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The World's Great Sermons
VOLUME VI
H. W. BEECHER TO PUNSHON
THE
WORLD'S
GREAT
SERMONS
COMPILED BY
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Formerly of Yale Divinity School Faculty;
Author of "How to Speak
in Public," Etc.
With Assistance from Many of the Foremost
Living Preachers and Other Theologians
INTRODUCTION BY
LEWIS O. BRASTOW, D.D.
Professor Emeritus of Practical Theology
in Yale University
IN TEN VOLUMES
VOLUME VI--H. W. BEECHER TO PUNSHON
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
NEW YORK and LONDON
COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
_Printed in the United States of America_
CONTENTS
VOLUME VI
Page
H. W. BEECHER (1813-1887).
Immortality 1
CHAPIN (1814-1880).
Nicodemus: The Seeker after Religion 27
STANLEY (1815-1881).
In Memoriam--Thomas Carlyle 51
VAUGHAN (1816-1897).
God Calling to Man 67
NEWMAN HALL (1816-1902).
Christian Victory 85
ROBERTSON (1816-1853).
The Loneliness of Christ 111
HITCHCOCK (1817-1887).
Eternal Atonement 131
KINGSLEY (1819-1875).
The Shaking of the Heavens and the Earth 147
CAIRD (1820-1898).
Religion in Common Life 167
STORRS (1821-1900).
The Permanent Motive in Missionary Work 195
PUNSHON (1824-1881).
Zeal in the Cause of Christ 219
HENRY WARD BEECHER
IMMORTALITY
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
HENRY WARD BEECHER, preacher, orator, lecturer, writer, editor,
and reformer, was born at Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1813. He
was by nature and training a great pulpit orator. Mr. Beecher
kept himself in perfect physical condition for his work. He has
described a course of vocal exercises which he pursued in the open
air for a period of three years. "The drill I underwent," he says,
"produced, not a rhetorical manner, but a flexible instrument, that
accommodated itself readily to every kind of thought and every shape
of feeling."
He had deep sympathy for all men, and this with his intense dramatic
power often carried him into the wildest and most exalted flights
of oratory. Phillips Brooks styled him the greatest preacher in
America, and he is generally regarded as the most highly gifted of
modern preachers. He was fearless, patriotic, clear-headed, witty,
and self-sacrificing. Dr. Wilkinson calls him "the greatest pulpit
orator the world ever saw." He died in 1887.
H. W. BEECHER
1813-1887
IMMORTALITY[1]
[1] From "Plymouth Pulpit Sermons." By permission of the
Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society.
_If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most
miserable._--1 Cor. xv., 19.
This is not the declaration of a universal principle: it is
biographical and personal. And yet, there is in it a principle
of prime importance. It is true that Paul and his compeers had
sacrificed everything that was dear to man for the sake of Christ.
Paul had given up the place that he held among his countrymen, and
the things which surely awaited him. He had consented to be an
exile. Loving Palestine and the memory of his fathers, as only a Jew
could love, he found himself an outcast, and despised everywhere
by his own people. And the catalog that he gives of the sufferings
which he felt keenly; which perhaps would not have been felt by a
man less susceptible than he, but which were no less keen in his
case--that catalog shows how much he had given up for Christ. And if
it should turn out that after all he had followed a mere fable, a
myth; that Christ was but a man; that, dying, He had come to an end;
that He stayed dead, and that there was no resurrection, no future,
but only that past through which he waded, and that present in which
he was suffering, then, surely, it would be true that of all men he
was most miserable.
This is the biographical view; but it may be said of all men, in
this respect, that no persons can so ill afford to lose faith of
immortality as those who have had all their affections burnished,
deepened and rendered sensitive by the power of Christianity.
When Christianity has had the education of generation after
generation, and has shaped the style of its manhood, and ordained
the institutions by which its affections have been enlarged and
purified; when, in short, generations of men have been legitimately
the children of Christianity, to take away from them the faith of
immortality would be a cruelty which could have no parallel in the
amount of suffering which it would entail.
It is not necessarily true that men without a hope of Christianity
would have no incitement to virtue--certainly not in the ordinary
way in which it is put to us. Abstractly, it is said that virtue
is its own reward--and it is. If there was enough of it to amount
to anything, it would be a great, an exceeding great, reward; but
where it is a spark; a germ; where it is struggling for its own
existence; where it bears but a few ripe fruits, the reward is
hardly worth the culture. If all that we get is what we have in this
life, it is but little.
Many men are favorably organized and favorably situated; they have
an unyearning content; things seem good enough for them; and they do
not understand why it is that persons should desire immortality and
glory--that is, at first. In general, I think there are few persons
that live long in life who do not, sooner or later, come to a point
in which they wake up to the consciousness of a need of this kind.
