spectacle which we witnessed this morning. The only strange thing that
there could be about it is that anybody should think that it is strange
that men should turn aside for half an hour from their ordinary business
pursuits, that they should come from the details of life to inquire in
regard to the principles, the everlasting principles and purposes of
life; that they should turn aside from those things which are occupying
them from day to day and make one single hour in the week consecrated to
the service of those great things which underlie all life--surely there
is nothing very strange. There is nothing more absolutely natural. Every
man does it in his own sort of way, in his own choice of time. We have
chosen to do it together, on one day of the week during these few weeks
which the Christian Church has so largely set apart for special thought
and prayer and earnest attempt to approach the God to whom we belong. It
is simply as if the stream turned back again to its fountain, that it
might refresh itself and make itself strong for the great work that it
had to do in watering the fields and turning the wheels of industry. It
is simply as if men plodding along over the flat routine of their life
chose once in a while to go up into the mountain top, whence they might
once in a while look abroad over their life, and understand more fully
the way in which they ought to work. These are the principles, these are
the pictures which represent that which we have in mind as we come
together for a little while each Monday in these few weeks, in order
that we may think about things of God and try to realize the depth of
our own human life. The first thing that we ought to understand about it
is that when we turn aside from life it is only that we go deeper into
life. This hour does not stand apart from the rest of the hours of the
week, in that we are dealing with things in which the rest of the week
has no concern. He who understands life deeply and fully, understands
life truly; he has forever renewed his life; and if there comes into our
hearts, in the life which we are living, a perpetual sense that life
needs renewal, a richening and refreshing, then it is in order that we
may go down into the depths and see what lies at the root of
things--things that we are perpetually doing and thinking. It is this
that brought us together here: it is that we may open to ourselves some
newer, higher life. It is that we may understand the life that we may
live, along side of and as a richer development of that life which we
are living from day to day, which we have been living during the years
of our life. How that idea has haunted men in every period of their
existence, how it is haunting you, that there is some higher life which
it is possible to live! There has never been a religion that has not
started there, lifted up its eyes and seen, afar off, what it was
possible for man to do from day to day, in contrast with the things
which men immediately and presently are. There is not any moment of the
human soul which has not rested upon some great conception that man was
a nobler being than he was ordinarily conceiving himself to be; that he
was not destined to the things which were ordinarily occupying his life;
that he might be living a greater and nobler life. It is because the
Christian Scriptures have laid most earnestly hold of this idea, it is
because it was represented not simply in the words which Christ said,
but in the very being which Christ was, that we go to them to get the
inspiration and the indication, the revelation and the enlightenment
which we need. I have read to you these few words in which Christ
declares the whole subject, the whole character of which His life is and
what His work is about to do, because it seems to me that they strike at
once the key-note of that which we want to understand. They let us enter
into the full conception of that which the new life which is offered to
man really is. There are two conceptions which come to every man when he
is entering upon a new life, changing his present life to something that
is different from the present life, and being a different sort of
creature and living in a different sort of a way. The first way in which
it presents itself to him--almost always at the beginning of every
religion, perhaps--is in the way of restraint and imprisonment. Man
thinks of every change that is to come to him as in the nature of denial
of something that he is at the present doing and being, as the laying
hold upon himself of some sort of restraint, bringing to him something
which says: "I must not do the thing which I am doing. I must lay upon
myself restraints, restrictions, commandments, and prohibitions. I must
not let myself be the man that I am." You see how the Old Testament
comes before the New Testament, the law ringing from the mountain top
with the great denials, the great prohibitions, that come from the mouth
of God. "Thou shalt not do this, that, or the other--Thou shalt not
murder. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt
not covet thy neighbor's goods." That is the first conception which
comes to a man of the way in which he is to enter upon a new life, of
the way in which the denial in his experience is to take effect. It is
as if the hands were stretched out in order that fetters might be placed
upon them. The man says, "Let some power come that is to hinder me from
being this thing that I am." And the whole notion is the notion of
imprisonment, restraint So it is with all civilization. It is perfectly
possible for us to represent civilization as compared with barbarism, as
accepted by mankind, as a great mass of restrictions and prohibitions
that have been laid upon human life, so that the freedom of life has
been cast aside, and man has entered into restricted, restrained, and
imprisoned condition. So it is with every fulfilment of life. It is
possible for a man always to represent it to himself as if it were the
restriction, restraint, and prohibition of his life. The man passes
onward into the fuller life which belongs to a man. He merges his
selfishness into that richer life which is offered to human kind. He
makes himself, instead of a single, selfish man, a man of family; and it
is easy enough to consider that marriage and the family life bring
immediately restraints and prohibitions. The man may not have the
freedom which he used to have. So all development of education, in the
first place, offers itself to man, or seems to offer itself to man, as
prohibition and imprisonment and restraint. There is no doubt truth in
such an idea. We never lose sight of it. No other richer and fuller idea
which we come to by and by ever does away with the thought that man's
advance means prohibition and self-denial, that in order that man shall
become the greater thing he must cease to be the poorer and smaller
thing he has been. But yet there is immediately a greater and fuller.
