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'HE DONNELLAN LECTURES Y FOR THE YEAR 1879-80, ED IN THE CHAPEL OF TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN, RY THE REV. THOS. JORDAN, D. D. A&ector of Magherafelt. S.E. C. O N D E D IT I O W. A) UAE Z/AV. H O D G E S, FIG GIS, AND CO., PUBLISHERS TO THE UNIVERSITY, LONDON : SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & CO. I 884. PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. IN sending forth a Second Edition of this little book, I desire to mention that I have learned with much satis- faction that many of the National School Teachers of the country have received it very kindly. Their appreciation of my notice of some of the great labourers in the schools of morals and philosophy, showed a sympathy with these subjects in a position very different, indeed, from that of the ancients, but still connected with youth and the formation of character. Such a spirit in the teacher of an elementary school would probably, I would conceive, diffuse itself among his scholars; and its spread, I cannot but think, would be of far greater value to the youth in their after-life, than many of the subjects of his school course, on which he laboured very diligently and properly to earn result fees. Seeing the admitted failure of the ancient moralists, we are on the way, I trust, to value the vantage ground from which, in more favoured times, the principles of life and conduct may be taught. Teachers living in the knowledge of the Gospel have a mighty moral lever, which was wholly wanting to the vi PREFACE. ancients, to raise their scholars from the evil, and to lead them to the good. The noblest school for youth is surely that in which, by precept and example, our duty to God and to our neighbour is most efficiently taught. However eloquently put forward, that lesson must often have fallen flat among the ancients. With the new motives to action which the Gospel supplies, and with the more correct views of life, we must trust that the great lesson may ever become more and more operative on life; and that thus' we may have a pledge of a better and a more hopeful future for our country. II. With regard to teachers of another class, addressing themselves through the public press—in some cases to persons of culture and taste, and in other instances to the more general public—one cannot look on their efforts without the gravest concern. The Agnostics and the Secularists, doubtless in many cases sincerely, profess to teach morality and to improve society, without any prin- ciple—except, perhaps, utility—as a foundation for the social fabric. The Moralists, of whom I have treated in these Lectures, all held most firmly that virtue was an unchangeable thing—that nothing could ever by any possibility make wrong right; and they also all believed in a future state. Their failure to influence society by their teachings is notorious and admitted. If such men as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, with their advantages in these respects, PREFACE. vii failed, I am at a loss to understand how these modern writers, however brilliant, and the lecturers, however industrious, to whom I now refer, can hope to succeed. That every teacher, intrusted with the care of Youth, in any school, however elementary, may aim at drawing out the moral and religious nature of his scholars; and that our people may be warned against the danger of a vague, baseless secularism, instead of the facts and doctrines of the Gospel—is the very sincere and earnest prayer of the writer. PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION. THE present Course of Lectures was suggested, by what appeared to be, the spirit of the present day in resisting distinctive teaching in religion. The spirit of our times is possibly right, in its disposition against a prominent place being allowed in public teaching, to the metaphysics of theology, but there is the greatest danger of that spirit carrying us entirely into the opposite extreme. While people shrink from mere barren speculations, taking the place of edifying teaching in theology, they are to be warned against putting aside the Supernatural facts and doctrines on which our religion rests. In this respect, the teaching of the later Stoics, in their praiseworthy office of moral preachers, in the first and Second centuries, has for us a strong note of warning. Their teaching, as a system of morality, practical duty, moral courage, and even of benevolence, so finely depicted in the pages of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, has very high merits. We know there are differences of opinion as to the PREFACE. ix inherent strength of moral teaching, some maintaining that, with the educated classes, at least, it would be efficacious, of itself, in leading to the discharge of all the duties and obligations of life, without any help from religion; while others think, that the efficacy of morality, in such a state of society as ours, is mainly due to the aid it has unconsciously received from religion. But however this may be, everybody must admit that, even with all the help—acknowledged or unacknowledged—it derives from religion, its sanctions are still weak enough. The heathen moralists of the first two centuries, with all their merits, were notoriously inefficacious and inoper- ative on the society of their day. To what was this owing 2 Clearly to their want of a sufficient sanction for their teaching, and this they could not have, because they had no clear belief in a personal, moral, and merciful God, and because of their uncertainty as to a future life. To weed out of our religion, thus, all distinctive and dogmatic teaching, and, step by step, to reduce it to a system of moral conduct, practical duty, and diffusive benevolence, would be to reduce it to the level of the moral teaching of the Stoics, and to render it as inoperative on the world, as theirs admittedly was. We do not, however, undervalue moral teaching. So far from doing so, the principles and facts on which it rests, we believe to be the very foundation of all religion. It is only through our moral nature we are able to form any Y. PREFACE. idea of a Superior Being in his goodness, wisdom, justice, and mercy—an idea necessarily at the root of all religion. II. In the first conflict of our religion with philosophy, we see the men of thought gradually brought over to it, until, with regard to the intellect of the time, we are able to say, “They that be with us are more than they that be with them.” Such a result of this conflict is a very encouraging and useful lesson in our own day, when many are of opinion that intellect and thought are to be found rather with the enemies, than with the friends, of our religion. The aim all through the Lectures has been to give the Stoic preachers full credit for what they did. Besides their other merits, they opened the way, in some respects, for the Gospel by their high moral, and often spiritual, teaching; while the contrast their system presents, directs our attention to the great doctrines of repentance; to the character of our Lord in its living attractiveness; to our right aim and object in life; and to the universalism of the Gospel; and thus brings out into greater prominence these all-important truths. III. An earnest endeavour has been made to render the subject as widely useful as possible, by treating it as a branch of Christian evidence. In pursuing this aim, it may have been impossible to avoid falling, unconsciously, at times into expressions, or modes of thought, already used by others. As far as possible the help derived from PREFACE. xi writers on the subjects treated of, is thankfully acknow- ledged in every instance. It may be added, that the Lectures were written in the midst of the many and important calls of Parochial duty, in a large and important Parish, allowing much less time for research, than could have been desired. They are published exactly as they were preached, in the earnest hope of impressing the lesson, as true in the nineteenth century, as it was proved to be in the first and second, that in its supernatural and distinctive truths, lies the strength of our holy religion. MAGHERAFELT, April, 1880. LIST OF BOOKS AND EDITIONS REFERRED TO IN THE FOLLOWING LECTURES. L. Annaei Senecae Opera : Amstelodami, 1672. The Epistles of Lucius Annaeus Seneca : Thomas Morrell, D.D. Lon- don, 1786. Epicteti Encheiridion: Coloniae. 1596. Arrian's Epictetus. The Discourses of Epictetus. Translated by George Long, M.A. Bohn's *- Classical Library. Marcus Antoninus: röv eus éavrov 848Ata 18. Gataker's Edition, 1697. The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus : newly translated from the Greek. Glasgow, 1742. The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus : translated by George Long, M.A. Bohn's Classical Library. Pensées de Marc Auréle; par Bathelemy-St. Hilaire. Paris, 1876. Pensées de Marc Auréle; traduction d’Alexis Pierron. Paris, 1867. Les Moralistes sous l'Empire Romain : par Constant Martha. Paris, 1872. Histoire des Persecutions de l'Eglise : par B. Aube. Paris, 1875. Modern Doubt and Christian Belief: by Theodore Christlieb, D.D. Edin- burgh, 1877. History of Christianity : Rev. H. H. Milman. Neander's Church History. Bohn's Standard Library. BOOKS REFERRED TO. xiii “Contemporary Review,” 1875: Articles by Professor Lightfoot. Do. Sept., 1877 : Article by Rev. R. F. Littledale, LL.D., D.C.L. “Church Quarterly Review :” Article on “Pantheism.” April, 1877. Bishop Lightfoot : “Philippians:" Dissertation II. St. Paul and Seneca. The Moral Teaching of the New Testament : Rev. C. A. Row. “The Fathers for English Readers.” Religion and Morality : Rev. R. T. Smith. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Seekers after God: by the Rev. F. W. Farrar. Biographical History of Philosophy : G. H. Lewes. Zeller's Stoics; Epicureans and Sceptics: translated by Rev. Oswald J Reichel. History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne : W. E. Hartpoole Lecky, M.A. Rocks Ahead; or the Warnings of Cassandra : W. R. Greg. C O N T E N T S. IECTURE I. MERITs of THE STOIC PREACHERs. How FAR PIONEERs. SUCCESS OF GOSPEL FROM ITS PECULLAR FEATURES. The Stoics and Epicureans representatives of all moral spe- culation. Virtue pursued either for its own sake or for its utility. Stoics alone could benefit society. Merits of their teaching. Moral obligation immutable. Example of advan- tage of their system without its extravagance. Benjamin Franklin's tablet for practice of cardinal virtues. Right place to be given to reason and conscience. High moral principles of Stoics in a most corrupt society. Examples. Unable to reform the world. Appearance of Gospel. Sup- posed resemblance to Stoic teaching. Separated from it by essential differences. (a) Repentance. (b) Due place given to the heart and the affections. (c) Future life taught as an operative principle influencing life. (d) Our Lord—not like the wise man of the Stoics an abstract ideal—an example and also a sacrifice for sin—a great attracting power IPAGE 1 22 CONTENTS. IECTURE II. ST. PAUL AND SENECA : A ContRAST IN LIFE AND IN DEATH . c * « » g e & Outward resemblance in their writings. Radical differences. (a) Stoic self-sufficiency and Christian humility. (b) The sublime contemplation of Stoic—the Christian's pursuit of duty. (c) Stoical suicide and Christian resignation. Seneca a labourer for good. His self-denial. His moral teaching inoperative. Contrast in great results wrought by the Apostle. Seneca did not derive his views from St. Paul. Contrast in their death. Seneca's views on nature of the soul. His uncertainty with regard to the future. His heroism. Paul approaching his martyrdom. His light. His assurance of faith. Conclusion from the contrast LECTURE III. EPICTETUS, AN EMINENT MORAL PREACHER, FAILED, NOT FROM IGNORANCE OF MORAL OBLIGATION, or of THE NATURE OF MORALITY, BUT FROM wanT of A SUFFI- CIENT MOTIVE TO ITS PRACTICE . Popular preachers of Heathen Morality. Examples of. Their high ideal conception of the office. Epictetus a devout teacher. His lessons. (a) Happiness independent of for- tune, (b) Complete resignation. (c) Virtue disinterested. (d) Forgiveness of injuries. His lessons inoperative. Why? Proofs of his failure. Contemporary Christian teaching—its great efficacy on life—proofs of. The evils the Stoic pro- vided against were necessary and unavoidable. The trials and sufferings of Christians altogether voluntary. The vo- XV PAGE 23 45 xvi CONTENTS. luntary test strongly applied to Christians. Proofs of this. Teaching of Epictetus the slave inoperative on slavery. Effect of Gospel on—and on moral slavery. Conclusion. The operative power of Christianity is in its supernatural facts and doctrines LECTURE IV. THE STOIC PREACHERs on NATURE AND FATE : THE GOS- PEL TEACHING OF THE UNIVERSAL FATHERHOOD OF God : A CONTRAST . St. Paul at Athens meets the views of the Stoics and Epicu- reans. The Nature-god of the Stoics. How can an imper- sonal and diffused being have intellectual and moral qualities? How excite love or worship ! Unity of this system neces- sarily followed by a plurality of idol worship. Proofs of this. The system fails to give any explanation of undeserved suffering—contrasts with Christian teaching of fatherly dis- cipline, and is an inexorable fatalism. Counterpart of sys- tem found in East. Modern statement of. Spinoza’s text. The system, in this view of it also, leaves no object for worship. Contradicts our inmost mental convictions. Con- trast to Universal Fatherhood of God in his continued Providence, The Universal Fatherhood not a mystic ab- sorption. Berkeley's view on Nature. Opposite to Spinoza's. The Creeds and the devotional spirit of early Church a safe- guard against the Pantheism of the time. The modern spiritual view of it—without the gross materialism—has a dangerous attractiveness. Why Practical safeguards against speculative errors PAGE 65 66 88 MERITS OF THE STOIC PREACHERS. HOW FAR PIONEERS. SUCCESS OF THE GOSPEL FROM IT'S PECULIAR FEATURES. Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoicks encountered him.—Acts xvii. 18. I WISH to ask your attention to the subject of the popular preachers of Stoic morality and to the Christians in the first two centuries. This comparison brings under our notice a philosophic system bearing a slight outward likeness in some respects to Christianity, but inwardly and really entirely unlike it in its nature and in its spirit. Such a comparison cannot be unimportant at the present day as directing our minds to the grand leading features of our holy religion wherein its strength undoubtedly consists. I very sincerely trust the same reasoning that shows the inefficacy of the one—running its little earthly course of , a few centuries—may bring home to us the life-giving power of the other that knows no end. B 2 MERITS OF THE The subject leads me to refer to writings with which you are very familiar in this place—many of you very much more so than I can have had any opportunity of being— and carries us on to the time when Christianity came forth triumphant from its first sore conflict with philosophy as represented by the Stoics, when, though not yet established, it had firmly rooted itself in the world. The two classes of philosophers mentioned here have divided the world of moral speculation between them. We must either rest the claim of virtue on its own merits or on the advantages to which it leads. The Epicureans took the latter course, while the Stoics pursued virtue for its own sake. There have always been high-souled men who made duty their one great aim, and others who rested duty on their interest. In the East and in the West, in the old world and in the new, it has been so. From Job’s comforters arguing that misfortune in life was the conse- quence of sin, and saying, “Who ever perished being innocent 2 or where were the righteous cut off 2 ” down to Benjamin Franklin, who traced his success in life to the degree in which he had been able to practise virtue, men have reasoned in this way, while all along there has been a school of grander and nobler aim resting all on duty for its own sake. The two sets of philosophers named here may thus be taken as representatives of moral speculation as to the foundation of virtue in all ages and nations. The two schools had pursued their work in Greece with great zeal for about four centuries since their founders, Zeno and Epicurus, had appeared. From Greece they had long since passed over to Italy; for captive Greece had taken captive her rude conqueror by her learning, her arts, and her Science being introduced into Italy. The doctrine £ STOIC PREACHERS. 3 of the Stoics found a congenial home among the Romans in the first ages of its introduction. A system of self- denial and of duty, plain and severe, it commended itself to the Romans, who were men of practice, not of specula- tion, who had conquered the world by strength of arm, not by refinements of inteliect. The Apostle encountered the two schools in Athens, and doubtless he did afterwards in the great capital of the world, where they had long flourished, when he arrived in Rome, and taught the Gospel in his own hired house. The easy-going atheistical Epicureans were the popular teachers, as indeed they always have been. Resting the obligation of duty on plain, palpable, and present advan- tages, with their gross material teaching so simple as to be taken in at a glance, and, as it were, with our bodily eyes—their unholy creed being, Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die—they readily caught, as they always have, the popular attention. Looking at the deep and sore wants of the old world, we may leave them entirely out of the account. If either of the philosophies named in the text was to regenerate society, it must be that of the Stoic, who pursued duty as earnestly when following a forlorn hope, as he did in the day when it led him gloriously to victory. If the Stoics could not renew a corrupt society, the other moralists need not attempt the task at all. They pursued virtue for itself, no matter what the consequences might be. The virtuous man on the road of duty was to bear pain, to be indifferent to wealth or poverty, to life or death, to have confidence in himself, for he was sufficient for his own happiness. He was to submit to the order of Providence, and to accept the 4 MEIRIT'S OF THE condition allotted to him with the most perfect resignation. Right-thinking men in all ages have looked back with fond affection on the great Roman orator’s teaching on duty, right, and virtue, and on his adopting the view of the Stoic"—for he had himself been taught in a Stoic school— that good conduct lay in the intention, and that he only was the honest man with whom, according to the proverb of the rustics, you could play at odd and even in the dark.” The Stoic aimed at making heroes, and in some cases he succeeded.” His pattern he found in the heroic legend of Regulus, the unflinching patriot, whom no threat of bodily torture could draw from what he thought his duty. His patron Saint, so to say, was Cato, who slew himself, driven to madness at seeing vice successful, and that this world was made for Caesar. His model man in the later times was Thrasea, the pure patriot in the all but universal corruption of Nero's reign. The vigour and courage of the Stoics in their pursuit of duty in the most trying circumstances are a most edifying and exalting example. Duty was the guiding-star of their life. Their watchword would be, “Be just and fear not.” In the darkest days for virtue, and in the most evil times for honesty, their struggling spirit — like that of the Hebrew, exclaiming, “Therefore will we not fear, though * Panaetius. See Cicero, De Officiis, lib. iii. cap. 19. * The story of Gyges and the ring, which is borrowed from Plato, is to support the teaching : “Honesta enim bomis virus non occulta quae- runtur.”—Cicero, De Officiis, lib. iii. cap, 9. * In Cicero the Stoic is made to say :—“I never have heard any mention made in the School of Epicurus of such men as Lycurgus, Solon, Miltiades, Themistocles, Epaminondas, heroes constantly spoken of by all other philosophers.”—CICERO ; de fin, lub. ii, cap. 21. STOIC PHEACHERS. 5 the earth be removed”—would find its expression in the stirring words:— “Let Jove's dread arm with thunders rend the spheres, Beneath the crush of worlds undaunted he appears.”” Our reason and conscience are in entire accord with them ; our love for their teaching is all the greater because it shone brightest when the moral darkness was deepest, and was purest when the surrounding society was most corrupt. Like the clear cold moon shining down on the bad acts of the night, it was untainted by the moral depravity around it. Thus their moral system was simple and good, and within its compass were to be found most of the cardinal virtues. To instruct youth to be wise, brave, temperate, and just, could not but be an advantage to every scholar who would enrol himself in the schools of the Porch, and their doctrine was unassailable, that these virtuous courses led to happiness even in this life. The extravagance to which some of their views were carried gave a handle to the scoffers against them, and made their teaching appear less valuable than it really was. In our day, rightly intolerant of the impracticable, I would ask your attention for a moment to the consequences of these teachings, so noble in themselves. In doing so, I would take an example as widely apart, in time, in place, and in circumstances, from the Stoics as I possibly can. In a country undreamt of by Greek or Roman—separated by an interval of 2,000 years—we have a very famous man * Si fractus illabatur orbis Impavidum ferient ruinae. —HoR., Ode iii. 3, 7. 6 MERITS OF THE of the 18th century—a latitudinarian, I grieve to say, in religion—Benjamin Franklin,” the American, turning to practical effect much of this old teaching. Taking thirteen cardinal virtues, beginning with temperance and ending with humility, his practice was to attend specially to each virtue for a time, not of course to the neglect of the others, but to one specially, and to note any signal breach of it. Such a course of the virtues, so to say, he often repeated from time to time at intervals during his long and busy life. The plan be found of the greatest benefit to himself.” The eminently practical and Sagacious Franklin, throwing aside the extravagance and absurdity with which the teaching of the ancients had been encumbered, found by experience that these laws of moral obligation led to the very same end for which they had been valued, at a vast distance of time before, among men different in every possible respect. In his religious views one is grieved to observe somewhat of a likeness to those of the Stoics. His practice was to begin the day with a prayer to Powerful Goodness, such as the Heathens, Zeno, Cleanthes, or * Born A.D. 1706; died 1790. * Recommending his plan to posterity, Franklin says:—“To Temper- ance their ancestor ascribes his hong-continued health, and what is still left to him of a good constitution ; to Industry and F ugality, the early easiness of his circumstances and acquisition of his fortune, with all that knowledge that enabled him to be a uscful citizen, and obtained for him some degree of reputation among the learned ; to Sáncerity and Justice, the confidence of his country, and the honourable employs it conferred upon him ; and to the joint influence of the whole mass of the virtues, even in the very imperfect state he was able to acquire them, all that easiness of temper, and that cheerfulness in conversation which makes his company still sought for, and agreeable even to his young acquaint- ance. I hope, therefore, that some of my descendants may follow the example and reap the benefit.” STOIC PREACHEIRS. 7 Seneca, might have offered up.' The example is taken— not indeed for its religious—but for its moral worth. It is taken as being so remote in every possible way and in every conceivable circumstance from the Stoics. In it there is one proof more, if more were wanted, that moral obligation does not vary with time, place, or circumstance, but is the same in every age and clime, the same in its nature and the same in the consequences to which it leads. From the old world and from the new, from men famous for speculation, from others famous for action, the voice comes that moral obligation is immutable and eternal—as the Stoics rightly taught—as written by the finger of God on the heart of his children. Very solemn are these voices ringing out their weighty lesson over the gulf of ages, that as we follow virtue or vice in youth, so we have the blessing or the curse in after life, and that it is as true in morals as in nature, that as we sow, we reap. II. In another respect the Stoics have rendered an invaluable service to morals. In their hands reason and conscience did a great work. They made, indeed, too much of reason, giving more than its fair share to the intellect. Their heart they carried in their head, as a great military adventurer of modern times is reported to have said of himself. Still they have placed the world under a great obligation to them for what reason and conscience accomplished in their hands, and for the appreciation of moral excellence which they showed. Our * “O Powerful Goodness! Bounteous Father l Merciful Guide l in- crease in me that wisdom which discovers my truest interest. Strengthen my resolution to perform what that wisdom dictates. Accept my kind offices to thy other children, as the only return in my power for thy continual favours to me.” 8 MERITS OF THE STOIC PREACHERS. meaning will be made plain by an example. We place ourselves in Rome in the year 44 B.C. The freedom of the republic is gone, and the statesmen and orators have the doubtful blessing of leisure for classical study. Trying to put flesh and blood on what is long passed away, and to make the mighty dead move among us as living realities, we find the great Roman orator composing a treatise on duty for the benefit of his son who is pursuing his studies at Athens. The great Roman orator stands in the old paths, and builds on lines laid down by a Stoic" two centuries before him. Taking up their cardinal doctrine— vivere convenienter naturae—Cicero shows that an unjust act done to another is a greater violence to the higher and better part of our nature, than any bodily pain we can suffer, than any distress of circumstances that can come on us, and that even death itself is a less calamity to us.” On the old, well-worn, but most important question, “Can anything that is right ever be hurtful to our worldly interest ?” he makes us sit at the feet of Socrates, and tells us how that great teacher used to execrate those who had separated even in thought our duty from our interest, inasmuch as they were necessarily bound up together. We see him citing as an authority more than once the Stoic whom he follows in the treatise that moral right and worldly wisdom ever go together, and that no greater pest has come on human life, than even the notion, that there ever was a contrariety between them. In this beautiful, moral treatise, we see with pleasure the Roman Stoic taking another leaf from Socrates, in which he taught that * Panaetius, died 236 B.C. * Cicero, De Off. lib. iii. cap. 5. STOIC PREACHERS PIONEERS. 9 we should be, in reality, what we would be thought of by others, and that insincerity and hypocrisy were as fruitless and as fleeting as the blossoms on the tree. Following the steps of these men, as we try to make them move among us, we see that in the midst of the many ills, political, social, and moral, which they deeply deplored, all was not lost, for their whole inward nature bore its mighty testimony, in their undying works, to the value of right, truth, and justice. A century is a good step in the history of a philosophic sect, and after taking that step, the moral teaching of the school is found as grand as before. In that time society is growing more and more corrupt. The writer of that moral treatise to which we have referred, murdered—his head fixed on the rostra at Rome—the degradation of society is reaching the very kernel of household life. Going still forward in the century, we see society from one depth of wickedness plunging into a lower still ; but withal, even in the times of the infamous Nero, there is no lowering of moral grandeur in the teaching of the school. What can be more exalting and ennobling than the lessons of the Roman satirist," a Stoic, and the scholar of a Stoic school, rising above all the corruptions of Nero's court, and praying that the Great Ruler of the universe would punish tyrants by showing them an embodiment of virtue, and make their lives pine away through remorse at having missed it.” The dignity of this teaching has touched the heart of the modern historian” and the modern philosopher," * Persius, born A.D. 34; died A.D. 64. * Virtutem ut videant intabescantoue relicta.