'God is Helper.' We do not know what interval of time elapsed between
the birth of these two children. There are some indications that the
second of them was in years very much the junior. Perhaps the
transition from the mood represented in the one name to that
represented in the other, was a long and slow process. But be that as
it may, note the connection between these two names. You can never say
'We are strangers here' without feeling a little prick of pain, unless
you say too 'God is my Helper.' There is a beautiful variation of the
former word which will occur to many of you, I have no doubt, in one of
the old psalms: 'I am a stranger _with Thee_, and a sojourner, as were
all my fathers.' There is the secret that takes away all the mourning,
all the possible discomfort and pain, out of the thought: 'Here we have
no continuing city,' and makes it all blessed. It does not matter
whether we are in a foreign land or no, if we have that Companion with
us. His presence will make blessedness in Midian, or in Thebes. It does
not matter whether it is Goshen or the wilderness, if the Lord is by
our side. So sweetness is breathed into the thought, and bitterness is
sucked out of it, when the name of the second child is braided into the
name of the first; and we can contemplate quietly all else of tragic
and limiting and sad that is involved in the thought that we are
sojourners and pilgrims, when we say 'Yes! we are; but the Lord is my
Helper.'
Then, on the other hand, we shall never say and feel 'the Lord is my
Helper,' as we ought to do, until we have got deep in our hearts, and
settled in our consciousness, the other conviction that we are
strangers here. It is only when we realise that there is no other
permanence for us that we put out our hands and grasp at the Eternal,
in order not to be swept away upon the dark waves of the rushing stream
of Time. It is only when all other props are stricken from us that we
rest our whole weight upon that one strong central pillar, which can
never be moved. Learn that God helps, for that makes it possible to say
'I am a stranger,' and not to weep. Learn that you are strangers, for
that stimulates to take God for out help. Just as when the floods are
out, men are driven to the highest ground to save their lives; so when
the billows of the waters of time are seen to be rolling over all
creatural things, we take our flight to the Rock of Ages. Put the two
together, and they fit one another and strengthen us.
This second conviction was the illuminating light upon a perplexed and
problematic past. Moses, when he fled from Egypt, thought that his
life's work was rent in twain. He had believed that his brethren would
have seen that it was God's purpose to use him as the deliverer. For
the sake of being such, he had surrendered the court and its delights.
But on his young ambition and innocent enthusiasm there came this
_douche_ of cold water, which lasted for forty years, and sent him away
into the wilderness, to be a shepherd under an Arab sheikh, with
nothing to look forward to. At first he said, 'This is not what I was
meant for; I am out of my element here.' But before the forty years
were over he said, 'The God of my father was my help, and He delivered
me from the sword of Pharaoh.' What had looked a disaster turned out to
be a deliverance, a manifestation of divine help, and not a hindrance.
He had got far enough away from that past to look at it sanely, that is
to say gratefully. So we, when we get far enough away from our sorrows,
can look back at them, sometimes even here on earth, and say, 'The
mercy of the Lord compassed me about.' Here is the key that unlocks all
the perplexities of providence, 'The Lord was my Helper.'
And that conviction will steady and uphold a man in a present, however
dark. It was no small exercise of his faith and patience that the great
lawgiver should for so many years have such unworthy work to do as he
had in Midian. But even then he gathered into his heart this
confidence, and brought summer about him into the mid-winter of his
life, and light into the midst of darkness; 'for he said'--even then,
when there was no work for him to do that seemed much to need a divine
help--'the Lord is my Helper.'
And so, however dark may be our present moment, and however obscure or
repulsive our own tasks, let us fall back upon that old word, 'Thou
hast been my Help; leave me not, neither forsake me, O God of my
salvation.'
When Moses named his boy, his gratitude was allied with faith in
favours to come; and when he said 'was,' he meant also 'will be.' And
he was right. He dreamt very little of what was coming, but this
confidence that was expressed in his second child's name was warranted
by that great future that lay before him, though he did not know it.
When the pinch came his confidence faltered. It was easy to say 'The
Lord is my Helper,' when there was nothing very special for which God's
help was needed, and nothing harder to do than to look after a few
sheep in the wilderness. But when God said to him, 'Go and stand before
Pharaoh,' Moses for the moment forgot all about God's being his helper,
and was full of all manner of cowardly excuses, which, like the excuses
of a great many more of us for not doing our plain duty, took the shape
of a very engaging modesty and diffidence as to his capacities. But God
said to him, 'Surely I will be with thee.' He gave him back 'Eliezer'
in a little different form. 'You used to say that I was your helper.