When we hear those words of Jesus, we see immediately that not the idea
of imprisonment but the idea of liberty, not the idea of restraint but
that of setting free, is the idea which is really in His mind when he
offers the fullest life to human kind. Have you often thought of how the
whole Bible is a Book of Liberty, of how It rings with liberty from
beginning to end, of how the great men are the men of liberty, of how
the Old Testament, the great picture which forever shines, is the
emancipator, leading forth out of imprisonment the people of God, who
were to do the great work of God in the very much larger and freer life
in which they were to live? The prophet, the psalmist, are ever
preaching and singing about liberty, the enfranchisement of the life of
man, that man was not imprisoned in order to fulfil himself, but shall
open his life, and every new progress shall be into a new region of
existence which lie has not touched as yet. When we turn from the Old
Testament to the New Testament, how absolutely clear that idea is!
Christ is the very embodiment of human liberty. In His own personal life
and in everything that He did and said, He was forever uttering the
great gospel that man, in order to become his completest, must become
his freest, that what a man did when he entered into a new life was to
open a new region in which new powers were to find their exercise, in
which he was to be able to be and do things which he could not be and do
in more restricted life. It is the acceptance of that idea, it seems to
me, that makes us true disciples of Christ and of that great gospel, and
that transfigures everything. When my friend turns over some new leaf,
as we say, and begins to live a new life, what shall we think of him? I
learn that he has become a Christian man, that he is doing something,
that he is working in a way and living a life which I have not known
before. What is my impression in regard to him? Is not your impression,
as you look upon that man, that somehow or other he has entered into a
slavery or bondage, that he has taken upon his life restrictions and
imprisonments which he did not have before? And you think of him,
perhaps, as a man who has done a wise and prudent thing, who has done
something that is going to be for his benefit some day in some distant
and half-realized world, but as a man who, for the present, has laid a
burden and bondage upon his life. That is never the tone of Christ; it
is never the tone of the Christian gospel. When a man turns away from
his sins and enters into energetic holiness, when a man sacrifices his
own self-indulgence and goes forth a pure servant of his God and his
fellow-men, there is only one cry in the whole gospel of that man, and
that is the cry of freedom. As soon as he can catch that, as soon as I
can feel about my friend, who has become a better man, that he has
become a larger and not a smaller, a freer and not a more imprisoned
man, as soon as I lift up my voice and say that the man is free, then I
understand him more fully, and he becomes a revelation to me in the
higher and richer life which is possible for me to live. But think of
it for yourselves, for a moment, and ask what freer life really is. Try
to give a definition of liberty, and I know not what it can be said to
be except something of this kind: Liberty is the fullest opportunity for
man to be and do the very best that is possible for him. I know of no
definition of liberty, that oldest and dearest phrase of men, and
sometimes the vaguest also, except that. It has been perverted, it has
been distorted and mystified, but that is what it really means: the
fullest opportunity for a man to do and be the very best that is in his
personal nature to do and to be. It immediately follows that everything
which is necessary for the full realization of a man's life, even though
it seems to have the character of restraint for a moment, is really a
part of the process of his enfranchisement, is the bringing forth of him
to a fuller liberty. You see a man coming forward and offering himself
as one of the defenders of his country in his country's need. You see
him standing at the door where men are being received as recruits into
the army of the country. He wants liberty. He wants to be able to do
that which he cannot do in his poor, personal isolation here at home. He
wants the badge which will give him the right to go forth and meet the
enemies of his country, and he enrolls himself among these men. He makes
himself subject to obligations, duties, and drill. They are a part of
his enfranchisement. They are really the breaking of the fetters upon
his slavery, the sending him forth into freedom. He is like a bit of
iron or steel that lies upon the ground. It lies neglected and perfectly
