personal evidence of Jesus Christ himself. It is the self testimony of
Christ that makes the assurance of the Christian faith. Does that sound
to you all unreasonable? Do you turn here in your pew or in your aisle
and say, "After all, it is the old story which I have tested and know to
be untrue."
Suppose yourself back there in Jerusalem. Suppose the self testimony
came to you from the very person of Jesus Christ. Suppose the words that
He absolutely said and the deeds that He absolutely did bore to you a
testimony that some greater than a human life was there, and that then,
as you pressed close to Him and became a part of His life, you found
your own life awakened and became a nobler man, ashamed to sin, aspiring
after holiness, thinking noble thoughts, lifting yourself not above the
earth, but lifting yourself with the whole great earth, which then is
taken up into the presence of God and made sacred through and through. I
know no man in whom I trust except by the personal evidence that he
bears to me of himself. I know no man's nature finally but by that
testimony which the nature gives me of him. Bring me all evidence that
the man is trustworthy, and then when I am convinced I will go and stand
in the presence of that man himself, and he shall tell me. So the world
stood, so the world stands to-day in the presence of Jesus Christ. His
presence on earth is an historic fact. The words that He spoke are
written down in a true record. The deeds that He did are the history of
the manifestations of His character, and the story of His christendom is
the continued manifestation of His life, the divine life in the life of
man, made divine through Him. Now, a question that comes in the
Christian's mind is "Why don't people believe this?" Why should they
not? Is it not written in the historical record? Has it not manifested
itself in the experience of mankind? If it has, surely then it appeals
to man's reason, and is not merely the act of the blind, stupid thing
which we call faith, but it is the noblest action of that hour in which
I believe, in the heavens above me and in the earth under my feet, in
the brother with whom I have to do in the long course of history, in the
total humanity which has grandly lived. The reason that men do not
believe it is that of course there seems to be to them some strange and
previous presumption with regard to it, something which makes the story
incredible. They say it is the supernatural in it, that it goes beyond
the ordinary experience of man. Ah! it seems also strange to me, the
ordinary experience of man. Who dares to dream that human life has lived
its completest and shown the noblest power of receiving God into itself?
Who dares to think that these few thousand years have exhausted this
majestic and mysterious being that we call man? Who dares to think of
his own life that, in these few thirty, forty, fifty years that he has
lived, he has known and shown all that God can do in and for him? Who
dares to say that it is impossible, that it is improbable, that he who
is the child of God shall receive some newer and closer access to his
father, that there shall come some new revelation which shall be written
not in a book, not upon the skies, not in the history of human kind, not
on the rocks under our feet, but here in our human flesh, that there
shall be an incarnation, that the God who is perpetually trying to
manifest Himself to human kind should find at last, should take at last
the most exquisite, the most sensitive, the most perfect, the most
divine of all material on which to write His message, and in that human
nature show at once what God was and what man is? Until there be some
exhaustive sight of human nature as that, it is in no wise improbable
that there would be that which outgoes our observation, that once in the
long music of our human life the great key-note of humanity shall be
struck, that once in our great groping after the God who made us He
shall seem to draw the veil aside, nay, more than that, shall come and
like the sunlight crowd Himself through every cloud until He takes
possession of our humanity.
"Ay," but you say, "those miracles in the life of Jesus Christ, how
strange those are; how strange that He should have touched the water and
the water become wine; how strange that He should have called to the
dead man and he should have come forth from the tomb; how strange that
He should have spoken to the waters and the storm grow still!" Ah, my
friends, it seems to me that there again we are dishonoring nature as
just before we did dishonor man. There again we are thinking that we
have exhausted the capacity of this wondrous world in which we live.
What is the glory of that world? That it answers to human kind. In the
mystic tradition of the Book of Genesis it is told how, when God first
made man, He set him master of this world and all its powers; and, ever
since, the world has been answering to man, who is its master, and every
message that comes back to him, every response that the field makes to
the farmer, or that the rock makes to the scientist, is but an assertion
and the culmination and the fulfilment of that which God did back there.
As man has been, so has the world responded to his touch and call.
