Prefatory Material

I.

CHRIST WAITING TO FIND ROOM.

“And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.”—Luke ii. 7.

In the birth and birthplace of Jesus, there is something beautifully correspondent with his personal fortunes afterward, and also of the fortunes of his gospel, even down to our own age and time. He comes into the world, as it were to the taxing, and there is scant room for him even at that.

A Roman decree having been issued, requiring the people to repair to their native place to be registered for taxation, Joseph and Mary set off for Bethlehem. The khan or inn of the village is full, when they arrive, and, being humble persons, they are obliged to find a place in the stall or stable, where the holy child is born. It so happens, not by any slight of the guests, in which they mock the advent of the child, for he makes his advent only as the child of two very common people. But there is a great concourse and crowd—senators, it may be, landowners, merchants, money-changers, tradesmen, publicans, peddlers, men of all sorts—and the most forward, showiest, best attended, boldest in airs of consequence, take up all the places, till in fact no place is left. What they have secured too it is their conceded right to keep. If the carpenter and his wife are in a plight, people as humble as they can well enough take the stable, when there is nothing better to be had.

So it was, and perhaps it was more fitting to be so; for the great Messiah’s errand allows no expectation of patronage, even for his infancy. He comes into the world and finds it preoccupied. A marvelous great world it is, and there is room in it for many things; room for wealth, ambition, pride, show, pleasure; room for trade, society, dissipation; room for powers, kingdoms, armies and their wars; but for him there is the smallest room possible; room in the stable but not in the inn. There he begins to breathe, and at that point introduces himself into his human life as a resident of our world-the greatest and most blessed event, humble as the guise of it may be, that has ever transpired among mortals. If it be a wonder to men’s eyes and ears, a wonder even to science itself, when the flaming air-stone pitches into our world, as a stranger newly arrived out of parts unknown in the sky, what shall we think of the more transcendent fact, that the Eternal Son of God is born into the world; that proceeding forth from the Father, not being of our system or sphere, not of the world, he has come as a Holy Thing into it—God manifest in the flesh, the Word made flesh, a new divine man, closeted in humanity, there to abide and work until he has restored the race itself to God! Nor is this wonderful annunciation any the less welcome, or any the less worthy to be celebrated by the hallelujahs of angels and men, that the glorious visitant begins to breathe in a stall. Was there not a certain propriety in such a beginning, considered as the first chapter and symbol of his whole history, as the Saviour and Redeemer of mankind?

But I am anticipating my subject, viz., the very impressive fact that Jesus could not find room in the world, and has never yet been able to find it.

I do not understand, you will observe, that this particular subject is formally stated or asserted in my text. I only conceive that the birth of Jesus most aptly introduces the whole subsequent history of his life, and that both his birth and life as aptly represent the spiritual fortunes of his gospel as a great salvation for the world. And the reason why Jesus can not find room for his gospel is closely analogous to that which he encountered in his birth; viz., that men’s hearts are preoccupied. They do not care, in general, to put any indignity on Christ; they would prefer not to do it; but they are filled to the full with their own objects already. It is now as then and then as now; the selfishness and self-accommodation, the coarseness, the want of right sensibility, the crowding, eager state of men, in a world too small for their ambition—all these preoccupy the inn of their affections, leaving only the stable, or some by-place, in their hearts, as little worthy of his occupancy and the glorious errand on which he comes.

See how it was with him in. his life. Herod heard the rumor that the Messiah, that is, the king, was born, and it being specially clear that there was no room for two kings in Galilee, raised a slaughter general among the children, that he might be sure of getting this particular one out of the way. Twelve years later when Joseph and his mother turned back to seek the child at Jerusalem, where they had left him, and found him sitting with the doctors of the temple, asking them questions and astonishing their comprehension by his answers; when also his mother, remonstrating with him for remaining behind, hears him say that he “must be about his Father’s business,” and goes home pondering his strange answer in her heart; how clear is it that they, none of them, have room, even if they would, to take in the conception of his divine childhood, or the history preparing in it. John the Baptist, again, even after he has testified in the Spirit on seeing him approach—“Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world!” and has all but refused to baptize him because of his superior dignity, grows doubtful afterward, yields to misgivings, gets perplexed, like any poor half-seeing sinner, with his mystery, and finally sends to inquire whether he is really the Christ, or whether some other is still to be looked for! is great ministry, wonderful in its dignity and power, wins but the scantiest hospitality; he journeys on foot through many populous towns and by the gates of many palaces, sleeping in desert places of the mountains, as he slept his first night in a manger, not having where to lay his head. Nicodemus, and many others probably in the higher conditions of life, felt the sense of some mysterious dignity in him, and went, even by night, to receive lessons of spiritual instruction from him, yet never took him to his house, and too little conceived him to so much as break silence at his trial by a word of vindication. The learned rabbis could have bid him welcome, if he had come teaching “corban,” or the precise mode or merit of baptizing cups, or tithing anise, but when he spoke to them of judgment and mercy and the right of doing good on Sundays, they had no room, in their little theologies, for such a kind of doctrine. His own disciples got but the slenderest conception of his person and mission from his very explicit teachings. They still wanted even the explanations of his parables explained. It was as if the sun had broken out upon a field of moles—there was a wonderful incapacity and weakness in all their apprehensions; he shone too brightly and they could see only the less. The priests, and rabbis, and magistrates, saw enough in him to be afraid of him, or rather of his power over the people. They charged him, before Pilate, with a design to make himself king instead of Cæsar, and when he answered, in effect, that he came only to be king of the truth, Pilate, greatly mystified by his answer, and the more that he had the sense of some strange power in his person, wanted still, like a child, to know what he could mean by the truth? On the whole it can not be said that Christ ever once found room, and a clear receptivity for his person, any where, during his mortal life. Mary and Martha did their best to entertain him and give him a complete hospitality, and yet their hospitality so little conceived him as to assume that being nicely lodged, and complimented with a delicate housewifery, was a matter of much more consequence than it was; even more, a great deal, than to fitly receive the heaven-full of honor and beauty brought into their house in his person. And so it may be truly said of him that he came unto his own, and his own received him not. lie was never accepted as a guest of the world any more than on that first night in the inn. There was not room enough in the world’s thought and feeling to hold him, or even to suffer so great a presence, and he was finally expelled by an ecclesiastical murder.

At the descent of the Spirit there was certainly a great opening in the minds of his disciples concerning him, and there has been a slow, irregular, and difficult progress in the faith and perception of mankind since that day, but we shall greatly mistake, if we suppose that Christ has ever found room to spread himself at all in the world, as he had it in his heart to do, when he came into it, and will not fail to do, before his work is done.

Were a man to enter some great cathedral of the old continent, of which there are many hundreds, survey the vaulted arches and the golden tracery above, wander among the forests of pillars on which they rest, listen to the music of choirs and catch the softened light that streams through sainted forms and histories on the windows, observe the company of priests, gorgeously arrayed, chanting, kneeling, crossing themselves, and wheeling in long processions before the great altar loaded with gold and gems; were he to look into the long tiers of side chapels, each a gorgeous temple, with an altar of its own for its princely family, adorned with costliest mosaics, and surrounded, in the niches of the walls, with statues and monumental groups of dead ancestors in the highest forms of art, noting also the living princes at their worship there among their patriarchs and brothers in stone—spectator of a scene so imposing, what but this will his thought be: “surely the infant of the manger has at last found room, and come to be entertained among men with a magnificence worthy of his dignity.” But if he looks again, and looks a little farther in—far enough in to see the miserable pride of self and power that lurks under this gorgeous show, the mean ideas of Christ, the superstitions held instead of him, the bigotry, the hatred of the poor, the dismal corruption of life—with how deep a sigh of disappointment will he confess: “alas, the manger was better and a more royal honor!”

So if we speak of what is called Christendom, comprising, as it does, all the most civilized and powerful nations of mankind, those most forward in learning, and science, and art, and commerce, it may well enough seem to us, when we fix. the. name Christendom—Christ-dominion—on these great powers of the earth, that Christ has certainly gotten room, so far, to enter and be glorified in human society. And it is a very great thing, doubtless, for Christ to be so far admitted to his kingly honors—more, however, as a token of what will sometime appear, than as a measure of power already exerted. Still what multitudes of out-lying populations are there that have never heard of him. And the states and populations that acknowledge him,—how unjust are their laws, how intriguing and dishonest their diplomacies, how cruel their wars, what oppressions do they put upon the weak, what persecutions raise against the good, what abuses and distortions of God’s truth do they perpetrate, what idolatries and mummeries of superstition do they practice, and, to include all in one general summation, how little of Christ, take them all together, appears to be really in them. Now and then a saint appears, a real Christly man, but the general mass are sharp for money and dull to Christ, and whether sharp or dull, are for the most part extremely ignorant as regards all spiritual knowledge, even if they happen, as men, to be specially intelligent, or practiced much in philosophy. The savor of Christ, in short, is so weak that we can scarcely get the sense of it once in a day. A wind blowing off from his cross might almost be expected to carry as much grace with it—so slight, evanescent, scarcely perceptible, doubtfully real is the evidence shown of a genuine Christly power, even in just those upper tiers of humanity, which are called the Christendom, or Christ-dominion itself.

But we must take a closer inspection, if we are to see how very little room Christ has yet been able to obtain, and how many things conspire to cramp the efficacy and narrow down the sway of his gospel. Great multitudes, it is well understood, utterly reject him, and stay fast in their sins. They have no time to be religious, or the sacrifices are too great. Some are too poor to have any heart left, and some are too rich—so rich, so filled up with goods, that a camel can as well get through a needle’s eye, as Christ get into their love. Some are too much honored to receive him, and some too much want to be. Some are in their passions, some in their pleasures, some in their expectations. Some are too young and wait to give him only the dry remains of life, after the natural freshness is gone. Some are too old and are too much occupied with old recollections and stories of the past forever telling, to have any room longer for his reception. Some are too ignorant, and think they must learn a great deal before they can receive him. Others know too much, having stifled their capacity already in the dry-rot of books and opinions. The great world thus, under sin, even that part of it which is called Christian, is very much like the inn at Bethlehem, preoccupied, crowded full in every part, so that, as the mother of Jesus looked up wistfully to the guest-chambers that cold night, drawing her Holy Thing to her bosom, in like manner Jesus himself stands at the door of these multitudes, knocking vainly, till his head is filled with dew, and his locks are wet with the drops of the night.

So it should be, as you will easily perceive beforehand; for Christianity comes into the world by supposition, just because the world is not ready to receive it. The very problem it proposes is to get room where there is none, to open a heart where there is no heart, to regenerate opposing dispositions, to sweeten soured affections, to beget love where there is selfishness, to institute peace in the elemental war of the soul’s disorders. This being true, we can see beforehand that the grand main difficulty of the gospel in restoring, the world, is to get room enough opened for its mighty renovations to work. It will come to be received where there is no receptivity. Mankind will even seem to be shutting it away by a conspiracy of littleness and preoccupied feeling, when formally preparing to receive it.

What shall Constantine, the first convert king do, for example, when he enters the fold, but bring in with him all his regal powers and prerogatives, and wield them for the furtherance of the new religion; never once imagining the fact that, in doing it, he was bringing church and gospel and every thing belonging to Christ, directly into the human keeping and the very nearly insulting patronage of the state. And so the gospel is to be kept in state pupilage, in all the old-world kingdoms, down to the present day—officered, endowed, regulated, by the state supremacy. Spiritual gifts have no place under the political regimen of course. Lay ministries are a disorder. No man comes to minister because he is called of God, or goes because he is sent of God, but he buys a living, or he has it given him, as he might in the army or the post-office. And so the grand, heaven-wide, gospel goes into quarantine, from age to age, getting no room to speak, or smite, or win, or save, beyond what worldly state-craft gives it. Call we this making room for the gospel?

Church-craft meantime has been quite as narrow, quite as sore a limitation as state-craft. Thus instead of that grand, massive, practically educated, character, that Christ proposes to create in the open fields of duty, by sturdy encounter with wrong, by sacrifices of beneficence and the bloodier sacrifices of heroic testimony for the truth, it contrives a finer, saintlier, more superlative, virtue, to be trained in cells and nightly vigils!—poor, unchristly, mean imposture, it turns out to be of course. To give the church the prestige of a monarchy, under one universal head, a primacy is finally created in the bishop of Rome, and now, behold the august father, occupied, as in Christ’s name, in blessing rosaries, preparing holy water, receiving the sacred puffs of censers, and submitting his feet to the devout kisses of his people! O how wretched and barren a thing, how very like to a poor mummery of imposture, have these ecclesiastics, contriving thus to add new ornaments and powers, reduced the gospel of heaven’s love to men!

And the attempted work of science, calling itself theology, is scarcely more equal to its theme. The subject matter outreaches, how visibly, and dwarfs all the. little pomps of the supposed scientific endeavor. What can it do, when trying, in fact, to measure the sea with a spoon! A great question it soon becomes, whether Christian forgiveness covers any but sins committed before baptism; as if the flow of God’s great mercies in his Son could be stopped by the date of a baptism, and the sins of his children, afterward, left to be atoned by purgatorial fires! The death of Christ is conceived and taught, for whole centuries, as being a ransom paid to the devil; then, after so many centuries have worn the superstition fairly out, as an offering, or suffering, to appease the wrath of God.. Meantime it is carefully held, to save God’s dignity in him, that he does not suffer at all as divine, but is even impassible; so that what he certainly suffers in his moral sensibilities, even because they are perfect—all to make the cross an expression of divine feeling powerful on the heart of sin—subsides into a stifled, unmoved, immovable mercy that, in fact, belongs to the stones. It becomes a great article of opinion also, that God only wants to save a particular number, and that exactly is the number He predestinates. Next, to coincide with this, Christ is shown to have died only for this particular part of mankind. Next to coincide with this, a limited or special grace is affirmed under the same restrictions. Regeneration, again, is wrought by baptism. Repentance subsides into doing penance. And the forgiveness of sins becomes a priestly dispensation.

But the most remarkable thing of all is that, when the old, niggard dogmas of a bigot age and habit give way, and emancipated souls begin to look for a new Christianity and a broader, worthier faith, just there every thing great in the gospel vanishes even more strangely than before. Faith becomes mere opinion, love a natural sentiment, piety itself a blossom on the wild stock of nature. Jesus, the Everlasting Word, dwindles to a mere man. The Holy Spirit is made to be very nearly identical with the laws of the soul. God himself too is, in fact, put under nature, shut in back of nature and required to stay there; the incarnation, the miracles, the Gethsemane, the Calvary, all the flaming glories of the gospel are stifled as extravagances, and the new Christianity, the more liberal, more advanced, belief, turns out to be a discovery that we are living in nature, just as nature makes us live. Salvation there is none, nothing is left for a gospel but development, with a little human help from the very excellent person, Jesus.

Now the blessed Lord wants room, we all agree; we even profess that we ourselves want mightily to be enlarged. Why then is it always turning out, hitherto, that when we try to go deepest, we drag every thing down with us? What, in fact, do we prove but that, when we undertake to shape theologically the glorious mystery of salvation by Christ, we just as much reduce it, or whittle it down, as human thought is narrower and tinier than the grand subject matter attempted.

But saddest of all is the practical depreciation of Christ, or of what he will do as a Saviour, experimentally, from sin. The possibilities of liberty, assurance, a good conscience, a mind entered into rest, are, by one means or another, let down, obscured, or quite taken away. To believe much is enthusiasm, to attempt much, fanaticism. The assumption is, that Christ will, in fact, do only a little for us, just as there is only a little done; when the very sufficient reason is, that there is only a little allowed to be done. As to any common footing with the ancient saints in their inspirations, guidances, and gifts—it is even a kind of presumption to think of it. They had their religion at first hand, we are now a degree farther off. They had the inbirth of God, and knew him by the immediate knowledge of the heart. We only read of him and know about him and operate our minds, alas! how feebly, toward him, under the notions, or notional truths, gotten hold of by our understanding. O it is a very sad picture! Dear Lord Jesus can it never be that better room shall be given thee?

True there is no grace of Christ that will suddenly make us perfect; but there is a grace that will take away all conscious sinning, as long as we sufficiently believe, raising us above the dominating power of sin into a state of divine consciousness, where we are new-charactered, as it were, continually, by the righteousness of God, spreading itself into and over and through the faith, by which we are trusted to his mercy. All this Christ will do. In this state of power and holy endowment, superior to sin, he can, he will establish every soul that makes room wide enough for him to enter and bestow his fullness. He will be a Saviour, in short, just as mighty and complete as we want him to be, just as meager and partial and doubtfully real as we require him to be. O what meaning is there, in this view, in the apostle’s invocation—“That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend, with all saints, what is the length, and breadth, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ that passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God.” This heavy, long-drawn sigh, whose wording carries such a weight of promise still—what does it invoke but that Christ may somehow, any how, get fit room, as he never yet has done, in these stunted human hearts.

And this same sigh has been how fit a prayer for all ages. Probably nothing comparatively of the power of Christ, as a gift to the world, has ever yet been seen or realized in it. And a main part of the difficulty is, that Christ is a grace too big for men’s thoughts, and of course too big for their faith,—the Eternal Word of God robed in flesh, the humanly manifested love and feeling of God, a free justification for the greatest of sinners and for all sin, a power of victory in the soul that raises it above temptation, supports it in peace, and makes obedience itself its liberty. Such a Christ of salvation fully received, embraced in the plenitude of his gifts—what fires would he kindle, what tongues -of eloquence loosen, what heroic witnessings inspire! But, as yeti the disciples are commonly men of only a little faith, and it is with them according to their faith. They too often almost make a merit of having no merit, and think it even a part of Christian modesty to believe that Christ will do for them, only according to what they miss, or really do not undertake for themselves.

And so it comes to pass, my brethren, that our gospel fails, hitherto, of all its due honors, because we so poorly represent the worth and largeness of it. What multitudes are there, under the name of disciples, who maintain a Christian figure scarcely up to the line of common respect—penurious, little, mean, sordid, foul in their imaginations, low-minded, coarse-minded every way. Until Christ gets room in the higher spaces of their feeling, and their consciousness gets ennobled by a worthier and fuller reception, it must be so. Others are inconstant, falling away so feebly as to put a weak look on the gospel itself; as if it were only able to kindle a flare in the passions, not to establish a durable character. This too must be so, till Christ is fully enough received to be the head of their new capacity and growth. Multitudes, again, are not made happy as they should be, wear a long-faced, weary, dissatisfied, legally constrained look, any thing but a look of courage and joy and blessed contentation. Yes, and for the simple reason that there is nothing so wretched, so very close to starvation, as a little, doubtfully received grace. True joy comes by hearts’-full and when there is room enough given for Christ to flood the feeling, the peace becomes a river—never till then.

Discordant opinions and strifes of doctrines endlessly propagated are another scandal. And since heads are little and many, full of fractious and gaunt notions, all horning or hoofing each other, as hungry beasts in their stall, what wonder is it if they raise a clatter of much discord? No, the true hospitality is that of the heart, and if only the grand heart-world of the race were set open to the full entertainment of Jesus, there would be what a chiming of peace and unity in the common love.

Why, again, since Christianity undertakes to convert the world, does it seem to almost or quite fail in the slow progress it makes? Because, I answer, Christ gets no room; as yet, to work, and be the fire in men’s hearts he is able to be. We undertake for him as by statecraft and churchcraft and priestcraft. We raise monasteries for him in one age, military crusades in another. Raymond Lull, representing a large class of teachers, undertook to make the gospel so logical that he could bring down all men of all nations, without a peradventure, before it. Some in our day are going to carry every thing by steam-ships and commerce; some by science and the schooling of heathen children; some by preaching agents adequately backed by missionary boards; some by tracts and books. But the work, however fitly ordered as respects the machinery, lingers, and will and must linger, till Christ gets room to be a more complete inspiration in his followers. They give him the stable when they ought to be giving him the inn, put him in the lot of weakness, keep him back from his victories, shut him down under the world, making his gospel, thus, such a secondary, doubtfully real, affair, that it has to be always debating in the evidences, instead of being its own evidence, and marching forward in its own mighty power.

But what most of all grieves me, in such a review, is, that Christ himself has so great wrong to endure, in the slowness and low faith of so many ages. Why, if I had a friend, who was always making me to appear weaker and meaner than I am, putting the flattest construction possible on my words and sayings, professing still, in his own low conduct, to represent my ideas and principles, protesting the great advantage he gets, from being much with me, in just those things where he is most utterly unlike me—I could not bear him even for one week, I should denounce him utterly, blowing all terms of connection with him. And yet Christ has a patience large enough to bear us still; for he came to bear even our sin, and he will not start from his burden, even if he should not be soon through with it.

All the sooner, brethren, ought we to come to the heart so long and patiently grieving for us. Is it not time, dear friends, that Christ our Master should begin to be fitly represented by his people—received in his true grandeur and fullness as the Lord of Life and Saviour of all mankind; able to save to, the uttermost; a grace all victorious; light, peace, liberty, and power; wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. Be it yours then so to make room for him, even according to the greatness of his power-length, breadth, depth, height. Be no more straitened in your own bowels, stretch yourselves to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Expect to be all that he will make you, and that you may be, open your whole heart to him broad as the sea. Give him all the widest spaces of your feeling—guest-chambers opened by your loving hospitality. Challenge for him his right to be now received by his disciples, as he never yet has been. Tell what changes and wondrous new creations will appear, when he finally breaks full-orbed on human experience—his true second coming in power and great glory. For this great consummation it is that every thing is preparing, and if there be voices and calls chiming through the spaces round us, which, for deafness, we have all these ages failed to hear, what is their burden but this—Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in.

II.

THE GENTLENESS OF GOD.

“Thy gentleness hath made me great.”—Ps. xviii. 35.

Gentleness in a deity—what other religion ever took up such a thought? When the coarse mind of sin makes up gods and a religion by its own natural light, the gods, it will be seen, reveal both the coarseness and the sin together, as they properly should. They are made great as being great in force, and terrible in their resentments. They are mounted on tigers, hung about with snakes, cleave the sea with tridents, pound the sky with thunders, blow tempests out of their cheeks, send murrain upon the cattle, and pestilence on the cities and kingdoms of other gods—always raging in some lust or jealousy, or scaring the world by some vengeful portent.

Just opposite to all these, the great God and creator of the world, the God of revelation, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, contrives to be a gentle being; even hiding his power, and withholding the stress of his will, that he may put confidence and courage in the feeling of his children. Let us not shrink then from this epithet of scripture, as if it must imply some derogation from God’s real greatness and majesty; for we are much more likely to reach the impression, before we have done, that precisely here do his greatness and majesty culminate.

What then, first of all, do we mean by gentleness? To call it sweetness of temper, kindness, patience, flexibility, indecisiveness, does not really distinguish it. We shall best come at the true idea, if we ask what it means when applied to a course of treatment? When you speak, for example, of dealing gently with an enemy, you mean that, instead of trying to force a point straight through with him, you will give him time, and ply him indirectly with such measures and modes of forbearance as will put him on different thoughts, and finally turn him to a better mind. Here then is the true conception of God’s gentleness. It lies in his consenting to the use of indirection, as a way of gaining his adversaries. It means that he does not set himself, as a ruler, to drive his purpose straight through, but that, consciously wise and right, abiding in his purposes with majestic confidence, and expecting to reign with a finally established supremacy, he is only too great to fly at his adversary, and force him to the wall, if he does not instantly surrender; that, instead of coming down upon him thus, in a manner of direct onset, to carry his immediate submission by storm, he lays gentle seige to him, waiting for his willing assent and choice. He allows dissent for the present, defers to prejudice, watches for the cooling of passion, gives room and space for the weaknesses of our unreasonable and perverse habit to play themselves out, and so by leading us round, through long courses of kind but faithful exercise, he counts on bringing us out into the ways of obedience and duty freely chosen. Force and crude absolutism are thus put by; the irritations of a jealous littleness have no place; and the great God and Father, intent on making his children great, follows them and plies them with the gracious indirections of a faithful and patient love.

It is scarcely necessary to add that there are many kinds of indirection, which are wide, as possible, of any character of gentleness. All policy, in the bad sense of the term, is indirection. A simply wise expedient has often this character. But the indirections of God are those of a ruler, perfectly secure and sovereign, and their object is, not to turn a point of interest for himself, but simply to advance and make great the unworthy and disobedient subjects of his goodness.

This character of gentleness in God’s treatment, you will thus perceive, is one of the greatest spiritual beauty and majesty, and one that ought to affect us most tenderly in all our sentiments and choices. And that we may have it in its true estimation, observe, first of all, how far off it is from the practice and even capacity generally of mankind. We can do almost any thing more easily than consent to use any sort of indirection, when we are resisted in the exercise of authority, or encounter another at some point of violated right.

There is a more frequent approach to gentleness, in the parental relation, than any where else among men. And yet even here, how common is the weak display of a violent, autocratic, manner, in the name of authority and government. Seeing the child daring to resist his will, the parent is, how often, foolishly exasperated. With a flush of anger and a stern, hard voice, he raises the issue of peremptory obedience; and when, either by force or without, he has carried his way, he probably congratulates himself that he has been faithful enough to break his child’s will. Whereas, raising an issue between his own passions and his child’s mere fears, he is quite as likely to have broken down his conscience as his will, unnerving all the forces of character and capacities of great manhood in him for life. Alas how many parents, misnamed fathers and mothers, fancy, in this manner, that when self-respect is completely demolished in their poor defenseless child, the family government is established. They fall into this barbarity, just because they have too little firmness to hold their ground in any way of indirection or gentleness. They are violent because they are weak, and then the conscious wrong of their violence weakens them still farther, turning them, after the occasion is past, to such a misgiving, half apologizing manner, as just completes their weakness.

It will also be observed, almost universally, among men, that where one conies to an issue of any kind with another, matters are pressed to a direct pointblank Yes or No. If it is a case of personal wrong, or a quarrel of any kind, the parties face each other, pride against pride, passion against passion, and the hot endeavor is to storm a way through to victory. There is no indirection used to soften the adversary, no waiting for time, nothing meets the feeling of the moment but to bring him down upon the issue, and floor him by a direct assault. To redress the injury by gentleness, to humble an adversary by his own reflections, and tame his will by the circuitous approach of forbearance and a siege of true suggestion—that is not the manner of men, but only of God.

True gentleness, we thus perceive, is, a character too great for any but the greatest and most divinely tempered souls. And yet how ready are many to infer that, since God is omnipotent, he must needs have it as a way of majesty, to carry all his points through to their issue by force, just as they would do themselves. What, in their view, is it for God to be omnipotent, but to drive his chariot where he will. Even Christian theologians, knowing that he has force enough to carry his points at will, make out pictures of his sovereignty, not seldom, that stamp it as a remorseless absolutism. They do not remember that it is man, he that has no force, who wants to carry every thing by force, and that God is a being too great for this kind of infirmity; that, having all power, he glories in the hiding of his power; that holding the worlds in the hollow of his hand, and causing heaven’s pillars to shake at his reproof, He still counts it the only true gentleness for Him to bend, and wait, and reason with his adversary, and turn him round by His strong Providence, till. he is gained to repentance and a volunteer obedience.

III.

THE INSIGHT OF LOVE.

“She hath done what she could; she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.”—Mark, xiv. 8.

It takes a woman disciple after all to do any most beautiful thing; in certain respects too, or as far as love is wisdom, any wisest thing. Thus we have before us, here, a simple-hearted loving woman, who has had no subtle questions of criticism about matters of duty and right, but only loves her Lord’s person with a love that is probably a kind of mystery to herself, which love she wants somehow to express.; She comes therefore with her box of ointment, having sold we know not what article, or portion of her property, to buy it, for it was very costly, and pours it on the Saviour’s head—just here to encounter, for the first time, scruples, questions, and rebuffs of argument. For though she is no casuist herself, no debater of cases of conscience, there are abundance of such among the Lord’s male disciples present, Judas among them, and they have more reasons, a great many, to offer than she, poor child of love, has ever thought of. “Hold woman,” they say, and particularly Judas in the representation of John, “Why this extravagance and foolish waste? Is not the Lord always teaching us to consider the poor, and do good in every thing, and what immense good might you have done, had you sold this ointment and put it to the uses of beneficence; why, the trains of benefit you might have set agoing by the money are even endless, and now it is thrown away for just nothing.” She makes no answer, has nothing at all to say, and does not see, most likely, why she has not been as foolish as they think.

But Christ answers for her. “No, children, no,” he says, “do not trouble the woman, she has an oracle in her love wiser than yours that you have in your heads; she has done a good work on me, fitting, altogether, to be done by her, if not by you. [Nay, she has even prophesied here, taken hold practically of my future—just that which I have never been able to make you conceive, or guess. The poor you have always with you, be it yours to bless them, but me ye have not always. She is come aforehand—dear prophetic tribute!—to anoint my body for the burying. Is it nothing that I die in the fragrant odors of this dear woman’s love? Verily I say unto you, wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that this woman hath done, shall be told for a memorial of her.”

No such commendation was ever before or after conferred by the Saviour on any mortal of the race. He testified for the Gentile centurion, that he had found no such faith as his even in Israel. He tacitly commended his three favorite disciples, Peter, James and John, by the peculiar confidence into which he took them. But the little gospel, so to speak, of this loving woman’s devotion, he declares shall go forth with his, to be spoken of, and felt in its beauty, and breathed in its fragrance, in all remotest regions of the world, and latest ages of time.

And what is the lesson or true import of this so much commended example? What but this?—do for Christ just what is closest at hand, and be sure that you will so meet all his remotest, or most unknown times and occasions. Or, better still, follow without question the impulse of love to Christ’s own person; for this when really full and sovereign, will put you along easily in a kind of infallible way, and make your conduct chime, as it were, naturally with all God’s future, even when that future is unknown; untying the most difficult questions of casuistry without so much as a question raised.

And precisely here, not elsewhere, is the great contribution Christ has made to morality, or the department of duty. He inaugurates, in fact, a new Christian morality, quite superior to the natural ethics of the world. Not a new morality as respects the body of rules, or code of preceptive obligations, though even here he instituted laws of conduct so important as to create a new era of advancement, but new in the sense that. he raised his followers to a new point of insight, where the solutions of duty are easy, and the otherwise perplexed questions of casuistry are forever suspended; even as this woman friend of Jesus saw more through her love, and struck into a finer coincidence with his sublime future, than all the male disciples around her had been able to do by the computations of reflective reason. Nay, if Judas who, according to John, was the more forward critic, had been writing just then a treatise on the economies of duty, her little treatise of unction was better.

But we shall not understand either her, or the subject we are proposing to illustrate, if we do not—

I. Bring into view the inherent difficulty that besets all questions of casuistry that rise under the laws, or precepts of natural morality. By casuistry we mean, as the word is commonly used by ethical writers, the settlement of cases, sometimes called cases of conscience. The rules or precepts of morality are easy for the most part, it is only their applications to particular cases that are difficult. And they are often so difficult as to cause the greatest perplexity in the most conscientious and thoroughly Christian minds; as many of you will know perhaps from the struggles of your own moral experience. Ready to do any thing which duty requires, ready to fulfill any precept, or law, which is obligatory, you have yet been tormented often with doubts, it may be, regarding what this or that rule of duty required of you, in the particular case which had then arrived. For the rules, or precepts of obligation, are all general or generic in their nature, while the cases are particular, and appear to even run into each other, by subtle gradations of color, so as to be separable by no distinct lines. Every case is peculiar, it is more, it is less, it is different—does the rule of duty apply?

IV.

SALVATION FOR THE LOST CONDITION.

“For the Son of Man is come to save that which was lost.”—Math. xviii. 11.

Every kind of work supposes something to be done, some ground or condition of fact to be affected by it; education the fact of ignorance, punishment the fact of crime, charity the fact of want. The work of Christ, commonly called a work of salvation, supposes in like manner the fact of a lost condition, such as makes salvation necessary. So it is that Christ himself conceives it, “For the Son of Man is come to save that which was lost.” He does not say, you observe, “that which is about to be, or in danger of being, lost,” but he uses the past tense, “was lost,” as if it were a fact already consummated, or, at least, practically determined. This work, therefore, is to be a salvation, not as being a preventive, but as being a remedy after the fact; a supernatural provision by which seeds of life are to be ingenerated in a lapsed condition where there are none. At this point then Christianity begins, this is the grand substructural truth on which it rests, that man who is to be saved by it, is a lost being—already lost.

And yet there will be many who recoil from this assumption of Christ, and, without any willing disrespect to his person, take up a suspicion that he somehow over-states the fact of our condition. They could admit, without difficulty, that they are imperfect, that they sometimes do wrong, and that there is often great perversity in men, or it may be in themselves. It would not shock them, if it were declared that every human being wants forgiveness; but to say that we are lost beings, appears to be an extravagance. They do not see it in the tolerably comfortable state of the world, and they are not conscious of it in themselves; they think they have even a kind of instinctive conviction against it, and feel obliged to repel it as injurious and without evidence.

Probably some of you before me are in just this position of mind regarding the great point stated. You feel obliged to make issue with the Lord Jesus in respect to it—doing it, as you believe, not from any disposition to have a conflict with him, but simply because you can not assent to his words, and seem even to know that the fact he assumes can not be true. The disagreement you will admit is very unequal, but how can you assent to a position that so far violates your honest convictions.

What I propose then at the present time, not in the way of controversy, but for your sake and Christ’s sake, is to go over this matter in a careful revision, offering, if I can, such a statement of it that, going out as it were from your own center and sentiment, you will meet the mind of Christ approvingly. Perhaps you will so take his meaning as to meet him with a felt tenderness in it, such as he most certainly reveals to you; concluding this friendly negotiation, so to speak, in a reverent, believing acceptance of him as your own great, necessary Saviour. To this end let us,

I. Clear away some obstructions, or points of misconception, that may put your feeling at unnecessary variance with Christ’s doctrine, or give you a sense of revulsion from it that is not really occasioned by any thing in it.

Thus, when he says “was lost,” using the past tense, as if the lost condition were a fact accomplished, you do not see that either you, or the world is in a state of undoing so completely reprobate. But he does not mean, when he says “was lost,” that the lost condition is literally accomplished in the full significance of it, but only that it is begun, with a fixed certainty of being fully accomplished; that, as being begun, the causes that are loosed in it contain the certainty of the fact, as truly as if the fact were fully executed. Thus if you see a man topple off the brink of a precipice a thousand feet high, you say inwardly, the moment he passes his center of gravity, “he is gone;” you know it as well as when you see him dashed in pieces on the rocks below; for the causes that have gotten hold of him, contain the fact of his destruction, and he is just as truly lost before the fact accomplished as after. So if a man has taken some deadly poison and the stupor has begun to settle upon him already, you say that he is a lost man; for the death-power is in him, and you know as well that he is gone, as if he lay dead at your feet. So a soul under evil once begun, has taken the poison, and the bad causation at work is fatal; it contains the fact of a ruined immortality, in such a sense that we never adequately conceive it, save as we give it past tense, and say, “was lost.”

Again, you have heard of such a thing as “total depravity,” and the declaration of Christ may be somehow associated with such a conception; a conception which you instinctively repel as unjust and extravagant, and contrary plainly to what you know of the many graces and virtues that adorn our human life. But this notion of total depravity is no declaration of Christ, and he is not responsible for it. It is only a speculated dogma of man, which can be so stated as to be true, and very often is so stated as to be false. You have nothing to do with it here.

It has much to do, again with your impressions on this subject, that you are so completely wide of all sensibility to, or consciousness of, the lost condition Christ assumes. Have you considered the possibility that you may be rather proving the truth of it in that manner? “If our gospel be hid,” says an apostle, “it is hid to them that are lost.” If you have no sense of being in the lost condition Christ speaks of, if the salvation he proposes seems, in that view, to be an exaggeration, a fiction, it may be true and is very likely to be, that the want of proportion is in you and not in it. I say not that it is, I only suggest that it may be. If it is, then it will appear by the positive evidence hereafter to be given.

Again, your mind is an active principle, and it keeps suggesting, or putting in your way, thoughts that run, as it were, to a contrary conviction; as that God is good, and will not put a race in being, to be lost regarding all good ends of being, or that he is a great being, competent every way to keep his foster children safe. The argument is short and easy, it seems even to invent itself. But there is another counter suggestion that is quite as likely to be true, and has weight enough certainly to balance it; viz., that God wanted possibly, in the creation of men, free beings like himself, and capable of common virtues with himself—not stones, or trees, or animals—and that, being free and therefore not to be controlled by force, they must of necessity be free to evil; consequently never to be set fast in common virtues with himself, except as he goes down after them into evil and a lost condition, to restore them by a salvation. This being true, creatures may be made, that perish, or fall into lost conditions., Besides the world is full of analogies. The blossoms of the spring cover the trees and the fields, all alike beautiful and fragrant; but they shortly strew the ground as dead failures, even the greater part of them, having set no beginning of fruit. And then of the fruits that are set how many die as abortive growths, strewing the ground again. How many harvests also are blasted, yielding only straw. In the immense propagations of the sea, what myriads die in the first week of life. Thus we find nature everywhere struggling in abortive growths, fainting, as it were, in the perfecting of what her prolific intentions initiate. And all these abortions are so many tokens in the lower forms of life, of the possibility that there also may be blasted growths in the higher.

Once more the amiable virtues, high aspirations, and other shining qualities, you see in mankind, make the assumed fact of our lost condition seem harsh and extravagant—you could not believe it if you would. But considering how high and beautiful a nature the soul is, it should not surprise you that it shows many traces of dignity even after it has fallen prostrate, and lies a broken statue on the ground. Besides, Christ himself had even a more appreciative feeling, in respect to what may be called our natural character than you. When a certain young man, rich, but conscientiously upright and nobly ingenuous, came to him asking what he should do “to inherit eternal life?” though he was obliged in faithfulness to answer, “one thing thou lackest,”—requiring him to suffer a total change of life, in the sacrifice of all he had, and the assumption of his cross—his manner and look were so visibly and affectingly tender, nevertheless, as to attract the special attention of his disciples, and from them it passed into the narrative, as a distinctly noted element of description—“Then Jesus beholding him, loved him.” You might not yourself have put any such terms of requirement upon him; I fear that you would not, but would you, with all you sensibilities to natural excellence, have loved him as much, or shown it by signs as beautifully impressive?

Having noted, in this manner, so many points of unnecessary revulsion from the fact of a lost condition, assumed by Christ in his work of salvation, I think I may take it for granted that you are ready—

II. To look at the evidence of the fact and accept the conclusion it brings you.

And the first thing here to be considered is, that our blessed Master, in assuming your lost condition, is not doing it harshly, or in any manner of severity. He is no dogmatist, making out his article of depravity. He is not a teacher of that light quality that permits him to be pleased with appalling severities of rhetoric, and over-drawn allegations of fact, without any due sense of their meaning. His feeling is tender, never censorious. Sometimes, by a kind of divine politeness so to speak, he puts a face on human character and relations that avoids a look of impeachment where impeachment would be true; as when he speaks of “laying down his life for his friends.” He could have said “enemies” quite as truly, or even more so, but did not like to put that now upon his disciples. In the same kind way of consideration, but with a deeper feeling, he apologizes to God for his murderers, even in the article of death, and apparently comforts himself in the allowance—“Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Is it such a being that will thresh you in random charges, the severity of which is apparent to you and not to him? You can not say it, or even be willing to think it.