free. You see it is made by the adjustment of the end of it so that it
can be set into a great machine and become part of a great working
system. But there it lies. Will you call it free? It is bound to be
nothing there. It is absolutely separate, and with its own personality
distinct and individual and all alone. What is to make that bit of iron
a free bit of iron, to let it go forth and do the thing which it was
meant to do, but the taking of it and the binding of it at both ends
into the structure of which it was made to be a part? It seems to me the
binding of a man,--it seems to me that the binding of the iron is not
the yielding of its freedom. It is not merely after finding its place
within the system that it first achieves its freedom and so joins in the
music and partakes of the courses with which the whole enginery is
filled. Is not it, then, for the first time a free bit of iron, having
accomplished all that it was made to do when it came forth from the
forge of the master, who had this purpose in his mind? This, then, is
freedom; everything is part of the enfranchisement of a man which helps
to put him in the place where he can live his best. Therefore every
duty, every will of God, every commandment of Christ, every
self-surrender that a man is called upon to obey or to make--do not
think of it as if it were simply a restraint to liberty, but think of it
as the very means of freedom, by which we realize the very purpose of
God and the fulfilment of our life. It is interesting to see how all
that is true in regard to the matter of belief, doctrine, and opinions
which we are apt to accept. How strange it very often seems that men go
to the Church, or to one another, and say: "Must I believe this doctrine
in order that I can enter into the Church?" "Must I believe this
doctrine in order that I may be saved?" men say, with a strange sort of
notion about what salvation is. How strange it seems, when we really
have got our intelligence about us and know what it is to believe! To
believe a new truth, if it be really truth and we really believe it, is
to have entered into a new region, in which our life shall find a new
expansion and a new youth. Therefore, not "Must we believe?" but "May I
believe?" is the true cry of the human creature who is seeking for the
richest fulfilment of his life, who is working that his whole nature may
find its complete expansion and so its completest exercise. We talk a
great deal in these days and in this place about a liberal faith. What
is a liberal faith, my friends? It seems to me that by every true
meaning of the word, by every true thought of the idea, a liberal faith
is a faith that believes much, and not a faith that believes little. The
more a man believes, the more liberally he exercise his capacity of
faith, the more he sends forth his intelligence into the mysteries of
God, the more he understands those things which God chooses to reveal to
his creatures, the more liberally he believes. Let yourselves never
think that you grow liberal in faith by believing less; always be sure
that the true liberality of faith can only come by believing more. It is
true, indeed, that as soon as a man becomes eager for belief, for the
truth of God and for the mysteries with which God's universe is filled,
he becomes all the more critical and careful. He will hot any longer, if
he were before, be simply greedy of things to believe, so that if any
superstition comes offering itself to him he will not gather it in
indiscriminately and believe it without evidence, without examination.
He becomes all the more critical and careful, the more he becomes
assured that belief, and not unbelief, is the true condition of his
life. The truth that God has entered into this world in wondrous ways
and filled its life with Jesus Christ, the truth that man has a soul and
not simply a body, that he has a spiritual need, that God cares for him
and he is to care for himself, that there is an immortal life, and that
that which we call faith is but the opening of a gate, the pushing back
of a veil,--shall a man believe those things as imprisonments of his
nature, and shall it not make him larger? Shall it not be the indulgence
of his life when he enters into the great certainties which so are
offered to his belief, believing them in his own way? Let us always feel
that to accept a new belief is no to build a wall beyond which we cannot
pass, but is to open the door to a great fresh, free region, in which
our souls are to live. And just so it is when we come to the moral
things of life. The man puts aside some sinfulness. He breaks down the
wall that has been shutting his soul out of its highest life. He has
been a drunkard, and he becomes a sober man. He has been a cheat, and
becomes a faithful man. He has been a liar, and becomes a truthful man.