What has become of your faith now? Has it all evaporated when the trial
comes? Surely I will be with thee.' If we will set ourselves to our
tasks, not doubting God's help, we shall have occasion in the event to
be sure that God did help us.
So, brethren, let us cherish these two thoughts, and never keep them
apart, and God will be, as our good old hymn has it--
'Our help while troubles last,
And our eternal home.'
THE IDEAL STATESMAN [Footnote: Preached on occasion of Mr. Gladstone's
death.]
'Thou shalt provide out of all the people able men,
such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness;
and place such over them.'--EXODUS xviii. 21.
You will have anticipated my purpose in selecting this text. I should
be doing violence to your feelings and mine if I made no reference to
the event which has united the Empire and the world in one sentiment.
The great tree has fallen, and the crash has for the moment silenced
all the sounds of the forest. Wars abroad and controversies at home are
hushed. All men, of all schools of opinion, creeds, and parties, see
now, in the calm face of the dead, 'the likeness to the great of old';
and it says something, with all our faults, for the soundness of the
heart of English opinion, that all sorts and conditions of men have
brought their sad wreaths to lay them on that coffin.
But, whilst much has been said, far more eloquently and authoritatively
than I can say it, about the many aspects of that many-sided life,
surely it becomes us, as Christian people, to look at it from the
distinctively Christian point of view, and to gather some of the
lessons which, so regarded, it teaches us.
My text is part of the sagacious advice which Jethro, the father-in-law
of Moses, gave him about the sort of men that he should pick out to be
his lieutenants in civic government. Its old-fashioned, simple
phraseology may hide from some of us the elevation and
comprehensiveness of the ideal that it sets forth. But it is a grand
ideal; and amongst the great names of Englishmen who have guided the
destinies of this land, none have approached more nearly to it than he
whose death has taken away the most striking personality from our
public life.
So let me ask you to look with me, first, at the ideal of a politician
that is set forth here.
The free life of the desert, far away from the oppressions of
surrounding military despotisms, that remarkable and antique
constitution of the clan, with all its beautiful loyalty, had given
this Arab sheikh a far loftier conception of what a ruler of men was
than he could have found exemplified at Pharaoh's court; or than, alas!
has been common in many so-called Christian countries. The field upon
which he intended that these great qualities should be exercised was a
very limited one, to manage the little affairs of a handful of
fugitives in the desert. But the scale on which we work has nothing to
do with the principles by which we work, and the laws of perspective
and colouring are the same, whether you paint the minutest miniature or
a gigantic fresco. So what was needed for managing the little concerns
of Moses' wanderers in the wilderness is the ideal of what is needed
for the men who direct the public affairs of world-wide empires.
Let me run over the details. They must be 'able men,' or, as the
original has it, 'men of strength.' There is the intellectual basis,
and especially the basis of firm, brave, strongly-set will which will
grasp convictions, and, whatever comes, will follow them to their
conclusions. The statesman is not one that puts his ear down to the
ground to hear the tramp of some advancing host, and then makes up his
mind to follow in their paths; he is not sensitive to the varying winds
of public opinion, nor does he trim his sails to suit them, but he
comes to his convictions by first-hand approach to, and meditation on,
the great principles that are to guide, and then holds to them with a
strength that nothing can weaken, and a courage that nothing can daunt.
'Men of strength' is what democracies like ours do most need in their
leaders; a 'strong man, in a blatant land,' who knows his own mind, and
is faithful to it for ever. That is a great demand.
'Such as fear God'--there is the secret of strength, not merely in
reference to the intellectual powers which are not dependent for their
origin, though they may be for the health and vigour of their work,
upon any religious sentiment, but in regard to all true power. He that
would govern others must first be lord of himself, and he only is lord
of himself who is consciously and habitually the servant of God. So
that whatever natural endowment we start with, it must be heightened,
purified, deepened, enlarged, by the presence in our lives of a deep
and vital religious conviction. That is true about all men, leaders and
led, large and small. That is the bottom-heat in the greenhouse, as it
were, that will make riper and sweeter all the fruits which are the
natural result of natural capacities. That is the amulet and the charm
which will keep a man from the temptations incident to his position and
the weaknesses incident to his character. The fear of God underlies the
noblest lives. That is not to-day's theory. We are familiar with the
fact, and familiar with the doctrine formulated out of it, that there
may be men of strong and noble lives and great leaders in many a
department of human activity without any reference to the Unseen. Yes,
there may be, but they are all fragments, and the complete man comes
only when the fear of the Lord is guide, leader, impulse, polestar,
regulator, corrector, and inspirer of all that he is and all that he
does.