Furthermore, it must be evident to you, as it has been to all most unrestrained critics and deniers, that his moral sentiments and standards are high and sharp beyond comparison—higher and sharper certainly than yours. He has also a most piercing insight of all that is deepest in character and its wants; as, by force of his most singular purity alone, he must of necessity have; what then will you sooner think of, when he calls you a lost man, than that, possibly, he knows you more adequately than you know yourself? Having then some better right than you to know, what does he in fact say?

I might go to the other scriptures, citing declarations from them; and especially from the writings of Paul, who discusses this very point many times over, showing by the most cogently close and formal arguments, the fallen state of disability and subjection to evil, out of which Christ has undertaken to raise you; but I prefer to keep the question still and altogether between you and him, and therefore I shall not cite any words but his. Notice then his parables of the lost sheep, and the lost piece of money, not omitting to observe that he is here sharpening no point of allegation against men, but only setting forth the joy that will accrue to the angels of God, and all good beings, when they are restored. Is it in this attitude of feeling that he is launching hard or unjust judgments upon them? He also speaks of a state of “condemnation,” declaring in a manifestly gentle feeling, that he has not come to condemn but to save the world, yet still obliged to add—“he that believeth not is condemned already.” What is this state condemned of God but a lost condition under another figure? He uses also the figure of death, spiritual death, in the same manner, saying—“I am the life.” “My Son was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found.” “Is passed from death unto life.” “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Death is the condition of disorder and spiritual dissolution, which is a lost condition. Life is salvation, because it is the condition of harmony restored; where part answers again to part, function to function, in a complete living order. The lost condition he also calls a state of “darkness” and “blindness,” and to it he comes as “the light” and “the way.” Who is more profoundly lost than he that walks groping for the wall? He conceives the lost condition as a state of moral disability, in which men “have eyes” which “can not see,” and “ears which can not hear,” and are able no longer to convert, or heal themselves. It even requires a divine power in us, he conceives, if we are to make any real approach to good—“No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him.” Not to multiply citations further, take the one practical exhibition of his discourse on regeneration. The doctrine is that man, as he conceives him, is in such a condition that nothing short of a divine movement upon him, can bring him back, into that character and felicity for which he was made. “Verily, verily I say unto you, except a man be born again”—“born of the Spirit,”—“he can not see the kingdom of God.”

These now are Christ’s convictions, most tenderly, faithfully, and variously expressed, concerning man, or the lost condition of man—your lost condition. He does not come to some very bad men, saying these things, but he speaks comprehensively to the race, and grounds his work of salvation fixedly upon the lost condition affirmed.

You will not hear them disrespectfully. Still it will not be strange if your feeling is unsatisfied. “If it be so with me,” you will ask, “why may it not somehow be made to appear?” Let me take you then a step further, into another field, where I think it will appear.

As the matter lies between you and Christ, and he has spoken already, I will take you now to yourself. Think it not strange, if your heart answers, after all, to the heart of Jesus, and re-affirms exactly what he has testified.

You live in a world where there is certainly some wrong—you have seen it, suffered from it, and consciously done it. But all wrong, it will be agreed, is something done against the perfect and right will of God, and a shock must of necessity follow it. Suppose a machinist to produce a machine, some one wheel of which will somehow run directly the other way from what was intended—does run the other way for some space, longer or shorter, every few hours. It will go into confusion of course and become a total wreck. So a soul going against the will of God, in acts of wrong, breaks God’s order in it. Taken as a functional structure, all the parts of which are to play harmoniously into each other, disorder and ruin begins just when wrong begins, and all its goings on afterward accelerate and aggravate the disorder. As the junctures and functions are no more in heaven’s order, it is practically undone. Then, as the body is the soul’s organ, the damage is propagated as disease in that. And then, as society is made up of souls and bodies, that also becomes an element of discord, infested with lies, grudges, enmities, jealousies, breaches of trust and of contract, deeds of injustice and robbery; history itself a volume, the main chapters of which report the conflicts of war, the oppressions of slavery, the wrongs of woman, the hard fortunes of industry, the corruptions of courts and governments, the intrigues of diplomacy, the persecutions of the good.

But I refer you to society thus only in a way of transition, and return immediately to the main question as it stands in the revelations of your own personal consciousness. It has always seemed to me that whoever will accurately note his own inward working, for but one half hour, must even be appalled by the discoveries he will make. You distinguish first of all a certain shyness, or feeling of recoil from God—why should you withdraw instinctively thus from a being wholly good and pure? It was just this feeling that Adam had, after the sin, when he withdrew and hid himself in the garden. Guilt is at the bottom of this shyness. And what is a more certainly lost feeling than the feeling of guilt? Who can stop it, or smooth it away, by any thing done upon himself? It testifies to a fact—can you ever annihilate that fact? No more can you stop the guilt which is only a fit remembrance of it.

You discover also a certain look of disproportion, that is painfully significant. Your ambition is too high for your possibilities and your place. Your passions are too strong for your prudence. Your prudence too close for your affections. Your irritabilities too fiery at times for both. Your resentments are too impetuous for your occasions. Your appetites too large for your possibilities of safe indulgence. Your will over-rules your conscience. Your inclinations master the dictates of your reason. And what is more sadly humiliating than any thing else, your great aspirations have some weight upon them which they can not lift, falling back baffled and spent, with no power left but to notify you of their constant failure. Your great ideals too, revealing, as it were, the summits of a magnificent nature, and lifting their flags of inspiration there, are yet draggled somehow and drugged by low impulses, that make you a mockery to yourself in your attainments. A kind of inversion appears in every thing—sure indication of disorder.

There is disagreement also, as well as disproportion. Your practical judgments of things disagree with your real wants, magnifying toys of sense, to leave you aching for God and the unseen good of the mind. Your eyes discover good in shows and outward preferments, your convictions place it in truth and character. Your generous and high sentiments look down with scorn upon the sordid and cowardly impulses of your selfishness, to be, in turn, alas! how often, mastered in the conflict with them. Your feeling of independence knuckles to conventionalities, and what begun as a war, is ended as a truce, in which you agree, as a kind of independent abject, to hold every thing in scorn that is not under the fashion. Your eternal convictions quarrel with your passions, and your will quarrels feebly with both, misgiving under one, succumbing to the other. The whole internal man is a troubled element. You hardly know, many times, what to think, on the plainest subjects of duty and religion, and are most facile to what you least approve. You ask where you are? and think you do not know; what to believe? and say you can not find; what to do? and do what you would not; what to avoid? and do it. Your mind is full of distraction—in endless mazes lost.

Take another and simpler view of your disorder, do just what so few men ever did, sit down for an hour, and watch the run of your thoughts. Nothing flows in regular causation, no law of suggestion can be more than faintly traced. As a man who is lost in a deep forest, turns confusedly one way and the other, unable to set his mind in a train of deliberative order, so it is with you. Your thoughts huddle on, crossing all lines, breaking through all trains, refusing all terms of order, uncontrolled, uncontrollable; even as droves in the jostle of panic before a prairie fire. The law of right proceeding appears to be somehow broken, the suggestions are, how often, base, impure, and low, and withal defy any look of system. What jumps of transition! how incongruous, unaccountable, and wild! Could the internal picture be mapped to the eye, what eye could trace it! It is as if the soul were an instrument played by demons. How unlike to the sweet flow of order and health in the mind of an angel. The metaphysicians do indeed make up their solutions, showing how every thing goes on by a law of suggestion or association in a strictly normal process. Their farthing candle gives a very little faint light, wholly insufficient, however, as regards the main question. The single word disease tells more than all their speculations. Watching these wild ways of thought, we distinguish a ferment of death, and not the flow of life. The look is abnormal; as if the soul were in a kind of dissolution. No man, duly observing thus himself will easily doubt that he is somehow lost. The appalling doubt, whether he can ever be saved will be more natural. What a work indeed to save him, restore him, that is, to the state of inward health, raise him up into the orderly movement of angelic life, and make the currents flow melodious and clear.

Glance now a moment, at the disabilities that have somehow come upon you, in what the Saviour calls your lost condition. You never encountered any trouble, it may be, on this point, never thought of being under any such disability as he speaks of. Have you not your will, your strong will left? Yes, but the difficulty is to execute, or carry through what you will to be done. When you resolve to govern yourself, thus or thus, or to be this or that, according to some ideal conceived, does your soul mind you? do you become forthwith such as you undertook to be? Are there no currents of habit encountered, no floods of contrary impulse, no volcanic fires of irritation, that prove quite too strong for you? Suppose you determine with all seriousness, now, or at some future time, to begin a religious life. Is it begun? You find base motives creeping into your mind, which you disrespect and determine to shut them away. Do you succeed? You grow sick of the world in one form or another, and rise up to cast it out. Does it go? You conceive a true notion of spiritual dignity and beauty of character, and set yourself to the attainment. Do you reach it? Try a thing more brave and certainly not less necessary; take stiff hold of your thoughts, set your will down upon them and still their tumult, and tame their wild way, into the sweet order of health and rational proceeding. Can you do it? Could any thing be more preposterous even than to try? And yet there is no true perfection of soul that does not include even this; including also, in the same way, all that belongs to internal order, proportion, agreement, and a full consent of all functions and powers. Have you courage to undertake such perfection? This now is the very profound disability in which Christ finds you yourself. Perhaps you never saw it before, but be looks upon you tenderly in it, and counts you to be lost—is any thing more certainly, manifestly true? This brings me to speak—

III. Of the salvation—what it is, and by what means or methods it is wrought. Too short a space is left me, you will see, to allow any thing but a very condensed statement. Excluding then all that may be held, or contended for, as regards the matter of expiation for sin, or the final satisfaction of God’s justice, in the death of Christ—which can, at the most, be no proper salvation from the inward disorder and disability we have discovered—we come directly to the question, how the death is quickened, bow the lost condition of the old man is, or is to be, renewed by Christ, in his work considered as a salvation?

Manifestly this can be done only by some means, or operation, that respects the soul’s free nature, working in, upon, or through consent in us, and so new ordering the soul.

Not then, by some divine act in the force principle of omnipotence, some new creating stroke from behind, that restores our disorder; the change thus accomplished is a mending by repair, and not a recovery; omnipotence, not Christ, is the Saviour.

As little is it by some help given to your development, or self-culture, or even self-reformation. When Lord Chesterfield gives disquisitions on the elegant properties of good manners and polite conduct, he speaks to men as having a power to fashion themselves by his rules. Christ is no professor of goodness in that way. He calls you never to go about being better. He does not so much as call upon you to stifle your deep hunger, by satisfying your own wants. He does not even put you climbing after the glorious ideals you have, and the still more glorious he gives you from his own life and person; as if you could get inspiration from these to raise yourself. The Chesterfieldian method, and the merely moral of Socrates, are not his. These were instructors, not Saviours, speaking both to men, not to lost men—what you want, and what Christ undertakes to be, is a Saviour for lost men. No scheme of Christianity, so called, includes a gospel, which does not include this. Any Christ, who does not come to save lost men, is antichrist, or at best no Christ at all; for who can be the Lord’s true Christ, not coming, as life to death, peace within to discord within, order to disorder, liberty to bondage.

We must look, in fact, for some such being as can be a World’s Regenerator; making good the fact that God has not created us for a lost condition, but for salvation. Doubtless it may be true that God could not bring us on as free, by any straight line progress of development, into the character he meant for us, and the relation to Himself, that was to be our joy and his. As the ancient poets tell us of this or that hero of their’s, who went down to hell, fought away the three-headed dog at the gate, and passed the Stygian river, and when the grim reconnoisance was over, forced his way back, even by the judgment bar of Radamanthus, out into the light; so there was to be, we may believe, an epic descent of souls into the hell-state of disorder and judicial condemnation, and a bursting up again, out of their penal imprisonment, into life and free dominion. But if the soul-history could not be a simply quiet educing of good, if it must be inherently terrible, plunging down through gulfs of disaster and loss, in the mad experiment of wrong, even as it is itself inherently free; then a Saviour is required who can sound the bottom of such gulfs, and bring up the lost ones, into that good and glory eternal for which they were made. This is Christ the Lord, coming, as in everlasting counsel, to execute a salvation prepared before the foundation of the world.

He works by no fiat of absolute will, as when God said “let there be light.” He respects your moral nature, doing it no violence. He moves on your consent, by moving on your convictions, wants, sensibilities, and sympathies. He is the love of God, the beauty of God, the mercy of God—God’s whole character, brought nigh through a proper and true Son of Man, a nature fellow to your own, thus to renovate and raise your own. Meeting you at the point of your fall and disorder, as being himself incarnated into the corporate evil of your state, he brings you God’s great feeling to work on yours. He is deeply enough entered into your case, to let the retributive causes loosened by your sin roll over him in his innocence, doing honor thus to God’s judicial order, that you may see it sufficiently hallowed without your punishment. And that he may get the greater and more constraining power over you, he reveals to you by his suffering death, the suffering state of God’s perfection—stung by the wrongs, and moved in holy grief for the sad and shameful lot of his fallen children. His suffering is in fact the tragic hour of divine goodness; for what to our slow feeling, is even eternal goodness, till we see it tragically moved? Nay, it was even necessary, if transgressors were to have their dull heart opened to this goodness, that they should see it persecuted and gibbeted by themselves. Thus, and therefore, he dies, raising by his death at our hands, those terrible convictions that will rend our bosom open to his love—dies for love’s sake into love in us. So he will become the power of God unto salvation, gathering you in, as it were, with all your disorders, into the infolding, new-creating sympathy of his own character in good; so that being thus infolded in him, all your disproportion, discord, disability, and all wild tumult of the mind will be new crystalized in his divine order. Thus ends the ferment of death, succeeded by the harmony and health of new born life. In this view it was that Christ said, “I am the life.” And the same thing was differently put, when he said “and I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.” He would draw by his death, moving on consent and choice, so to gather in all our disorder, into the molds of his own perfect life.

V.

THE FASTING AND TEMPTATION OF JESUS.

“Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungered.”—Math. iv. 1-2.

I think I do not mistake, when I assume that this particular chapter of the gospel history, commonly called the temptation, is just the one that a good many theologians, and a much larger number of Christian disciples, do really, if not consciously, wish had not been written; that which most stumbles their speculation, and least fructifies their spiritual impressions; that which wears the most suspiciously mythic look, that which they skip most frequently in the reading, or, if they read, only gather up their minds to go on with due attention, after they are through with it.

Jesus Immanuel, the eternal Word incarnate, innocence itself and purity, the only perfect being that ever trod the earth, fasting! opening his great ministry of life in a fast of forty days, and a conflict with the devil for so long a time! Coming down, as he himself declares from heaven, to set up the kingdom of God among men, he goes to his work as if it were a deed of repentance—out of a desert, out of a fast—inaugurating his sublime kingship by austerities and fierce mental conflicts, such as guilty souls might undergo for their chastening. The picture is incongruous, many think, and revolting to faith. Besides they have a settled disrespect to fasting itself.

What I propose then at the present time, is a careful inquiry into the matter.—The fasting of Jesus in the wilderness. My hope is, that I shall be able to clear this remarkable scene of what many regard as its forbidding, or unwelcome aspect. I even hope to open up a conception of it that will place it along side of the agony and the cross, and will make it correspondently dear to all most thoughtful, practically earnest souls.

In the descent of the Spirit upon him at his baptism, he passes his great inward crisis of call and endowment, the effect of which the gospels report, in terms that require to be distinctly noted; saying, one that he is “led up,” [transported,] another, that he is “led,” [taken away,] another, that he is “driven” by the Spirit into the wilderness. Under all these rather violent forms of expression, the fact is signified, that the Spirit, coming here upon him in the full revelation of his call, raises such a ferment, in his bosom, of great thoughts and strangely contesting emotions, that he is hurried away to the wilderness, and the state of privacy before God, for relief and settlement. He was not wholly unapprised of his Messiahship before, but had come to no adequate impression of what, as Messiah, he was to do and to be. He began at twelve years of age, to talk, in words profoundly enigmatical to his friends, of being “about his Father’s business.” He was reading also, from that time onward, the prophets, so often quoted by him afterward, and his soul was making answer more and more consciously to their words, even as a bell that chimes responsively to some quivering harmony of sound that is felt upon the air. Still he was so far from expecting a public inaugural in John’s baptism, that when John objects, saying “comest thou to me?” he only pleads the common reason of the multitude, a desire “to fulfill all righteousness,” in the accepting of John’s righteous ministry.

As he was human, so there was to be a humanly progressive opening of his mind, and a growing presentiment of his great future. All which makes the revelation, when it comes, only the greater and more astounding, because he is just so much more capable of taking the fit impression of it. Nor does it make any difference what particular account we frame of his person. If there is a divine-nature soul, and a human-nature soul, existing together in him as one person, that one person must be in the human type, unfolding by a human process, toward the consciously great Messiahship he is going to fulfill. If he is pure divinity incarnate, he is not simply housed or templed in the flesh, but inhumanized, categorized in humanity, there to grow, to learn, to be unfolded under human conditions of progress.

And then it is only a part of the same general view, that when his endowment settles upon him, as it does in the scene of his baptism, it raises in his feeling just the same kind of commotion that is raised in any very great and really upright human soul; as for example, in that of a prophet when his call arrives. There has been a mighty apprehension waking gradually in him before, and now there is a mighty breaking in, as it were at once, of the tremendous call; all the great movings attendant—sentiments, misgivings, joys of hope, agonies of concern—coming in with it, like the coming in of the sea. The surges break all round him, and the little skiff of humanity that he has taken for his voyage quivers painfully—quivers even the worse that it feels the heavy armament aboard of so great purpose and power.

An amazing transformation is suddenly wrought in his consciousness. As heaven opens above to let forth the voice, and let down the power, and the gate is set open before him to let him forward into his great future as a world’s Redeemer; as every thing opens every way to prepare his mighty kingship, and he feels the Messianic forces heaving in his breast, he reels so to speak, under the new sense he has of himself and his charge, moved all through in a movement so tremendous that every faculty groans in the pressure, like a forest swaying in a storm. And the result is that he does what he must—tears himself utterly away from the incontinent folly of human voices, and the sorry conceit of human faces, and plunges into the deep silence and solitude of the wilderness; there to settle his great inward commotions and compose himself to his call. He is “driven of the Spirit,” only in the sense that the crisis brought upon him by his call and felt endowment drives him. And he goes “to be tempted of the devil,” only in the sense that, being so mightily heaved by his inward commotion, he both is and will be tempted thus, till he finds his point of rest, and settles into his plan of sacrifice.

As to the fast itself, it is not likely that he had any thought of fasting, when he betook himself to the retirement of the wilderness; he only found, when there, that a fast was upon him, and since it might help him to subdue his partly intractable humanity more completely to his uses, he took it for his opportunity, refusing to come out into the sight of the world’s works and faces, to obtain his customary food. The great inward tumult he was in held him thus to his fasting for a whole forty days, and so deep was the stress of his feeling, that he does not appear to have been particularly conscious of hunger, till the very last of it; when as we are told “he began to be an hungered”—all which, as many are forward to say, is a myth, or, if not, a perfectly incredible story; no mortal organization being able to subsist for so long a time without food. And yet we hear every few months, of cases well attested that correspond. There appears in fact, to be a possible state of mental and nervous tension, that allows the subject to maintain life without food, for a much longer time than he could in the quiet equilibrium of a more natural state.

But what is Christ doing in this long solitude and silence of the wilderness? To say that he is fasting does not satisfy our inquiry. The fast we can see, is total; not a fasting from food only, but from the comforts of human habitations, from conversation, from society, and even from public worship in the synagogue, where “his custom” was, even from his childhood, to be always present. Isolated thus from the great world, and closeted with God in that grim wilderness, there is of course, no one to report him and he has not chosen to report himself; save that, in the very closing scene of his exhaustion, which is often called “the temptation,” he allows the veil to be lifted.

Who has not wished many times, that he could have the record of these forty days? And yet they may be worth even the more to us, that the record is not given—left with a veil hung over it, left to the imagination; by that only, as the purveyor to faith and sympathy, to be explored and pictured as it may be in its scenes, for there is nothing so fructifying as the supplying fondly of what is not given us in our Master’s history, but is left, in this manner, to our creative liberty. In this view, certain blank spaces were even necessary, it may be to our complete benefit in the record of his life. Had he kept a complete diary for us of the forty days experience, it might have been a far less fruitful chapter, than the almost total blank he has left us to range in, loosing our love in tender explorations and reconnoisances, and constructing a history for our faith, out of the scantiest helps given to our understanding.

VI.

CONVICTION OF SIN BY THE CROSS.

“Of sin, because they believe not on me. Of righteousness, because I go to the Father, and ye see me no more. Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged.”—John, xvi. 9-11.

In the convincement of sin, the Holy Spirit is to be the agent, and Christ rejected the argument—so Christ himself conceives the promise of the Spirit which he is here giving. The convincing work is to be wrought by no absolute method of force, but by truths and reasons drawn from Christ’s person, and the treatment he received from the world. “Of sin,” he says, “because they believe not on me.” The two other points that he adds—“Of righteousness because I go to the Father and ye see me no more; Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged;”—appear to be only amplifications of the first, or points in which the guilty convictions of his rejectors will be raised to a higher pitch. Thus when he is gone out of the world to be seen here no more, gone up to the Father in visible divine majesty, they will begin to conceive who he was—the Son of God, the righteousness itself of God. He will be no more the man or the prophet, poorly apprehended, doubtfully conceived; all their. opinions of him will undergo a revision, and their minds be quickened to a new sense even of what righteousness is; so, to a deeper more condemning, more appalling sense of their sin. Then again this conviction will be set home with a still heavier emphasis, by the fact made visible in his death and resurrection, that the “prince of this world is judged,” and forever cast down. For if evil, when triumphant by conspiracy, still can not triumph, but falls inevitably doomed, how certainly doomed is every soul that meets the Just One it rejected, on its final day. When the bad empire called the world, is itself cloven down, visibly, by the rising and the over-mastering kingship of God’s Messiah, the conviction of sin will be as much more appalling, as the general defeat and overthrow requires it to be.

It is then a fixed expectation of Christ himself, and that is the truth to which I am now going to call your attention—that his mission to the world will have a considerable part of its value, in raising a higher moral sense in mankind, and producing a more appalling conviction of their guilt or guiltiness, before God.

A widely different, or even contrary, impression appears to be generally derived from certain things said in the scripture, concerning the law; taken as they are, in a less qualified manner than they should be, or the facts of the gospel require them to be. Thus it is declared that, “by the law is the knowledge of sin.” It is also described in its relation to the gospel, as the letter that killeth,” “the ministration of death,” “the ministration of condemnation;” that on the other hand, being “the Spirit that giveth life,” “the ministration of righteousness.” On the ground of such representations, an impression is received, that conviction of sin is distinctively “a law work.” As such it is specially magnified, and it is even abundantly insisted on, that the effective preaching of the law is the prime condition of all genuine success in preaching. The conception is that what is called “the law” is a certain battery side of government, before which guilty minds are to be shot through with deadly pangs, and then that the ministration of life, in Jesus and his cross, coming on the gentle side opposite, does a work of pure healing and life. On that side, all is condemnation. On this side, all is forgiveness. There is guilt, here is peace. Bondage only is there, liberty only is here.

Now this impression is so far true, that conviction of sin doubtless supposes the fact of some. rule or law, broken by sin; and that, when such law is broken, it can, as law, do nothing more than condemn—can not help, or save. God only can do that, and that he does in Christ.

But, in a certain other view, there is more law in Christ, more, that is, in his character and life and doctrine, then there is in all statutes beside. The law of Eden is to the law of the sermon on the mount, as a jewsharp to an organ. The ten commandments, mostly negative, or laws of not doing, are not, all together, as weighty and broad upon the conscience, as Christ’s one positive law, “Do ye unto others as ye would that others should do unto you.” Not even the thunders of Sinai are any match for the silent thunders of Calvary.

Besides, it is not so much the question, where most law is given, as by what means the sense of law may be most effectually quickened, where before it slept. And here it is that Christ’s great expectation hinges, when he says, “of sin,” “of righteousness,” “of judgment.” For in him, the law is more than a rule, or than all rules—a person, clothed in God’s righteousness, bearing God’s authority, filling and permeating all human relations with an exact well doing, and with all most loving ministries, such as never before had been even conceived in these relations. How much then will it signify, when guilty minds are so painfully dazed by the glories of right in his person, that they. can not endure the sight; conspiring even his death, and falling upon him in their implacable malice, to thrust him out of the world! Why, simply to have had such a being living in the world, doing his work, suffering his pains at the hands of his enemies and breathing out his pure untainted breath upon the poisoned air, changes it to a place of holy conviction, where sin must be ever knowing itself, and scorching itself in its own guilty fires!

Thus much it was necessary to say, in a way of general statement, or adjustment, as respects the relative agency of Christ and the law in the convincement of guilty minds. That Christianity was to have, and has had, a considerable part of its value, in this convincing, as well as in a forgiving and restoring agency, I will now proceed to show, by arguments more special and positive. And—

1. Make due account of the fact, that conviction of sin is a profoundly intelligent matter, and worthy, in that view, to engage the counsel of God in the gift of his Son. If we have any such thought as that what is called conviction of sin is only a blind torment, or crisis of excited fear, technically prescribed as a matter to be suffered in the way of conversion, we can not too soon rid ourselves of the mistake. It is neither more nor less than a due self-knowledge—not a knowledge of the mere understanding, or such as may be gotten by philosophic reflection, but a more certain, more immediate sensing of ourselves by consciousness; just the same which the criminal has, when he hies himself away from justice; fleeing, it may be, when no man pursueth. He has a most invincible, most real, knowledge of himself; not by any cognitive process of reflection, but by his immediate consciousness—he is consciously a guilty man. All men are consciously guilty before God, and the standards of God, in the same manner. They do not approve, but invariably condemn themselves; only they become so used to the fact that they make nothing of it, but take it even as the normal condition of their life. Their sin gets to be themselves, and they only think as thinking of themselves. Living always in the bad element, they think it is only their nature to be as they are. Their consciousness is frozen over, so to speak, and they see no river underneath, but only the ice that covers it. The motions of sins they do not observe, because the standards they have always violated are blunted and blurred by custom. They are only conscious, it may be, of a certain shyness of God, and they come to regard even that as being somehow natural. Hence it comes to be a very great point, in the recovery of men to God, to unmask them to themselves, to uncover the standards and reopen their consciousness to them; exactly what is done by Christ and his rejected Messiahship, inwardly applied by the Spirit of God. The result is conviction of sin; which is only a state of moral self-knowledge revived. Doubtless there is a pain in this kind of self-knowledge, but it is none the less intelligent on that account. The sense of guilt is itself a pain of the mind, just as light is pain to a diseased eye; but light is none the less truly light, and guilt is none the less truly intelligent, on that account. This returning of guilty conviction is, in fact, the dawning, or may be, of an everlasting and complete intelligence, in just that highest, moral, side of the nature, that was going down out of intelligence, into stupor and blindness. Is it then a severity in Christ that he is counting on a result of his ministry and death, so essentially great and beneficent?

2. It is quite evident that such a being as Christ could not come into the world and pass through it, and out of it, in such a manner, without stirring the profoundest possible convictions of character. If the divine glory and spotless love of God are by him incarnated into the world, the revelation must be one that raises a great inward commotion. It should not surprise us that even the bad spirits were rallied, in that day, to a pitch of unwonted disturbance and malign activity, much more the bad mind of the race. The great standards of holiness, so fatally blurred as rules, will be all brought forth again, speaking in the doctrine, shining out in the perfect life. Every guilty mind will feel itself arraigned, and brought to know itself, that beholds, or looks into the perfect glass of history that describes this life. And above all when it is ended by such a death, inflicted by a world in wrong, who that knows himself to be a man, will not be visited by silent pangs, not easy to be stifled.

3. Christ was a being who perfectly knew the pure standards of character and duty, knowing, as well, just what sin is in the breach of them, and what man is in the sin. He also knows of course, exactly what is necessary to stir up the guilty consciousness of men; sometimes doing it by instruction, sometimes by acts of unwonted patience and beneficence, sometimes by terrible rebukes and lifted rods of chastisement, and more than once by a divine skill of silence—as when stooping down, once and again, he drew mystic figures on the ground; sending out thus one by one, condemned and guilt-stricken, the pretentious accusers of the woman; or when, scarcely speaking and urging no defense, he so visibly shook with concern, the guilty mind of Pilate, by the dumb innocence only of his manner. He knew exactly what to do on all occasions, and with all different classes of men, to put the sense of guilt upon them, and we can see ourselves, that he has it for one of the great objects of his ministry; even as it was a great expectation, in the matter of his death, that all enemies and rejecters would discover, in bitter pangs of conviction, that, in what they have done upon him, they have only let their sin reveal its own madness. Let us turn now

4. To the scriptures and gather up some few of the tokens that Christ, before his coming, was expected to come in this character; and also of the declarations, by himself and his followers afterward, that he had, especially in his death, accomplished such a result.

“They shall look on me whom they have pierced,” says the prophet, “and they shall mourn.” Other expressions of the prophets correspond. Accordingly when the infant Jesus was brought to Simeon, by his mother, he said to her, “Behold this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be spoken against, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” His rejection was to reveal the heart of his rejectors. John the Baptist conceives, in the same manner, that he is coining with “the axe” of conviction, to be laid to the root of all sin, and “the fan” of separation, to winnow out the chaffiness of all pretense, so to unmask the secrecy of guilt and place it in the open light of conviction.

Christ himself also testifies that he has done it, saying to Nicodemus, “He that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this the condemnation (how deeply shall the sting of it some time pierce the heart of my rejecters,)—this is the condemnation, “that light is come into the world and men have loved darkness rather then light, because their deeds were evil.” On another occasion, he says, to the same effect,—“If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin, but now they have no cloak for their sin;”—they see now, by what they reject and hate, precisely what they are—“If I had not done among them the work which none other man did, they had not had sin, but now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father;” intimating clearly that their hatred of him, they will sometime see, is, at bottom, a hatred of goodness itself. On still another occasion, he brings out the same truth more argumentatively saying—“If God were your Father, ye would love me; for I proceeded forth and came from God. He that is of God heareth my words, ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God.” Your rejection of me is nothing but an exhibition, without, of that rejection of God in which you inwardly live. The bitterness of their reply you know.

Take the trial scene of Jesus next, noting first, the bad spirit out of which it comes, and then the guilty conviction that follows it. What injury had Christ done to Caiphas and the managers of his party, that they should be so bitterly exasperated against him? There was never a more inoffensive being, save as goodness is itself an offense to sin. Hence the violence of their animosity; for no man is so violent and brutish in his animosities, as he that is storming against goodness, to drown the disturbance, and redress the guilty pangs it creates in an evil conscience. Hence the barbarous insults put upon the Saviour’s person. If these great people of Jerusalem—high-priests, rabbis, scribes, and others—had been a tribe of Osages, or Dyaks, their treatment of Jesus would have been exactly in character. The slap in the face, the crown of thorns, the mock cries, the scourging, the spitting, the wagging of the heads, and the jeer “let him come down,” connected with a visibly conscious disrespect to evidence and justice, and with outcries raised to stifle even the sense of justice; the malignity and spite of the punishment itself, a slave’s punishment, a crucifixion put upon a man whose dignity and the power of whose words,—“speaking as never man spake”—had been a principal part of his offense—what does it mean that gentlemen, Jewish leaders of the highest standing and culture, are found instigating these low barbarities of spite and cruelty? What has he done to transform civilized men, into savages in this manner? O it is the offense of his character! He has raised up demons of remorse in the conscience of these men, by the luster simply of his goodness. This it is that rankles in their hatred, and hate, as against goodness, is a feeling too weak to suffer the assumption even of dignity. Hence the simply diabolical frenzy of their conduct.

Mark the result. The very moment after Jesus has commended his spirit to the Father and ceased to breathe, the conviction of crime begins to break through the enmity of his crucifiers. Their malignity is discovered, they could hate a living enemy, but the helpless body of a dead one over-masters their violence. Immediately the centurion himself glorified God, saying, “certainly this was a righteous man.” “And all the people that came together to that sight, beholding the things which were done, smote their breasts and returned.” This is the sign that was “to be-spoken against,” and now “the thoughts of many hearts” begin to be “revealed.” “They look on him whom they have pierced,” and they are pierced themselves.

Next we see the great principle of conviction—“of sin because they believe not on me,”—beginning to be wielded with overwhelming energy, by the apostles. This very truth charged home—you have rejected and crucified Christ—is the arrow of the day of Pentecost. “Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly,” says Peter in his sermon on that occasion, “that God hath made that same Jesus whom ye crucified both Lord and Christ—he hath shed forth this which you now see and hear. Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and cried—‘Men and brethren, what shall we do?’”

And the very next sermon of Peter hangs upon the same bitter truth of conviction. “Ye denied the Holy One and the Just, and desired a murderer to be granted unto you, and killed the Prince of Life, whom God hath raised from the dead, whereof we are witnesses.”

And again, in the third sermon of the same apostle, he hurls the same arrow. For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and thy people Israel, were gathered together.”—all orders and nations, because all alike are sinners—“and now behold their threatenings and grant unto thy servants that with all boldness they may speak thy word.” Whereupon the place is shaken again a third time. Under the first sermon, three thousand souls have the thoughts of their hearts revealed, and turn to seek salvation in Jesus Christ. Under the second, the number is swelled to five thousand. Under the third, the count ceases and the number becomes a multitude—“the multitude of them that believed.”

So it was that Peter, in his preaching, charged home upon his hearers everywhere the rejecting and denying of Jesus the Saviour.

Paul too was traveling over all seas, and through all lands, telling the story of his remarkable conversion—how at first he disbelieved and hated the very name of Jesus, how he was exceedingly mad against his followers, and went about dragging them to prison, till, at last, on his way to Damascus, he was met by that word of irresistible conviction, which had been so powerful many times before—“I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.” O what depths were opened now in the persecutor’s heart! All his bitter wrongs and fiery inflictions flame back in that word—“I am Jesus whom thou persecutest!” showing him the madness that reigns within. Thus begins the life in Christ of this great apostle—itself an illustration how sublime of the Saviour’s thought! “Of sin because they believe not in me.” But there is a reason—

VII.

CHRIST ASLEEP.

“And behold there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the ship was covered with the waves: but he was asleep.”—Matt., viii. 24.

Christ asleep—the eternal Word of the Father, incarnate, lapped in the soft oblivion of unconsciousness—a very strange fact, when deeply enough pondered to reveal its significant and even singular implications.

Where then do we go to look upon so great a sight, the sleep of God’s Messiah? Is he royally bestowed in some retired hall, or chamber of his palace? Is he curtained about and canopied over on his bed of down, as one retiring into the deepest folds of luxury, there to woo the delicate approach of sleep? Must no doors be swinging, no feet of attendants stirring in the halls? Are the windows carefully shaded, lest some ray of moonlight streaming in may break the tender spell of the sleeper? No, it is not so that Jesus sleeps, or with any such delicate provisions of luxury to smooth his rest; but he is out upon the Gennessaret, in some little craft that his disciples have picked up for the crossing, and upon the short space of flooring, or deck, in the hinder part, he sinks, overcome with exhaustion, and is buried shortly in the deepest, soundest sleep. The open sky is over him, the boat swings drowsily among the waves, and the boatmen, talking over the miracles of the day, and all they have seen and heard, under the wonderful new ministry, continue on, as we may suppose, till by degrees the conversation lulls, the replies become slow and sepulchral, as if coming from afar, and finally cease. Meantime Jesus sleeps, fanned by the gentle breath of the night, rocked by the babbling waters, watched by the stars, that brighten seemingly to a finer purity, reflected from the sleeper’s dreams.

By and by a change appears. A dark and ominous cloud, sailing up, shuts in the sky. The lightnings begin to fall, crashing on the head of Gerizim and Tabor, and very soon the tempest that was booming heavily in the distance, strikes the little skiff, dashing the waves across, and filling instantly the forward part with water. The little company are thrown, as it would seem, into the greatest panic and confusion, unable to manage the sinking vessel, and only mixing their cries of distress with the general tumult of the storm. Still Jesus sleeps, folded in that deep self-oblivion which no rage of the elements can disturb. “And behold there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the ship was covered with the waves: but he was asleep.” Even so, no wildest tumult without can reach the inward composure of his rest. The rain beating on his face, and the spray driving across it, and the sharp gleams of the lightning, and the crash of the thunder, and the roar of the storm, and the screams of the men—not all of these can shake him far enough inward, to reach the center where sleep lodges and waken him to consciousness. It is as if both consciousness and soul were gone—gone up in holy dream, to bask in the divine peace, breathing airs of music, and wandering along the rivers of paradise, where angels moor their boats and watch the currents of eternity. Finally some one touches him gently and says, “Master;” whereupon he is roused instantly; for it is a tender word, spoken, too, distressfully, in a manner of appeal, and there is no softest call of compassion that is not louder in his ear than either tempest or thunder. So his sleep is ended, and the storm, in turn, is laid in a deeper sleep than he.

The sleeping of Jesus I believe is mentioned nowhere else in the gospels, and I do not recollect ever to have heard the subject presented as a topic of discourse, or even distinctly noticed—an omission the more remarkable that the theologic implications of the fact appear to be so important.

Sleep is a shadow that falls on the soul, as well as on the body. It is such a kind of state, or affection, as makes even the mind, or intelligent principle, unconscious. What could be more in point, then, for the speculative humanitarian, than to call this fact to his aid, by raising the question, what can be made of the sleep of Jesus, on the supposition that he is divine? Does sleep attack divinity? How can it be conceived that deity, or a nature essentially deific, sleeps, falling into the condition of unconsciousness? And then what next should follow, in the common way, but that such as think to maintain the divinity of Christ, only as they are able to explain it, will make answer, that it is the human nature of Jesus that sleeps and not the divine—giving up thus, for the time, the fact of the incarnation itself; which, if it is any thing, is the absolute unity of the divine and the human in one person.

It would carry me too far, to go into these questions here, taking me, in fact, quite away from my subject. I most readily admit that Jesus, being essentially a divine person, can not, in good logic, sleep; and just as certain it is that, if we proceed logically, he can not, as having a deific nature, be a man. And yet he both slept and was a man. As being God incarnate, the Word made flesh, the infinite in the finite, he is logically impossible. But God has a way of doing the impossible. In the communication of himself to men, he tears away the logical carpentry, refusing to put his glory into it. The truth is that our laws of thinking are totally at fault, in regard to subjects of this nature, speculatively handled. All that we can say of the personality of Jesus is that he is a being in our plane, and yet not in it—in it as a practical approach of God, not in it as being logically resolvable by our scientific, or speculative deductions. The very thing proposed in the person of Jesus is to make an approach transcending any possible explication by us; viz., to humanize divinity; that by means of a nature, fellow to our own, he may bring himself within our range, and meet our feeling by a feeling formally humanized in himself. And in order to this, there must be no doubt of his humanity; he must not be simply templed in a human body, but he must make his humanity complete by that last, most convincing evidence, the fact of sleep. If he were exhaustible only, or weak, or frail, as other men are known to be, but were never to sleep, we could scarcely feel that he is one of us; but beholding his intelligence close up, his consciousness fall away, and his prostrate body palpitating in deep slumber, we no longer question his humanity. Call Him the Word incarnate, the Son of God, God manifest: still he is none the less truly man to us, now that we find him asleep. No matter if we can not explain the mystery, or seeming contradiction, as we certainly can not. To say that only the human soul sleeps, explains nothing, and it signifies nothing more to us, if it does, than the sleep of any other human soul. To say that he is only human,: is against the plainest declarations of scripture, and against all that we know of his more than mortal bearing, or character. All that we can do here is to confess that the incarnate Word is somehow man, even one of ourselves, receiving and embracing in him the eternal love, and fellowship, and fullness of God.