-SAT. iii. 38. * Merivale, “The Romans under the Empire,” vol. vi. * Les Moralistes Sous L'Empire Romain, par Constant Martha. 10 STOIC DREACHERS PIONEERS. both in our own and in other countries. Making real to ourselves those dreadful times, as the background of the picture, we cannot look on it without the greatest sympathy with the heart of the writer. We listen in wonder to the young poet denouncing, in the most incisive brevity, the vile prayers of heathendom, against which even publicity itself would be a safeguard— aperto wivere voto—and teaching, almost in the language of a prophet, that, in coming to God in prayer, our soul must be right to God and man, our heart pure in its very core, and our nature impregnated with honour and honesty." We find ourselves carried away by the poet—standing, as has been well said, at the very portal of Christianity, but not entering in—calling on young and old to learn from the Stoic teacher the true aim of life, and not to put off till to-morrow our preparation for our latter end.” These voices of the heathen are an incontrovertible proof that men are “a law unto themselves, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accus- ing or else excusing one another.”” In such teachings we see the unconscious pioneers of a spiritual religion about to be given to the world. Giving their due place to reason and conscience, we acknowledge their great and inestimable value. We must own them to be our light. If we put them out, we are in utter darkness. Admitting * Compositum jus fasque animo, sanctosque recessus Mentis, et incoctum generoso pectus homesto. Haec cedo ut admoveam templis et farre litabo. SAT. ii. 73. 2 petite hinc juvenesque senesque Finem animo certum, miserisque viatica canis. SAT. v. 65. * Rom, ii. 15. DEPRAVITY OF ROMAN SOCIETY. 11 this, we see they had a limit which they could not pass. From Zeno to Marcus Aurelius, for five centuries and a half, they had done the world a most invaluable service. To those who, by their reason and conscience, have be- queathed such gifts to mankind, the meed of honour has been accorded by the voice of all ages, and theirs it most deservedly is. Allowing all this, and we desire to do so to the very fullest extent, we shall see there was a task to which they were unequal. They could not reform society, nor regenerate mankind. III. It will not be disputed that the first century of our era was about the most corrupt period of society. The re- cords of the twelve Caesars, from the great Julius to the infa- mous Domitian, exhibit a picture of astounding wickedness in the rulers and of unlimited endurance by the subjects over whom they ruled. The wickedness is satanic, the endu- rance is amazing. The disposition of a people is well seen in their public amusements. Their feelings and senti- ments must have been entirely brutalized, when they could take a passionate delight in the gladiatorial shows. Cruelty must have become a second nature, when tens of thousands of persons could meet together in an amphitheatre to see wretched men fighting to death with each other, or with wild beasts, to make a Roman holiday. In their domestic life the same cruelty is seen in their treatment of their servants. For the smallest offence the most horrible punishments were inflicted. One shudders at the popular poet of Society telling the servant that his honesty was no cause for his master's thankfulness, and that as long as he was upright, his crucified dead body would not be food for the fowls of the air. The story is well known of the dreadful death from which Augustus, at an entertainment, 12 THE PREACHING OF THE GOSPEI. saved a servant who had accidentally broken a vase. The records of this century are appalling, by the frequency of the suicides they mention, and if possible still more so by the levity and utter forgetfulness of all the purposes of our being, with which an immortal soul throws its valuable life away. The whole tone of society is seen to be utterly wretched and reckless. The standard we are applying is indeed a low one. We make no reference to the higher, diviner, spiritual life to be seen when men are walking with God. Our view of the condition of the Roman Em- pire at this time is taken merely in a social way, as a com- munity with rights and obligations to each other, with professed teachers of a high standard of morality among them, and as it is described by its own heathen writers. It is certainly without a parallel for wickedness, cruelty, recklessness, and debauchery. IV. At this period of a most corrupt society—rotten to the very core—the reformer appeared in a remote part of the world. In the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, the word of the Lord came unto John in the wilder- ness, and he came preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.” This preacher of repentance was preparing the way for One greater, who soon appeared. £verything in the local and surrounding circumstances is against him, when he appeared, for the word with regard to him was, “Is not this the carpenter's son ? Whence then hath this man all these things 2* At a subsequent period the local opinion is still unfavourable as it was at the earlier time. The word is still, “How knoweth this man letters, having never learned ?” “ In the course of his * Luke iii. 1. * Matt. xiii. 54-56. * John vii. 14, 15. THE PREACHING OF THE GOSPEL. 13 public ministry there is nothing to excite, but everything to disarm, hostility. His mercy never shines more brightly than towards the end. Coming up to Jerusalem, on his last journey, he wept over the doomed city. He weeps at the grave of Lazarus, the great miracle, at which, drew down on him the crushing wrath of the Sanhedrim. In the last week he heals the blind and the lame in the temple. In his last night he washes his disciples’ feet, not even excluding Judas. In words of most tender pity he tells the daughters of Jerusalem, not to weep for him, but for themselves. In his agony on the cross his mercy goes out, in most comforting words to the penitent thief, and in prayer for his impenitent murderers. In his words and works his mercy increases, as his enemies grow stronger. There is everything against the anti-miraculous view of Renan, of his gentle mercy being in the earlier stages of his public ministry, when he was in the fair scenery of Galilee, amidst the enthusiasm of simple-minded country-people, and of his having been goaded into the severity of extreme denunciation, by the opposition of the chief men of his nation. The facts of his life are quite the other way. We are not to forget his early Judaean ministry and his opening of it at his first passover, with the cleans- ing of the temple from those who had made his Father’s house a den of thieves, as at his last passover he does a like act. His mercy pervades the whole of his public ministry from first to last, as does his faithfulness in re- buking and denouncing wrong." His ministry on earth from first to last—in spite of the ever-rising tide of his mercy—had everything in the local surroundings and in * Hutton's Essays, Theological arid Literary, London, 1871. 14 PECULIAR FEATURES OF THE GOSPEL. earthly influence against it. Taking this state of things in the public ministry of our Lord, I place beside it the state- ment of the philosophic historian with regard to the spread of his religion in the second century: “There are unex- ceptionable witnesses who declare that in nearly all the East and among the Germans, Spaniards, Celts, Britons, and other nations, Christ was now worshipped as God.”" This change in the creed of the world was effected in about 120 years. A revolution, so widespread and so rapid, compels us to pause and to consider why the Christian religion so won- derfully caught the heart of mankind. Giving the Stoics every credit—as we have certainly tried to do—for their grand moral lessons, we must now point out some essential differences by which the Gospel rises above all earthly teaching—far above the glory and beauty of all mere morality, however good and grand—and carries in itself a witness to its own divine origin. (a) The Author of the Christian religion began his work with the sublime doctrine of repentance. His teaching held out hope to the downtrodden and the fallen, whom the world in its unjudging haste would have pronounced past hope, past cure, past help. To penitence for the past and amendment for the future he opened the gate of mercy. The Stoic had no place in his system, and could not possibly have any place, for repentance. He was suffi- cient for himself. He was the equal of the gods. The Author of the Gospel, whenever the penitent came before him, pointed out the path of hope, “Go thy way; sin no * “When he saw the multitudes, he was moved * Mosheim, Ecc. History, Cent. ii. Part i. PECULIAR FEATURES OF THE GOSPEI. 15 with compassion on them, because they fainted and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.”* No philosopher—as has been well said—had spoken such words as: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” When all the publicans and sinners drew near to him to hear him, he taught in his most comforting parables that “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.” Mercy—as has been said—is mightiest in the mightiest, and his word of mercy was mighty in its com- prehensiveness, “Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” “ All subsequent teachers of the Gospel pur- sued the same course. The Apostle Peter had this repent- ance and amendment of life involved in the very notion of his teaching; for the Christian “no longer should live the rest of his time in the flesh to the lusts of men, but to the will of God.” The Christians at Ephesus were taught by the Apostle of the Gentiles that when we were dead in sins, God hath quickened us together with Christ." As surely as society is made up of individuals, this was the way to reform it. To give back the penitent to society, to restore him, the same and not the same, the same in person, but not in spirit, this was to regenerate the world, to put a new leaven into the lump, till the whole was leavened. (b) The Christian religion—unlike the Stoical teaching —gave their due place to the heart and its emotions. It taught the right use of the affections.” It did not present * Matt. ix. 36. * John vi. 37. * 1 Peter iv. 2. * Eph. ii. 5. * “Thus to relieve the indigent and distressed, this is that humanity which is so pecularly becoming our mature and circumstances in this world.” “The final causes then of compassion are to prevent and to relieve misery.”—Bishop Butler, Sermon on Compassion. 16 PECULIAR FEATURES OF THE GOSPHL. a maimed picture of man by describing him as only in a good state when his heart and all its emotions had been stifled. No system, philosophic or religious, had ever before given such full scope to pity, mercy, and charity. What the Stoics looked on as a weakness, Christ gave as the great mark of his Church : “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another, as I have loved you. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”” The teachings of the Christians abounded with appeals to the heart and the feelings, and these hortatory addresses had their echo in their manner of discharging the practical duties of life, and had the most powerful effect on them in times of distress. Distant lands were brought together by their charities.” In their care for widows and orphans they were a great example. They were not wealthy, but they could deny themselves, and what they saved by fasting, they could, and did, give to the common need. When poor countries were not able to raise all that was needed, the wealthier joined, and the work of charity was com- pleted by the rich and the poor meeting together. Their teaching that they were one body in Christ, and every one members one of another, was thus not a barren sentiment, but a strong operative principle. These works of mercy were not spasmodic efforts added on to the surface of Christian teaching. They sprang necessarily out of the correct view of our nature, from the heart, the emotions and affections, which the Stoics had done their best to suppress, and which the Christians gloried in cultivating. They were not momentary in their action, nor from the * John xiii. 34, 35. * Acts xi. 29. PECULIAR FEATURES OF THE GOSPEL. 17 very nature of the case could they be. Manifested in the early days of the Christian Church, they were seen when- ever and wherever the Gospel appeared. The history of the Church abounds with examples. In a pestilence ravaging North Africa about the middle of the third century, the chief pastor of the place teaches his Church that mercy to each other and to the heathen was their bounden duty in such a crisis, when the ties of nature were broken by the heathen cruelly deserting their sick and dying through fear of the plague. The historian having quoted the stirring words which Cyprian spoke to the hearts and the affections of the people of Carthage, goes on to show how the neces- sary work was at once done, and “the city delivered from the danger of an universal infection.”” (c) A third peculiarity of the Christian religion touches more closely the centre of our faith than either of those I have mentioned. The wise man of the Stoics was an ideal character, an abstraction. Such a notion in their system is a witness of the felt want of a perfect exemplar and of the advantage of such to mankind. The Christian religion presents a Being of immaculate purity tried in every possible way, but without sin; a person, though sinless himself, yet of such mercy that he never turned anyone away from him in the three years of his public ministry. The sinners when penitent were admitted to the presence of the sinless one, and were to go and sin no more. The example is perfect for us in every circumstance; and without any formal description being given of him, there springs out of these very circumstances a pattern of every thing good and holy. Were we to ask for whom has this * Neander, Church History, Vol. i. p. 359. 18 PECULIAR FEATURES OF THE GOSPEL. example had the most loving attraction, the answer from every side would be, as has been said, for the best of every age and every nation. These, too, turning from all earth's best and purest—as at its very best imperfect—have been ready to say, “Whom have I in Heaven but thee ? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee.” To the sinful the example has been an attraction immeasur- ably beyond all else, ever growing more attractive as they advanced in holiness of life, for they ever found the truth of the word, “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God.” This immaculate One rises entirely above all humanity, for he constantly calls on those around him to believe in him, to trust him, to love him to death, and through death. He speaks of himself as the light of the world, the truth, the bread of life, the life itself. Standing thus forth in the majesty of Divinity and withal in sinless humanity—the grandest possible example of self-sacrifice—he is most attractive for our race, most fit for the worship of the human heart. This Divine Being is presented to us as having in his sinless humanity what the Stoics would call the infirmities of our nature. He is wearied, troubled, an hungered ; he is represented as sighing, groaning, actually weeping, and thus all the more attractive as a perfect pattern to the bulk of mankind. Not only is he presented to us as an example of life, but also as, by the sacrifice of his death, making our peace with God. “He suffered for us, leaving us an example.” By the all-attracting mercy of God giving his Son for the world, he draws us to him, as nothing else in the history of mankind has ever done, according to his own * 1 Peter ii. 21. PECULIAR FEATURES OF THE GOSPEL. 19 far-seeing word: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” " (d) In another respect every human soul is under the deepest debt to the Christian religion for lifting the veil and revealing the future state, not as a barren speculation, but as an operative principle influencing daily life in the strongest manner. On this all-important subject the greatest of the ancients were in doubt. In his philosophic treatise” on the immortality of the soul Cicero leaves the question as an uncertainty, while on a great public occasion Caesar is represented as stating positively that beyond this world there was neither hope nor fear.” The Author of our Faith puts away for ever all uncertainty on the question. “What is a man profited,” he said, “if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” “ The most thought- less must be startled by his words on that state in the case of the rich man and Lazarus. All his teachings on the question show that the inequalities of this life were to be redressed for the virtuous, and that the erring judgments of human tribunals were to be made right. By the future life and the resurrection of the body an incentive to virtue and religion was given such as as had never been given before, through the boundless hopes and the endless fears thus opened up. He “brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”" The philosophers mentioned in my text looked on the Apostle teaching this great doctrine to the Athenians as bringing strange things to their ears, * John xii. 32. * Tusculan Disputations, Book i., on the question, “Is death an evil?” * Sallust: Cataline. * Matt. xvi. 26. * 2 Tim. i. 10. 20 PECULIAR FEATURES OF THE GOSPEL. and parted from him with contempt or indifference. It may have been to the atheistical Epicureans that he appeared a babbler, while the more thoughtful of his audience—and such the Stoics would be according to their creed—said, “We will hear thee again of this matter.” In the great pattern of the Stoics there is another example showing how much this clear teaching on the future was needed:—“I cannot pass by,” says Seneca, “So striking an example as that he (Cato) showed, when on his last night, he was reading Plato with his sword laid above his head. These were the two instruments he cast his eye upon in his extremity; the one to teach him to be willing to die, the other to put it into execution.” “ The modern writer describing this situation makes the distressed Stoic in his extremity say of the future:— “The wide, the unbounded prospect lies before me, But shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it.”” The very writer who represents so faithfully the perplex- ity of the ancients in the hour of death, is able—through the revealed light we have on the future state—to send for his friend that he may see how a Christian can die. We wonder not at such a record of such a man, for, looking forward in his life to the dark valley, we all know how fully he had entered into the spirit of the immortal words of the Psalmist :— “Though in the paths of death I tread, With gloomy horrors overspread, My steadfast heart shall fear no ill.” Placing thus the Christian religion side by side with a morality the highest and grandest which the heathen world * Seneca, Epist, xxiv. * Addison's Cato. PECULIAR FEATURES OF THE GOSPEL, 21 has produced, we see the great gulf fixed between them. They are separated by the all-important facts on which the Gospel rests, and the sublime doctrines proceeding from these facts. The moral teaching of the Gospel is indeed more sublime and more comprehensive than the greatest of the ancients conceived, yet the whole history of its progress shows, that it is these facts and doctrines that gave it life and potency, led to its amazing influence on human conduct, and produced its unparalleled triumph in the world. The Stoics had the world before them for several centuries. Their moral doctrine was a grand but lifeless form. The Gospel with its peculiarities—some of which I have referred to–drew the world to it by its supernatural and divine energy. In the darkness in which men had been groping for long ages it brought forth light ; in the corruption eating away every good thing in social life it led to purity; in the unparalleled cruelty of the times, institutions of mercy sprang up wherever it went. Men saw a new thing on the earth. A divine spring was passing over the world with the breath of a new life, and the hard winter of the world was gone. Of the cardinal peculiarities of our religion, no one was at all so great, or in any way so important, as the Author of it himself in his immaculate life and in his atoming death. His all- attracting power went to the heart of the individual man, and out of falsehood there came forth men of truth ; out of dishonesty men ruled, in everything, by an enlightened conscience ; out of defiling blasphemy men of no corrupt communication. Under the influence of that all-attracting power the duties of household life were done, as they had never been before. His attracting power was all-pervading, for people most widely parted from each other by country, 22 PECULIAR FEATURES OF THE GOSPEL. education, and by every possible separating circumstance— carrying only in their hand, the letter from the Christian to the Christian *—came together as the helpful members of one body. The Author of the Christian religion put the breath of life into the dry bones of a dead morality, and “they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.” In the sublime language of the Gospel prophet, instead of the thorn came up the fir-tree, and instead of the brier, the myrtle tree, and the moral desert rejoiced and blossomed as the rose. In the Gospel a supernatural and Divine energy passed over the world, and mankind felt— and showed they felt—“this is the Lord’s doing, it is marvellous in our eyes.” * Neander, Church History, vol. i., p. 354. | II. ST. PA UL AND SENECA : A CONTRAST IN LIFE AND IN DEATH. God hath chosen the weak things of the world to con- found the things which are mighty.—1 Cor. i. 27. N comparing the later Stoics of the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries with the Christians, we have the great advantage of being able to refer, for their teachings, to their extant works. ØTheir system has left no outward institutions, nor has it produced visible effects on the world, that might serve as a guide to their history." Their only enduring monument is to be found in the writings of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. LIn making this comparison, we are confronting the world's strength with its weakness. The writer of the text is an example of the weak things of the world. Beside him I place one mighty in the world, mighty in wealth, rank, power, eloquence, and learning; Seneca," the Stoic philo- * Born at Corduba, in Spain, a little before the Christian era; died A.D. 64. 24 ST, PA UL AND SENECA. sopher; who was in a great measure his contemporary. The writings of Seneca have deservedly taken a high place in the world. In a reign of dark infamy, like Nero's, it is wonderful to meet with a heathen philosopher of such a tone, that some Christian writers have spoken of him as one of themselves. ZThere is much in his writings to attract us to him. No one, of fair judgment and of average moral appreciation, can read his letters to his friend Lucilius, the Epicurean, without being wiser and better. Though, as a strict Stoic, he had little place in his system for the gentler virtues, yet in an age of the most heartless cruelty, he was a strong advocate for mercy to the weak, to servants, to slaves; V for a spirit of brotherhood between man and man; and, to his everlasting honour, he was most vigorous in showing the atrocities of the gladiatorial shows in the arena. v. A pattern of life he certainly was not, but it is quite as true that he was not a moral impostor. His lot was cast in dreadful times. Amidst his many frailties, imperfections, and crimes, there was still a strug- gle to make life a matter of conscience. To view his conduct, as we would a modern statesman and a great public teacher in the present settled state of society, would be to compare a seaman in the calm, without a ripple on the water, with the mariner managing his ship in as furious a tempest as ever broke over the sea. His teaching was: “There is no safety but in the desire of what is truly good, and this arises from a good conscience, from honest thoughts and just actions.” “v His lesson was : “It is of greater moment to live well than to live long.”.” W“Virtue * Epist. xxiii. * Ideo, mi Lucili, propera wivere : et singulos dies, singulas vitas puta. —Epist. ci. t ST. PA UL AND SENECA. 25 is honoured by a pious will and integrity of heart.” We are not to expect from the heathen sage such a practice as that of the inspired Psalmist, remembering God upon his bed, and meditating on him in the night watches. And yet the philosopher's desire of living well and in obedience to the rightful rule of conscience is conceived in the same spirit, as is seen from his custom of examining himself, each night, as to his words and actions.” . He is constant and earnest in professing his belief in a divine providence, trying to bring himself into a spirit of resignation, and without murmuring or repining at any loss, to say the will of heaven was otherwise: “Diis aliter visum est.” That superintending providence he brings very near us, as in his words, ‘‘ God is near thee, he is with thee. Yes, Lucilius, I say, a holy spirit resides within us, the observer of good and evil, and our constant guardian.” “ Sentiments these, we see, agreeing outwardly and verbally—but as coming from a material pantheist, outwardly and verbally only— with the Psalmist’s ennobling and comforting words, “Whither shall I go from thy spirit 2 ” “ and possibly opening the way for the Gospel teaching of the presence and help of the Holy Spirit to all who seek it. Such teachings, on mercy, conscience, and providence, make the philosopher appear in accord with the Apostle. His * Epist. cxv. * “Cum sublatum e conspectu lumen est, et conticuit uxor moris jam mei conscia, totum diem meum scrutor, facta ac dicta mea remetior.”— De ira, lib. iii. c. 36. “I conceal nothing from myself, I let nothing slip, for why should I fear my own errors? It will be easy for me to say, See thou do this no more, Seneca, and for this time I pardon thee.”—Same Chapter: Treatise on Anger. * Epist. xli. * Psalm crxxix. 7. 26 OUT WARD RESEMBLANCE writings abound with resemblances of thought and expres- sion to every part of the Scriptures, and there is no difficulty in finding in him a heathen counterpart to many of the inspired moral sentiments of the Apostle Paul. In making this comparison we are on an old and well-worn road, travelled many centuries ago by one, who has been named, the most eloquent of the Latin Christians of the fourth century." A few examples may be taken from the letters to Lucilius. The philosopher, exhorting his friends to sound wisdom, points to the sufferings of whole armies driven to the ex- tremes of hunger, and in stirring words asks, “For what did they suffer all this 2 For a kingdom, and, what is still more surprising, for a kingdom not their own "*—words at once suggesting to us the powerful exhortation of the Apostle, “Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown ; but we an incorruptible.” ” VThe philosopher—true to the introspective habit of the Stoics—teaches as of the greatest value to our happiness to know wherein to rejoice, the true source of which was from a good conscience, from honest thoughts and just actions," reminding us of the Apostle's word, “Our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our con- science.” " The Stoic is frequent and earnest in his teaching that the body must be treated more roughly,” and that nature hath enchained us with this heavy load of flesh; and in the same spirit is the word of the Apostle—-with his heart and mind in the future—“I keep under my body.” " * Lactantius; about A.D. 330; see Mosheim, vol. i. p. 335. * Epist. xvii. * 1 Cor. ix. 25. * Epist. xxiii. * 2 Cor. i. 12. * Epist. xxiv. * 1 Cor. ix, 27. IN THEIR WRITINGS. 27 | | Resemblances such as these can be easily found ; and so it striking has the similarity appeared, in moral sentiments and in words, that it has been thought the philosopher had derived his views from the Apostle, and legend tells of a correspondence of fourteen apocryphal letters, having passed between Seneca and Paul." Many of these resemblances are merely moral common- places, and may be paralleled again and again from the writings of antiquity; others, founded on a metaphor, or on an illustration, have no depth of likeness. With regard to others, where the resemblance is deeper and more real, we would be inclined to reverse the usual notion of tracing such sentiments spoken by the heathen to a Christian origin, and to say that, taken from a Stoic source, they had been adopted into the inspired writings. While everybody sees these resemblances on the surface, if we look a little more carefully into their writings, we shall see they are separated, by radical and essential differences, on the most vital points. (a) Their views on our relation to God are diametrically opposite. The bold blasphemy of the Stoic sage, at once, sweeps away all the blessings and the comforts of divine worship. Their wise man was “the companion of the gods,” the equal of the Divine being.”