'Men of truth'--that, of course, glances at the crooked ways which
belong not only to Eastern statesmanship, but it does more than that.
He that is to lead men must himself be led by an eager haste to follow
after, and to apprehend, the very truth of things. And there must be in
him clear transparent willingness to render his utmost allegiance, at
any sacrifice, to the dawning convictions that may grow upon him. It is
only fools that do not change. Freshness of enthusiasm, and fidelity to
new convictions opening upon a man, to the end of his life, are not the
least important of the requirements in him who would persuade and guide
individuals or a nation.
'Hating covetousness'; or, as it might be rendered, 'unjust gain.' That
reference to the 'oiling of the palms' of Eastern judges may be taken
in a loftier signification. If a man is to stand forth as the leader of
a people, he must be clear, as old Samuel said that he was, from all
suspicion of having been following out his career for any form of
personal advantage. 'Clean hands,' and that not only from the vulgar
filth of wealth, but from the more subtle advantages which may accrue
from a lofty position, are demanded of the leader of men.
Such is the ideal. The requirements are stern and high, and they
exclude the vermin that infest 'politics,' as they are called, and
cause them to stink in many nostrils. The self-seeking schemer, the
one-eyed partisan, the cynic who disbelieves in ideals of any sort, the
charlatan who assumes virtues that he does not possess, and mouths
noble sentiments that go no deeper than his teeth, are all shut out by
them. The doctrine that a man may do in his public capacity things
which would be disgraceful in private life, and yet retain his personal
honour untarnished, is blown to atoms by this ideal. It is much to be
regretted, and in some senses to be censured, that so many of our
wisest, best, and most influential men stand apart from public life.
Much of that is due to personal bias, much more of it is due to the
pressure of more congenial duties, and not a little of it is due to the
disregard of Jethro's ideal, and to the degradation of public life
which has ensued thereby. But there have been great men in our history
whose lives have helped to lift up the ideal of a statesman, who have
made such a sketch as Jethro outlined, though they may not have used
his words, their polestar; and amongst the highest of these has been
the man whose loss we to-day lament.
Let me try to vindicate that expression of opinion in a word or two. I
cannot hope to vie in literary grace, or in completeness, with the
eulogies that have been abundantly poured out; and I should not have
thought it right to divert this hour of worship from its ordinary
themes, if I had had no more to say than has been far better said a
thousand times in these last days. But I cannot help noticing that,
though there has been a consensus of admiration of, and a practically
unanimous pointing to, character as after all the secret of the spell
which Mr. Gladstone has exercised for two generations, there has not
been, as it seems to me, equal and due prominence given to what was,
and what he himself would have said was, the real root of his character
and the productive cause of his achievements.
And so I venture now to say a word or two about the religion of the man
that to his own consciousness underlay all the rest of him. It is not
for me to speak, and there is no need to speak, about the marvellous
natural endowments and the equally marvellous, many-sided equipment of
attainment which enriched the rich, natural soil. Intermeddling as he
did with all knowledge, he must necessarily have been but an amateur in
many of the subjects into which he rushed with such generous eagerness.
But none the less is the example of all but omnivorous acquisitiveness
of everything that was to be known, a protest, very needful in these
days, against the possible evils of an excessive specialising which the
very progress of knowledge in all departments seems to make inevitable.
I do not need to speak, either, of the flow, and sometimes the torrent,
of eloquence ever at his command, nor of the lithe and sinewy force of
his extraordinarily nimble, as well as massive, mind; nor need I say
more than one word about the remarkable combination of qualities so
generally held and seen to be incompatible, which put into one
personality a genius for dry arithmetical figures and a genius for
enthusiasm and sympathy with all the oppressed. All these things have
been said far better than I can say them, and I do not repeat them.
But I desire to hammer this one conviction into your hearts and my own,
that the inmost secret of that noble life, of all that wealth of
capacity, all that load of learning, which he bore lightly like a
flower, was the fact that the man was, to the very depths of his
nature, a devout Christian. He would have been as capable, as eloquent,
and all the rest of it, if he had been an unbeliever. But he would
never have been nor done what he was and did, and he would never have
left the dint of an impressive and lofty personality upon a whole
nation and a world, if beneath the intellect there had not been
character, and beneath character Christianity.