There is then a very great spiritual importance, in the fact that Jesus sleeps. In it we behold the divine humanity sealed or set in complete evidence. Divine he must be, for his character is deifically spotless and perfect; human he must be for he sleeps like a man. O this Great Benefactor and World’s Redeemer in his sleep! just to look upon him here, in this strange hour—the rain and the spray drenching his body, his hair and pillow of plank washed by the driving storm, his calm benignant face lighted by the glittering flashes that set the night ablaze—thus to gaze upon him, king of angels and men, descended to this mortal plight—how very nigh does it draw us to his humbled state, how closely, and by what easy ties of sympathy, knit us to his person!

And yet more nigh, by a sympathy more tender, when we go over the count of what he had been doing yesterday, and see how it was that he fell into a sleep so profound. The warrior sleeps returning spattered and spent from the bloody horrors of the field; the devotee of pleasure sleeps, because he has drunk the cup dry and would fain forget himself; one hasting to be rich, exhausted and spent by his overmastering cares, and the strain of his mighty passion, sleeps a hurried sleep, fevered by his price-current dreams; the hireling sleeps on his wages, gathering strength for the wages of tomorrow; Jesus sleeps, because he has emptied the fund of his compassions and poured himself completely out in works of mercy to the sick and the poor. His giving way to sleep is well accounted for, when we find him engaged the whole day previous, in works of teaching, advice, counsel, sympathy, consolation, healing, and rebuke, such as kept him in a constant expenditure of feeling and strain of attention, that no mortal strength could support. According to Matthew he heals the centurion’s servant, and Peter’s wife’s mother, and continues at his work of healing, thronged by multitudes pouring in upon him, even till night. On the same day, according to Mark, he appears to have given the parable of the sower, and that of a candle hid under a bushel, and that of the earth as a harvest field sown by the owner, and that of the grain of mustard seed, with a discourse on hearing, and a private exposition of his parables to his own immediate disciples. It is also understood by some, combining what is given in the sixth chapter of Luke, and the third of Mark, that he was awake the whole night previous to this day, engaged in prayer; that he chose the twelve at day-break, and that coming down from the mountain, he was so thronged, at that early hour, that he could not so much as eat bread, and came near being trampled by the crowd; whereupon his friends laid hold of him to bring him off, declaring that he was beside himself; his mother and brethren also came to expostulate with him. However this may have been, it is at least clear that every moment of his day is a draft upon his physical resources, and the multitude are growing more clamorous for attention as their number increases, till finally, unable to bear the strain longer, he flies what he can not support. It even appears to be intimated by Matthew, that he was obliged to effect his escape, by hastening on board a vessel that lay near the place—“Now when Jesus saw great multitudes about him, he gave commandment to depart to the other side.” The greatness of the multitude, and their pressing applications were rather a reason why he should stay, than why he should try to escape. They were only not a reason, when he was just ready to sink for exhaustion. Accordingly we see that, no sooner is he entered into the boat and cleared from the shore, than he drops on the deck of the skiff, apparently not minding the hunger of a whole day’s toil unrespited, perhaps, by food, and is buried immediately in a slumber so profound that not even the hurricane wakes him.

In this sleep of Jesus therefore, as related to the works of the day, a very great mistake, into which we are apt to fall, is corrected or prevented; the mistake, I mean, of silently assuming that Christ, being divine, takes nothing as we do, and is really not under our human conditions far enough to suffer exhaustions of nature by work or by feeling, by hunger, the want of sleep, dejections, or recoils of wounded sensibility. Able to do even miracles—to heal the sick, or cure the blind, or raise the dead, or still the sea—we fall into the impression that his works really cost him nothing, and that while his lot appears to be outwardly dejected, he has, in fact, an easy time of it. Exactly contrary to this, he feels it, even when virtue goes out only from the hem of his garment. And when he gives the word of healing, it is a draft, we know not how great, upon his powers. In the same way every sympathy requires an expenditure of strength proportioned to the measure of that sympathy. Every sort of tension, or attention, every argument, teaching, restraint of patience, concern of charity, is a putting forth with cost to him, as it is to us. And yet we somehow do not quite believe it. We read that he goes long journeys on foot, but we do not conceive that he is weary and foot-sore as we might be. We read that he is actually “wearied with his journey,” and sits him down by a well, while his disciples go into the town to obtain food, but we do not seem to think that he is really way-worn, or faint with hunger, in the proper human sense of these terms. We read that he actually “hungered,” and that having no table, or supply, he went aside to explore a fig tree, and break his. morning fast on the fruit, but we do not think that such a being as he could really care much for a breakfast any way. He declares his poverty and his outcast lot on earth, by protesting that he has not so much as a place for comfortable and protected sleep—“the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head”—but we think of him probably as meaning only to say, that he has no property; never as testifying his privation of comfort in this first article of civilized bestowment, a sheltered, in-door sleep—obliged, like the dumb animals, to sleep where he may; in the mountains, on the rocks, sometimes under the night rains, shivering often with cold.

Now all such miscolorings of his human experience take him, so far, out of our tier of life, and slacken proportionally our sympathy with him. And they are beautifully corrected in the night of the boat. Jesus had become so exhausted that he could not, in fact, support himself an hour longer, and dropped immediately down, mind and body together, into the profoundest sleep. Is it really no true sleep, but only a divine seeming? Is he conscious in it? Does he hear the storm? does he feel the rain? does the plunging of the boat startle him? Ah! there is reality enough here to make a sight how affecting.

Blessed be thy rough sleep, O thou great benefactor! thou that art wearied and spent by thy particular works and the virtues that have gone out of thee! What is it now to thee, that the waters drench thee, and the fierce tempest howls in tumult round thee! Sleep on exhausted goodness, take thy rest in the bosom of the storm! for it is thy Father’s bosom, where they that are weary for works of love, may safely trust, and sink so deeply down into the abysses of sleep, that no thunder even may rouse them.

Notice more particularly also the conditions, or bestowments of the sleep of Jesus, and especially their correspondence with his redemptive undertaking. Saying nothing of infants, which in a certain proper sense are called innocent, there have been two examples of full grown innocent sleep in our world; that of Adam in the garden, and that of Christ the second Adam, whose nights overtook him, with no place where to bestow himself. And the sleep of both, different as possible in the manner, is yet most exactly appropriate, in each, to his particular work and office. One is laid to sleep in a paradise of beauty, breathed upon by the flowers, lulled by the music of birds and running brooks, shaded and sheltered by the overhanging trees, shortly to wake and look upon a kindred nature standing by, offered him to be the partner and second life of his life. The other, as pure and spotless as he, and ripe, as he is not, in the unassailable righteousness of character, tears himself away from clamorous multitudes that crowd upon him suing piteously for his care, and drops, even out of miracle itself, on the hard plank deck, or bottom, of a fisherman’s boat, and there, in lightning and thunder and tempest, sheeted, as it were, in the general wrath of the waters and the air, he sleeps—only to wake at the supplicating touch of fear and distress. One is the sleep of the world’s father, the other that of the world’s Redeemer. One has never known as yet the way of sin, the other has come into the tainted blood and ruin of it, to bear and suffer under it, and drink the cup it mixes; so to still the storm and be a reconciling peace. Both sleep in character. Were the question raised which of the two will be crucified we should have no doubt. Visibly the toil-worn Jesus, he that takes the storm, curtained in by it as by the curse—he is the Redeemer. His sleep agrees with his manger birth, his poverty, his agony, his cross, and what is more, as the curse that is maddening in his enemies is the retributive disorder of God’s just penalty following their sin, so the fury of that night shadows it all the more fitly, that what he encounters in it is the wrathful cast of Providence.

How fitting was it also, both that sleep should be one of the appointments of our nature, and that Christ should be joined to us in it. These rounds of sleep are rounds, in fact, of bodily regeneration, and there is no better possible type of the regeneration of a soul, than the recreating of a body, in the article of sleep. It was spent by labor. All the functions were subsiding unto weakness. The pulse ran low and slow, the gait was loose, life itself was ebbing consciously, and a general ferment of disability was, in every faculty, from the brain downward. The man said he was tired, and alas! he could do nothing in himself to mend his condition. No surgeon’s or physician’s art could put him up again equipped for action. But the silent new-creator, sleep, could do it. Taking down the spent subject of consciousness into his awful abyss of nihility and dark un-reason, he will decompose him, so to speak, and put him together again, all lubricated for new play, and send him forth to his old works, as it were with a new nature. We are made familiar thus with great internal changes and mighty new-creations, wrought by mystic powers, whose methods we can not trace. And Christ the great moral Regenerator goes the same rounds with us here; suffers the same exhaustion, sinks into the same unconsciousness, rising to the same newness of life—himself regenerated bodily with us, as he fitly should be.

But as I have spoken of the sleep, I must also speak of the waking; or at least I must so far note the manner of it, as to draw from it some deeper and more fit conception of the internal state of the sleep. It is a matter of common remark that one who goes to his night’s rest charged with a purpose to rise at some given signal, or at some fixed hour, will catch the faintest notification, and will almost notify himself, by a kind of instinctive judgment, or sense of time kept ready for the spring, even in his unconscious state. So Christ, whose love is ready, and full-charged to catch the faintest note of human distress, sleeps on through all the commotion of the elements, undisturbed; but the first cry of panic, “Lord save us, or we perish”—louder to him than all the tumult of the sky and the waters—strikes his inward ear and brings him straightway to his feet. “Then he arose and rebuked the sea, and there was a great calm.” The tempest met his sovereign look and fell abashed before him; type sublime of the diviner and more difficult calm that he will bring to the storms of the mind. “What manner of man,” said they, “is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?” A far more wonderful and greater, that he can speak to man’s guilty feeling, and the turbulent storms of his remorse, and calm even these into peace.

But observe specially his manner when he wakes. It is as if the great commotion round him had been only a hymn lulling his slumber. He is not flurried or startled by the tumult, shows no sign of confusion, or alarm. If he sleeps, a man, he wakes, a God. You can almost see by his waking, that his dreams have been thoughts pure and mighty, coasting round the horrors of a guilty wrath-stricken world on errands of love and peace. Indeed if it has ever occurred to you to wish that you could once look in upon the sleep of Jesus, and distinguish accurately the dream-state of his thought, even this you may sufficiently guess from the manner of his waking. How majestic the tranquillity of it. The tempest roaring, the men screaming, the vessel just ready to go under—and yet, if his waking were the sunrise, it would not be less disturbed, or less flurried by excitement. Could any thing make it more certain that his sleeping mind has been flowing serenely, steadied and evened by a mighty peace. Internal purity, order, and harmony have been the paradise plainly of his rest. In all the wild confusion of the night and the sea without, his self-approving mind has been sleeping, as it were, in a chiming of sweet melodies. Thoughts vast, mysterious, merciful and holy, have been coursing through his unconscious humanity, as recollections, or recurrences of habit, from his august and supremely good eternity; so that when he wakes, at the cry of his disciples, it is only to say, “peace,” to the raging elements, from that transcendent peace that was bathing his spirit within. It was no such waking as the bad and guilty mind, haunted all night by spectres, pursued by murderers, dropping into pitfalls, throttled by serpents round the neck, crushed by weights on the breast, scared by night-mare shapes in the air—it was out of no such element of guilt, or dyspeptic torment that Jesus waked. A sleep thus exercised prepares to fear and the wildness of panic—if the house be on fire, to leap into the fire, if the ship be sinking, to leap into the waters. A good pure mind sleeps goodness and purity, and wakes in peace; a bad sleeps painfully, conversing with internal horrors, ready, when it wakes, to meet the images it has seen. Probably the sleep of a holy mind is even more distinct from that of a bad, than its waking state is, because, in sleep, the thoughts run just as the internal habit makes them; the superintending will-power that musters, and drills, and artificially shapes them, when awake, being now suspended. Hence the profound philosophy as well as the beauty of the poet’s prayer—

I am fully conscious, my friends, that I have been discoursing on this matter of the sleep of Christ, in a somewhat random way; for it is a specially intangible, unexplorable subject. Not an unimportant subject either in its theological implications, or its practical relations to our Christian life, but one whose value does not so much depend on our definite interior knowledge of it, as in the external and evident fact. It does not definitely, or conclusively teach, but it suggests many things, and things only suggested are often of as great consequence to us as things proved. Let us note a few of the points suggested. And

1. The possible, or rather actual redemption of sleep. Sleep is just as truly fallen as humanity itself. And who that knows the sleeping thoughts of man, as they are, can have any doubt of it? Nay, who that knows the waking thoughts of man, as they are, can be at all ignorant how they will run when he sleeps? Gnawed by care, racked by ambition, bittered by the gall of envy, sensual, selfish, fearful, hateful, a prey to bad resentments, loaded and clogged by excesses, filled with hypocondriac terrors from nerves that are shattered by abuse, what can he be, in his sleep, but a faithful representative of what he is awake? And hence it is even one of the saddest known facts of the world, that it sleeps badly—one of the most grateful and most touching facts of the world, that Christ will even be the Redeemer of sleep. He does not of course offer himself to the state of sleep, for it would only be absurd; but he does undertake the regeneration of the soul in character, and that includes every thing; for when the soul’s fearful stricture is taken off by love, when it is rested in faith, fortified by self-government, cleared by temperance and spiritual chastity, cheered by hope, it falls into chime, inevitably, with the divine order; so that, when the will is suspended, as in sleep, its internal movement flows on still in the divine order, meeting only grateful images and thoughts of peace. Hence partly it was that so much was made of their dreams, by holy men of old. It was no superstition of theirs—they had only come, so consciously, into the divine order of health and sanctity, that when they went to their sleep, they seemed even to be yielding themselves up to a sanctified flow of the mind, and to the unobstructed sway of a really harmonic movement with God. Nor is any thing more certain than that souls, advancing in holiness, will advance proportionally in the quality of their sleep. As they are being redeemed themselves, so it is a part of their divine privilege that their sleep is also. Accordingly it is often reported by such as have cleared the bondage of nature, and risen to a specially high pitch of intimacy with God, that they find a remarkable change in their sleeping thoughts. None but Christ can sleep the sleep of Christ, and they that are nearest to him ill spirit will as certainly be most like him, in the peace of their unconscious hours. Their very redemption is, according to its measure, the redemption of their sleep.

2. It is another point suggested here, that there is a right and wrong sleep, as well as a right and wrong waking state. Sleep is the subsiding of soul and body into nature’s lap, or the lap of Providence, to recruit exhaustion, and to be refitted for life’s works. But what right has any one to be refitted for wrong; and above all refitted, by the help of Providence? Such sleep is a fraud, and the fund of new exertion obtained by it is actually stolen. Sleep was never appointed by God, to refit wrong-doers and disobedient children, and enable them to be more efficient against Him. Their very sleep they go to, therefore, as a crime, and the dark shadow of guilt curtains in their rest. O ye days-men, that a few hours hence, when your fund is spent, will go to your sleep to be refitted for to-morrow, is it to be a lying down upon wrong, upon sin, or will it be upon right—there is a very serious meaning in the question. Will you suffer it to rise and be distinctly met, when your head meets your pillow? How very hard a pillow would it be to many, if they took it understandingly!

VIII.

CHRISTIAN ABILITY.

“Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are driven of fierce winds, yet are they turned about with a very small helm, whithersoever the governor listeth.” James iii. 4.

The ships that were “so great” in former days, were, in fact, scarcely more than cock-boats, or small coasters, scraping round the shores of the inland seas; whereas, now, what we call the great ships are big enough to store in their hold, a whole armed fleet of the ancient time, vessels and men together; and these huge bulks strike out on the broad oceans defying their storms, yet still turned about, as before, with a very small helm, whithersoever the helmsman will. There he stands at his post, a single man, scarcely more than a fly that has lighted on the immense bulk of the vessel, having a small city of people and their goods in the world of timber under him, and perhaps with only one hand, turning gently his lever of wood, or nicely guaging the motion of his wheel, steers along its steady track the mountain mass of the ship, turning it always to its course, even as he would an arrow to its mark.

Dropping now the particular reference had by our apostle, in his illustration, to the tongue, or the power of the tongue, I shall take it simply as an instance or exhibition of what is more general, viz., the fact—That man turns about every thing, handles all heaviest bulks, masters all hardest difficulties in the same way; that is, by using a small power so as to get the operation of a power greater than his own. He gets an immense ability thus, where his sufficiency is most restricted, and his Christian ability is of just this kind. We have no power to handle ships at sea by their bulk; as little have we to do or become, in the grand whole of character, what God requires of us. The soul is a magnitude more massive than any ship, and the storms it encounters are wilder than those of the sea. And yet there are small helms given us, by which we are able always to steer it triumphantly on, to just the good we seek and the highest we can even conceive.

In this mode of statement the very supposition is, you perceive, that we have no ability in ourselves, more than simply to turn ourselves into the track of another, more sufficient power, and so to have it upon us. Helms do not impel ships, and if there were no other kind of power moving on the sea, they would only swing dead-logged upon the waters, making never a voyage. So the power we have as persons, in religion, is not a power of self-impulsion, but only a steering power; though it is a very great power at that. For when we so use it as to hold ourselves fairly to God’s operation, as we hold a ship to the winds, that is sufficient, that will do every thing, turning even our impossibles themselves into victory. Our inability to regenerate, or new-create ourselves can not be too strongly stated. As little can our ability, when regarding the fair adjustment and perpetual offering of ourselves to God’s operation.

Glance a moment here at the analogies of our physical experience. Great, overwhelmingly great, as the forces and weights of nature are, what do we accomplish more easily than to turn about their whole body and bring them into manageable service?—doing it always by some adjustment, or mode of address, which acknowledges their superior force. We do not manage a horse by the collar, but by the bit. We do not raise the winds that serve us by blowing on the mill ourselves, but we let them blow as they list, only setting the fans of the wheel to get advantage of them. The cliffs of rocks we do not tear open with our hands, but we drill them and, by merely touching a little gunpowder with a spark of fire, as we know how, let that blow them into the air by a force of its own, repeating the operation till we have literally removed mountains. Our many thousand wheels of manufacture we do not turn by our arms, but we take the rivers, flowing as they will, and let them flow, only cutting sluices for them and setting wheels before them, or under them; whereupon they turn producers for us and even builders of cities. We have a way too of taking that most fierce and dreadful power called steam into service and management—doing it never by gathering it up into our arms and holding it in compression, but by raising it in heated folds of iron, and turning it through cocks and conduit pipes, into points of lifting or expansion, where it does the work of many winds and waters, conquering in fact both oceans and their storms. The lightnings we do not catch by the chase and whip into service, to be our couriers, but we just give them a wire and they run, of their own accord, upon our errands, true and swift as we could wish. We bring in thus all the great powers of nature and set them to doing almost miracles for us, by only just offering ourselves to them, in a way that steers them into our service. The great art now of all arts, that which is changing and new-creating the modern world, is, at bottom and in some real sense, a steering art. All our machineries—and where is the end of them?—are only so many adjustments, by which the great bulks and masses of force in nature are steered into methods of use. Even our rail roads, which are revolutionizing, in a sense, all the values and powers of the world, are in fact scarcely more than adjustments for the steering of motions and forces. The very skill we study most, and most continually practice is that of address to nature; finding how, or by what means and arrangements, we may get the forces of the creation to exert themselves in our behalf. Our ability thus amplified stops at almost nothing. Neither have we any difficulty in regard to this kind of ability, as if it were no ability at all. It is precisely that in one view, and in another it is all ability. Having got some force of nature, be it this or that, into use, we have it even as a property, we make real estate of it, buy it and sell it and, when we have it not, set our wheels of motion, raise our cylinders and fires, to obtain it. And it never once occurs to us that the weakness we thereby confess in ourselves is any real inability, or creates any shade of discouragement to effort. On the contrary we call it our great power over nature, and we have courage given us in it to attempt almost any thing.

Prepared by such analogies, our dependence, in the matter of religion, ought to create no speculative difficulty, and I really do not believe that it does, unless it be in some few exceptional cases. There used to be much debate over the question of ability and dependence, but as far as my knowledge extends, such difficulties are not felt any longer as they once were. And yet we seem to have as much difficulty as ever in making that practical adjustment of ourselves to God, which is necessary in any and every true act of dependence.

Thus a great many, admitting quietly the fact of some such ability as makes them responsible, take it really upon themselves to do, out and out and by their own force, all which they are responsible for. It is as if they were setting themselves to steady and move on the general bulk of the ship, seizing it by its body. What tremendous weights and fearfully complex forces the soul contains, and how many and fierce the storms may be that have broken loose in it, under the retributive damage of sin, they do not sufficiently consider, daring even to hope that they can gather it back into the sweet unity of order and health, by their own self-governing power. It turns out of course, since they can govern but one thing at a time, that while they are governing that one, a hundred others are breaking loose—and all these lusting, rasping, raging, tumultuous, wild, forces of evil, driving like fierce winds and tossing like mountain seas, are too much, of course, for any human power of self-government.

Besides we have no capacity, under the natural laws of the soul, as a self-governing creature, to govern successfully any thing, except indirectly, that is by a process of steering. We can not govern a bad passion or grudge by choking it down, or master a wild ambition by willing it away, or stop the trains of bad thoughts by a direct fight with them—which fight would only keep them still in mind as before—all that we can do in such matters, in a way of self-regulation, is to simply steer the mind off from its grudges, ambitions, bad thoughts, by getting it occupied with good and pure objects that work a diversion; and then the danger is—only working thus upon ourselves—that we shortly forget ourselves; when the sky is filled, again, of course, with the old tumult. We ourselves, acting on ourselves, institute harmony in the soul and establish heaven’s order in its working?—why if all its many thousand parts and forces were put in a perfect military subjection to the will, we could not even then conceive the state of internal order and harmony accurately enough to command them into their fit places and functions.

Furthermore, if we could, our self-government would not be the state of religion, or bring us any one of its blessed incidents. The soul, as a religious creature, is put in affiance, by a fixed necessity of its nature, with God. Having broken this bond in its sin it comes back in religion to become what it inwardly longs for—restored to God, filled with God’s inspirations, made conscious of God. And this is its regeneration; a grand, all-dominating, change that supposes a new revelation of God in it, and is called, in that view, its being born of God. Can it then reveal God in itself by its own self-regulative force? Can it, in fact, accomplish any one thing that is distinctively religious-the state of peace, the state of liberty, the state of light, the state of assurance? “Impossible” is the word written over against every character and condition of good it can, as a religious nature, attempt. And yet these impossibles we can easily and surely master, by only bringing ourselves into the range of God’s operations. The helm-power only is ours, the executive is God’s. He can govern the soul, its grudges, lusts, ambitions, bad thoughts, all at once. He knows the state of harmony internally and can settle us in it as a state of rest. He has inspirations, when he gets into our love, that make all duty free. He can settle assurance and confidence in us. He can be peace in the sealing of his forgiveness upon us. Revealing himself in the soul, he can fill its horizon with light. He can be angelic perfection in us, he can be purity, heaven, in his own fit time and order.

What is wanted therefore in us, and nothing more is possible for us, is the using of our small helms so as to make our appeal to God’s operation. Self-impelling, self-renovating power we have none; but the helm power we have, and if we use it rightly, it will put us in the range of all power, even the mighty power of God. Hence the great call of the scripture salvation is, “come unto me,” “come unto God;” because the coming unto God is the coming unto God’s operation, and the receiving of what his divine power will work in the soul, when he is templed in it. Hence also the call to renounce our own will, to renounce the world, to renounce eternally sin; because whoever lives in his own will—lives for the world as his end, lives apart from all homage to God—can not be in God’s will, or come at all into God’s operation. In the same way there must be a clearing of a thousand particular and even smallest things that will steer off the soul from God. When the helm of a ship gets foul, or so tangled in ropes, or weeds, that it can not traverse freely, it will even steer the ship into wreck instead of holding it to its course. So exactly it is with the soul. An old grudge adhered to steers it forever away from God. Any mode of profit, whose fairness or beneficence to men we distrust, but will not give up, will do the same. Adhering only to a party that we begin to doubt the merit of, takes away the possibility even of confidence toward God. In the same way, the dread only of being singular, the going after popularity, the fear of men’s opinions, the cringing of the soul to men’s fashions—all these give over the helm of one’s life to others, that they may turn it where they will—always away, of course, and still away from God. Every such thing must of necessity be renounced or even denounced, as we hope to come into God’s operation, or come unto God. No soul is born of God till it comes into his very mind and offers itself, as a really transparent medium, to his light. When the helm is practically set, honestly guaged for God, God will be a perfectly open harbor to it, but how can it think of entering either this or any other harbor, when it is really steering itself away?

Hence also that very positive matter called faith, or the fixed demand of it as a condition of salvation. The conception of it is, not that we are to do or attempt doing something great upon ourselves—regenerating ourselves, sanctifying ourselves. All that we can do is to simply trust ourselves over to God, and so to bring ourselves into the range of His divine operation. In one view, or considered as including what God does for it and by it, faith it is very true is every thing—the whole substance and bulk and body of holiness; but considered in a manner most analytical and closest to us, it is our act alone and a very small one at that, to be the determining helm of a new life. Doubtless faith, again, is some how wrought by God, but it is none the less acted by us, being the sublimest and completest mortal act of dependence possible; in which the soul, ceasing from itself, turns away to God—comes unto God. Whereupon as God meets it, accepts it, and pours himself into its open gates, it is filled with God’s inspirations and the working of his mighty power. Now the life proceeds again from God as it ought, being instigated inwardly, by his divine movement. Peace, liberty, light are its element; it is even conscious of God.

All human doings therefore, as regards the souls’ regeneration, or the beginning of a new-life, amount to nothing more than the right use of a power that steers it into the sphere of God’s operation. And the reason why so many fail here is, that they undertake to do the work themselves, heaving away spasmodically to lift themselves over the unknown crisis by main strength—as if seizing the ship by its mast, or the main bulk of its body, they were going to push it on through the voyage themselves! Whereas it is the work of God, and not in any other sense their own, than that coming in, to God, by a total trust in Him, they are to have it in God’s working. Let the wind blow where it listeth—God will take care of that—they have only to put themselves to it, and the impossible is done.

In just this way also it is that so many miscarriages occur, after conversion. Nothing was necessary to prevent them, but simply to carry a steady helm in life’s duties. Thus there will be some who get tired of the helm; to be always at their post, praying always, guaging their motions carefully to meet their new conditions, keeping their courses set exactly by their conscience, and allowing no slack times of indulgence, becomes wearisome as certainly as they lose out the Spirit that makes exactness liberty, and then they take away their hand, as it were to rest themselves. Some too will have a way of persuading themselves that the soul will get on well enough, at least for a time, by the impulse it is under already, and so far will consent to do what no sailor ever dares, let the ship steer itself; whereupon, when it begins to wheel, and plunge, and go just nowhere, as regards the voyage, they begin also to cry, “impossible!” “how can we stop it!” “how can we turn it back!” They imagine some great fatality, impossible to be controlled, when in fact the only fatality suffered is that of a ship that can not keep, or get back into, its course without being steered.

At the same time it must not be forgotten, that multitudes of disciples fall out of course, for no less positive reason than that they actually steer themselves out of God’s operation. One goes into an employment the right of which he is not sufficiently sure of to have a good conscience in it. Another galls himself in a right employment, by the consciously wrong manner in which he carries it on. A third goes into company that consciously does him injury, yet still continues to go. A male disciple turns himself to the pursuit of honor, a female disciple to the worship of fashion; one to the shows of condition, the other to the more personal vanities of dress. Thousands again will let their lusts and appetites get above their affections, their bodies above their minds. Some are nursing their pride and some their envy, driven of fierce winds by the gustiness of one, eaten out and barnacled by the water vermin of the other. These now and such like are the small helms, which all you keep turning, who turn yourselves away. You ask why it is, half grievingly, that you fall away from God so often, and loose the savor of his friendship so easily? But the very simple fact, if you could see it, is that you really steer yourselves away; allowing yourselves in modes of life that even turn you off from God, as by your own act. You not only forget, or neglect, the small helms of guidance, but you actually turn them the wrong way—only making now and then some clumsy effort, as you wake up in pauses of concern, to do some mighty thing by your will; in which you virtually attempt to handle the slip by its body—sighing piously in mock resignation, as you fail, over the inevitable fact of your dependence! O, if you could but use your dependence rightly, finding how to really and truly depend, what power and victory would it bring! The very steering power you have, which is the highest power God has given you to wield, is nothing but a way of depending; that is of right self-adjustment to the gales of the Spirit and the operating forces of God. How certainly too and tenderly would your God be drawn to you, putting all his power upon you, if he only saw you carefully guaging your small duties so as to guide yourselves into his help. Remember his promise, “he that is faithful in that which is least,”—nothing draws the heart of God like that.

Now it is very true that a man who is tending the small helm of duty with great exactness may become painfully legal in it—a precisionist, a Pharisee. But it should not be so, and never will be, save when the precision is itself made a religion of. That precision which is only a way of steering the soul, precisely and faithfully, into God’s inspirations, is but the necessary condition of liberty. No man ever keeps the way of liberty in a heedless, hap-hazard life. Mere strictness is only a mode of pain, but the strictness of a delicately faithful and punctual address to God, has God’s witness and free blessing always upon it. Such a disciple consciously means to be faithful and, as certainly as God is God, he will somehow have God’s power upon him. A very nice way of application, a steady, sleepless watch of the helm, turning it moment by moment, by gentle deflections—this navigates the ship and keeps it bounding on, as in the liberty of the sea No Christian is ever driven loose from his course, when he holds himself up to God, in the adjustment of a careful trust.

Now in all that I have said, thus far, in the unfolding of this very practical subject, I have been preparing a more distinctly Christian view of it, that could not otherwise be given—this I will now present, and with this I close.

I have been showing what power accrues, or will accrue, as we keep ourselves in, or bring ourselves into, the range of God’s operation; and this word operation has been taken probably as referring only to the omnipotent working of his will, or spiritual force. But there is a power of God which is not his omnipotence, and has a wholly different mode of working; I mean his moral power—that of his beauty, goodness, gentleness, truth, purity, suffering compassion, in one word, his character. In this kind of power, he works, not by what he wills, but by what he is. What is wanted, therefore, above all things, in the regeneration of souls, and their advancement toward perfection afterward, is to be somehow put in the range of this higher power and kept there. And here exactly is the sublime art and glory of the new divine economy in Christ. For he is such, and so related to our want, that our mind gets a way open through him to God’s divine beauty and greatness, so that we may bring our heart up into the transforming, molding, efficacy of these, which we most especially need—need even the more imperatively, that our -very conceptions of God, under the lowness and blind apathy of our sin, are so dull, and dim, and coarse, as to have little value and power.

The infinite perfection, or unseen beauty of God—how could we so much as frame a notion of it, when even the being of God, as an unseen spirit, has so little reality to our coarse and fearfully demoralized apprehensions? Therefore understanding well our utter inability to so much as conceive the perfect good in which we require to be fashioned, or the moral excellence of God whose image is to stamp itself upon us, He has undertaken to put even this before our eyes. To this end he becomes incarnate in the person of His Son. As the incarnate Son, He is God in the small, God in humanity, the Son of Man, bringing all God’s beauty and perfection to us in a personal being and life akin to our own—powerful on our own, by the tragic tenderness of his cross; so that if we simply love and cleave unto his human person, unto his cross, we embrace in him all that is included in God’s infinite feeling and character. In this view it is, that he says, “I am the door;” for he is just that opening into the infinite beauty that brings us to the sense of it, and puts us in the power of it. Just this too was his meaning when he said, “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father”—he has seen a man simply, in one view; yet, in another, he has seen even God, in all those distant, impossible glories, and perfections, he otherwise could not conceive. This too was what he had in thought when he said—“He that believeth on me believeth not on me, but on him that sent me. And he that seeth me seeth him that sent me.” The omnipotence of God works absolutely, the moral power of God by being seen, and Christ makes it seen. By which means, as an apostle conceives, he becomes the power of God—“Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” In short this exactly is Christianity—this thought labors all through—that Christ in humanity is God humanized, divine feeling and perfection let down into the modes of finite sentiment and apprehension. In his human person, and the revelation of his cross, he is the door, the interpreter to our hearts, of God himself—so the moral power of- God upon our hearts. It is not necessary that we should so much as frame the intellectual idea of God’s perfection from him, which multitudes could never do—we have simply to love him and cleave to him as to a human person, and we have the very excellence of God framing itself into us, by a most naturally relational, humanly real, sympathy; the power, that is the moral power, of God is upon us, and revealing itself in. us with all needed efficacy.

Christ then as the Son of Man, is that small helm put in the hand, so to speak, of our affections, to bring us in, to God’s most interior beauty and perfection, and puts us in the power of His infinite, unseen character; thus to be molded by it and fashioned to conformity with it. And so we have nothing to do but to keep his company, and watch for him in faithful adhesion to his person, in order to be kept in the very element of God’s character, and have the consciousness of God, as a state of continually progressive and immovably steadfast experience. The moral power of God and God’s glory is mirrored directly into us, to become a divine glory in us. Beholding, as in a glass, the glory of the Lord, we are changed into the same image from glory to glory. This it is, working in our sin, that clears it all away—the power of God unto salvation.

What now brethren and friends, is our conclusion? What have we seen but that all condolings with ourselves, all regrets of failure, turning upon the fact of our weakness, all protestations of inability, all sighs and suspirations ending in the word “impossible,” are without a shadow of reason—utterly groundless. We can do and become just all that we ought, and without so much as one strain of self-endeavor. It is very true that God has not made us omnipotent—we can not manipulate ourselves into holy character by our will, we can neither regenerate, nor make free, nor purify, nor keep ourselves. And just so we can not do any thing in the world of natural experience, without making our address to the powers of nature. Do we mourn over this in listless impatience, and call it our dreadful inability? Does the man who can not navigate a ship by its body, or drag it through the sea by its beak, set himself down upon the word impossible, and desist from the voyage? No, but he takes the very small helm, heading bravely out into the storms, compelling the huge bulk, in that easy manner, to go where he sends it, dashing on still on, by night and by day, and week after week, and month after month, till he has taken it possibly clean round the planet he lives on, and brought it quietly in to the haven for which he was set. Here, just here, is the mighty power of man, that he can steer! Weak in himself, as regards most things, able to do almost nothing in the gross, he can yet do almost any thing by only steering it into the lines of forces that will do it for him. And the same holds true exactly in religion. No man here is called to do some great thing which he can not do. Nothing is necessary for you, in becoming a Christian, or maintaining a triumphant Christian life, but just to stay by the helm, and put yourselves in where the power is—then you have all power, and every mountain bulk goes away at your bidding! Come unto God, unite yourselves to God, and the doing power you have is infinite!—and is none the less yours because it is His. Trim your ship steadily to the course, and God’s own gales will waft it. If you want success enough to set yourselves for it, and guage your courses accurately by a strict application, infallible success is yours. Or, better still, if your mind is dark, if you do not even know how to guage any movement rightly, or even what the words mean that speak of it—then come to the man Jesus, your blessed, all perfect brother, ask him to let you go with him and keep him company, cling fast to him, and all the transforming moral power of God shall be with you. To investigate much and know many things, is not necessary. Only to love Jesus and adhere to him faithfully, knowing simply him, is wisdom enough.

He will be the door, so that your heart will pass in, where your understanding can not. reach. No matter how weak you may seem to be, or how many impassable mountains to be before you, or how many fierce storms to be raging round you, still you will go over mountains beaten small as chaff, on through tempests that have heard the word “be still.” You will never fail or fall. Stay by your love to Jesus and the power of God’s infinite will is with you, and the still mightier, more inconceivable, power of his greatness upon you. O this glorious fact of our dependence—if we speak of ability, we have all utmost ability in it. We come to no bar in it, brethren, as many are wont to speak. If only we can rightly depend, we come into all power rather, and are able to do all things! Here it is that so many of God’s. mighty ones became mighty—Moses, Elijah, Paul, Luther, Cromwell—all those efficient and successful ones that we ourselves have met, wondering often how they got such emphasis of action, such resistless sway. They were men who kept company with God, and lived in the powerful element of his divine operation. Here is the only way of success, whether of single men, or of churches. How can a church get on in any great concern of religion, when it is out at sea, beating about as it is driven, and steering just no whither. Nor is it any better if we take the ship into our own hands, to do all for it ourselves. Let us come into God’s operation, and God will know how to open a way for us. He will lead just where we most want to go, and send us every gift even as he gives us a gospel. So if we are baffled personally, in all our Christian aims and doings, losing ground, weak and growing weaker, unhappy, dissatisfied, hopeless of good—out upon this wild and dreadful sea, and driven by all fierce winds and storms of the mind, we have only to steer ourselves on, by the steady helm of dependence, and our way is clear to the harbor.

IX.

INTEGRITY AND GRACE.

“Judge me O Lord according to my righteousness, and according to mine integrity that is in me.”—Ps. vii, 8.

A truly noble confidence!—and yet many of our time would call the language very dangerous, or scarcely Christian, language, if it were spoken by any but one of the scripture saints. What can be a slipperier footing, they would say, for any sinner of mankind, than to be appealing to God in the confidence of his own righteousness; or, what is even worse, in the confidence of his mere integrity? What does it show but a state of egregious, fearfully overgrown, spiritual conceit, coupled with a prodigious self-ignorance? And what could evince a lower sense of God and religion? We shall see whether it is so, or must needs be so in all cases or not.

It may not be amiss to note that some Unitarian teachers, on the other hand, charge it as a fault in our doctrine of salvation by grace, or justification by faith, that it lets down even the standards of our morality itself; making grace a cover for all defections from honor, truth, honesty, and whatever belongs to the outward integrity of our practices; allowing us to be selfish, heartless, perfidious, crafty, cruel, mean, and all this in good keeping, because it is a part of our merit under grace, to have no merit.

Let us pursue this subject, and see if we can find the true place for integrity under the Christian salvation. And we shall best open the inquiry, I think, by noting—

1. How the scriptures speak of integrity; how manifold and bold the forms in which they commend it, and how freely the good men of the scripture times testify their consciousness of it, in their appeals to God. The text I have cited does not stand alone. In the twenty-sixth Psalm, David says again—“Judge me O Lord; for I have walked in mine integrity.” And again—“But as for me, I will walk in mine integrity.” The Proverbs testify in language still more unqualified,—“that the integrity of the upright shall preserve them,” “The just man walketh in his integrity.” In the same view it is, that good men are so often called “the upright” and “the just”—“Mark the perfect man and behold the upright,” “The way of the just is uprightness, thou most upright dost weigh the path of the just.” They are called “righteous” too and “right” in the same manner, and it is even declared that they “shall deliver their own souls by their righteousness.” And lest we should imagine that the integrity, honored by so many commendations and examples, is only a crude and partial conception, belonging to the piety of the Old Testament, the Christian disciples of the New are testifying also in a hundred ways, to the integrity, before God and man, in which they consciously live. They dare to say that they have a conscience void of offense, that they serve God with a pure conscience, that they count it nothing to be judged of man’s judgment, when they know that God approves them. They rejoice in the confidence that they are made manifest unto God, and tenderly hope that they may be made manifest also in the consciences of men. They are so assured in the sense of their own integrity, as followers of Christ, that they even dare to exhort others to walk as they have them for examples. And this holy consciousness of being right with God, of being wholly offered up to him, of wanting to know nothing but Christ, of losing all things for his sake, appears and reappears in as many forms as language can possibly take. They spend their life, as it were, in the testimony that they please God. Making the strongest confessions of ill desert, and resting their salvation everywhere on the justifying grace and righteousness of God, they still are able, somehow, to be free in professing their own conscious integrity in their discipleship, and the sense they have of being right and true—whole men, so to speak, in the service of their master. Whether we can explain the riddle, or not, so it is. But the explanation is not difficult, and, before we have done, will be made sufficiently clear. Consider then—

2. What integrity means, or what is the state intended by it. As an integer is a whole, in distinction from a fraction, which is only a part, so a man of integrity is a man whose aim, in the right, is a whole aim, in distinction from one whose aim is divided, partial, or unstable. It is such a state of right intention as allows the man to be consciously right-minded, and to firmly rest in the singleness of his purpose. He is a man who stands in the full honors of rectitude before his own mind or conscience. It does not mean that he has never been a sinner, or that he is not now, as regards the disorders and moral weaknesses of his nature, but simply that whatever may have been his life, or the guilt of it, he is now turned, as regards the intent of his soul, to do and be wholly right; firmly set, of course, to receive all the possible helps in his reach, for maintaining a life wholly right with God and man.