Suppose that to-morrow morning the perfect man should come, not the man
simply of the twentieth century or of the twenty-first, who shall be
greater in his humanity than we, but suppose the perfect man, the
perfect man because the divine man, comes. I cannot dream that nature
shall not have words to say and a response to make to him that it will
not make to these poor hands of mine. I can do something with the rock
and field, I can do something with the sea and sky. What shall he do who
is to my humanity what the perfect is to the absolutely and dreadfully
imperfect? What shall the divine man do? When Paul speaks in that great
verse of his and tells us how the whole creation groaneth and travaileth
waiting for the manifestation of the Son of God, the whole future
history of human science, of man's knowledge and use of the world, is in
his words. The world shall know man as fast as man shows himself, and
when the Son of God shall be manifested, then the groaning and
travailing creation shall set all its powers free, and with the
knowledge with which it floods him and with the usages and service with
which it supplies him, it shall claim at last its glory as the servant,
the obedient servant of man. The Son of man has come. You may at least
suppose it if you do not believe it. And if He came to-morrow morning,
would not this whole world lift itself up and answer Him? Who can say
what the hills and valleys and trees and oceans and seas would have to
say to Him who at last manifested that which the world had been waiting
and groaning for, the manifestation, the complete manifestation, of the
Son of God? That is the reason why I claim that miracles--I do not know
that there have not been fastened upon the miraculous power of Jesus
stories of things, thinking that they were done miraculously, which He
did by what we choose in our ignorance to call the ordinary powers of
nature--but I do know that the coming into the world must have been more
to this world, that it would have been the most unnatural and incredible
thing if the divine man coming here had been to the world and the world
had been to him only what it is to us.
And now the question comes to each one of us--for I must hasten on--how
shall a man get within the region of that which perhaps you recognize,
which I do not see how you can help believing, how shall a man get
within the region of that higher power and let it be the rule of his
life, let it manifest itself through him? How do you get within the
power of any force, my friends? Here is Christ, a force if He is
anything, not a spectacle, not a miracle, not a marvel, not wonderful to
look at, but a force to feel. How do you get within the power of any
force? You look out of your window, and men say the frost is freezing,
and you see your neighbors wrapping their cloaks about them and going
down the street as if they were cold. Men say that a storm is blowing,
and you see them shelter themselves against the storm that blows. How
will you make that storm a true thing for yourself? Go out into it. Let
the frost smite your cheek, let the rain beat into your face, let the
wind blow upon your back, and then you know by personal experience what
you had known by your observation before. And so I say that only when a
man puts himself where he can feel the power of the Christ, where it is
possible for him, if there be a Christ, if Christ be all that the
Christian religion claims that He is, only when a man puts himself where
he needs and must have and must certainly feel that Christ, if there be
a Christ, only then has he a right to disbelieve if the Christ be not
there, only then has he a right to believe if the Christ find him there.
And where is that? When a man takes up the highest duties, when he
accepts the noblest life, when he lays open his soul to the great
exactions and obligations which belong to him in his spiritual nature,
when he tries to be a pure man, a devoted man, a noble man, only then
has he a chance to know that force which only then comes into its
activity. Only when a man tries to live the divine life can the divine
Christ manifest Himself to him. Therefore the true way for you to find
Christ is not to go groping in a thousand books. It is not for you to
try evidences about a thousand things that people have believed of Him,
but it is for you to undertake so great a life, so devoted a life, so
pure a life, so serviceable a life, that you cannot do it except by
Christ, and then see whether Christ helps you. See whether there comes
to you the certainty that you are a child of God, and the manifestation
of the child of God becomes the most credible, the most certain thing to
you in all of history.
It may have been that such moments have been in some of your lives.
Think of the noblest moment that you ever passed, of the time when,
lifted up to the heights of glory, or bowed down into the very depths of
sorrow, every power that was in you was called forth to meet the
exigency or to do the work. Think of the time when you stood upon the
mountain top or plunged into the gulf. Remember that time--it may have
been the death of your little child, it may have been your own
sickness, it may have been your failure in business, it may have been
the moment of your complete success in business, when you were
solemnized as the great shower of wealth poured down upon you, and you
felt that now you really had some work for God to do in the world. Ah,
look back to that moment and see if then it seemed so strange to you
that God should come into the presence and person of His universe, of
His children, and take possession of their life. We grow so easily to
forget our noblest and most splendid times. It seems to me there is no
maxim for a noble life like this: Count always your highest moments your
truest moments. Believe that in the time when you were the greatest and
most spiritual man, then you were your truest self. Men do just the
other thing. They say it was "an exception, a derangement of my nature,
an exultation, a frenzy, it was something that I must not expect again."
How about the time when they plunged into baseness and made their soul
like a dog's soul? They shudder at the thought of that because they
think it would come again. Nay, nay, shudder if you will at the thought
of that, but believe that the highest you ever have been you may be all
the time, and vastly higher still if only the power of the Christ can
occupy you and fill your life all the time.
