one's hands and to have let it slip; to have had the Messiah sitting by
you and not to have recognized Him; to have thought it just a
commonplace day when the most sacred revelations of God were
occurring,--that is about the saddest confession that any one can make.
And yet, that is what might happen to any one any day. No one can be
sure when the great exigencies of life are likely to occur. He looks
forward to great things to be done in some more favoring future, and,
behold, the insignificant incidents of to-day are the greater things
which he does not discern. He looks forward to the discovery of God in
some difficult intellectual achievement, and meantime the daily task is
full of revelation, and as he wakes to the morning the new day stands
by him and says: "If you only knew the gift of God, and who it is that
speaks to you today." And at last perhaps he begins to realize that
the ordinary ways of daily life are the channels of God's revelation,
and then there
"Comes to soul and sense
The feeling which is evidence
{184}
That very near about us lies
The realm of spiritual mysteries.
With smile of trust and folded hands,
The passive soul in waiting stands,
To feel, as flowers the sun and dew.
The one true life its own renew."
{185}
LXXIV
THE WEDDING GARMENT
_Matthew_ xxii. 11-14.
Here is a man who has the feast offered to him, but is not clothed to
meet it. He is unprepared and is therefore cast out. He does not wear
the wedding garment and therefore is not fit for the wedding feast.
This seems at first sight harsh treatment; but one soon remembers that
it was the custom of an Oriental feast to offer the guest at his
entrance a robe fit for the occasion. "Bring forth the best robe,"
says the father of the prodigal, "and put it on him." This man had had
offered to him the opportunity of personal preparation and had refused
it. He wanted to share the feast, but he wanted to share it on his own
terms. He pressed into the happiness without the personal preparedness
which made that happiness possible.
Every man in this way makes his own world. The habit of his life
clothes him like a garment, and only he who wears the wedding garment
{186} is at home at the wedding feast. The same circumstances are to
one man beautiful and to another, at his side, demoralizing. You may
have prosperity and it may be a source of happiness, or the same
prosperity and it may be a source of peril. You may be at a college
and it may be either regenerating to you, or pernicious in its
influence, according as you are clothed or unclothed with the right
habit of mind. God first asks for your heart and then offers you his
world. The wedding feast is for him alone who has accepted the wedding
garment.
{187}
LXXV
THE ESCAPE FROM DESPONDENCY
1 _Kings_ xix. 1-13.
This is God's word to man's despondency; and when we strip this man's
story of its Orientalism, it is really the story of many a discouraged,
despondent man of to-day. Elijah has been doing his best, but has come
to a point where he is ready to give up. His enemies are too many for
him. "Lord," he says, "it is enough. I have had as much as I can
bear. I am alone and Baal's prophets are four hundred and fifty men."
So he goes away into solitude, and looks about him for some clear sign
that God has not deserted him. But nothing happens. The great signs
of nature pass before him, the storm, the lightning, and the
earthquake, but they only reflect his own stormy mood. The Lord is not
in them. Then, within his heart, there speaks that voice which is at
once speech and silence, and it says to him: "What doest thou here,
Elijah," and behold, the man is convicted. For when he {188} reflects
on it he is doing nothing at all. He is sitting under a tree,
requesting that he may die. He has fled from his duty and is hiding in
a cave. Then the voice says to him: "Get up and go and do your duty.
You might sit here forever and get no light on your lot. The problem
of life is solved through the work of life. The way out of your
despondency is in going straight on with the work now ready to your
hand. Answers to great problems are not so likely to come to people in
caves, as along the dusty road of duty-doing. Not to the dreamer, but
to the doer come the interpretations of life. Elijah, Elijah, what
doest thou here?"
{189}
LXXVI
THE DIFFICULTIES OF UNBELIEF
_Matthew_ xxiii. 24.