He has been a profligate, and he becomes a pure man. What has happened
to that man? Shall he simply think of himself as one who has crushed
this passion, shut down this part of his life? Shall he simply think of
himself as one who has taken a course of self-denial? Nay. It is
self-indulgence that a man has really entered upon. It is an indulgence
of the deepest part of his own nature, not of his unreal nature. He has
risen and shaken himself like a lion, so that the dust has fallen from
his mane, and all the great range of that life which God gave him to
live lies before him. This is the everlasting inspiration. This is the
illumination. I don't wonder that men refuse to give up evil if it
simply seems to them to be giving up the evil way, and no vision opens
before them of the thing that they may be and do. I don't wonder that,
if the negative, restricting, imprisoning conception of the new life is
all that a man gets hold of, he lingers again and again in the old life.
But just as soon as the great world opens before him then it is like a
prisoner going out of the prison door. Is there no lingering? Does not
the baser part of him cling to the old prison, to the ease and the
provision for him, to the absence of anxiety and of energy? I think
there can hardly be a prisoner who, with any leap of heart, goes out of
the prison door, when his term is finished, and does not even look into
that black horror where he has been living, cast some lingering, longing
look behind. He comes to the exigencies, to the demands of life, to the
necessity of making himself once more a true man among his fellow-men.
But does he stop? He comes forth, and if there be the soul of a man in
him still, he enters into the new life with enthusiasm, and finds the
new powers springing in him to their work. And if it be so with every
special duty, then with that great thing which you and I are called upon
to do--the total acceptance by our nature of the will of God, the total
acceptance by our nature of the mastery of Jesus Christ. Oh! how this
world has perverted words and meanings, that the mastery of Jesus Christ
should seem to be the imprisonment and not the enfranchisement of the
soul! When I bring a flower out of the darkness and set it in the sun,
and let the sunlight come streaming down upon it, and the flower knows
the sunlight for which it was made and opens its fragrance and beauty;
when I take a dark pebble and put it into the stream and let the silver
water go coursing down over it and bringing forth the hidden color that
was in the bit of stone, opening the nature that is in them, the flower
and stone rejoice. I can almost hear them sing in the field and in the
stream. What then? Shall not man bring his nature out into the fullest
illumination, and surprise himself by the things that he might do? Oh!
the littleness of the lives that we are living! Oh! the way in which we
fail to comprehend, or when we do comprehend, deny to ourselves the
bigness of that thing which it is to be a man, to be a child of God!
Sometimes it dawns upon us that we can see it opening into the vision of
these men and women in the New Testament. Sometimes there opens to us
the picture of this thing that we might be, and then there are truly the
trial moments of our life. Then we lift up ourselves and claim our
liberty or, dastardly or cowardly, slink back into the sluggish
imprisonment in which we have been living. How does all this affect that
which we are continually conscious of, urging upon ourselves and upon
one another? How does it affect the whole question of a man's sins? Oh!