I said that there were many things that people attached to Christianity
that did not belong to Christianity. I know there are. It is impossible
that a great system like the system of Christ, a great person like the
great person of Christ, should be in the world, and men not have
speculated and thought in regard to Him. Those are not Christianity. I
want to-day, if I may do nothing else, to tell you absolutely how simple
and single the Christian faith, the Christ, really is. It is not the
inspiration of this book or any theory in regard to its inspiration. It
is not the election of certain souls and the perdition of other souls.
It is not the length of man's punishment, whether it is going to be
forever and ever, or whether man is to go to his restoration. It is not
even the constitution of the divine life, the great truth of the way in
which God lives within His own nature. None of these are the essence of
the Christian faith, but simply this: The testimony of the divine in man
to the divine in man that lifts the man up and says: "For me to be
brutal is unmanly; to be divine is to be my only true self." Why do I
believe in God? If some man asked me, when on the street, I think I
should have an answer to give him. I could give one great reason--two
great reasons which are really but one great reason--why I believe in
God. I believe in God, my friends, I believe in God with all my soul,
because this world is inexplicable without Him and explicable with Him,
and because Jesus Christ believed in Him; and it was Jesus Christ that
showed me that this world demanded God and was inexplicable without Him;
that made certain every suspicion and dream that I had had before, and
Jesus Christ believed in Him. Shall I go to the expert about chemistry
or geology and ask him the truth with regard to the structure of the
world and the meeting of its atoms and forces? And shall not I go to the
spiritual expert, to him in whom the spiritual life of man has been
clearest, and say, "O Christ, tell me what is the centre and source and
end of all?" When he says, "God," shall I not believe Him?
It is impossible, as I have suggested to you again and again in what I
have been saying, that a man can have his mind open to the receipt of
the truth of a person unless he be a certain kind of man himself. I do
not know but the basest and the wickedest man who lives may believe in
the Copernican theory, or that two and two make four, yet I cannot help
believing that if he were a better and truer man he would believe even
those truths, outside of himself, of science and arithmetic, more fully
and deeply. Men were not all astray in the first thing that they were
seeking after, though they were wofully astray in many things that they
said about it, when they talked about faith and works. Faith enters in
through the soul that does a noble deed, and in the coming in of that
faith the higher deed becomes possible to him. Hear the words that Jesus
said, words that our age must take to itself until it shall be wiser
than it is to-day: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see
God." "If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine,
whether it be of God." Ponder those words, my friends. See how
reasonable they are. See how important they are. See how they have the
secret of your own life, of what it is to do, of what it is to be,
forever and ever sealed up in them. These two things, I am sure, are
true with regard to the method of belief--that no man can ever go
forward to a higher belief until he is true to the faith which he
already holds. Be the noblest man that your present faith, poor and weak
and imperfect as it is, can make you to be. Live up to your present
growth, your present faith. So, and so only, as you take the next
straight step forward, as you stand strong where you are now, so only
can you think the curtain will draw back and there will be revealed to
you what lies beyond. And then live in your positives and not in your
negatives. I am tired of asking man what his religious faith is and
having him tell me what he don't believe. He tells me that he don't
believe in baptism or inspiration or in the trinity. If I asked a man
where he was going and he told me he was not going to Washington, what
could I know about where he was going? He would not go anywhere so long
as he simply rested in that mere negative. Be done with saying what you
don't believe, and find somewhere or other the truest, divinest thing to
your soul that you do believe to-day, and work that out: work it out in
all the action and consecration of the soul in the doing of your work.
This I take to be the real freedom of Christian thought--when the man
goes forward always into a fuller and fuller belief as he becomes
obedient to that which he already holds.
But yet I know I have not touched the opinion, the feeling, nay, I will
say the black prejudice that is upon many, many minds. "Ah, but you have
bound yourself," you say. "You have given your assent to a certain
creed, you believe certain dogmas. To put it as simply as you have put
it to us this morning, you believe a certain person. I, I am free, I
believe nothing, I can go wandering here and everywhere and disbelieve
to my heart's content." Yes, I do believe something, and I thank God for
it. But I deny with all my intelligence and soul the very idea that in
believing that something I have shut my soul to evidence. I am ready to
hear any man living, any man living to-day who will prove to me that the
Christ has never lived and that he is not the Lord of men. I will listen
to any man who is in earnest and who is sincere. I will not listen to
any trifler, caviller, who is merely trying to make a point and to get
ahead of the poor arguments that I can use; but let any fellow-man come
to me with an earnest face, either of puzzled doubt, or of earnest and
convinced unbelief, and say to me, "Are you not wrong?" or "I believe
that you are wrong," and I, of course, will talk to him. Do I want to
believe anything that cannot be proved to be true, anything that my
intelligence shall not receive? Why should I believe it? Shall I trust
myself to the ship merely because I have refused to examine its timbers,
when men tell me that it is unsound? Shall I throw away my truthfulness
simply for the sake of holding what I want, what I choose to call the
truth? It is not because it is safe, it is not because it is pleasant,
it is because it seems to the Christian man to be true, that the
Christian man believes in the presence, the life, the power of Jesus
Christ. Therefore come, let me hear every one of you what you have to
say. Let me see where that upon which my soul rests for its very life
breaks down; but, until I hear, I will go forward, strong in the
assurance of that which takes hold of all my life, convinces my reason,
lays hold of my affections, enlarges my actions, and opens my whole
being to the freedom of the child of God.