It is not always true in the case of persons of refined moral and
intellectual culture that they are conscious of needing a belief in
immortality; but a belief in immortality is the unavoidable result
and the indispensable requirement of all true manhood. When you
look at growth, not in each particular case, but largely, as it
develops itself in communities; when you consider it, not only in a
single individual, but in whole communities, as they develop from
childhood to manhood, or from barbarism through semi-civilization to
civilization and refinement, the law of development is always away
from animal life and its sustaining appetites and passions toward
the moral and the intellectual. That is the direction in which
unfolding takes place.
The naturalist watches the insect, and studies all the stages
through which it goes, till it becomes a perfect insect. We look at
a seed, and see how it develops stem and leaf and blossom all the
way through, till we find out what the plant is in its final and
perfect condition. And in studying men to know what is the perfect
condition of manhood, looking at them from the beginning to the end,
which way does manhood lie, in the direction of the bodily appetites
and senses, or in the other direction?
Men come into life perfect animals. There is very little that
culture does in that direction, giving them a little more or a
little less use of themselves, as the case may be. That which we
mean when we speak of developing manhood in a child, is something
more than the development of symmetry of form and power of physical
organization. When we speak of the civilization and refinement
of the race at large, development does not mean bodily power or
bodily skill: it means reason; moral sense; imagination; profounder
affection; subtler, purer, sweeter domestic relations. Manhood
grows away from bodily conditions, without ever leaving them. The
body becomes a socket, and the soul is a lamp in it. And if you
look narrowly at what we mean by growth in mankind, whether it be
applied to the individual or to the race, you will find that we mean
an unfolding which takes a man away from the material toward that
which is subtler, more spiritual, existing outside of the ordinary
senses, tho acting from them, as something better than bone and
muscle, nerve and tissue.
All development, then, is from the animal toward the spiritual and
the invisible. This is the public sentiment of mankind even in the
lower forms of society. What are considered heroic traits, the
things which bring admiration to men, if narrowly examined will
be found to be not the things which belong to men as brutes--tho
these things may be employed by them as instruments. Even in the
cases of such men as Samson and Hercules, who were rude, brute
men, it was not their strength that drew admiration to them: it
was their heroism; it was their patriotism; it was that which they
did by their strength for their kind, and not for themselves. And
in lower societies it is courage, it is self-devotion, it is the
want of fear, it is the higher form of animal life, that attracts
admiration. But as we develop out of barbarous into civilized
conditions, we admire men, not because they can lift so much,
or throw such heavy weights, or endure such hardships of body.
Admiration on these accounts has its place; but higher than these is
the power of thought, the power of planning, the power of executing,
the power of living at one point so as to comprehend in the effects
produced all circuits of time in the future. Thought-power;
emotion; moral sense; justice; equity in all its forms; higher
manhood, and its branches, which stretch up into the atmosphere
and reach nearest to the sun--these are something other than those
qualities which develop earliest, and are lowest--nearest to the
ground.
True manhood, then, has its ripeness in the higher faculties.
Without disdaining the companionship of the body the manhood of man
grows away from it--in another direction. There is not simply the
ripening of the physical that is in man; but there is, by means of
the physical, the ripening of the intellectual, the emotional, the
moral, the esthetic life, as well as the whole spiritual nature.
When reason and moral sense are developed, there will inevitably
spring up within a man an element the value of which consists in
perpetuating things--in their continuance. It is spontaneous and
universal for one to seek to perpetuate, to extend life. I do not
mean by this that one wants to live a great while; but men are
perpetually under the unconscious influence of this in their nature:
the attempt to give form and permanence to that which is best in
their manhood. We build, to be sure, primarily, to cover ourselves
from the elements; but we very soon cease to build for that only:
we not merely build for protection from cold and from wet, but we
build for gratification. We build to gratify the sense of beauty,
the sense of convenience, and the sense of love. And we go on beyond
that: we build in order that we may send down to those who are to
come after us a memorial of our embodied, incarnated thoughts. In
other words, when men build, they seek, by incarnation, to render
things permanent which have existed only as thoughts or transient
emotions. There is a tendency to incarnate the fugitive elements in
men, and give them permanence. And the element of continuing is one
of the elements which belong to the higher manhood.
This throws light upon the material growths of society. Men strive
to perpetuate thoughts and feelings which are evanescent unless they
are born into matter. Men build things for duration. There is this
unconscious following out of things to make them last; to give them
long periods. And it opens up to men the sense of their augmented
being. Largeness of being is indissolubly connected with extended
time of being.
We admire the pyramids, not because they have been associated with
so many histories, but because they have stood so many ages. We
admire old trees, not because so many tribes have sat under them,
nor because so many events have taken place beneath them, but simply
because they have age with them. For there are mute, inexplicable
feelings connected with the mere extension of time which belong to
the higher development of manhood in us. Frangible things are of
less value than things that are infrangible. Things that last are of
more value, on the same plane, than their congeners are that do not
last.