He was far removed, in ecclesiastical connections, from us
Nonconformists, and he held opinions in regard to some very important
ecclesiastical questions which cut straight across some of our deepest
convictions. We never had to look for much favour from his hands,
because his intellectual atmosphere removed him far from sympathy with
many of the truths which are dearest to the members of the Free
Evangelical Churches. But none the less we recognise in him a brother
in Jesus Christ, and rejoice that there, on the high places of a
careless and sceptical generation, there stood a Christian man.
In this connection I cannot but, though I have no right to do so,
express how profoundly thankful I, for one, was to the present Prime
Minister of England that in his brief eulogium on, I was going to say,
his great rival, he ended all by the emphatic declaration that Mr.
Gladstone was, first and foremost, a great Christian man. Yes; and
there was the secret, as I have already said, not of his merely
political eminence, but of the universal reverence which a nation
expresses to-day. All detraction is silenced, and all calumnies have
dropped away, as filth from the white wings of a swan as it soars, and
with one voice the Empire and the world confess that he was a great and
a good man.
I need not dwell in detail on the thoughts of how, by reason of this
deep underlying fear of God, the other qualifications which are
sketched in our ideal found their realisation in him; how those who,
all through his career, smiled most at the successive enthusiasms which
monopolised his mind, and sometimes at the contrasts between these, are
now ready to admit that, whether the enthusiasms were right or wrong,
there is something noble in the spectacle of a man ever keeping his
mind, even when its windows were beginning to be dimmed by the frosts
of age, open to the beams of new truth. And the greatest, as some
people think, of his political blunders, as we are beginning, all of
us, to recognise, now that party strife is hushed, was the direct
consequence of that ever fresh and youthful enthusiasm for new thoughts
and new lines of action. Innovators aged eighty are not too numerous.
Nor need I say more than one word about the other part of the ideal,
'hating covetousness.' The giver of peerages by the bushel died a
commoner. The man that had everything at his command made no money, nor
anything else, out of his long years of office, except the satisfaction
of having been permitted to render what he believed to be the highest
of service to the nation that he loved so well. Like our whilom
neighbour, the other great commoner, John Bright, he lived among his
own people; and like Samuel, of whom I have already spoken, he could
stretch out his old hands and say, 'They are clean.' One scarcely feels
as if, to such a life, a State funeral in Westminster Abbey was
congruous. One had rather have seen him laid among the humble villagers
who were his friends and companions, and in the quiet churchyard which
his steps had so often traversed. But at all events the ideal was
realised, and we all know what it was.
Might I say one word more? As this great figure passes out of men's
sight to nobler work, be sure, on widened horizons corresponding to his
tutored and exercised powers, does he leave no lessons behind for us?
He leaves one very plain, homely one, and that is, 'Work while it is
called to-day.' No opulence of endowment tempted this man to indolence,
and no poverty of endowment will excuse us for sloth. Work is the law
of our lives; and the more highly we are gifted, the more are we bound
to serve.
He leaves us another lesson. Follow convictions as they open before
you, and never think that you have done growing, or have reached your
final stage.
He leaves another lesson. Do not suppose that the Gospel of Jesus
Christ cannot satisfy the keenest intellect, nor dominate the strongest
will. It has come to be a mark of narrowness and fossilhood to be a
devout believer in Christ and His Cross. Some of you young men make an
easy reputation for cleverness and advanced thought by the short and
simple process of disbelieving what your mother taught you. Here is a
man, probably as great as you are, with as keen an intellect, and he
clung to the Cross of Christ, and had for his favourite hymn--
'Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee.'
He leaves another lesson. If you desire to make your characters all
that it is in them to be made, you must, like him, go to Jesus Christ,
and get your teaching and your inspiration from that great Lord. We
cannot all be great men. Never mind. It is character that tells; we can
all be good men, and we can all be Christian men. And whether we build
cottages or palaces, if we build on one foundation, and only if we do,
they will stand.
Moses leaves another lesson, as he glides into the past. 'This man,
having served his generation by the will of God, fell on sleep, and was
gathered to his fathers, and saw corruption'; but He 'whom God hath
raised up saw no corruption.' The lamps are quenched, the sun shines.
Moses dies, 'The prophets, do they live for ever?' but when Moses and
Elias faded from the Mount of Transfiguration 'the apostles saw no man
any more, save Jesus only,' and the voice said, 'This is My beloved
Son; hear ye Him.'