—With such a view, __–~~~ __--~T TTT ----- ~ See Bp. Lightfoot's Epistle to the Philippians, Dissertation ii., St. Paul and Seneca. * Ep. xxxi. * Seneca’s description of the wise man gives him some advantages over the gods themselves: “Est aliquid, quo sapiens antecedat Deum. Ille naturae beneficio non timet, suo Sapiens: ecce res magna, habere imbeci. litatem hominis, securitatem Dei.”—Epist. liii. “Jupiter quo antecedit virum bonum ? Diutius bonus est. Sapiens nihilo se minoris aestimat, quod virtutes ejus spatio breviore clauduntur.” —Epist. lxxiii. 28 RADICAL DIFFERENCE devotion to God is impossible, and would be absurd. l In reverent humility, the Apostle had nothing he had not received. In his best acts he would say, “By the grace of God I am what I am.” The Apostle, in all his plans for good and in all his efforts for carrying them out, looked for his help from God. v. He was the frail ivy, but twining round the giant oak. In our infirmities, errors, and sins, reason and conscience will tell us which of these should be our frame of mind. What is true of him as a Christian man is also seen in him as an Apostle. The rationalists, in their view of the history of Christianity, make Paul a greater figure than he really is, and vastly more than he would desire to be himself. They are inclined to trace Christianity, as a universal religion, as much as possible to the views and exertions of Paul in elevating it from the obscurity of a local Judaism to a gospel of world-wide mercy." The labours of Baur and of his theological school in this respect are entirely alien to the Apostle himself, who always turned to our Lord as the one source of everything with him. “Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos,” asks the Apostle indignantly, “but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man 2 ” ” In every way unlike the arrogance of Zeno, Chrysippus, or Seneca, in every way alien to such a position, as the rationalists of the Tübingen School would give him, the Apostle looked from his own weakness to the divine power of Christ. As a Christian man, counting all things but loss that he might win Christ, as an Apostle labouring to * Dr. Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, p. 527. * 1 Cor. iii. 5. g IN THEIR WRITING.S. 29 win souls to Christ, his word was equally, “I can do all \ things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” T (b) In their views on our patient continuance in our state of life, the difference is cardinal and essential. This leads us to the great sin and shame of the Stoical system. Looking at this part of their teaching and prac- tice, we feel looking down into a dark gulf, from the edge of which we start back in horror. The philosopher writes approvingly of a friend putting an end to his life in a most deliberate manner, after having settled his worldly affairs, v and given rewards to his faithful servants.” Such a course the Stoic plainly advocates as our right, even in our calm reason and in the fulness of deliberation. With all this, we find in him no such strong advocate of suicide, as in many of the school. In fact, he tries to moderate their fanatical views on this most dreadful crime.” The history of those unhappy times shows, that their own suicidal hand had much to do with rendering the great family of Seneca extinct. In striking contrast to all this, in a city famous for suicides—where Brutus and Cassius each killed himself after the battle of Philippi had decided the fate of the world against them—Paul arrested the hand of the Philippian jailor, when he drew his sword and was about to kill himself. . In the Apostle we see the unflinching \. | Phil. iv. 13. * “Tullius Marcellinus, quem optime noveras, adolescens quietus et cito senex, morbo, et non insanabili correptus, sed longo et molesto, et multa imperante, coepit deliberare de morte. Amicus noster Stoicus, videtur mihi optime illum cohortatus. Sic enim coepit: Noli, mi Mar- celline, torqueri, tanquam de re magna deliberes. Non est res magna vivere.”—Epist. lxxvii. * “Ne nimis anemus vitam, et ne nimis oderimus. Vir fortis ac sapiens non fugere debet e vita, sed exile.”—Epist. xxiv. 30 FADICAL DIFFERENCE courage of the martyr; and at the same-time-perfect resig- nation to God's will in his afflictions. If obliged to die for his faith, he is ready; if permitted to remain at his post, he is all the more willing to labour: “If I be offered upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I joy, and rejoice with you all.” “To abide in the flesh is more needful for you.”” To the Christian, in this frame of mind, no duty was too humble, as none was too high. The very Apostle who pleaded before Agrippa, and before whom, as he reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, Felix trembled, has written a most touching letter about a run- away slave, and asks his master to receive him again, | “not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved.” The sufferings of life, if grievous, were a call to the Stoic, to end them by his own reckless and wretched hand; by the Christian, They were borne patiently, in the conviction that they are “not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.” In affliction the Stoic saw nothing but a call to leave his post, the Christian remained in patient continuance at it, in the assurance that our present “light affliction worketh for us a far more ex- ceeding and eternal weight of glory.” II. As the contrast is striking in their writings, so is it in their lives, to which we may turn for a moment. | Each of the men I am comparing, at a crisis of his life, saw his cherished hopes suddenly cast down. The philo- sopher, accustomed to look on Rome as the centre of every thing, the field of his ambition, the place for the exercise of his talents, banished from all this, had a great trial. * Phil. ii. 17, and i. 24. IN THEIR LIVES. 31 **º The situation subjected his philosophy to a crucial test. If equal to this, it might be safely said few of the ills of life would be too great for it. Taking up one of his extant writings,” we find him describing himself as light-hearted and cheerful in his exile, intent on his studies, and on meditations of the highest order. The Sublime contem- plation, so much spoken of in the Stoic Schools, was found, however, unequal to the trial. It is an instructive lesson to youth, with the world before them, with their high hopes and generous aspirations, to see that mere mental contemplation or intellectual occupation could at best but assuage, but that it could not at all adequately meet the grievous calamities and trials of life. Many centuries afterwards, another prisoner on the lone island is described as turning for his comfort to Something higher and better than philosophy or learning : “Religion what treasures untold Reside in that heavenly word l’’ Eight years of banishment, to the philosopher who had nothing grander, nobler, holier to turn to than dry and barren contemplation, were indeed a severe trial, and led him to efforts wholly unworthy and unbecoming to regain his freedom.” Restored to the society of Rome after his lengthened banishment, placed in a position of the greatest difficulty and responsibility, as tutor and adviser to the youthful Emperor * Epist. ad Helviam matrem de Consolatione, A.D. 41 or 42. Seneca makes a twofold division of this work, and aims at proving that his banishment was not a cause of distress to himself, and should not be to lus mother. * Ad Polybium de consolatione liber. 32 RAIDICAL DIFFERENCE Nero, his services to the empire were of the greatest practical value. The first five years of that reign —after- wards so fraught with dark infamy—are generally praised for the excellence of the government. In those years Seneca was at the helm. Seldom, if ever before, had philosophy attained such a grand position for good; and a labourer for good Seneca was. In the midst of the greatest wealth—much of which he had inherited—he practised the self-denial which he preached. Living on the most frugal fare, sleeping on a hard bed, there must have been much earnestness of purpose, in the long-continued practice of self-denial, in the midst of the greatest possible surrounding luxury.” Happy had it been for the philosopher had he held fast by the great dictum of his Stoic school, to follow the higher and better parts of our nature—vivere convenienter naturae —had he always stood on the unassailable position, to act rightly for its own Sake—virtutem propter se expetendam —caught in the meshes of a tortuous policy, we see a sad compromise of these noble lessons, and according to the common experience of all ages, he was made to feel:— “O how wretched Is that poor man that hangs on princes’ favour.” During many years of his life in Rome, and certainly during those just spoken of, there was very much in favour of the Stoic school. v The philosopher’s self-denying habits of life—kept up for many years, and still, in some respects, * Called Quinquennium Neronis, A.D. 54-59. * His house is said, whether truly or not, to have been furnished with 500 tables of cedar with ivory feet to them, all alike and of equal size. IN THEIR LIVES. 33 persevered in at the time he writes to his friend"—his great eloquence, his power as a writer, his high social rank, and his position in the world's great capital, were great advantages. The fierce light of the world's observation beat on Seneca. He is seen in the first rank of all the heathen teachers of his day. Many others doubtless there were before, and during his time—names forgotten now—whose position saved them from the strong temptations under which he fell. The deepening corruptions of the times— with the capital of the empire the common sink of the vice of all nations—proclaim with trumpet-tongue the inefficacy of the doctrines of Seneca and the contemporary Stoics. Their clear, cold, moral lessons were as powerless to stop the ever-rising course of wickedness, as would have been the teachers themselves to stay with their words the tide of the sea. Turning to the Apostle, we have indeed a contrast. We see him in the crisis of his life miraculously converted by the appearance to him of Jesus Christ, as the Son of God; we see the blinded man, led by the hand into the city which he had been approaching, as a persecutor; we see him baptised into the Faith, against which, up to this time, he had been such a determined enemy; and after a period of retirement in the desert, we see him coming forth the teacher of the salvation of all men. . The rationalists tell us this was a subjective thing ; an impression on the imagination; and that he thought he saw the risen Lord. * His instinctus, abstinere animalibus coepi: et anno peracto non tantum faciliserat mihi consuetudo, Sed dulcis. Agiliorem mihi animum esse credebam. Laudare solehat Attalus culcitam, quae resisteret corpori: tali utor etiam Senex, in qua vestigium apparere non possit.—Epist. cwiii. D 34 ST. PA UT, AS A MISSIONARY. No miracle could be followed by greater or more lasting effects." For twenty-seven years he continued the greatest missionary the world has seen of the Christian faith. The influences of what he did, under the Author of our religion, have not ceased after nearly two thousand years, but have been ever increasing. We must let the Apostle speak for himself. We must listen to his own words: “Am I not an Apostle 2 Have I not seen Jesus Christ 2 ”* In his enumeration of the appearances of the risen Lord, he says, “Last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.” The Saviour he saw with his bodily eyes. By him he was made an Apostle. To say with the rationalists that Paul was a visionary, an epileptic, an unreasoning enthusiast, and that as such he produced the effects we know he did, is to bring in a far greater miracle than the one we reject. Such a view reverses the known principles of life and conduct, and lands us in hopeless difficulty at every stage of his progress. In the crisis of his life, starting, as he says himself he did, on his new career, his aim was, through Christ, to put the breath of a new life into the world. The whole creation lay groaning and travailing in pain together. Combining in himself the Gentile philosophy of Tarsus, no mean city, and the Jewish teaching at the feet of Gamaliel, his desire was to preach the Gospel to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. Burning with a world-wide charity, he was debtor both to the Greeks and to the barbarians; while to his own countrymen, his charity bore him to a height never exceeded, expressing itself in the words, “I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ, for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.” In the service of Christ no kind of suffering could overcome him. In perils * 1 Cor. ix. 1. * 1 Cor. xv. 8. * Rom. ix. 3. ONLY EXPLANATION OF. 35 of all sorts, “in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness,” he held on his rough road in gathering converts and in founding churches in the great centres of Europe and Asia. One fails to see the visionary, the epileptic in all this. Besides all miraculous gifts, there must be cool reason, great resolution, herculean endurance, and invincible courage in these mighty movements. A poor man of weak presence teaches the Christian religion before kings, viceroys, pro-consuls, and magistrates; in Athens, the eye of Greece, where the Stoics and Epicureans encountered him ; in the capital of the province of Achaia, where Gallio—the brother of Seneca—was the deputy, who cared for none of these things; in Ephesus, with its world-famed temple of Diana and the head-quarters of her worship ; and in Rome itself. Am I to believe that it is a weak visionary, a wandering epileptic, whose teaching goes to the heart of the women who resorted where prayer was wont to be made ; to the heart of the runaway slave; to the heart of the wealthy people of the province of Achaia, and of the poor of Macedonia 2 Am I to believe that in Rome itself, such an influence gathers Christian converts among the slaves, the freedmen, the members of the Imperial household 2 They of Caesar's household salute their Christian brethren at Philippi," and the Apostle of my most blessed Saviour—for such I must regard him— tells the same Church his bonds in Christ are manifest in all the palace.” Looking back, from his arrival in Rome, to his conver- sion near Damascus, his career is entirely in keeping with its miraculous origin. Any other theory lands us in * Phil. iv. 22. * Phil. i. 13 36 MATURE OF ST. PAUL’S TEACHING. hopeless difficulties." At the time of the Apostle's arrival in Rome” the philosopher's influence, as a State minister, is on the wane; he is falling into disgrace with the emperor, and withdrawing from Roman society, lives much in retirement. They, therefore, most probably never met. We know very well what subjects engaged the Apostle’s mind during the two years of his first imprisonment, waiting for his trial before the tribunal of Nero. He was “preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ.” The Epistles* written during that imprisonment show, more in detail, the truths the Apostle would put forward in his teaching, and how full his mind was of the atoning work of Christ, and of the edifying power of the Holy Ghost. Every one acquainted at all with the writings of Greece and Rome, knows well how often the philosophers have described the moral conflict which man is to carry on with sin. Every turn of that battle with a man's self has been painted, in unfading colours, by the men of matchless genius, and too often the impression left on us by the picture is the failure of the combatant. Here was the Apostle teaching the new doctrines of the atoning power of Jesus Christ, and the help of the Holy Spirit from on high to aid every honest struggler in that sore conflict, which the Christian is to carry on : “His warfare is within. There unfatigued His fervent spirit labours. There he fights And obtains fresh triumphs o'er himself, And never-with'ring wreaths, compared with which The laurels that a Caesar reaps are weeds.” * Modern Doubt and Christian Belief. Christlieb, page 481. * A.D. 61. * Acts xxviii. 31. *To the Philippians; Colossians; Ephesians, and to Philemon. NATURE OF ST. PAUL’S TEACHING. 37 Here was the Apostle teaching all orders and relations the discharge of their duties from a new principle. Husbands and wives, fathers and children, masters and servants were animated by a new principle, as the servants of a Divine Master who had died for them, as moved by God’s Spirit sent down to them. All their duties of life were bound to the throne of God, for, risen with Christ, they were to set their affections on things above, “where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.” No one of these great truths is to be found in the philosopher's writings. They are the very core of the Apostle's teaching. y Nobody can believe that the great philosopher—if he had ever met the Apostle— would have heard from him a mere colourless morality without any of the facts of the Christian religion, or any of the doctrines that necessarily spring out of them. Without these our religion would be nothing. If we could not pray, “By thy cross and passion; by thy precious death and burial ; by thy glorious resurrection and ascension, and by the coming of the Holy Ghost,” our prayers would have neither strength nor comfort. These things would be the very essence of the Apostle's teachings. From the time the Apostle began that teaching in Rome till the philosopher fell a victim to the atrocious tyrant on the throne, is a short span of only about three years. Of those great and essential truths of the Gospel, with which the Apostle's heart was so full, and which, most assuredly, he would not fail to press on all within his reach, there is but little trace in the philosopher. The career of Seneca, moralist, naturalist, rhetorician, courtier, statesman, from his return from banishment, was as different from that of the Apostle, coming forth from his retirement in Arabia * Col. iii. 1. 38 SENECA'S VIEWS after his conversion, having suffered the loss of all things, as any two lives have ever been. The high moral senti- ments of Seneca are as widely separated from the life-giving principles taught by Paul, as are their lives. High moral sentiments without a basis to rest on, are sand without lime, as Caligula said of the sentences of Seneca; without a Sanction to give them potency, they are valueless. III. Within a very few years of each other, these two great men meet their end; the philosopher on a charge of conspiracy against the government of the monster Nero, the Apostle as a martyr for the Christian religion. The circumstances of the two are in strong contrast, as the one is in great uncertainty about the destiny of the soul in the future; and the Apostle has around him the comforting light of revelation. In a solemn moment, when, by some turn of affairs, we are led to say with the preacher, “Vanitas Vanitatum,” all is vanity, and looking steadily into the future, we ask our- selves what did the great seekers after truth among the ancients think on this? we find they had earnest searchings after immortal life; they longed for it, but there was to them no certainty of it. “This short stay in mortal life,” says Seneca, “is but the prelude to a better and more lasting life above.”" His creed was that the soul is a discerped part of the Divine essence. If a thing be discerped, and a part of something else, the whole must * “Cum venerit dies ille qui mixtum hoc divini humanique secernat corpus, hoc, ubi inveni, relinquam : ipse me diis reddam. Per has mor- talis aevi moras, illi meliori vitae longiorique proluditur.” “When the day shall-come that will separate this composition human and Divine, I will leave this body here, where I found it, and return to the gods; not that I am altogether absent from them even now ; though detained from superior happiness by this earthly clog.”—Epist. cii. OF FUTURE LIFE. 39 be material; but though material, if it be a part of the Divine essence, its immortality would seem to be implied in such a view. Still there is an uncertainty; a wavering in the grasp taken of this doctrine. To the mind of dis- tressed sufferers there arose nothing on the subject, but hopeless vagueness. The great Latin poet—writing more than half a century earlier—has represented one passing from the world in a paroxysm of despair, and as she said:— “My fatal course is finished; and I go, A glorious name, among the ghosts below.” Many questions on the future would be in the back- ground of that harassed mind. Many of these questions, on the soul’s destiny, are put together by Seneca.” Giving loose rein to his fancy, the philosopher speculates on many inquiries, that, in all ages and among all nations, have possessed the most fascinating interest. The chief points to which most of the questions he raises can be reduced are : “Is the soul material or not ? Does it die with the body, or does it not ? If it survive, does it do service to more than one body ?” This last heathen speculation, as to the transmigration of the soul, we may leave out of view, as of * “Vixi, et quem dederat cursum fortuna, peregi; Et nunc, magna mei sub terras ibit imago.” VIRGIL, Ae. lib iv. 653. * “Whence it is ; of what quality; when it begins to be ; and how long it shall continue in being ; whether it be subject to transmigration; and still changing its habitation passeth from one form of living crea- tures into another; whether it performs no more than one service, and being set free, wanders about the universe; whether it be a body or not ; what it shall be employed upon when it ceaseth to act in conjunction with the body; how it will use its liberty when it hath escaped from this prison.”—Epist. lxxxviii. 40 SENECA’S WIEWS OF FUTURE LIFE. no interest to us. Turning to another Epistle, where he confines himself to the grand question of its immortality, his reasoning takes the form of an alternative : “Death either quite consumes us or sets us free. If the latter, what a better state may we not expect, when disencumbered from this load of flesh 2 If the former, there is an end of all ; we are equally deprived of good and evil.” ” In this not a word is said of “the dread of something after death.” The whole matter of future punishment, so momentous to every immortal being, is really overlooked, being regarded merely in the light of the popular mythology, with which the whole question was overlaid. To which side soever of the alternative he inclines, he has no fear of the inevitable lot. Having received the fatal order from the infamous tyrant, his former scholar, he is borne up by an invincible courage. None can read, with- out much emotion, the record of the philosopher entering the dark Valley. Annihilation, or at best a flickering hope of the future, was all his support. The soldier, falling bravely in the forlorn hope, sometimes gains more for his memory with posterity, than by the most brilliant victory. The philosopher, by his heroism in that hour, gives a reality to his lessons which the greatest prosperity of life could mever have imparted to them, and makes us anxious to judge him as favourably as can be. One stands in deepest humility, gazing in fancy on this most melancholy close of a great life; amazed at the deep corruptions of the times, and strongly moved by the courageous resignation of the philosopher, in that dark hour, with no light on the future. * Mors mosaut consumit, aut exuit. —Epist. xxiv. ST. PAUL'S VIEWS OF FUTURE LIFE. 41 | With the Apostle approaching his end, the contrast is great. In his first imprisonment he said to the Philippian Christians: “If I be offered upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I joy, and rejoice with you all.” His own son in the faith, Timothy, was with him, and his name is joined with the Apostle in the Epistle, in which this readiness to die for Christ—if necessary—is expressed. The Apostle was not then to seal his missionary course with his death. Released from imprisonment, he pursued his labours as an apostle. In his second imprisonment, seeing the end drawing near, the Apostle wrote earnestly for his loved and loving son in the faith to do his diligence to come shortly to him. True to the deep feeling of our nature— *. “On some fond breast the parting soul relies”— the Apostle wished to see him once more before his eyes would close for ever. To the Apostle there was then the darkness of a Roman prison ; the distress from several friends falling away; * and there was the dark shadow of approaching death. Far from his country; in the Capital of the Gentiles, he was to seal his mission to them as a martyr. An Epistle written in these most solemn circum- stances is in our hands. In it we see the light around him; for the past came before him with happiest remem- brance : “I am now ready to be offered. . . . . . I have finished my course ; ” while the assured hope of the future was most blessed : “Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness.” With his life-blood ebbing away, the philosopher felt himself drifting out on a dark and unknown sea. To the 1 Phil. ii. 17. * 2 Tim. iv. 10. 42 ST. PA UL'S VIEWS Apostle there was beyond the sea the blessed home, for the assurance of his heart was : “The sufferings of this pre- sent time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.” In his prison the Apostle had before him the cases of others whose souls had gone forth—since the Christian light was raised on high—as the traveller on the great journey of all. To one it had been said thirty-three years before, “To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise,” and the Lord of life himself the same day had said, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” To the prisoner, soon to be the martyr, these would be a light, for the line is here clearly drawn between the frail body and the immortal spirit; between what is of the dust of the earth and what was made in the image of God, and the lesson is, the soul goes forth from the body, living, conscious, intelligent, active, and happy. The first of the noble army of martyrs, taking up the teaching of the Lord's words, had said, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,” and had said it in the hearing of the future Apostle, for “the wit- messes laid down their clothes at a young man's feet, whose name was Saul.” With these examples and teachings before him, with the Spirit of God upon him, the Apostle, on his approaching end, looked to our Saviour Jesus Christ, “who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel.”” The many centuries between us and the Apostle have not, blessed be God, weakened nor changed these princi- ples. Perhaps Christian work and Christian example may weigh more with some than strict logical reasoning. They * Acts vii. 58. * 2 Tim, i. 10, OF FUTURE LIFE. 43 may, perhaps, rather touch the heart and influence the life. The poor sufferer, in the infirmary wards of the work- house, is a prisoner from poverty, from sickness, from the many wants of little children, and, tried in many ways, expresses her willingness to depart on the great journey, in the Lord's good time. A prisoner, though from causes entirely different from the Apostle, in the large, bare, un- furnished room, with its staring, whitewashed walls, with poverty in every possible shape around her, on her bed of sickness, soon to be her bed of death, her faith and her hopes are the same. With the pauper, as with the Apostle —with the unlettered one as with the matchless thinker and writer—with the one in our day as with the other, who, eighteen centuries ago, saw the risen Lord with the eye of the flesh, the blessed assurance is, “absent from the body, present with the Lord.” Great is the contrast between the philosopher and the Apostle in life and in death. The contemporaries had each a rough course, but the waters were vastly more troubled for the Apostle. We see in them, about the time of our Lord's appearing in the world, two ships, start on their great voyage, on stormy and most dangerous seas. On an Outside, superficial view, the ships are somewhat like each other. The one is fitted up in the most splendid style, furnished with all that wealth can command or skill sug- gest ; while the other has received no preparation, from the wealth or the strength of the world. The ships are managed on totally different principles, and they take courses as widely apart as is the east from the west. The one becomes a wreck—a sight so sad in such a noble vessel, that few can look on unmoved—and drifts away darkly out of view. 44 ST. PAUL'S VIEWS OF FUTURE LIFE. The other vessel, with everything against it, makes its way against wind and tide to the harbour where it would be. In that frail vessel, when the waters were troubled and the storm was loud, there was the strength of the all-powerful One, always saying, Be not afraid, I am with you, as, with his footsteps on the sea of Galilee, he had said to his trou- bled disciples, “It is I; be not afraid.” III. EPICTETUS, AN EMINENT MORAL PREACHER, FAILED, NOT FROM IGNORANCE OF MORAL OBLIGATION, OR OF THE NATURE OF MO- RALITY, BUT FROM WANT OF A SUFFICIENT |MOTIVE TO ITS PRACTIOE. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men wrºto me.—John xii. 32. GREAT claim is put forward in these marvellous words. For its fulfilment it carries us far into the future. Shutting our eyes for a moment to what the speaker was, and taking him, as he appeared among men, a Jewish peasant, the claim is astounding. If it has not been justified by fact, it must necessarily react injuriously —we speak it in all reverent humility—on him who made it. The text asserts the attracting power of our Lord and of his work on the Cross most broadly and distinctly, and for its fulfilment carries us into all ages and nations. Never was there a greater need of an attracting power for good, than in the times of which our subject treats. In the first and second centuries there was distress, in many forms, among the heathen people of the Roman Empire. 46 ITINERANT PREACHERS. Men's hearts were failing them through expectation of the things that were coming on the earth. Who were to lead, instruct, or comfort the masses of the people 2 The prominent teachers were the philosophers of whom we have been treating, whom we have called the popular preachers of heathen morality—the Stoics. They are to be met in the great centres of influence, of business, and of public life. The records of the time tell of some teachers of this school—from Tarsus, the city of St. Paul—having access to the family and household of the emperor Augustus. On some occasions their movements have a historic importance. One of them—Dion Chrysostom"— flying from the wrath of the Emperor Domitian—like a second Moses escaping from the Sword of Pharaoh- his only treasures in his flight being a treatise of Plato and a speech of Demosthenes, helps to place the first of the five good emperors,” as they are called, on the throne. On occasions when great multitudes were brought together; at the vast assemblies for the celebration of the national games, such as the Apostle refers to in his comparison of the corruptible and the incorruptible crown; in the tumults of great cities, the travelling Orator might be often heard, his voice and influence usually on the right side. Their efforts were erratic and spasmodic. Their philosophy had no vital power to produce any outward organization. It was not able to bring forth anything at all of the nature of a visible church. The tree had no such inherent life- producing power. Preachers, indeed, of practical morality —their efforts highly dramatic, and therefore, I fear, very * See “Les Moralistes sous L'Empire Romain ;” par C. Martha, p. 215. * The five good emperors are Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius. Their reigns extend from A.D. 96 to A.D. 180. EPICTETUS AS A PREACHER. 47 inoperative—they were rather speculative philosophers and rhetorical speakers than men exercising much practical effect on life and conduct. Their conception of the mission of the popular teacher was a high ideal, and, in the main, correct. Feeling as we often must, as ambassadors for Christ, our inadequacy and our deep responsibility, in lifting up the soul from earth, in the chamber of sickness; at the dying bed, when we are ready to say, Who is sufficient for these things 2—their ideal conception of the office of a heathen preacher is a great lesson. What can be grander than their notion, that “the public teacher is a messenger from heaven (Zeus) to men about good and bad things. His conscience must be pure. His mode of life pure also ; for if entangled in vice how can he reprove others.” It may be instructive to turn our attention for a few moments to the greatest of these men—the best and most earnest man of the time—Epictetus,” in some measure a contemporary with the writer of the text, the evangelist John. They were both sufferers at the hands of the infamous Domitian.” In life he did his best to carry out his own description—to which I have referred—of the ideal, popular moral teacher. Devotion to God— according to his teaching—was to run, like the golden thread, through our every act, and to make the web of our life a fair and uniform whole." Sympathizing, as we must, with this devout heathen, eighteen hundred years * Arrian's Epictetus, lib. iii. cap. 22, on the description of the true Cynic teacher. * Epictetus, a Phrygian slave, belonging to Epaphroditus, a freedman and favourite of Nero, was taught the Stoic philosophy at Rome. Born about A.D. 50. He lived probably into Hadrian's reign (A.D. 117). * His reign is from A.D. 81 to A.D. 96. * Arrian's Epictetus, lib. i. cap. 51. 48 SPIRIT OF PRESENT DAY. ago, singing his hymn—to use his own words—at all times to God, a most instructive lesson may be drawn from the success, or the failure, of his teaching, as we may consider it to have been, the one, or the other. In late years the movement has been to sink the distin- guishing landmarks of our Faith; especially has this been so, since the popular work of the German rationalist," and the still more widely circulated, kindred work of the French- man;” to have as little dogmatic teaching as possible, and to put, for the leading features of Christianity, a system of mere morality, and a diffusive benevolent amiability. In the face of this movement, to put the dead for the living, I would ask you to consider briefly the fate of a heathen system, somewhat of this sort, by a most devout, able, and popular philosopher, in far other times and places. In our inquiry we shall see that this good man's difficulty was not from ignorance of morality, of its right nature and immutable obligation, but from the want of an attracting power—such as in the text—the attracting power of One, in the form of God, bearing our sins in his own body, making our peace with God; of One, becoming the first fruits of them that slept, and Sending down the Holy Ghost to make us fit for heaven—a power to draw man out of himself, and to lift him up to God. I. As a great popular preacher, what are the lessons of Epictetus? His system is simplicity itself. The compass of it was contained in the two words, bear and forbear (āvéxov cal &réxov). His text is, Courage under suffering: his motto, What can’t be cured must be endured. 1 Strauss’ “Life of Christ” appeared in its popular form in 1864. * Ernest Renan: “Wie de Jésus.” 1863. EPICTETUS AS A PREACHER. 49 (a) The wise man looked for all his happiness not from his surroundings, but from himself—a sentiment found in our own sweet poet, without the extravagance of the Stoic — “How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part, which laws or kings can cause or cure.” J This doctrine of indifference (ºláiopia), so famous in their schools, he preaches most eloquently, and shrinks not from carrying it out to the most trying calamities of life, as exile, imprisonment, death, and disgrace. The sentiment he repeats in various forms, and so manifestly overstates it, as to make us recoil from it, as an absurdity. (b) In laying down the doctrine of resignation to the order of providence, the heathen preacher goes further than most could follow, for he teaches “that if the virtuous" and good man knew beforehand what was going to happen, he would himself co-operate towards it.” In spite of the over-statement, we must recognise the great truth underlying it, and the general impression will be, that no doctrine contributes more to the happiness of life, and that nothing can be more in a spirit of devotion than for a congregation of worshipping people, each to pray to our all-wise, all-holy, all-loving Father:— “O teach me from my heart to say, Thy will be done.” (c) Never has the disinterestedness of virtue been more clearly shown, nor under more trying circumstances, Asked what will virtue gain, the answer was, “From a * 6 kaxós kåt d'yatos.-Arrian, lib. ii. cap. 10. 50 EPICTETUS AS A PREACHER. faithless you will become a faithful man; from having been intemperate, you will be a man of sobriety.” The heathen preacher is entirely right. Every man who makes duty the guiding star of his life will go thoroughly with him in this. Utilitarian morality makes a man a calcula- ting coward. The curse of any country, it makes the nation professing it a community of over-reaching sharpers. To deliberate about virtue is to be lost. To haggle over its consequences is to lose sight of its very essence. The teacher of this ennobling and elevating doctrine, in the surrounding infamy of Domitian’s reign, would have few followers. He might be the voice of one crying in the wilderness. The doctrine would not be popular. Its merit is higher. It is true. (d) In none of his lessons did this popular preacher make more advance on those before him, than in the sublime doctrine of the forgiveness of injuries, and in none does he approach nearer to the Gospel. In the trial of Cataline and the conspirators in the Roman senate, B.G. 68, we have the model man of this philosophy—the patron Saint, so to speak, of the Stoics—advocating an unforgiving spirit, as his usage, and basing the correctness of this disposition on his never having taken too merciful a view of his own shortcomings.” From the open avowal of this horrible doctrine of unrelenting unforgiveness, to the banishment of Epictetus to Nicopolis—the “city of Victory,” built by Augustus after the battle of Actium—is * éé àko)\ágrow a tºppay.—Arrian, lib. iv. cap. 9. * Cato's sentiment was : “Inasmuch as I have never pardoned the faults of myself and of my own disposition, I could not readily fall into the habit of forgiving the wrongs proceeding from the evil hearts of others.”—SALLUST : “Cataline,” cap. 52. EPICTET'US AS A PIREACHER. 51 about a century and a half. In spite of all the hardships and severities of his life, he has no word in favour of the wild justice of revenge. Approaching most nearly the blessed word, “Love your enemies,” he teaches forgive- ness, and to overcome evil with good, illustrating his amiable doctrine by an example from Greek history. In his lessons the preacher reflects the severe aspect of the times. It was an age of severity. Great calamities in life—many of which he had experienced—were common, and often unavoidable. His aim was to make man indif- ferent to them. The arrows of fortune he could not keep off, but he forged the strongest armour he could against them. The nameless slave—for Epictetus is no name, but simply means one purchased’—brought from Hierapolis in Phrygia, which St. Paul mentions in connexion with the Churches of Colosse and Laodicea—proved no common man. Held in the greatest esteem during his life, and in admiration approaching to veneration after his death, what was the practical effect of the eloquent, self-denying, heathen preacher on human life and conduct 2 With good moral doctrine, with a mighty power of incisive expression and illustration, that always hits home, the teacher himself, venerated almost as a saint, did he touch the heart or awake the conscience of mankind 2 Tried by this test—with all our respect and esteem for the man—our verdict must be, “failure.” The preacher himself may be taken as his own witness. He often complains of this. “We also.”—he is speaking of his own philosophic sect—“say one thing, but we do another.” * étrikrntos, gained besides, newly acquired. 52 INOPERATIVE ON SOCIETY. The whole history of the period is full of proofs of this. The pictures by Juvenal of the people of the day : “Who live like Bacchanals, yet Curii seem,” and the records of Tacitus are undying proofs that this teaching was speculative and theoretic, rather than practical and operative on life. Seneca, the great heathen preceding him, had said that philosophers denouncing avarice, lust, and ambition seemed to be making a description of them- selves. The hollowness of Stoical exaggeration was seen in many of the sect renouncing their profession; under the decree of the infamous Domitian expelling the philosophers from Rome;” rather than leave the capital. The philoso- pher himself, to his honour, carried out consistently his teaching, that all places were to him matters of little moment. A timid follower, he said, need not fear the persecuting emperor at Rome. He need not hesitate even to return thither, for the will of man can be maintained with equanimity in any place, teaching thus the sentiment stated so strongly by our own Epic poet :— “The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of hell, a hell of Heaven.” True himself to his principles, amidst the general deser- tion, his complaint was, most were philosophers in word, but not in act (āvev Töv Trpattelu, Hexpt Töv \eyeuv). Their Schools were full of mountebanks and pretenders; but the earnest, good men among them were the very first to See, * Qui Curios simulant Bacchanalia vivunt, Indocti primum ; quamguam plena omnia gypso Chrysippi invenies. —JuvBNAL, Sat. 11. * A.D. 90, See Arrian's Epictetus, lib. i. cap. 2, INOPERATIVE ON SOCIETY. 53 own, and lament the failure of their teaching. They would have been the first to reverse the words of the text in their own case, and to say, we are not able to draw men unto us. Who can wonder at the fruitlessness of their doc- trines, however heroic, and the inefficacy of their morality, however sublime, if we remember that they had neither a powerful motive, an attracting impulse, nor a strong sanction ? II. They failed, because they had no such all-attracting power as in the text. The popular mind was being drawn to the new system, of which this was the very life and soul. For examples of this, we cannot turn to times of peace in the Church, and of tranquil, holy, family life. Of such we have not the records. The contemporary literature takes little notice of the Christians, except when their sufferings and persecutions thrust them into notice. It was thus they came under the notice of the Satirist :— “Touch Tigellinus now, and thou shalt shine In that pitched shirt, in which such crowds expire, Chained to the bloody stake, and wrapp'd in fire.”" In two such references made to them in the history of the period, during the life of Epictetus, we have a strong fulfil- ment of the text. (a.) In his youth, while he was still a slave, the power of Christ, drawing men to him, and upholding them in the most tormenting sufferings, was most plainly seen in Rome. What the Christians suffered under Nero—when he made them the scapegoat for his setting Rome on fire—was so * “Pone Tigellinum : taeda lucebis in illa Qua stantes ardent, qui fixo gutture fumant.” —JUVENAL Sat. i. 155. 54 THE SPIRIT OF GOSPEI, frightful and so fiendish, that even the worst and most degraded of the heathen people would not have it. When we have read the fearful description of their sufferings by the exact Roman historian,' we cannot but say, “If the attracting power of our Lord and Saviour was equal to draw men to him through all that, it is more than equal to do what the heathen philosophy was unequal to. If it bore such a strain as that, it is more than equal to produce god- liness of life. What sustains a man in an agonizing death, would certainly make him more than conqueror in common trials and temptations.” If we ask how they bore that ordeal, two sufferers stand out prominently from the crowd (ingens eorum multitudo) of the persecuted; strongly drawn to Christ. The Apostle of the Gentiles, who then died for his faith, had his attract- ing and supporting power in Christ, according to his own word: “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” In another—the Apostle Peter, a martyr at the time, so strongly drawn to Christ, that legend tells he thought himself unworthy totsuffer in the same way as his Lord—and in the great multitude of their comrade martyrs, we see the all-prevailing power of Christ, as it draws men to him, through the greatest sufferings. (b.) Half a century later—when Epictetus is growing an old man—we hear the voice of heathendom, from the country of the Seven Churches, owning the attracting power of Christ : “Our temples are deserted,” they say, “victims for our sacrifices are not purchased.”” We see Pliny, the provincial governor of the place—of whom every- * Tacitus, Annall. xv. 44. * Phil. iv. 13. * See Milman: “The History of Christianity.” Book II, chap. vi. ; STRONGLY OPERATIVE ON LIFE. 55 body speaks most favourably, as a model man for modera- tion and impartiality—view the whole movement as a thing of state policy. With the merits or the demerits of the religion he had no concern. “Whatever it was that the Christians confessed, he had no doubt,” he said, “that inflexible obstimacy” (that is, steady adherence to their faith) “should be punished with death.” “ The very fea- ture of the Christian character, which finally determined the statesman to a death punishment, is what caught the attention of the popular heathen preacher. Epictetus makes his one and only reference to the Chris- tians,” whom he calls Galilaeans, and to their habits of obstinacy in adhering to their faith. Both show the power of the word of the text. What is called obstimacy by the statesman and the philosopher, is the unconscious witness of heathendom to the truth of the Lord’s word, his drawing all men to him, and holding them in their unshaken ad- herence to their creed. History is repeating itself under the accomplished pro- consul, if in a less horrible form than under the fiendish Nero, yet certainly on a vastly wider field. The power of Christ is drawing numbers to him, according to the heathen record of the period.” The tree producing such fruits would necessarily yield the graces and virtues of a good life. The power that sus- tains martyrs and confessors, would certainly make heroes and Saints. * “Inflexibilem obstinationem debere puniri.” Pliny's letter to Trajan, Milman places in the year A.D. 111 or 112. * Arrian's Epictetus, lib. iv. cap. 7. * “Multi omnis aetatis, utriusque sexus etiam.”—Pliny's letter to Trajan. 56 CHRISTIAN SUFFERINGS From the sufferers of the time one figure stands out in bold prominence, like a rock exposed to the sea in a storm. Putting himself forward, to draw off persecution from less noted Christians, or taken as a mark for vengeance, the pent-up rage of heathendom burst, in its fury, on the most prominent man in the Church. Great in the strength of his Lord, the Syrian martyr, called the God-bearer (6eoqbópos), Ignatius of Antioch, stands forth as the strong rock :— “Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal sunshine settles on its head.” The wonder and the scorn of Utilitarians and Epicu- reans, in a cold age, cannot wipe out whole chapters of history. The intense earnestness, the devotedness, the high-wrought enthusiasm, if you will, of the man who had known for thirty years the writer of my text, who had governed for forty years, as chief pastor, the Church in a city as populous as this our own capital; the holiness of a man who had realised Heaven on earth—these things show the strength of Christ's living word, “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.” Ask what power lifts the man of God above earth, and opens to him the gate of Heaven. Ignatius answers for himself: “It is Christ; no phantom, but Christ himself.” III. The strength of the motive-power of Christianity appears still more, by considering that the sufferings and trials of the Christians were all voluntary—every one of them, the free movements of the Christian heart drawn toward Christ. In their case we have not the preparation of the Stoic teacher against the necessary and unavoidable * “The Apostolic Fathers,” page 176. The Rev. H. S. Holland. |WOLUNTARY. 57 ills of life. A dramatic writer* of the ancients, in one of his pieces, advises a man coming home from a journey, to consider the many possible calamities, that may have oc- curred to his household in his absence. Even now, in our Settled society, there may be the happy home, and the trial, we know, might come :— “Which in one moment, like the blast of doom, Would shatter all the happiness of the hearth.” These calamities—vastly more frequent in old times, from war, slavery, exposure of infants—were constant texts for the Stoic preacher, and he prepared his audience for the worst. Altogether different was the case of the Christians. Through trials and persecutions they were indeed drawn to Christ, but always of their own free will. “With cords of a man, with bands of love,” “Christ drew them. Every martyr, confessor, or Christian hero was perfectly free in his choice. They had entered the road knowing what was to be met on it. “Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of 2 ” “ said Christ. “If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.” “ Of another, brought into the Church at a later date, the Lord said: “I will show him how great things he must suffer.”” Whatever the Christian movement led to in their case was entirely voluntary. With the alternative before them, persecution or apostacy, their word was, “We ought to obey God rather than men.”" If the will ever wavered, the heathen did their best to turn the scale. In the tribunals of the lesser Asia, the * Terence. * Hosea xi. 4. * Matt. xx. 22. * John xv. 20. * Acts iz. 16. * Acts v. 29. 58 HEATHEN TESTIMONY. usage was for the Christian to be called upon, not once, nor twice, but three times, to renounce his faith, and if he persisted after these repeated offers, he was condemned to die. In the East and in the West efforts were made to make the Christians falter, by showing them the instru- ments of torture, and the savage beasts to which their brethren and comrades had been thrown. In the records of the North African Curch, few can read without emotion the strong entreaties of the heathen father to his Christian daughter, imploring her, by everything dear to them both, to give up her religion, renewing his appeal to her again and again, and always with fresh inducements.” We cannot, unmoved, look on the struggle of the daughter and the mother, powerfully drawn both ways, to her father in his earnest appeal, and to her child, but still more strongly by the all-conquering love of Christ. In all, it was their own free will, except so far as they were constrained by conscience, to speak for Christ. In that sense they could not do other- wise. “The Lord God hath spoken, who can but pro- phesy 2 ”” Great was the power of Christ in all lands, in all circumstances, drawing their conscience and their will to himself. In proof of this power, we may turn for a moment to a keen observer of life—the atheistical Lucian—the Woltaire, not of the eighteenth century, but of the second, drawing his description from what was often seen. Their virtues towards each other, their unshaken confidence in their own immortal life, were the striking features in the Christians, as witnessed since they renounced the gods of the Greeks, * Neander : “Church History,” vol. i. p. 172. * Amos iii. 8. GOSPEL OPERATIVE ON LIFE. 59 and followed—in his blaspheming language—the Sophist that had been impaled." The infidel scoffer is a witness to the truth of my text. Christ crucified was “unto the Greeks foolishness;”* but to the converted Christian, the strongest incentive to a pure and merciful life. Looking once more at the teachings of the nameless slave, afterwards the famous philosopher, we ask was his teaching at all operative on the great blot of the old society, the slave system ? Having felt to the quick its hardships and severities, we would expect he would aim here, with all his might, at practical effect. To the lasting honour of this school of philosophy, it did what it could for the slave. The teachings of their great men moulded Roman law on the subject, and helped the slave in many ways. The thing, however, remained, and philosophy, though it lessened the evil, did not, and could not, put it down. In my text Christ says he would draw all men to him, without distinc- tion of class, race, or time. The Gospel struck right at the root of the evil. In Christ there is neither “bond nor free.” In him all were brethren. Often in family life, when the skilful physician had said there was no earthly hope for the sick sufferer, and that the head of the great house must die, my text showed its power in the dying man wishing “ to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free.” “ Then feeling the work of Christ for his soul, anxious to do something for the glory of God, with white lips and trembling hand he took the pen, and with his rude mark made many free. Acts orogºta rāsāvaako)\ottagevos. See Neander: “Church History,” vol. i. pp. 218-20 * 1 COT. i. 23. * Col. iii. 11. * Isaiah lyiii, 6. 60 ROMAN SLAVERY. repeated thus, again and again, in many countries changed the face of society. Christ, drawing all men unto bimself, brought in slowly, but surely and peacefully, a greater revo- lution than the greatest earthly conqueror had ever wrought by his victories in the field. Epictetus looked on his bro- ther slave lying wounded and half-dead on the hard road of Roman life, and looking on him, in the fullest and heartiest sympathy with his sufferings, was wholly powerless to make him free. Christ took up the slave as a brother, and the work of his cross drawing master and servant alike to him, wiped out the foulest blot on the society of the old world. When the evil reappeared, in perhaps a darker and a worse form than in the age of the nameless slave, the Gospel again, in other lands, in the time of our fathers, took the sufferer to its warm, loving heart ; kept the ques- tion on the wave of public opinion through long years, and through much opposition sustained the liberators of the slave, till the evil was once more put under foot. As often as we read that page of British history, we see in it afresh the strength of our religion; we see the Lord, according to his own most true word, drawing all men to him. There are other slaveries with which the cross of Christ has to contend, and which it will surely overcome. Bad as was the Roman, black as was the worse West Indian slavery, which Wilberforce put down, there is a worse still. A living example may come home to us, and may possibly carry conviction, as a present thing, when the past would fail. The distressed mother, or the broken-hearted sister, is made to feel this worst slavery—cast down to the very dust by the intemperance in the family. The passionate word of that mother or sister, to the minister of religion looking MORAL SLAVERY. 61 round on that household, is, “Take from this house this odious, debasing, disgusting slavery. Make this house pure ; cast out this foul thing; break this terrible bondage; make us free from this curse in this family—if not, we will rise up, and take these innocent children, before they are cor- rupted and made slaves, and go to the new world, however wild or savage.” The all-attracting work of Christ is brought to bear on the intemperate one. The evil spirit is cast out, and returns no more. The household is made a God-fearing family, going on in the love of Christ, with peace here, and looking forward to meeting, “no wanderer lost, a family in Heaven.” Thus is the attracting power of the Cross for good, as it ever has been. We ask the Apologists, as men writing for an immediate effect, to relieve their Christian brethren from the foul calumnies cast on them by the heathen ; and therefore, speaking of things as they were around them, “What is the great point that strikes you in Christianity?” They all, from Justin Martyr in the second century, to Lactan- tius in the fourth, for their answer point to its practical effect on every-day life. No one, I am sure, could regret more than the devout Epictetus himself, that this teaching was not more effica- cious on life, and that it did not permeate and leaven society more than it did. His contemporary, the Evangelist John, the writer of my text, without the austerity of the Stoic, is a preacher of general benevolence and of gentle mercy. “This is the message,” says he, “that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another.’’’ ‘‘ He that loveth not * 1 John iii. 11. 