And why should not you, my friends, why should not you? I honor the
sceptic, the faithful and devout sceptic, with all my soul. I am no
scorner of the man who, without scorn, finds it impossible to accept
that which to my soul seems to be the absolute truth. I will scorn only
that which God scorns. He scorns the scorner, and only the scorning man
is worthy of the scorn of human kind. But while I honor the sceptic,
while I invite him to make manifest his scepticism, not merely for his
sake but for my own, I will not hold, I cannot hold that he is living a
larger life than the man whom the Christ invites to every noble duty, to
every faithful fulfilment of himself. I will feel that he, perhaps by
the necessity of his nature, perhaps by his circumstances, perhaps by
something which came down to him from his ancestors, is shut in, is a
contained and hampered and hindered man, and I will long for the day
when he, lifting up his eyes, sees that Christ walking in the midst of
humanity, and yet at the head of humanity, manifesting our human nature,
but outgoing our human nature, glorifying our streets while He
interprets our streets for the first time into their full meaning,
giving to our shops and houses a radiancy which they have expected and
dreamed of, but never felt, and tempting us always into a deeper belief
in Him, which, embodying itself in a completer consecration to the right
and true, shall lead us on into the fulness which he fills. Can I, can
you, have Christ in human history, Christ in the world, and live as if
He were not here? Will you not give yourself to that of Him which you
know to-day? Will you not at least lay hold of the very skirts of His
garment and say, "I see that Thou art good, I see that Thou art true.
Lead me into the goodness and truth which by communion and sympathy
shall know Thee more. Lord, I believe. I believe just a little. Lord, I
know that that must come which Thou hast said has come in Thee. I would
enter into Thee, to see whether it has indeed come in Thee, and Thou
shalt lead me, Thou shalt teach me. Lord, I believe. I have not grasped
Thee. No man has grasped Thee. The man who says that he has grasped Thee
proves thereby that he does not know Thee. I know that I have not
grasped Thee, but I will follow Thee by doing righteousness, by serving
truth, by knowing and acknowledging Thee until all of that shall become
clear to me. I will follow Thee, and Thou shalt lead me into the glory
which Thou Thyself abidest in. Lord, I believe, Lord, I believe, help
Thou mine unbelief." The story of the present, the hope, the pure,
certain hope of the future is in those great words: "Lord, I believe,
help Thou mine unbelief."
III. THE DUTY OF THE CHRISTIAN BUSINESS MAN.
I will read to you once again the words which I have read before, the
words of Jesus in the eighth chapter of the Gospel of St. John:
"As He spake these words, many believed on Him. Then said Jesus to
those Jews which believed on Him, if ye continue in My word, then
are ye My disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the
truth shall make you free. They answered Him, We be Abraham's seed,
and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest Thou, Ye shall be
made free? Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you.
Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the servant
abideth not in the house forever: but the Son abideth ever. If the
Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed."
I do not know how any man can stand and plead with his brethren for the
higher life, that they will enter into and make their own the life of
Christ and God, unless he is perpetually conscious that around them with
whom he pleads there is the perpetual pleading and the voice of God
Himself. Unless a man believes that, everything that he has to say must
seem, in the first place, impertinent, and, in the second place, almost
absolutely hopeless. Who is man that he shall plead with his fellow-man
for the change of a life, for the entrance into a whole new career, for
the alteration of a spirit, for the surrounding of himself with a new
region in which he has not lived before? But if it be so, that God is
pleading with every one of His children to enter into the highest life;
if it be so, that God is making His application and His appeal to every
soul to know Him, and in Him to know himself, then one may plead with
earnestness and plead with great hopefulness before his brethren. And so
it is. The great truth of Jesus Christ is that, that God is pleading
with every soul, not merely in the words which we hear from one another,
not merely in the words which we read from His book, but in every
influence of life; and, in those unknown influences which are too subtle
for us to understand or perceive, God is forever seeking after the souls
of His children.