But we must not pass over the distinction between what is called commercial, or social integrity, and the higher integrity of religion. This commercial integrity which is greatly affected and much praised among men, relates, only to matters of truth and personal justice in the outward affairs of life, and becomes integrity only because it is measured by a partial and merely human standard, viz., the standard of the market, and of social opinion. Such a character is always held in high respect among men, and, what is more, it should be. It is really refreshing in this selfish, scheming, sharp-dealing world, to meet an honest man. Whether he be a Christian or not, we love to honor such a man. It will also be seen that he is a man who means, at least so far, to honor himself. But it does not follow that such a man’s integrity is complete enough even to give him a good conscience. He is, after all, it may be, no such integer in his confidence, or the approbation of his own mind, as he consciously might be. His intent is not really right, that is to accept the principle of right doing in its breadth, as the arbiter of all action, and do and be all right and forever. All that can be said of him, all that he will say for himself, is that he has had it for his law to speak the truth, fulfill his promises, and deal fairly by his fellow men. Still it is not, and has never been his aim, or object, to do what is right to God; and that if I am not mistaken, is a matter of much higher consequence and more necessary to his real integrity. God is a person as truly as men are, more closely related to us than they, a better friend, one who has more feeling to be injured than they all, claims of right more sacred. What then does it signify that a man gives men their due, and will not give God his? Does it give one a title to be called humane, that he will not stick a fly with a pin because of his tenderness, and yet will stab, in bitter grudge, his fellow man? Does it fitly entitle one to the name of a just man, that he is honest and fair with men of one color, and not with those of another, honest and fair on three days, or even five days in the week, and not on the days that remain? What then shall we think of the mere commercial integrity just described, taken by itself? Calling it integrity, it is still integrity by halves, and, of course, without the principle; integrity by market standards only, and not by any standard that makes. a real integer in duty. Real integrity begins with the principle, meaning to give every one his due; to be right with God, as with men, right against popularity as with it, right everywhere, wholly and eternally right.

You perceive, in this manner, how easy it is for a man to be in great repute for this virtue, and yet be wholly uncommitted to principle in it. Nay, he may even be a very bad man. Examples of the kind will occur to almost any one. I knew in college, and afterward in a remote part of the country, a man of such repute now in the law, that he was said to have made the greatest argument ever presented before the Supreme Court at Washington, whose reputation, as a kind of Cato in this matter of market integrity, was scarcely less remarkable. He had more than once kicked a man out of his office, who had come to engage him in a case plainly tainted with fraud, and would never allow himself to gain a point, by the least deviation from truth. And yet he was a man of many vices, and a man, withal, of such infernal temper, that his wife and children knew him only as a tyrant scarcely endurable. Getting exasperated almost to the pitch of insanity, by what he conceived to be a base attempt of his law partner to jew him, for he was a Jew, in a matter of business, he drew off in disgust and anger from his practice, determined to add nothing more to the profits of the concern, where before he had, in fact, brought all. As the contract still existed in law, the right of his proceeding might be questioned, but his almost overgrown sensibilities to points of honor would no longer suffer him even to look upon the face of such a man. Still he would not so far disrespect the contract as to open a separate and rival office, but hired himself out as a common laborer in unloading coal from one of the ships in the harbor. While at work there, smirched and grimed by coal-dust, there came to him, in a few days, a client who wanted to engage him in a great cause involving the title to a vast property. Inasmuch as he must live, apart from all profits, he finally consented to undertake it, on condition that he should receive only a small day-wages allowance. He won the cause. And then, five or six years after, when he had his family with him, and was known to be short in the means of living, his old client, whom he had made a rich man, sent him a present of twenty thousand dollars. He was rather offended than pleased—as if he would do so mean a thing as to cover up the fact of a fee, under the semblance of a stipulation for day-wages! Forthwith he returned the present, and when it was renewed as a present to his wife, he required her also to send it back. If his partner had seen fit to raise a legal claim for the money as a fee, he might easily have been quieted by half the sum, but rather than consent to enrich a knave by that amount, he preferred to rob his family of the same.

Now this man, so keenly sensitive to the matter of honor in business, as to be well nigh demonized by it, was not even a virtuous man. He was, in fact, the most magnificently abominable man I ever knew. And he died as he lived. The steamer on which he was a passenger sprung aleak at sea, and when they called him to the pumps, protesting, with an oath, that he would do no so mean thing as to pump for his life, he locked himself up in his state-room, and there he stayed, like a tiger in his cage, till the ship went down.

Was he then a man of integrity? In one view he certainly was, and that was his reputation. Still he was a man false to every right principle, both of God and man, but just one; an example in which any one may see how little the boasted integrity of commercial honor and truth may signify, when taken alone.

I could easily have given you a thousand nobler and more beautiful examples of integrity, in the spheres of business, and before the human standards of commercial obligation. I give you this, just because it is so nearly repulsive; showing, in that manner, how little true merit of character belongs to this kind of virtue, when it stands by itself. How far off is it then from being any true equivalent for that Broad, universal, radically principled, integrity that includes religion. Whoever is in the principle of right-doing, as a principle, will be ready to do all right, always, and everywhere—to God as to men, to men as to God. This it is and this only that makes a genuinely whole-intent man, thus a man of integrity.

There is, then, a kind of integrity which goes vastly beyond the mere integrity of trade, and which is the only real integrity. The other is merely a name in which men of the market compliment themselves, when they observe their own standards; though consciously neglecting the higher standards of right as before God. This higher, and only real, integrity, is the root of all true character, and must be the condition, somehow, of Christian character itself. Let us inquire—

3. In what manner? Christ, we say, does not undertake to save men by their merit, or on terms of justice and reward, but to save them out of great ill desert rather, and by purely gratuitous favor. What place have we then under such a scheme of religion, for insisting on the need of integrity at all. Does it not even appear to be superseded, or dispensed with?

I wish I could deny that some pretendedly orthodox Christians do not seem, in fact, to think so. It is the comfort of what they call their piety, that God is going to dispense with all merit in them, and this they take to mean about the same thing as dispensing with all the sound realities of character—all exactness of principle and conduct. They are sometimes quite sanctimonious in this kind of faith. Cunning, sharp, untruthful, extortious, they look up piously still, at the top of what they call their faith, and bless God that he is able to hide a multitude of sins—able to save great sinners of whom they are chief! Submitting themselves habitually to evil, they compliment themselves in abundant confessions of sin; counting it apparently a kind of merit that they live loosely enough to make salvation by merit impossible. Ten times a day they declare that they will know nothing but Christ and him crucified, and lest they should miss of such a faith, they do not spare to crucify him abundantly themselves!

It can not be that such persons are not in a great mistake. Any scheme of salvation that undertakes to save without integrity, has, to say the least, a very poor title to respect. And it ought to be evident beforehand, that Christianity is no such scheme at all.

Yes doubtless, it will be said, there must be such a thing as integrity—that is, commercial integrity—in Christian men, else they would bring very great scandal on the cause. Is it then permitted that, if they will be just and true in trade and in society, they may safely consent to be out of integrity with God? Looking at the principle of things, for there is nothing else to look at here, it would seem that the Great God and Father of us all is certainly as much entitled to consideration from us as we are from each other, and how can there be any genuine principle at all in a disciple, who is not in that higher integrity which includes doing justice to God—being right with God?

There must then be some place for the claim of integrity in our gospel, even though it be a scheme of salvation by grace. Nor does the solution of the matter appear to be difficult. Integrity, we have seen, is wholeness of aim, or intent; but mere intent of soul does not make and never could complete a character. It is even conceivable that a soul steeped in the disorders of sin, might take up such a kind of intent, on its own part, and, acting by itself, be only baffled in continual defeats and failures to the end of life, There is no redeeming efficacy in right intent, taken by itself—it would never vanquish the inward state of evil at all. And yet it is just that by which all evil will be vanquished, under Christ and by grace, because it puts the soul in such a state as makes the grace-power of Christ, co-working with it, effectual. Conscious of wrong, for example, and groaning under the bitterness of it, I take it up as my intent to be and become wholly right. Then I find Christ near me—O how near!—yielding me his divine sympathy, and pouring his whole tenderness into my feeling. As regards the guilty past, he will justify me freely, and hold me to account no more. As regards the future, he will take me as a friend, raise my conceptions of what is good by his own beauty, ennoble my feeling by society with him, draw me up out of my lowness and my weak corruptions, by his character great in suffering, and so enable me to conquer all my evils, as he conquered his. As certainly then as I come into right intent, I shall come into faith, and trust myself to him, as a means of becoming what I have undertaken to become.

Here then is the place of integrity. It is even presupposed in all true faith, and enters, in that manner, into all true gospel character. It does not exclude the grace of Christ, or supersede salvation by grace, but on the human side moves toward grace, and is inwardly conjoined with it, in all the characters it forms. The sinning man, who comes into integrity of aim, is put thereby at the very gate of faith, where all God’s helps are waiting for him. Now that he is so tenderly and nobly honest, there is no grace of God, or help of his merciful spirit, that will not flow into him as naturally as light into a window. By this grace, in which he will now trust, his whole being, feeling, aspiration, hope are invested, and the light of God, the brightness of salvation, everlasting life, is in him—he is born of God.

His integrity, therefore, his new and better aim, is not any ground of merit, or title of desert, which dispenses with faith, but his way of coming into faith—thus into the helps, inspirations, joys and triumphs that Christ will inwardly minister—in one word, into the righteousness of God. And accordingly the scriptures formally condition all such helps, on the integrity of the soul that wants them. “Ye shall seek me and find me, if ye search for me with all your heart—that is with a whole and single aim.” “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.” “If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” The scriptures, we may thus perceive, have no difficulty in finding how integrity is needed in a way of salvation by grace, and there is, in fact, no such difficulty, save as we make it ourselves.

Having discovered, in this manner, what, and how great a thing integrity is, and the necessity of it on strictly Christian grounds, let us note in conclusion, some of the practical relations of the subject. And

1. Consider what it is that gives such peace and loftiness of bearing to the life of a truly righteous man. What an atmosphere of serenity does it create for him, that he is living in a conscience void of offense. And when great storms of trouble drive their clouds about him, when he is assailed by enemies and detractors, persecuted for his opinions, broken down by adversities, thrown out of confidence and respect even, as will sometimes happen, by false constructions of his conduct and malignant conspiracies against his character, still his soul abides in peace, because he justifies himself and has the witness that he pleases God. These clouds that seem to be about him do still not shut him in. He sits above with his God, and they all sail under! Such a man is strong my brethren—how very strong! There is no power below the stars that can shake him! The steaming vapors of a diseased body can not rise high enough to cloud his sun. He is able still and always to make his great appeal and say—“Judge me O Lord, according to my righteousness, and according to the integrity that is in me.” Who can understand like him, the meaning of that word—“And the work of righteousness shall be peace, and the effect of righteousness, quietness, and assurance forever.” Here too—

2. Is the ground of all failures, and all highest successes in religion, or the Christian life. Only to be an honest man, in this highest and genuinely Christian sense, signifies a great deal more than most of us ever conceive. We make room for laxity here that we may let in grace, and do not hold ourselves to that real integrity that is wanted, to receive, or obtain, or be in, that grace. O how loosely, irresponsibly, carnally, do many Christians live—covetous, sensual, without self-government, eager to be on high terms with the world, praying, as it were in the smoke of their vanities and passions, making their sacrifices in a way of compounding with their obligations. Little do they conceive, meantime, how honest a man must be to pray, how heartily, simply, totally, he must mean what he prays for. Perhaps he prays much, prays in private, prays in public, and has it for a continual wonder that he gets on so poorly, and that God, for some mysterious reason, does not answer his prayers! Sometimes he will even be a little heart-broken by his failures, and will moisten his face with tears of complaint. He has made great struggles, it may be, at times, to freshen the fire that was burning in him, and yet, for some reason, he is all the while losing ground. His faith becomes a hand, as it were, without fingers, laying hold of nothing. The more he pumps at the well of his joys, the drier he grows. It is as if there were some dread fatality against him, and he wonders where it is. Commonly it is here—that he wants rectitude. He is trying to be piously exercised in his feeling, when he is slack in his integrity. He has been so much afraid of being self-righteous, it may be, that he is not righteous, at all. When he is loose at the conscience, how can he be clear in his feeling?

Perhaps he has conceived a higher standing in religion, a state of attainment where his soul shall be in liberty, and has tried for whole months, possibly for years, to reach it, and yet he finds it not. He begins to imagine, not unlikely, that no such thing is for him—God’s sovereignty is against him, and he must be content to stay in that lower plane that God has appointed him. “God never means,” he will say, “that I should be much of a Christian—that is given to others that have a higher calling.” Now strange as it may seem, here again is the root of his difficulty—that his projected attainments are clear ahead of his integrity. Some traitor is hid in his soul’s chambers that is kept there, and carefully fed. What is wanting is the integer of a clear, undivided intent. Honesty! honesty! O that Christian men, saying nothing of others, could understand how much it means, and the wonderful power it has! We connive at evil and do it so cunningly that we do not know it. Our eye is evil, we regard iniquity in our heart, therefore do we fail in our prayers, therefore do we lose ground, therefore are we baffled and floored in all our attempts to rise. But it is not so when we have the single eye. Such power is there in this integrity, when it is real, that, making faith real, it makes all gifts attainable. God loves the honest mind, hears the honest prayer, pours all his fulness into the honest bosom. No great flights of ecstatic feeling are wanted, frames carry nothing, but that silent, sound, integrity, which poises the soul on its pivot of truth and self-approbation, is so mighty that it wins its way to God through all obstacles. Here is the secret after all, of the true success in every case. Success is the fixed destiny of any soul that has once reached the point of whole intent. No one need be troubled about his frames, or fluctuations, or even what appear to be his losing moods, if only he can stay by his conscience firmly enough to say, “Judge me O Lord according to mine integrity.” Here then, brethren, is the spot where you are to make your revision, find what your intent is, whether it is honest and whole and clean, warped by no ambiguities, divided and stolen away by no idols. Here the Achan will be hid, if any where. Make sure of his dislodgment, and your way is clear. Then your faith will be faith, your prayers will be prayers; every thing will have its genuine meaning, and God will be revealed in every thing you do. I proceed now

3. To another very important deduction, viz., that every man who comes into a state of right intent, or is set to be a real integer in the right, will forthwith also be a Christian. There is apt to be much pride in men not religious, on the score of their commercial integrity. They will find, if they search more narrowly, that they still have no right conscience in it. They feel themselves to be inwardly wrong. They live in a state of conscious disturbance. They are often consciously disingenuous, as regards the truths and claims of religion. They have consciously a certain dread of God which harrows their peace. What I mean to say, at present, is that whoever gets a clear perception of the state of wrong in which he lives, and comes back into a genuinely right intent, to be carried just where it will carry him, sacrifice what it will cost him—any thing to be right—in that man the spirit of all sin is broken, and his mind is in a state to lay hold of Christ, and be laid hold of by him, almost ere he is aware of it. Nor, when I say this, do I throw discredit on the common modes of expression; for this exactly is the point to which every converted person comes, though he may not so conceive at the time. One may tell of his convictions, another of his fears, another of his unspeakable wants, one of the prayer that he made thus or thus, another of the restitution or acknowledgment he made to some one he had wronged, many of their deep sorrow that melted into joy, many others of the despair they came to in their struggles, under which they fell off helpless in the hands of God’s mercy, and behold it was deliverance itself. But whatever may have been the form of exercise, this most assuredly is in it always, consciously, or unconsciously present, that there is a coming somehow into a state of pure intent, a mind to receive all truth and do all right forever. And no man ever came to this, who did not find himself, at once, all over in the faith of Christ, a consciously and strangely new man.

Let me give you a case, in which this particular point, in the matter of conversion to God, will be clearly distinguished. There died, in the city of New York, about ten years ago, a distinguished merchant, and: much more distinguished saint of God, whose conversion was on this wise. He was born and brought up in the island of Santa Cruz, belonging to a wealthy and gay family, in which he received no religious instruction at all. He had a naturally gay, light, forceful character, and scarcely a religious idea. One Sunday, when the family and their guests went out for a ride, he remained at home. Going to the library for something to read, his eye fell on a book labeled “The Truth of Christianity Demonstrated.” He took it down, saying as he looked on the back of it, “The truth of Christianity demonstrated—the truth of Christianity demonstrated—well if it is, I ought to believe it and live it, and—I will. Let me try the book and see.” Sitting down, at that point, he opened the book and began to read, and though it was an argument only; giving no particular appeal to feeling, he was surprised to find a strange brightness of light on the words. Holy conviction flowed in upon him, a wondrous love waked up in his feeling, a still more wondrous bliss dawned upon his love, and in a very few minutes, it seemed that the helm of his nature was somehow taken by a mysterious power he could not resist. The joy of the change, which he did not understand, or conceive, was so great as to prove its reality; he could never, from that moment, shake off the conviction of his being quite another man. What it was to be a Christian he did not know, but he knew that he was something, which to lose, or cease to be, he could as little think of as losing his life. When the riding party came back, he began forthwith to let out his joy, tell his wonder, testify of Christ, just as he would of any good, gay time he had had before. They were astonished, some of them doubted whether he was not somehow beside himself. But there was no slack in his flame, he went on like the just, growing brighter and brighter. There was no appearance of sanctimony, no cant, he was the same outspoken, social, manly youth, that he had been. Hungering finally after some religious society, he managed to remove to Philadelphia, where he found teaching and sympathy; and great works of duty. He went once to the theater, once to a ball, having no scruples about the right of it, and scarce knowing that he could have. But he never went again, simply because it did not meet his feeling, and gave him no pleasure. He finally came to a settlement in New York, where he was known many years as a man of dignity and power, nobly free and joyous, fond of the young, and open to all humblest minds wanting counsel, the most distinguished mark, and brightest ornament ever known in the churches of that great city. From first to last his Christian life was but a hymn.

At what point now did this remarkable servant of God pass his conversion? Not when he was reading the book, but when he was looking on the back of it; for there it was, in that little deliberation on the label, and the nobly honest conclusion he accepted concerning it, that his soul took hold of integrity, and sin was all reversed! The mere resolve to accept it, if true, decided all. And therefore it was that Christ met him in the book, with a revelation so blessed. Doubtless it was the Spirit of God, working unseen, that drew him out in the previous parley on the label; and every step of the change, nay, of his whole life, was in some sense, worked by a power superior to his own mere will. And yet he had a will, by that consented to believe what is true, and live it in his life.

Now there is no man in this audience, however remote he may have been from the thought of being a Christian, when he came into this place of worship today, who has any thing more to do, in order to be one, than to just come into the same really honest mind. You call not will to believe what is true, and do all right, as fast as you can find it and forever, and go out hence in your sins. Are you not ready my friends for this new and nobler kind of life? Call you lie down tonight and sleep outside of this blessed integrity? How can you think of yourself with respect, as not being a Christian, when that which is demanded of you is only what you think you are demanding of everybody. True, this integrity we speak of is of a higher kind, and more real; is it therefore less to be honored, and less promptly chosen?

And now in conclusion of my subject, I will only lay down God’s indorsement upon it and upon all that I have said, in a single, but remarkable sentence of scripture. I wish it might be remembered, and stay by you always, even from this hour till your last—“For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro, through the whole earth, to show himself strong in behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward Him.” This “perfect heart” means a right conscience, a clean, simple intent. And the substance of the declaration is, that God is on the lookout always for an honest man—him to help, and with him, and for him, to be strong. And if there be one, that God will not miss of him; for his desiring, all-searching eyes are running the world through always to find him. And when he finds him, he will show himself to him in the discovery even of his strength. I believe that he has sometimes found such a man, even in the depths of heathenism, and to him been discovered as the helping and strong friend he longed for. Many a skeptic has he flooded with light, because he saw him willing, at last, to be right, and hungering for something true. This perfect heart, this soul of integrity, my friends—O if we had but this, what else could we fail of? I repeat the word thus explained—put it down to be with you, in your struggles with sin, your sickness, your poverty, your Christian defects and drynesses, all the mind-clouds, all the guilt-clouds, of your mortal state—“For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro through the whole earth to show himself strong in behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him.”

X.

LIBERTY AND DISCIPLINE.

“As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they can not fast. But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast in those days.”—Mark ii, 19.

It is one of the honorable distinctions of Christ’s doctrine that he is never one-sided; never taken, as men are, with a half-view of a subject, or a half-truth concerning it. If there is, for example, a free side, or free element, in Christian life and experience, and also a restrictive side; conditions and times of not fasting, and conditions and times of fasting; he does not fall to setting one against the other, but he comprehends both, and holds them in a true adjustment of their offices and relations. John’s disciples come to him in the question, why he does not put his disciples to fasting, as their own great prophet and the Pharisees do theirs? But instead of making light of fasting, and calling it an old, ascetic practice, now gone by, as many human teachers would have done, seeing only half the truth, and rallying a party for the part they see, he simply replies—“every thing in its time; the attendants of the bridegroom will, of course be wholly in the festive mood, while the wedding is on foot, but when it is over, they will fall into such other key as their personal condition requires. My disciples can not fast while I am with them. But when I am taken up they will turn themselves to such ways of fasting as their deprivation, or bereaved feeling requires.”

His answer, taken more spiritually, amounts to this: that when the love is full, and the soul is consciously gladdened by the present witness and felt impulse of God, any kind of restrictive, or severely self-compelling discipline is inappropriate or uncalled for, and is really out of place; but that when there is a failure of such divine impulse, when the soul is losing ground, brought under by temptation, groping in dryness and obscurity of light, then some sharp revision of the life, some new girding up of the will in sacrifice and self-discipline, is urgently demanded, and must not be declined. In other words, let there be liberty in God while there may, girding up in ourselves, by forced exercise and discipline, when there must; let the soul go by inspiration when the gale of the Spirit is in it, and when it has any way stifled or lost the Spirit, let it put itself down upon duty by the will; when the divine movement is upon it, let it have its festal day with the bridegroom, and when the better presence fades or vanishes, let it set itself to ways of self-compulsion, moving from its own human center.

Much the same general truth though differently conceived, is taught by Paul when he represents the Christian soul as a coin having two seals or mottoes, on the two sides; on the obverse, or face—“The Lord knoweth them that are his;” on the reverse, or back—“Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.” It is as if divine calling, endowment, and help were on one side; self-discipline, watching, mortified lusting, and steady resolve on the other.

Liberty and discipline, movement from God’s center and movement from our own, sanctified inclination and self-compelling will, are the two great factors thus of Christian life and experience. We may figure, in a certain coarse analogy, that we live in a city having two supplies of water for its aqueduct; one upon high ground back of it, whence the water runs down freely along the inclinations of the surfaces; and the other in some lake or river on its front; whence, in case that fails, or the ducts give way, a supply is to be received by forcing, or the dead lift of the pump. The water, however, is not created in this latter case, you will observe, by the enforcement, but is taken, as in the former, from the general supply of nature’s store. So there are ways of Christian living, where every thing goes by impulse, and a gracious inspiration, flowing in, as it were, by its own free motion; and other ways and times, where a self-compelling discipline of sacrifice and painstaking are wanted to regain the irrigating grace that was practically lost or shut away, by moods of inconstancy and mixtures of subjection to evil.

It is very obvious that both these conceptions may be abused, or pushed to excess, as in fact they always are when they are taken apart from each other, and made a religion of. Thus we shall have, on one side, just what has many times appeared in this or that variety, a school of enthusiasts, living only in frames and for them, flighty, rhapsodical, ecstatic, moving in the upper air on wings, till such time as they get weary of their thin element, and consent, for comforts’ sake, to light upon the ground; when, of course, they do as the prophet’s living creatures did—“when they stood they let down their wings.” Perhaps they will spread them again, and perhaps not. They are all for inspiration, or the state of divine impulse, and nothing else is to be much accounted of. To be in this elysian state is piety, and if they chance to fall out of it, or sink away, flagging and spent, as regards their good excitabilities, they have no way of going on foot to think of, that will prove their fidelity, and put them in a sober way of blessing. They have no conception of a walking with God that is not flying with him, and their high movement commonly ends, where dissipation must, in a state of loose keeping, disability, and general collapse.

On the other side, where every thing takes the shape of will-work and discipline, the result will commonly be quite as bad. Sometimes the word will be activity, and a general campaign of doing will set every thing in a way of tumult, and aggressive motion. Responsible only for action, action will come to be just the thing most irresponsibly done. Hard, graceless, censorious, denunciatory, sometimes wild, and always unchastened by the love it magnifies, it keeps the conflagration up till the combustible matter is burned away, and then the fire goes out of course. Sometimes the word is sacrifice, and then comes on the dreary train of penances, vigils, vows of celibacy, mendicancy, and the pallid funeral hosts marching out alive to be entombed in cells. All these, making up a religion by their will, and the drill of their passionless obedience, agree, in fact, to make as hard a time of it as possible, and they will most fatally succeed; for it can not be long, ere the discipline they covet as a religion, breaks down both will and principle together, and shows them, alas! too perfect in the training of uncharity, mendacity, sensuality, and lust.

I ought also, perhaps, to name two counterfeits that cover the ground of both these particular excesses. Thus, on one side,: the argument will be, “why should I do, or attempt to do in religion, what I can not do in liberty, or from inclination? When I am not inclined to prayer why should I pray? Why cross myself in duties which I only dislike? Why put myself under service by rules that only annoy me, and do not bless me? How can I imagine that God is pleased with me, when: he finds me doing by compulsion, what he knows I distaste, and have really no heart to?”

The assumption is, in this way of. speaking, that when there is real inclination to the thing done, there is even something a little remarkable in it; a kind of superlative, or superfine, merit, such as discharges all thought of obligation respecting duties where such inclination fails. And yet the supposed. inclination, having so great value as to excuse all responsibility for inclination where there is none, is even understood to be nothing but an occasional glow of sentiment or desire, in the plane of nature; not any really divine or supernaturally inbreathed impulse. It is not of the bridegroom, raises no thought of any festal flow, in which Christ bathes their feeling. It is even the end of the law, without Christ, in a much more summary and complete sense that Christ himself could be; for it not only discharges all obligation, but forbids any farther command—how can God command what one is not inclined to already? and what he is inclined to needs, of course, no command.

The counterfeit upon the other side, is that self-reliant morality, which counts it a sufficient, or even a rather. superlative religion, to live in correct practice under rules, and makes nothing of receiving from God, or being in any consciously restored relationship with him. Christ is engaged as a Saviour, I conceive, to connect human nature with God, according to its normal idea, and have it regenerated, as by God’s restored movement in it—born of God. He wants to raise again the very plane of our existence, lifting us up out of mere self-hood into a state of divine consciousness and beatitude. This to him and this only is religion. The beaver is not more certainly below humanity, than the footing it along by mere rules, is a kind of life below the grade of religion, or concourse with God. That high world of blessing too, for which Christ has undertaken to prepare us, is not a world of good morals, but of godly affinities and free inspirations, moved, and lifted, and wafted, and glorified, and always to reign in God.

We have then two conceptions of Christian life and experience, which Christ holds comprehensively together, but which his disciples are often trying to hold separately, making a whole religion of either one or the other; and then we have a counterfeit of each, contriving how to make a religion of each, without the reality of either one or the other. Let us see now if we can bring ourselves back into the conception of Christ, and find how to hold with him both the two sides at once; setting both in that genuine mutual relationship that belongs to them. There is then

I. A ruling conception of the Christian life, which is called having the bridegroom present; a state of right inclination established, in which the soul has an immediate knowledge, or consciousness of God, and is swayed in liberty, by His all-moving, supernatural, inspirations. This kind of state, if it were complete, as it never is in this world, would, of itself, be the all of perfection and of blessedness. The whole aim of Christianity is fulfilled in this alone. No other kind of service, taken by itself, at all meets the Christian idea. Self-compelling ways of discipline, resolve, self-regulation, body-government, soul-government, carried on by the will may be wanted—I shall presently show in what manner—but no possible amount of such doings can make up a Christian virtue, and, if such virtue were perfect, they would not even be included in it. Every thing in genuine Christianity goes for the free inclination. Here begins the true nobility or princely rank of God’s sons and daughters, and they will be complete, when their inclination is wholly to good and to God. They strike the point of magnanimity, when they do the right, as God does, because they simply love the right—bearing burdens, because it is the nature of love to bear them, making sacrifices, never from fear, interest, self-consideration, always for God’s great ends of mercy and blessing. The bridegroom joy is now upon them, because their duty is become their festivity with Christ. Perfected in this duty and joy, they are complete in God’s everlasting beatitude; for there is no wear of friction in such duty, but eternal liberty and play rather. What then

II. Is the place, or office, or value of that whole side of will and self-discipline; which Christ himself assumes the need of, when the bridegroom is to be taken away? Here is the main stress of our subject, and upon the right solution of this point, its uses will principally depend.

There is then, I undertake to say, one general purpose, or office, in all doings of will, on the human side of Christian experience, viz., the ordering of the soul in fit position for God, that he may occupy it, have it in his power, sway it by his inspirations. No matter what the kind of doing to which we are called, or commanded; whether it be self-government, or self-renunciation, or holy resolve, or fasting, or steadfast waiting, the end is one and the same, the getting in position for God’s occupancy. As the navigator of a ship does nothing for the voyage, save what he does by setting the ship to her course, and her sails to the wind, so our human doings in religion, those I mean, which make up our self-compelling, self-adjusting, self-constraining discipline, are all to be concerned in setting us before God, in the way to receive the actuating impulse of his will and character. We are not called, of course, to work a religion thus, ourselves, Or by our own will. Setting sails to the wind does not propel the ship, or give it the least onward movement, as regards the voyage; and yet, without such holding of it in position, the voyage could never be made. So also a seed must have position, else it can not grow; if it is laid on a rock, or buried in sand, or sunk in water, or frozen up in ice, it will be inert as a stone; but in good warm soil, and sun, and rain; and dew, it will quicken easily enough, because it is in position. A tree will die out of position, a clock will stop out of position, a plough wants holding, a saw wants guiding, a compass wants setting; nothing in the world works rightly that has not position given it. And the reason is that every thing to be operated upon must be fitly presented to that which operates; telescopes to their objects, mills to water-falls, and souls to God.

And here is our particular human part in religion—all that we can do is summed up in self-presentation to God, or the putting of ourselves in position for his operation. Hence the call to salvation is “come,” and the complaint is, “ye will not come to me that ye might have life.” So also, when the casting down of pride and self-will is required, the forsaking of all things, the yielding up of life and whatever is most dear, these ways of self-renunciation are only the taking down of bars that fence away God’s entrance and free movement from the soul. Faith again is made the condition of salvation, in just this view, and no other; because, when a sinning soul trusts itself up to Christ, to be cared for, regenerated in good, and saved by his mercy, it is put in exactly the position toward God that is most open, and admits him most freely; even as the brazen serpent, lifted up before Israel, was to be effective in their healing, when looked upon. Out of position, with their backs toward it, there was no virtue to be received from it, because there was none expected or admitted.

So it is in the matter always of conversion, or the beginning of a new life—it is always begun, just as soon as the subject comes into position far enough to let it be. And then the same holds true of all proper Christian doings afterward—they are all summed up, either in keeping position toward God, or in regaining it after it is lost. Thus, if by reason of a still partially remaining subjection to evil, the soul should be stolen away from its fidelity and the nuptial day of its liberty should somehow be succeeded by a void, dry state, without any proper light or evidence left, then the disciple has it given him to recover himself, by getting himself in position again before God. He will take time by forcible resolve, and gird himself to a careful revision. He will set himself upon his idols to clear them away, take up his cross invoking sacrifice itself to be his helper, rectify his misjudgments, make good his injuries, slay his resentments and grudges, mortify his appetites, crucify his bosom sins, tear open all the subtleties of distemper and treason—watching all the while his new beginnings, saving carefully his little advances, doing first works humbly and tenderly, and by this drawing into position, will, if possible, make ready for the festal coming of his Lord, and the restored liberty of a son.

In this kind of struggle the disciple will get on most effectively, when for the time, he is much by himself, and much apart from the world, and even its pleasurable scenes and gifts. In one view, there will be a certain violence, or desperation sometimes in the fight of his repentances. “For behold what carefulness it wrought in you; yea what clearing of yourselves; yea what indignation; yea what fear; yea what vehement desire; yea what zeal; yea what revenge.” By these stern rigors of will, these mighty throes of battle, the disciple out of liberty will in fact be only putting himself in position to recover it. He takes himself in hand in fiery self-chastening, and rigidly enforced subjection, that he may prepare himself to God’s help. He gets confidence in this manner, by his thoroughness, to believe that God accepts him, and has the testimony given him that he pleases God. Restored in this manner to his liberty, the enemy that came in at the postern goes out at the front, and God again will have his full dominion.

Neither let any one object that all such stresses and strains of endeavor must be without merit) because they are forced and are, in one sense, without inclination. Such kind of endeavor God honors because it is practical, and not for the merit of it. What should he more certainly honor than the true endeavor of souls to present themselves to him, and get position for the complete admission of his will. If these struggles of enforcement do not belong to the perfect state of good, it must be enough that they are struggles after that state. God is practical; and without prudishness; if nothing is really good: to him that is not from the heart’s inclination, he will yet be drawn to such struggles against inclination, as he is to the cries of the ravens, and will put his benediction upon them, under that same fatherly impulse, if no other.

Holy scripture has no such dainty way of reasoning in this matter, as they give us, who, by affected reverence, excuse themselves from all rough discipline, because they have no inclination for it. It even commands us to serve, when we are not in a key to reign. “Mortify therefore, your members which are upon the earth”—do men mortify themselves by inclination? “Ye have crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts”—do we this self-crucifying by inclination? “Deny thyself, take up thy cross”—do we deny ourselves by inclination, or take up the cross for inclination’s sake? When Christ again, to get a certain rich moralist or formalist into position for God, bids him sell all that he has and give to the poor and come and follow—whereupon he “goes away sorrowful”—does the sad questioner sorrow because he is required to have his inclination? The Saviour too has even a more cutting requirement than this—“And if thy right eye offend thee pluck it out; if thy right hand offend thee cut it off.” Is there any thing in which we are farther off from inclination, than in plucking out right eyes and cutting off right hands? What in fact is the very point of the Saviour’s meaning here but to say, put your will down upon whatever is hardest and most against your inclinations—any thing for position.

How feeble, superficial, sophistical, and withal, how very like to a practical mockery of all deep movement in religion is that word so often ventured, and of which I have already spoken—“Why should I pray when I do not feel inclined to it? Why should I go to church, why should I read the scriptures, why should I give alms, why should I hold myself to observances, all which I am weary of, and in fact really dislike? If I can not offer God from the heart, what better is my offering given than withheld? Just contrary to all such feeble platitudes Christ, we have seen, appoints a grandly rugged, thoroughly real, massive, discipline, by which souls, at best only half inserted into good are to hold on their way: and press themselves down upon the constancy their fickle hearts would fly. Filling them to the full, if he possibly may with holy inspirations and loving impulses, he counts even this a gospel on one foot, if he may not also put them every man to a hard fight of discipline, and watch, and drill and resisting even unto blood. When the inspiration is upon them, he will let the festive movement flow in its liberty. And when the grace-power lulls or is gone, he will have them take their turn of discipline, to gather up by their will, and bring into position for God’s occupancy, all their vagrant and unsteady functions; so to strengthen the things that remain and are ready to die. These two things, in fact, he will hold, if possible at all times, to a close and practically guarded comprehension, the festive and the restrictive, the movement of love and the self-girding watch.

But I should not produce any just impression of the immense reach of this very practical matter—the so ordering of our life, on the side of self-discipline, as to be always squaring ourselves to God, and holding true position before Him—if I did not specify some of the humbler and more common matters in which it is to be, or may be, done.

Order, for example—how great a thing is it for a Christian, or indeed, for any one, to keep his life and practice and business in the terms of order? Holding himself steady, and squaring his habit thus carefully by system in God’s will, his very order is itself position—the orbit he traverses having God to traverse it with him; and the worlds of the sky will not be more surely and steadily moved in their rounds, than he by God’s impelling liberty. Fallen out of this order into all disorder and confusion, how can he ever be in position for God, till he comes back into the exactness and true discipline of the same?

A responsible way has the same kind of value. An irresponsible man has no place for God or God’s liberty. But a soul that stays fast in concern for all good things—responsible for the church, for the brethren, for the welfare and salvation of perishing men, for the vices and woes of society, for the good of the country—is just so far in position with God, and ready for his best inspirations. God loves responsible men, and delights to keep them in the full endowment of strength and liberty.

Openness and boldness for God, the readiness to be found on God’s side in the full acknowledgment of his name and people, is an absolute requisite, as regards the effective revelation of God in the soul. Whoever will not thus acknowledge God, in a bold commitment of himself before the world to his cause, wants the firm courage and manly truth of feeling which puts him in position. Real and bold devotement is magnanimity, and where there is nothing of one, there is nothing of the other—as little receptivity therefore for God. God loves to be trusted, and loves the men that can boldly take their part with him. When they stand openly for his name, he stands by them, and puts his. might upon them.

Descending to what is in a still humbler key, let me speak of honesty—how a large and faithfully complete honesty puts every soul in true position before God. A single eye—that is honesty; and “if thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” But the honesty of which I thus speak, is more and higher, you will observe, than mere commercial honesty. That will do justice to customers and laws of trade, but not to enemies, and least of all, to God. There is no reality in it therefore, more than there would be in doing justice to customers of one country, or color, and not to those of another. Called honesty in the market, it still may, and, many times, certainly is, hypocrisy and a lie. Real honesty takes in principle, engaging to do justice every where, every way, every day, and specially to God’s high truth and God. O, what a presentation that to invite the incoming of God! Who is in position for God but he that will clear himself, thus impartially, of every wrong and injury; and how certainly will God’s spirit flow into such a bosom, in how full a. tide of liberty! How completely open here is the gate of possibility for all greatest and divinest things!

I could speak of things yet humbler and more common; such, for example, as dress and society. These are matters which we commonly put even outside of the pale of religious concern, or responsibility. And yet there is how much in them to fix the soul’s position toward God. How perfectly evident is it that one may dress for the Holy Spirit and the modest opening of the soul to God’s manifestation; or so as to quite shut away any possible visitation from the divine. In the same way, society may be observed in such a way of sobriety and grandly true hospitality, that angels, much more Christ and God, will gather to it unawares; or in such a way of ambition, flashiness, and worldly assumption, that the Holy Spirit can not get room in it for any smallest dispensation of his gracious impulse. I speak not here for any sumptuary, or morbidly scrupulous, restriction. I only say that there may be enough, in the modes of dress and society, to quite settle the matter of the soul’s position toward God.