these sins, the things we know so well! As we sit here and stand here
one entire hour, as we talk in this sort of way, everybody knows the
weaknesses of his own nature, the sins of his own soul. Don't you know
it? What shall we think about those sins? It seems to me, my friends,
that all this great picture of the liberty into which Christ sets man,
in the first place does one thing which we are longing to see done in
the world. It takes away the glamour and the splendor from sin. It
breaks that spell by which men think that the evil thing is the glorious
thing. If the evil thing be that which Christ has told us that the evil
thing is--which I have no time to tell you now--if every sin that you do
is not simply a stain upon your soul, but is keeping you out from some
great and splendid thing which you might do, then is there any sort of
splendor and glory about sin? How about the sins that you did when you
were young men? How can you look back upon those sins and think what
your life might have been if it had been pure from the beginning, think
what you might have been if from the very beginning you had caught sight
of what it was to be a man? And then your boy comes along. What are the
men in this town doing largely in many and many a house, but letting
their boys believe that the sins of their early life are glorious
things, except that those things which they did, the base and wretched
things that they were doing when they were fifteen and twenty and
twenty-five and thirty years old, are the true career of a human nature,
are the true entrance into human life? The miserable talk about sowing
wild oats, about getting through the necessary conditions of life before
a man comes to solemnity! Shame upon any man who, having passed through
the sinful conditions and habits and dispositions of his earlier life,
has not carried out of them an absolute shame for them, that shall let
him say to his boy, by word and by every utterance of his life within
the house where he and the boy live together, "Refrain, for they are
abominable things!" To get rid of the glamour of sin, to get rid of the
idea that it is a glorious thing to be dissipated instead of being
concentrated to duty, to get rid of the idea that to be drunken and to
be lustful are true and noble expressions of our abounding human life,
to get rid of any idea that sin is aught but imprisonment, is to make
those who come after us, and to make ourselves in what of life is left
for us, gloriously ambitious for the freedom of purity, for a full
entrance into that life over which sin has no dominion. And yet, at the
same time, don't you see that while sin thus becomes contemptible when
we think about the great illustration of the will of God and Jesus
Christ, don't you see how also it puts on a new horror? That which I
thought I was doing in the halls of my imprisonment I have really been
doing within the possible world of God in which I might have been free.
The moment I see what life might have been to me, then any sin becomes
dreadful to me. Have you ever thought of how the world has stood in
glory and honor before the sinless humanity of Jesus Christ? If any life
could prove, if any argument could show on investigation to-day that
Jesus did one sin in all his life, that the perfect liberty which was
his perfect purity was not absolutely perfect, do you realize what a
horror would seem to fall down from the heavens, what a constraint and
burden would be laid upon the lives of men, how the gates of men's
possibilities would seem to close in upon them? It is because there has
been that one life which, because absolutely pure from sin, was
absolutely free; it is because man may look up and see in that life the
revelation and possibility of his own; it is because that life, echoing
the great cry throughout the world that man everywhere is the son of
God, offers the same purity--and so the same freedom--to all mankind; it
is for that reason that a man rejoices to cling to, to believe in,
however impure his life is, the perfect purity, the sinlessness of the
life of Jesus. When you sin, my friends, it is a man that sins, and a
man is a child of God; and for a child of God to sin is an awful thing,
not simply for the stain that he brings into the divine nature that is
in him, but for the life from which it shuts him out, for the liberty
which he abandons, for the inthrallment which it lays upon the soul.
There is one thing that people say very carelessly that always seems to
me to be a dreadful thing for a man to say. They say it when they talk
about their lives to one another, and think about their lives to
themselves, and by and by very often say it upon their death-bed with
the last gasp, as though their entrance into the eternal world had
brought them no deeper enlightenment. One wonders what is the revelation
that comes to them when they stand upon the borders of the other side
and are in the full life and eternity of God. The thing men say is, "I
have done the very best I can." It is an awful thing for a man to say.
The man never lived, save he who perfected our humanity, who ever did
the very best he could. You dishonor your life, you not simply shut your
eyes to certain facts, you not simply say an infinitely absurd and
foolish thing, but you dishonor your human life if you say that you have
done in any day of your life or in all the days of your life put
together, the very best that you could, or been the very best man that
you could be. You! what are you? Again I say, The child of God, and this
which you have been, what is it? Look over it, see how selfish it has
been, see how material it has been, how it has lived in the depths when
it might have lived on the heights, see how it has lived in the little
narrow range of selfishness when it might have been as broad as all
humanity, nay, when it might have been as the God of humanity. Don't
dare to say that in any day of your life, or in all your life together,
you have done the best that you could. The Pharisee said it when he went
up into the temple, and all the world has looked on with mingled pity
and scorn at the blindness of the man who stood there and paraded his
faithfulness; while all the world has bent with a pity that was near to
love, a pity that was full of sympathy because man recognized his
condition and experience, for the poor creature grovelling upon the
pavement, unwilling and unable even to look upon the altar, but who,
standing afar off, said, "God be merciful to me a sinner!" Whatever else
you say, don't say, "I have been the very best I could." That means that
you have not merely lived in the rooms of your imprisonment, but that
you have been satisfied to count them the only possible rooms of your
life, and that the great halls of your liberty have never opened
themselves before you. Shall not they open themselves somehow to us
to-day, my friends? Shall we not turn away from this hour and go back
into our business, into our offices, into the shops, into the crowded
streets, bearing new thoughts of the lives that we might live, feeling
the fetters on our hands and feet, feeling many things as fetters which
we have thought of as the ornament and glory of our life, determined to
be unsatisfied forever until these fetters shall be stricken off and we
have entered into the full liberty which comes to those alone who are
dedicated to the service of God, to the completion of their own nature,
to the acceptance of the grace of Christ, and to the attainment of the
eternal glory of the spiritual life, first here and then hereafter,
never hereafter, it may be, except here and now, certainly here and now,
as the immediate, pressing privilege and duty of our lives? So let us
stand up on our feet and know ourselves in all the richness and in all
the awfulness of our human life. Let us know ourselves children of God,
and claim the liberty which God has given to every one of his children
who will take it. God bless you and give some of you, help some of us,
to claim, as we have never claimed before, that freedom with which the
Son makes free!
