their religion languished as a piety and expanded 
 only as a despair. Coming to a lofty intellect like 
 August Comte, it only turned into a philosophic 
 obscurity and sadness that became readily a poetry 
 but never a salvation. 
 
 Furthermore, what was that humanity which 
 these philosophers so loved that their sentiment was 
 
« ATHEISM UPON MORALS. 267 
 
 dignified as a religion? What was that human race 
 whose memory was all the immortality the good 
 man might desire ? Alas, for their argument, this 
 stream of life which so., touched that school had 
 been made beautiful in the temple of religion. Out 
 of that sanctuary had come Seneca with his high 
 philosophy, Aurelius with his virtue, St. Louis with 
 his prayers, Beatrice with her beauty of soul, Dante 
 with his poetry, Angelo with his subjects, Massillon 
 with his eloquence, the orators with their rights of 
 man, the Church with its charity. If the worship 
 of man be indeed so noble it is unfortunate for 
 atheism that religion had to come first and create 
 such a charming humanity. And yet such is the 
 dilemma. Into that web of life so loved by the 
 followers of Comte, religion, Pagan and Christian, 
 has interwoven its many beautiful threads. The 
 human race, so beautiful, had made its charming 
 toilet in the temple of the gods. 
 
 The second reply of atheism is this: As a fact 
 it has produced great characters. It points to a few 
 minds great in talent, and learning, and usefulness, 
 and spiritual peace. I confess the splendor of those 
 names, which have become representatives of a world 
 without a God. In learning, some of them have 
 stood among the highest ; in purity of life they 
 
268 THE INFLUENCE OF 
 
 have equaled the saints. I'here are human pictures 
 in the gallery of atheism that long detain the 
 spectator with their lines of beauty. But before 
 these grand portraits we make these two reflections. 
 First, the atheism was not complete. In all the 
 days and years of those men God stood before them 
 as a possibility. He passed by at times as a shadow 
 or as a radiance. He came not, indeed, as drawn by 
 the Calvinistic or Roman articles, but came as the 
 eternal Alpha and Omega, trailing His garments in 
 the sunset, or whispering upon the colossal harp of 
 nature, whose frame is made of worlds and whose 
 strings are the rays of streaming light ; came not as 
 a fear ; not as a vengeance ; but as the universal 
 Mind from which all souls have fallen as pollen 
 from the anthers of flowers. There are lofty minds 
 so gifted with sensibility and so full of skepticism's 
 tears that in their highly-wrought spirits an almost 
 invisible outline of a Creator wakes up more of the 
 music of religion than other souls less divine ever 
 draw from their whole Trinity or from a whole 
 Pantheon. 
 
 Second reflection: There exists no individual in 
 the whole world who stands for only his own belief. 
 Each child of the nineteenth century is the product 
 of the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, and of 
 
ATHEISM UPON MORALS. 269 
 
 all former times. No soul can live an absolute life. 
 Each person in this assembly is three or four 
 thousand years old. Not only were the features of 
 the modern face wrought out in France, Germany, 
 and England, but there also the soul lay and took 
 its shape of sentiment. Our souls are vases into 
 which the past poured not its ashes, but its faith. 
 Hence, what atheists there are in the present are 
 not standing up in a moral or a mental greatness 
 all their own, but in a consciousness and conscience 
 gradually fashioned in days where the mothers 
 bowed in prayer, and where all the music and 
 eloquence of Christianity molded the sentiments. 
 The customs and maxims of life surrounding the 
 atheist of to-day are not customs and maxiins of his 
 own, but of the theism in minds and hearts that 
 have come down through the atmosphere of a piety 
 and have been colored in its religious hues. The 
 atheists of to-day are, therefore, not the results of 
 the worship of humanity, but they are still the 
 results of a history that has every where been full 
 of the Supreme Being. A man may reject the 
 creed of yesterday, but he can not reject its influ- 
 ence any more than he can command his forehead 
 to become low or his intellect to go back to the 
 stolidity of the times of King Alfred. Hence, the 
 
270 THE INFLUENCE OF 
 
 atheists of to-day stand half-clad at least in the 
 beautiful robes of an old religion. As it required 
 thousands of years for religion to build up the 
 shape of human character we now witness on earth, 
 and as the shapings of society come after long 
 processes of education, and long successions of life 
 and death, so atheism will not dare come into this 
 passing century, and, picking out a lofty philosophet 
 here and there, say, " These are my proofs of the 
 adequacy of unbelief." It would be necessary for 
 one or two centuries to come and go, all empty of 
 God — centuries in which no daughter or wife looked 
 toward Heaven, in which no philosopher or states- 
 man saw in eternity any idea of right, or in 
 immortality any reward — before the advocates of a 
 society without God can point us to a man or 
 woman of their own make ; can point us to the 
 unalloyed results of their system. 
 