Not pursuing these illustrations further, it must be enough that we have found, and practically verified two elements in Christian life and experience, liberty and discipline, God’s free movement and our own self-constraining will. That is the heavenly state of blessing and perfection; this our human concern to get, as in conversion, recover, as in dryness and decay; or keep, as in all most ordinary goings on of life, the position toward God that commands his bestowment of the other.

But what, of fasting? the very thing about which my text is itself concerned, and about which I have said as nearly nothing as possible. In one view it is even so; in another I have been speaking of nothing else; for the whole course of argument pursued has been tracing its fit place and relationship, as an integral part, or factor, of the true Christian discipline.

Are we then to allow, some will ask, that fasting belongs to Christianity? I certainly think so. Did not Christ himself declare that his disciples should fast after he was gone? Did he not also begin his great ministry, by a protracted fast, which duly considered, and rightly conceived, constitutes one of the grandest and most impressive chapters of his story? It is easy, doubtless, to assume, in self-compliment, that we have now come to an age of maturity that permits us to conceive the Christian grace more worthily, but no such assumption will be very impressive as against the example of Christ himself! Some will also maintain, more argumentatively, that fasting is a bodily penance, excluded by the genius of Christianity; but when Christ is heard, in his great, first, sermon, discoursing of it just as he does of prayer and of alms, and giving it exactly the same promise of reward, the conclusion appears to be not far off that, either they do not, or Christ did not, understand Christianity!

It is a great mistake of many, in our time, that they are so easily carried by a certain half-illuminated declamation against asceticism. Let us have nerve enough to withstand the odium of a word, and be less superficial, and just as much stronger in our practical life. For there is—I put the issue boldly that it may not be missed—a good asceticism that belongs to Christianity, as a worthy and even rationally integral function; the same which an apostle describes when he says, “I exercise myself (ασκω) to have a conscience void of offense.” By which he means that he puts himself to it by the direct training of his will, even as a rider trains a horse by the rein.

In this good asceticism, we take ourselves away purposely, when it seems to be needed, from society, from gain, and from animal indulgence, that we may assert, with more emphasis, the principle of self-subjection to God, or gird ourselves anew to the divine keeping. Thrusting down a whole side of our nature that habitually assumes to be uppermost, we get in this manner a powerful shove of reaction; for the great law of action and reaction holds universally, both in the worlds of matter and mind. In this manner painstaking itself is a great element of success; not because it is the taking of so much pain, as if there were some merit in that, but because the mind gets a confidence of honest meaning in it, such as nerves the soul to sacrifice, and gives it assurance with God. Christianity, as I have Shown, takes in this element. Filling us with great inspirations, it puts us to a stout self-discipline also, that we may get position for still greater, and a still more victorious liberty.

Over against this good asceticism, there is also a false and a bad, as already intimated. It makes a virtue of self-torment, contrives artificial distresses to move on God’s pity, or pacify his resentments, or purchase his favor. It macerates the body to make the soul weak and tender. It dispenses, in fact, with faith itself, and even thinks to square its account with God, by a due contribution of bodily pains and privations.

This bad asceticism we exclude, the good we accept. And in this, we shall train ourselves, sometimes even naturally, by a fast. If we are mortified by the discovery that the body is getting uppermost, if our Sundays are choked, our great sentiments stifled, by indulgences of the body we meant not to allow, we shall turn upon it in this good asceticism, and say to it, with a meaning—“I keep under the body.” In the same way, if we can not find how to bear an enemy, if we recoil from sacrifices that are plainly laid upon us, if we have no great courage to meet a great call, we shall emulate the example of Cromwell’s soldiers, who conquered first the impassive state, by their fastings and prayers, and then sailing into battle as men ironclad, conquered also their enemies; or better still, we shall emulate those martyrs, who could sing in the crisp of their bodies, because they had trained their bodies to serve. So again if we are losing ground, getting under the world, heated by prosperity, soured by disappointment, bittered by resentments and grudges, we shall do well to seek the wilderness, taking our temptation with us to be mastered. So again if we have some great crisis upon us, even as our Master had, some turn of life to settle that will settle every thing; or if we have great endowments coming upon us, or coming out in us, that we must be responsible for—property, place, eloquence, fame, beauty, genius—what a girding do we need to meet our occasions, or even to effectually stifle the nonsense of pride and foolish suggestion. O, if we could set ourselves in position thus for God’s call and his Christly inspirations, how cheap the discipline would be.

Observed on occasions like these, a fast will sometimes wonderfully clear the atmosphere of the mind. The sentiments will be quickened in their play. The imagination, which is a great organ for religion, will get a more reverberative ring. The conscience will become at once more rigid and more tender. All the powers will be girded up, and God will have the soul in position, waiting to be filled with his eternal life and vigor.

No such good results of fasting will follow, or will be expected, where it is improperly observed. No one should ever go into a fast, when he has the bridegroom consciously with him. Such fasting is untimely. Turning sunshine into night, and making misery gratis, when we are not miserable, is any thing but Christian, though alas! some very good people do sometimes make a merit of it.

Some persons, who are not practiced in the art, so to speak, of fasting, complain that they are only troubled and mentally confused by their hunger, and get no advantage from it. But when they have learned the way to set their mind facing Godward, instead of facing the body, and moving in the low range of the gastric energy, it will not be so—they will even forget to be hungry. It might be well for such to begin with a prolonged half-fast, or Lenten reduction, instead of abstinence. Feeding the body circumspectly thus, as between cage bars, they may still the growling of nature, and learn, at last how to get a spring of reaction for the mind. A prolonged bridle check upon the body is good both for it and for the rider; for what both most especially need is to get accustomed to the rein!

At the same time, fasting should always be a reality, never a semblance. To pretend a fast, when all the routine of table, office, and shop, is still going on as usual, is to make a cheat of it; such as takes away the mind’s honor, and leaves a most sorry conviction of hypocrisy in place of any benefit. But let no one make the fast excessive under pretense of making it real. It should never amount to a maceration of the body; though sometimes the benefit gained by a disciple will even tempt him to make a luxury of it. Let it be a rule that the fasting should never be more frequent or more stringent, than is necessary to maintain, for the long run of time, the very clearest, strongest, healthiest, condition both of mind and body. For the digestive function wants its Sabbaths, just as truly as any other, and will keep the soundest health when it has them.

Instead of recoiling now, my brethren from this more rugged kind of discipline, there ought even to be a fascination in the severities of it. As it is profoundly real and earnest, it will also make us strong. How often are we oppressed with the feeling that our modern piety wants depth and spiritual richness. It is as if it were in the skin and not in the heart—thin, flashy, flavorless, destitute of the heroic and sturdy qualities. It never can be otherwise, till we consent to endure some hardness, or at least to find some way of painstaking. The gymnastic we are in must be strong enough to make muscle, else we shall not have it. Hence the profound necessity, as I conceive, that there should be an ascetic side or element in this free salvation, where the disciple “exercises himself,” as the apostle has it, putting himself in training and self-chastening for success. For as the competitors in games of wrestling, and rowing, and racing, do not despise the toughest severities of training for the victory, no more should the Christian repel that nobler discipline that is to be the girding of his character. It would not do, for a way of grace, to only fondle or codle us, in tenderings of favor and soft mercy and overflowing bounty; we could not be floated into the heights of character by any such gentle tide-swing as many look for, and conceive to be the grace offered to their faith. Such a kind of treatment qualified by nothing more sturdy and severe, might even soften the brain of our piety. No, there must be an ascetic self-girding for us, as well as a gracious impulsion, something which is more than fasting, but of which that is a type. There needs to be a side of tough endeavor, in which we undertake a mighty becoming,. even punishing ourselves, so to speak, into right position for God. We must come into the vise of a rugged and fiery self-discipline, where, if we wince for the severities suffered, we still forbid our cowardly, soft, nature to yield. If there is to be any fibre in our character, there must be a Spartan discipline to make it. There was never a strong Christian, or a Christian hero, that did not put himself to being a Christian with cost. To be merely wooed by grace, and tenderly dewed by sentiment, makes a Christian mushroom, not a Christian man. It is even difficult to conceive, how those angels that excel in strength, and are called the chariots of God, ever got their vigor without some fit training; nay, it is most certain that they never did. So much meaning has our master, when charging it upon us, again and again, without our once conceiving possibly what depth of meaning he would have us find in his words—Deny thyself, take up thy cross and follow me.

XI.

CHRIST’S AGONY, OR MORAL SUFFERING.

“And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”—Luke xxii, 44.

What Christian has not many times wished that he could lay hold of the precise condition and feeling of Jesus, in this very remarkable scene or chapter, commonly called his agony? And yet a suspicion may well be indulged that we not seldom push it quite away from us, and make it unrealizable, by dogmatic solutions that rather confound than solve it. Mystery, in some sense, it certainly is, and must be; for the person itself of Christ is, internally viewed, a mystery, and the What and how, of his personal pains, in what part they affect him, under what laws of intensity, and by what internal force he is able to support them, we can never know, till we understand his psychology itself—as we certainly shall not here on earth.

Still the agony is given us, because it can somehow be seen to be for us; yielding impressions of Christ and of God, manifested in him, which it is important for us to receive. And to receive these impressions from it is, at least so far, to understand it. All the more to be regretted is it, if we interpose theologic constructions that make it impossible to all receptive sympathy. Thus if we conceive, or dogmatically assume, that Christ is in this hour of distress, because the sin of the world is upon him, to be punitively treated in his person; that God withdraws judicially from him, to make him suffer, and that the “cup” over which he groans is the cup of God’s eternal indignations; may it not be that we ourselves so far violate the subject matter, as to make it an offense to our most inborn convictions of right, and raise up mutinous questions that even forbid the discovery of its meaning to our hearts?

A much less artificial, tenderer, and, I think I shall be able to show, truer and more affecting conception of the agony is, that it rises naturally out of the perfect feeling, and the personal relations and exigences of the sufferer. Such. a being, on such a mission, meeting such objects of feeling, at such a crisis, will have just this agony, without any infliction to produce it.

The facts of the scene briefly and freely related are these. The Saviour, attended by his disciples, goes up into a dell on the slope of Olivet, and enters a certain garden or olive yard, where he had often before communed with them apart. He requires them to sit down. But there is something peculiar in his manner. A feeling of depression makes him droop in his action, and gives a drooping accent to his voice. He signifies to three of their number that he wants their company while he goes forward a little way, to pray. Heretofore he has commonly sought to be alone in prayer, going apart at dead of night, and ascending this or that high mountain top, there to be closeted with God in solitude. The depression that before appeared now becomes a crushing weight upon him. In the language of the narrative, he begins to be sorrowful and very heavy. He speaks too, unable to suppress his feeling—“My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.” And then he adds what indicates even greater anguish, such as almost takes away his self-possession—“do not leave me, do not sleep, stay here and watch with me!” He goes forward a few steps, falling upon his face, which is the eastern posture of extreme sorrow and despair, and there he cries aloud—“O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” He rises and turns back to his friends, but the weight is still heavy on his heart, and he throws himself again upon his face. And he does it again, even a third time. There is also given us, in the narrative made out by Luke, the pathology of his feeling—“And being in an agony, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” Which is the same as to say, that the agony of feeling he was in was so intense that, under the laws of bodily affection, there were forced out, through the pores of the skin, large drops resembled to blood. An ancient writer reports the fact of a bloody sweat, or a sweat exceeding like to blood, produced by the bite in India of a poisonous serpent, and the same thing is reported, I believe, as a result of certain bodily diseases that produce very intense suffering. But the symptom is none the less peculiar here, since it is not the effect of any poison, or physical pain, but of a purely mental anguish.

Thus far, as relates to the agony, or crisis of pain itself, reported in the narrative. Other points relating to his conduct in the scene, will come into view as we inquire into the causes of the agony, and need not be recited. Whence and why, this very strange crisis of mental anguish? According to a very common impression, as already intimated, the suffering has a judicial character, and is to be taken as a theologic factor, in a scheme of retributive justice. The conception is that Christ has somehow come into the place of transgressors, to receive upon his person what is due to them, and that God, accepting him in that office, launches upon him the abhorrence or displeasure, that is clue to them; inflicting upon him, as it were, deserved pains by withdrawing from him and letting fall upon him the horror of darkness under which he groans. The facts of the narrative have been so frequently, or even habitually, submitted to this construction, that our first concern will be to make a revision of the facts, ascertaining how far they give it their support.

Thus it is alleged, as a striking peculiarity of the scene, that the suffering appears, on a merely human footing, to be out of place. Before the arrest, in a quiet place out of the city, at a still hour of the night, when he has all his friends about him, and judging by outward tokens, has far less reason to apprehend violence from his enemies than he has had many times before—such is the time and place, where Jesus falls into his dreadful agony and great horror of distress. In which he certainly appears to be exercised in a way that is not human, invaded by a suffering that can not on mere human principles be accounted for. And this fact favors the conviction, it is imagined, that he suffers because some mysterious judicial infliction is descending upon him, from a source invisible. But such a conclusion is rather made up theologically for the scene, than drawn from the facts themselves. No single intimation of any such thing is, either contained in the facts, or given out by the narrative.

Again his language, in the figure of the “cup”—“if this cup may not pass away from me except I drink it”—is taken as favoring the idea of some suffering, in the nature of infliction. But do we not use the same kind, of language ourselves, having still no such thought as that the cup of anguish we speak of, or pray to have taken away, is a judicial infliction? This figure too of the cup is used, in scripture, for all kinds of experience, whether joyful, or painful. Thus we have the “cup of salvation,” “the cup of consolation,” “the cup of trembling,” “of fury,” “of astonishment,” “of desolation.” Whatever God sends upon a man to be deeply felt, and by whatever kind of Providence, whether benignant, or disciplinary, or retributive, is called his cup. How then does it follow, when Christ speaks of his cup, that it is a cup of judicial chastening? Besides, does he not say to his followers—“ye shall indeed drink of my cup;” and is any thing more fixed in this penal view of Christ’s agony, than that no human being can, at all, participate in such matter of atonement? And, that being true, his cup, as he himself speaks, can not, in this particular instance at least, have reference to any penal suffering, and probably has not in any other.

Again the agony is accounted for as having been caused by the judicial withdrawment of the Father; leaving him to feel the weight, in his human person, of that displeasure which is due to the sins of the world, now upon him. There is no intimation whatever, to this effect in the narrative, but his exclamation afterward, in the scene of the cross—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,”—is carried back to the agony to fix this construction upon it. But there is not the least reason to suppose that Christ means literally to say, in the exclamation referred to, that God has forsaken him. Did he not comfort himself but a short time previous, in the assurance—“therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life for the sheep?” how then can he imagine that God is forsaking him, in just the sacrifice for which he loved him? Nay it was only an hour ago that he was saying, in the dearest confidence, and in tender appeal even to the Father—“I have glorified thee on the earth, and now I come to thee.” Besides it is represented by Luke, in his account of the agony itself, that an angel is sent unto him to strengthen him; does God then send his angels to support whom he himself forsakes? And again, when he says in his prayer, three times repeated—“Not as I will but as thou wilt,” what does he indicate, according to all human methods of judgment, but the dearest present confidence in God and repose in his favor? It must also be noted, again, that, between the agony and the crucifixion, and even before he leaves the garden, he formally declares just this confidence, saying—“Thinkest thou that I can not now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?” The whole account in short, is crowded full of the most decisive proofs that he does not himself imagine any such thing as that he is forsaken of God and judicially given up to suffering. Let it also be observed, that when he utters the cry, “why hast thou forsaken me,” he is just reeling out of life; requiring his outcry therefore to be taken as a mere interjectional utterance of distress. Nothing could be further from him than to be protesting God’s severity thus, in the article of death.

But he does it nevertheless, some one will say; for if we take his words interjectionally, why should he vent his sufferings by the outcry of what is not true? Because, I answer, the not true is often the most vehemently, best uttered truth. Thus when Jonathan and his armor bearer broke into the camp of the Philistines, the wild commotion, or panic, they two raised in the army, and the garrison, and all the people, is described by saying, “and the earth quaked; so there was a very great trembling.” Does any one suppose that the earth really quaked on that occasion, or is it said only to set off the trembling? So when Paul, in the shipwreck, says, “not one hair of your head shall perish,” it is not impossible that a good many hairs of the multitude were lost in their drifting ashore. He only said there should not, as a way of promising the safe landing more emphatically. Outcries too, of this kind are always to be taken freely, as the utterance of tragic feeling, or suffering, not as the language of historic allegation. Exactly so Zion cries in her distress, “the Lord hath forsaken me;” when immediately God answers, “I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.” It will be a great day, I must add, for the scriptures, when the dull soul of dogmatism has done with its undiscerning inflictions; when poetry is taken for poetry, passion for passion, and the hyperbolic intensities of interjection, never again for propositional statements.

I will further add what ought, by a short method, to finish the argument, apart from all criticism on the terms of the narrative, that the absolute morality of God makes any such withdrawment of the Father impossible. That eternal goodness should forsake goodness in suffering, and even to make it suffer, in a way of gaining ulterior ends or advantages however merciful, is to pawn the eternal chastities of character for ends of beneficence; which, as certainly as God is God, will never be done.

Dismissing now this artificial, over-theological, way of conceiving the agony as a judicial infliction, let us endeavor

Secondly to find the spring of it, in a way that looks to the simple character and conditions of the sufferer himself. I greatly mistake, if it does not so become, at once, more intelligible, and as much more effective on our feeling, as it is closer to the range of our human sympathies.

That it is not resolvable into fear is, I think, sufficiently evident. It is quite incredible that a character of such transcendent worth and majesty should be thus appalled, thus miserably shaken, or dissolved, by fear of any kind. Besides, in fear the blood flies the skin, rushing back upon the heart, and leaving a deadly pallor over the whole exterior aspect; while here we have a kind of agony that racks the soul, in some way, at the very center of life, forcing the blood outward and driving it even through the skin. In which we may see as conclusively as possible, that fear, the common human weakness, had nothing to do with his suffering. It must also be noticed that the account given of his agony does not call it fear. It simply declares that he was sorrowful, “exceeding sorrowful,” a state which has nothing to do with fear.

And yet he is shaken, somehow, in a degree that would not be considered honorable in a man of ordinary spirit, when about to die. Not only does the very great and wise man Socrates surpass him in the noble composure of his last hours, but thousands of malefactors even have received the sentence of death for their crimes, with a better show of serenity and self-possession.

We have a great matter then to account for, viz., that Jesus Christi the incarnate Word of God, a being who has never had to acknowledge a sin, or had the feeling of it, a perfect character who has confronted every sort of peril in his works of mercy, one who shows the most perfect confidence in God and the final success of his cause, is yet somehow shaken by the most dreadful agony—rent as it were asunder, by his agitated sensibility—when he meets the prospect of death.

The first thing that occurs to us is that this agony can not be simply human. It visibly exceeds, in its degree, all that we know of human sensibility. Calling it then divine, if only we could think it possible for the divine sensibility to be a suffering sensibility, the question would begin to open. That this suffering sensibility should not fearfully wrench, and burden even to crushing, the human vehicle it occupies, is scarcely credible. A suffering that exceeds the proportions of the vehicle must needs appear by violent symptoms—even as a powerful engine in a frail, light-timbered vessel, must needs make it groan heavily, or shake it even to wreck.

What then is the fact? Is there any sensibility in God that can suffer? is He ever wrenched by suffering? Nothing is more certain. He could not be good, having evil in his dominions, without suffering even according to his goodness. For what is goodness but a perfect feeling? and what is a perfect feeling but that which feels toward every wrong and misery according to its nature? And thus it is that we freely impute to him, whether we observe it or not, every sort of painful sensibility that is related to bad and suffering subjects. We conceive of him as feeling displeasure, which is the opposite of pleasure. We ascribe it as one of his perfections that he compassionates, which means that he suffers with, the fallen. We conceive that he loathes what is disgusting, hates what is cruel, suffers long what is perverse, grieves, burns, bears, forbears, and is even afflicted for his people, as the scripture expressly declares. All which are varieties of suffering. We also ascribed it to God, as one of his perfections, that he is impassible; but here, if we understand ourselves, we mean that he is physically impassible, not that he is morally so. Moral impassibility is really to have no sensibilities of character, which is far as possible from being any perfection. Indeed there is a whole class of what are called passive virtues that can not, in this view, belong to God at all, and his perfection culminates without including more than half the excellencies demanded even of us, in the range of our humble, finite capacity.

There is then, we conclude, some true sense, in which even God’s perfection requires him to be a suffering God—not a God unhappy, or less than perfectly, infinitely, blessed; for, though there be many subtractions from his blessedness, there is never a diminution; because the consciousness of suffering well brings with it, in every case and everlastingly, a compensation which, by a great law of equilibrium in his and all spiritual natures, fully repays the loss; just as Christ, assailed by so many throes of suffering sensibility—in the temptation, in his ministry, in the garden—still speaks of his joy, and bequeathes it as a gift most real and sublime to his followers.

Now it is this suffering sensibility of God that most of all needed to be revealed, and brought nigh to human feeling, in the incarnate mission of Jesus; not being revealed in any sufficient measure through nature and the providential history of men. It was necessary for us to feel God in his feeling, to know him in his passive virtues—his patience, forbearance of enemies, compassion, pity, sympathy, and above all, his deep throes of love, agonizing for the salvation of transgressors and wanderers from his fold. This, accordingly, is just what we are to look for in the agony so called, viz., a true discovery to our hearts of God’s intensity and depth, in those suffering virtues by which his transcendently sovereign nature is exercised.

Christ then, we shall expect to find, suffers in his agony, not because it is put upon him judicially from without, but only as his better nature should and must in the crisis that has overtaken him. Not to particularize further, two great sources, or causes of anguish open upon him at once; firstly the chastity of his pure feeling recoils, with horror, from the hell-gulf of wrong and wild judicial madness into which he is now descending; and secondly the love he has for his enemies brings a burden of concern upon his heart, that oppresses and, for the time, well nigh crushes him. Of these two modes or kinds of anguish I will speak in their order.

Christ, is a being of unsullied innocence, or even of divine purity, though incarnated into the corporate evil and retributive disorder of the world, to bear its liabilities and be himself a part of it. This retributive disorder of the race is what is called in scripture “the curse;” and, being himself a man, he is just so far in it as he is human. In all his previous ministry—in his temptation, in his healings, in the arts of hypocrisy and the cruelties of wrong he has encountered, he has been struggling often with the sense of recoil, or even with pungent visitations of horror difficult to be suppressed. But now, as he nears the great crisis of his life, he beholds the corporate evil, or curse, gathering itself up to a deed upon his sacred person, that will display just all that is most horrible in it. He is not afraid, but his pure feeling shudders at the madness which is ready to burst upon him—shudders even the worse that it is to be judicial madness. For, though God is not going to deal judicially with him, he does perceive that the rage of sin, ordinarily restrained and graciously softened by God’s Spirit, is now to be let forth in his betrayers and crucifiers, in just the madness that judicially belongs to it—so to glass itself before conviction, in a deed of murder upon the only perfect being that ever trod the world, nay a deed of murder upon divine love itself! This it is that, in sad note of warning, he testifies, when his enemies come shortly after, to arrest him—“For this is your hour, and the power of darkness.” He refers to no power of darkness, as many contrive to understand, upon himself; it is darkness upon them, his enemies—judicial darkness, the full, unmitigated, natural curse of wrong. This is “the cup” over which he groans, and which he is now to drink; the wormwood and the vinegar of the world’s wild malice. The suffering and death are penal upon him, only in the sense that all martyrs suffer penally, when the corporate judgments of God upon their wicked times and wicked fellow-men, infuriate and even dehumanize their natural feeling. But the martyrs are sinners, suffering as such at the point of their faith; he is the sinless, suffering at the point of his innocence. They suffer as men, still bronzed in their susceptibility, by the old demoralization of sin; he as the celestial one, and as a pure superhuman feeling must. The recoil of his horror is dreadful, quite unimaginable probably by us, and his poor human vehicle breaks under the shock, even as a stranded ship under the heavy blows of the sea. He groans aloud, falls upon his face, calls to his friends to stay by him, utters anguished cries to God, shows discolored drops resembled to blood exuding from his face—suffers in a word more incontinently, a great deal, than either soldier, philosopher, or man of spirit should, nay than many a malefactor would! And so, it truly seems to me, that he ought: for who of all mankind had ever a tithe of his sensibility to evil. Indeed one of the most difficult things for us mortals is to be duly shocked by wrong and feel a just horror of its baseness. Impassive to fear, even as God himself, he is yet wrenched all through, in every fiber of sensibility, by the appalling and practically monstrous scene before him—human creatures!—creatures in God’s image!—going to crucify their Divine Friend from above!—God’s messenger and their Saviour! By their bloody hands he is himself to die! Verily it is given unto men to die, but ah! it was not given unto him. Death has no rights against him. Nothing but the corporate liability of his incarnation puts him under it. He shudders in throes of recoil, even as God’s pure angels would, meeting such a death; nay more and worse, as he has a vaster nature, and a deeper sensibility, with only a human apparatus to support the shock!

Now this suffering of the agony is the suffering, in one sense, of justice, answering doubtless many of the uses conceived by those who contrive to make it a suffering divinely inflicted. It is a suffering that he undergoes in God’s retributive order. In one view it is the curse that murders him, being that power of darkness and corporate evil that has come upon the world, as disordered and shaken out of God’s harmony, by the recoil of transgression. His very incarnation had put him into or under it, and he would not even by the power of miracle push the liability away; for it was one of his purposes to offer such a tribute of respect to God’s retributive order, as would sanctify it in the feeling, and fix it in the convictions of mankind. Thus, by his power of miracle, he could have made to himself a testudo, so to speak, of inviolable protection against the rage of his enemies, but he preferred instead to suffer just what men are suffering, in that penal disorder and social dislocation, which God, in judgment, has appointed for the fact of sin. It was in his heart to let God’s justice have its due honors, breaking out, at no one point, from the fiery liability into which he had come, in becoming a man. He consented thus to let the hell which scorches wrong scorch him too, claiming no exception even for his innocence. Behold, he would say, O man, God’s sacrament of wrath that is on thee, revealed by the wrath its poison stirs within thee; and because it is the ordinance of his justice, bear witness that I spurn it not, neither ask that my integrity excuse me from it! Sacred it shall be because it is right; and being for man as man, a power of darkness for all sin, I will take the bitter cup for thy sake! Only this be noted, since the malediction working in thee will not suffer even goodness to live, how certain it is that blindness, madness, murder, all that is called hell, goes with thy sin, whose eternally just and sufficient penalty it is that it shall live in its own fires, and be itself!

After such a tribute paid to the instituted justice of God, who will imagine that the forgiveness of penitent souls will loosen the joints of governmental order? By this submission of Christ to man’s curse or lot of penalty—penalty in no other sense to him—an impression will be made for God’s justice, and a sting of conviction sharpened against sin, that will even start a new sense of his law, and the penal order of his rule in the hearts of all mankind. Even as Christ himself anticipated when he said—“Of sin because they believed not on me.” Also as it was anticipated for him that under and by his suffering mission, “the thoughts of many hearts should be revealed.” And again, still further back, in the ancient prophecy—“They shall look on me whom they have pierced.” All which was to be signally proved by the result of his crucifixion—“And all the people that came together to that sight, beholding the things which were done, smote their breasts and returned.” When had they ever felt the horrible nature and the justly damning power of their sin as now?

It remains to speak of yet another and very distinct kind of suffering included in the agony, viz., the suffering Christ bore on account of his love. As he recoiled in horror from the spirit and deed of his enemies, so he was oppressed by his anguish of concern for the men. He had come into the world, in the fullness even of God’s love, to unbosom that love to the sight and feeling of mankind. As respects all enemies and rejectors, it had been a suffering love even from eternity, and it will be none the less a suffering love that it has taken humanity for its vehicle. Every sort of love connects some kind of suffering greater or less—desire, concern, affliction, anguish. A bliss in itself, it is even a bliss intensified, by the burden it so willingly or even painfully bears. Thus it is that friendship, charity, motherhood, patriotism, carries each its burden, light or heavy, according to the nature and degree of its love and according to the want, or woe of its object. What then must the feeling of Christ be, when he looks upon his enemies in the near prospect of death at their hands—death horrible to him, and a sacrilegious murder in them. If the great liberator Moses, discouraged and crushed in feeling by the perversity of his people, cried—“I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me, and if thou deal thus with me kill me;” if Paul, himself a man, was constrained, by the burden of a man’s love, to say—“I have great heaviness and continued sorrow in my heart; for I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ, for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the faith;” who shall wonder at the anguish of Christ’s burden, when he bows himself under it to the ground, when he calls it his “cup,” when he cries, “my soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death?” If the love of a human benefactor will sometimes beget anguish, what will the love of God do less than to create an agony?

And yet how little will our dull-hearted world bronzed in evil, habitually unloving, unvisited or seldom visited, by a consciously tender compassion; how little, indeed, will the most unselfish, or even beneficently Christian of us, conceive this agony of the divine love for men! Our hearts make feeble answer to it at the best; so feeble that there even seems to be a kind of overdoing, or overfeeling in it. Indeed we are even wont ourselves, for dignity’s sake, to halve our own little emotion and we do the same unconsciously for the emotion of God; halving it also again, by the consideration here let in, that his love is only love to transgressors and enemies. Ah! if we could think it, that is just the fact, in which God’s love becomes an agony; leaving, as it were, the ninety and nine of his friends, to go after that one who has gone astray, and rejoicing more over that, as he has felt the loss with a more painful concern. God’s love has no burden of pain for the good; it sharpens to a pain only when it looks upon the evil. And here precisely is the stress of Christ’s agony.

When I consider thus who Christ was, what the love he bore, what the crime his enemies were going to perpetrate, invoking, in horrible delusion, his blood upon themselves and their children; I seem to get some little, dim, conception of his anguish for them, in this dreadful hour. I can not go to the depth of it, I can not ascend to the height of it, but I can perceive why it should transcend my feeling and even the possible reach of my conceptions. It is even the more credible too that its tokens do so plainly exceed all human demonstrations. The most adequate and complete thing we can say of it is, that it reveals the Suffering Holiness of God.

The reason of the agony then—this is our conclusion—lies in the facts themselves; in the sensibilities of the sufferer and the causes acting on those sensibilities. No theologic reason, such as makes him suffer by infliction, or by the judicial forsaking of God, has even a tolerable pretext, aside from the theory that makes up such a construction for its own sake. Even the justice of God is more adequately impressed and set before the world more convincingly, without any so revolting conception, than with it. Never was there made before such an expression of God’s abhorrence to sin, as in this recoil of Christ’s agony from it; never such honor put upon God’s instituted justice, as in Christ’s submission to the corporate woe and penal madness of it. Never was the horrible nature of sin so revealed to human conviction, as by this agony of compassion, on one side, met by such judicial blindness and even phrenzied malice, on the other.

Can there now my friends, be any thing more strange than that multitudes of you, having had full time to ponder this scene, and take its meaning after the fact, should still adhere to your sin, nay should even be quite insensible to it and the feeling of God concerning it. Beholding this immense sensibility of God, you still have none! O it is even appalling! Rightly conceiving such a fact, you would even start from yourself! Were you called by some angel, in the brightness of the sun, or by voices of thunder in the clouds, it would signify much less; but that you should not feel the silent call of God’s feeling ought to make you think even with dread of yourself. When the Christ of Gethsemane meets you bathed in the sad drops of his divine sorrow, there certainly ought, if there be any feeling left, to be some answering sorrow in you. Is there still none? What a relation this between your sensibility and goodness—functional death, lying as a rock in Gethsemane, feeling as little that horror of sin, softened as little by that sorrowing love! O thou highly gifted creature, what kind of attainment hast thou made!

The lessons derivable to us, my brethren, from this subject are many; I can only call attention specially to this one, that as Christ suffers in his agony, not by the forsaking of God, not by any kind of infliction making compensation to eternal justice; but naturally, because of his character, and the crisis into which he has come, so there will be times and conditions where we shall suffer in like manner, according to our measures, and the degree of our likeness to him. Purity in us will shudder, love in us will bear its burden of sorrow. It is no presumption or profanation for us to think of being with him in his passion, we shall even require it of ourselves, as a necessary Christian evidence. Even as he himself declares—“ye shall indeed drink of my cup.” Not that we are to be as deep in the pains of holy sensibility as he—that is impossible. Not that we are to make a point of suffering much, and be always talking of some dreadful burden that is on us, and having it as a point of merit to be always in a groaning testimony. Christ did not make a three-years’ funeral of his ministry. Once he had a heavy struggle of temptation, telling never a word about it but the close. Once, and again, he wept. Once he declared that his soul was troubled. Once he fell into an agony, and was very soon through with it. It was never his way to suffer more than he must, or to call for sympathy by a show of his sorrows. On the other hand, no disciple is to make a merit of being always floated in a luxury of bliss, as if the gospel had no purpose more rugged and practical than simply to beget an elysian frame. Much less may a disciple think it well that he suffers nothing, or is never overcast in his feeling, when the simple reason is that his soul is cased in the indifference of sloth and worldly living. No pangs of life are suffered by the dead! As certainly as your Master’s love is in you, his work will be upon you. His objects will be yours, and also his divine burden. And sometimes that burden will be heavy. If your heart grows pure, it will just so far be shocked and revolted by the wrath and wrong of evil-doers. As certainly as you have feeling, you will have the pains of feeling. Expect to have your part then with Jesus in his Gethsemane. Come in freely hither, tarry ye here and watch. Out of his agony learn how to bear an enemy; what to do for your enemies and God’s. If your intercessions sometimes turn to groans, if you sometimes wonder that being a Christian you are yet so heavily, painfully, burdened, almost crushed with concern for such as you are trying to save, let your comfort be that so you drink indeed your Master’s cup. If your love is repelled with scorn, and your good work baffled, and your heart grows heavy under sorrow and discouragement—ready to sink under its load—come hither and pray with Jesus in his sweat of blood, “let this cup pass from me.” If wickedness grows hot in malice round you, if conspiracy and violence array themselves against you, go apart into this Gethsemane of your Lord’s troubles, and be sure that some good angel shall be sent to strengthen you; is not Christ’s heart wringing for you more bitterly than yours for itself—tarry ye here and watch. If some demon of impatience whispers, here or there, “why not give it up?” behold the agonizing obedience of Christ, faithful unto death, and say, with him, “not as I will but as thou wilt.” Look for no mere holiday of frames, but for such kind of joy as a heart may yield that is many times broken by sacrifice. Behold your Master prostrate on the ground, and by his agony and bloody sweat, be girded for a passion of your own. Consent with Christ to suffer; and when having gotten his victory, he says “rise, let us be going,” go, not faltering, even though he lead you to the cross.

XII.

THE PHYSICAL SUFFERING, OR CROSS OF CHRIST.

For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.—Heb. ii, 10.

It is a fact worthy of distinct notice, that our apostle is here making answer to the very same question that Anselm propounded for settlement, a thousand years afterward, in his very famous treatise, the Cur Deus Homo? And despite of the very great admiration won by this treatise, I feel obliged to suffer an impression, that the apostle has greatly the advantage; writing out his answer with a freer hand, and a far more piercing insight, and presenting, in fact, the whole subject more adequately, in a single sentence, than the much venerated father was able to do in the high theological endeavor of his volume.

In the verse previous to this sentence, which is my text, finding Jesus made a little lower than the angels, and, for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor, it is as if his mind began to ask, even as Anselm did, why should he suffer thus, or come, in the way of suffering, at all? why could not God, the Almighty, strike out the needed salvation by a shorter method, without suffering, viz., by his omnipotent force? Whereupon he makes answer, virtually, that force is out of the question; because the needed salvation is a purely moral result, which can be accomplished only by moral means and motives—“For it became Him”—it was even a fixed necessity upon Him, the Almighty—“for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in the bringing of many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”

The words bringing and captain, here occurring, have a relationship in the original, which would not be suspected, and which disappears in the English; as if we should read—“in the bringing on of many sons unto glory, to make the bringer on” &c. There is no importance however in this reading, such as might be supposed, for a captain is a leader and bringer on of course; only we conceive the passage more fitly, if the family relationship of the two words is understood. The declaration is, and that is the matter of chief importance, that God, the Almighty, must needs work morally in such a case, and not by force: and that Christ, the leader, is made perfect, or perfectly competent, as regards the moral new creation, or bringing up unto glory, by his cross and the tragic eloquence of his death.

That we may fully develop the apostle’s meaning in this general announcement, and verify it in the orderly exposition of the points included under it, let us begin at the question where he appears to have begun himself; viz., why should Christ, in the redeeming of souls, and bringing then, unto glory, subject himself to physical suffering?—what, in other words, were the necessities and uses of that suffering?

I confine the question here, it will be observed, to his physical suffering. He encountered two distinct kinds of suffering, as we commonly use the term, viz., mental suffering, and bodily suffering; that which belongs to burdened feeling and wounded sensibility, and that which is caused by outward privation, or violence done against the physical nature; that which appears more especially in the agony, and that which appears in the death of the cross. The former kind of suffering I believe is never called suffering in the New Testament, but a being grieved; a bearing, or a burden, as in sympathy and loving concern; a being troubled in spirit, or very heavy; sorrow; agony. The word suffering is applied, meantime, I think, only to physical suffering; and was doubtless used by the apostle, in the present instance, as relating to Christ’s physical suffering only.

It is obvious enough then, at the outset, and as the first thing to be noted, that physical suffering, taken by itself, or as being simply what it is in itself, is never a thing of value. On the contrary it is; so far, a thing on the losing side of existence, a subtraction from the general sum of good. It will not help a friend, or feed an enemy, or stop a fire, or cool a fever. To the sufferer himself, looking never to any thing beyond it, or consequent upon it, but simply at what it is, it has no inherent value, like wheat and wool, anal no market value, like gold. It is not, in fact, a commodity of any kind, exchangeable or not exchangeable, but a simple incommodity—a quantity purely negative and a worse than worthless fact.

And the same exactly is true of Christ’s suffering. Taken as physical pain simply, nothing is to be made of it. All the worse and more deplorable is the loss or negation of it, that it is a suffering which has no relation to personal desert; and still more deplorable in the fact that, regarding the divine order of the sufferer, it is even a shocking anomaly, which reason can not comprehend and faith only can accept. God certainly did not want it as wanting to get so much suffering out of somebody. He does not exact a retributive suffering, even in what is called his justice, because he wants so much in quantity to even the account of wrong, but only that he may vindicate the right and testify his honor to it by a fit expression. Nothing could be more horrible, or closer akin to blasphemy, than to say that God wants pain for his own feeling’s sake; or because he is hungry for that particular kind of satisfaction. We have it as a proverb, that “revenge is sweet;” but I recollect no proverb which avers that justice is sweet; because the mind of justice is a right mind, as the mind of revenge is not; and, being right, no pain is sweet to it, not even that which chastises injustice and sin. Besides, there is, it is agreed, no justice in the pains of Christ, as being due on his own account; and it ought to be as well agreed that God could not take them as compensations on account of others. That would be taking them as actual somethings, or quantities having value in themselves, when, in fact, they have, as we have seen, no value at all. Nay worse, if God takes them, he gets only incommodities for his satisfaction, and makes a gain that is purely harm and loss.

