continual warfare. They drank his blood to fight his fights. It is a
fight that knows no armistice. It acknowledges no flag of truce. Eternal
vigilance and eternal struggle is the price of spiritual freedom. Life
is warfare; it is never parade-drill; it is never holiday review; we are
never off duty; the contest is constant, and the close of every day
records a victory or a defeat. Our Master never promised his soldiers a
life of ease. The beast promises roads which are pleasant as field paths
that lead through grassy meadows. There shall be no flints, no thorns,
no briars; and if we choose, we can lie down in the meadows morning,
noon and night! That is the promise that the beast makes,--a promise
which is always broken. Our Lord always calls us to battles, to noble
crusades and prolonged campaigns. "His blood-red banner streams afar!"
He calls us to share the travail that makes His Kingdom come. Yes, He
calls us to glorious, endless battles, but He promises sure and certain
victory if we drink His blood along the way.
And so they conquered the beast by the blood of the Lamb. They
conquered by the continual battles of their faith. And lastly they
conquered by their songs of victory. They sang their way to the sea of
glass, and their songs were songs of victory all along the road. They
did not moan in misereres; they did not wail in lamentations as if the
beast were mightier than their Lord. They knew their Lord was mightier
than all; and their songs of victory were the beginning of their
triumph. O, the singing that abounds in the Word of God! O, the singing
you may hear in the Acts of the Apostles! And, O, the singing that
sounds through the Book of Revelation; the song of victory, the song of
Moses and the Lamb! At the battle of Dunbar, in the great critical days
of English freedom, Cromwell's troops sang their way to victory. They
could hear the roaring of the sea. The land was swept with deluges of
rain. But above the roar of the sea, and the sound of the pelting rain,
they lifted their voices in praise to God, and as they swept into battle
their song rang out; "God is our refuge and strength, a very present
help in time of trouble; therefore will we not fear if the earth be
removed and the mountains be shaken in the heart of the seas! The Lord
of Hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge!" Their song was
part of their armour; it was indeed the armour of their souls. I greatly
like that word of the Christian, Appollinaris, in Ibsen's play,--"The
Emperor Julian," which he spake when the forces of the beast were massed
against the soldiers of the cross;--"Verily I say unto you, so long as
song rings out above our sorrows, Satan shall never conquer!" Verily, I
too will say that our praise is an invincible armour,--we sing our way
to the triumph we seek!
Men and women, the beast can be conquered, for the mouth of the Lord
hath spoken it! You and I may stand at the sea of glass, pure,
transparent, fervent with divine love, victors over the beast, through
the blood of the Lamb, through constancy in battle, and in songs which
ring out above our sorrows, as we push along life's way.
"Soldiers of Christ, arise!
And put your armour on;
Strong in the strength which God supplies
Through His eternal Son.
From strength to strength go on,
Wrestle, and fight and pray;
Tread all the powers of darkness down
And win the well-fought day."
XIV
THE COMING GOLDEN AGE
_Holy Father, we thank Thee for the privilege of fellowship, and
for the help which we can give to one another. May the faith of
everyone be strengthened by the faith of all. May our penitence
be deepened because we are all engaged in common confession. May
our joys be enriched because we are all contemplating the
unsearchable riches of Christ. May our obedience become more
devoted because we all drink of the waters of inspiration.
Impart unto us the grace of sacred sympathy. May we reverently
bear one another's burdens and carry them in the arms of
intercession. We beseech Thee to grant unto us visions of Thy
glory in so far as our eyes are able to bear them. May we make
new discoveries among the mysteries of Thy truth. May the whole
worship prepare us for a larger ministry in the service of Thy
kingdom. Wilt Thou give us the armor we need for the great
campaign. Especially may we receive the endowment of the love
that never grows faint. Reveal to us our work, and then lead us
into a devotion which will never be satisfied until the work is
finished. Look upon the whole world in this hour of desolation
and woe. Enlarge our hearts to comprehend the sorrow, and may we
share the sufferings of our Lord in sacrificial labors. Let Thy
kingdom come, O Lord, and let Thy will be done on earth as it is
in heaven. Amen._
XIV
THE COMING GOLDEN AGE
"And many people shall go up and say, Come ye and let us go up
to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob;
and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths:
for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord
from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the nations, and shall
rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into
ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall
not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war
any more." Isaiah 2: 3, 4.