We are often very much impressed by the difficulties of religious
belief. It seems hard to attain any absolute, convinced faith. There
are doubts and obscurities which every one feels, and these
questionings are often stirred into activity by the mistaken efforts of
the defenders of the faith. There is even a special department in
theological teaching known as Apologetics, or the defense of faith; as
though religion had to be always on the defensive, and as if the
easiest attitude of mind, even of the least philosophical, were the
attitude of denial. But did you ever consider the alternative position
and the difficulties which present themselves when one undertakes
absolutely and continuously to deny himself the relations of the
religious life? Did you ever fairly face the conception of a logically
completed unbelief, a world stripped of its ideals, with no region of
spiritual hopes or of worship, a {190} world absolutely without God, a
permanently faithless world? What is the difficulty here? The
difficulty is that these aspects of life, though they are often hard to
maintain, are harder still to abandon. Faith has its perplexities, but
no sooner do you eliminate the spiritual world than you are confronted
with a series of experiences, emotions, and intimations which are
simply inexplicable. That was perhaps partly what Jesus had in mind
when he met the Pharisees. "You find it hard to believe in me," he
said. "Ah, yes, but is it not still harder altogether to refuse me?
You are quite alive to the smaller difficulties of my position, but you
seem to be quite unaware of the difficulties of your own position. You
busy yourself with straining out the gnat which floats on the surface
of your glass, but you do not seem to observe the residuary camel."
So with his splendid satire Jesus turns the critical temper back upon
itself. Difficulties enough, God knows, there are in every
intellectual position, and intellectual certainty usually means the
abnegation of the thinking faculty.
But many persons strain out the little difficulties and swallow the
great ones. What is, {191} on the whole, the best working theory of
life?--that is the only practical question. Under which view of life
do the facts, on the whole, best fall? Especially, what conception of
life holds the highest facts, the great irresistible spring-tides,
which sometimes rise within the soul, of hope and love and desire? So
Browning's Bishop, turning on his critic, says:--
"And now what are we? unbelievers both,
Calm and complete, determinately fixed
To-day, to-morrow, and forever, pray?
You'll guarantee me that? Not so, I think.
In nowise! All we've gained is, that belief,
As unbelief before, shakes us by fits,
Confounds us like its predecessor. Where's
The gain? How can we guard our unbelief,
Make it bear fruit to us? The problem's here.
Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides,--
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature's self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,
Round the ancient idol, on his base again,--
* * * * * * *
What have we gained then by our unbelief
But a life of doubt diversified by faith,
For one of faith diversified by doubt.
We called the chessboard white,--we call it black."
{192}
LXXVII
KNOWING GOD, AND BEING KNOWN OF HIM
_Galatians_ iv. 9.
It is very interesting to come so close to a great man as we do in this
passage, for the Apostle seems to be discovered here, correcting
himself. It is as if he had written one teaching to the Galatians, and
then crossed it out and written another. "You know God," he says, "or
rather you are known of Him." He is asking himself why the Galatians
should in a given case do their duty, and he answers: "Because they
know God; they are aware of His purposes and laws, and having this
rational understanding of Him they know how to act as His servants."
"But no," he goes on to say, "that is not the real impulse of their
duty. What holds them to their best is rather the thought that God
knows them, that He gives them their duty, and that they obey." It is
like the position of a soldier under his commander. The soldier does
not expect to know {193} all about the plan of the campaign, but what
keeps him to his best is the knowledge that some one knows about it;
that the commander overlooks the field; that each little skirmish has
its place in the great design. That is what makes the soldier go down
again into the smoke and dust of his duty with his timidity converted
into faith.
Knowing God,--that is theology; being known of Him,--that is religion.
Both theology and religion have their influence on conduct. It is a
great thing to know that one knows God. There is power in a rational
creed. But, after all, the profoundest impulse for conduct is to know
that beneath all your ignorance of God is His knowledge of you; that
before you loved Him, He loved you, that antecedent to your response to
Him was His invitation to you. Thus it is that a man looks out into
each new day and asks: "What is to hold me to-day to my duty?" Well,
first of all, everything I may learn ought to help me. It is all God's
truth, and, as I get a grasp on truth and stand on its firm ground, my
conduct is steadier and assured. But, after all, the deeper safety
lies in this other confession, that I am known of God; that I {194} am
not merely an explorer, searching for truth, but guided and controlled
as ever under the great taskmaster's eye; known of Him, with my
ignorance of Him held within His knowledge of me, until the time comes
when at last I shall know even as also I am known.