V. THE CHRIST IN WHOM CHRISTIANS BELIEVE.
I want to read to you again the words of Jesus in the eighth chapter of
the Gospel of St. John: "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 for ever: but the Son abideth ever. If
the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." The
service of God is not self-restraint, but self-indulgence. That is the
first truth of all religion. That is the truth which we found uttered in
those words of Jesus when we were thinking of them the other day. That
is the truth to which we return as we come back again to think of those
words and all that they mean and all that the speaker of them means to
us and to our lives. When we remember that truth, when we recognize that
no man is ever to be saved except by the fulfilment of his own nature,
and not by the restraint of his nature, when we recognize that no man,
no personal, individual man, is ever to be ransomed from his sins except
by having opened to him a larger and fuller life into which he has
entered, we seem to have displayed to us a large region, into which we
are tempted to enter, and which is so rich and inviting to us that we
immediately begin to ask ourselves if it is possible that there should
be such a region. It is simply a great dream that we set before us. It
is something that we imagine, something that comes out of the
imaginations and anticipations of our own hearts, simply stimulated by
the possibilities of the life in which we are living. It would be very
much indeed, if it were only that. It would bear a certain testimony of
itself, if it simply came out of the perpetual dissatisfaction of men's
souls, even if there were no distinct manifestation of that life and no
possibility of entering into it at once with our own personal
consecration, with the resolution of our own wills. But if it were
simply a dream, ultimately it must fade away out of the thoughts of
men. It is impossible that men should keep on, year after year, age
after age, this simple dream of something which does not exist. It would
be like those pictures which the poet has drawn, something which appeals
to nothing in our human nature and stands only as a parable of something
that is a great deal lower than itself. The poet pictures to us in his
imagination those things which do not appeal to our life, because they
find nothing to correspond to their high portraits, to show those
transformations of nature into something that is entirely different and
foreign to itself. If religion be simply the dream that some men hold it
to be, if it simply be the cheating of man's soul with that which has no
reality to correspond to it, then it will be no more than this. Is there
any assurance that is given to us, that is before the soul of man, of
some great new life which it is given for man to seek, without which it
is given for no man to be satisfied? I do not know where any man could
find that assurance absolutely and entirely, unless there had stood
forth before us the person of Him who spoke these words and who
manifested them in His life. And therefore it is that, having pictured
to you the richness of the life which is open to every man, his own true
life, the large freedom into which he may go if, giving up his sins he
enters into the fulness of the life of God, I cannot help now calling
you to think about Him who gives, not merely by His words, but by the
whole of His own person and life, that manifestation of the reality of
the divine existence and tempts us to follow after Him. In other words,
we come to-day to think of Christ, Christ who claims to be the master of
the world, Christ from whom the revelation of that higher life has come,
not in its first instance in the manifestation of the words which he
spoke, for it had been the dream of human hearts through all the ages,
but who made it so distinct and clear that ever since the time of Christ
men have been able to cease to seek after it, men have never been able
to give up the hope and dream that it was there. It is our Christ in
whom we Christians believe. It is the Christ in whom a great many of you
listening to me now claim to believe--I do myself--in whom many of you
do believe, whom many of you have followed into that newer life. I would
to God that I could so set Him before you to-day, could so make you feel
