life, of the world at large! And there seems no power arising
within the circle not reached by Christian influence to relieve
the gloom, to elevate those who are opprest by these sore burdens.
There _is_ no power. Property asserts its right to oppress, and
to enjoy; poverty accepts its function, however unwillingly, of
suffering in silence; the degradation of woman strikes a vicious
stab at the heart and conscience of immense communities, while the
oppression of childhood blights life at its germ; and, with the
prospect of nothing better to come, suicide becomes a common refuge
from the unbearable misery. There is nothing overstated in this
description of the world at large; and you know how it is in your
city slums, even in this city of refinement and culture, I have no
doubt; certainly in the city in which I live; in the London and
Birmingham of the other side, where the little girl twelve years old
had never heard the name of Christ, where the boy of about the same
age only knew the nature of an oath by having been his lordship's
caddy. These are what we are to reach and lift, if we can do it.
These are they to whom we are to bring blessings from the Most
High. Certainly, every heart in which there is a spark of Christian
sympathy must feel the power of this motive, pressing to the utmost
and instant exertion of every force to relieve the suffering, to
enlighten the darkened, and to lift the opprest.
No one need exaggerate, everyone should recognize, the weakness and
wretchedness, the exposure and the peril of human society. When we
remember that in this universe of ours destiny clings closely to
character, has never anything mechanical or arbitrary about it,
but follows the spirit which encounters it, then those tremendous
words of our Lord in the twenty-fifth of Matthew have upon them an
appalling sharpness and reach, as addrest to the great classes and
companies of mankind; and we must recognize it, and hear the solemn
bell of the universe ringing through His word, and telling us of
what is to be looked for in the hereafter.
But then with this recognition of the exposure and peril of human
society, of mankind at large, we must associate the recognition of
the recoverableness to truth, to virtue and God, of persons and of
peoples who are now involved in these calamities and pains; to whom,
now, unrest and apprehension are as natural as speech or sight; the
recoverableness of men as persons, and of communities as well as
persons.
Here, of course, we come into direct antagonism with the pessimist,
who says, "It is all nonsense! You can't possibly do the work; you
can't take these ragged and soiled remnants of humanity in your city
streets and weave them into purple and golden garments for the
Master; you can not accomplish the effect which you contemplate, in
the cities, in your own land, along the frontier, or in other lands.
It is as impossible to make the unchaste pure, to make the mean
noble, as it is to make crystal lenses out of mud, or the delicate
elastic watch-spring out of the iron slag!" That is the world's
view, a common and a hateful view. Our answer to it is that the
thing can be done, and has been done, and done in such multitudes
of instances that there is no use whatever in arguing against the
fact. Christ came from the heavens to the earth on an errand. He
knew what was in man; and He did not come from the celestial seats
on an errand known beforehand to be fruitless and futile. He came
because He knew the interior, central, divine element in human
nature, to which He could appeal and by which He could lift men
toward things transcendent. We have seen the examples of success,
how many times! Hundreds, yea even thousands of times, in our own
communities, as missionaries have seen them in the lands abroad:
where the woman intemperate, in harlotry, in despair, has been
lifted to restored womanhood, as the pearl oyster is brought up with
its precious contents from the slimy ooze; where the man whose lips
had been charged with foulest blasphemies has become the preacher
of the gospel of light and love, of hope and peace, to others, his
former comrades; where the feet that were swift to do evil have
become beautiful on the mountains in publishing salvation. We have
seen these things in individuals and in communities; in the roughest
frontier mining-camp, where every door opened on a saloon or a
brothel, or a gambling-table, and where, by the power coming from on
high, it has been transformed into the peaceful Christian village,
with the home, with the school, with the church, with the asylum,
with the holy song, where the former customary music had been the
crack of revolvers. We have seen the same thing on a larger scale
in the coral islands, scenes of savage massacre and of cannibal
riot and ferocity, where the Church has been planted, and Christian
fellowships have been established and maintained. We have seen these
things, and why argue against facts?