There is something almost unreal in these words when they are read
aloud in the times through which we are passing. They sound like the
voice of a mocking-bird calling from the midst of the dust and the
debris of a ruined world. It is like hearing the gentle peal of church
bells on the bloody field of battle. It is like anything you choose
which has become unreal, and which has been transferred from the healthy
book of noble prophecy to the bitter pages of satire and the sour lips
of the cynic. Yes, I grant that the great passage unfolds ideals which
have become mere scraps of paper, torn and retorn into a thousand
pieces, and blown about like withered leaves in an autumn gale. What,
then, are we to do? I am reminded of what Lord Morley said in Manchester
a few weeks ago. "When the war is ended,--this mournful chapter of sore
bereavement and wasted treasure, when all that is gone, I ask is there
not a moral loss which ought to be counted, a moral loss in the wreck of
ideals in which the men of my generation were deeply concerned? That
loss has got to be counted and retrieved. The fabric of those ideals has
to be built up again in the hearts and minds of men and women." Surely
that is an opportune word, and it offers both counsel and warning to the
Christian Church. We must not just sit down in the bloody dust, and wail
our misereres in deadly impotence. We have got to reconstruct the ruined
pile, and we must begin the reconstruction by rebuilding the golden
palace of our dreams.
And if we are going to rear again that stately temple of vision and
dream, who can give us nobler help than the Hebrew prophets, and who
among the prophets can help us more than Isaiah? Isaiah was a prophet
interpreting the mind of God. He was a statesman with a keen and
comprehensive outlook on human affairs. He was also a poet bringing to
human problems the illuminating imagination of the seer. He lived in a
time of grave national disloyalties, a time when peoples were abandoning
their most sacred trust. His were days of international strife and
convulsion, days witnessing vast world movements in which empires were
seen at their birth, and empires were seen in withering decline and
death. Isaiah was a man whose thought was distinguished by breadth and
depth and length. He saw things broadly, he saw things deeply, and he
also saw the things which gleamed afar. And as he looked out upon the
world to his vision the troubled and chaotic day merged into a
reconstituted order of active concord and peace. Isaiah was a confirmed
optimist. He had a keen sense of the future. He felt the days before
him. He could scent the waving harvest while yet the snow was on the
ground. He could catch the sound of harvest-home while the wintry wind
was whistling across the ice-bound field. And looking out over the dark
scene of convulsion and disaster, and amid the rude and brutal clamour
of international strife, he sang this song of the morning,--"They shall
beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into
pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither
shall they learn war any more." If we are purposing to rebuild the
fallen ideals of our own day, and so reconstruct our common life, can we
do better than stand near this man for guidance and inspiration?
How, then, does this man say that the golden dream is to be realized?
Through what preparatory stages are we to pass before we reach the
shining consummation? Isaiah declares that the fulfilment of the dream
is to begin in _the profound revival of spiritual religion_. "It shall
come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the Lord's house
shall be established at the head of the mountains, and shall be exalted
above the hills." That is to say, the dominant peak in the reconstructed
landscape is to be a shining spirituality of pure and undefiled
religion. Man's relationship to God is to be the supreme relation
overtopping and overseeing everything else. "And many peoples shall say,
Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of
the God of Jacob, and He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in
His paths." That is to say, in the golden age this is to be the common
aspiration; spiritual desire and spiritual ambition are to be dominant;
the biggest thing in life is to be the yearning for the divine
communion, the gladsome craving for fellowship in the heavenly quest.
That is how the golden dream is to begin to be fulfilled; it is to begin
in the recovery of vital worship, in the profound revival of spiritual
religion.
Now, all the best things can be mimicked in the cheapest counterfeits!
Pearls can be so skilfully manufactured that even the expert eye can be
deceived. There are diamonds about, common as window glass, and their
dancing gleams can delude the very elect. Yes, the best things can be
cleverly imitated, and their counterfeits can move unsuspected in the
most exalted places. It would be an amusing trait, if it were not a
tragic characteristic of human nature, how willing we are to borrow the
clothes of realities, and just strut about in our cheap and glittering
attire. And it is so easily done! Anybody can borrow the jolly meters of
Rudyard Kipling and put their own tawdry stuff into his caskets; and a
thousand people have done it! Anybody can borrow the disorderly
irregularities of Walt Whitman, and into his eccentric bottles they can
pour their own cheap wine; and crowds of people have done it! It is so
easy to borrow clothes, and bottles, and outer forms. Yes, and it is so
easy to borrow the outer garments of religion and to move about in the
mere trappings of devotion. We can borrow the sacramental cup and put
into it the thinnest and the most diluted wine of life. Our apparent
religion can be just an affair of clothes, a borrowed skin, an acted
thing, a play, a theatricality with feigned postures and emotions,
altogether devoid of blood-red life, and having no deep and vital
commerce with the Infinite. Religion can be conventional, having no
inner sanction of fine awe and godly fear. We can get religion while all
the time religion has not got us. It can be just a light performance, a
social convention and not a solemn travail in which the soul is doing
great business in deep waters in communion with the eternal God.