his actual presence in the life which we are living, which we may be
living, that there should be no question in any man of the power that is
open before him to enter into the higher life and to fulfil his soul to
God. What I want to do, in the few moments which I may speak to you this
morning, is--laying aside all the theological conceptions regarding
Him, laying aside everything that attaches to the complications and
mysteries in which His nature has been involved in men's dreams of Him,
laying aside everything which the churches are holding as the special
doctrine of their especial creed--to go back to the very beginning and
see if we can understand anything of what it is--this personal Christ,
who lives here in the world and manifests the power of God and opens the
possibility of every man. Surely it is good that we should know
something about Him of whom we speak so much, that there should be some
clear and directest conception of one whose name has been upon the lips
of men for eighteen hundred years; and it is possible for us, in the
simplest way, to understand how His power has come into the world and to
see where it is possible that it should come and enrich our lives and
make us different men. We go back, then, to the very beginning of the
aspiration after God, which is in the heart of man everywhere. There has
never been a race that has been without it. There has never been a
generation that has not reached forward and thought there was a higher
life, a fuller liberty, to which it could come. It has been in all the
religions which have been not simply fears, but which have been the
highest utterances of all the different races in all the different
generations of mankind and all the different countries of the world; and
there was one especial race in one especial part of the world in whom
that aspiration was especially strong. We will not ask how it came to be
there. There it was in this strange people living on the eastern shore
of the Mediterranean Sea, and in all its history marked out by the
strange peculiarity that it was a spiritual people, that in the midst of
all its sins, blunders, and weaknesses it was forever lifting up its
soul to God and striving to find Him out. Very often it blundered
strangely and sadly. Very often it failed to get that for which it was
seeking, by the very impetuousness, rashness, and earnestness of search.
But it was always seeking after Him. And the years rolled by, and by and
by in the midst of that great nation there was a little company of men
who, accompanying one another from the beginning of their lives, had
been searching after this God and trying everywhere if they could find
Him. And one day they heard that down by the river which ran through
their country, which was sacred to them from the multitude of old
national associations, there was a great teacher come, who was declaring
that for which the human soul was forever reaching after, the need of
escaping from sin and entering upon and leading a higher life. This
little company went down and met two disciples of John the Baptist, and
learned from them everything that they had to teach them. Their souls
were stirred by that which he had to say. But one day, while he was
teaching them, it seemed as if they had come to an end of that which he
could teach them. He looked up, and there upon the hill just above the
river there was passing one upon whom the gaze of the fishermen by the
river immediately kindled, and he lifted his hand and said, "He is the
one who is to teach you now. You must go after him. Behold the Lamb of
God, which taketh away the sin of the world." Great and mysterious
words, that filled in that which men had believed in all the records
they had read and the thinking they had done before! And they turned
away from John and went after this new teacher and, following to His
house, there they abode with Him during that day and the days that
followed after. Little by little, as we read the story of their being
with him, we can see them taken into His power, we can see how there was
a certain fascination in His presence which laid hold upon them. It
seemed at first to be purely human, to be the way in which one strong
man takes possession of his fellow-man and compels him to rely upon him.