{195}
LXXVIII
FREEDOM IN THE TRUTH
_John_ viii. 32.
"The truth shall make you free;"--that is one of the greatest
announcements of a universal principle which even Jesus Christ ever
made.
But the Jews began to ask of him: "How can one be a disciple of your
truth and yet be free? Is not that discipleship only another name for
bondage? We are free already. We are in bondage to no man. Why then
should we enter into the servitude of obedience to your truth?" And to
this Jesus seems to answer: "That depends upon what it is to be free.
It is a question of your definition of liberty. You seem to believe
that to be free one must have no authority or leadership or master.
But I say unto you that there is no such liberty. You must be the
servant of something. You must be under the authority of your law, or
your superstition, or your God, or yourself. Freedom on any other
terms is not freedom, it is lawlessness. {196} Indeed it may be more
like slavery than freedom."
What is a free country? Not a country without law,--a country of the
anarchist,--but a country where the law encourages each citizen to be
and to do his best. A free country gives every man a chance. It opens
life at the top. It invites one's allegiance from the things which
enslave to the things which enlarge. And that is the only liberty,--a
transfer of allegiance, a higher attachment, which sets free from the
lower enslavements of life. Suppose a man is the slave of a sin, how
does he get free? He frees himself from his sin by attaching himself
to some better interest. Sin is not driven out of one's life; it is
crowded out. Suppose a man is the slave of himself, sunk in the
self-absorbed and ungenerous life, how does he get free? He gets free
by finding an end in life which is larger than himself. He becomes the
servant of the truth, and the truth makes him free. Suppose a man asks
himself, "What can religion do for me? It does not solve all my
problems, or satisfy all my needs. What then does religion do?" Well,
first of all, it gives one liberty. It detaches one's life from {197}
the things which shut it in, and attaches it to those ideal ends which
give enlargement, emancipation, range to life. God speaks to you of
duty, of self-control, of power in your prayers, and then you go out
into the world again, not as if all were plain before you, but at least
with a free heart, and a mind not in bondage to the world of
circumstance or of trivial cares. The truth of God, so far as it has
been revealed to you, has made you free. You have found the perfect
law, the law of liberty.
{198}
LXXIX
THE SOIL AND THE SEED
_Matthew_ xiii. 1-9.
It takes two things to make a seed grow. One is a good seed, and the
other is a good soil. One is what the sower provides, and the other is
what the ploughman prepares. God's best seed falls in vain on a rock.
Man's best soil is unfruitful till the sower visits it. Now the
tilling of the soil of life is what in all its different forms we call
culture, and the expansion of God's germinating influence is what we
call religion. Some people think that either of these alone is enough
to insure a good crop. Some think that culture makes a man fruitful,
and some think religion is a spontaneous growth; and some even talk of
a conflict between the two. But culture does for a man just what it
does for a field. It deepens the soil and makes it ready, and that is
all. The merely cultivated man is nothing more than a ploughed field
which has not been sown, and when it comes to the proper time of
harvest has a most {199} empty and untimely look. And religion alone
does not often penetrate into the unprepared life. Sometimes, indeed,
it seems to force its way as by a miracle, and take root, as we see a
tree or shrub growing as it seems without any soil in which to cling.
But in the normal way of life the seed of God falls in vain upon a soil
which is not deepened and softened to receive it. It waits for
preparedness of nature, for the obedient will, the awakened mind, the
receptive heart;--and all these forms of self-discipline are
comprehended in any genuine self-culture.
Culture and religion--here they meet in university life. Most of your
time is given to culture. What are you doing? You are enriching and
spading up the soil of life. That is the test of culture. Is it
quickening, deepening, stimulating the mind? Is it opening the
imagination and training the will? Then it is true culture and not
that spurious cultivation which spreads over life gravel instead of
fertilizers. Culture prepares the soil; and then in sacred moments,
perhaps in your worship here, perhaps in the solitude of your own
experience, or perhaps in the busiest moments of your day, God, the
sower, comes, scattering {200} His seeds of suggestion and His minute
influences for good over the heart, and what He needs is a receptive
mind and an awakened heart; the life of man ready for the life of God,
and the descending influences of God finding depth of earth within the
life of man.