Now, is not this the religious condition into which the world has
drifted in these latter days? I do not make exception of any country,
not even of America. This country is delivered from the horrors of the
European convulsion, not by a separating gulf of moral and spiritual
condition, but by 3,000 miles of sea. If the coast line of America had
been twenty-five miles from the coast of Europe she would have been
involved in the woes of the boiling cauldron. And therefore do I put the
inclusive question,--and I venture to challenge your judgments,--is not
the religious condition which I have suggested one into which the entire
Christian world appears to have fallen? Multitudes of Christian people
are just wearing the clothes of religion. We have religious professions
without spiritual possessions. We have religious conventionality without
devotional vitality. We have the show without the life. We have the skin
of religion without its sacrificial heart. We have the crucifix without
the Saviour. We have the altar but not the open heaven.
You may make the test in any way you please. Let us test our condition
by any one of the primary characteristics of true and vital religion.
Let us apply one test. Let us test our condition by our own secret and
personal communion with the Lord. I am speaking in a Christian church,
and I am addressing professedly Christian people; well, how do we stand
the test? What proportion of the members of the Church of Christ in this
country have a really living and fruitful fellowship with God? How many
have walked the way of communion so frequently that it is now a
much-beloved and well-trodden road, along which they can easily and
naturally make their way in the dark, yea, even in the stormy midnight
when the floods are out, and the tempest howls about their ways?
For we cannot have religion with God wiped out! If religion is only
beneficence, if it is only decent, respectable living, if it is only a
comfortable conformity with accepted social standards,--if that is all
it is, then let us say so and have done with it. Let us pull down our
altars and fling their useless stones to the winds. But this is not
religion. True religion is more than this. True religion is the reverent
and most solemn recognition of the eternal God. It is the conscious
prostration of the soul in His most holy Presence. It is the free
because reverent fellowship of a child with the Father. It is the loyal
acceptance of the Father's will. It is the humble reception of His grace
as offered to us in Jesus Christ our Lord. It is the assumption of our
life as a sacred trust accepted from the hands of God. It is the
anticipation of His glory in our eternal home. Religion has great human
relationships with our fellowman, and these shall not be overlooked. But
for the moment, I am speaking of the fontal relationship of the soul
with God, that fundamental fellowship in which all other worthy
fellowships are born, and I ask you whether all the peoples of all
professing Christian nations have not wandered far from the vitalizing
bond of this primary communion? Let your eyes roam over the darkened
world; dense clouds are still rising everywhere on the ominous horizon.
How is that night-time to be turned into day, yea, into a day like unto
a lovely summer's morning? Here is the answer of the greatest of the
prophets when he, too, was confronted with tempest and night;--the first
thing we have to pray for, and work for, and seek for, in every
Christian country, is a profound revival of spiritual religion, when
"the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established at the head of
the mountains, and when many peoples shall say, Let us go up to the
mountain of the Lord, and He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk
in His paths." This, I say, is needed in every country, until in every
country all who profess the Saviour's name shall cry out in the fervour
of a great and quenchless desire,--"As the hart panteth after the water
brook, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God!"
Now look at the second stage in the realization of the golden dream.
"He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths.... And He
shall judge between the nations." That is to say, a profound revival of
spiritual religion will be accompanied by _loftier and more exacting
moral standards_. He will teach and we will walk. Morals always grow lax
when piety gets cool. When religion becomes a mere conventionality,
morality always loses its awful sanctions. Wipe out God and your moral
standards will surely fall. If I neglect the temperature of my
greenhouse, or if I play fast and loose with it, my tender plants will
assuredly droop. And if I neglect my spiritual temperature, which is the
climate of my soul, my moral and spiritual flowers will be smitten and
pinched. We cannot lower our spirituality and yet have our morality keep
its winsome bloom. Let me ask you,--have you ever known anyone grow
loose and careless in their religion, and at the same time become
correspondingly nobler and purer, and more scrupulously faithful in
their daily life? Have you ever known anyone drop Christ and then become
more like Him? Have you ever had occasion to whisper this secret
concerning any living woman,--"O, yes, she broke off communion with
Christ, and then she put on moral grace and beauty like a robe?" The
very question is an insult to our intelligence, as it is an affront to
our experience; for this is the eternal law, whose workings can be
witnessed every day,--when the spirit deteriorates the moral life
becomes diseased.