But some one will object in the question—are not the physical sufferings of Christ what are called, in the scripture, his sacrifice for sin? and what is the use of sacrifice but to atone God’s justice? I do not understand the scripture to speak of suffering and sacrifice in that manner. Thus we hear an apostle say—“made perfect through sufferings”—for what made perfect? for the satisfying of God’s justice? No, but “to bring many souls unto glory?” “Lamb of God that taketh away”—what? the pains of justice? No, but “the sins of the world.” “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree”—for what end? that God might be satisfied with his pains? No, but “that we being dead unto sin, should live unto righteousness;” “By whose stripes”—what of the stripes? do they pay off the release of ours?—“by whose stripes ye were healed.” “For Christ also Lath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust”—in what view? to satisfy the justice of God? no, but “to bring us unto God.” All the lustral figures—those of washing, purging, sprinkling, purifying, cleansing—set forth the sacrifice in the same manner, not as a way of reconciling God to us, but of reconciling us to God. And so universally—I do not know the instance where Christ’s cross and physical suffering are conceived as a making satisfaction to God’s justice.

Regarding Christ’s sufferings then as having no value in themselves, on the ground of which they may be accepted as compensations to justice, we must not leap to the conclusion that Christ could do nothing in a way of bringing men to God, without such sufferings. He could even have been incarnated into the world, in such a way as to involve no physical liability at all. He might even have been incarnated, I suppose, into the family of Cæsar, and strid into his mission, as a prince iron-clad, in all the dignities and immunities of the Empire. He might have taught the same doctrine, omitting only his call to take up the cross, which he taught as the son of Mary. He might have healed as great multitudes, with as kind a sympathy. He might even have been followed, if he chose, by trains of great people, as he was by the humble and the poor, dining at their tables, lodging in their palaces, receiving all the while the highest honors of genius. Or if it should be imagined that, teaching faithfully the same principles, and rebuking the same sins, and offering himself to men as the incarnate Word and Lord, he must of necessity provoke the hatred of enemies, and stir up powerful conspiracies of violence and bigot zeal, what suffering could they bring upon him, armed as he was with miracle, strongly enough even to have routed the Roman army? As the posse that went out to arrest him could not strengthen their knees to stand, or their hands to seize, but fell backward on the ground even as moths fall off from flames they attack; as the moneychangers and trafficking priests fled away before him, taken by a strange panic that no single man ever raised before; so he could have withered Caiaphas by a look, and dashed his accusers away, as a rock tosses off the sea; making Pilate’s wife dream a great deal worse dreams than she did, and causing the poor servile magistrate himself to be a good deal “more afraid” than he was; and as to being gibbeted on the cross, if the conspiracy could have gone so far, he probably enough could have changed the wood into water, as he did the water into wine. There was, in short, no necessary condition of physical suffering implied in his Messiahship. He probably could not have been as complete a Saviour without physical suffering, but he could have been a wonderfully great character and beneficent teacher, as clear of spot or stain, as true in his truth, as wise in his wisdom, as evidently, and some would say, a great deal more evidently, divine.

If then Christ’s physical sufferings, taken as such, had no value, and if he could have been incarnated in the human state without suffering—doing and teaching, to a great extent, the same things—why did he come under conditions of suffering, what uses did he expect to serve by it, such as would compensate the loss? It was done I answer, that he might be made perfect by such suffering—perfect, that is, not in his character, but in his official competency; perfect as having gotten power over men, through his sufferings, to be the sufficient bringer on, or captain, he undertakes to be, in bringing many sons unto glory.

Does he then, it may be asked, undertake the suffering as having that for his object or as consenting to it for effect’s sake? He of course knows that he will suffer, and how, and when, and by whom, arid with what result, but he does not fall into the weakness of those partly fanatical martyrs who undertook the particular merit of being somehow murdered. Coming down to do a work of love, he simply took the liabilities of a human person doing such a work. He was not ignorant of the immense value or power of a right and great suffering, as regards the possible effect of it, and as sin would certainly be exasperated by his goodness, and drag him down to suffering, he meant beforehand to make it a right and great suffering, and so to win dominion by it. He suffered understandingly, therefore, as the Lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world, though not as aiming to get himself afflicted, or to make an ostentation of being wronged.

What, then, we have now to look after, is the manner and degree of that power over men’s convictions and feelings, which Christ obtained by his physical suffering. And the points to which I call your attention are such as these.

1. The manner in which, by his physical suffering, he magnifies and sanctifies the law in men’s convictions. This in fact was a kind of first point to be carried in getting the necessary power over fallen minds. The speculation that requires him to suffer in a way of helping God to justify himself in the forgiveness of sins, before certain great judicial minds in other worlds and spheres, is a speculation that to say the least travels far, and the scripture gives it no help. The true Christian idea appears to be that Christ is magnifying the law, and making it honorable, not before the remote altitudes, but before the sinning souls of this world by whom it has been trampled. How else shall they ever be regained? God is an essentially practical and not a romantic being. He will not concern himself about the figure he makes in the forgiveness of sins, before the outlying populations of his realm, if only he can bring transgressors down to ask forgiveness here on earth, by making the pinnacles of order smoke before their guilty consciences.

See then how he does it in the matter of Christ’s physical suffering. He came into the world with a perfect right to be exempted from such suffering. There is nothing in his character to require this kind of discipline, or even to make it just. He also had power to put all suffering by, and sail over the world as the stars do, in a region of calm and comfort above it. He could have exorcised the wild hate of his enemies, as he did the poor lunatics of the Gergesenes. By his power of miracle, if not without, he could have driven Pilate and his accusers out of the judgment-hall into the street, passing intact through all the conspiracies of his enemies, even as Moses passed through the sea. But he would not so far infringe on the penal order of God’s retributions., Looking on society, in its madness against him and against the truth, as grinding in God’s mill of retribution, swayed, and rent and tortured by exasperating causes in the guilt of its own transgression, he refuses to take himself out of the general torment. Having taken humanity, he takes all the judicial liabilities of human society under sin, preferring, in this manner, to submit himself to the corporate order of God’s judgments, and testify in that manner, his profound homage to law and justice. He will not so much as parry any one of the bad causations loosened by sin. He will let the world be to him just that river of vinegar and gall which its sins have made it to itself. So he bears the world’s bitter curse, magnifying, even by his pains, the essential sanctity of law and justice.

He suffers nothing as from justice to himself, and therefore makes no satisfaction to the justice of God. But he powerfully honors that justice in its dealings with the world, by refusing to let even his innocence take him out of the murderous and bloody element it mixes. Hence the marvelous, unheard of power his life and gospel, and especially his suffering death, have exerted in men’s consciences. His suffering has this wonderful divine art in it, that it sanctifies both forgiveness and justice, and makes them common factors of good, in the conscience of all transgression.

XIII.

SALVATION BY MAN.

For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection from the dead.—1. Cor. xv. 21.

It can not, of course, be the apostle’s meaning, that mankind are going literally to raise themselves from the dead. When he says “by man,” he mentally refers to Christ; only taking advantage of the fact that, since Christ the Son of God incarnate, is become a proper man, a member of the race, it is therefore permitted us to regard the whole remedy of sin, or power of salvation, as being included in humanity itself. Redemption, life, resurrection—all are, in a sense, being and to be, by man. When we say humanity, there is inclosed and, as it were, closeted in it, all the inspiration, all the light, all the life-impulse of the divine man, and so all the supernatural, resurgent powers of a complete salvation, even up to the resurrection force itself. It is not as if God had called us here from a distance, or had sent his Son to sit upon the circle of the heavens and lecture us from those supernal heights, but he has gotten him into the race by a birth, and has entered, in that manner, a corporate grace of life into the race itself.

What I propose then at the present time, is the practically important fact that Christ is not so much to be thought of as a being external, or as dispensing salvation from above, as a second Adam in the race itself; a regenerative and redemptive power, so inserted into humanity as to be in a sense of it. Just as the apostle’s language intimates—“For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection from the dead.” For this word “since” is a word of rational connection, supposing an impression felt of some inherent fitness, requiring the corporate disadvantage of the fall, to be made good by a corporate remedy. Consider then—

1. The antecedent probability of such a remedy, indicated by familiar analogies. It is not God’s manner to work all remedies in things from without, but to make them largely self-remedial, when attacked by damage, or disorder. Thus all creatures of life, all substances above the range of mineral substance, are endowed by him with recuperative functions for the repair of their own injuries. The bush that is bent to the ground does not require some other bush or even tree, to come and lift it up, but, no sooner is it let go, than it springs up suddenly by an elastic force within. Cut it down, as it begins to be a tree, and it will set new growths to pricking through the hard bark even of its stump, and so, by a newly begun architecture it will go on to build the tree it was beginning to build at the first. Every animal body has a distinct self-medicating force in its own vital nature, called by physicians and physiologists the vis medicatrix. When, therefore, it is attacked by disease, or hacked by violence, the qualified physician, knowing how it will rally its own hidden force, and put its own mysterious self-medications at work, will simply endeavor, on his part, to clear the way, and supply the needed stimulus of action, till the subtle, inborn physician, wiser and more sovereign than he, has mended the break, or completed the cure. The same is true as regards all defections of honor or character. If the man himself does not return to himself, and repair his losses by a process of recovery undertaken by himself, there is no recovery for him. The whole world toiling at his vices and dishonors, could not repair one of them. He alone has power to win the first inch of recovery. On a larger scale the same is true of society. Broken down by oppression, desolated by conquest, rent by faction, weakened by every sort of incapacity, it finally gets clear and rises, by reactions from within itself—just as Italy is rising now. The rational resurrection comes by man—man, that is, grown manlier, as God prepared him to be, by his own great struggles of devotion.

We see, in this manner, on how large a scale God contrives to incorporate powers of self-recovery in things. What then shall we expect, when humanity is broken by the irruption, or precipitation of sin, but that if he organizes redemption, he will do it in a way to have it appear as a redemption from within, executed in a sense by man.

I do not mean, of course, when I speak in this manner of “self-recovery,” and “salvation my man,” that the recovery and salvation are not by God. There is exactly the same propriety in this kind of language that there is in speaking of a harvest, or a voyage, as being by man—it is never such in the sense of excluding God and his natural agencies. Indeed the recovery and salvation of souls are more properly by man, because the agency of God is here incarnated and works in the race by a man thus inserted into it.

2. It is another point to be observed, that we not only want a supernatural salvation (for nothing less than that can possibly regenerate the fall of nature,) but in order to any steady faith in it, we must have it wrought into nature and made to be as it were, one of its own stock powers. It does not meet our intellectual conditions, till it satisfies, in a degree, the scientific instinct in us, and becomes rational and solid, by appearing to work inherently, or from within, as by a certain force of law. Moving on the soul and society, as from a point above and without, it would be here, and there, and nowhere, flitting as it were apparitionally, breaking out now as from behind the moon, and vanishing next, as our faith reels away, in we know not what spaces of the air, or abysses of the sea. What we want can be seen, at a glance, from the eagerness that hurries such multitudes of our time after the doctrine of progress. We love to look on education, political liberty, personal culture, and the sway of moral ideas, all as advancing under fixed laws of progress. This doctrine of progress is even a better kind of gospel to many, and more rational. And yet if we speak of a strictly natural progress, under natural laws, there is no fiction more utterly baseless: for after the fact of sin, or moral evil broken loose in the race, the progress of society must be inevitably downward from bad to worse. Just that too which ought to be true is true, many of the proudest, most historic races drop into extinction; and many others exist that we call savage races, just because they make no such progress, more than the animals, from age to age.

And yet we want a salvation that is to us all which this doctrine of progress pretends to be, and God defers to our want, by contriving a gospel for man that is to be, in form, by man; giving us to see the general humanity so penetrated and charged with the supernatural, by Christ living in it, as to be, in a sense, working out redemption naturally from within itself. We call it the progress of society, and such it really is, and yet, solid and scientific as we think it, all the reality it has comes of the incorporated, incarnated grace, in Jesus Christ, which is countervailing always the penal disorders of nature, and setting continually on, as by a destiny itself, the rising fortunes of the race. Our gospel is a cause, in this manner, among causes; a real calculable force, the Confidence of which can be held with a steady assurance. Is any thing more rational than to believe that goodness and truth are bound to master all things by their own everlasting necessary laws? No matter from what sphere they come, natural or supernatural, getting into man, into the race, they will as certainly master man at last, master the race, as gravity will master a stone. Exactly this confidence God therefore means to give us—no visionary confidence but a rational, that of a banker whose fund is in; for God has put the stock functions of his own everlasting kingdom into humanity itself, and by man He must reign. Meantime—

3. We shall see that, if it were possible to restore the fall of our race, by any kind of agency, or operation, wholly external, supposing no recuperative forces and concurrent struggles operating from within, it would reduce our character and grade of significance to a virtual nullity. Dismiss the grand world-honoring fact of the incarnation, conceive that the Jehovah angel, or some angelic messenger comes to us, not humanized in sympathy or in order, but having a plastic power to work on us from without and sway us to good, by his own methods of divine magic, apart from our consent; this would settle us, at once, into a state of cliency both dangerous and humiliating. We should probably begin, at once, to pay him the honors of idolatry; for the manly consciousness in us will be taken away, and we shall be to ourselves a kind of second rate interest in God’s kingdom; just that which the incarnation, begetting a new divine power in the race itself contrives to avoid with a skill so beautiful.

Or we may suppose that God was able to put the physical world into such a state of divine glow, showing forth, in its objects, such radiances and miraculous revolvings, such glorious apparitions of truth, such faces of. goodness, that men should have their bad will quite taken away by the magical sceneries they live in. But the transformation they undergo in this manner would have little dignity in it, because their manhood is unexercised in the change. It would be a kind of vegetable conversion, not a kindling of God’s fires in the soul’s aspirations and choices.

So, if the race were to be recovered in any way that includes no struggle of self-recovery, no power within striving toward recovery, it would almost take away the sense of our personality. We should be ciphers to ourselves, not men. Exactly contrary to this, it is the very great merit of the incarnation, that it brings help in a way to make it valuable. God could easily help us in a way to crush us, just as many human helpers will really make nothing of their beneficiaries, by allowing them to make nothing of themselves, and be nothing for themselves. The very thing wanted here is to get power into the fallen race, and put it striving upward; to raise a ferment of recuperative energy, feeling, aspiration, choice, and whole right working in humanity; exactly what the nearness and high sympathy of God in the incarnation must inevitably do. The Saviour being, or becoming man, the salvation dignifies and raises man even before he receives it; giving him the right to feel, that, coming verily as an approach of God, it is none the less a power in the race itself, a salvation by man.

4. Since it is continually assumed by the scripture that we fall by race, or as a corporate whole, we naturally look for some recuperative grace to be entered into the race, by which so great disadvantage may be repaid or overcome. Thus, if we say “as in Adam all die,” we want also to say, “so in Christ shall all be made alive.” Or if we say that “through the offense of one many be dead,” we want also to say, “much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.” In this manner it is that Christ is conceived to be a “second Adam,” a kind of new progenitor, such that we get in him, as it were, a new descent from good.

But we are born of Adam physiologically, it will be remembered, and so we go down with him as a race by physiological consequence, while we are not thus born of Christ the second Adam. He only comes into the race at a given point, just as we do, and communicates nothing by descent to persons collateral, any more than we do to persons collateral to us. How then, being no progenitor, does he become any proper Adam at all? how get himself into the race, in any such general way, as to become a new headship of life?

To this I answer, that we must not press the correspondence too closely; it is not understood to be literal, or to hold in any but a general and qualified way. Let it be enough that as the sin abounded, so the grace much more abounds, only not in exactly the same manner. Adam is our head physiologically, Christ is our head by the head influences he inaugurates, by the authority, sympathy, beauty, of his suffering goodness—a power that propagates across all the lines of generation, as efficiently as if it traveled by descent—a new regenerative power incarnated into the race as such, there to work, running down through all descent, as a redemption of man executed in the large view by man.

Observe too this very striking distinction, that good souls have a power to get into the race by collateral propagations of their goodness, when bad souls have almost no such power at all. The bad impregnate human feeling through falsities, and lies, and oppressions, and combinations of interest, or at best through the dazzling exploits of ambition. But there is a short run to such kind of power. Deep in evil, the world is yet naturally shy of evil, and begins very soon to get away from it. No bad character propagates long, as by character. Even bad writings drop out soon and die, as it were, of their own poison. On the other hand it will be seen that good and great souls have a destiny of headship, propagating side-ways, and every way, till they become Adams in the sublime fatherhood of their power, and that so completely as to finally reach, and take headship of the race. Thus we think of Socrates, for example, as a kind of progenitor in good for his people; a man whose ideas, principles, sacrifices, entered him into the whole Greek race, and more and more widely into the general life of the world. So of Washington. Dying childless, he had yet many children, and his large posterity still multiplies more and more rapidly, in every part of the world. Aaron Burr was a man of greater splendor, but he never got into the world’s life and feeling at all, and never became progenitor of any thing. He was dropped instinctively even out of the world’s thought. But Washington goes on to be, not father of his country only, but world’s father also; inserting his grand fatherhood into kings, emperors, peoples, and laws, accepted more and more reverently, by the compulsion of good in his life, and reigning, in fact, as a kind of civil-state Messiah, that has come to propagate his sway in human laws and liberties. The civil capacity even of the world, is increased by the august propagations of his example and sentiment.

And so it is, illustrating the great by the small, the divine by the human, that Jesus, the incarnate word of God’s eternity, coming into birth and living and dying as a man, fills the whole race with new possibilities and powers, starts resurgent activities, overtops the sin abounding with a grace that much more abounds, and becomes the Adam, so to speak, of a new humanity. Consider now—

5. Some of the scripture evidences of the subject. And here we meet, first of all, as it were at the head of all scripture, the remarkable and rather strangely worded promise, which declares that the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head. The representation is not that Christ, sometime hereafter to be born of the woman, shall bring under and finally destroy the bad power, though that is true, but that the woman’s whole posterity, having Christ included, shall do it. God will of course be always present in the struggle, pushing it on, and turning all the crises of it, by his invisible agency; while outwardly, to human apprehension, it is but a struggle, in one view, of society and man. In this manner, he contrives, by the hiding of himself, in our otherwise poor, dejected humanity, to put us in confidence and keep us at a pitch of courage, quite above our own broken powers.

Here and there, it is true, this interior hidden method is departed from, and he appears to be operating from without, doing something for, or upon, our humanity, and not through it; working some astounding miracle, sending some angel, or appearing by some angelic theophany. In one case he even ordains a supernatural sign that is to be a kind of institution, recurring, like the sun itself, with astronomic regularity; the cloud, I mean, by day and the pillar of fire by night. And yet none of these extraordinary, external things, appear to get much hold of the race, just because they do not get into it. Nothing works like a power that does not work by man. The sacrifice of Abraham and the wrestling of Jacob bring more victory and might into the race, as far as we can see, than the brazen serpent, or the waters drawn out of the rock. When, too, Christ comes, what is he but a man? and though, as such, he has a divine power and plenitude, how careful is he to get his attitude in the race and not above it. He undertakes no outward championship. Seed of the woman, a proper man, he only gets into the common family register as such, and puts the struggle on, as being a struggle of the race itself. Perfect in all divinity even, he is still the Son of Man, claiming the appellation for himself. He dies low. And when he is gone, all that we know is that a gospel is born! In one view there seems to be nothing here but the same humanity there was before, and the same hard fight still going on that before was struggling to bring the serpent under and to bruise his head. But it is a very different fight, as respects the power of it; for there is a Christ now in the race, and the whole seed of man is quickened by the sense of his divine brotherhood.

We shall find, accordingly, that the scriptures are full of images, that conceive the great contest with evil to be a struggle in the bosom of the race itself, and give us the expectation that it will go on, as such, till it has won a complete triumph for the truth. Thus it is that Isaiah uses the word “increase,” which does not mean to enlarge by additions, but by internal growth;—“And of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end.” Thus it is that Daniel represents the kingdom of the Messiah as “a stone cut out without hands,” but a most remarkable kind of stone in the fact that it grows from within itself, and becomes a great mountain filling the whole earth. In the same way it is compared, by Christ himself, to a grain of mustard seed, which does not grow by something added on the outside, but by an internal operation, becoming in that manner a tree. He compares it also to leaven hid in a large quantity of meal, there to work till all is leavened; where the working, it will be observed, is not the working only of the original leaven, or that of the atmosphere outside, but such a kind as puts the meal next the leaven working too, and that also on doing the same to what is next to it; and so the propagated working goes on, till the whole body of the bread is leavened.

Here Christ is giving, you will see, his deliberate opinion of the manner in which his kingdom will be extended. The process will be forwarded, he conceives, within the race itself, and will so far be human, that we may rightly say of it—for since by man came the fall of the world, by man came also its restored glory and peace.

Observe, again, how even holy scripture is the scripture also of man, written by man, given to the world by man, bearing, in every book, the particular stamp and style of the particular mind, in whose personal conceptions it was shaped. The subject matter too of the historic and biographic parts is human, showing how men have acted, thought, felt, suffered for the truth, fallen before temptation, triumphed over it. Indeed the value itself of these records consists, to a great extent, in the fact that they give us divine lessons under human incidents, in the molds of human character and life. They show us too, on a larger scale, what is the meaning and way of God’s Providence, by the disasters of wrong and the struggles of merit, and also by the overturnings and uprisings of nations.

When we come to the writings of devotion, the Psalms, for example, and other chorals of scripture, these are human sentiments, lifted indeed by holy inspirations, but none the less properly human for that reason—rolling in as such upon us, from the word, even as the tides roll in from the sea.

The proverbs are specially human, being maxims of human wisdom, such as have even gained a proverbial currency, in the judgments of philosophy, and statesmanship, and common life.

The prophets, again—these are all men speaking by men s words and voices. True their voices are voices also of God, but they are none the less human, that God wants to use them as such, or that he sometimes puts them to speaking in the first person for him, saying “I the Lord;” for when he crowds himself thus into men, or men’s voices, he only proves how much he may prefer to do as man.

The same is true of the Epistles. They are written by men, to men, in the words of men, under the relationships of teacher and taught, and shepherd and flock. They deal with actual human conduct, in actual human conditions. They speak to human difficulties and human dangers. They show how good men suffer in times of persecution, how they bruise Satan under their feet, how fidelity triumphs; in a word how the great life-struggle of the church goes on.

A corresponding reason doubtless required the gospel of Christ to be preached by human ministers. It is not commonly expected that thieves will be sent to reform thieves, or perjurers to remonstrate with perjury, but sinners are sent to gospel sinners. God certainly could have taken a different method. He could have sent cohorts of angels flying through the air, to publish the good news, even as they began to do, for an hour, when Christ was here. He could have set the stars chiming with the silver music of salvation. He could have made the stones cry it out of the mountain tops, and under the ground, and under the sea. But he wants the great work of the redemption to go on from within the race itself, unfolding by internal growth, intending that his kingdom shall be great and finally universal, only because the powers or principles he has inserted are sufficient of themselves to make it so.

He also constructs a corporate state, called the church, in which, as being corporate, and not subject to death, he deposits the gospel and the sacraments, and all the institutional appointments of religion, thus to be conserved and perpetuated by man.

In the same way too, he makes the church even to be the pillar and ground of the truth itself; for the disciples in it are to be Christ’s living epistles, gospels of the life, new incarnations of the word, showing always what is in the text, by what is expressed in their life and walk and character. Were it not for this light continually supplied to the written gospel, from the lives of those who live it, the word of the skies would shortly become an utterly dead language, a kind of Sanscrit jargon, without either salvation or intelligence in it. Living men are its interpretation, living men are its arguments and evidences. It lives by man.

As the disciples are to be new incarnations, in this manner, of Christ, so, in a sense, they are to be vehicles also of the Spirit, demonstrations, revelations, of his otherwise unseen or unobserved agency; and so, many of his most effective operations will be through their gifts, works, prayers, sufferings, personal testimonies, and the pentecostal glow of their assemblies.

Again, last of all, and as it were to include all, it is given to men even to convert the world. Not that they, as being simply men, are able to do any such thing, but that Christ, the Son of Man, being entered into the race, and working as a leaven in the mass of it, will make them a leaven also to one another, and set the ferment on till all is leavened. And so the great world itself, all the empires, known or unknown, all the continents, and islands undiscovered, all most distant ages and times are given as a trust to men, originally to a very few, very humble men. “Ye,” said Christ, “are the light of the world.” “Go ye into all the world and disciple every creature.”

I will not detain you with farther illustrations of the subject in hand, but will simply suggest in conclusion, a few points variously related, in the practical drift of its applications.

We have then a very significant presumption raised, that when any breakage, or damage, occurs in any legitimate institution, or society of the world, God has prepared, or put in somewhere, some kind of self-remedial force to mend it. Thus if any church, or Christian brotherhood, is rent by disagreements, embittered by recriminations, and broken, for the time, as regards a due confidence of the future, the remedy must still be in it, else it is nowhere. Even if God himself undertakes for it, he will accomplish his restoring purpose, in some very important sense, only by man, even by themselves; that is by their strivings after one another, their sorrowings over themselves, their prayers and their longings after the lost love. If there be any remedy for them, it must so far come out of themselves. Not even God will try to bring it from any other quarter.

So if there be a great nation rent by faction, a good government broken down and trampled by rebellion, God has no miraculous fire to flash upon the conspirators and scorch them down. It must be enough that he has given a sword for the punishment of evil doers, that the remedy may come by man, making due use of it. If the people too will know that God is with them, let a spirit be kindled in their manly breast that shall take them to the field, forbidding any word of peace to be spoken, till the laws are vindicated and the foes of order crushed. If God will make a broken world restore itself by man, much more a broken people, and it will as certainly be done as there is quantity enough of manhood in them—enough great sentiment and patriotic fire—to do it.

XIV.

THE BAD CONSCIOUSNESS TAKEN AWAY.

“Because that the worshipers, once purged, should have had no more conscience of sins.”—Heb. x, 2.

The reading is not, you observe, “conscience of no more sins,”—as if the sins were stopped, but “no more conscience of sins,”—as if the conscience of sins already past were somehow extirpated, or else the sins taken quite away from it and forever extirpated themselves, as facts, or factors of the life. And the allegation is, that while the old sacrifices of the law had power to accomplish no such thing, it is accomplished by the wonderful, seemingly impossible, efficacy of the gospel sacrifice. Those older sacrifices could not make the comers thereunto perfect—perfect, that is, as pertaining Ito the conscience—and therefore they must needs be renewed as remembrances of sin every year; but the offering of the body of Jesus, once for all, was sufficient; allowing us forever after to have no more conscience of sins. Now it is this practical wonder, this: seeming impossibility accomplished by the cross, to which I invite your attention on the present occasion. It is what our apostle elsewhere calls—The mystery of faith in a pure conscience.

I fell in company, some years ago, with a college acquaintance—not a minister of religion, but a remarkably subtle, closely scientific thinker, and withal a devout Christian—who said to me, in a manner and tone of sensibility I can never forget—My great trial in religion is, to find how a clean bosom, in regard to sin, is ever possible. I can, not see how my sin can ever be really gotten away; indeed I fall into such darkness on this point, when I undertake to solve it, that I quite lose my faith in the possibility of a real deliverance, and feel obliged to say with David—“my Sin is ever before me.” He went on to state his difficulty more fully, but as I have it on hand to make an exposition of the whole subject, the ground of his difficulty will be covered with much other ground beside. How then is it, or how is it to be imagined, that Christ, by his sacrifice, takes away the condemning conscience, or the felt dishonor of transgression? This is the question we are to consider, and, if possible, answer; in doing which I will—

I. Go over, as briefly as may be, certain supposed answers, that do not appear to reach the real point of the question; and—

II. Will endeavor to exhibit and support by sufficient illustrations what appears to be the true scriptural answer.

I. The supposed answers that are not sufficient. They are various and very unlike among themselves; they still fall short, all of them, at the same point; viz., in the fact that they do not touch, or take away at all from the mind, or memory, or conscience, the fact and shame of wrong-doing. Be the remedy this or that, still the man, as a man, is none the less consciously guilty, none the less really dishonored, shamed, damned, before himself. There stands the fact, unmoved and immovable forever, that he is a malefactor soul, none the better for being safe, or forgiven, or justified.

Thus, when it is conceived that Christ has borne our punishment, that, if it were true, might take away our fear of punishment, but fear is one thing, and mortified honor, self-condemning guilt, self-chastising remorse, another and Very different thing; and that will be only the more exasperated, that divine innocence itself has been put to suffering on its account.

Neither will it bring any relief to show that the justice of God is satisfied. Be it so; the transgressor is none the better satisfied with himself—his own self-damning justice is as far from being satisfied as before.

Is it then conceived that what has satisfied the justice of God, has also atoned the guilty conscience? Will it then make the guilty conscience less guilty, or say sweeter things of itself, that it sees innocence, purity, goodness divine, put to suffering for it? If any thing could exasperate, even insupportably, the sense of guilt, it should be that.

Is it then brought forward to quell the guilt of the conscience that Christ has evened our account legally by his sacrifice, and that we are even justified of God, for Christ’s sake? But if God, in this manner, and by a kind of benevolent fiction, calls us just, do we any the less certainly disapprove and damn ourselves even to eternity? Nothing it would seem can save us from it, but to lose the integrity of our judgments!

Forgiveness taken as a mere release of claim, or a negative letting go of right against transgression, brings, if possible, even less help to the conscience. Christ had forgiven his crucifiers in his dying prayer, but it was the very crime of the cross, nevertheless, that pricked so many hundreds of hearts on the day of pentecost. Christ bad forgiven them, but their consciences had not!

But Christ renews the soul itself, it will be said, and makes it just within; when, of course, it will be justified. That does not follow. If Judas at the very point where he confessed—“I have betrayed the innocent blood,” could have been instantly transformed into an angel of beauty, his purified sensibility would have been shaken, I think, with a greater horror even of his crime than before.

But the fatherhood of God—the disciple of another and different school will take refuge under that, and say, that here, at least, there is truly no more conscience of sins. Would it not be strange, if a tolerably good father can forgive and forget, and God can not? But who is God, and what most fitly represents him? a mortal father who is able, just because of his weakness, to forgive and forget, or to forgive without forgetting, or to forget without forgiving, or the transgressor’s own everlasting immutable conscience, which can neither forgive nor forget? What is this conscience, in fact, but God’s throne of judgment in the man? Why, if God, in his fatherhood, were such a kind of being, dealing in laxities and fond accommodations, having no care for his rectoral honor, as the defender of right and order, we certainly are not such to ourselves. A conscience that can say, “no matter, God is rather loose and very easy with his children, therefore I will be to myself as good as good in my sin, and let the matter go,?”—I certainly, for one, whatever may be said by others, have no conscience that can go in that loose gait. I love my conscience because it is the one thing in me that goes true and will unalterably, inevitably damn my wrongs, even if God should let them go. Nay, if God be such a God, it would even set me in a shudder, to find how easily I might sigh for a being whom I can more sufficiently respect.

You perceive in this recital, my friends, how great a matter we have undertaken, and how very obstinate, or intractable, our difficulty is. Doubtless a foul vessel may be washed, a fracture mended, a personal injury redressed, a sick body restored to health and soundness, and dressed in a new covering of flesh; nay, there is a clear possibility of raising the dead to life, but to conceive a sinner so wrought in as to obliterate the fact of his sin, leaving no more conscience of it, is a very different matter, and if the possibility were not really: shown by the gospel itself, we must certainly give up the question, as one that we can not solve, by any faculty that God has given us. We come then—

II. To the question as it is, and the answer given it by the scriptures of God.

The great question meeting us at this point is, whether it is possible, or how far possible; to change the consciousness of a soul, without any breach of its identity? In this manner, we shall find, the gospel undertakes to remove, and assumes the fact of a removal of, the dishonor and self-condemnation of sin. But we shall conceive the matter more easily and naturally, if we notice, before going into the scripture inquiry, certain analogies discoverable in our human state, which may serve as approaches to the proper truth of the question.

Thus a thoroughly venal, low-principled man, elected President of the United States, will undergo, not unlikely, an inward lifting of sentiment and impulse, corresponding with the immense lift of his position. The great honor put upon him makes him willing to honor himself. He wants to deserve his place and begins to act in character in it. He is the same man, regarding his personal identity, but he is raised, even to himself, in the grade he occupies. His old natural consciousness has a kind of Presidential consciousness superinduced, which holds a higher range of quality. He lives, in fact, Presidentially, and is dignified inwardly by the dignities of his position.

How many thousand soldiers, who before were living in the low, mean vices, lost to character and self-respect, have been raised, in like manner, in our armies, to quite another grade of being. It has given them a wholly different sense of themselves, that their dear, great country has come upon them in so great power. They are consciously ennobled, in the fact that they have borne themselves heroically in the field; and are so become another kind of man even to themselves. They are the same, yet by a vast reach of distance not the same. A certain great something has come into their feeling. They stand more firmly, and bear themselves more erectly; and it gives them an-exultant feeling even, that their discouraged and miserably forlorn consciousness is gone—supplanted by the sense of self-respect, and manly honor.

The same, again, is true in a different way, of all the gifted ones in art and speech and poetry, when they are taken by the inspirations of genius. When such a soul, that was down upon the level of uses, torturing itself into production for applause, or even for bread, begins to behold God’s signatures upon his works, and worlds, and the magnificent discipline he gives us; discovering in objects ideas, in facts the faces of truth; catching also the fires of a Promethean heat from all subtlest moods and hardest flints of experience;—then it is become, to itself, quite another creature. It is as if the grub-state were gone by, and the winged life had broken loose, to try the freedom of the air. In that finer element he ranges at will, lifted by his etherial seership, to move in altitudes hitherto invisited; consciously another and different being—another, yet still the same.

XV.

THE BAD MIND MAKES A BAD ELEMENT.

“Then answered the Jews and said unto him—say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?”—John viii, 48.

It is often remarked as a curious, half ludicrous distinction of insane persons, that they look on others round them as being out of their head. And yet this kind of phenomenon is more or less observable, in all cases of diseased action, whether mental or spiritual; the subject sees his disorder, not in himself, but in the objects and conditions round him.

Under the disease or disaffection called sin, the same is true; as we may see by the answer of these carping hypocrites, when Christ reproves their high pretenses, and sanctimonious lies. “You call yourselves children of Abraham,” he says, “when you do none of his works, when your fatherhood is more truly discovered in the father of lies. And as he abode not in the truth, and has no truth in him, so because I tell you the truth ye believe me not.” They feel the sharpness of the words, but do not perceive the solemn justice of the argument—throwing it captiously back upon him as in the text; “say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan and hast a devil?” Just as they should if his argument was true; for the men who have a devilish spirit are sure to see their devil objectively in others. There must be a devil on hand somewhere, they are sure, and who will expect them to find it where it is, in themselves? The truth accordingly which I now propose for your consideration is this:

That a bad mind sees bad things, and makes to itself a bad element. In other words, a bad mind projects its own evils into persons and conditions round it; charging the pains of its own inward disorder to the objects that refuse to bless it, and counting, it may be, Christ himself a sting only of annoyance.

It would be far more agreeable to me to assert this truth universally, or so as to include the good; showing how they convert all things to good by their bright and loving spirit, and how the stones even of the field are in league with them to bless them; but this would take me over too large a ground, and therefore I must be content to occupy you, for the time, with a subject not grateful in itself, hoping that you may even find the greater benefit in it. If the errand we are after is not pleasant, if it compels us to go burrowing into the dark, underground, abysses and pains of evil in the soul, let us not recoil from the task, because we find a great deal of our conceit inverted and a great many of our complaints of God and the world turned back upon ourselves.

I do not mean, of course, to say, that we can have nothing to complain of, or that other men can not do us bitter wrongs. Neither do I undertake to say, that we shall not feel them. But he that suffers a wrong rightly, finds a law of compensation going with him, as with God, so that his injury, or injured feeling, is repaid many times over, like that of God, by the consciously sublime repose of his own self-approving spirit. And, this being true, it is only the bad mind in us, after all, that allows us to be really troubled and harassed by wrong. I will only add that what I am going to say may seem to be an over-statement, or exaggeration of the truth, without this qualification, and must therefore ask to have it remembered.

We shall best open the gate of our argument on this subject, if we notice two great facts, or laws of our nature, which are the ground of this tendency in us to refer our own evils to things about us, and in the same way to keep us from a discovery of them as being in ourselves.

First, by a fixed necessity of language, we are obliged, apart from all the blinding effects of our sin, to represent. a great part of what transpires in our experience, in a way of objective description. For example, it is the natural way of language to call things “hot,” “sweet,” “bitter,” and the like, when in fact the words really describe nothing but our own inward sensations. So we say that a “subject is dark,” not because there is any thing dark in the subject, but that we are dark to it. So again we say. that a thing bears a “suspicious look,” when we are suspicious of it; or of some spectacle that it “is fearful,” when we are fearfully moved by it. We speak in the same way of “taking our chances” and “meeting our dangers,” when in fact there is neither chance nor danger in things at all, but only an absolute certainty that this or that will take place. The uncertainty, or ignorance of what is to come is in us, and we call it chance or danger in things. Now the great part of mankind go through life, using every hour these objective terms of language, without ever once suspecting that what they describe as without, is nothing but an experience within themselves. Almost all staple words of language, as related to our inward experience, are of just this kind; it could not, as might easily be shown, have been otherwise. In this manner, we put almost all that we suffer, enjoy, feel, and think, into the objects and doings and characters round us, not understanding that what we figure, as in them, is really transpiring in ourselves—just as we say, how often, that we have “taken a cold,” and verily believe that a cold something, we know not what, has seized us; whereas we have simply gotten up a fever—probably by over-indulgence—and then the shiverings and atmospheric chills that follow we take for the causes of the mischief.

But there is another great condition, or law of experience in bad minds, that is operating always and more powerfully in the same direction. A bad mind lives in things and for things, or we might rather say, under things. Condition, pleasure, show, are its god. And then it follows that the worship is only another name for distemper, unreason, hallucination. It is not positively insane, but what is very nearly the same thing, unsane—a nature out of joint, poisoned, racked with pains, a cloudy, wild, ungoverned, misconceiving power. It knows nothing but things, and if things do not bless it, what can it do but fall to cursing them? Being a distempered organ, it sees its distempers only in things and conditions round it. Thus when a diseased ear keeps up a nervous drumming in the brain, all sweetest music will have that drumming in it. So if the taste is bittered by some dyspectic woe, it will find that bitter savor in all most delicate things, and even in the pure waters of the spring. So also, I suppose, if the humors of the eye were jaundiced, the pure light of heaven would be yellowed also. Even the sun is smoky, seen through a smoked glass. Just so we are meeting all sorts of bitter, painful, and bad things, in our life, just because we are bitter, painful, bad, ourselves, and can not see that this is the root of our misery.

Besides it is a fact, under this great law of retributive disorder, that even good things are really bad to our feeling, because there is a bad mind in us. They are not given to be our torment, but the subjective badness of the soul makes them so; just as the weakness of the diseased eye makes the light a cause of injury and pain. The light is not bad in itself, but the receiving organ is bad, and so the pure light, image itself of God, shoots in arrows of pain that sting the body. In the same way selfishness and sin make the whole soul a diseased receiving organ; when, of course, every thing received or looked upon is bad, and imparts some kind of pain. The good law is made death unto it, Christ himself a savor of death. Truth is bad to us, holy men are a disturbance, life a burden, death a terror, heaven itself a world of constrained service and unreal or impossible joy.