Arguing against fact, as men ultimately find out, is like trying
to stop with articulate breath the march of the stately battleship
as she sweeps onward to her anchorage. An argument may meet a
contrary argument; no argument can overwhelm a fact. And these
facts in experience are as sure, as difficult of belief perhaps,
but as compulsive of belief, as are the scientific demonstrations
of the liquid air, of the wireless telegraphy. We do not question
the reality of what we see; and we know that these effects have
been produced, on the smaller scale and on the larger. I suppose
that everyone who has ever stood on the heights above Naples, at
the Church of San Martino, on the way to St. Elmo, has noticed,
as I remember to have noticed, that all the sounds coming up from
that gay, populous, brilliant, fascinating city, as they reached
the upper air, met and mingled on the minor key. There were the
voices of traffic and the voices of command, the voices of affection
and the voices of rebuke, the shouts of sailors, and the cries of
itinerant venders in the street, with the chatter and the laugh of
childhood; but they all came up into this incessant moan in the
air. That is the voice of the world in the upper air, where there
are spirits to hear it. That is the cry of the world for help. And
here is the answer to that cry: a song of triumph and glorious
expectation, taking the place of the moan, in the village, in the
city, in the great community; men and women out of whom multitudes
of devils have been cast, as out of him of old, sitting clothed, and
in their right minds, at the feet of Jesus.
You can not tell me that it is impossible to produce these effects,
for mine own eyes have seen them, mine own hands have touched
them. I know their reality, and that every human soul which has
not committed the final sin and passed the judgment is recoverable
to God, if the right remedy be definitely applied; and that every
people, however weak, however sinful, however wanting in hope
and expectation, has within it the possibility, and above it the
promise, of the millennium. God's power is adequate to all that. We
want to associate this idea of the recoverableness of persons and of
peoples to the highest ideal and to God Himself; we want to combine
this with the idea of man's present misery and hopelessness in his
condition, to constitute the true and powerful missionary motive;
and then we want to recognize the fact that the gospel of Christ is
the one force which, being used, secures this result in the most
unpromising conditions.
Here, again, we encounter the opposition of multitudes. How often
men have laughed, how loudly they have laughed, at the idea that
the story of the crucified Nazarene could inspire a despondent soul
to hope, could purify the vicious soul into virtue, could bring
any soul nearer to God! Perhaps somewhere they are laughing at it
now; possibly even in this city of Boston, the home of culture and
refinement, of fine and wide thought--I don't know, I don't live
here; but I know that in the country at large there are always those
who are disposed to say, "It is perfectly puerile to try to reach
human sorrow and human sin with the power of the gospel, lodged in
the little book which the child may carry in her hand!" As if the
inconspicuous forces in the world's development were not always
those deadliest on the one hand, or most benign on the other; as if
wafts of air did not kill multitudes more than all the batteries of
artillery; as if the unseen forces, hardly manifesting themselves
at all, were not those which society seizes by which to advance
itself most rapidly and grandly--that little spark, vanishing
instantaneously, but revealing the unseen force which drives
machineries, draws carriages, illuminates cities, and enables you
and me to talk as if face to face with friends and correspondents
at the distance of a thousand miles; that fleecy vapor, vanishing
silently into the air but representing the gigantic servant of
modern civilization, which tunnels mountains, scoops out mines, and
links the continents together with iron bands. These unseen powers
are the ones that man craves and uses, or that, on the other hand,
he dreads and repels; and the power of the gospel, however men may
smile at the idea of that power, has vindicated itself too many
times to be assailed by argument, certainly too many times to be
encountered with ridicule.
The gospel is able to reconstitute society by reconstructing the
character of individuals. Through its effect on persons it opens
the way for vast national advances. It touches not merely the
higher themes, but all the themes that are associated with those,
and immediately pertinent to the interest of mankind. It teaches
frugality and industry, and honesty, by express command, and by the
divine example of Him who brought it to us. It turns men, as has
been forcibly said, "out of the trails of blood and plunder into
the path of honest toil." It is a gospel for every creature, that
is, for every created thing; and gardens bloom in a lovelier beauty
under its influence, and harvest festivals, of which the country is
full to-day, are only its natural and beautiful fruit and trophy.