It was upon purely human ground. It was in the manifestation of the
excellence of this human nature of ours that they believed in Jesus and
gradually became His disciples. Little by little it so commanded them
that at last the moment came when it was impossible for them to separate
themselves from Him; and one day, when the people were turning away from
Him when He was preaching and saying things that it was hard for them to
understand, He looked around upon them and said, "Are you going also,
will you leave me now?" And then there burst forth from the lips of one
of them, the most strong and characteristic act of the little company,
those great words that declared how He had become necessary to them:
"Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life." You
see the power that Jesus had acquired over these men. You see the way in
which He had taken them absolutely into His dominion, simply because of
the manifestation of character and life, simply because He had shown
them what man might be and opened the springs of the better life in
themselves by the words He had spoken to them. And then they lived on
with Him still, and by and by they had become so convinced by His truth
and wisdom, His character had so taken possession of them, that they
were ready to believe anything that He said. One day He lifted up His
voice and declared that which had gradually been dawning upon them all
the time, that He was more than they were, that He had brought in some
mysterious way a divine life into this world and had much to communicate
to them. He told them that He was the Father from whom His life and
their life had come. He told them that He and the Father were one. He
told them, not in theological statement, not as men have worked out
since in their desire to know it fully, but in the simple statement of
the truth that could be the inspiration of their life, that in His
presence there was here the very presence of God among them. It was not
strange to them, though human creatures, though men, that the highest
aspiration of their humanity had never thought God so far from this
world that it seemed to them strange that there should be in very human
presence the divine life here with them. They could not explain it and
did not try to explain it. Here it was, that which they had seen
shadowed in the divinest men whom they had known, that which they had
recognized. Here it was before them in this being who had won such a
power over them that they were ready to accept His testimony with regard
to Himself. Oh! my friends, let us not feel that the evidence of our
Christian faith fails when it is seen to rest upon the word of Christ
Himself. My neighbor knows more of himself than I know of him. I know
more of myself than any man can know of me, if only I be earnest and
sincere. And that the greatest of men who ever trod this earth should
not know more of His nature than any other man should know, and that
therefore His word should not be the richest revelation of that which is
in His life and makes His power over mankind, that is incredible.
Therefore the men were right when they believed Jesus' own word and
looked to Him for the divinity which He said was present with Him upon
the earth. Then His life went on, and by and by fulfilled itself in the
one great action in which He declared those two things which He longed
to know, the life and newness of God and the power of their human
nature. He gave His life for them, indeed, in the awful suffering that
preceded and that culminated upon the cross. He gave His life in
crucifixion for them, and in that crucifixion opened the divinest doors
of His life, when opening a sanctuary of sorrow; and He bade them enter
in and know there the absolute life of God and the great capacity of
human nature to sacrifice itself for God. And before He died, and
afterward, He again appeared to them. He spoke great words which said
that this was not the end of things, that after they had ceased to see
Him and touch Him and hear His voice He still was to be present in the
world. He said that the mysterious presence of those who had passed
away, which all had known, was to culminate and be fulfilled in Him. "I
am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." Wherever you "are
together in my name, there am I." Words and words and words again like
those He spoke, in which He declared that He was to be an everlasting
presence among mankind, and therefore that which had taken place in the
life of those disciples might forever take place; that that which Jesus
had done in the days when He was present upon the earth should be
continually repeated, in that He was forever to do that which He had
been doing, giving Himself to human kind for their inspiration, for
their elevation, for their correction, for their reproof, as He had been
doing, their salvation, as He had been doing in those days in which He
was here among them. Men have believed that simply. They have recognized
that word of Christ, and found the fulfilment of it in their own lives;
and that has been the Christian religion,--just exactly what it was in
the old days when Jesus was present in Jerusalem and Galilee. Just
exactly what men did then men have been doing in all the generations
that have come since. Just exactly what was possible then is possible
for them now--that we may become the followers of that same Christ and
the receivers through Him of the divine life, by which alone the human
life is perfected and fulfilled.
That is the Christian religion. That is the Christian faith. Is it not
clear and simple, whether it be true or not? My friends, you may believe
it or you may disbelieve it, but the Christian faith is clear and simple
enough surely in this statement, stripped of a thousand difficulties,
perplexities, and bewilderments. That is it, that there is in the world
to-day the same Christ who was in the world eighteen hundred and more
years ago, and that men may go to Him and receive His life and the
inspiration of His presence and the guidance of His wisdom just exactly
as they did then. If you and I had been in Jerusalem in those old days,
what would we have done, if we were more than mere creatures of others,
more than men merely absorbed in our business, if there were any
stirring in our souls after the deeper and diviner desires, could we,
would we have been satisfied until we had gone wherever He might be,--in
the temple, in the courts, or on the country road,--and found that
Jesus, and entered into some sympathy with His life, that He might give
to us what revelation of life and what guidance of will it might be
possible should come from Him to men who trusted Him, until we had
entered into sympathy with Him and the fascinations of His character?
That is the Christian life, my friends, the thing we make so vague and
mysterious and difficult. That is the Christian life, the following of
Jesus Christ.