62 GOSPEL OPERATIVE ON LIFE his brother, abideth in death.” The mark of the Chris- tian mission was : “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”” History, or legend—call it which we will—falls in with these views, by the story of his dwelling constantly on this teaching of gentle mercy in his old age—“Little children, love one another,” being the burden of his public discourses—and defending himself for so doing, on the ground that such a lesson took in everything needful. These lessons, like fair flowers, could not live and thrive without a root, and that root was in the great verities of the text. He that, in the words of the text, was to draw all men unto him, had been in the beginning with God, and was God. The mission of the Evangelist was indeed the culture of the fair graces and the gentie virtues of life, but not without a soil out of which they were to grow. Who can believe that the Apostle, called by his Lord the son of thunder; admitted to the closest friendship with Christ ; called in his own day a pillar; one whose symbol the ancients found in the flying eagle ; one who represents the Lord, as in my text, making his attracting power co- extensive with all ages and all people—who can believe that this Evangelist preaches, as the regeneration of the earth, a mere baseless sentimental benevolence? The foundation of all is strongly laid in the verities of God’s nature ; in the mercy of God, springing out of the depths of the eternity behind us; thus giving strength and power to all that follows. The attracting power of Christ —as represented by St. John—is not merely bound up with the all-conquering mercy that is behind us; it is indisso- * 1 John iii. 14. * John xiii. 35. FROM DISTINCTIVE TEACHING. 63 lubly connected with the realities before us. Face to face with the mysteries of life and death, looking forward to “The undiscovered country, from whose bourne No traveller returns”— what could have been more disheartening and debasing than the teaching of Epictetus, the heathen contemporary of the evangelist, that our death was merely returning to whence we had come 2 “What was in you,” he said, “ of fire, goes back to that element, what was in you of earth returns to earth, of air, to air, and of water, to water.”” Am I to compare this creed of elemental dissolution— this creed of nothingness, with the ennobling and elevating words: “In my Father's house are many mansions”?” The great Saviour put himself forward to the writer of the text with this all-attracting power in the future. “Fear not,” said he ; “I am he that liveth and was dead : and have the keys of hell and of death.” ” In our inner, real being we are not discerped at the hour of death; we are not resolved into the elemental parts; we pass into the paradise of God in our identity, in our conscious person- ality, and in grateful memory to the Lord ; for the new song of the redeemed souls is, “Thou hast redeemed us to God, and hast made us unto our God kings and priests.” “ Thus have we had two things, side by side, under our consideration. Which of the two has the power to make homes pure and happy 2 Certainly no such power was in the heathen * Arrian's Epictetus, lib. iii, cap. 13. * John xiv. 2. * Rev. i. 17, 18. * Rev. v. 9, 10. 64 GOSPEL OPERATIVE ON LIFE philosophy. Tertullian—writing in the generation after Epictetus and the evangelist—describes the pure Christian woman, works of mercy in her heart and on her hands, harassed and thwarted in her household, in every possible way, by the profane impiety of her heathen husband." Which of the two has the power to evolve, out of itself, a network of merciful institutions spread over the world 2 Certainly there is no trace whatever of any such power in philosophy. Which has the power to restrain the grasping hand, the lustful eye, and the covetous heart 2 The heathen preachers, of whom we have been treating, all say, “We have no such strength.” Which has the power to make the young and the strong discharge the duties of life for the gentle, the meek, the pure, for those unable to enter the battle of life and to do for themselves 2 Certainly, the attracting power of the Cross. The word from the Lord lifted up on it was, “Woman, behold thy Son;” and to the disciple whom he loved, “Behold thy mother;” “and from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home.” Which has the power to make and keep the heart full of mercy in spite of hardening sorrows and sufferings 2 The writer of the text ; his brother a martyr; himself per- secuted; in extreme old age, in the very agony of the Church's suffering, answers, for his word is : “He that loveth not his brother ”” is not of God. Which of the two has the restraining power for good, in the race of ambi- tion ; in the efforts of unscrupulous jealousy; the restrain- ing power over the passions of the human heart, become so strong as to appear all but ungovernable 2 The answer * Neander: “Church History,” vol. i. p. 391. * 1 John iii. 10. FROM DISTINCTIVE TEACHING. 65 comes clearly and distinctly out of the past : “No such power has been in the clear but cold morality of the Stoic popular preachers.” From the past the answer is unmis- takable, and the present re-echoes it : “Such power is surely in the all-conquering love, and in the all-attracting work of Christ, according to his blessed and blessing word: ‘And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.’” IV. THE STOIC PREACHERS, ON NATURE AND FATE : THE GOSPFL TEACHING OF THE UNIVERSAL FATHERHOOD OF GOD : A CONTRAST. In him we live, and move, and have our being.—Acts xvii. 28. THE Apostle opens his adddress on Mars’ Hill in a conciliatory spirit. He tells the Athenians he saw no tendency to Atheism among them. The bent of their mind was rather the other way. They were too supersti- tious, or rather too reverential. Around him were the temples of many gods, built by renowned architects; statues of finest symmetry from the hands of Phidias; objects on every side, proving the devotional spirit (êeta-ubatpuova) of the Athenians. Near him was the garden of Epicurus, where the teacher and his scholars lived in proverbially good friendship, though their doctrine struck at the root of all friendship. In front of him was the porch (stod); where Zeno taught his high motives of action ; from which his disciples took the name of Stoic. ST. PA UI, AT ATHENS. 67. The representatives of both schools formed part of Paul’s audience. Standing where the orators, the statesmen, the philosophers of matchless mind had addressed the Athenian people, the unknown stranger, of weak bodily presence, needed the promised help of Christ to give him “a mouth and wisdom,” which doubtless he received. The poor travelling missionary—to whom they said: “May we know what this new doctrine, whereof thou speakest, is ?”—starting from their inscription to the unknown God—which he had observed—tries to lift their minds to right thoughts of him whom they ignorantly worshipped. In the spirit of the first words of the Bible, he teaches the grand truth of an intelligent, moral, personal Creator. Contrary to the Epicurean notion of all things having come together by a cast of chance; by a fortuitous concourse of atoms; he leads up their minds to | “God that made the world and all things therein.” Con- trary to the degrading Epicurean notion of the gods taking no concern" in the conduct of our lives or in our progress in the world, he teaches the exalting and comforting wº doctrine of the all-wise and continued providence of the \\ \ Creator, who “ hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” The other philosophic school, named here, the Apostle approaches in some of their views. Taking up the word of Aratus, the Stoic teacher of Tarsus, his own native city, or the sentiment of Cleanthes, a Stoic also, again leading up his hearers to the one adorable Creator, he shows the 1 Describing the Epicurean view of the Divine Being, Cicero says: “Free from occupation and from labour, he finds his happiness in the contemplation of his own wisdom and virtue.”—De Natura Deorum, lib. l 3. i. cap. 19, 20. 68 UNIVERSAL FATHERHOOD OF GOD. vanity of the idol worship, with which their city abounded. Teaching the cardinal truth, the omnipresence of the Blessed Creator, he is pretty much in accord, not only with the elder Stoics, whom he quotes, but also with the later; one of whom, his own contemporary, has said: “God is near thee; he is with thee.” The omnipresent One could not be made local. It was a contradiction to suppose he could be bound down to a particular place. Omnipresent he was in one sense of the Stoic teaching; but a diffused impersonal deity, according to them, he most assuredly was not, and could not be, for he was “God that made the world.” The universal father- hood of God, the universal brotherhood of men, were new doctrines to the Athenians, who claimed to be of an older stock than other nations.” Zeno, the founder of the Stoics, had, indeed, taught the humane and levelling doctrine, “that all men are by nature equal.”* The lesson—though three centuries old—had been utterly inoperative. The mind is lifted up here to the source of this, in God having made of one blood all nations of men. The Apostle says to them, as it were, “We must not degrade ourselves, we are all the children of our Father in |Heaven. We must not, we cannot, and we dare not limit the adorable Creator to a point of space. Let us look at the better part of ourselves, at our hearts, our emotions, our minds, and our conscience which he has given us, and it is impossible for us to think that the Godhead is like * “There is no need to pray the aedile to admit you to the ear of an image, that so your prayers may be heard the better. God is near thee; he is with thee.”—Seneca : Epist. xxiv. * &vróx0oves, Thucydides i. 2. * Lecky : European Morals, vol. i. page 306. ST. PA UI, AT ATHENS. 69 unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device.” Omnipresent this adorable Creator was, and must be— 'not assuredly as the soul of the world, in the creed of material pantheism—but as the preserver of all, “seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things.” Pro- ceeding from this, he teaches the grand doctrine of repentance and the new life to which it leads, in opposition to the Epicuream motto, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die;” and no less in opposition to the self- sufficiency of the Stoic ; “for God commandeth men everywhere to repent.” The mercy of the universal Father —unlike the philosopher's culture for the few great spirits, the leaders of men—was now calling all from the vanities of the many idolatries to himself, who was never far from any of them, and who “ hath appointed a day in the which he will judge the world in righteousness, by that man whom he hath ordained.” In our treatment of the philosophy of the Stoics, we have reached a leading part of their system--their doctrine on nature and fate. The Apostle—encountering them here—is in striking contrast to them on these subjects, in his comforting teaching of the universal fatherhood of God. Their teachers—especially in the later times of their system—were eminently moralists, and their labours received, and could receive, little support from their theology. They were rather in spite of it; for their theology, if consistently carried out, would have destroyed their moral system, which is the permanent and deserved glory of their later schools. Its defect was—one is grieved to say—that it had so little practical influence on life. Statue-like, it was cold and lifeless. To be effectual, 70 THE SOUL OF THE WORLD moral teaching must look to the strong Sanctions of religion. However fair, standing alone, it is a house without a foundation. Religion, I believe, must give it force, to be operative with the bulk of mankind. I. The Apostle, teaching the universal fatherhood of God, is separated, by a great fixed gulf, from the nature- god of the Stoics. Their deity, pervading all nature as its animating principle, is represented, by a professed exponent of their system, as wise, good, happy, and intelligent." How such qualities can exist in an imper- sonal deity, is certainly very difficult to perceive, as it is to understand, how they, in such circumstances, could move our mind or touch our affections. The heart of man, like a well-tuned instrument, might be in accord with nature, alive to its beauties, in admiration of its wonderful adaptation of means to an end, and of its all- pervading design ending in beneficence, and yet, that heart could not possibly rise in adoring gratitude to God. An impersonal and diffused being is, necessarily, unable to excite love or worship. The Divine Being, with these philosophers, was the force or power of nature, acting with uniform and unfeeling regularity, unmoved by man’s prayers, and untouched by his sufferings. To look on nature, with her millions of arrangements, all contributing to a beneficent end, and, at the same time, all gaining that end without any ordering or directing mind—by way of creation, evolution, or development—is inconceivable. It is as if the inhabitants of a country were to gather from Past and West, from North and South, to defend the right and to repel an invader, without any one to summon them to their high duty of guarding their homes, their country, * Cicero ; De Natura Deorum, lib. ii. AN IMPERSONAL DEITY. 71 and their religion. In such a case, the mighty purpose must have been formed in some earnest heart, planned in Some wise head; the inhabitants—in sympathy with the master-mind—must have been touched with the justice of the cause; the rallying cry must have gone forth, and then—and not till then—we can understand all coming together for one great and good purpose. In nature, in flower, shrub, and tree, in hill, plain, and valley, in mountain, lake, and Sea, in summer and winter, Seedtime, harvest, day and night, can we conceive all coming together for the good and great purpose, without any preparing intelligence going before, to plan, direct, evolve, carry forward, and complete? “The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made ;” but the spirit of this teaching could find no echo in material pantheism. In the East—though this creed has ever found there a congenial home—one of old could say—one to whom countless generations of worshippers have looked as the grandest exponent of God from his works—“The heavens declare the glory of God;” but in the speech and language of this creed, their voice was not, and could not be, heard. This system of the all-pervading deity was one-sided in its essence, and many-sided in its development; it was unity at its core and diversity in its surroundings. The unity of the world—God—the soul of the world—was taught, for without one spirit acting on all, there could not be the harmony of design seen everywhere in the works of nature." At the same time, the endless number of things with forces, strength, and life in them, led to a divine power for each. The one all-pervading deity was lost * Cicero: De Natura Deorum, lib. ii. cap. 7. 72 ITS NECESSARY ACCOMPANIMENT sight of in the countless works of nature; and the popular mind—to satisfy its wants, its cravings, and its require- ments—formed to itself gods of the Sea, the storm, the earth, and the spring, and made them into a pantheon of idol worship, with all its degrading accompaniments and consequences. Contending against this, we have Zeno at Athens, with the unity of the nature-god at the root of his system, and holding a slight part of the truth of the text, teaching the worthlessness of temples. Seneca, at Rome, preaching this unity, in the same spirit, sets small store by objects of idol worship. Marcus Aurelius, putting the word nature for God, makes the educated man say to the unity of nature, in reverence and submission, “Give what thou wilt and take what thou wilt.” Such were the efforts, of great men, seeing the shadow of the truth; running over a space of five hundred years, their fruitless efforts, to maintain the unity of the world-god amidst the idol worship of the multitude. The unity of the system is described by the great Latin poet :" “Know, first, that Heaven and earth's compacted frame, And flowing waters, and the starry flame, And both the radiant lights, one common soul Inspires, and feeds, and animates the whole.” At the same time, his poem represents to us the god of the sea raising up his calm head above the roar of the storm. The father of gods and men is described to us as * Principio coelum ac terras camposque liquentes Lucentemque globum Lunae, Titaniaque astra Spiritus intus alit; totamgue infusa per artus Mens agitat molem, et magnose corpore miscet. —VIRGIL, AE. vi. 724. POPULAR IDOL WORSHIP 73 looking down from his heights on the earth and the ocean; the hero of the poem is constantly helped, in his troubles, by his goddess mother, appearing to him at the opportune moment; while the suffering Tyrian queen, in her mortal agony, is visited by the rainbow, to release the struggling soul from the weary body. The whole mytho- logy of the period is wrought into the popular poem of the day. All the parts of nature are ruled by their respective deities. The gods many, and the lords many were a necessary graft on the stock of the one great soul of the world. The unity of the system was for the cultivated few, while the diversity, a necessary accompaniment of it, met the requirements of the vulgar. What the popular poet taught, the philosopher defended. “God is not jealous,” says Celsus, in his controversy with Origen, “of the adoration paid to subordinate deities,” exactly reversing the word with regard to the Lord being a jealous God.” A fragment of the philosophic side of this creed is interesting to us, as teaching that our souls are a portion of the deity, and that the earth's greatest and best men had played their famous parts in the heroic times, by the presence and help of the gods.” As hypocrisy is the homage of vice to virtue, this part of the creed is an acknowledgment of the truth, that “the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord,” and that all that is really great and all that is truly noble, are done, and can be done only, by the help of what is divine. In greatest contrast to the comforting doctrine of our * Milman: History of Christianity, book ii. ch. 8. * Cicero, De Natura Deorum, lib. ii. cap. 66. * Psalm xxxvii. 23. 74 THE SOUL OF THE WORLD loving, Heavenly Father, is this entirely heartless system, utterly wanting in every touch of feeling, to meet the crying distress of the times of which we treat. Trying to make real to ourselves the surrounding state of things, one sees a sufferer come slowly forward, from a mass of misery. Such a crowd of suffering was to be seen in any large household, where the slaves were very numerous; or on the island of Aesculapius, in the Tiber, on which old and infirm slaves were cast out, like cattle, to die; or in the throng at the door of a great man, where the daily dole of bread was given. From one of these masses of misery, a sufferer comes forward and says: “I am old, poor, friendless, and sick. I have always acted according to my lights. This all-pervading god of nature, this soul of the world, knows nothing of me; else why am I thus 2’’ The answer of the teacher of this system, professedly a theist, would be: “ The gods have no concern with small and trifling matters—Dii magna curant, parva negligunt— You are only a small ripple on the sea of life, rising out of, and sinking into, it again.” How unlike is this to the comfortable assurance of a father's love in discipline, as taught to such a sufferer coming forward among us ! The minister of religion, taking such a sufferer by the hand, tries to draw the bitterness out of his heart, by pointing him to a Father in Heaven, who disciplines us here for a higher and better state; he labours to make that sorely-tried heart cease to be a well of bitterness to itself, and to bring it into unison with his fellow-men, and, above all, to show him that “our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” * 2 Cor. iv. 17. A HEARTLESS FATALISM. 75 The question—which I have put into the mouth of the poor old suffering heathem—has been constantly asked, from the earliest dawn of moral speculation; but of all attempted explanations, what the pantheist offers is the most harsh and the least satisfactory. Worse than heart- less is this system. It is a ruthless and inexorable neces- sity.” Name it as you please, pronoia, Zeus, nature, épappuéum ; it is an inflexible iron destiny. Jupiter has written the unchanging fate.” The events of life are the links of a chain, each bound fast to the link going before. “Fate,” says Marcus Aurelius, “spins your thread of life.” “A chain of causes, invincible and invariable,” says Seneca, “binds and draws all things with it.” “ The sufferer, coming forth from the mass of misery, is, accord- ing to this teaching, as a fly or a worm, that may be mercilessly crushed by the revolving wheel of fate. The system, unfortunately, was not theoretic and specu- lative merely. If such it had been, it might be left in the obscurity of the remote past. It has been eminently practical for evil. With its necessary accompaniment of polytheistic idol worship, it bore fruits the most poisonous and deadly to society. To their dishonouring God, in this way, Paul traces up the great sinfulness of the heathen world." The most wretched state to which they had reduced themselves—the very reading of which makes One shudder—had its origin in the foul spring of idolatry. * “Lead me, O Jupiter, and thou, O Fate, the road by which I am to go.”—Epicteti enchiridion, cap. 77. * Scripsit quidem fata, sed sequitur. Fata nos ducunt.—Seneca, De Providentia, cap. 5. * Marcus Aurelius: lib. iv. cap. 34. * Seneca; Letter, 77. * Rom, i. 23. 76 BAD EFFECTS ON LIFE. All this is in great measure the counterpart of what has been found in the East, the cradle of the creed. There, too, the unity of the world-god has been followed by its natural outcome of countless objects of worship. The votaries of an ancient and subtle philosophy hold, indeed, an unity, in this sense, in God, but an unity, surrounded by a polytheism of loathsome and sickening details." The effects have been the most hurtful to the mind, the heart, the imagination, and the conduct.” The counterpart, too, is found in its having been followed by a doctrine of fate, unchanging and irresistible; the followers of the creed, conceiving themselves hemmed in by walls of brass, against which any human effort—if such were made— would spend itself in vain.” The doctrine, having found its disciples in various lands, East and West, and in many ages, is presented to modern Europe, about two centuries ago, in a more spiritual, and much more captivating form. On this it is necessary to Say a word. Its apostle, in modern times—Spinoza’—born a Jew, took as his motto, the words of St. Paul, “In him we live, and move, and have our being,” to which I have to-day asked your attention. A motto they may be,” but it is not easy to see what support they can lend to his system, except by disregarding the whole context—the * Buddhism and Jainism.—Contemporary Review, December, 1879, pp. 650-58. * Church Quarterly Review, April, 1877. * This was seen in the inhabitants of the famine-stricken districts of Madras, in many cases, casting themselves down in an obscure place, to die in hopeless submission to fate. * A.D. 1632-1677. * See Dugald Stewart: “Dissertation,” p. 305. Edinburgh, 1854. THE SOUL OF THE WORLD 77 general tenour of the Apostle's great speech—which teaches, most plainly, an adorable Creator, Spiritual and moral, with a loving providence over all his children, in their acts and movements, and in the end, a righteous judgment of the world. With this great thinker, whom his own people cast out of their synagogue at Amsterdam, there was nature producing—natura naturans—and nature begotten–natura naturata—and in the identity of these, we find the deity.” Nothing could be in greater contrast to our subject to-day—the loving fatherhood of God—than this view of Spinoza, or to the teaching of his Bible, that had sustained the Jew, his former co-religionist, for thirty centuries. Our Father in Heaven had proclaimed him- self, “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, keeping mercy for thousands”—words giving fresh strength and comfort in pious households, where there was a Lois or Eunice in every successive generation. With tears of gratitude, the pious house- holder, opening the psalm book, would read, “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.” In thankfulness of heart, she would ask herself, “What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits toward me 2 ” ” To the excommunicated Spinoza there was no personal conscious Creator, such as this—merciful, wise, and just —whose loving care is without beginning, and knows no end. The Divine Being was to him a logical necessity. * “Natura naturans et natura naturata in identitate Deus est.”—G. H. Lewes : “Biographical History of Philosophy.” Charles Knight & Co., London. * Exodus xxxiv. 7. * Psalm czvi. 12. 78 MODERN STATEMENT OF Call it substance, ens, substratum; name it with Locke, a thinker of a widely different school, the unknown support of known qualities; with Kant, voupevov, as distinguished from phenomena, from all appearances that come and go; it is certainly identified with nature, with creation. It may be necessary as a support of phenomena; but what sort of God would this be 2 one cannot but ask, in sorrow- ful astonishment, as we would ask the Stoic, in reference to the soul of the world : “How am I to love this with all my heart, with all my mind, with all my soul, and with all my strength " ? Taking us by the hand to the study of nature, such reasoning makes us lose God, rather than find him, there. To rise from nature to God has ever been the intuitive, unpremeditated movement of every well-tuned heart, for God left not himself without witness." Everything without us and within us, rises up against this teaching. The traveller, throwing himself in despair on the sands of the African desert—his eye falling by chance on a moss of exquisite beauty—is led into a new train of thought, and his mind is carried from what meets his eye, upward to the adorable and merciful Creator.” Reasoning, such as this, is certainly, the natural language of man’s heart. To come nearer home, we find much within ourselves, in the inmost recesses of our being, that rises up against this. How are we to explain the self-determining power * Acts xiv. 17. * “At this moment, painful as were my feelings, the extraordinary beauty of a small moss irresistibly caught my eye. “Can that Being, thought I, who planted, watered, and brought to perfection, in this obscure part of the world, a thing of so small import- ance, look with unconcern on the situation and sufferings of creatures formed after his own image 2 Surely not.”—Mungo Park's Travels. AGAINST OUR CONVICTIONS. 79 of our own will, in our resolve to help forward a good work, or folding our hands, to sit still ? What is the still, small voice sternly blaming us for our neglect, if we sit still, and anticipating, at the last, a higher and a perfect judgment 2 How are we to explain our heart's deep conviction of our own personality? When the Apostle says, “I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to be revealed in us,” the sufferings are placed before him as a picture; and the Apostle, realizing himself as a conscious personality distinct from them, is looking at them, and comparing them with something else. Interrogating our- selves once more–How are we to explain our feeling of our own self remaining untouched ? “Unhurt amidst the wars of elements, The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds.” “If our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” Here the writer supposes himself surviving the dissolution of the body, and un- changed by all that may occur to it, remaining himself the same. From our own self-determining power of will; from our own self-consciousness; from our irremovable conviction of our own identity, we rise to these necessary principles in the ever-blessed and ever-adorable Father, in whom we live, and move, and have our being. II. In greatest contrast to the doctrine, whether stated in the gross material form of the Stoics, or in the spiritual way by Spinoza, is the Apostle teaching one moral Creator and righteous Preserver of the world ; one loving Father of all, and all his children one attached brotherhood. A 80 UNIVERSAL FATHERHOOD OF GOD. trace there was of this among the heathen. The words the Apostle quotes, “We are his offspring,” show a remnant of it still lingering on among men. Faint, feeble, and impotent it was, like a dim star to the traveller on the road of life. My text states the doctrine broadly, as the very foundation of religion. The bursting of it on the world was like the sun with its heat and light. (a) My text gives no countenance to that remote, un- satisfying, and inoperative theology of the world being put in order once by a divine hand, and then left to run its course, without any interference. This, in effect, banishes God from our thoughts and from our presence, and, for all practical purposes, is the same as atheism. The Apostle, in my text, brings our blessed Father very near us. As the universal Father, he is present in spirit with all. Our Lord’s lessons—of which we never tire— from the feeding of the ravens; from the fall of the sparrow; from the clothing of the grass of the field; from the hairs of our head—all teach his constant presence and his unceasing providence. Do not his words give point and force to the same lesson: “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work;” “All power is given unto me in Heaven and in earth " ? Words these, not of negative import merely, destructive of the heathen sentiment, to which I have referred—magna dii curant, parva negligunt —but on the positive side, building up our faith, and leading us to the comforting doctrine—very different from a barren theological formula—of our Heavenly Father's loving care over all his frail, but still loved children. The poor slave, sitting by the bedside of her dying child, would have her strength in such teaching, in the conviction of her heart, that not an inexorable destiny, NOT A MYSTIC ABSORPTION. 