Who can equal the pictures which are painted on the panes of glass
in our winter rooms? Where can you find a Lambineau, or any painter
who can give a mountain scenery such as we have for nothing, every
morning, when we wake up, and such as the sun outside, or the stove
inside, destroys before ten o'clock? These pictures are not valued
as are those which are painted on canvas, and which are not half
so good; but the element of enduring is with the latter, while the
element of evanescence is with the former. Tho the pictures on the
pane are finer than those on the canvas, they lack the element of
time, on which value so largely depends. The soul craves, hungers
for, this quality of continuance as an element for measuring the
value of things. This element of time is somewhat felt in the
earlier conditions of humanity; but it grows with the development of
men, and attaches itself to every part of human life.
I never saw a diamond that was so beautiful as are the dew-drops
which I see on my lawn in summer. What is the difference between a
dew-drop and a diamond? One goes in a moment; it flashes and dies;
but the other endures; and its value consists in its endurance.
There are hundreds of things which are as beautiful as a diamond in
their moment; but the endurance of the diamond is measured by ages,
and not by moments, and so carries on the value.
I do not draw these reasonings very close as yet--I do not desire to
put too much emphasis upon them; but I think you will see that there
is a drift in them, and that they will bear, at last, an important
relation to this question of immortality. The element of manhood
carries with it a very powerful sense of the value of existence.
The desire to live is a blind instinct. A happy experience brings
to this instinct many auxiliaries--the expectation of pleasure; the
wish to complete unfinished things; the clinging affection to those
that have excited love; and habits of enterprise.
Besides all these, is a development of the sense of value in simply
being. We have said that in external matters the continuity of being
is an element of value in the judgment which mankind at large have
put upon things. We say that the same is true in respect to the
inward existence--to manhood itself. The savage cares very little
for life. He lives for to-day; and in every to-day he lives for
the hour. Time is of the least importance to him. The barbarian
differs from the savage in this: that he lives to-day for to-morrow,
perhaps, but not for next year. The semi-civilized man lives for
next year; but only for the year, or for years. The civilized man
begins to live in the present for the future. And the Christian
civilized man begins to live with a sense of the forever.
The extension of the sense of time goes on with the development of
manhood in men. The sweet, the tender, the loving, the thoughtful,
the intellectual, live not simply with a sense of life as a
pleasure-bringer: there grows up in them, with their development
toward manhood, an intrinsic sense of the value of being itself.
The soul knows the cargo that it carries. It knows that that cargo
is destined to immortality. As men are conscious of seeing more,
of thinking more, and of feeling more; as thought becomes more
precious; as emotion becomes deeper and more valuable; so men more
and more feel that they cannot afford to have such things go to
waste.
A man who takes in his hands a lump of mud and molds it to some
pleasing form, cares but little when, dropping it, he sees it
flatten on the ground. The man that grinds a crystal, and sees it
broken, thinks of it for a moment, perhaps, with regret, but soon
forgets it. No one, however, can see an organized thing, having its
uses, and indicating exquisite skill and long experience, dashed
to pieces without pain. But what is anything that is organized in
life worth in comparison with the soul of a man? And if that soul
be pure, and sweet, and deep, and noble, and active, and fruitful,
who can, without a pang, look at it, and think that it must in an
instant go to nothing, dissolving again as an icicle from a roof in
the spring?
The feeling is not the fruit of mere reflection. It is instinctive.
It is universal. Men do not cultivate it on purpose. They cannot
help having it. No man of moral culture can regard human life as
without immortality except with profound melancholy. No man that is
susceptible to reflectiveness can bear to think of man's existence
here without the bright background of another life.
The sense of the continuity of existence is grounded in men, and
grows with their refinement and development and strength, and gives
color to their life, and change to their opinions, it may be.
To men who have developed moral sense and intellectual culture,
every element of value in life is made precious by some conscious or
some unconscious element of time and continuance. It is the nature
of our better faculties, in their better states, to place a man in
such relations to everything that is most precious to him, that
it gives him pleasure in the proportion in which it seems to be
continuous and permanent, and gives him pain in the proportion in
which it seems to be evanescent and perishing.
We are building a crystal character with much pain and self-denial;
and it is to be built as bubbles are blown? What is finer in
line than the bubble? What is more airy? Where are pictures more
exquisite, where are colors more tender and rich and beautiful--and
where is there anything that is born so near to its end as a
bubble? Is the character which we are building with so much pain
and suffering and patience, with so much burden of conscience, and
with so much aspiration; is the character which we are forming in
the invisible realm of the soul--is that but a bubble? Is that only
a thin film which reflects the transient experiences of a life of
joy or sadness, and goes out? Then, what is life worth? If I had no
function but that of a pismire; if I were a beetle that rolled in
the dirt, and yet were clothed with a power of reflection, and knew
what the depths of feeling were, what intense emotions were, and
what struggling and yearning were; if, being a mere insect, I had
all the works in the intellect of man, and all the aspiration that
goes with spiritual elements; if I were but a leaf-cutter, a bug in
the soil, or about the same thing on a little larger pattern, and
were to be blotted out at death, what would be the use of my trying
to grow? If by refining and whetting our faculties they become more
susceptible to pleasure, they become equally susceptible to pain.