 It would be begging the question to declare that 
 those results springing forth from the worship of 
 only humanity would be pitiable. I do not know 
 what kind of men and women would stand upon 
 earth in a hundred years after religion had been 
 withdrawn. But we may scarcely doubt that earth 
 would retreat in its departments of morals, and 
 beauty, and power. Man is fashioned by ideals. As 
 
ATHEISM UPON MORALS. 271 
 
 all the painters and sculptors have shaped their skill, 
 have drawn their inspiration from ideal faces more 
 beautiful than life, so the moral quality in the soul 
 has shaped itself before the mirror in which lay the 
 infinite love and purity. As the army of Moses 
 marched toward the pillar of cloud and fire, so the 
 army of all men has marched toward that ideal of 
 holiness which we call God, filling all space with its 
 radiance. Of all visions that have cheered and 
 directed and inspired man, the vision of God and 
 immortality has been the chief. Atheism would be 
 an awful destruction of ideals. To make man 
 look downward instead of up, to look backward 
 instead of into endless life, to ask the heart to 
 exchange God's temple for the forum, to ask woman 
 to look away from the Infinite purity and find her 
 virtue only in the laws of the state, this would be 
 such a destruction of ideals as a soul fashioned like 
 the human soul could not bear, we fear, without 
 sinking like that morning star, Lucifer, from the 
 light of heaven down to hell's rayless gloom. The 
 soul is not shaped by the actual but by the ideal. 
 
 Permit me to add one reflection more. If the 
 difficulty of atheism lies partly in its never having 
 been granted a time and field of experiment, so 
 theism labors under a similar embarrassment. It, 
 
272 THE INFLUENCE OP 
 
 too, has had no time and no place. At no time has 
 there been before the hviman race a truthful image 
 of the Creator. If you point to Christ, the reply is 
 that the world has failed to see the Christ. It imme- 
 diately clothed Him in its own half-vile raiment, and 
 mingled Heaven's beauty with earth^s deformity. 
 We can truly say that theism has never enjoyed a 
 career of light and liberty. It has had to pass 
 along, with its divine wings plucked of their plumes 
 by the ignorance of men, and with millstones of 
 diabolism fastened to those feet that were made for 
 floors of sapphire. All along, the Christian's God 
 has been degraded and made to build the fires of 
 torture where martyrs have died; made to forge the 
 fetters of slaves ; made to consign men to hell for 
 ever from "mere good pleasure," and made to call 
 those His saints who have been unworthy of the 
 association of even good men. For eighteen hundred 
 years our God has lain like a Prometheus chained 
 to the Church's rock, the vulture of human 
 ignorance at His vitals, and the links of lame 
 humanity festering in His flesh. 
 
 There Prometheus lay, chained to the cold rocks of Caucasus ; 
 
 The vulture at his vitals, and the links 
 Of the lame Lemnian festering in his flesh. 
 
 When we mark in what distorted shape the ages- 
 
ATHEISM UPON MORALS. 273 
 
 past accepted of its God, how they transformed Him 
 into the likeness, not simply of man, but even of 
 wicked man, we can not but wonder that the human 
 race has drawn from His worship so much of 
 spiritual power and beauty. But if thus seen 
 through a dark glass, the idea of God has so molded 
 all thought and character, what will atheism ever 
 bring to place alongside that conception of the 
 Creator that is now trying to burst into the world 
 through the windows of a holier temple ? If the 
 altars of religion helped man even when those altars 
 asked man to go forth to cruel war and cruel 
 persecution, what may not the human race expect 
 from them when the only beings that shall bow 
 before them shall be brothers, saints, penitents, and 
 the only angels above that new mercy-seat shall be 
 the seraph of love and the cherub of light? 
 