81 but a Father's loving and loved hand, brought on her that trial. Making real the presence of her Father in Heaven, as she laid her fair, but faded, flower in the two-feet grave, her heart would hold to the words : “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” In the partings of families, common enough among the ancients, as they are still amid the many-headed sorrows of life, the heart would be upheld by the teaching of the text, that not a blind force of nature was urging that movement, but that its leader was the Father in Heaven, who hath determined the bounds of their habitation. In going out alone, on the great journey of all, it was not taking a leap in the dark, but passing through the dark valley, with our weak and trembling hand in the strong but tender hand of our Father in Heaven. In all these cases my text blesses us, with the strength and comfort of the spiritual presence of our Heavenly Father. (b) To push this spiritual presence too far, so as to con- found the divine with the human ; the blessed and blessing Creator with the works of his hands; the mind of the all- wise with that of his children, is the delusion of the dreamy speculator and of the mystic philosopher. The outcome of this is a mystic absorption, in its indolent worthlessness, not a wholesome religion, in its boundless and all-extending usefulness. If the poor praying slave—whose case I have taken– engaged heart, mind, Soul, and affection in struggling prayer, be locally and literally one with the Divine Being, there can be no religion ; no adoring approach of the sinful but penitent creature to the holy and pure Creator, for the petitioner and the petitioned are one—according to this G. 82 UNITYERSAL FATHERHOOD OF GOD view, and absorbed in each other." The praying méther cannot offer her prayer of intercession to God for her child, in her motherly love, holding the one with imploring hand, and in her agony casting herself at the footstool of the other, except she be separate and distinct as a worshipper. The comforting doctrine of the text must not in good reason and in good sense be pushed to a contradiction. What is the very notion of adoring worship 2 The sponta- neous outpouring surely of the individual will, mind, and conscience, sanctified by God’s Spirit, of each one as a distinct and separate worshipper before God. The wor- shipper, however earnest, carrying up his heart and feel- ings—like the eagle rising into the clouds—into the love of him in whom we live, is still necessarily distinct. We must allow the fervour of devotion to find its expres- sion as best it can, not gauging its language by a cold materialism. “Prayer,” says Clement of Alexandria, “if I may speak so boldly, is intercourse with God.” When the devout Christian is in silent prayer, “God is near him, and with him, for he is still speaking to him.” This is merely clothing in circumstances the sentiment of the psalmist, “As the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God;” it is merely expressing the strong yearning of the immortal soul to find its full satis- faction in the living God. Augustine, treating of the omnipresence of God, speaks of him as “diffused through all, but still not as an attribute of the world.” “Its creator”—according to his description—“in his provident care knows no toil, and in his unwearied love upholds all * Hutton : “Essays, Theological and Literary,” p. 78. London, 1871. * Neander: “Church History,” vol. i., pp. 395-96. MOT A MYSTIC ABSORPTION. 83 things” —language amounting to no more than a com- ment on our Lord's word : “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” (c) The words of my text must not be pushed to the strict letter, as Spinoza must do, in adopting them. This is not merely against the spirit of the text, and its sur- roundings, but runs counter to the Apostle's whole Scrip- ture teaching elsewhere. The whole gist of his teaching is to raise man from the earth, and to make him meet for heavenly things. To stir up man for the moral conflict, every conceivable figure is used. He is to run, to wrestle, to struggle, to fight ; to put on the whole armour of God. In the creed of the world-god, either in its gross or its spiritual form, these figures of strongest exhortation have neither meaning nor application. Christ risen and as- cended, has sent the blessed Spirit to give strength for this moral conflict. Our prayers coming back to us, in answer- ing help, are the fulfilment to us of our Lord’s words.” Offending man had wandered from his Father, in whom we live. Christ was a meeting-place for the two, “for God commandeth men everywhere to repent.” The prayers of the penitent were offered by him, the risen and ascended Lord ; the one mediator between God and man. All this daily teaching of the Christian life was the safeguard against the absorption of the finite into the Infinite. You know from the records of philosophy there have * “Substantialiter Deus ubique diffusus est. Sed sic est Deus per cuncta diffusus, ut non sit qualitas mundi, Sed substantia creatrix mundi, sine labore regens et sine onere continens mundum.” G. H. Lewes : “Biographical History of Philosophy.” Dissertation on Spinoza. See note in which this passage from Augustine is given. * Matt. xviii. 20. 84 BERKELEY'S VIEW OF NATURE. been those who have taken the opposite view from Spinoza; who have denied the existence of what he held to be a logical necessity, and have stated that there was no sub- stratum, no unknown support of known qualities.” From these records, we learn that there have been those who Said :— “The cloudcapt towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself,” exist merely as far as we perceive them, and that beyond what we can learn of all these by our perceptions, they are nothing to us. Metaphysical speculations, such as these, interfered little with the virtues and the missionary spirit of Berkeley. His life of virtuous kindness was a plain, practical, though illogical answer to all difficulties about perception. In the keenness of mental vision, the philoso- pher might not go beyond his outward perceptions; “esse ’’ might be the same as “percipi;” and if all immortal minds were annihilated, the world might virtually cease to exist; but the good man and Christian labourer swept these speculations away in actual life like morning mist. So had it been in ages before in other speculations. In the Christian life, the dreamy, the mystic, the ecstatic had their safeguard against over refinement and over speculation in the doctrines and the practices of Christian worship. Lifting up their hearts to God, who had made all things; to Christ, their risen and ascended Lord, yet to come again —as the Apostle teaches in this discourse—the judge of quick and dead; to the Holy Ghost, the Lord and giver of life, proceeding from the Father and the Son—in these great facts, strong as the everlasting hills—was a constant * Berkeley, A.D. 1684-1753. IPRACTICAL SAFEGUARDS AGAINST. 85 protection against a subtle mental refinement. In their public worship, observing the command of their Lord, “This do in remembrance of me,” they showed forth the Lord’s death till he come. In that act of Holy Commu- nion, the word was, “Lift up your hearts,” and the answer from the worshippers was, “We lift them up unto the Lord.” Not joined locally, nor united in a bodily manner, their hearts and minds ever went up to their ascended LCrd at the right hand of God. In those early times, the mind of the Christian wor- shipper—surrounded by the pantheism of a heathen philo- sophy—was ever carried on to the coming again of the Lord. This is seen from the whole tenour of the Epistles in the New Testament. Toubtless, it was a great step of the Apostle, from the creation to the general judgment ; from God who had made all things, to his having appointed a day in which he will judge the world, “by that man whom he hath ordained.” That grand event—to which the Apostle turns in the end of his discourse—was what the early Church ever looked to. That expectant attitude of the Church, not knowing whether her Lord would come at midnight, at cock-crowing, or in the morning, was utterly at variance with the speculations in the surrounding philo- sophic schools; for the finite was to stand before the infinite ; the creature, justified through Christ, sanctified by the Holy Ghost, before the justifier and the sanctifier. Our text holds a middle place between the unsatisfactory theology that puts our Heavenly Father far away out of sight, and the opposite error of our finite spirits being absorbed into the Infinite. This old philosophic view— with the materialism put aside—presenting a spiritual diffused essence, as the divine notion, may have a powerful 86 SPECULATIVE ERRORS. fascination for the ardent student of nature, for the specu- lative and the dreamer. The attraction of the creed may be felt by the ardent admirer of nature, in his own strong health, gazing in rapture on the frosted fretwork on the pine trees of centuries; or at another season, when the genial breath of spring is on his face, as he looks on the springing corn and the budding tree. He may feel that attraction when the wind fills his sail on the sea; or, at another season, he may feel it in the forest in the warm Summer day, with the innumerable life around him. Looking at the ages through which the creed has run, and the many peoples among whom it has planted its foot, it must, for the speculative, have a subtle mysterious attract- iveness in it. Perhaps it offers itself as a sort of middle course between the difficulties of religion; seen in what we think the un- deserved sufferings of the virtuous, and the immeasurably greater difficulties of no religion. Perhaps it is viewed as a compromise between our responsibilities—when we read of the strait gate and the broad road—and the disgust- ing abomination of atheism. Since the excommunicated Spinoza put forward the creed in a more attractive form, a great impetus has been given to it; and many, as they float calmly on the stream of life, may have found in it such a middle course. The disaster in life, or the great family sorrow, may be the first thing to break through the delusion, and then, looking up from earth to heaven, they may cling to the great word of the risen Lord, “I ascend unto my Father, and your Father ; and to my God, and your God,” and to the great truth of the merciful Father; distinct from, but still present with all; “in whom we live.” PRACTICAL SAFEGUARDS AGAINST. 87 In the practical works of religion; in ministering to the sick, the suffering, and the dying, the difficulties raised by a subtle intellect melt away; and in the activities of a God- fearing life, we go on our road with increasing strength, till we enter “into the country of Beulah, whose air is very sweet and pleasant ; out of the sight of doubting castle, and within view of the heavenly city.”” Such has been, and ever will be, the experience. From the perplexities of mental speculations, the minister of reli- gion is suddenly called to the bedside of the sick sufferer, whom he finds on the border-land, between this world and the next. One feels a new atmosphere around. The sen- timent expressed in the sick room by the peasant, looking forward to her great Sorrow, in her daughter being taken from her, is, “The will of God must be done ; the good- will of our Heavenly Father.” Many objections and diffi- culties are swept away—not at all in a logical manner— with that strong, but kindly hand. That hearty, honest expression of a devout, praying woman is worth many a volume of theology; and the perplexed man retraces his steps, finding, in his own soul, the fulfilment of the Lord's word, “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God.”” However it may be with particular minds in special cir- cumstances, to the bulk of mankind there is the strongest possible safeguard, in the devotional teaching and in the scriptural creeds of our beloved Church, against any such delusive melting away of our religion. We have little fear of the utterly repulsive form of atheism. It has little power. Our dangers are far other and far greater. For * Bunyan. * John vii. 17. 88 SPECULATIVE ERRORS. our own peace and that of our children, we must earnestly contend against an empty shadow of an abstract philo- sophic notion being passed upon us, for the life-giving reality of an ever-living and ever-loving Father. The more we enter into the spirit of our devotional teaching, and the more we allow ourselves to be lifted up by it, the stronger will be our safeguard against a view which, under a milder name, and with a more fascinating form, is the same thing in life and in death as atheism. V. THE STOIC PREACHERS HAD A GREAT FIELD FOR MISSION WORK AMONG THE MASSES, IN THE TIME OF MARCUS AURELIUS : THEY MADE NO SUCH ATTEMPT. The world by wisdom knew not God.—1 Cor. i. 21. N the course of our subject we have reached a period when the world’s wisdom—in high places—was, face to face with the Christian religion, regarded as foolishness. The philosophers, of whom we are treating, representing that wisdom at the time, come under our notice in a new light, as having no mission to the bulk of mankind. The very circumstances of the times were eminently in favour of them, as they certainly were the reverse for the Gospel. About the middle of the second century of our era, flood and fires, famine and pestilence, wars and earthquakes, were doing their most dreadful work in different parts of the Roman empire. The overflowing of great rivers, sweep- ing away a large amount of property, had caused great distress. Destructive fires in several of the great cities, and earthquakes in divers places, had followed, adding to 90 DISTRESSED STATE OF THE EMPIRE the horrors of the situation. The troubles of the mother country being seized on, as the opportunity of the con- quered provinces, irruptions of barbarians into the empire took place on every side. The armies engaged in putting down the rebellion in the East suffered much from a plague of great malignity. The survivors of the sword and the plague, in these eastern wars, returning home carried with them the dreaded disease, and were the means of spreading the infection. Looked on with horror—like the Jewish leper standing afar off, and crying out, Unclean—the people through whom they passed, shrank from them as from an unclean thing. In all these sore and varied cala- mities, the heathen populace read the wrath of their neg- lected gods, in the great numbers that had gone over to the new religion, and laid the blame of all on the Chris- tians. At every great heathen gathering-place, at the national assemblies, the cry was—“Away with the godless; the Christians to the lions.” In spite of calumny and per- secution, the Christians, with faith and courage, stood by the sufferers with self-denying constancy. Their courage and large-hearted mercy—often a striking contrast to the selfishness and neglectful cruelty of their heathen neigh- bours—could not but produce a marked effect. The influ- ence and blessed results of such self-denying mercy, by our own Church, were felt and seen, when our own country was So Sorely tried, about the middle of the present century, by some of the calamities of which I have spoken. Then the members of our Church stood by the sufferers from famine and fever, as did the Christians in the early times. Never was there a greater field for missionary labour, than in that great crisis of complicated distresses in the Roman empire. In times of darkness and distress, the UNDER THE ANTONINES. 91 work of mercy shines brightest. The greatest activity and the most zealous devotion were indeed to be found among the maligned and persecuted Christians; but the honoured and accredited teachers of the period were the Stoic philosophers. On them Marcus Aurelius' has shed the imperishable lustre of his name. His “Thoughts” are a lasting monument of the high moral tone of his philosophy, and of his own pure and beautiful character. Written in the midst of the greatest cares and labours, and surrounding distress, they are the meditations of a man anxious to live well, set down for his own benefit.” The work is rightly described as being religious and devotional, rather than a philosophical treatise.” Rarely has history presented a more brilliant galaxy of eminent men than clustered round the court of the Anto- nines. From such men the world would naturally expect much. Their lessons appear to have been practical, useful, and suited to make a good preparation for a future states- man and ruler ; indeed, good for everyone who could be prevailed on to listen to them. We are allowed to see a good deal of the aim and purpose of their schools in the commencement of the emperor’s “Thoughts.” From one of these distinguished teachers he had learned “undeviating steadiness of purpose;” while, from another, he had “the example of a family governed in a fatherly manner.” The lessons of a third had been of a negative kind, but still good, like a beacon-light warning against danger, and were to observe what envy, duplicity, and * A.D. 161 to A.D. 180. * Töv ćus éavröv 843)\va Ödöeka. * “Les Moralistes sous l'Empire Romain,” par C. Martha, p. 174. Paris, 1872. 92 MARC U.S. A URELIUS hypocrisy are in a tyrant. A cure for many ills in life had been put into his hand by a fourth, who taught him ‘‘cheerfulness in all circumstances, as well as in illness.” Gratitude to predecessors is not the rule with mankind ; too often our effort is to exalt ourselves by lowering them. Aurelius is a noble exception. “Do everything,” says he, “as a disciple of Antoninus,” that thou mayest have as good a conscience, when thy last hour comes, as he had.”” No scholar has ever looked back in after-life, to a seat of learning, with fonder affection, than does the great em- peror to the teachers from whom he received these lessons. To several of them he has raised a monument, more en- during than the brass or marble, by his mention of their names. For nearly every one of the cardinal virtues he was able to avail himself of a separate teacher, so distin- guished were the schools, there being teachers for every department, into which moral science could be divided : himself in time becoming an additional teacher, for we see his gentle spirit infusing a leaven of greater mercy into their doctrines. Turning from the discourses of Epictetus to the “Thoughts” of the emperor, the difference is most marked. We feel no longer the tone of the stern ascetic, but the merciful wisdom of a worldly-wise man. Circum- stanced as he was, he could not but look on himself as a citizen of the world. The philosophy became cosmopolitan, and the gentler virtues of benevolence, mercy, and pity claimed a larger share in the teaching. His working creed is, thu kata púatv; wivere conveni- enter naturae ; live conformably to nature ; which neces- sarily raises conscience to its rightful place, as the lawful * Antoninus Pius, A.D. 138-161. * Marcus Aurelius, lib. vi. cap. 30. AS A PHILOSOPHER. 93 sovereign over every part of our nature. “We must keep the governing principle, the divinity within us, free from violence, and unharmed.” We are “to desire nothing which needs walls or curtains,” “teaching reminding us of the divine expression, “All things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.” ” From this working creed, there necessarily flowed an en- larged benevolence; for to care for all men is according to man's nature, and approaches in spirit to the Scripture lesson, “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” General and private interests could not clash, for in the nature of things they were one and the same. All efforts to set class against class, or to separate the rich from the poor, were not only bad, they were unphilosophical blunders. “What is not the interest of the hive, is not the interest of the bee.” Further still did his working maxim carry him, for the universe was with him a city of God. He had been, he owns, most highly favoured of Heaven," and all things in nature were connected with what is divine. These principles were the very centre of his life and daily conduct. An air of solemnity ran through all his acts, for his aim was to do all, as if it were the last thing one were ever to do. Looking into the “Thoughts,” we see, as in a mirror, his most painfully exact truthfulness; his goodness aiming at being as disinterested, as the vine that yields its fruit, thinking of no return,” but proceeds simply to prepare for next year's produce, to be given up in the same way; and * Tov čvöov čáupova avč8ptotov Kal datumv, lib. ii. 17. * Lib. iii. 7. * Heb. iv. 13. * Lib. i. 17. ° Lib, v. 6. 94 NUMERO US HEATHEN TEACHERS * his forgiveness of injuries, so genuine as to approach the Scripture word, “Love your enemies.” Putting together the features reflected in his work, we see, perhaps, the fairest and the finest character of antiquity. Such a character being—in an imperfect way—an embo- diment of ideal virtue, could not but be most attractive." We can well understand the veneration in which he was held by his contemporaries, and that it was really felt that, in the death of the greatest of the Roman emperors, the world had sustained an irreparable loss. The emperor, whose rule extended from the deserts of Africa to the Rhine and the Danube, and from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, with distress on all sides among his sub- jects, from within and from without, with his endless toil and care, must have found his world-wide Sovereignty a weary thing. The state of the times made an urgent call for teachers and guides, but not on the emperor. His function was civil, not religious. It is a common-place truth that morality, and still more that religion, cannot be enforced by law. Everybody knows that the mightiest sovereign is utterly powerless to control the mind or heart of a single one of his subjects. That inner free kingdom, which God claims as his own, man cannot trench upon. From the emperor, we turn to the philosophers of the day. With the awful realities of life and death before them, the great empire threatening to break up, the misery of the people on all sides staring them in the face, we ask in amazement what were they doing. The first men of their day, where was their mission to mankind 2 In the * Forman quidem ipsam, et tanquam faciem honesti vides : quae si oculis cernerctur, mirabiles amores, ut ait Plato, excitaret Sapientiae. — Cicero De Officiis, lib, i. cap. 5. UNDER THE A WTON INES. 95 court of the emperor—in the schools of Tarsus, Antioch, Corinth, or Athens, they addressed only the cultured few. Bigh as the heavens above the earth, were their lessons above mankind. Heroes in life, such as their lessons suited, are very rare. To the bulk of mankind, there is the weary wear and tear of every-day life. Excepting a few spasmodic efforts—which I referred to in a former lecture— One meets with none of these men labouring as mis- sionaries for good. Barbarous tribes were left in their barbarism, and untaught nations were let alone. For those before whom is the trivial round, the common task, they had no word of counsel nor comfort. With ready access to the most distant provinces, opened up in the business of life, there was every opportunity, as there was an overwhelming need, for something better from the seat of mental activity and from the seat of government, than brute force and crushing iron rule. The words “civis Romanus sum ” acted like a magic charm, and were a protection against ill-treatment in coun- tries the most savage and remote. In the same spirit the philosophers might fairly expect, and in most cases would receive, a fair hearing for what they had to teach. They did not touch the heart, nor influence the life of the bulk of mankind. They have left no mark on the world. What working materials had they for such a mission ? They had an excellent system of morals ; the cardinal virtues, courage, justice, and temperance, were to be pur- sued for their own sake; conscience was the mainspring of our moral nature; Epictetus had been a fervent teacher of forbearance and resignation; and the rays of a merciful benevolence were now falling on them from the throne itself. 96 ASTOIC APATH Y. What is the inherent strength of these principles 2 Are they potential to evolve out of themselves a mission to man- kind 2 If they are, the opportunity, which the situation offered, was not seized. The sorely-tried nations would not have failed to draw the line between a reserved selfishness and any helpful movement towards them. In the late Indian famine, the heathen people in the district of Madras saw very clearly, and have shown that they saw, the differ- ence between selfish heathen nations, who let them alone in the day of their distress, and the Christian people, with all our shortcomings, whose subjects they were. The spirit of Stoicism is alien to any such movement. e idea at its root is the self-sufficiency of man. It ne- cessarily leads to self-complacency and apathy. Aurelius himself, from the excellence of his natural disposition, was in a great measure free from this. Subdued in him, still it is not wanting. We are to begin the morning by saying: “I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.”" The Stoic had a resigna- tion at sight of sin and wrong-doing * He stood like a calm philosopher on the bank of the river, and, unmoved, held out no helping hand to the multitudes drowning before his eyes. The spirit of Christianity is the exact reverse of this. Expansive, it leads man out of himself. When Jesus “saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.” His loving nature carried out the * Lib. ii. 1. * Lib. vii. 70. Lib. xi. 18. * Matt. ix. 36. CHRISTIANITY EXPANSIVE. 97 good shepherd after the lost sheep, to carry them back to the fold. When he looked on his own city, the prayer going forth from his heart amidst his tears was, “O that thou hadst known, even in this thy day, the things that belong to thy peace.” The spirit of the founder is the spirit of his reli- gion. When the great missionary saw the city wholly given up to idolatry, his spirit was moved within him." What else was the spirit of those praying people, whose prayers Paul asked, that the word of the Lord might have free course and be glorified ? This outgoing spirit makes the missionary sacrifice everything that men hold dear, and carry his religion through self-denial and danger to the ends of the earth. II. This difference, I believe, is cardinal and essential, and I shall now show its actual working in life by an ex- ample or two. & Actuated all along by this expansive spirit, the Christians could no longer be ignored. In the time of the Antonines they were in the highways of life, and the Gospel had now to enter the arena against the whole reasoning power and philosophic skill of the heathen world. The actual conflict of the two is strongly brought out, at the time we have reached, in the case of Justin Martyr, one of the first learned divines, who became a preacher of the Gospel in Rome, while still in the special dress of a philosopher. Having studied in various philosophic schools, for he had made the round of the Stoic, Peripatetic, Pythagorean, and Platonist, at length directed to the Gospel, he gives up his pursuit of philosophy for a persecuted religion. A zealous * Acts xvii. 16. 