{201}
LXXX
THE LORD'S PRAYER, I [1]
_Matthew_ vi. 1-15.
From day to day we gather here and repeat together the Lord's Prayer.
One is tempted sometimes to wonder whether in this daily repetition the
prayer keeps its freshness and reality. I will not say that even if it
becomes a mere form it is useless in our worship. It is something even
to have a form so rich in the associations of home and of church, of
the prayers of childhood, and the centuries of Christian worship. And
yet this prayer is first of all a protest against formalism. "Use not
vain repetitions," says Jesus, and then he goes on to give this type of
restrained, unswerving, concentrated prayer.
While the prayer, however, is a protest against formalism it is itself
extraordinarily beautiful in form. When a clear mind {202} expresses a
deep purpose its expression is always orderly, and the petitions of the
Lord's Prayer do not unfold their quality until we consider the form in
which they are expressed. Look for a moment at the order of these
petitions. There are two series of prayers. The first series relate
to God, His kingdom, and His will; the second series deal with men,
their bread, their trespasses, and their temptations. The Lord's
Prayer, that is to say, reverses the common order of petition. Most
people turn to God first of all with their own needs. The Lord's
Prayer postpones these needs of bread and of forgiveness, and asks
first of all for God's kingdom and His will. Thus it is, first of all,
an unselfish prayer. When a man comes here and prays the Lord's
Prayer, he, first of all, subordinates himself; he postpones his own
needs. He subdues his thoughts to the great purposes of God. He prays
first for God's kingdom, however it may come, whether through joy and
peace or through much trouble and pain; and then, in the light of that
supreme and self-subordinating desire for the larger glory, the man
goes on to ask for his own bread and the forgiveness of his own sin.
[1] See also, F. D. Maurice, _The Lord's Prayer_, London, 1861; Robert
Eyton, _The Lord's Prayer_, London, 1892; H. W. Foote, _Thy Kingdom
Come_, Boston, 1891.
{203}
LXXXI
THE LORD'S PRAYER, II
OUR FATHER
_Matthew_ v. 21-25.
I have said that the Lord's Prayer is by its very form an unselfish
prayer. This same mark of it is to be seen in another way by the word
with which it begins. It does not pray: "My Father, my bread, my
trespasses." It prays throughout for blessings which are "ours." Not
my isolated life, but the common life I share is that for which I ask
the help of God. Even when a man enters into his inner chamber and
shuts the door, and is alone, he still says: "Our Father." He takes up
into his solitary prayer the lives which for the moment are bound up in
his. He thinks of those he loves and says: "Our Father." He sets
himself right with those he does not love, reconciles himself with his
brother, and says: "Our Father." He joins himself with the whole great
company of those who have said this prayer in all the ages, and have
found peace {204} in it, and with that great sense of companionship the
solitude of his own experience is banished, and he is compassed about
with a cloud of witnesses, living and dead, as he bends alone, and in
his half-whispered prayer begins to say: "Our Father."
{205}
LXXXII
THE LORD'S PRAYER, III
FATHER AND SON
_Galatians_ iii. 26; iv. 6.
The fatherhood of God has become so familiar a phrase that we hardly
realize what a revolution of thought it represents. In the whole Old
Testament, so the scholars say, God is spoken of but seven times as
Father; five times as Father of the Hebrew people, once to David as the
father of his son Solomon, and once as a prediction that sometime men
would thus pray. And so when Jesus at the beginning of his prayer
says: "After this manner pray, Our Father," he is opening the door into
a new conception of God's relation to man.
And what is this conception? It is the recognition of kinship. It is
the conviction that the spiritual life in man is of the same nature as
the spiritual life in God. The child's kinship to the parent involves
the natural inheritance of capacity and destiny. "If children," says
St. Paul, "then heirs, heirs of God, and {206} joint heirs with
Christ." "Because we are sons we cry, Abba, Father." We are not Greek
philosophers interpreting the causes of nature or the world of ideas;
we are not Hebrew prophets representing a sacred nation; we are
children, with the rights and gifts of children, and the assurance of a
father's confidence and love. All this great promise the humblest
Christian claims when he begins to pray the Lord's Prayer. He says, "I
am not a brute, I am not a clod, I am a partaker of the Divine nature;
I claim the promise of a child. And that sense of kinship summons me
to my best. I pray as my Father's son, and as his son I bear a name
which must not be stained. _Noblesse oblige_. There are some things
which I cannot degrade myself to do because my position forbids them.