And in this great, grinding, groaning world, pain is altogether out
of proportion to pleasure, in an exquisite temperament. The finer
men are the better they are, if they are forever; but the finer men
are the worse they are if they are only for a day; for they have a
disproportion of sensibility to suffering over and above present
remuneration and conscious enjoyment.
Men feel an intrinsic sense of personality and personal worth. They
have self-esteem, which is the only central, spinal, manly faculty
which gives them a sense of personal identity and personal value,
and which is an auxiliary counselor of conscience itself. This sense
of "I" demands something more than a short round of physical life,
to be followed by extinction. I am too valuable to perish so; and
every step in life has been training me in the direction of greater
value. As men grow broader, and stronger, and finer, and deeper, and
sweeter, they become more and more conscious of the intrinsic value
of their being, and demand for themselves a harbor in order that
they may not be wrecked or foundered.
Nor do I think that there can be found, to any considerable extent,
or developed, friendships which shall not, with all their strength
and with all their depth, resist the conception of dissolution or
of fading. For friendships are not casual likings. Friendships are
not merely the interchange of good nature, and the ordinary friendly
offices of good neighborhood. These things are friendly, but they
do not comprise friendship. Two trees may grow contiguous, and throw
their shade one over upon the other; but they never touch nor help
each other; and their roots quarrel for the food that is in the
ground. But two vines, growing over a porch, meet each other, and
twine together, and twist fiber into fiber and stem into stem, and
take shape from each other, and are substantially one. And such are
friendships. Now, one cannot have his life divided as two trees
are. He cannot enter into partnership with others, and be conscious
that that partnership shall be but for an hour or for a moment. The
sanctity, the honor, the exaltation, the exhilaration of a true and
manly friendship lies in the thought of its continuance. There can
be no deep friendship which does not sign for endlessness.
Still more is this true of love: not that rudimentary form
which seeks lower fruitions, and which is often but little more
than passion done up in friendship; but that higher love which
manifests itself chiefly in the spiritual realm; that love which
is not forever asking, but forever giving; that love which is not
centripetal, but centrifugal; that love which, like a mother's,
gives for the pleasure of giving; that love which reveres; that love
which looks up; that love which seeks to exalt its object by doing
what is pleasant and noble; that love which demands continuance,
elevation, yea, grandeur, it may be, in the thing beloved. How
little will such a love tolerate the idea of evanescence, the
dread of discontinuing! Can such a love do other than yearn for
immortality?
So then, if you take the thought, it is this: that if men develop,
they come under the dominion of higher faculties; and that it is
then their nature to stamp on all their occupations, on their
self-consciousness, on the whole development of their affections,
the need of continuance, of immortality. There are, therefore, in
the growth of the mind itself, as a department of nature, these
elements of conviction. The mind cannot do other than develop in
itself a faith in immortality.
It may be said, and it sometimes is said, that the origin of the
belief of existence out of the body, of spiritual existence, may
be traced directly back to the dreams of the barbarous ages, to
a period when men were so low that they did not recognize the
difference between a dream and a waking reality--to a time when
persons dreamed that their friends came back to them, and waked up
and believed that they had been back. Thus, it is said, began the
thought of continuity of life after death. For my part, I do not
care how it began. The question is not how it started; the question
is, What becomes of it now that it has begun? No matter how it was
born, what purpose is it to serve? What is it adapted to do? How
is it calculated to influence our manhood? In what way shall it be
employed to lead man God-ward? How shall it be used to work most
effectually in the direction of civilization and refinement? It so
fits every human soul, that men will not let it go. They cling to it
with their inward and best nature.
All experiences of human life fall in with this tendency of the
mind. When men look out upon the incoherent and unmannerly course
of things in time, I can understand how, believing in the future,
they may live with patience; but in every age of the world where
the clear light of immortality has not shone, men have mostly been
discouraged, have been generally indifferent to public superiority,
and have taken no interest in things done for the sake of humanity.
Such is the worthlessness of time, to the thought of those that
have no faith in the future, that they have cared for little except
present physical enjoyment. And on the whole, when such men crowd
together, and tribes take the place of individuals, or kingdoms
take the place of tribes, with all their complications in the
working out of their clashing results, they look upon human life,
and feel that the world is not worth living for. Things are so
uncertain, products are in such disproportion to their causes, or
to the expectations of men, that if there is to be nothing but this
life, then, "Eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die," is
not only the philosophy of the epicurean, but the temptation of the
most wise and frugal and self-restraining. The nature of life to a
man who is highly educated requires that he should believe in the
continuity and existence of the myriads that he sees in such a state
of quarreling infelicity and wretchedness in this mortal condition.