98 JUSTIN MARTYR. and active Christian teacher, he is arraigned at Rome on the charge of being a Christian. He had incurred the ill- will of a Cynic teacher—the Cynics were a rough and a much less desirable branch of the Stoics—because of his greater success and attractiveness as a teacher, and with him for his prosecutor, and with another philosopher’— one of the early teachers of the emperor—for his judge, the learned apologist is condemned, scourged, and beheaded in Rome, in the early part of the reign of the philosophic emperor.” Truly the world by wisdom knew not God. His first apology for Christianity, this converted philo- sopher had drawn up in the previous reign. “Addressed to the emperor, Antoninus Pius, and his sons, the sacred Senate, and the whole Roman people, he calls it a petition on behalf of those of all nations, who are unjustly hated and wantonly abused, he himself being one.”" The very title of his work shows the earnest endeavour to carry out the expansive spirit of the Gospel. We turn away, in sickening horror, from the picture of the gladiatorial shows in the arena. It is more awful to See the Christian philosopher pursued to death by a heathen philosophy, many points of which were so admir- able. Pausing by the grave of that martyr in Rome, one asks, What was this attractiveness, acting on the higher and nobler minds, and drawing them away from the lofty doctrines of their philosophic school 2 A century before Justin, there had been addressed “to all that be in Rome, beloved of God, called to be Saints,” an Epistle, which * Rusticus. * A.D. 164 or 167. * See “The Fathers for English Readers,” “Defenders of the Faith,” p. 137.-Rev. F. Watson. CHRISTIANITY EXPANSIVE. 99 has been described as containing “the religious philosophy of the world’s history.” ". With the Gospel, the power of God unto salvation, as its central doctrine ; with benevo- lence the most enlarged ; with charity, such as the world had not seen, in the writer willing to be accursed from Christ for his brethren ;” with a morality the loftiest, the purest, the most comprehensive, and certainly operative on daily life ; the Epistle containing all this had been an influence in Roman society, as the leaven in the meal, for a century. The principles laid down by Paul had been growing. Gathering strength, they were now making themselves more felt in the world, and thus, naturally, prepared the way for the number of disciples and scholars that gathered round Justin Martyr. We cannot but look with sympathy on the emperor giving us, in his “Thoughts,” his belief in the unity of nature; her necessary laws; her irresistible tendency in bearing all things away, and his perfect resignation to her sway, all expressed in the language of deep devotion. Turning from this to the true Roman, with the cloud of superstition on his mind, assisting, for several days, at the heathen sacrifices, to the gods many, and the lords many, before setting out to fight for the Empire on the Danube, one is tempted to ask, “Can this be the same Iman 2'' Turning from him to the philosophers, stung by many of their order going over to the Christians, originating nothing themselves, but joining the popular fanaticism against their young and rising rival; in him, and in them, * Smith's Dictionary of the Bible : Article, Epistle to the Romans. * Rom. ix, 100 HEATHEN PHILOSOPHERS we have many examples of the truth of my text : “The world by wisdom knew not God.” The situation presents a striking contrast. The great Stoic teachers of the time, Fronto, Crescens, Diognetus, take up their pen against the Christians. The devout and earnest Epictetus, of whom nobody can speak but with the greatest respect ; for whose writings the emperor was specially grateful; was certainly not effectual as a reformer of society, and he has said his first and last and only word with regard to the Christians. The head of medical science, Galen, whom the jealousy of his brother physicians accused of working his cures in the plague by magic—the “wonder-worker,” as he was called—has no word but contempt for the Christians, though admitting their constancy and firmness. The Stoic philosopher, whose school Marcus Aurelius attended even when empe- ror; is found trying to draw away Christians from their faith, when travelling with the army in the distant East." The wit of Lucian burns up all religion, and leaves the world nothing but a heap of dead ashes. These men have nothing for mankind. Their work is destructive merely. The lights of the heathen world have no ray of hope or comfort for the suffering millions. In strongest contrast is this apathy to those who realised their mission to mankind. With them were no spasmodic efforts. In the East, in the Church of Smyrna, the eighty-six years of which Polycarp speaks—“Eighty-six years have I served Christ, and he has done me nothing but good *-represent a long line of labour among the people, and carrying us well back, as has been shown, * Apollonius, A.D. 161. Burton : “Church History,” page 207. * Contemporary Review, May, 1875. Art. by Professor Lightfoot. * ** © * ** ;" © & ,°w * o t l n º to * ... • tº . . * -* º & HAVE NO MISSION. 101 into the life of St. John, give an unbroken continuity to the Church's work. The expansive spirit and extent of those labours are seen from Polycarp spending the time, allowed him by his persecutors, in praying for all the Churches throughout the world. Still more plainly are they seen in the universal shout of the Jews and heathens at his execution : “This is the teacher of all Asia, the overthrower of our gods, who has perverted so many from sacrifice and the adoration of the gods.”" The unbroken line of mission labour went on, and the Church of the place, after the martyrdom of her venerable head, still pursued her work. Still greater is the contrast, and comes with still more force from the west, from the Gallican Churches, where the persecution Smote, as a fierce storm, the different ranks and orders of life; the deacon and the bishop ; the very old and the young ; the mistress and the slave girl; the poor; and the high born who came forward to help them.” To shake the Church in her mission to the world, every form of terror and torture was here used. To read what was done to stamp out the work makes our flesh creep. The teachers in those Churches must have done their work in the spirit of Apostles, as their disciples carried out the doctrine taught them, in the truest spirit of martyrdom. This persecution —the fiercest that up to this time had swept over the Church, in the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius, had his express sanction.” The very historian of the persecution is a living protest against * Milman: “History of Christianity.” * Neander. * Those who gave up their faith, were—according to his rescript—to be released, the rest were to be beheaded. 102 THE APOLOGISTS. these efforts being spasmodic or transitory. He is an actual link of the continued carrying out of the expansive spirit of the Gospel. Connecting us with Polycarp, who could “ describe his intercourse with John, and with the rest who had seen the Lord,” Trenaeus, his scholar, is without any missing link, a protest against a break in the continuity of the Church’s mission, of which the rational- ists of the Tüebingen School would persuade us. In the contrast I have presented, it will be allowed on all hands, on which side was the intense desire to benefit mankind. We may suppose, however, one of that time asking : “But on which side is the intellect of the day ?” The philosophic schools, with their prestige of many centuries, and their great names in their past history, would give such a question great point and power. Nothing could be more disastrous to religion, at any time, than to be divorced from thought. Then, indeed, if ever that be so, hanging our heads, we might say, vae victis, the fortress of our Zion is really thrown down. Looking, however, at the time of which we treat; at the great centres of mental activity; we see much intellect on the same side. At Athens the converted Athenian philosopher laid his apology at the foot of Adrian’s throne, when the emperor visited his city in the early part of the century. In Rome we have seen the course of the converted philosopher ending in the martyr's grave. At Antioch, as the century goes on, We have the chief pastor,” addressing his learned work to a pagan friend in defence of Christianity. * Quadratus and Aristides presented their Works, in favour of the Christians, to the emperor, about A.D. 125. * Theophilus, A.D. 168. MARCUS A URELIUS. 103 In Alexandria, at the head of the great catechetical school, we have a Christian philosopher and a widely-travelled missionary, Pantaenus; and in his scholar, Clement, his successor at the head of the same School, we have a man of great learning, aiming, in his published works, at converting the learned heathen. Allowing the intellectual shortcomings of some of these men, no one can say that the intellectual activity was all on the one side. Once only in his “Thoughts” does the emperor mention the Christians." The reference, uncomplimentary enough, for he saw them through a distorting medium, owns the unflinching determination in the Christian to be ready to die for his faith. With the darkness on his mind as to a future state—seen in the very words of the reference to them—he could not comprehend the Christian's attitude. Looking for an inheritance incorruptible—a crown of life —of which he knew nothing—ever anxious to impart to others the treasures they had found themselves—as con- fessors and martyrs they shrank from no sufferings. Wide in his sympathies, he could understand the leaders of great movements that had gone before him. He tried to understand the spirit of Cato, in his struggle against what he thought to be successful vice. We must not “Cesarize,” he says, a word of his own, showing, as several have pointed out, his abhorrence of those who had brought infamy on the throne of the empire. With the * “What a soul that is, which is ready, if at any moment it must be separated from the body, and ready either to be extinguished, or dispersed, or continue to exist; but so that this readiness comes from a man’s own judgment, not from mere obstinacy, as with the Christians, but considerately and with dignity, and in a way to persuade another.”— Lib. xi. cap. 3. * 104 HIS VIEW OF CHRISTIANS. men who had done and dared for the cause of liberty or country, he could sympathise. Those labouring to break the worst of all slaveries—the slavery of vice and sin—he did not understand; for those who laboured not for a country, but for mankind, he had no sympathy. The greatest of the Stoics, surrounded by the philosophers his friends and counsellors, in his attitude towards the Christians," is one example more of my text: “The world by wisdom knew not God.” III. How did this philosophy stand toward the end of the second century 2 From Zeno its founder, to Marcus Aurelius, with whom it died out, in a course of five centuries, it had been an inspiring spirit in great men in its native land, and, finding a congenial home under the Roman republic, it had done good service in the land of its adoption, in sustaining heroic virtue, and in keeping up a high standard of morality. It left its mark on Roman law, and on the stern governing policy of the great empire :— To tame the proud, the fettered slave to free, These are imperial arts, and worthy thee.” Influencing Roman law—and it was from this philoso- phy that law chiefly drew its inspiration—and through it afterwards the laws of modern Europe; it has had in this respect a lasting effect. Nations may have profited by it, that have known nothing of the fountains from which the * “Marcus despised the Christians as a philosopher, and punished them as a sovereign.”—GIBBoN. * Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento: Hae tibi erunt artes, pacisque imponere morem, Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos. —AENEID, vi. 1.851. STOICS INFLUENCE LA W. 105 advantages have flowed, and many, that never heard the name of Zeno, may have derived benefit, from his senti- ment of the natural equality of mankind." In the reigns of darkest infamy it placed the world under a great debt to it, by teaching, not with bated breath, nor in whispering humbleness, its lofty doctrines. At the time we have reached, it is found in fierce conflict with a prevailing system, that unlike it, had been strug- gling with its unbroken continuity of teaching among mankind, and with still unbated courage, for the en- lightening of the mind and for the control of the heart. Struggling on thus as a living power, the generations came and went quickly; but when one follower of this system perished—such an one as Polycarp—unlike what was seen in human systems—many rose from his ashes. When one was tortured to death—such an one as the aged pastor, as the poor slave, as the growing youth in the Church of Lyons—many, animated by the same spirit, took their place. Mankind had interrogated these philoso- phers on the questions that every living man wants answered : “Whence have I come 2 º’ “Where am I going?” “Why am I here ?” To these questions they had given, and could give, no answer. Mankind were turning to those who professed to answer these questions, so far as it is good for us to have them answered. There is no reason for Christian people to be dis- quieted by the course Rationalists and Freethinkers take, in dwelling on the merits and virtues of Marcus Aurelius, and in pointing to him as a great pattern produced by heathendom.” What has this to do with the merits of * Lecky: European Morals, vol. i. p. 306. * Contemporary Review, Sept., 1877. Article by Rev. R. F. Littledale. 106 MERIT'S OF AURELIUS. our religion ? It would be the greatest bigotry and ignorance to say he was not a great pattern. No one can study his noble character and his pure life without being wiser and better. In sincere admiration we try to follow him, in our mind, making his great journeys through his vast empire, with those holy thoughts in his heart, some of which have come down to us. The mighty empire of which he was the head was falling to pieces. The shadows of the coming events were upon him. He saw it, and he knew it. Firmly but sadly he stands, the master of the house, doing everything in the heathen religion, in the laws, in the institutions, and in arms, to hold it together ; doing his duty steadily to the last, to use his own expression, “as a Roman and a man.” He could say with perfect truth, as the warrior of old :— “Enough is paid to Priam's royal name ; More than enough to duty and to fame.” In the previous century, another traveller, in humble guise, had gone through many of the same countries, “often in painfulness and weariness,” on the same great Roman roads, eastward through Asia, westward through Europe—not at the head of great armies, nor with the power of the kingdom, described as the “strength of iron that breaketh in pieces;” but with far different aim. That traveller's word was, as a labourer among mankind, “I am debtor both to the Greeks and to the Barbarians;” “Woe is unto me, if I preach not the Gospel.” Self- sufficiency was the strength of Aurelius. His word to * Lib. ii. cap. 5. *Sat patriae Priamoque datum : si Pergama dextra Defendi possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent. —AENEID ii. l. 29. ANOTHER HERO. 107 himself—as expressed in his recorded thoughts—was “One should stand erect by himself, and not be kept straight by others.” " With Paul, the travelling missionary to mankind, in the dust of humility, the strength was in the presence of God. Springing up in the conviction of that strength, his heart told him, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” If the course of events was too strong for Aurelius, and if the current was bearing him away, the only cure for failure with the Roman was to evoke more strength from within. The source of the Apostle’s strength was derived, and from without. No- thing but his own shortcoming can part the Apostle from the power and love of Christ: “Who shall separate us?” The devout emperor was, indeed, a man of prayer to a ruling and prevailing providence; but it was like the seaman in a storm, making supplication to the law of gravitation: the other traveller, the missionary, was speeded on his journey by all the churches praying for him, while his prayers for them ever went up to the risen and ascended Saviour. Looking on to the last, the aim of the great emperor was, in childlike piety, to sink into nature, like a child on its mother’s breast, in placid calm, with little hope, and with less fear. The other, the unceasing labourer, though his presence was weak, looked at the last for incorruption, immortality, and for an unfading crown. Many will be inclined to think that the humble traveller, even apart from his inspiration, was much the greater man of the two. Measured by results, the comparison becomes absurd. Where Aurelius has been a blessing and a comfort * Lib. iii. cap. 5. 108 A URELIUS TO BE JUDGED. to persons of high culture, to the leaders of men, the great labourer among mankind has been, through Christ, an unspeakable blessing to uncounted millions of his fellow-creatures. We are to remember that several of his best qualities were in spite of his philosophic culture, and were not, at all, the fruits of it. The moral height to which he towered above mankind shows how inapplicable is the doctrine of his philosophic school to people generally. We have to go through many centuries before we find his equal. He stands out almost alone from the heathen world. Great is the reproach to many professing Christians, to fall far short of the standard of conscientious duty to which he attained. But if the arrow be pointed from this against our religion, it falls entirely powerless. If the word be, “Here are fruits as good, and flowers as fair, in the land of the heathen, as the Christian tree has ever produced,” we can only say this is most misleading and most unjust. Standing on the lines marked out by Bishop Butler," we must take our holy religion according to its bent, its aim, and its genius—according to what it would do, if we would hear its voice and fall in with its requirements. Then, in the language of the prophet, while the land behind it is as the desolate wilderness, that before it would be as the garden of the Lord. As a speculative objection to our religion, this is wholly beside the point, but as a matter of practice it ought to be of great value. Who can doubt but that it may be more tolerable for the great heathen moralist in the day of judgment than for many who, in the midst of light and knowledge, fall far short of his virtuous attainments 2 ! l Analogy of Religion, Part II. chap. i. p. 153. ACCORDING TO HIS TIMES. 109 The Apostle whom I have compared with him, says of himself: “Who was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious : but I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.”” In the spirit of this sentiment we are to form our judgment in this case. To think of him pursuing the course he did in light and knowledge, would be the very gravest error. The men of the second century are to be judged according to the circumstances of the times and their surroundings, and not by our standard. Seeing the Christians through the calumnies with which they were aspersed, and through the philosophers around the throne, he thought very unfavourably of them. Had he known God as the loving Father of all ; had he known Jesus Christ as the loving Saviour of the world, who can doubt but that he would have been the friend, not the foe of the Christians, their patron, and not their persecutor, the protector of their mission, not its destroyer ? With the gate of mercy wide open, the Lord said, “They shall come from the east and the west, the north and the South, and shall sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of God;” and in the same spirit he spoke the comforting word—“In my Father's house are many mansions.” In the spirit of that teaching, we cannot but believe that Marcus Aurelius, and many of the noble army of martyrs in his time—persecutor and perse- cuted—are together, in perfect charity, in the Paradise of God. Looking once more at him, as a practical moralist, trying to do his best with this philosophic system, as the head of the heathen world, great, wise, and good as he was, we cannot but learn one thing more, the most valuable of * 1 Tim. i. 13 110 NEED OF REVELATION. all. The irresistible conclusion is, that the best of men, by their unaided efforts, were unable to renew society in its deep corruptions, and that, if mankind were to be raised to a new and pure life on earth, and to the elevating and comforting hopes of immortality, that could be done, in one way, and in one way only—by those whose mission was based on the revelation of Jesus Christ. VI. THE UNIVERSALISM OF THE GOSPEI, ; A CON- TRAST TO JUDAISM AND TO THE NARROW- MESS OF THE STOICS. And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.—Luke xxiv. 47. HE universalism of the Gospel is the spirit of the text. I am naturally led to this by the contrast it presents to the Stoic philosophy, as shown in my last lecture. The rationalizing theology of the Tüebingen School teaches, that Christianity took the idea of an universal religion from the Roman Empire, which, at the time of which we are treating, had conquered, and was then ruling, the known world. An humble parentage certainly this would be for our religion, for the holy Catholic Church. The surroundings of my text lead us to a far different origin. The risen Lord is showing that his sufferings and resurrection were in accord with Scripture: “Thus it is written, and thus it behowed Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day: and that repentance and 112 ROMAN EMPIRE remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.” The Author of the Christian religion is here explaining the fulfilment of the Old Testament Scriptures in his person and work. Brought up in the synagogues of Judaea—with the Old Testament Scriptures as their chief literature—he speaks here in their spirit, though very differently from the views of his countrymen. The long line of prophecy, from the earliest times, telling of mercy for the whole world, had become most broad and clear before the foundations of Rome were even laid. Before the time of Romulus and Remus, before even a rude cabin had been built on the banks of the yellow Tiber, the word of the Gospel prophet had been : “The mountain of the Lord's house shall be established. All nations shall flow unto it: for out of Zion shall go forth the law.” The thought of the text—if its universalism is to be sought elsewhere than in the all-seeing mercy of its author—runs entirely according to the whole tenour of the Old Testament Scriptures. The Roman Empire offered facilities certainly for spreading an universal religion, by opening up the world for the transaction of business; by the provinces being led to look to one centre of govern- ment. The Latin tongue being the prevalent one in the West, as the Greek was in the East, were two wings prepared for mission work; but prophecy shows that from the first the universal Father had in store the offer of mercy to all his children. The text has two commands. Repentance and remission of sins are to be preached among all nations, and the offer of mercy is to be made to the Jews first. In offering the Gospel to the Jews, and Luke xxiv. 46, 47. Isaiah ii. 2, 3. OFFERED FAOILITIES, 113 in maintaining, at the same time, that its mercy was for all nations, they met a great difficulty. They were at once put into a dilemma. If they did not put forward the extended mercy of the Gospel as a cardinal position, they did not preach the whole Gospel, and if they did, they at Once encountered the persecution of the Jews. The Jews were exclusive in their religion. The Roman satirist does not appear to have overstated this in his reference to them.” They shut the gate of mercy on mankind. Sal- vation, in their view, was for the Jews and for the proselytes to Judaism. To approach them with the Gospel as a blessing for all nations, as well as for them- selves, at once awoke the spirit of persecution. This task the text laid on the Apostles. In carrying it out through the long and bitter persecutions it entailed, we shall see the depth and earnestness of their conviction that they were doing the will of their divine Lord. A colony might think more favourably of their country, on hearing how much the first settlers had to do and suffer, in order to have it a free and happy land, for those who were to come after them. It may be useful and edifying for us, to go back, for a little, to the way in which this obligation, to a mission of world-wide mercy laid on the Apostles, was fulfilled. We shall see, at the same time, the contrast of this to the narrow, self-contained philosophy of the Stoic, and be led, I trust, in our heart’s adoring gratitude, to say: “The Lord is good to all; and his tender mercies are over all his works.”” The first martyr was stoned to death for his teaching in this enlarged spirit. The charge against Stephen was his speaking blasphemous words against this holy place, and the law. He is as plain in showing that the worship of * Juvenal. * Psalm czlv. 9. 114 THE JEWS AGAINST God is to be no longer local and national, as he is patient in bearing the consequences that teaching brought upon him." When the border of the Holy Land is crossed, and the door of faith is opened to the Gentiles, the Jews are the persistent persecutors of the missionaries. The attacks are renewed at the different points of their journey; and on their return to Antioch from their missionary labour, “certain men, which came down from Judaea, taught the brethren, and said, Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved.” The questions thus raised, in carrying out the text, are only settled at the first council held in Jerusalem.” The very same course is adopted towards the Hellenist Jews outside the Holy Land. There is no more zealous teacher of the extent of Gospel mercy than Paul, and, in consequence, he bears the full brunt of Jewish persecution. In the different scenes of his missionary labours, his first resort is to the synagogue, and his first address is to the Jews. At Ephesus, a great centre, as the place of the world- famed temple of Diana,” and as the chief town of the Roman province of Asia, with its many Jews, “he went into the synagogue, and spake boldly for the space of three months.” “ Persecution drove him from the synagogue. Three years after, in his address to the elders of Ephesus —whom he had called to Miletus—he speaks of the temp- tations which befell him, by the lying in wait of the Jews. * Acts vii. 58, 60. * Acts xiii. 42, 45, 50 ; Acts xv. * The city was called weakópos, or “Warden of Diana.”—Smith's Dic- tionary of the Bible. * Acts xix. 8. WORLD-WIDE GOSPEL. 115 On our division of the world, when the Apostle was called to come over and help us, he pursued this course. Corinth, famous for its schools, its trade, and its wealth, and not less so as a leading centre of extreme vice, had its syna- gogue, which the Apostle made the first scene of his labours; and when the Jews opposed themselves and blas- phemed, he shook his raiment, and said unto them, “Your blood be upon your own heads; I am clean ; from hence- forth I will go unto the Gentiles.”" The same path of duty and danger the great missionary followed in other places; and it was the Jewish persecution drove him to appeal to Caesar, and to take the first step towards visiting the capital of the old world. The consequences of that step, of the greatest moment to himself, and to the future Church, are still around us after eighteen centuries. The brethren there, hearing of the Apostle coming, showed their earnest anxiety, by meeting him at a long distance from the capital. The Jews were numerous at Rome. To them, first, in the spirit of the text, the Apostle addressed himself, and after a lengthened discussion with them, he turned to the Gentiles.” The modern French historian of the persecutions cor- rectly brings together these scattered details. “The Jews, in fine,” says Aubé, “are the only opponents of Chris- tianity, up to the year 64.” ” These facts, gathered from many years' history of the early Church, and from many places, entirely overturn the rationalist view of the Tüebingen school, that Christianity * Acts xviii. 6. * Acts xxviii. 23-28. * “Les Juifs, en somme, sont les seuls adversaires du Christianisme, jusqu’en 64,” p. 75. “C'est parmi les Juifs que le Christianisme trouva ses premiers perse- cuteurs comme ses premiers adeptes,” p. 39. Aubé: “Histoire des Persecutions de l'Eglise.” Paris, 1875. 116 CURRENT OF JETWISH FEELING is a mere natural outcome of Judaism, and of the world being prepared for more enlarged views in religion. No such theory can stand in the face of facts so plain and so strong. Everybody knows there was then an expectation of a prophet that should come into the world. “When the ful- ness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son.” But if the Christian religion was the natural growth of the Jewish mind, and of the Society of the time, how are we to understand their attitude towards the Apostles and the missionaries of the new doctrine 2 How is it that the outward history of Christianity—as the French historian sums it up—consists of scarcely anything but its persecu- tions by the Jews 2 The fact is, the whole current of Jewish feeling, national, political, and religious, ran strongly against Christianity. Christ crucified was to the Jew a stumbling-block. Would the Lord’s sentiment, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's,” find favour with the Jewish Zealot ? Would the Lord’s word, that not one stone would be left on another in the temple, find favour with the national party, the heart of whose life was their temple 2 Would He, who taught, not as the Scribes, find favour with the Scribes, who addressed the learned only, while he taught all ? Would his morality, allowing no evasion of its pure and high precepts, find favour with the Pharisee ? Would his resurrection, fore- told by himself, preached by his immediate followers, attract the Sadducee ? The stream of the Gospel had to run up the hill. Its doing so could not be a natural thing. Persecutor and persecuted, long since gone to their ac- count, are to us things of a remote past. And yet in an hour of Solemn thought, when we ask ourselves, “And now, AGAINST WORLD-JWIDE GOSPEL. 