We come now to the matter of fact itself. Is it only theory of which we have been speaking, or is it fact?

Here we make our appeal first of all to the scripture, where the illustrations are manifold and striking. There was never among men a more inoffensive, winning, and beautiful character than Joseph. But his brethren hated him and could not speak peaceably to him—hated him so intensely that they were willing to put him out of the way, by almost any method, however cruel. They talked with one another about him, painted him as a selfish, proud brother, and set him off in the most odious colors. Having a bad mind towards him, they saw only bad and hateful things in him. But the bad things were all in themselves, not in him. His only crime was his worth, and the beauty of his spirit, and that God, on this account, had advanced him, giving him the precedence his character deserved. So with Saul; the devil of jealousy creeps into his morbid, selfish heart, and he sees in David, the faith-.ful servant of his throne, a scheming usurper only and traitor, waiting to vault into his place. He is wrought up thus to such a pitch of fear and malice, that, in one of his paroxysms, he hurls a javelin at his head. The evil he sees in David is really in his own wild, ugly passion, but instead of strangling that, he tries to murder him!

Equally mad, exceedingly mad, almost conscientiously mad; as he himself relates, was Saul, the young rabbi of Tarsus, though in a different vein. The fiery young zealot was hot against Jesus, hot against Stephen, hot also against all the disciples of the new religion; but the heat of his passion he afterwards discovered was in the bad fire of his own bad mind, and the miserable bigotry that possessed him.

It is also a fact most remarkable, evincing the same thing, that Jesus Christ, the only spotless and perfect character that ever breathed the air of our planet, was more accused and hated, and charged with worse crimes, than it ever fell to the lot of any mortal to perpetrate. He was not only a Samaritan and had a devil, but he cast out devils by a devil, he broke the Sabbath, he was a mover of sedition, he made himself equal with God, he spoke blasphemy, he was a conspirator against Cæsar, his silence was called obstinacy, his eating and drinking gluttony and drunkenness, his cross the proof of his weakness and a fit mark for jeering, his death his defeat as an impostor and his final expulsion from the world. And yet there was nothing in him to irritate, or anger good men. His life was beauty itself, his spirit breathed the pure benignity even of God. Yes, and for just this reason, he disturbed the bad mind of men only the more bitterly. Troubled, heated, moved with jealousy, convinced of evil, they all rushed upon him as the troubler; becoming, at last, so exasperated against him, as to break out—priests, rabbis, senators, soldiers, populace—crying, all with one voice, crucify him, crucify him. See them gathering round his cross, hear their coarse mockeries and jeers! the poor fools have no thought or suspicion, that they are raging, in this diabolical malice, against exasperating causes that are after all in themselves!

The same truth is continually thrust upon our observation, in the intercourse of life. The passionate, ill-natured man is an example, living always in stormy weather, even though it be the quiet of dew-fall round him—always wronged, always hurt, always complaining of some enemy. He has no conception that this enemy is in his own bosom—in the sourness, the ungoverned irritability, the habitual ill-nature of his own bad spirit and character. I speak not here of some single burst of passion, into which a man of amiable temper may, for once, be betrayed; but I speak, more especially, of the angry characters—always brewing in some tempest of violated feeling. They have a great many enemies, they are unaccountably ill-treated, and can not understand why it is. They have no suspicion that they see and suffer bad things because they are bad, that being ill-natured is about the same thing as having ill-treatment, and that all the enemies they suffer from are snugly closeted in their own devilish temper.

The same is true of fretful persons—men and women that wear away fast and die, because they have worried life completely out. Nothing goes right; husband, or wife, or child, or customer, or sermon. They are pricked and stung at every motion they make, and wonder why it is that others are permitted to float along so peacefully, and they never suffered to have a moment of peace in their lives! And the very simple reason is that life is a field of nettles to them, because their fretful, worrying tempers, are always pricking out, through the tender skin of their uneasiness. Why, if they were set down in Paradise, carrying their bad mind with them, they would fret at the good angels, and the climate, and the colors even of the roses.

The animosities of the world are commonly to be solved in the same way—“Hateful and hating one another.” A purely good mind would not hate even the worst of enemies and wrong-doers, but would. have a sublime joy in loving him still. Thus we have one kind of enmity that hates differences of thought and sentiment, and is continually rasped by the fact that other men are so generally wrong-headed. Commonly the difficulty is prejudice, or bigotry in ourselves, reigning as a narrow, self-willed principle in the heart. Another misery we suffer, in the pride, and the high airs, and the ambition, and the undeserved successes of others. We wish there was some justice in the world, and that such people had their due! This now is envy in the soul, green-eyed, sick, self-tormenting envy. Then, again, we have it as another form of misery, that, having injured some one, we for that reason hate him; and there is no hatred so implacable, so bitter, and so like the pain of hell, as that which a man has to one whom he has injured—not to one who has injured him, but to one whom he has injured himself. And yet he will charge it not to himself, but only to the unaccountable fact, that the object of his malice must be so bad, so unmitigably hateful.

So again in regard to things of condition. The poor hypochondriac is just ready to be stranded in utter poverty and distress, though he holds, it may be, millions of property. We laugh at the strange fatuity he suffers. But every selfish mind is in it, only in some different way, or in some less exaggerated and palpably absurd form. Thus, what care, fear, anxiety, hunger, eagerness, is there in the world; and the secret of it is, that we are all imagining some fault in our condition. We want condition. Our thirsty, weary, discontented soul finds all it wants of blessedness denied, and wonders why it is that God has given us such a miserable desert to live in; as if the desert were in the world and not in ourselves—an immense Sahara wider than Africa knows! Why, if we were in the midst of God’s own paradise, carrying our bad mind with us, we should see the desert there. The inward dearth and desolation of a mind separated from God and the all-sufficing rest and fullness of his peace, would raise mutinous questions and harsh accusations of dryness, against the finest, most superlative felicity God has ever been able to invent for his angels themselves.

Let us not omit to notice that the immoralities and crimes of the world are commonly conceived, by those who are in them, to be not of themselves, but to be chargeable on the bad causes round them. What is more continually asserted by thieves and gamblers, than the maxim that the world owes them a living; till, finally, they half teach themselves to feel that the world wrongs them, because it does not pay what it owes, but requires them to take the pay as they may find it. Whereas the bottom fact of all is, that they hate the bad necessity of work. The blasphemer, raging in a storm of imprecations and swearing by all sacred names—he is saying inwardly, even if no one remonstrates with him, how can I help it? an angel would speak some bad words, if he had such a horse as this to manage, or such a neighbor to deal with. The poor victim of drink—was he not disinherited by his father? or broken down by the slanders of enemies? or troubled by loads of debt from misfortunes that overtook him? Or married to a wife who was a perpetual thorn to his peace? Was he not driven by the bad world somehow, as he manages to think himself, into this mode of drowning his misery? And so of the traitor hatching his treason—whole states of traitors hatching public treasons. Listen to their grievances—all in others, none in themselves. They have been injured, or insulted, or at any rate they were going to be. They are hot with the sense of injury not yet arrived, and must have their redress! Farewell order! welcome anarchy and blood! What an example of human passion, seeing worlds of wrong and enmity through the smoke of its own guilty jealousies, and the rampant fury of its own domineering habit.

XVI.

PRESENT RELATIONS OF CHRIST WITH HIS FOLLOWERS.

“Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away and come again unto you.”—John xiv, 28.

To go away and come again, or to go away in order to come again, would seem, taking the words -at their face, to be a rather idle or unmeaning operation; but if we can get far enough into the mind of Christ to apprehend his real meaning, we shall find that he is proposing, in these words, a change of the greatest consequence—a change that is necessary to the working plan of his gospel and even to the complete value of his incarnation itself. In what sense then he is going, and in what sense he will come again, what change of relationship he will inaugurate between himself and his followers, and so what kind of personal relation he undertakes to hold with them now, is the subject to which I call your attention this morning, as one of intense practical interest, and even of the tenderest personal concern.

Whoever has reflected much upon the subject of the incarnation has discovered that its value depends on brevity of time, and that no such condition could be permanent, without becoming a limitation upon itself and a real hindrance to its own objects. Remaining permanently on earth in the body, Christ, plainly enough, could never have extended his rule into parts remote, or to persons debarred by distance from the external modes of access and acquaintance. The incarnation, therefore, requires shortly to be inverted. After the immense new revelation, or new salvation, of God has been accomplished, by such a manifested presence and divine life in the flesh, there needs, just as truly, to be a withdrawment from the eyes; otherwise Christ, remaining in the world and permanently fixed in it, could only gather a small circle about him, and become the center of an outward Lama worship, as restricted as the mere sight, or appearing, of the divine man-idol requires it to be.

Therefore he says—“it is expedient for you that I go away,” adding the promise—“I will come to you.” He means, by this, that the time has now arrived, when there must be a change of administration; when he must needs be taken away from the eyes, and begin to be set in a new spiritual relation, which permits a universal access of men to him, and a universal presence of him with them—so a grand, world-wide kingdom. Saying nothing of the particular objects to be gained by his death, he could not stay here and carry on his work; he had as many friends now as 6he could speak with, or allow to speak with him; and if he should remain, holding fixed locality, as of a body in space, he could be the head only of a coterie, never of a kingdom. What is wanted now is an unlocalized, invisible, spiritually present, everywhere present, Saviour; such as all may know and receive, being consciously known and received by him.

And this will be his coming again, or his second coming—such a kind of coming as shows him bearing rule in Providence, and riding in the clouds of heaven—rolling on the changes, unfolding the destinies of time, and preparing his universal kingdom. The world, he says, seeth me no more, but ye see me; and having your spiritual eye open for this, it will be as if you saw me coming triumphantly in the clouds. This image is a well-known Eastern figure of princely pomp and majesty; they say of every great monarch, taking ascendancy, that he rides on the clouds of heaven. So, as Christ comes on, bearing sway and ruling invisible, it will be as if he were seen coming on overhead, in the clouds. And especially will this be felt when Jerusalem the Holy City is blotted out, as it were by God’s hand of judgment upon it, in the conquest by Titus. By that sign goes out the old, exclusive, Jew-state; and there comes in after it, now to have its place, the Christian, catholic, free state, that is to be gathered under the universal, spiritual headship of Christ. That gathering in, as in power, is to be his coming, or coming again—no bodily appearing, no visible pomp, no manifestation locally as in space; for the very thing that made it expedient for him to go away from the senses, forbids any such outward manifestation. And therefore be adds a caution, telling his disciples expressly, that his coming thus again is not to be a coming with observation. There shall be no calling “Lo, here is Christ, or lo, there,” “behold he is in the desert,” “behold he is in the secret chambers.” The power in which he comes will be morally diffusive and secretly piercing—“as the lightning cometh out of the east and shineth even unto the west, so also shall the coming of the Son of Man be.”

In all which Christ, you will perceive, is proposing to do exactly nothing which many of his disciples, specially taken by the faith of his second coming, so fervently preach and so earnestly magnify. They believe that he is to come in a body, and be visible as in body. He will of course be here or there in space, a locally present being, at some particular geographic point—Jerusalem, or London, or Rome, or going about in all places by turns. Hearing now that he is here, or there, we shall think no more of seeing him by faith, and begin to think of seeing him with our eyes. Every ship that sails will be crowded with eager multitudes pressing on to see the visible Christ. Thronging in thus, month by month, a vast seething crowd of pilgrims, curious and devout, poor and rich, houseless all and hungry, trampling each other, many of them sick, not one of them in the enjoyment truly of God’s peace, not one of a thousand getting near enough to see him, still fewer to hear him speak—how long will it take under such kind of experience to learn what Christ intended and the solid truth of it, when he said—“it is expedient for you that I go away.” Nothing could be more inexpedient, or a profounder affliction, than a locally descended, permanently visible, Saviour. How much better a Saviour present everywhere, and at all times; a Saviour who can say, “Lo, I am with you always,” and make the promise good; one whom the heart can know, as being at rest in him, and behold, as. by faith; wheeling his chariot on through all the tumults and overturnings of time, till his universal kingdom is complete.

I am well aware that our brethren, who look for Christ’s visible coming, will not allow the inconveniences, or almost absurdities, I have here sketched, to be any proper results of their doctrine. “We believe,” they will say, “that he will come in a spiritual body, such as he had after his resurrection, not in a coarse, material body. It will be such a body that he can be here, or there, at any given moment, hampered by no conditions of space; even as he came into the room where his disciples were gathered, when the doors were shut.” But they only impose upon themselves by such a conception. If their spiritual body is to be visible, it must be as in space and outward appearing; for that is the condition of all visibility. And then we have a flitting Saviour, breaking out here or there, at what time, or on what occasion, no mortal can guess. And the result will be that they are in a worse torment than they would be, if he were established in some known locality. Going after their eyes, they are taken off from all faith, and where their eyes shall find him they know not.

Pardon me then if I suggest the suspicion that they are more carnal in their expectation than they know. If it is so much better to have a visible Saviour, are they not more weary of faith than they should be, and secretly longing, catching at straws of prophecy, to get away from it? There is nothing, I must frankly say, that would be so nearly a dead loss of Christ to any disciple who knows him in the dear companionship of faith, as to have him come in visible show; either setting up his reign at some geographic point, or reigning aerially, in some flitting and cursitating manner which can not be traced. How beautifully accessible is he now everywhere, present to every heart that loves him; consciously dear, as friend, consoler, guide, and stay, in all conditions; close at hand in every sinking ship. in the uttermost parts of the sea; the sweet joy of dungeons under ground, where there is no light to see him in a body; immediately and all-diffusively present, to comfort every sorrow, support every persecution, and even to turn away the tempting thought before it comes. A Saviour in the body and before the eyes can serve no such offices. None can find him, but them that come in his way, or chance to spy him with their eyes.

We have no want then of a locally related, that is of a bodily resident Saviour; we perceive, without difficulty, the expediency of which Christ speaks, that he should go away and not continue the incarnate, or visible state, longer than to serve the particular objects for which he assumed that state. But he gives us to understand, that he is not going to be taken utterly away in the proposed removal, but rather to be as much closer to his disciples as he can be, when all conditions of time and space are cast off. And accordingly the question rises at this point, how is Christ related now to the knowledge and friendship of his people? “Ye have heard how I said unto you I go away and come again unto you.” And again—“I will not leave you comfortless, I will come to you.” And again—“but ye see me.” And again—“Lo, I am with you always.” He evidently means to put himself thus in a practically close and dear relation with his people—what is that relation? how set open? how maintained?

Obviously what we want ourselves, is to be somehow with him, and to know that he is with us. We want a social, consciously open state with him, as real as if he were with us bodily, and as diffusive as if he were everywhere; thus to have a personal enjoyment of him, and rest in the felt sympathies of his personal companionship. This, too, exactly is what he means to allow us; not in the external way, but in a way more immediate, and blessed, and evident, and as much more beneficial. If we had him with us in the external way, as his own disciples had, when they journeyed, and talked, and eat, and slept, in his company, we should be living altogether in our eyes, and not in any way of mental realization. And, as a result, we should not be raised and exalted in spiritual force, or character, as we specially need to be. What we want, therefore, is to have a knowledge of him, and presence and society with him, that we can carry with us, and have as the secret joy, and strength, and conscious blessing of our inmost life itself; that we may see him, when we are blind and can see nothing with our eyes; that we may hear him speak, when we are deaf and can hear nothing with our ears; that we may walk with him, when we can not walk at all; sit in heavenly places with him, when we can not sit at all; rise with him when he rises, reign with him when he reigns; never away from him, even when beyond the sea, or passing through the valley of the shadow of death.

Now it is just this relation that he undertakes to fill, when he goes away. Being himself a Comforter, [Paraclete,] for this is the word translated Advocate, he promises “another Comforter;” that is, in some proper sense, another self. Indeed, he really calls the Comforter promised, another self; for he says expressly, in this very connection—“Even the Spirit of truth, whom the world can not receive because it seeth him not; neither knoweth him, but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you and shall be in you;” striking directly into the first person, to say the same thing over again, as relating to himself—“Yet a little while and the world seeth me no more, but ye see me; because I live, ye shall live also. At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.” And then, to be still more explicit, he gives the promise, that whosoever of his followers follows faithfully, keeping his commandments, shall have the immediate manifestation always of his presence—“I will manifest myself unto him,”—“If a man love me he will keep my words, and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him and make our abode with him.”

The great change of administration thus to be introduced, by the going away and coming again, includes several points that require to be distinctly noted.

1. That Christ now institutes such a relationship between him and his followers, that they can know him when the world can not. Before this, the world had known him just as his disciples had, seeing him with their eyes, hearing his doctrine, observing his miracles, but now he is to be withdrawn, so that only they shall see him—“the world seeth him not.” As being rational persons, they may recollect him, they may read other men’s recollections of him, but his presence they will not discern, he is not manifest unto them, but only to his followers. He that loveth knoweth God, and he only.

2. It is a point included that the new presence, or social relationship, is to be effected and maintained by the Holy Spirit, the Comforter. And he it is that Christ, in the promise, calls so freely himself. The. New Testament writings are not delicate in maintaining any particular formula, or scheme of personality, as regards the distributions of Trinity. They call the Spirit “the Spirit of Christ.” They say, “God hath sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts.” They speak of “the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ.” They speak also of “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.” They say, “the Lord [Christ] is that Spirit.” Christ also is shown, more than once, fulfilling the official functions of the Spirit; as in Paul’s conversion, where the invisible Christ, that is the Spirit, says “I am Jesus of Nazareth whom thou persecutest;” or again, when Paul himself describes his conversion by saying, “when it pleased God to reveal his Son in me.” No theologic scruples are felt in such free modes of expression, and indeed there never should be; for to every one but the strict tritheist, Christ must, in some sense, be the Spirit, and the Spirit, Christ. And when Christ calls the Comforter he promises, himself, he gives precisely the best and truest representation of the Spirit, in his new office, possible to be given. It is to be as if the disincarnated soul, or person of Christ, were now to go away and return as a universal Spirit invisible; in that form “to abide forever.” And the beauty of the conception is, that the Spirit is to be no mere impersonal effluence, or influence, but to be with us in the very feeling and charity of Jesus. All the fullness of Christ is in him; the gentleness, the patience, the tenderness, the self-sacrifice; all that makes Jesus himself such a power of personal mastery in us. He is to be with us in Christ’s name as a being with a heart, nay, to be the heart itself that was beating in the Son of Mary. All the charities, and even the blessed humanities of Jesus are to be in him, and, in fact, to be ministered socially, and socially manifested by him; even as Christ expressly declared—“He shall glorify me; for he shall receive of man and show it unto you.” This inward showing is, in fact, the virtuality of Christ. He will be to the soul all that Christ himself would wish to be; for he loves the world with Christ’s own love. He will be as forgiving as Christ in his passion, as tenderly burdened as Christ in his agony, as really present to physical suffering, as truly a Comforter to all the shapes of human sorrow. All which Christ outwardly expressed, he will inwardly show.

3. In this coming again of Christ by the Spirit, there is included also the fact that he will be known by the disciple, not only socially, but as the Christ, in such a way as to put us in a personal relationship with him, even as his own disciples were in their outward society with him. “Ye shall know that I am in the Father, and ye in me, and I in you.” “But ye know him.” “But ye see me.” Many persons appear to suppose that the Holy Spirit works in a manner back of all consciousness, and that there is even a kind of extravagance in the disciple who presumes to know him. And so it really is, if the conception is that he knows him by sensation, or by inward phantasy. But what means the apostle when he says—“the Spirit itself beareth witness with our Spirit that we are the children of God”? That bearing witness with imports some kind of inward society, or interchange, in which a divine testimony flows into human impression, or conviction, else it imports nothing. The real Christian fact in regard to this very important subject appears to be, that the Holy Spirit, or Spirit of Christ, though not felt by sensation, or beheld by mental vision, is yet revealed, back of all perception, in the consciousness. We are made originally to be conscious of God, just as we are of ourselves, and know him by that immediate light. This is our normal state and it is now so far restored. Our finite being was to be complete in the infinite, and apart from that, could only be a poor dead limb, or broken fragment, worthless to itself. And this accordingly is the wonder of a true religious experience begun, that the soul, awakened to the consciousness of God, not knowing how, has a certain mysterious feeling of otherness imparted, which is somehow a new element to it—a pure, inwardly glorious, free element. By and by it gets acquainted with the new and glorious incoming, and dares to say, it is Christ, it is God. A whole side of the nature turning Godward thus, and before closed, is now open, and the man is even more impressively conscious at times of the divine movement in his feeling, than of his own. And this fulfills the promise—“I will manifest myself unto him.” A promise which Paul bravely answers, when he says, out of his own conscious experience—“Christ liveth in me,”—“who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Here then is the relationship we seek—Christ is so related now, to the soul of them that receive him, that he is present with them in all places, at all times, bearing witness with their spirit, in guidance and holy society; a friend, a consoler, a glorious illuminator, all that he would or could be, if we had him each to himself in outward company. Yes, and he is more than this; for if we simply had him in such outward company, the contrast perceived would be even mortifying and oppressive; but now, as he comes up from within, through our personal consciousness itself, we are raised in dignity, and have him as the sense of a new and nobler self unfolded in us. O, what a footing is this for a mortal creature to occupy, an open relationship with Christ and God, in which it shall receive just all which it wants, being consciously girded with strength for whatever it has to do, patience for suffering, wisdom for guidance. His very nature is penetrated by a higher nature, and, being spirit to Spirit, he moves in the liberty of that superior impulse and advisement. His relationship to Christ is that of the branch to the vine, and the presence that he has with Christ is immediate, vital, and if he will suffer it, perpetual. Its whole gospel in one view it has in the promise—“Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world.”

But there is a different conception of this whole matter, which I must briefly notice. Many persons appear to assume, that we have, and can have, no relations to Christ, more immediate than those which we have through language and the understanding, The Spirit, they say, works by truth, and only as the truth gets power in our thoughts and choices. Their conception is that we have nothing to do with God, except as we get hold of notions, or notional truths, concerning him—reported facts, for example, and teachings, and doctrinal deductions. Undoubtedly we are to have this notional furniture in the understanding, but it is never to be a fence between us and God, requiring us to know him only at second hand, as we know China by the report of the geographers. We are still to know God, or Christ, by our immediate experience; nay, to know him as we know ourselves, by consciousness. It is useful for us to know ourselves scientifically, intellectually, reflectively; but this kind of artificial self-knowledge is not enough. Some of us, in that way, would scarcely know ourselves at all, and none of us more than partially, intermittently, and in spots. We want to know ourselves all the while, and without study, so as to be all the while possessing and going along with ourselves, and therefore we are gifted with an immediate consciousness of ourselves. But we want, just as much, to know God by this immediate and perpetual knowledge; for apart from. God we are nothing, we do not even half exist. Our finite existence becomes complete existence, only as we are complete in Him, and this we can not be, save as he is manifested, or participated, by our consciousness. Thus we might have our advantage in a notional, or scientific conception of the atmosphere, but if we could breathe only by such scientific self-regulation, many of us would stop breathing entirely, and all of us would be gasping for air a great part of the time; what we want is a continual fanning of the breath that shall keep the air at work, feeding our life all the time, without intermission, and without any kind of notional self-regulation. So, too, we want a perpetual inbreathing of God, a witnessing of the divine Spirit with our spirit, else our very nature is abortive and worthless. It is not enough that we have notions, or doctrines, of God, which we may use, or apply, to obtain flavors of good effect through such media—we want the immediate manifestation of God himself. And then, lest we should sink away into the abysses and trances of contemplation, with Plotinus and others who struggle out vaguely into and after the infinite, we have the infinite humanly personated in Christ; so that, instead of wandering off into any abysses at all, we simply let the Son of Man be God in our feeling, and fashion us in the molds of his own humanly divine excellence. Christ we say liveth in us; and therefore by the faith of the Son of God, we live.

But is not this a kind of mysticism, some will ask, better therefore to be avoided than received? I hardly know what is definitely meant by the question; unless perhaps it be that a word is wanted that will serve the uses of a stigma. A great many will begin to suspect some kind of mysticism, just because they are mystified, or misted, and see things only in a fog of obscurity. But if this be mysticism, nothing is plainer than that Christ is the original teacher of it, and his two disciples, John and Paul, specially abundant teachers of it after him. Every man is a mystic in the same way, who believes that Christ is the Life—in such a sense the life that he truly liveth in his followers, and giveth them to live by him. God as the Life, the all-quickener, the all-mover and sustainer, the inward glory and bliss of souls—this may be set down as a thing too high to be any but a mystical notion. And yet all highest things are apt to be most rational, and, at bottom, most credible. What can be more rational, in fact, than to think that God will give us most certainly what is most wanted—water, and light, and air, and yet more freely, Himself? He will not put us off to know only things about him, truths, notions, items of fact, but will give us to know Himself. And since all souls are dark, living only to grope, without Him—poor, blind pilgrims, straying on the shores of eternity—what will he do, what, in all true reason, must he do, but make himself the true sunrising to them, and the conscious revelation of their inward day.

Our answer then to the question what are Christ’s present relations to his followers? is that he is present to them as he is not, and can not be to the world; present as an all-permeating Spirit; present as the all-quickening Life; consciously, socially present; so that no explorations of science, or debates of reason are wanted to find him, no going over the sea to bring him back, or up into heaven to bring him down; because he is already present, always present, in the mouth and in the heart. In this manner he will be revealed in all men, waits to be revealed in all, if only they will suffer it. The word for every loving, trusting heart is, I will come unto it, I will be manifest in it. Lo, I will be with it always.

But the answer at which we thus arrive is a purely spiritual answer, you perceive, one that is real and true only as it is opened to faith, and experimentally proved. But all such spiritualities waver and flicker; we are too much in the senses to hold them constantly and evenly enough to rest in them. Therefore to keep us in the range of this relationship, God has contrived to fasten us in the sense of it, and make it good, by two fixed, partly outward, institutes, that are to stand as forts, or fortresses, in the foreground of it; viz., by the church and by the sacraments.

“Behold the kingdom of God is within you,” says the Saviour, meaning that he will be there, and there will have his reign. But he also lays the foundations of a great, perpetual, visible institute, that he names the church, calling it to be the light of the world, even as he, in the body, was the light of the world himself, and because he is now, in the Spirit, to be entered into and fill the body of the church with light. His apostle calls it too “the pillar and ground of the truth,” because it is to be that corporate body that never dies, receiving the written word as a deposit and trust for all ages to come, and becoming itself a living epistle, answering faithfully to it, and shedding, from its own luminous property, a perpetual light of interpretation upon it. Of this body, called the church, he is to be the Head himself, and all the members joined together in him, are to be so related to Him as to make a virtually real, and perpetually diffusive, incarnation of him in the world. While, therefore, it was expedient for him to go away as the Son of Man, or of Mary, it was yet to be found, as he comes again by revelation to the consciousness of his disciples, that he is again taking body, in fact, for all time, in them; so to be manifested organically, and, as it were, instituted in their undying and corporate membership—“Head over all things to the church which is his body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all.” The members are to know him personally, each in his own immediate life, and then they are to know him again even the more firmly, that they are consciously instituted and framed into body by his life. It is to be as if their divine consciousness itself were certified, and sealed, and made visible, by its own organizing power—that power which ages and times can not weaken, which outlives the kingdoms and their persecutions, and defies the gates of hell. “From whence the whole body, fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.” What solidity is there now in such a relation to Christ! Spiritual as the relation is, it is yet even more intellectually fixed, and carries better evidence, than Christ in the body was ever able to give his followers.

But the spiritualities of the relation Christ maintains with his disciples were to be settled and fortified by still another institute; I mean the sacraments, and especially the sacrament of the Holy Supper. The very object of the supper appears to be the settlement, and practical, or experimental, certification of that revelation to consciousness, of which we have been speaking. “This is my body, take and eat.” “This is my blood, drink ye all of it.” And this, to establish, as by institute, the fact that Christ here present, is to be communicated and received, as by nutrition, or as life. And this is what is meant by discerning his body, and the showing forth of his death; for there is to be an accepting, in the partaker, of his here represented embodiment, and a confession of trust in his death, to which he will, by these instituted symbols and pledges, be inwardly discovered, as certainly and as often as the rite is duly observed. When, therefore, he says, “this do in remembrance of me,” we are not to take his words in the lightest, shallowest, possible meaning, as if he were only giving us a mnemonic to refresh our memories, but in the deepest and most sacredly inward sense; viz., that he is giving it to us here, to receive the dearest hospitality, the communion of his own divine Life. All that famous discourse. of his about the bread and the blood, in the 6th chapter of John, is but the fit opening of his meaning. “I am the bread of life—the living bread that came down from heaven—if any man eat of this bread he shall live forever. My flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.”

And this exactly is the great institute of the supper. Christ engages to be present in it, by a most real presence, without a miracle of transubstantiation; so that when we come to offer him up ourselves, and open our inmost receptivities to the appropriation of his presence, it is no vague, volunteer, possibly presumptuous, thing that we do, as if venturing on some almost aerial flight, in the way of coming unto God, but we have the grace by institution, firmly pledged, and given, as it were, by routine. Here is Christ to be communicated. Here are we to commune. There is no miracle, but what is a great deal better, viz., life; community of life with Christ and God. What we get in the conscious revelation of his Spirit, we here receive by an outward and perpetually instituted dispensation. And we have this communion also with each other as with Christ; because he is the common life, which is endeavoring always a common growth in the members.

O, that we might receive this supper to-day, my brethren, according to its true meaning, and eat and drink worthily. Take it as no mere commemorative ceremony over Christ dead, but as the appointed vehicle of Christ living, and in you to live. Come not here to be sad and sit mourning for your Master’s body, like the women weeping for Tammuz. Consider, above all, this, that Christ, once dead, is here alive, that he may here dispense himself to you. Blessed is the heart that shall be fully opened to him. Be that true, as it may be, of you all; that you may go forth loving one another as you love your Master, and shining without, by the light he gives you within. Neither forget how that open, dear, relation of spirit with him, of which we have been speaking, is here sanctioned publicly for you, and sanctified before you, even as by an institute of God. As he has gone away, so believe, henceforth and always, that he has come again. Count this coming in the Spirit to be with you, dearer than even outward society with him would be, such as his disciples had at the first; and expect to be always with him in this manner, in the closest, most immediate, knowledge; even as he said himself—BUT YE SEE ME.

XVII.

THE WRATH OF THE LAMB.

“And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb. For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?”—Rev. vi, 16-17.

The lamb is the most simply innocent of all animals. Historically also it had become a name for sacrifice. For this twofold reason, Christ is set forth as the Lamb. Under this name, as fulfilling the conception of gentleness and sacrifice in God, we give him ready welcome. We magnify him as the Lamb, and expect to magnify him even eternally, in ascriptions offered to that dear name. Even such as are most remote from the life of religion are commonly satisfied with conceptions of God under this gentle, patient figure; making up, not seldom, schemes of divine character and order, that have only the innocuous way of the lamb—just as thousands of the devotees of liberty will magnify liberty, as being the whole substance of government; counting it really the same thing as a release from being governed. Yet liberty is but justice secured; and, in just the same manner, the Lamb is but the complemental gentleness of God’s judicial vigor.

XVIII.

CHRISTIAN FORGIVENESS.

“Forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”—Eph. iv, 32.

Under these words, “even as,” and the relation or comparison they introduce, a very serious and high truth is presented; viz., that our human or Christian forgivenesses are to correspond with the forgiveness of sins by Christ himself; to be cast in the same molds of quality and bestowed under similar conditions. And that we may not fail of receiving such an impression, the principle or idea is made to recur many times over, and in such ways that we can not miss of it, or throw a doubt upon it. Thus we read again—“forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any; even as Christ forgave you so also do ye.” Again, in the gospels, it is given us in Christ’s own words—“forgive, and ye shall be forgiven”—“for if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive your trespasses.” He will not even allow us to pray for forgiveness, save as we ourselves forgive—“Forgive us our trespasses, even as we forgive those who trespass against us.” All this on the ground that there is such an analogy between the forgiveness of Christ to us, and ours to our brethren and our fellow-men, as makes them virtually alike in spirit and kind, though not equal of course in degree. The quality of the virtue, the greatness of feeling, and height of meaning, will be so far correspondent, at least, that the smaller will represent the larger, and, according to its measure, reveal the same properties.

I state the point thus distinctly, because, in the matter of forgiveness among men, a kind of lapse, or sinking of grade, appears to have somehow occurred; so that, holding still the duty of forgiveness, we have it in a form so cheap and low, as to signify little when it is practiced. “O, yes,” says the brother, finally worn out by much expostulation, on account of the grudge he is holding against another who has greatly injured him, “I will forgive him, but I hope never to see him again.” Christ does not say that to the man whom he forgives, and I suppose it would commonly be regarded among brethren, as a rather scant mode of forgiveness—such a mode of it as scarcely fulfills the idea. Another degree of it, which would probably pass, says—“Yes, let him come to me and ask to be forgiven, and it will be time for me to answer him.” Probably a quotation is made, in this connection, of the scripture text which says—“If thy brother repent forgive him.” And most certainly he should be thus forgiven, when the repentance appears to be an actual and present fact; but suppose that no such repentance has yet appeared. Is it then enough to say, “let him come and ask to be forgiven?” Many think so, and the argument appears to be conclusive, when they demand—“How can I be expected to forgive, where there is no repentance, and the wrong is just as stubbornly adhered to as ever? What but a mockery is it for me to forgive, when there is no forgiveness wanted, and my adversary has not even come into the right?”

Well then, suppose that Christ had stopped just there. Nobody is asking to be forgiven, all are in their sins and mean to be there. They love their sins. They have asked no release or forgiveness. They are not repentant in the least degree? What then is there for him to do? Is he not absolved from any such matter as the preparing and publishing of forgiveness, by the simple fact that nobody wants it, or asks for it?” “If they were penitent,” he might say, “it would lay a heavy charge upon me. But they are not, and what is forgiveness thrust upon souls that do not even so much as care for it?”

Why, my friends, it is just here that Christ and his gospel begin—just here, in fact, that his forgiveness begins; viz., in for-giving, giving himself for, and to, the blinded and dead heart of unrepentant men, to make them penitent, and regain them to God. The real gist of his forgiveness antedates their. penitence; it is what he does, shows, suffers, in a way of gaining his enemy—bringing him off and away, that is, from his wrongs, to seek, and, in a true sorrow, find, the forgiveness that has been searching beforehand so tenderly after him.

If we are to understand this matter accurately, as it stands in the New Testament, we need to observe that two very distinct and, in some respects, dissimilar Greek words are employed here, to denote the virtue under consideration; both of which are translated by the single, very beautiful, but strangely dishonored English word, forgiveness. One signifies merely a letting go, a release of charges, an exemption from punishment, the merely negative good of not being held in condemnation; a word accurately translated here and there by the word “remission.” The other signifies the very positive and operative matter of sacrifice and suffering to gain the heart of an adversary; that which not merely lets go, but prepares men to be let go. Literally this word means “to bestow grace.” Thus in the text, where it is translated forgive, we may read—“dealing grace, one towards another, even as God for Christ’s sake, hath dealt grace towards you.” There is also this remarkable contrast between the two words, translating both by forgiveness, that one fixes on the very last point, or final effect of forgiveness, viz., the release, the letting go of charges, the absolution which says, “go in peace;” and the other finds its main idea in the first things of forgiveness, the love, the going after, the giving-for, by which the soul is taken hold of sooner than it asks to be; that which did not wait for penitence to come, that it might let penitence go, but which undertook to bring on penitence, prepare it, melt the heart into it, and so to execute the letting go of the soul, by making the sins let go of it.

Now both of these words are names, we have said, of the same grace; viz., the grace of forgiveness; only one names it from a last incident or effect, and the other from the initiative movement of love and operative goodness, in which it took its spring—just as one might name the dawn, as a mere effect, or call it the sunrising, as denoting the cause or spring of the returning light; where of course the names are coincident, though inherently different from each other. In the present case, there is an immense difference between the two words employed, as regards the dignity and the real amount of their meaning—all the moral greatness, or high beneficence, appears to lie in the grace-dealing of love and sacrifice that prepares the remission; and yet when the lower, feebler word is used, as it is in a majority of cases, all that is in the other word is supposed to pass into its meaning, and keep along with it. Nothing is further off from Christ and his apostles, than to suppose, in any case, that the forgiveness they speak of is nothing but the simple letting. go of charges against the penitent. They have it understood always that the grand reality of the forgiveness preached is that which went before, in the putting by of so much injured feeling, the going after them that want no forgiveness, the giving for, and suffering for, by which they may be drawn to God;—just that which is described historically and transactionally, when the apostle says, “Who gave himself a ransom for all,” “who gave himself for me.” For it is precisely this which goes into the higher word “grace-dealing” and composes the reality of its meaning. This is the grace, that Christ gives himself for us, and so works in us, by his sacrifice, that we are transformed, reconciled, covered in with God’s feeling, in one word, forgiven.

Do not understand me to say that the higher Greek word is made up of the verb to give, with the preposition for, like our English word. It is not; it signifies literally and simply “dealing grace,” or “doing grace upon;” which is represented by the genius of our tongue, in the word “for-giving;” and, what is remarkable, the Latin and all the principal modern tongues, [as in con-dono, par-don, ver-geben,] make up their word signifying remission in the same way, by compounding their verb to give with a preposition answering to for; giving it, as it were by vote, and declaring it as their inward sense or conviction, that the true forgiving of wrong and evil is that which has its beauty and greatness and the spring of its operative power, in a giving-for the sinners and the sins to be forgiven.

And lest this might seem to be scarcely better than a suggestion of the fancy, or a curiosity of speech, let us glance a moment at the practical, or practically Christian, import of forgiveness when it is received. What is it practically to us, or in us? What does it do for us? What internal changes of position, or experience, does it bring? Answering these questions, we shall find that forgiveness, when ascribed to Christ, has suffered a lapse or fall in our understanding, much like that which it has suffered when applied to men. For the word is taken by multitudes, including even teachers of theology, as if it had no reach of meaning above the lower and more negative of the two words just referred to. Thus we say that Christ first prepares a ground of forgiveness, by suffering before God (penally or not penally) in a manner to even the account of our sin; and then, having magnified the justice of God, he is able to let go, remit, release the charge of, in that sense, forgive, our sin. Well, suppose the absolution is passed and we are let go, declared to be let go, as I let go verbally my enemy when I forgive him. What does this signify, that God has let go, taken off all charges against, his enemy? Just nothing but a most barren mockery, unless he has somehow got into the man’s bosom and executed his pardon, by making the sins let go of him. And precisely here is the stress, the struggle, the wonder and glory of the forgiveness; that Christ, going before, has gotten him away from his sin; and, in all this previous grace-dealing, the reality of the letting go, otherwise nothing but empty words, is accomplished. Why, the man to be redeemed had a hell of retributive causes tearing in his disordered nature, and the mere letting him go only lets him have that hell to himself! No, the grand effort of forgiveness begins farther back, in what is undertaken for the sinner to win upon him, change him, get him loose from sin, loose from retribution, and then the letting go is only the ending off, or completion declared. And so the real forgiveness is that Jesus came, to be for his adversary and execute the great release in him. Long ages ago, before the foundation of the world, his mind of love began to grapple with the wrong and bitter woe of his adversary. He was not saying, “let him come to me, in his day, and ask it if he will, and then I will forgive him;” as little was it in him to say, “let him be a better man and by-gones shall be by-gones.” But he was the Lamb slain already. He was contriving how to get beforehand in his forgiveness, postponing his just indignations, laying himself into the case of his adversaries to gain them back, planning a descent into the flesh and a suffering life—giving himself for, in a word forgiving, in all profoundest reality of feeling, ages before they arrive, and of course before they come to ask forgiveness. And when they come along in their day, and say for their scanty testimony in receiving such a grace, “Christ has let us go, Christ has remitted our sins,” he will himself have a deeper solution, in the consciousness of having long ago given himself for them, and had the enjoyment of their forgiven state. Neither will he ever think of it as any fit summation of his work in the world, to say that he has first prepared a ground of forgiveness, and then that having made forgiveness safe in that manner, he is able to release or let go, or in that sense forgive sins. No, but he will understand that he was lifted up to draw men away from their sins, and be the release in them; that, by showing how God suffers in feeling for sinners, he has gotten a power in their feeling; in a word, that, by giving himself for his adversaries, in such burdens of sympathy, and fear, and care, and against such tempests of murderous and bloody wrong, he has slid himself into the secret place of their sins and made them all let go—in that manner executed the release; so that now he can say, with real truth in the words, “thy sins are forgiven thee.”