The utter futility of the best part of man's life here, the total
bankruptcy of his best endeavors, the worthlessness of his career
from the material standpoint, makes it imperative on him to believe
that he shall have another chance in another sphere of being.
Is it enough to have been born, to have lived till one is of age,
and then to be launched out to founder in mid-ocean? Is it enough
that one should devote the best part of his life to the building
of a character, only to see the fabric which he has constructed
tumbling about his ears? Is this enough in the day of distress
and bankruptcy? Is it enough, in the time when a man's ambitions
are crossed, and the sky is dark, and he can do nothing but stand
amid the ruins of his hopes and expectations? Is not the thought
revolting to every instinct of manhood?
But if there is another life; if all our labor has this value in
it, that while a man is building up his outward estate, if it is
certain that the man himself will live, no matter what becomes of
his property and his reputation, then all his endeavors have endless
scope, and his life becomes redeemable and radiant.
Nowhere else so much as in the realm of grief, I think, is the
question of immortality interpreted. It is true that the first shock
of overwhelming grief sometimes drives faith out of the mind; that
it sometimes staggers the reason; that it sometimes dispossesses
the moral sense of its accustomed health, and leaves the mind in
weakness. As in a fever, the natural eye can see nothing aright,
and things then seem to dance in the air, and take on grotesque
forms, so persons who are bewildered with first sorrow oftentimes
see things amiss. And there is no skepticism which is so deep and
pulseless as that which often takes possession of people in the
first great overmastering surprize and shock of grief. But after
one had recovered a little, and the nerve has come to its wonted
sensibility, the faith of immortality returns. There is that in
every soul which knows what is the strength of life and noble deeds
and aspirations; and therefore there is that in every soul which
calls out for immortality.
I cannot believe, I will not believe, when I walk upon the clod,
that it is my mother that I tread under foot. She that bore me, she
that every year more than gave birth to me out of her own soul's
aspiration--I will not believe that she is dust. Everything within
me revolts at the idea.
Do two persons walk together in an inseparable union, mingling their
brightest and noblest thoughts, striving for the highest ideal, like
flowers that grow by the side of each other, breathing fragrance
each on the other, and shining in beauty each for the other; are
two persons thus twined together and bound together for life, until
in some dark hour one is called and the other is left; and does
the bleeding heart go down to the grave and say, "I return dust to
dust?" Was that dust, then? That trustworthiness; that fidelity;
that frankness of truth; that transparent honesty; that heroism
of love; that disinterestedness; that fitness and exquisiteness
of taste; that fervor of love; that aspiration; that power of
conviction; that piety; that great hope in God--were all these
elements in the soul of the companion that had disappeared but just
so many phenomena of matter? And have they already collapsed and
gone, like last year's flowers struck with frost, back again to the
mold? In the grief of such an hour one will not let go the hope of
resurrection.
Can a parent go back from the grave where he has laid his children
and say, "I shall never see them more?" Even as far back as the dim
twilight in which David lived, he said, "Thou shalt not come to me,
but I shall go to thee"; and is it possible for the parental heart
to stand in our day by the side of the grave, where the children
have been put out of sight, and say, "They neither shall come to me,
nor shall I go to them; they are blossoms that have fallen; they
never shall bring forth fruit"? It is unnatural. It is hideous.
Everything that is in man, every instinct that is best in human
nature repels it.
Is not the human soul, then, itself a witness of the truth of
immortality?
Men say, "You cannot prove it. There is no argument that can
establish it. No man has seen it, and it cannot be substantiated. It
is not a ponderable thing." Men demand that we should prove things
by straight lines; by the alembic; by scales; by analysis; but I
say that there is much in nature which is so high that scales and
rules and alembics cannot touch it. And is not man's soul a part of
nature--the highest part?
I hold that even the materialist may believe in immortality.
For, altho there is a gross kind of materialism, there may be a
materialism which is consistent with a belief in immortality.
Because, on the supposition that the mind is matter, it must be
admitted that it is incomparably superior to any other matter that
we are familiar with. Is there any matter outside of mind that
produces thought and feeling such as we see evolved among men? If
it be the theory that mind is matter, and if the matter of which
the mind is composed be so far above all other kinds of matter in
its fruit and product, is it not on so high a plane as presumably
not to be subject to the lower and coarser forms of examination and
test? I know no reason why cerebral matter may not be eternal. I do
not belong to those who take that material view of the mind; but I
do not know that immortality is inconsistent even with materialism;
and how much more easily may it be reconciled to the view of those
who believe in the ineffable character, the imponderable, spiritual
condition, of the soul!