117 Lord, what is my hope 2'' such records come home to us in a strange way, forcing on us the conviction that the Gospel flowed, as it did, only by a power from heaven. The converts gained from the Jews were thus a mighty ac- knowledgment to the power of truth. Almost their every sentiment as Jews was in opposition to it. It is a question whether they had more to unlearn, or to learn. This cardinal position of the Gospel—its world-wide mercy—for which the Apostles suffered so much—is stereo- typed in their writings. Is there an antagonism on this between the Apostle, to whom was specially given the ministry of the Circumcision, and Paul, the missionary to the heathen 2 Such alleged opposition has been made to play an important part in the early history of Christianity, in the two supposed parties, the Petrine and the Pauline, said to have been headed by the two great Apostles. Cer- tainly one would not expect an opposition to this principle from Peter, who said at the Council of Jerusalem : “We believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we (the Jews) shall be saved, even as they (the Gentiles).” Many years after, we find Peter supporting this principle all through his first Epistle. We see the aged apostle, at Babylon, on the Euphrates, with his face westward, looking out on the strangers scattered—the strangers of the disper- sion—through the provinces of the lesser Asia, sending them ; in all the force of his fervent character, and with all his experience of Christian suffering ; his message of strengthening comfort and of blessing. Addressing the con- verts, Jewish and Gentile, of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, he says to them, as it were : “Think not your fiery trial a strange thing, for this is merely being partakers of Christ's sufferings. These things do not prove that the face of your Heavenly Father is against you. 118 THEORY OF ANTAGONISM Rightly have you been taught by your missionaries, Paul and Silas. There is no longer any special privilege for the Jew, for we are all led to the Father, ‘who, without respect of persons, judgeth according to every man’s work.” Our religion is no longer local. Our temple in Jerusalem, to which every one of our nation, wherever he lives, turns still with affection and pride, is the type of a spiritual house, in which every renewed Christian is a part. The walls of brass, which, in our national exclusiveness, we may have run up between ourselves and others, are now all thrown down. The advantages conveyed in the great words, “Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people,’ are for all in the future, for those, ‘which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God.” “This,” says Peter, in substance, send- ing forth his first Epistle,” by the hands of Silvanus, “is the teaching of Paul to his children of the Churches of Galatia, and of Silvanus, a brother faithful unto you, “this is the true grace of God wherein ye stand.’” “ Peter teaches those whom Paul had converted the same essential truths on which the Apostle of the Gentiles con- stantly dwelt. Children of the one Father, redeemed with the precious blood of Christ, who had once suffered for sins,” sanctified by the Holy Ghost, they looked on, through the resurrection of Jésus Christ, to an inheritance incor- ruptible, a crown of glory that fadeth not away. Thus is the principle of the text vindicated. Peter endorses what Paul had written." * I Peter i. 17. * 1 Peter ii. 10. * About A.D. 63 or 64. * 1 Peter V. 12. * 1 Peter iii. 18. ° 1 Peter v. 4. * Smith's Dictionary of Bible. Article, First Epistle of Peter. The General Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude, edited by E. H. Plumptre, D.D. PETWEEN PETER AND PAUL. 119 The latter, the Apostle of the Uncircumcision, writing to the Galatian Churches a few years before," points to himself as the living embodiment of the principle for which he contends. If he had not preached an open door of faith to the Gentiles, his own people would have let him alone : “If I preach circumcision, why am I persecuted ?” He proves to them, a truth for universal acceptance, “that man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ,” “a doctrine, in the words of our Church, very full of comfort. Their minds are lifted up above narrow nationalities, and carried on to the humani- zing doctrine of one brotherhood through Christ: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” If a Jew said: “Surely we must have some privileges; all our old advantages cannot go for nothing,” the Apostle, in reply, would say: “The special favours of your nation are no more,” for ‘in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision; but faith which worketh by love.’” “ Notwithstanding the recorded inconsistency of Peter on an occasion on this question, he states the great principle most clearly in his writings and in his speech. His accord with Paul on this fundamental question is entirely against the theory of antagonism, altogether overstated in being made a pivot, for a critical theory of the growth and spread of the Gospel. Both these Apostles, taught by the same Holy Spirit, point the world to the same wide gate of mercy. If we would see the difficulty of the position which the Apostles had to maintain, and how dear the holy city and the temple were to the heart of the Jews, and with what * A.D. 57 or 58. * Gal. ii. 16. * Gal. iii. 28. * Gal. v. 6. 120 THEORY OF ANTAGONISM desperate earnestness they clung to their local institutions, we must look into the record of their unparalleled suffer- ings in the siege of their city under Titus.” Most of the Apostles had gone to their great reward, before this most dreadful event. The history of it, as we read it through our tears, helps us to form some notion of what the Apos- tles must have suffered, in offering a religion of world-wide mercy to the Jew, with the whole current of his feelings running so deep and so strong against such a doctrine. Our sympathy goes very strongly, with those who have laboured much and long in a good cause, against a yoke being put upon them. The page of history, telling of such a struggle, is one we love to dwell on. Here was some- thing vastly greater; a principle of world-wide importance, in which every human being had an interest. The contest, again and again renewed, raged once more in the early part of the second century. The Jews would not see, even when their religion could no longer be carried out, that their law had done its work; that their day was gone, and that the lowing Father of all would have mercy offered to all. They were constantly trying to put back the wheels of time, and to revive their national institutions. The records of Bar- chochebas—the son of the star—the false Christ, but the brave warrior, in the reign of Hadrian, show once more at what a terrible price this principle was gained. The Chris- tians stood steadily by the great doctrine of my text. Through danger and through death they held by Christ, who had made them free from the yoke of the law, and rejected the narrow nationality and the religious exclusive- ness of Judaism. II. While the Gospel was first offered to the Jews, the second position of the text—its universalism—was con- * A.D. 70. PETWEEN PETER AND PA UL. 121 stantly, and with vision, ever growing clearer, kept in view. Was it not so, when an Apostle, speaking of his missionary journey, says: “That from Jerusalem, and round about unto Illyricum, I have fully preached the gospel of Christ 2 ” Was it not so, when the same Apostle makes this wide field of labour still wider, speaking of the Gospel as having come into all the world 2* From incidental notices in the Epistles of the New Testament, and a little later” from the official correspond- ence that passed between a pro-consul in the lesser Asia and the Emperor Trajan, it is seen that the Christians were very numerous in those districts. From friend and foe, it is proved to us how the Lord's command was carried out, how repentance and remission of sins had been preached among all nations, and with what success. Turning to another quarter of the world, we see with what zeal the spirit of the text must have been kept ; how widely the Gospel must have spread itself along the countries of Northern Africa, when in the year A.D. 215, a council is said to have been attended by seventy native bishops. The candlestick of that Church has been re- moved; its Christian light long since quenched in deepest darkness; but the vigour of Tertullian, the zeal of Cyprian, and the theology of Augustine are links for ever connecting it with the visible Church. No page of the history of Europe can have at all the same interest for us as the record of the founding of the Church at Philippi, and the beginning of a moral warfare —where the fate of the old world, a short time before, had been decided by the sword—which has led to our quarter of the world, putting on the outward profession, at least, * Rom. xv. 19. * Col. i. 6. * A.D. 111. 122 WORLD-WIDE GOSPEL of the Gospel, and has placed it and the dependencies sprung from it, at the head of everything. Once planted in the great capital—and we read of Christians in Caesar's household saluting those in other churches—it would soon be found in other parts of the empire. Wide were the limits in the Apostle's mind, for he looked forward, in his indomitable resolution, to carrying the Gospel treasure to the then remote parts of Europe, when he would take his journey into Spain." These would be the boundaries in three quarters of the world, in a rough way of speaking, conterminous with the Roman Empire, and the warfare of the missionary would thus be as wide as the Romans had carried their arms, their civilization, and their laws. Far beyond these limits was the command of the text to be carried, that repentance and remission of sins should be preached among all nations. “Regions, Caesar never knew, Farther than his eagles ever flew,” were to receive the inestimable treasures of Christ. Whether we look backward or forward, the comforting doctrine of God’s world-wide mercy could not have been suggested by the extent of the Roman Empire. My text was in accord with the whole tenour of prophecy on the subject before the foundations of Rome were laid, and it has received its widest and noblest fulfilment many cen- turies after that empire, described as the strength of iron, had been broken into pieces, and had ceased to exist. Broadly in contrast is this to the narrowness of Judaism, and not less so to the limits within which philosophy confessed herself obliged to confine her blessings. She had nothing in her hands for the man at the plough, the * Rom. xv. 28. AMONG GENTILES. 123 loom, and the forge. The lives of these—84vavorov 8tov ëſiv—were below her notice. The life—not reaching to professional skill or a knowledge of public affairs—was unskilled, ignoble, and ignorant." According to Plato, whom the founder of the Stoics called the Homer of philosophers, the knowledge of God could not be commu- nicated to all. Worse still was behind. Like iconoclasts, they had broken the idols of the popular faith by their wit and reasoning. They had built up nothing on the ruins. Hence the demoralizing view of the popular heathen religion, being useful as a police regulation. Seneca points out to the man of culture his right course, in reference to the popular faith. “All such rites, the Sage will observe, because they are commanded by the laws, not because they were pleasing to the gods.” “ All good men must have have deplored such a sad necessity. Striking, as it necessarily did, at the root of all honour, truth, and integrity, the position was most melancholy. The states- man, seeing the ship sinking in the sea of corruption, was Snatching like the drowning man at the straw. To make religion a handmaid of statecraft, as the historian, the geographer, and the philosopher of the ancients point out, was the sad alternative to which the world was reduced. To rule mankind, by a system of untruths and pious frauds, was, necessarily, demoralizing in the highest degree to the rulers themselves. Broadly in contrast stands the principle of the text in its world-wide mercy. Holding on thus to its high road, which all were invited to travel, what had it done when the reign of Marcus Aurelius closed,” and it came forth from its first conflict with the philosophy of the world 2 * lövőrms 8tos, Plato, Rep. 578 c. * Neander, p. 10. * A.D. 181. 124 NARROWNESS OF STOICS. What was the number of the Christians in proportion to the heathen 2 To that we are unable to give a definite answer. In- cautious zeal may have overstated their relative strength, as much as the malice of enemies may have unduly depreciated it. In a quarter of a century after the time of which I speak, the Apologist expostulates with the prefect of North Africa, with regard to a decree against the Christians, saying, that the carrying out of it would decimate Carthage. One in ten is the proportion of the Christians to the surrounding heathen population in that city, according to Tertullian. In the country of the Seven Churches they would certainly appear to have been more numerous before this. The proportion has been set by Gibbon” as a small minority. Certainly not carried away by any bias towards the Christians, he makes them, de- ducing the calculation “from the examples of Antioch and of Rome,” about a twentieth part of the population before the time of Constantine. In particular places they must have been very much more numerous. In some of the Eastern cities, shortly before the time of Constantine, they are proved, by incontestable documents, to have been a majority. Before reaching that, however, some most terrible persecutions were before the Church. At the time of which we speak they were, undoubtedly, a minority, and in many places a little flock. In that minority, in the time of the Antonines, certain elements of great strength strongly arrest our attention. (a) The intellect of the day was well represented in that minority. It is impossible to describe how much the Christians had suffered from the malignant falsehoods of * Milman: History of Christianity. * Decline and Fall, chap. xv. THE CHRISTIAN MINORITY. 125 the heathen majority. They had no religion, so ran the calumny, no morals, and no loyalty. There was the greatest need, for the work of the Apologists begun by converts from the philosophy of the day. Our hearts' sympathy must go entirely with these men in their labours to vindicate their brethren from the foulest of calumnies, and to present Christian truth in an earnest and forcible way. We must not, and we cannot, separate the branch from the tree. What power enabled the two men of Athens— one of them afterwards bishop of the place, the other a converted philosopher—to lay their apology before the emperor of their day ?" What strength upheld the first learned divine, in the face of a terrible death, to repel the taunt, “The Christians are atheists,” and to state the Christian creed in plain and correct words 2* What power upheld the chief pastor of Sardis, making his way into the presence of Marcus Aurelius, as an advocate of the Chris- tians, at a time when the edge of persecution was sharpened by the informers receiving the confiscated goods of the condemned Christians?” What can be stronger than his petition, “that the emperor would inform him- self and impartially decide whether Christians deserve punishment and death, or deliverance and peace.” Plead- ing for his Christian brethren, he reminds the emperor, “ that his father (Antoninus Pius) wrote to all the Greeks, not to molest the Christians.” “ The Christian body was, no doubt, a minority; but with such men in it, great was its power. In the strength of Christ, such men maintained * Quadratus and Aristides, A.D. 125. * Justin Martyr. * Melito, Bishop of Sardis. See Neander, vol. i. p. 144. * A.D. 167. Mosheim, vol. i. p. 145. 126 STRENGTH OF MINORITY. their apologetic attitude. Their words and works were in the spirit of that mouth and wisdom which Christ had promised. Strong and vigorous branches were they in the true vine. So the work still went on, and another" Athenian philo- sopher laid a model apology—so called from the manner in which it was written—before Marcus Aurelius and his son. The spirit of the past appears in the very title of the work. Named an embassy on behalf of the Christians, it is reviving the spirit of Paul, an ambassador for Christ. The work was produced in the very year of the dreadful persecution of the French Church, as if to show, that from the very fires and tortures, in which the Christians had perished, there came forth a new spirit of life and vigour. (b) In that minority was another element, the moral heroism of the time, which we can never value too highly. Most of its records time has swept away. The great landmarks alone remain, of the persistent heathem efforts to stamp out the Christians, and of their still more per- sistent endurance. In that minority, in the second century, had been Ignatius, the Bishop of Antioch, martyred in the reign of Trajan. In it had been Polycarp, the influence of whose death is shadowed out in the calumny of the Jews; surrounding the fire in which he perished ; that the Christians would worship his body, if they got it. The taunt, instantly flung back as a thing impossible with Christians, shows, nevertheless, the wide- spread influence of the event. In that minority were the martyrs of the Gallican Churches, the wide effect of which is seen in the persecutors casting their mangled remains into the neighbouring Rhone, to distress their friends still ' Athenagoras. STRENGTH OF MINORITY. 127 more, and to scoff at the article of the Christian Faith, “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” Wast must have been the strength of such a minority. The sufferings of their eminent men must have attracted vast attention, and in every place that had been the scene of them, the word of the North African apologist was found to be true : “The deeds of the Christians find more disciples than the words of the philosophers.” Here we reason as before. The heroism of the army of martyrs carries us back to Him, who said, “If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.” Who supported these men in all lands, and gave them strength in the very fire ? The risen and ascended Saviour. With the persecuted and suffering ones in the Christian minority, Christ was identified, the living head with the suffering members, as when he said, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” Such a minority has very much more in it than a numerical power. Those constituting it should be weighed as well as counted. III. In the effects of this preaching, among all nations, we must give their due place to human causes. God works by means. Gibbon" enumerates the secondary causes of the rapid growth of the Christian Church, and dwells on them so fully, as to leave little place for any primary or supernatural origin of the events. This cuts away the ground we thought so strong from under our feet. Others have laid much stress on the tendencies of the time as promoting such a movement. Causes and circumstances such as these may help forward, but they could not originate; they may accelerate the traveller, but * Tertullian, quoted in “The Apostolic Fathers,” p. 174. Rev. H. F. Holland. * Chap. xv. 128 SECON DARY CAUSES they could not give him the power of motion. That he must have had, or such help would be entirely futile. The zeal of the first Christians—one of these alleged secondary causes—no doubt did very much. It carried them through countless difficulties and dangers, and tore away, as so much cobwebs, what to other men would have been insuperable hindrances in missionary work. But that zeal must have been produced by something going before. The torch burned brightly, and lighted the road into many lands; the torch-bearer, falling at his post, passed on the light, according to the image of the ancients, to his suc- cessor. But surely the torch could not have lighted itself. The kindling flame necessarily came from without. The teaching of the future life—another alleged se- condary cause—with its awful sanctions in the unbounded prospects opened up, would have great weight; but surely only in proportion to the greater light, and the clearer evi- dence with which the doctrine was taught. In such a secondary cause, we must consider what brought the doc- trine home to the heart and the conscience 2 Who held the light high above the grave 2 Surely He, who was the light of the world, must have gone before. Who Smote the conscience with conviction ? Surely He, whose coming forth from the grave, was the ground-work of the whole movement. These examples of alleged secondary causes show us, at the same time, how little force is in what has been alleged, of Christianity having come in on the tendency of the time, on the wave of opinion. Doubtless there was, in the Apostolic times, a turning of men's minds towards the East with regard to religion; there certainly was what has been called an influx of eastern cults. What has this to do with Christianity ? Had it come in as a thing that the TENDENCY OF THE TIME 129 world wished for ; as what Jew and Gentile desired ; as a natural growth of the spirit of the age, it would surely have met with a far different reception ; it would have been received with open arms, and not met everywhere with the most terrible persecutions. To read of fierce persecutions for centuries in all lands, and to say, at the same time, the religion persecuted was according to the tendency of the times, is a contradiction. As to the promoters of the movement, this view main- tains that they put the breath of a new life into a dead society, and raised mankind to an immortal hope; carried themselves to this work on the wave of opinion. The Apostles and the missionaries, according to this view, brought in a morality, of which the Stoic—good as it was —was only a feeble rival, and spread countless merciful institutions over the world, like armies in the air, on the tendency of the age, and suffered the most horrible tor- ments in all lands, and for three centuries, for what was agreeable to the spirit of the age. Such a view reverses all the known principles and motives that influence mankind. It avoids, indeed, a reversal of physical law; but in doing so, it reverses all the mental and moral laws that have ruled mankind since the beginning of our race. If our inward nature—our heart, mind, and conscience —go on according to known principles, as does the outward world, it would be the greatest of all miracles that a thing coming in, as this theory alleges, sustained its promoters under the severest trials; fitted ignorant and unlearned men to teach and to satisfy anxious, inquiring souls; to reclaim the fallen; gave them courage to stand by the sufferer in pestilence; led them to feed the hungry; to redeem the captive; to comfort the prisoner; and to stand K 130, GIVES WO EXPLANATION. courageously before kings and rulers with their life in their hand. All is plain, straightforward, and intelligible, ac- cording to their own explanation. The secret of their strength was the promise of their Lord fulfilled to them : “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end.” Our subject does not carry us beyond the reign of Marcus Aurelius. We have confined ourselves to a comparison of the Gospel with the accredited and the popular philosophy of the day up to that time. The fading light of a setting sun is now falling upon it. The Gospel has been making its, way through the darkest of clouds; for “the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not;” and now the rays of a rising sun are on it. The comparison of the two, which I have ventured to make, has, I trust, drawn our attention, as I stated, in the opening of these Lectures, it would, to the strong points of our holy religion and to the weakness of the other. We have tried to show that these philosophers were con- fined, in the effects produced, to the few ; and even in the few whose lives they did reach, they fell far short, if we make one or two exceptions, of those noble and pure heights which the Gospel morality reaches. It would be an outrage on good sense and feeling to compare with the countless Saints and martyrs of the Christian Church, the few great and good men whom their philosophy produced. We feel, with confusion of face, that our religion is a most imperfect realizing of what it ought to be; but with all this, even in the simple annals of the poor, whom they never thought of at all, there are countless numbers in everyday life, who, in patient duty, in conscientious rectitude, in generous mercy, and in devotion to God, reach immea- Surably beyond their very grandest attainments. We See FFFECTS OF GOSPEL. 181 from the stirring words spoken to, and of, the members of the early churches, the effects that had certainly been pro- duced on them. “Ye are washed;”* “Cast off the works of darkness;”* “You hath he quickened;”* “I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty;” “ words these, not addressed to men in a corner, but to the people in the great cities of Corinth, Rome, Ephesus, and Smyrna, great centres of intellectual activity, where these philosophers had been the prominent teachers for long centuries. We cannot, and we do not, wish to bring in the great men, to whom every school of religious thought in Christendom looks back with respect and admiration; but even in com- mon Christian life—in strata of society below what history concerns itself with—the effects produced by the two are as the pine of the mountain, to the shrub of the valley. Where a Stoic professor in any of these schools could show one great person with the dim shadows of these solemn realities upon him, the Apostle or the missionary—as we see from their Epistles—could point to many under their full in- fluence. Passing from its height to its breadth, it has been said, and truly," that, in one respect, in teaching the omnipre- sence of God, this philosophy might have opened the way for a world-wide religion. The grain of truth—at the bot- tom of the doctrine of the soul of the world—was a notion of the omnipresent deity. This may have produced a facility with the philosophic mind to receive Christian truth. Still long was the way from this mystic, vague idea to the plain reality of the text, repentance and remis- Sion of sins preached to all nations. * 1 Cor. vi. 11. * Rom. xiii. 12. * Eph. ii. 1. * Rev. ii. 9. * Neander, vol. i. 132 UNIVERSALISM OF GOSPEL. Treading down the notion of the wise man being perfect in himself—the scoff of even the heathem satirist—the hand of mercy was held out to true repentance. Everywhere the doctrine assimilated itself with varying nations, diverse temperaments, civilisations, educations, and manners. On the Euphrates; on the Tiber; on the African deserts, in Alexandria; among the rude islanders of mountainous Crete; with the refined citizens of Ephesus; with the bar- barous people of Lystra ; with the philosophers of Athens —it met all and, with the ease of an almighty thing it commingled itself with all, purifying them, exalting them, and leading them up to God. For surely the repentance to be preached was change of heart, to be followed by change of life. Christ set up his throne in the heart of his followers. “To as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God.” His name, said the Gospel prophet, shall be called Wonderful. Standing among the Jews, thine own people, wonderful, we say, art thou, in thy broad contrast to nar- row Judaism. Standing in that small obscure country, wonderful art thou in broad contrast to the narrowness of the sages of the old heathen world. Standing in an obscure part of that obscure country, and in great humility, won- derful art thou in taking the world for thy field : “The field is the world.” Wonderful art thou in commanding that thy world-wide offer of mercy should be preached through the world by the fisherman, the tax-gatherer, and the tent-maker. Bowing the head in loving adoration, we say: “This is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.” C. W. 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