 18 
 
THE TEUE LIBEEALISM. 
 
SERMON" XV. 
 
 THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 
 
 "ForlDid him not, for lie that is not against us Is for us." — 
 Imke 9:50. 
 
 "TN times when the words "liberal" and "liberal 
 -*- Christians," and "broad" and "broadness" are 
 flying from all the open mouths of the present, 
 from some accompanied b)' derision, from others 
 with delight, it seems our duty to pause long 
 enough to define the terms. To-day I shall discuss 
 before you the real meaning of the word "Liber- 
 ality." 
 
 How full the air is of this word! This idea 
 of liberalism assumes many different names, and, 
 entering the bodies of a hundred different words, 
 is flying around like birds in the air or moving like 
 troops upon the battle-field. There are two parties 
 in the world beneath this flight of words. One 
 party loves all these sounds that express in one way 
 or another what they call "advanced ideas," while 
 
278 THE TSUE LIBERALISM. 
 
 the other party cordially hates the same group of 
 expressions and feels that they are the watchwords 
 of an advancing Satan. To them " liberality " is 
 the highway to atheism. 
 
 This "liberalism" has been in the world so long 
 that there must be something real and tangible 
 about it. In a most unexpected moment it came 
 from the lips of Christ when some of his impetuous 
 disciples wished him to check some men who seemed 
 to be acting as Christians without having received 
 a direct commission. To the amazement of the 
 disciples, we doubt not, Christ commanded that they 
 be let alone, for they were doing something fpr the 
 kingdom. They had a desire to serve the Master, 
 and that desire was too valuable to be checked by 
 any rebuke. 
 
 No doubt " liberalism " is as old as human 
 thought. From what we see in the history of 
 Athens and Rome there must always have been 
 men in each period of the world who were busy 
 protesting against certain old forms of custom and 
 idea. Indeed, this is not a matter of conjecture. 
 From old India, full of despotism, there arose poets 
 who sung of liberty. In Greece, full of the poly- 
 theistic idea, there arose minds that declared the 
 Divine Unity, and for a more spiritual worship. 
 
THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 279 
 
 One of the Greek sages did not desire to be called 
 a citizen of Athens, but of the world. He did not 
 love the law of caste, of exclusiveness, popular 
 among the Athenians. 
 
 Each age having thus revealed a shape of liber- 
 ality, it must be that "liberalism" possesses a spirit 
 that the student may find and analyze. It is an old 
 and a large body; it would be wonderful if it 
 should have no soul. We can not believe such a 
 statement. There must be a soul in it, and we 
 imagine that soul is a noble one. 
 
 The spirit of liberalism must consist of the wish 
 to gather up the most general ideas of politics, 
 ethics, or religion. The word " broadness " must 
 result from this quality. There are in all systems 
 two sets of ideas, a local and temporary group doing 
 duty in their day, and a universal and lasting group 
 doing duty for ever. In our government the ideas 
 of currency or internal improvements or tariff are 
 less permanent than the ideas of liberty and 
 equality. " Broadness " must be a mental tendency 
 to estimate and love these less changing ideas. 
 Such must have been the inspiration of the public 
 orator who declared slavery to be sectional and 
 freedom national. When, on the opposite, Dr. 
 Palmer and Jefferson Davis rallied to the support of 
 
280 THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 
 
 slavery, they illustrated narrowness by giving their 
 great intellects to a perishable fact. 
 
 Any one looking at Christianity will perceive that 
 it moves forward amid two sets of facts; that the 
 facts of one class are changeable as the clouds 
 upon the sky; that the facts of the other class are 
 permanent as the deep blue back of the clouds. It 
 is known to all the lovers of nature that the clouds 
 never repeat their forms in the West. Never twice 
 does the setting sun give the admiring world the 
 same picture. 
 
 Thus, in Christianity, no two eras arrange alike 
 the religious details. The revivals, the service, the 
 sermons, the prayers, the hymns, the music, the 
 ceremonies, change like the toilet of the worshipers. 
 More than this, doctrines change, and out of a 
 hundred ideas that enter an age, only a tenth will 
 come forth meaning what they meant, or retaining 
 the love they enjoyed when they passed into the 
 gates of the epoch. Ideas rush into a century much 
 like the "charge of the six hundred." Beautiful is 
 their equipment, bright their armor, nodding and 
 white their plumes, but after the thunder of battle 
 has passed by, how few are the warrior truths that 
 remain ! The field is covered with the dead. 
 