In addition to these arguments, when we come to the Word of God, we
hear the voices of those who sang and chanted in the past. We hear
the disciple crying out, "Christ is risen!" and we hear the apostle
preaching this new truth to mankind. So that now the heavens have
been broken open. The secrets of the other life have been revealed.
And is there not a presumption, following the line of a man's
best manhood, that immortality is true? Does one need to go into
a rigorous logical examination of this subject? Should one stand
jealously at the side of the sepulcher of Christ, and examine this
matter as a policeman examines the certificate of a suspected man,
or as one takes money from the hand of a cheating usurer and goes
out to see if it is gold? Shall one stand at the door from which
issue all the hopes that belong to the best part of man; shall one
look upon that which is demanded by the very nature of his better
manhood, and question it coldly, and tread it under foot?
What do we gain by obliterating this fair vision? Why should not
heaven continue to shine on? Why should we not look into it, and
believe that it is, and that it waits for us? Have we not the
foretokens of it? Is not the analogy of the faculties one that leads
us to believe that there is some such thing? Does not the nature of
every man that is high and noble revolt at flesh and matter? Are
they not rising toward the ineffable? Are not all the intuitions and
affections of men such that, the better they are, the more they have
of things that are manly, the more indispensable it is that they
should have endurance, etherealization, perpetuation?
The heart and flesh cry out for God. They cry out for immortality.
Not only does the Spirit from the heavenly land say to every
toiling, yearning, anxious soul, "Come up hither," but every soul
that is striving upward has in it, if not a vocalized aspiration,
yet a mute yearning--a voice of the soul--that cries out for heaven,
"As the hart panteth after the waterbrooks, so panteth my soul
after thee, O God!"
On such a day as this, then, in a community of moral feeling, how
blest is the truth which comes to us, that we are not as the beasts
that die; that we are as the gods that live! That for which we were
made is immortality; and our journey is rough, straight, sharp,
burdensome, with many tears. Our journey is not to the grave. I
am not growing into old age to be blind, and to be deaf, and to
be rheumatic, and to shrink a miserable cripple into the corner,
shaking and tottering and forgetting all that I ever knew. The best
part of me is untouched. The soul; the reason; the moral sense; the
power to think; the power to will; the power to love; the power
to admire purity, and to reach out after it--that is not touched
by time, tho its instrument and means of outer demonstration be
corroded and failing. No physical weakness touches the soul. Only
the body is touched by sickness. And shake that down! Shake it down!
Let it go! For, as the chrysalis bursts open, and the covering
which confines the perfected insect is dropt, that he may come out
into brightness of form and largeness of life, so this body is but
a chrysalis; and when we break through it, we rise on wings by the
attraction of God, and by the propulsion of our own inevitable
desire and need, and are forever with the Lord.
CHAPIN
NICODEMUS: THE SEEKER AFTER RELIGION
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
EDWIN HUBBELL CHAPIN, Universalist divine, was born in Union
Village, Washington County, N. Y., in 1814. He began his very
successful ministry 1837 in Richmond, Va., subsequently he preached
in Charlestown, Mass., from which place he was called to the
pastorate of the Fourth Universalist Church in New York City. His
preaching attracted large congregations, and he was generally
regarded as one of the greatest preachers of this country. He spoke
from a manuscript, using no gesture, but his magnetic personality
never failed to drive his message home. He published numerous
volumes of sermons and lectures. He died in 1880.
CHAPIN
1814-1880
NICODEMUS: THE SEEKER AFTER RELIGION
_There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of
the Jews: The same came to Jesus by night._--John iii., 1, 2.
Altho we have but few glimpses of Nicodemus in the gospels, he is
a personage of peculiar interest. A Pharisee, and a member of the
great Jewish senate, or Sanhedrin, he shows us that the influence of
Christ was not limited to the poor and the obscure; but that, while
His words and works awoke enmity and fear among the higher classes,
they struck, in the breasts of some of these, a holier chord.
It may not be certain that Nicodemus ever openly confest Christ;
yet, in this chapter, he appears in the attitude of a disciple, and
we find him defending Jesus before the Sanhedrin, and assisting at
His burial. Still, unless the last-mentioned act be considered as
such, we do not discover, in his conduct, that public and decisive
acknowledgment which the Savior required; we do not behold the frank
avowal of Peter, or the intrepidity of Paul. There is an air of
caution and of timidity about him. He carefully feels the ground of
innovation, before he lets go the establishment; and, indeed, he
appears to have taken no step by which he forfeited his caste or
his office. It is difficult, too, to discover the precise purpose
of this visit to Jesus. Perhaps he sought the interview from mixed
motives. A religious earnestness, kindled by the teachings and the
character of Christ, may have blended with speculative curiosity,
and even with the throbbings of political ambition. His coming by
night, too, may have indicated timidity, or he may have chosen that
season as the best time for quiet and uninterrupted discourse. But,
whatever may have been his motives, the position in which we find
him shows, I repeat, that the power of Christ's ministry was felt,
not only by the excitable multitude, but by the more thoughtful and
devout of the Jewish people.