On the other hand, let there be an enrichment in vital godliness and
our conduct will begin to shine like burnished gold. "He will teach,"
says the prophet, "and we will walk." _He_, with Whom we hold vital
communion, _He_ will be the teacher of the spirit, and the illuminant of
the conscience and the inspiration of the will; a nobler conduct will be
born of that fellowship as surely as the choicest grapes are the
children of the healthiest vines. When we are all in living and deep
communion with Christ, truly worshipping in the innermost secret
place,--English, and German, and American, and Japanese,--a finer spirit
of judgment will be abroad in the earth, a healthier moral climate, and
we shall naturally and instinctively seek to do what Jesus did, and in
the way that Jesus did it, when He came and dwelt among us as a
carpenter's Son, Son of Mary, Son of Man, Son of God!
Only one thing remains to be said as to the process by which the
radiant dream of the prophet is to be fulfilled. When there has come a
profound revival of spiritual religion, and, consequently, a loftier and
more exacting moral standard, there will be a wonderful conversion of
destructive forces in the personal and national life. "They shall beat
their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks." I
want you carefully to notice that the sword is not to be destroyed; it
is to be transformed; it is to become a ploughshare. The spear is not to
be broken and thrown away; it is to be converted into a pruning-hook.
That is to say, the rudely destructive energies in human life are to be
changed into constructive energies. What was darkly negative is to
become brightly positive. The martial is to be transformed into the
pastoral. The rude implement of slaughter is to become the breaker of
the earth-clod or the helpful friend of the vine. "They shall beat their
swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks." After the
first historic siege of Antwerp, the cannon balls were taken and
converted into church bells; and may the gracious and holy Lord grant
that there may speedily come such a transformation in modern Antwerp,
when all the ministers of carnage shall be changed into sweet and sacred
ministers of worship and devotion!
But now, if swords are to be beaten into ploughshares and spears into
pruning-hooks, where must that work begin? It must begin in the
individual heart. We are never going to get the swords out of the
nations until we have got them out of the hearts. There is a sword in
the heart, a cruel sword, a minister of destruction. There is a sword in
the German heart, and a sword in the English heart, and a sword in the
American heart, and that sword has got to be transformed before the
material sword can become a ploughshare of the field! We are all
familiar with our own swords; perhaps I had better say, we are all
acquainted with one another's swords. There is the sword of ill-will.
There is the spear of deadly gossip. There is the sword of evil
prejudice. There is the spear of petty spite and contempt. Yea, surely
there is a sordid armoury in the soul. And this has to be converted into
a tool-house of a noble Christian culture before the material armouries
can be emptied and the sound of war is heard no more.
And therefore, the great national revolution is to begin in individual
conversions, and these are to be the children of a vital and saving
religion. The transformation of the world is to begin in the conversion
of people like you and me. There is no other way. When our own
militaristic armour, the one stored in our own soul, is changed into a
garden tool-house,--malice changed into good-will, suspicion into
enlightened understanding, cynicism into genial and gracious esteem, and
foul hatred into Christ's own strong and fruitful love, then we are
bringing the day nearer of which the herald angels sang, when there
shall be "peace on earth and good will among men."
All this cannot be done by scholarship. We cannot do it by legislation.
We cannot do it by commerce. It is the vital work of salvation, and it
only can be done by the Saviour of the world. And He must do it in His
own way, and His work must be thorough, profound, fundamental. He must
search the very cellarings of our being, seeking out our wickednesses as
with a candle, and cleansing and purifying us in the deepest and most
secret rooms of the soul. And when we thus come to know our Saviour, we
shall most surely come to know our brother, for we shall see him with
ourselves in the radiant light of the same eternal grace and love. Then
will our swords be beaten into ploughshares and our spears into
pruning-hooks and we shall learn war no more!
XV
MORE THAN CONQUERORS
_Heavenly Father, wilt Thou graciously redeem us from any
perilous mood of independence which sets our wills against
Thine. Help us to find ourselves in Thee, and to come to our
inheritance in the riches of Thy grace. Give us that lowliness
of spirit which will enable us to find the gate of higher life
and to enter in. Forgive the sin that binds our judgment and
enable us through a pure heart to see ourselves in Christ, and
to behold ourselves perfected in the power of His love. Save us
from low ideals. Lift us out of the thoughts that belittle us
and which check and destroy our powers of growth. Give us wider
and deeper conceptions of all things. May the experiences of our
life come to us as helpful disciplines, through which we may
apprehend more of Thy purpose, and more swiftly put on the
likeness of our Lord. May we not be mastered by our
circumstances, but may we be so strong in Thy strength, that
every circumstance may be our servant, adding some fresh grace
to our spirits, and some new influence to our lives. May we lose
the things we ought not to keep, and may we desire the things we
ought to find. Control us, O Lord, by Thy spirit, taking us away
from the shallows of common life into the great deep privileges
of communion with Thee. Amen._
XV
MORE THAN CONQUERORS
"In all these things, we are more than conquerors." Rom. 8:37.