 Now, it must be that true liberalism is an effort 
 
THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 281 
 
 to find the unchanging truths, the heroes that never 
 die, and to enlist under their banner. It is no 
 pleasing outlook of life if, after one has given his 
 days of work and sorrow to doctrines, these doctrines 
 are all to perish, to be put aside as men throw away- 
 old raiment. Why should one toil and fight and 
 even die for the pope, or for the conservation of 
 slavery, or for the divine right of kings, if just after 
 us are to come generations who will build up a wide 
 freedom without slave or pope or king upon the 
 ruins of one's life and thought? All the disappoint- 
 ments of the past, all the labors that have come to 
 naught, all the broken hearts sleeping in forgotten 
 graves, combine to warn you against idolizing the 
 transient of thought and to implore you to give 
 your soul to the fewer but grander truths that are 
 perpetual. 
 
 Why labor for the meat that perisheth? 
 
 To many the word "liberality" carries within it 
 all the terrors of "infidelity" or "atheism." The 
 last lesson the multitude will learn is that the most 
 of their beloved ideas are transient. The venerable 
 father supposes the tune he sings without time or 
 melody is to be sung forever. The multitude refuse 
 to realize that any thing valuable will come after 
 them. As a little child takes up its new hoop or 
 
282 THE TRUE LIBEBALISM. 
 
 new top as though the game and pleasure were to 
 be for eternity, so the majority of the human race 
 press the customs of to-day to their bosoms as 
 though millions of years hence they should thus 
 stand, like Dante's two lovers transformed into 
 eternal ice when their lips met. Any one coming 
 to this multitude with any hint that their ideas will 
 nearly all perish, will fall like Autumn leaves, comes 
 always with all the hideousness of an infidel. While 
 one part of humanity is made up of childish 
 prejudice, the other part will always seem to be 
 infidel. 
 
 Of course, there is a line where liberalism fades 
 away into unbelief. But all thinking is perilous. 
 The search for evidence is dangerous, for it builds 
 up a love of proof which at last religion may fail 
 to gratify. Liberalism may seek for the unchanging 
 until amid the enigmas of the world, it shall cry 
 out: "All is vanity," and confess no faith. But 
 while the peril of the liberal spirit is great, the 
 peril of the narrow spirit is vastly greater. For 
 each soul marred or ruined by too much breadth, 
 one can point to myriads rendered frightful by their 
 assumption that the little ideas in their hands were 
 the eternal wish of God. The bloody record of the 
 past drew nearly all its crimson from multitudes who 
 
THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 283 
 
 would not look beyond their feet, but who thought 
 the little doctrines they held were the everlasting 
 laws of nature, and that the bloody psalm they sang 
 was the sublime chant of eternity. While, then, the 
 world embarks upon the career of liberality with 
 some risk, the peril can never equal that which lay 
 before the human family when it set forth thousands 
 of years ago upon a career of narrowness. After 
 the perils of belief, through which man has come, 
 he has little to fear from the occasional evils of a 
 higher rationalism. There will never be atheism 
 enough in the world to cause a return of the sorrows 
 once brought by credulity. 
 
 But, secondly, liberalism is not impelled by 
 simply the love of the most true, but also by the 
 love of the most useful. Its spirit is not simply 
 philosophic, but also practical. All philosophy is 
 humane. Not only are there sets of ideas that exist 
 forever, but there are ideas that are constantly 
 useful. All the glory of religion has come into the 
 world by a few gates. The beautiful characters seen 
 in the temple of religion were made by a few great 
 agencies of the spiritual kingdom. Daniel left us no 
 record of much else than a life of prayer. Enoch 
 simply walked with God. Abraham looked up to 
 Heaven. All that redeems the names of David and 
 