Nicodemus, however, presents a peculiar interest, not only because
he exhibits the influence of Jesus upon the higher orders of his
nation, but because he appears as a seeker after religion, and as
one personally interested in its vital truths. His interview with
the Savior gives occasion for one of the most important passages in
the New Testament. The conversation of Christ, in this instance, is
not uttered in general principles and accommodated to the multitude,
but it is directed to an intelligent and inquiring spirit, in the
calm privacy of the night-time laying bare its very depths, and
craving the application of religion to its own peculiar wants. To
be sure, Nicodemus did not profess this want, but commenced the
conversation with the language of respect, and with suggestion
of more general inquiry. But He who "knew what was in man," had
already penetrated the folds of the ruler's breast, and saw the
real need that had sent him; so, putting by all compliments, and
all secondary issues, He struck at once the conscious chord that
throbbed there, and exclaimed: "Verily, verily, I say unto thee,
except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God!"
These words must have filled Nicodemus with surprize, both from
their sudden heart-searchingness, and as addressing to him a term
which was usually applied to men of very different condition. For
the phrase, "new birth," was a customary one to express the change
through which the Gentile passed in becoming a Jew. But it was
indeed a strange doctrine that he, a son of Abraham, a Pharisee, a
ruler, must be born again, before he could be fit for the Messiah's
kingdom. Therefore, really or affectedly, he misunderstood the
Savior's words, and gave to a phrase, plain enough when applied to
a heathen, the most gross and literal interpretation. But Christ
reiterated the solemn truth assuring him that an inward change,
and an outward profession, a regeneration of the affections and
the will, and a renunciation of pride and fear, by the symbol of
baptism--a new birth of water and of the Spirit--was essential to
true discipleship. And thus, stripping away all the reliances of
formal righteousness, and all the supports of birth and position, in
reply to the earnest question of Nicodemus: "How can these things
be?" the great Teacher proceeded to utter some of the sublimest
doctrines of the gospel.
As I have already said, whether Nicodemus became an avowed follower
of Jesus, or not, is uncertain; but we know that the truths which
he then heard are of everlasting importance, have a personal
application to every man, and appeal to wants in our own souls,
which are as real and as deep as those of the ruler of old.
But while thus Nicodemus exhibits a need of our common humanity,
he especially represents a class who may be called "seekers after
religion," either as being unsettled and inquiring in their spirits,
or as resting upon something which is not religion, but only,
perhaps, a tendency toward it--they are seekers after it, as not
having actually found it. In other words, for this class, religion
has its meaning and its pressure; they think about it, and they
feel its claims, yet they do not thoroughly and mentally know it;
or, like Nicodemus, they rest upon some substitute. Some of these
positions I propose now to illustrate.
I observe, then, in the first place, that some seek religion in
rituals and sacraments. The tendency of the human mind, as to
matters of faith and devotion, has always been to complicate
rather than to simplify, and to associate these with set forms and
symbols. In all ages, men have shrunk from naked communion with God,
from the solitude of an intense spirituality, and have conducted
transactions with the Invisible, through the mediation of ceremony.
But that which, at first, was an expression of the individual soul,
has grown into a fixed and consecrated rite. Gestures and modes of
worship, suggested by the occasion, have been repeated in usage, and
grown venerable with age, until they have become identified with
religion itself. They have been exalted into mystic vehicles of
grace, have been considered as possessing virtue in themselves, and
as constituting an awful paraphernalia, through which, alone, God
will deign to communicate with man, and through which man may even
propitiate and move God. Christianity has not escaped this tendency;
and, even now, there are many with whom the sacraments are something
more than expressive signs and holy suggestions, and with whom the
position of an altar, the shape of a vestment, and the form of a
church are among the essentials of religion. With such, baptism
speaks, not merely to the eye of an inward washing, but it is of
itself a regenerative process. In their view, the communion bread
is not simply a representation of the broken body of the Redeemer;
but is itself so sacred, so identical with that body, that they must
receive it by a special posture, and upon a particular part of the
hand. As a matter of course, to such, religion must appear eminently
conservative and retrospective; the genius of the established and
the past, rather than of the reformatory and the future. Cherishing
the minutest fibers of these ancient rites, they chiefly venerate
the men who authenticate them, and the soil out of which they grow.
With them, the fluent spirit of religion became organized, and fixt
into a form, with fast-days and feast-days, with miter and cassock,
and a lineal priesthood, ages ago.