There are some things to which I could not attain of myself, but which
are made possible to me as my Father's son. I accept the unearned
privilege of my descent; I claim the great inheritance of the kinship
of God, and out of my self-distrust and weakness I turn to self-respect
and strength, when I pray: 'Our Father.'"
{207}
LXXXIII
THE LORD'S PRAYER, IV
HALLOWED BE THY NAME
_Exodus_ xx. 1-7.
I suppose that to many a reader the prayer: "Holy be Thy name," means
little more than: "Let me not be profane; help me to keep myself from
blasphemy." But it is not likely that Jesus began his prayer with any
such elementary desire as this; or that our first prayer need be only a
prayer to be kept from irreverence. The name of God to the Hebrews was
much more than a title. His name represented all His ways of
revelation. The Hebrews did not speak the name of God. It was a word
too sacred for utterance. Thus the man who begins the Lord's Prayer in
that Hebrew spirit first summons to his thought the things which are
the most sacred in the world to him, the thoughts and purposes which
stand to him for God; the associations, memories, and ideals which make
life holy, and asks that these may lead him into his own prayer. {208}
What he says is this: "My Father, and the Father of all other souls,
renew within me my most sacred thoughts and all the holy associations
which are to me the symbol of Thyself. Give to me a sense of the
sanctity of the world. Set me in the right mood of prayer. And as I
thus reverently look out on Thy varied ways of revelation and of
righteousness, help me to bring my own spirit into this unity with
Thyself, to make a part of Thy holy world, and humbly to begin my
prayer by hallowing Thy name."
{209}
LXXXIV
THE LORD'S PRAYER, V
THY KINGDOM COME
_Luke_ xvii. 21.
The prayer that the kingdom of God might come had long been familiar to
the Hebrews. They had been for centuries dreaming of a time when their
tyrants should be overcome and their nation delivered and their God
rule. But all this desire was for an outward change. Some day the
Romans and their tax-gatherers should be expelled from the land and
then the kingdom would come. Jesus repeats the same prayer, but with a
new significance in the familiar words. He is not thinking of a Hebrew
theocracy, or a Roman defeat; he is thinking of a human, universal,
spiritual emancipation. There dawns before his inspired imagination
the unparalleled conception of a purified and regenerated people.
Never did a modern socialist in his dream of a better outward order
surpass this vision of Jesus of a coming kingdom of God.
{210}
But to Jesus the means to that outward transformation were always
personal and individual. The golden age, as Mr. Spencer has said,
could not be made out of leaden people. The first condition of the
outward kingdom must be the kingdom within. The new order must be the
product of the new life. That is the doctrine of the social order in
the Lord's Prayer.
We too are looking for outward reform in legislation and economics. It
is all a part of the movement to the kingdom of God. Yet any outward
transformation which is to last proceeds from regenerated lives. The
kingdom of God is within before it is without. Do you want a better
world? Well, plan for it, and work for it. But, first of all, enter
into the inner chamber of your prayer, and say: "Lord, make me a fit
instrument of thy kingdom. Purify my heart, that I may purify thy
world. I would live for others' sakes, but first of all that great
self-sacrifice must be obeyed: 'For their sakes I sanctify myself,
Reign thus in me that I may rationally pray: Thy kingdom come!'"
{211}
LXXXV
THE LORD'S PRAYER, VI
THY WILL BE DONE
_Luke_ xxii. 39-46.
The Lord's Prayer begins as a prayer for the great things. It prays
for a sanctified world: "Holy be Thy name." It gives form to that
great hope: "Thy kingdom come." It deals with the means of that great
coming: "Thy will be done." The coming of the kingdom and the
hallowing of the name are to happen through the doing of the will.