It exalts womanhood; and by the honor it puts on womanhood, and by
the honor it puts on childhood, it inaugurates the new family life
in the world. It honors, as no other religion does or ever did,
the essential worth of the immortal spirit in man; and it forces
him, pushes him, crowds him, into thoughtfulness and educational
discipline, since it will not allow him to be manipulated into
paradise by any priestly hand, but comes to him in a Book, and sets
him to work to investigate its contents, to inquire concerning it,
to look out widely around it, and to inform himself by careful
thought of what it is and what it means.
There is the basis of colleges and theological seminaries, and I
hope there will be no quarrel between them! There is the basis of
all the educational institutions and influences that are worthy in
the world. Christianity brings them. It generates by degrees a new
social conscience. It unites communities, on which it has operated,
in new relationships to each other. International alliances become
possible, become vital. International law becomes a reality and
a power; beneficence is stimulated, and law becomes ethical. As
we have seen recently, in the prodigious excitement of feeling
throughout civilized countries in consequence of the apparent gross
injustice done to a single French officer by a military court, the
time is coming, tho it has not yet fully come, when mankind shall be
one in spirit, and an
"... instinct bear along,
Round the earth's electric circle,
One swift flash of right or wrong."
It is not commerce which does this, it is Christianity. We are
witnesses to it. Our ancestors, not many centuries ago, were mere
rapacious savages, robbers in the forests, pirates on the sea; it
was Christianity, brought to them, that lifted them into gladness,
serenity, great purpose, great expectation and hope; and the new
civilization in which we rejoice on either side, I will not say
of the separating, of the uniting ocean, was founded on that New
Testament, the folios of which, I believe, are still preserved in
Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, and in the Bodleian Library
at Oxford. Here is the basis of what has been the grandest, most
illustrious, and most prophetic, in the recent history of mankind.
Give the gospel freedom and it will everywhere show this power.
Among the children and youth to whom it goes, among the mature
and the strong, wheresoever it goes, it grapples conscience, it
stimulates the heart. That one sentence, "The blood of Jesus Christ
cleanseth us from all sin," is the profoundest truth, is the most
persuasive and commanding appeal, ever addrest by an inspired
apostle to the children of mankind; and wherever that is heard, sin
is lost in penitence, and hope is lost in triumphant vision, and the
glory of the world disappears before the glory immutable of the Son
of God!
Then we are to remember, certainly never is this to be forgotten,
that the great imperishable motive, surpassing and dominating
every other in missionary effort, is adoring love toward Christ,
as central in the Scripture, glorified in history. No student of
history, no observer of human experience, can fail to see that there
is the sovereign passion possible to human nature; beside which
the passion of love for a friend, for a country, for a business,
for studies, may be auxiliary, but must be subordinate. There is
the passion which has done the grandest things the world has ever
known. There is the passion the vision of which interprets to us
the strangest, sublimest pages of history. We have all felt it, I
am sure, if we are Christian, in our measure, and at times; at the
sacrament, perhaps; in those sabbaths of the soul of which Coleridge
speaks, when the mind eddies instead of flowing onward; when we have
been moved to a great effort for Him whom we love; most keenly,
perhaps, when we have been in keenest sorrow, when the earth was as
iron under our feet and the heavens as brass above our head, and we
were all alone, yet not alone, for there stood beside us One in the
form of the Son of Man, making luminous the dark! We have felt this
love toward Christ; and when we have felt it we have known that no
power could surpass or approach it in the intensity of its moving
force, to every enterprise, great, difficult howsoever it might be
by which He would be honored.
Love has been the sovereign power in all the Church. Judgment
may be generous; love is lavish. Judgment may be stedfast in its
conclusions; love is heroic in its affirmations. It was love that
garnished the house, and poured out the spikenard, and spiced the
sepulcher. It was love that faced the flames, as in Felicitas and
Perpetua, fronting the dungeon and not shrinking, fronting the sword
and not blanching. It was love that said, "The nearer the sword, the
nearer to God." You can not conquer that power, indestructible, full
of a divine energy.