It cannot be said that this method is entirely unfounded. It has its
justification in human nature, if not elsewhere. There are those
who can find peace only in the arms of an hereditary faith: who can
feel the inspiration of worship only among forms that have kindled
worship in others for a thousand years: with whose earliest thoughts
and dearest memories is entwined a ritual and an established
church, so that personal affection and household sanctity, as well
as religious feeling, demand that every great act of life--of joy
or sorrow--should be consecrated, by the familiar sacrament. For
that church, too, their fathers have died in darker times, and
beneath its chancels, sainted mothers molder into dust. All, too,
that can exalt the ideal, or wake the pulses of eloquent emotion,
is connected with such a church. To them it opens a traditional
perspective, the grandest in all history. Behind its altars, sweep
the vestments of centuries of priests, and rises the incense of
centuries of prayer. In its stony niches, stand rows of saints, who
have made human life sublime, and who, through all the passing ages,
look down upon the turmoil of that life with the calm beatitude of
heaven; while its flushed windows still keep the blood-stain of its
own martyrs, plashed against it ere yet it had become an anchored
fact, and while it tossed upon the stormy waves of persecution. I
can understand, then, how an imaginative and reverential mind can
find the truest religious life only in connection with ritual and
sacrament.
I can understand, moreover, the reaction in this direction, which is
taking place at the present day.
It is the retreat of the religious sentiments from the despotism of
an imperious reason. It is the counter-protest of loyal affections
against what is deemed an anarchical tendency. It is the clinging
of men's sympathies to the concrete, alarmed by the irreverent and
analytic methods of science. It is the retirement of faith and
devotion to those cloistered sanctities that shut out the noise of
the populace, and the diversions of the street. It is the reluctance
of taste and imagination at our new and varnished Protestantism,
with its bare walls, its cold services, and its angular churches, of
which one wing, perchance, rests upon a market, and the other upon a
dram-shop. Especially would I not deny the profound spiritual life,
the self-sacrifice, and the beautiful charities which have consisted
at all times, and which consist in the present time, with this
ritual and sacramental form of religion.
But when men claim that this alone is the genuine form--that
these are essentials of the only true Church--then I deny that
claim. If it fills some wants of our nature, it repudiates others
equally authentic. If one class of minds find peace only under
its consecrated shadows, others find no satisfaction but in the
discipline of a spontaneous devotion, and the exercise of an
individual reason. If it suffices for men like Borromeo or Newman,
it does not suffice for men like George Fox or Channing; and the
religion of these is as evident, in their simple spirituality, as
those in their mystic symbolism. When it sneers at the Puritan, then
I must vindicate that rugged independence of soul, that faithfulness
of the individual conscience, that sense of the divine sovereignty,
which could kneel at no man's altar, and to God alone; which
sacrificed all things for the right, but yielded not a hair to the
wrong; which could find no medicine for the spirit in sacraments,
but only in the solitude of the inner life; and which has, under
God, wrought out this noble consummation of modern times, whereby
others may plant their vine of ritual under the broad heaven of
toleration, and have liberty to sneer. When the ritualist deprecates
the ultraism and irreverence of the anti-formalist, I must urge
the tendency of his own principles to mummery and absolutism. And,
finally, when he falls back upon tradition, I must fall back upon
the Bible. The spirit of the New Testament is not that of rituals
or sacraments; and the universal sentiments of the Old are not. The
prophet Isaiah, who exclaims: "Bring no more vain oblations; incense
is an abomination unto me; your new moons, and your appointed
feasts, my soul hateth.... Wash you, make you clean ... cease to
do evil, learn to do well!" joins with the apostle, who says that
Christ "blotted out the handwriting of ordinances ... nailing it to
his cross," and that no man should judge us in meat or drink, or
times, or seasons. And surely, there is no argument for forms or
places in those Divine Words, which declare that "God is a Spirit,
and they who worship him, must worship him in spirit and in truth."
We cannot deny, then, that pure religion may consist with rituals
and sacraments; we cannot deny that it may exist without these.
But I insist upon this point: that the sacrament, the ritual, is
not, itself, religion. It may be a beautiful sign--it may be a
quick suggestion--it may be a medium of spiritual influence; but,
alone, it cannot take the place of inward, personal piety, of right
affections and an obedient will. No punctilious form can stand
substitute for a vigilant conscience; no posture of devotion can
supply the place of living deeds; no ascetic mortification can
atone for guilt; no auricular confession can speak, instead of
the breathings of repentance, in the ear of God, and out from the
depths of the solitary soul. He who relies upon these forms, and
finds sanctity only in them, may be sincere, may be serious about
religion, but as yet he is only a seeker; and, speaking to his heart
with all-penetrating meaning, comes to him the decree: "Ye must be
born again."
Again; there is a class who seek religion in philosophy. They
believe in God by a course of reasoning. They believe in
immortality, because it is a conclusion riveted in their minds by
the iron links of induction. They pray, or not, according as it
seems logical to do so. They would be good, because goodness is
useful.