284 THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 
 
 Solomon was their penitence. The richness of their 
 temple service counts for naught. Isaiah comes to 
 us sacred in the simple light of piety. The glory 
 of St. John lies in his near friendship with Christ. 
 The fame of Aurelius as a religious being grows up 
 out of his piety. The Saint Louis became exalted, 
 not by being a Catholic, but by his unrivaled 
 spirituality. Bossuet enjoys an immortality that 
 comes not from the book he wrote against the 
 Protestants, but from the plain truths of righteous- 
 ness which he thundered forth in presence of kings. 
 In his own day the people worshiped him because 
 of his argument against the Protestant world, but 
 the mistaken people and their adulation died along 
 with the book, and then a permanent gratitude 
 began to come up from the world over the perpetual 
 ideas that ran through that old eloquence. Pascal 
 was not assisted any by the accidental in his 
 religion, but only by the few ideas that he found 
 like a few grains of wheat in a great tomb of 
 mummies. His girdle of thorns, his fastings, his 
 hatred of so-called pleasure, his solemnities, all 
 count nothing in the subsequent eras, but the 
 golden ideas which he washed patiently from a shore 
 of dirt and sand declare to-day the splendor of his 
 soul. Thus all the mighty virtues of yesterday 
 
THE TRUE LIBEBALISM. 285 
 
 come down to us from only a few gates, and 
 liberalism, perceiving this, refuses to give its heart 
 to any other ideas than those out of which the 
 highest virtue, the immortal goodness of man, has 
 come. Why, when all the long pathway of man is 
 strewn with the wrecks of little, frail ideas, and 
 adorned with monuments of great truths alone, 
 should the children of to-day forget this impressive 
 scene and worship again at altars which will soon 
 become deserted of man and God? Look, for 
 example, at Sir Thomas More. From the blemish 
 found in his narrow Romanism, from the effect of 
 his pamphlets against Luther and Tyndale, from the 
 consent he gave to persecution, his name has been 
 beautifully rescued by the single conception of 
 integrity that lay in his bosom like an image of the 
 Almighty. When Henry VIII. attempted to frighten 
 him into signing a wicked law, he replied, " Terrors 
 are for children, not for me ! " Thus righteousness 
 is seen to be an immortal law of human life. A 
 true "liberalism," therefore, is only a human mind 
 out in pursuit of that which has brought to the 
 human family the most of good, and withdrawing 
 the heart's love from all that is less worth}', it 
 concentrates its affection where the worship of to-day 
 will not be the contempt of to-morrow. 
 
286 THE TRUE LIBWBALI8M. 
 
 As liberalism is the seeker of the wider truth 
 and the more permanent usefulness, so its opposite is 
 the dissipation of the soul's forces over what is not 
 of long life nor of value while it lives. The great- 
 est usefulness comes from the concentration of love 
 upon objects the most noble. The moment a man 
 finds time or the disposition to love some small rite 
 or ceremony, that moment his heart has divided up 
 its current. Instead of flowing into the sea majes- 
 tically like the Amazon, its love spreads out like the 
 delta of the Nile into a himdred channels, through 
 no one of which can an ocean ship pass. Any great 
 truth sailing up toward such a heart must anchor 
 on the outside. 
 
 Having now viewed theoretic liberality and hav- 
 ing found it to be a philosophy and a utility, let us 
 note now some of its theoretic duties. All relations 
 involve duties. A citizen, a father, a friend, a painter, 
 a poet, must confess duties that spring up from the 
 peculiar qualities that give him the special name. 
 Thus liberalism, unless it be only a shadow, must 
 confess its own peculiar duties. Let us attempt to 
 find some of these. (1.) It must tolerate all the 
 many shades of Christian belief. It must seek to 
 remove them, but must still love those who hold 
 them. If, as this proud system claims, it seeks and 
 
THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 287 
 
 respects great general facts, it is bound to confess 
 that the unchanging, immortal truth is difScult of 
 attainment, and that a heart that should hate the 
 narrow would be driven to misanthropy, and hate all 
 mankind. One of the general truths which that 
 philosophy must early bind up in its sacred bundle 
 must be that love toward all men is the highest 
 duty. This is an imperishable generality. 
 