We go back now from this excursion, to the subject-matter at which we began; viz., the duty of forgiveness between brethren, or. fellow-men. And we carry back this very important principle or discovery; that the reality of forgiveness, or the grace of a forgiving spirit in us, lies not so much in our ability to let go, or to be persuaded to let go, the remembrance of injuries, as in what we are able to do, what volunteer sacrifices to make, what painstaking to undergo, that we may get our adversary softened, to want, or gently accept, our forgiveness. If it is in us to forgive, in any real and properly Christian sense of the term, it will not be that we can somehow be gotten down to it, by the expostulations of brethren, nor that we only do not expressly claim a right to stay in our grudge, or the hurt feeling raised by the wrongs of our adversary, till he comes to us in a better mind. Perhaps he ought to come, or to have come long ago, but that is nothing as regards our justification. If we know how to forgive, we shall be like Christ our Master, we shall be giving ourselves for our adversary, circumventing him by our prayers, contriving ways to reach his tenderness and turn the bad will he is in, taking pains, even to the extent of great loss and suffering, that we may get him into the right again; thus to accept our remission, and be joined to us openly for Christ our Master’s sake.

XIX.

CHRIST BEARING THE SINS OF TRANSGRESSORS.

“So Christ. was once offered to bear the sins of many.”—Heb. ix, 28.

Christ bearing our sins ought to be the tenderest and most soul-subduing of all facts conceivable. And yet it may even be made quite revolting, by the over literal, and legally hard, face put upon it. Perhaps I ought to say that it too often is, and that what is given to be the new creating power of God in our lives, is made, in this manner, to be an offense that even balks our repentances. What I propose then, at the present time, is to answer, in a very practical way, the very practical question—

In what sense, or manner, it is, that Christ bears the sins of the world?

To make the answer clear, I begin by specifying some things which are not to be understood by it.

Thus we are not to understand that the sins of the world are put upon him, or transferred to him, so as to be his. That is impossible. Guilt is a matter so strictly and eternally personal, that nobody can be in it, but the transgressor himself to whom it belongs. Apart from him it is nothing. Strike him out of existence and it no longer exists. The bad conscience, the blame, the damning self-conviction, is as incommunicably his, even as his brain, or his will. Indeed, the creatorship of the world can as well be transferred, as the doership of a sin. The meum and tuum of property can be transferred, but the meum and tuum of sin is even absolute. If I owe a debt, another man can make himself a debtor in my place, but if I am a felon, no other man can be the felon for me.

It follows, in the same view, that Christ does not bear our sins in the sense that he bears our punishment. Everlasting justice forbids any such commutation of places in punishment. What is this justice? An indignation against wrong that wants pain out of somebody, caring only that the quantum be made up? Or is it, rather, an indignation against the wrong-doer himself, and no other? No matter if another consents to bear that indignation, and suffer all the deserved pains of the wrong-doer, when that second person comes to offer himself, God’s justice will forthwith object in the question—“Are you guilty of this man’s sin? Doubtless you may be his friend, but the only thing you can do for him is to be innocence in him, and you can as well do that as to be guilty instead of him. But as long as you are innocence yourself, what kind of transaction is it that you undertake, when you come to be punished in innocence? What opinion have you of my justice, when you expect me to release the pains deserved, if only I can get enough that are not deserved? Did I ever threaten to punish the guilty man, or somebody else, when my law should be broken? You ask more than is possible, when you ask me to smooth over even the everlasting distinctions of principle, and be satisfied with the punishment of innocence. I can only be revolted by the thought, and should be everlastingly by the deed.”

Again, it is not conceivable that Christ bears our sin, in the sense that the abhorrence of God to our sin is laid upon him, and expressed through, and by means of, his sufferings. How can God lay abhorrence upon what is not abhorrent? Is he going to abhor goodness, truth, beauty itself? And if Jesus, being all this, comes in as a volunteer into the place of transgressors, challenging upon himself the abhorrence due to them, will God falsify and mock all his own approving judgments and moral affinities, by acting an abhorrence which he must renounce every one of his perfections to feel? Perhaps it will be imagined that he only puts great pains on Christ, which we ourselves are to look upon as tokens of abhorrence to us. That would be very ingenious in us, but how are we going to take up such a thought? In the first place, God did not inflict those pains, but we ourselves. Are we then going to put Christ to death and take it up as a religious discovery, having a gospel in it, that God’s abhorrence to us is so far expressed by our very abominable deed of murder, that it need not be any more, by our punishment? We can easily enough imagine God’s abhorrence, in such a case, to the sin perpetrated, and the murderers by whom it is perpetrated, but the difficulty is to get either Christ or his suffering into the same line; for the last thing any human soul can think of will be, that God’s abhorrence touches him any how, or looks out any where from his pains.

We come now, having dismissed these rather common misconceptions, to the positive matter of the question, or the positive answer to be given. And here let me indicate, beforehand, a certain point of fact that will probably distinguish any true answer; viz., that Christ, in bearing the sins of transgressors, simply fulfills principles of duty, or holiness, that are common to all moral beings, and does it as being obliged by those principles. If there is any fundamental truth in morals, it is that there is no superlative kind of merit or excellence; that as far as kind is concerned, the same kind is for all, and there is no other. Thus, if Christ has it incumbent on him, as a point of beneficence, or love, to bear the sins of transgressors, it will be incumbent on every moral being in the universe, ourselves included, to bear sins; only not perhaps in the same degree, or with the same effect. If he is to be a sacrifice for sin, it will be laid upon us to be, every man, a sacrifice and an offering in like manner, only not to accomplish all the same results. We are not then to look for some artificial, theologically contrived, never before heard of, kind of good, in the bearing of sins, but simply to look after what lies in the first principles of religious love and devotion, as related to the conduct of all. Having this intent in view I shall make out—

XX.

THE PUTTING ON OF CHRIST.

“But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ.”—Rom. xiii, 14.

The highest distinction of man, taken as an animal among animals, lies not in his two-handedness, or his erect figure, but in his necessity and right of dress. The inferior animals have no option concerning their outward figure and appearing. Their dress, or covering, is a part of their organization, growing on them, or out of them, as their bones are grown within. Be it feathers, or fur, or hair, or wool; be it in this color or that, brilliant as the rainbow, or shaggy, or grizzled, or rusty and dull, they have no liberty to change it, even if they could desire the change, for one that is glossier and more to their taste. But man, as a creature gifted with a larger option, begins, at the very outset, to show his superior dignity in the necessary option of dress. It is given him for his really high prerogative, to dress himself, and come into just what form of appearing will best satisfy the tastes into which he has grown; or, what is very nearly the same thing, will best represent the quality of his feeling and character. With this kind of liberty comes, of course, an immense peril; for there is a peril that belongs to every kind of liberty. As dress and equipage may create a difference of appearing, that very nearly amounts to a difference of order and kind, the race of ambition, as soon as ambition is born, will here begin. And now the tremendous option of dress, given as a point of dignity, becomes, under sin, a mighty instigator in the fearful race of money, society, and fashion.

You already understand from this course of remark, that I am going to speak of dress as the outward analogon, or figure of character, and of character as the grand “putting on” of the soul. It would be instructive here to notice the immense reacting power of dress on character, showing how we not only choose our own figure in it, but our figure in turn chooses us; requiring us to feel and act, or helping us to feel and act, according to the appearing we are in. But I hasten to speak of the analogy referred to. Dress relates to the form or figure of the body, character to the form or figure of the soul—it is, in fact, the dress of the soul. The option we have, in one, typifies the grander option we have in the other. The right we have in one, above the mere animals, to choose the color, type and figure of the outward man, foreshadows the nobler right we also have to cast the mold, fashion or despoil the beauty, of the inward man. There is also an immense reaction in character; what we have become already, in the cast of life, going far to shape our doings and possible becomings hereafter.

On the ground of this analogy it is that the scriptures so frequently make use of dress, to signify what lies in character, and represent character, in one way or another, as being the dress of the soul. Thus they speak of “the wedding-garment,” “the garment of praise,” that “of cursing,” that “of pride;” “the robe of righteousness,” and “of judgment,” and “the white robe,” and “the best robe” given to the returning prodigal, and “the robe that has been washed,” and “judgment put on as a robe;” of “white raiment,” and “white apparel,” of “glorious apparel,” of “filthiness,” or “righteousness that are filthy rags,” of “filthiness in the skirts;” and more inclusively and generally still, of being “clothed with salvation,” “with strength and power,” “with humility,” “with majesty,” “with shame,” “with fine linen clean and white, which is the righteousness of saints;” “I put on righteousness,” says Job, “and it clothed me.” And, in the same way, it is that Paul, conceiving Christ to be the soul’s new dress, or what is no wise different, its new character, says “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ.”

All the figures of dress or clothing are used up, in this manner, by the scriptures, to represent the forms of disgrace and filthiness, or of beauty and glory, into which the inner man of the soul may be fashioned—wearing heaven’s livery or that of sin. As character is the soul’s dress, and dress analogical to character, whatever has power to produce a character when received, is represented as a dress to be put on.

Passing thus into the great problem of life as a moral and spiritual affair, we are surprised to find that inward character and outward covering are so closely related, as to be taken, by a kind of natural instinct, one for the other, and the loss of one for the loss of the other. What do the first human pair imagine when they fall into sin, and make the loss of character, but that they have lost their covering? It does not appear to be merely a stroke of art in the description given, but a most natural turn of fact, that the shamed consciousness within is taken, by their unpracticed simplicity, as a shock that has come upon their modesty.

No sooner is the deed done, than the culprits, all covered in before by the sense of God’s beauty on their feeling—for exactly that was their original righteousness and not any beauty of their own culture—begin to be troubled by the discovery of their nakedness! The real difficulty is that the pure investiture of God upon their consciousness has been stripped away, thrown off by their sin. Nothing is changed without, as they foolishly think—stitching their scant leaves, vain hope! to hide a loss that is within. And probably the same is true of the immense dressing art and trade of the world; it is put agoing and continued, as regards the fearfully deep zeal of it, by just that shame of the mind which keeps it company in evil, and makes it always emulous of some better figure. Were this inward shame taken away, and the soul inwrapped, as at the first, by the sense of God’s beauty upon it, the secret phrenzy at least would soon be over. The maiden would forget her torment in the sense of a holier beauty within, the hidden man of the heart, the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit; and the man of the world would be striving no more after the outward shows and trappings that are needed to cover the lost honors of the mind.

In the same way it is, just according to the manner of the fig-leaf history, that such an immense patching art, in the matter of character, is kept in practice in all ages of the world. It is the general admission of souls, that they are not in a true figure of respect before themselves; but instead of returning to God, and the complete investure in which he will cover them, they imagine, or get up, small shows of excellence, which they contrive to think are as good, for the matter of character, as they need. These small shows we have a name for, calling them pretexts, shows of covering that, after all, do not cover—patches, fig-leaves. In one view the absurd figures continually put forward as pretexts, in this way, are abundantly ludicrous; in another they carry a look most sad, as well as profoundly serious. Politeness—this is one of the fig-leaves; taken for a complete character by many, and carefully maintained, as the standard excellence of life. Honor is another and scantier, assuming still to be even a superlative kind of character; more imposing and airy than it could be under the restrictions of virtue. Bravery, again, is a fig-leaf pretext, put on to cover the loss of courage; for evil in the soul is of a coward nature, and can only keep itself up, without heart, by sallies and wild dashes of bravery from the will. These and many others of the same class are pretexts of character outside of religion, but immensely significant, as revelations of the shamed consciousness of sin. Passing into the more immediate field of religion, the pretexts there invented and put forward, as covers to the soul’s nakedness, are scarcely to be numbered or named—such as sacrifices offered the world over to idols, self-tortures of the body to cover the sin of the soul, penances, austerities of solitude, vows of abstinence and poverty, exactness in rites and traditions, orthodoxy, alms-givings, honesty in trade, the doing others no harm, resignations and fatalizing submissions to God, works of reform and philanthropy, patience without feeling, liberality without character. This fig-leaf stitching is, in fact, the great business of the world; in which we may see, more convincingly than by any thing else, the certainty that men are goaded everywhere by the secret, inexpugnable feeling of nakedness or a want of character. It is a most sad picture to look upon. Then how piercing and fearful is the revelation, when the Holy Spirit strips away all the illusions they practice, and they are made to see that their righteousnesses are rags and not garments, and that they are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked. O, this nakedness of the soul! how dismal a figure it is even to itself! Jesus pities it, and comes to it saying, in what gentleness of promise—“buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich, and white raiment that thou mayest be clothed, that the shame of thy nakedness may not appear.”

XXI.

HEAVEN OPENED.

“And he saith unto him—Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”—John i, 31.

With a singular felicity and power of statement, Mr. Coleridge gives it for his doctrine of scripture inspiration—“In the Bible there is more that finds me, than I have experienced in all other books put together; the words of the Bible find me at greater depths of my being; and whatever finds me brings with it an irresistible evidence of its having proceeded from the Holy Spirit.” God only can be so far privy, that is, to the soul, as to make it answer thus, all through, in its deepest and most hidden parts, to his words. Whatever may be thought of his doctrine, as a complete and sufficient solution of the question, it is certainly good, and even powerfully good, as far as it goes. And it has a beautiful coincidence, which he probably had never observed, with the very simple and truly natural sentiment of Christ’s interview with Nathanael.

Fig-trees make a very dense covering of leaves and sometimes drop their boughs very low. Nathanael had lately retired into the cabin of thick foliage thus provided by some tree of his garden, and closeted there with God, was opening his heart, in regard to some particular difficulty, or enemy, or question of duty, or promise of a Messiah to come, in a manner only the more guileless, that he felt himself to be so entirely removed from human observation. Shortly after, probably on that same day, being notified by Philip, he comes to see Jesus, who is even thought to be the great Messiah himself. Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him and saith of him—“Behold an Israelite indeed in whom is no guile!” Nathanael saith unto him—“Whence knowest thou me?” Jesus answered and said unto him—“Before Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig-tree, I saw thee.” Nathanael saith unto him” Rabbi, thou art the Son of God, thou art the king of Israel.” Jesus answered and said unto him—“Because I saw thee under the fig-tree believest thou? thou shalt see greater things than these.” And he saith unto him—“Verily, verily I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”

The two main points of the dialogue are, first, that Nathanael was so impressed by the finding of Christ, or the privity of Christ’s knowledge of him, under the fig-tree, that he at once declared his belief in him as the Messiah; and secondly, that Christ immediately proclaims a deeper finding, and a more convincing privity of knowledge, that shall, in, due time, be shown or proved, by the opening, within his own bosom, of a supernatural, sense and the discovery to him thus of supernatural beings, the passing and repassing, the flow and reflow of their blessed society. According to the description given, it will be as if that isthmus barrier between the two great oceans of the world were cloven down, for the oscillating tides to begin their coming and returning flow; when also the ships of the nations, wafted convergently thither, shall be sailing freely through, burdened with the fruits and golden riches of all climes and shores.

Now this opening of heaven, which is to be our subject, is presented by the Saviour in terms that may seem to be a little enigmatical. We shall conceive his meaning perhaps more sufficiently, if we note three principal views of the heavenly state that occur in the scripture. First, there is the local objective view, that conceives it as a place somewhere in the upper worlds of heaven or the sky. Secondly, there is the terrestrial objective view, where the New Jerusalem descending from God out of heaven and refitting our world itself to be the abode of God with men, makes it a province, in that manner, of the other. Thirdly, the subjective view, which has nothing to do with place or locality, but conceives the heavenly state simply as a state of spiritual beholding and social commerce opened in the soul itself. There is no necessary contradiction or disagreement between the three conceptions stated; they are all true, though probably in different senses, and may be taken as complementary, in fact, to each other. The first is more impressive and popular and more commonly used; the second, as being more geographical, is more closely connected with our mundane prospects and affairs; the third is more entirely moral and rational, being simply the condition of character. All are to be used with entire freedom, and without any attempt to maintain one against the others; the presumption being that a state. so transcendent will be only feebly conceived, when they are all brought in, to intensify and qualify, or complement, each other.

In the conversation with Nathanael, the Saviour appears to be speaking in the subjective way, as of a heaven to be opened in the soul itself. In his terms of description, he refers, apparently, to Jacob’s dream, where that patriarch beholds, not without, but in the chamber of his own brain, in a dream of the night when the senses are fast locked in sleep, a ladder set up and the angels of God coursing up and down upon it; only what transpired subjectively in his brain he naturally associated with the place, conceiving also that the sky above was somehow specially set open there, saying—“how dreadful is this place,” and calling it “the gate of heaven.” So the Saviour says, “ascending and descending,” putting the ascending first; as if the metropolis or point or departure, in the commerce begun, were to be from within the soul itself. There lives the Son of Man, reigning in his heavenly kingdom at the soul’s own center, and from him go up couriers and ministers of glory, descending also back upon him there. The precise point made, in this manner, with Nathanael is, that as he was discovered under the fig-tree, so he shall be discovered, as regards the immense upper world of the soul, existing unsuspected in him hitherto, but now set open. These two propositions cover the ground of the subject stated, and these I shall endeavor to substantiate.

I. That there is a supernatural sense, now slumbering or closed up in souls, by which they might perceive, or cognize, supernatural beings and things, even as they cognize material beings and things by the natural sense. And

II. That Christ undertakes to open this supernatural sense, and make it the organ or inlet of universal society.

I. There is a supernatural sense now closed up, or existing under a state of suppression.

We encounter a difficulty here, in attempting to prove the existence of faculties and powers that are shut in, or suppressed in their action. And yet even our natural faculties are very nearly in that condition at the first—no man knowing, or conceiving, what is in him, till it is brought forth. We also know that all finest qualities and highest powers are stifled, for the time, or even permanently, by wrongs and vices. What we here suppose to be true is, that in the original and properly normal state, souls were open to God, and a full, free commerce with his upright society. Being made in God’s image, they were to be children with God their Father, living in society with him, having him to know, enjoy, and love, and having all their desires freely met and satisfied by the open ministry of his friendship. He was, and, with all his glorious company, was eternally to be, revealed in them, as in a heaven of present bliss, and immediately conscious communion of life.

But this original and properly normal state was necessarily broken up and brought to a full end, by their fall into sin. They now become afraid of him and hide themselves instinctively from him. No longer can he be revealed to their immediate knowledge, because the personal affinities through which he was to be revealed are closed up in them. They fall off thus into their senses, and become occupied with the objects of the senses; having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, through the ignorance that is in them. So they live as under heavy storm-clouds in the night; the. lightning flashes in sharp gleams across the clouds, or glares in red anger fits from within their body, but there is no opening through, to let in the light of the stars. Heaven is gone out to them in the same manner; God is hid, and they know not where they can find Him; spirit and spiritual being and spiritual society with his great family is so far a lost possibility, that, if they think it, they can not give it reality. There is something too in guilt, or the state of guiltiness, that amounts to a virtual shutting up, or suppression, of all affinities with supernatural being. It freezes in perception. It condenses all the Godward and pure aspirations and gathers them in, by the dreadful recoil it makes on the soul’s own center. It pronounces a damnation too upon itself, and by its own remorseful severities makes the sentence good. Falling away thus from God, and closing itself up as regards all supernatural relations and perceptions, it becomes self-centered, isolated, a worm in the ground, having its belongings there and not in the element of day.

Is there now any such supernatural sense existing under suppression in the soul, as the statement I have made supposes? The question is a very great, and is getting to be the almost only, question for our day.

To go over the evidence briefly, there is obviously nothing impossible in the fact of such a sense. There may as well be a power to cognize immaterial, supernatural being, as material.

Neither is it any thing, that our philosophers recognize no such higher ranges of faculty. No faculty is ever recognized, save as it comes into consciousness by use. That which is shut up, therefore, can be nothing to philosophy. When the lantern of a light-house has no light burning within, it will be an opaque body at the top, as it is in the base below—even the transparency will be opaque.

But we can affirm, I think, with confidence, for one distinct argument, that there ought to be just this upper world of supernatural insight in souls. As they are related to God, there ought to be a power of immediate knowledge, in which he is revealed—they require, in fact, to be as truly conscious of God as of themselves; for God is the complement of their being, and without him they only half exist. Again, as they are related to eternal society with all good beings, they ought also to have powers of discerning that may apprehend them. In this manner, as they are not made to be mere plodders, however intelligent, or scientific in distinguishing the laws and causes of things, but to have their summits and supreme destinies of life, in their commerce with God, and the supernatural society of his realm, their fit equipment requires, obviously enough, a higher sense opening towards the supernatural. How can the understanding, operating on the subject matter of sense, discover, or attain, by mere inference, to what is not in the premises of sense, but in a totally different range? Whoever then adheres to immortality and religion, and denies the credibility of what is supernatural, confesses, at once, that he wants the commerce of God’s universal society, and cuts off the possibility of finding it.

Again, there not only ought to be aspirations in the soul, and powers of sensing for the supernatural, but we can see, by many signs, more or less definite, that there are. Sometimes a groping will signify as much as an open discovery, and what has the race been doing, in all the past ages and everywhere, but groping after gods, and demons, and populating even the earth and the sky with mythologic creations. It is as if some divine phrenzy were in them, goading them on after what they so mightily want. Little, indeed, do they discover of what is real and true; they only go a marveling, as the phrenologists would say, carried off from the mere plane of reason, by they know not what. They grope with their eyes shut, and their groping signifies more than their discoveries. I think also that we can find, every one of us, in ourselves, dim yearnings, imaginations coasting round unknown realms, guesses asking after the commerce of good and great beings, that put us in profound sympathy with them. Nothing will account for what we find thus in ourselves and the world, but the fact of supernatural longings and perceptions, existing in us under suppression. Indeed, I think we should very nearly suffocate, all of us, including even the infidel deniers, shut down close under nature and her causes. After all, we do think higher things, and there is more comfort in it than perhaps we know.

We are able, again, to conceive certain things about this supernatural sense, taking in supernatural things and beings, which makes it seem less extravagant. To say that we can sense, or could, other ranges of being, and have them in the open heaven of the soul, appears to be violent, or extravagant. Just as violent is it still to say, that we do take in the world of matter by the natural senses, and have it in us, even from the sky downward. We do not go to things in our perception of them, neither do they come locally to us; the latitudes, and longitudes, and altitudes, are still there; we do not spread ourselves in presence upon them; and yet we somehow have them in us, and subjectively possess them. Besides, in the relation of spirits and beings supernatural, we know not by what presences and revelations they may come within the precincts of knowledge; as little by what fences they are kept asunder. Place in this matter may be nothing, congenialities every thing. It does not surprise us that the bad should somehow come upon the bad; as little should it that the good have a way of social presence with the good. Perhaps, too, it will relieve the aspect of extravagance here, if I say, that faith is nothing but the opening of the supernatural sense of the soul on the supernatural being to be apprehended. It opens, in other words, the heaven of the mind, and God, and Christ, and the good supernatural society press in to fill it. Faith is the evidence, ill this manner, even as the scriptures declare, of things not seen, and the substance, or substantiation, of things hoped for. There is even a kind of faith in the sensing of sight, turning mere images, in the eye, to things, and making them real. That there is a higher sense, realizing beings supernatural, is a fact every way correspondent.

Furthermore it is a fact well attested, in all ages, and proved by manifold experience, that minds do consciously approximate God and the heavenly society, accordingly as they are turned away from evil and set open to good. They feel a certain nearness to beings and words supernatural, that amounts to society begun. And then how very often, as their affinities are more completely fined and set open, do they, in their last hours, hail the Saviour present, and good angels revealed, and departed friends whom they salute by name, waiting to receive them. Doubtless all such things will be set down as the illusions of their wandering faculty, but what if they should happen to be true—even the truest truths ever beheld by them, and most profoundly wanted by us all?

I will only add that the scriptures constantly assume, and in many ways assert, the fact of a supernatural sense in souls, that is shut up and requires to be opened. Christ declares this truth again and again, as, for instance, when he says, “For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed, lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart.” He does not say this of the natural senses and judgments, but of the higher perceptions of the heart, or the religious and spiritual man. The same thing also is very deliberately and carefully put by the apostle, when he says—“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things.” There is, in other words, a natural man and a spiritual, a lower range of perception and a higher; and by this latter only, set open to the light, can the spiritual and supernatural. things of God be discerned and judged. And this is the supernatural sense of which I have been speaking, the upper range of faculty that belongs to religion, prepared for a seeing of the invisible. By this it was that Christ expected to be in the soul’s inward beholding, as when he said—“but ye see me.” By this it was that a whole heaven of being and society is conceived to reveal itself to souls, when they are converted and set open to God—“But ye are come unto mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, and to the general assembly and church of the first-born which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect.” And so glorious and clear was their inward beholding, at times, that one disciple seemed to be caught up into some “third heaven” by it, though the heaven, as he well understood, was within. Another also declared, as in vision, “I see heaven opened,” and though he “looked steadfastly up” at the time, it was only that altitude is the natural language, or line of direction, in such inward exaltations. So intensely perceptive, according to the scripture view, may a human soul become, when awakened inwardly, and drawn out in its higher apprehensions, after those invisible, supernatural, associations for which it is created.

Assuming now the fact of a supernatural sense in souls, that it is shut up by sin, we are next to consider—

II. How Christ, as he declares to Nathanael, will open this suppressed faculty, and make it the organ, or inlet, of universal society.

And here it will be remembered, that angelic visitations had been coursing back and forth upon the world and through it, in all ages, both before Christ’s coming, and at his coming, and after. Moses had gone up into the mount and brought down tables lettered, as it were, in heaven. Fires had been kindled, from above, in sacrifices offered on rocks, and altars of turf. Two holy men had been visibly translated. And yet heaven still appears to be somehow shut. The angels—not ascending and descending but descending and ascending—are thought of only as having gone away, to some invisible nowhere whence they came. The great public miracles only help the chosen people to believe in a kind of Jew-God reigning under limitations, and holding their little patch of territory for his field. Instead of catching the hint from so many wonders, and so many bright visitants, of a world above the world, waiting to receive them in eternal society, it even makes them angry to hear, that God will include, in one circle of being, all that come to him on earth. A holy few found real access to the king, led in, to his seat, by the teachings of their prophets and the more secret teachings of the Spirit. But it is a most singular fact that no one of these, no dying saint most enlightened by holy experience, speaks, in these former ages, of going to heaven, or even of there being a heavenly world where righteous souls are gathered; unless it be that one or two expressions of the prophets are to be taken in that sense. Many critics therefore have denied, that there is any revelation of immortality, or a second life, before Christ’s coming. And we know that, when he came, it was even an open question, whether any such being as “angel or spirit” really exists?

If now any one should ask what this means—how the world above seems to be already opened if it ever can be, and yet is shut?—the answer is, that all this apparitional machinery goes on without, before men’s eyes, while the heaven of the soul is shut; and that so many angels therefore, coming and going, are looked upon only as ghosts of the fancy, or at least mere outsiders and strangers. They do not stay to be citizens, they are seen only as in transitu; they flit across the stage and are gone-gone, as many will think, to the same blind nowhere that receives all phantasms.

Here then is the deeper work Christ undertakes to do; viz., to open the heaven of the soul itself, or, what is nowise different, to waken in it that higher sense, by which it may discern the supernatural being and society of God’s realm. How he does it we shall hardly be at a loss to find.

First, he comes into the. world himself, not apparitionally, like an irruption of angels, but he comes up, so to speak, out of humanity, emerging into his visibly divine glory, through a glorious and perfect manhood. And so it comes to pass that, while they accomplish nothing by their character, and have, in fact, no character beyond what is implied in their message, he is bringing on his wonderful, visibly divine manhood, and becoming, by force of his mere supernatural character alone, the greatest miracle of time—with the advantage that, being self-evident, even as the sun, all other miracle is upheld by it. At first he appears to be only a man among men, the Son of Mary, growing up in the mold and mortal weakness of a man; but his life unfolds silently and imperceptibly, till the magnificent proportions of his Godhood begin to appear in his manhood, and the tremendous fact is revealed, that a being from above the world is living in it! Supernatural event and character are built in solidly thus, into the world’s history, to be an integral part of it. Mere nature is no longer all, and never can be again. The very world has another world interfused and working jointly with it.

He comes too in no light figure, but in the heavy tread of one that bears eternal government upon his shoulder—comes to reconcile the world, to justify, and gather, and pacify, and save, the world; “For it pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell, and having made peace by the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all unto himself, whether they be things in earth or things in heaven.” Everlasting order hangs tremulous in expectation round his cross, and eternity rings out from it, tolling in the world. As the veil of the temple is rent, so the way into the holiest opens. As the dead are shaken out their graves when he dies, so the souls shut up in death are loosened from the senses, to behold the new-sprung day. The middle wall is now broken down, the dividing isthmus cut through, and things in heaven, and things in earth, are set in a common headship in his person. Heaven is become an open door which no man shutteth, an abundant and free entrance is ministered, that we may enter with boldness into the holiest.

It is a great point also, as regards the impression effected, that every thing taught by him, in his doctrine, holds the footing of immortality and eternity, looking towards a higher and relatively supernatural state. Nothing is allowed to stop short, within the boundaries of time, as in the old religion. The very law of God is carried forward into spiritual applications; the temporal and outward sanctions are taken away, and the inmost principle of duty under it is enforced by the tremendous allotments of a future, everlasting state. Outward sacrifices and remissions will not answer. There must be a sacrifice that purges even the conscience itself. There must be a righteousness found, that exceeds the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees—even the righteousness of God. Every thing in the doctrine out-reaches nature and time, piercing even to the dividing asunder, and stirring all the inmost senses, sentiments, and fears of the religious nature. Not that any mere standards, or sanctions, can force open the shut heaven of souls; but that, by these things, grinding hard upon the supernatural sense, it is made to feel a reverberative movement of the powers of the world to come, and look in, through the rifts that are opened in the stony casement that surrounds it.

Let us not imagine now that, by any or all these things, the supernatural sense, or heaven of the soul, is really opened. These are preparations, all, including even the cross itself—powers that move on our consent, but without that consent accomplish no result. Nothing done will ever accomplish that result with many; they will go to their graves denying that any such upper world of faculty is in them. But with some it will be otherwise; they will respond, they will believe, and their faith will be the opening of heaven. In that faith the Son of Man will be revealed, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon him. But this faith, in still another view, is love, and here we have the grand finality. Christ and his cross are a movement on the world’s love, and love itself is the higher sense, or apprehending power of the soul. Love is perceptive; whatever is loved is most really known, or discovered. He that loveth knoweth God, and, in that manner, he that loveth universal society knoweth universal society. Worlds above the world are present to the sense of love. All the immense longings of souls after universal society are consummated and crowned, when they are issued in love. And this is the opening of the soul, this the state and character which are its heaven—the kingdom of God within.

And what a finding of the soul will it be! what a sublime privity of knowledge will it reveal! when Christ, as in the promise made to Nathanael, shall have made it conscious eternally, in this manner, of the paradise hid in its own higher faculty, so long shut up and suppressed.

Some very important consequences follow, in the train of the subject thus presented, and with these I conclude.

1. The real merit of the issue made up between Christ and the naturalizing critics of his gospels is here distinctly shown. Professing much respect to his character, they are offended by the supernatural matters reported in his life, and set themselves at work to produce a new Christianity, without either miracle or mystery, or more than natural fact in it—and, of course, without even Christ himself, who is the greatest miracle of all. Christ, on the other hand, undertakes to give them, over and above the supernatural facts they reject, supernatural evidences; viz., to set open a higher range of faculty in them related to himself and all supernatural beings, and so to find them at the point of deeper sentiments and apprehensions in their nature, than they are themselves aware of. They do not even imagine, that they have any thing included in their nature, above the mere basement story so much investigated and magnified by the philosophers; viz., reason, memory, imagination, affectional capacities and the like, including, perhaps, a merely moral, in distinction from a religious, conscience; practically ignoring, because they are shut, the sublime upper ranges of their spiritual nature—their transcendent affinities prepared for immense supernatural relations, their capacities to apprehend what is above the test of mere intellectual judgments, divine being, viz., arid concourse and the flow and reflow of God’s universal society. The heaven of their nature being shut, and the supernatural sense practically undiscovered, they proceed to bring the great questions of the gospels down for trial before the basement court of their criticism; where it results, that having made their souls small enough for their doctrine, they have no great difficulty in making their doctrine small enough for their souls.

They are men of high talent, if any talent is high in the lower ranges only of the nature, they are some of them scholars specially advanced in their culture, but talent and scholarship are, alas, how pitiably shriveled in their figure, when they undertake to handle the questions of religion, without so much as a conception of the inherently supernatural relations and discerning powers of the religious mind. Why, the humble, guileless Nathanaels, who never had a speculation in their lives, but have the heaven of their faith set open, and have found the Son of Man deep set in the heart’s own center, have a better competence in the supernatural than Hennel, or Parker, or Strauss, or Renan, or than all these brilliant gospel extirpators together. No, gentlemen, Christ did not come to be approved before the tribunal of your mere logic, or lore, or critical acumen, but before a nobler and more competent, which, though it be in you, is yet hidden from you. Having a nature boundlessly related to the supernatural, flowering never, save in the knowledge and concourse of supernatural society, you put your critical extinguishers on it and stifle it, and then you can even triumph in the discovery that all you most sublimely want is incredible—scientifically impossible! Hardly could you make yourselves a more fit mark for Christian pity; for, with all your fine stores of learning, you are in fact the least knowing men of your day. Would that Christ might only find you, in that glorious opening of the nature of which he speaks; what a revelation would it be—and, first of all, because it would be a revelation so wonderful of yourselves!

You assume that you can settle questions of being, or not being—supernatural being, or not being—by logic, and criticism, and the processes of the head, even as you do questions of thought, or idea. Can you then reason a rock, as being or not being, in that manner? No, you will answer; subjects of being can not, in the first instance, be thought or reasoned, they can only be cognized, or perceived, by the senses. And so it is of all supernatural being, God, angels, worlds above the world, universal society; they are known only as they are cognized, by the supernatural sensing of the spiritual man; or, what is nowise different, by faith. And when it is done, they are had in as complete evidence even as the solids of matter. I do not undertake to say what particular facts of the gospel will, or will not be proved in this manner, but only that nothing will be rejected, because it is supernatural. The soul will be going after things supernatural and the commerce of the supernatural society, because it is practically open to their concourse. Here then is Christ, on one side, contriving how to open this immense upper world of the soul, and you, on your side, protesting that there is not, and must not be, any such upper world in you. He would make the soul a sky-full of glorious and blessed concourse, and you set yourselves to it, as a problem worthy of your industry, to make it a cavern! His work may be a hard one, but yours will be much harder. The emptiness of your cavern will ring back answers, stronger to most men, after all, than your arguments. For heaven is as much a necessity to men as bread, and souls can no more live without the supernatural, than the senses without matters of sense. In the same way—

2. We have given back to us, here, the most solid, only sufficient, proof of our immortality. How often do we stagger at this point, even the best of us. All mere rational arguments, here, fall quite short of the mark. They never established any body. And yet every man ought to know his immortality, even as he knows that he is alive. He is made, to have an immediate, self-asserting consciousness of immortality, and would never have a doubt of it, if he had not shut up and darkened the divine side of the soul. And for just the same reason, Christ, when he opens the soul, opens immortality also. What was so dimly revealed, under the old religion, stands out visible everywhere under the new. There is no room here for a Sadducee to live. The metropolis of the world is here in Christ’s person, and the visitants of all unknown spheres crowd about him, ascending and descending upon him. And they are all certified to our faith, by his supernatural character. We grow familiar thus with spirit, realize it, and know it in ourselves. Immortality! why the dead Christ proves it. And again the resurrection proves it; for what could such a being do but rise? It would even be a greater wonder if he did not. Away to their native abyss fly all our doubts—life and immortality are brought to light through the gospel! It only remains—

3. To note precisely, as we can at no other point of view, the meaning of salvation, or the saving of souls. Christ does not undertake to save them as they are only half existing in the plane of nature. Do we call it saving the hand, that we save it in all but the fingers? Is it saving an eye, that we save it in all but the sight? Do we save a tree, when we save the stump and the roots, and not the leafy crown of shade and flower? No more is it saving a soul to save the economic under-work only of opinion, judgment, memory, and the like. These are not the soul, and if we take them to be, we only come as near saying, as possible, that the soul is gone already. And it is in just this condition that Christ finds us—O, that he might also find us in the deeper sense of his promise! He comes to the soul as having a whole heaven hid in its possibilities, which heaven is shut up, which possibilities are even ignored and hid. He finds it made little, a fire almost gone out. Related constitutionally to a vast supernatural society, and to ranges of life and knowledge, as much broader than all causes and laws of the world, as eternity is broader than time, he undertakes to open it again upon its true field, relieve the pinch of its compression, give it enlargement, and make it truly live. Whatever man of opinion, taking on the airs of science, tells him that his gospel is incredible because it is supernatural, will get no answer, but that his soul is very nearly gone out already, and is wanting simply salvation. And just here it is that the soul gets such an immense lifting of pitch, and outspreading of dimensions, when it comes to Christ. The coming unto Christ is, in another view, Christ coming unto it and being revealed in it. Even as the apostle says—“When it pleased God to reveal his Son in me.” And what a revelation was it to him!—as great proportionally to all who receive it. It is as if they had gotten a new soul, with a heaven-full of society gathered round the Son of Man there revealed. Therefore it is called “the new man;” not because it is new, for it is older even than the old man put away, being the original, normal, man of Paradise, hitherto stifled and suppressed; still it is new, all things are new. The change is so great as to be sometimes even bewildering. It is as if some wondrous, unknown light had broken in; the whole sky is luminous. The soul is in day; for the day has dawned and the day-star is risen. God, eternity, immortality, universal love and society—into these broad ranges it has come, and in these it is free, having them all for its element and its conversation in them, as in heaven. The unknowing state, the old, blank ignorance that was, because of the blindness of the heart, is gone; and a wondrous knowledge opens because the heart can see. Before it was a doubter possibly, mighty in opinion, wise in the wisdom of this world, pleased with its own questions and reasons, now it has come up where the light is, and the old questions and reasons do not mean any thing—the judgments of moles, in matters of astronomy, are as good. O, what strength, and majesty, and general height of being, are felt in the new life begun! And this is salvation! great because it saves, not some small part of the soul, but because it saves and glorifies the sublime whole; restoring its integrity and proportion, and setting it complete in God’s own order, as in everlasting life. Who could wish it to do less? who could ask it do more?

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