 A second reason for this tolerance, and even 
 affection, may be found in the fact that while the 
 accidental ideas are living their brief life; while they 
 are fluttering like ephemeral insects in a sunbeam 
 that is to be at once the morning and evening light 
 of their life, many who hold them are being led 
 along to immortality, not by the ephemeral ideas, 
 but by the very ideas of liberalism living beneath. 
 Though the candle and the censer, and even the 
 pope, of the Romanist, are false and worthless tenets 
 and will pass away, yet in the bosoms of millions 
 who hold these tenets there is flowing along the 
 very river of truth, which the philosophers love as 
 imperishable. There is no process by which all the 
 human family may be transformed into philosophers. 
 All are on the march toward that destiny, and this 
 should give the wise men joy enough for the day. 
 The majority are broad, though their theory be narrow. 
 
288 THE TEUE LIBBBALI8M. 
 
 "While devotion to the transient is an injury, a drawing 
 of the heart away from the great, yet in our age the 
 narrowness is larger in theory than in life, for with 
 the exception of here and there an individual. Chris- 
 tians are holding to the small ideas with only a 
 gentle grasp, and are daily becoming more and more 
 heirs of a full emancipation. If you will select two 
 churches of this city; if you will choose from the 
 hundreds of sanctuaries two seemingly so far apart 
 as the. Second Presbyterian and the Grace Episcopal 
 Churches, and will, by a careful analysis, examine the 
 souls that worship at those two shrines, you will find 
 no marked qualities that distinguish between the 
 two throngs. Coming from the same avenues and 
 from the same conditions of life, the faith, and hope, 
 and character, of the two groups are the same. 
 Both trees will let fall the same fruit in the autumn 
 of the grave. This resemblance comes to pass from 
 the fact that only an ignorant age can be the perfect 
 slave of minor ideas, and that in our century these 
 two representative congregations are children of only 
 general truths, and are carrying along with them a 
 diversity that is becoming external, getting ready, 
 like the chrysalis of the butterfly, to fall away and 
 go back to dust, handing over the inmate to wings. 
 Around those two meeting-houses an immense Chris- 
 
THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 289 
 
 tianity stands, enlarging the organ tones within by 
 the responses of its deeper voice. The diversity of 
 the two temples is neutralized hy the unity of the 
 surrounding century. 
 
 When a philosophic liberalism sliall gather up the 
 phenomena of church life as carefully as it seeks the 
 general principles of religion, it will find much of its 
 own breadth every where ; will find itself able to 
 join in the service of Episcopalian or Presbyterian 
 without any other feeling than that of gratitude to 
 God that all over earth His children have an altar 
 for their hour of deep worship and meditation. The 
 Unitarian who can not at times worship with the 
 orthodox because of the errors in the book of the 
 latter, has degraded his liberalism into a narrowness, 
 for its mission being to find and love the general 
 and lasting in thought, it is compelled to mark and 
 love the general and lasting in the human soul. The 
 truly broad churchman can worship in all temples, 
 for as musical tones can be heard further than un- 
 pleasing sounds, so the divine parts of the service 
 only will reach his spirit, his soul being too far up- 
 ward to be reached by the notes that are discordant. 
 
 Having alluded now to the philosophy and the 
 duties of liberalism, let us ask something about its 
 associations in history. They have been both good 
 
'290 THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 
 
 and bad. The theory is pure, but as nothing can 
 pass through the hands of humanity without 
 becoming soiled, so this mode of tliought has often 
 found its injurious extreme. Of all theories of 
 government, that of a republic is the truest, but in 
 the hands of actual men democracy has often ground 
 the people with a severity equal to that of a 
 despotism. An unjust tax sanctioned by a ballot- 
 box is as hard to be borne as a similar tax levied 
 by a king. Thus all good theories are made corrupt 
 by passing through defective souls. Into such a 
 world come all the ideals of the intellect and heart, 
 and become stained like the marbles carried from 
 God's hills, or the studio of the sculptor into the 
 smoky cities of man. Thus liberalism has often 
 rushed madly forward into the recklessness of a 
 "free religion," or of an unbelief that discards all 
 spiritual ideas. But the evil in its history has not 
 been as great as the good. One may safely claim 
 that the large part of the world's blessings have 
 come from those minds that have hastened to 
 separate the great from the small. Out of an 
 entangled worship Socrates tried to deduce the unity 
 and greatness of God. Paul became immortal by 
 his effort to make the word Jew give place to the 
 word human. Dante and Milton revolted against 
 
THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 291 
 
 kings, that they might espouse the broader cause of 
 mankind. All the orators have built up their fame 
 on the basis of only the broad and everlasting ideas 
 of earth. Out of the transient no eloquence has 
 ever been born. Liberahsm has always been the 
 coming of God, so far as God has ever come to His 
 children. Paul, Luther, Wesley are places where 
 the ceremonial gave place to tlie spiritual and the 
 eternal. Permit me now to mention one name from 
 wliich I have deduced what little of this broad 
 philosophy it may be my happiness to possess. All 
 of you are aware that there are many persons who 
 look with horror upon all those who dare raise the 
 banner of a broader Christianity. Mistaking their 
 early associations for wisdom, and standing afar 
 from mankind and near only to self, they carry a 
 heart full of bitterness toward the disciples of 
 general rather than of local and special ideas. It 
 ought to be a matter of interest with these to 
 know the fountain whence comes the true Christian 
 liberalism which is rising within our century, and 
 which is destined to blow like a sweet south wind 
 over the centuries to come. But let us pronounce 
 the name of the one mighty intellect which, more 
 than all others, has sown in the Church the seeds 
 of this harvest, of poisonous plants as some say, but 
 
292 THE TBUB LIBERALISM. 
 
 of golden grain indeed destined to be the food of 
 the future ! Let us pronounce the name and then 
 ask those whose bosoms are full of alarm to call 
 him "infidel," or "destroyer!" The name! The 
 name! Ah! here it is — Jesus Christ of Bethlehem! 
 There is the fountain whence roll the transparent 
 waters of this broad philosophy. Far beyond all 
 beings who have ever lived Christ was the broadest. 
 His ideas are all imperishable. He cast out the 
 temporary that had come down from Moses ; He 
 made the old iron-bound Sabbath die in the field 
 where the sweet wheat was ripening; He saw the 
 , human soul in Lazarus, in Magdalen, in little 
 children ; He rebuked the disciples when they 
 desired to draw the sword of their sect; He uttered 
 few of the ideas that enter into the modern 
 differences between denominations ; He preached a 
 discourse, every word of which falls not upon 
 Judea, but upon the whole earth; a sermon under 
 which all men have written the word "forever." 
 There have been broad minds in all times. In our 
 day men love to repeat the names of illustrious 
 intellects, and praise them for "advanced thought." 
 But much of this modern "broad thought" is only 
 a denial or a silence. While the heart beats in 
 man with its infinite longings, he can never be 
 
THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 293 
 
 styled "broad" who studies science and omits the 
 soul. He is a partial, a half soul, who does nothing 
 but debate over our dust. Christ is the true 
 " liberalist," because He did not take refuge in 
 silence or doubt, but boldly uttered His creed, and 
 in such terms that it suits alike those of all times 
 and continents. 
 
 The true Christian liberalism is, then, only the 
 gradual coming of a time that changes not, of a 
 beautiful that does not fade, of a good that turns 
 not into a sorrow. The old Hebrew ritual became 
 a burden. Its material objects became tiresome as 
 soon as man grew larger within. As the philoso- 
 phers love at last the pleasures of truth more than 
 the pleasures of food and drink, so when the world 
 reached development, it flung away the washings of 
 hands and the killing of sacrifices, and worshiped 
 the invisible. It took refuge in the spiritual Christ. 
 Then the Roman age came with its higher externals, 
 but again the world moved on in the great Refor- 
 mation of the sixteenth century. And onward it 
 will still move. The liberalism of you and me may 
 be defective. Beyond doubt it is. It may possess 
 too little piety and too little power to grasp all the 
 facts. But coming generations will do God's will 
 more perfectly and sweetly, and fling us aside as 
 
294 THE TRUE LIBERALISM. 
 
 we throw down the follies of our fathers, and will 
 find the fullness of the stature of Christ, as far as 
 our most extravagant dream. He who stood at the 
 gates of onr era nineteen hundred years ago and 
 turned mankind toward a spiritual religion, contains 
 within His infinite heart other blessings beyond 
 those the nations have yet gathered, for in the 
 kingdom of grace, as in the kingdom of nature, 
 spring and harvest come in an endless succession. 
 
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