And with the experience of this comes the vivid vision of the
divine Providence, working for the gospel in human history. How
wonderful it is! Look at the progress of the last ninety years,
since missionary work began in this country! The changes, except
as they are matters of public record and of universal personal
observation, would be simply unthinkable--the vast new machineries
of travel and of commerce; the incalculable additions to the wealth
of civilized lands; the ever-increasing prosperity and power of
Protestant nations, in which the gospel is honored; the equally
ever-reduced power and lessening fame of nations, ancient and
famous, in which the gospel is refused free movement with a home
among the people; the continually closer approaches of civilized
and Protestant nations to each other, as of Great Britain and this
country. Many years ago Lord Brougham said, you remember, "Not an
ax falls in the American forest but it sets in motion a shuttle in
Manchester." That has been true ever since, and is more true to-day
than ever before. Not a mine is opened, not an industry established,
not a mechanism invented in the one country, which is not
recognized, and the power of which is not felt, in the other; and
more and more their policies are weaving together, not necessarily
in form, but in fundamental, underlying sympathy. All these things
are going forward with the opening of regions and realms formerly
inaccessible to Christianity; so that now the Christianity which
seemed buried in the catacombs, which seemed burned up in the martyr
fires, has the freedom of the world, and may everywhere be preached
in its purity and its power. Here are the plans of God going
forward; and we ought to feel in ourselves that in every hardest
work we do we are only keeping step with the march of omnipotence.
I know that there are many who fear that the prosperity of our
times, the love of pleasure, the desire for ease and enjoyment, are
to interfere with and stay these plans of the divine Providence for
the furtherance of Christ's Church, and of His cause in the world. I
do not wonder at the fear, though I do not share it. Unquestionably
the secular spirit is more intense and widely distributed at
this time than it ever was before, and the opportunities for its
gratification, in the acquirement of wealth and in the enjoyment of
every luxury, are greater than ever before. Undoubtedly it is true
that Sunday observance is far less strict, and family discipline
and training far less careful, than they were, perhaps, in the days
of our own childhood. Sunday newspapers make almost all American
ministers wish they were Englishmen; and Sunday observance among
ourselves reminds one too often of that colloquy between Joshua and
Moses as they were coming down from the mount during the idol-feast,
when the younger said, "There is a noise of war in the camp." "No,"
said the elder and more discerning, "it is not the voice of them
that shout for the mastery, neither is it the voice of them that cry
for being overcome, but it is the voice of them that sing, that I
hear." Sometimes in our congregations I think it is not the shout
for the mastery of the truth, pushing it upon men, it is not the
voice of them that cry, in penitence and humble obedience, because
they are overcome, but it is the voice of them that sing that we
hear; and the singing is too often in operatic measures, and done by
quartets, not by congregations! Talleyrand was right in saying years
ago that Americans take their pleasures sadly. I think that we are
right also, and more nearly right, when we say that Americans take
their religion too lightly, too gaily, as if it were a varnish upon
life instead of a fire and power within it.
But the human soul is still beating, and full of life, in the heart
of everyone whom we address; and God's gospel has its grip on that
human soul whenever it reaches it through our ministry, lifts it
nearer the things supernal, and nearer God Himself. While I see
many things to make us solicitous, I see nothing to make us timid,
concerning these mighty advancing plans of God. If persecution
could not stay them, if prelacy could not finally thwart them, I
do not believe that bicycles are going to override them, in the
end, or that they are to find their grave in the fascinating golf
links. No! there is One who sitteth above the circle of the earth,
and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; and His plans go
forth, soundless, silent, except as they come into operation. But
they never are broken; they never are drawn back; and the world has
to learn more and more clearly, every century, that the banners of
God are those which never go down in any struggle, and that whoever
walks and works with God is sure of the triumph.
Then do not let us forget that this is the sublime interval in
history between the ascension of the Master and His second coming in
power and glory, to judge the world! "In a grand and awful time" the
hymn says--and I repeat it:
"We are living, we are dwelling,
In a grand and awful time,"
when the heavens have been luminous with the splendor of the
ascension, and are destined to be luminous again with the awful
glory of the coming for judgment; and now is our time for work--for
work with the energy of the divine Spirit whose dispensation this
is. That Spirit wrote His gospel by the inspiration of human minds,
and by the instruments of human hands, on leaves of parchment and
papyrus. He is writing His gospel now, at large, through His
inspiration of human minds and guidance of human hands over the
expanses of the continents. But it is the same gospel--the gospel
of sin, the gospel of atonement, the gospel of regeneration, the
gospel of future judgment, and of future glory for the believing.
That is the gospel; and we are to go with Him in extending the
knowledge of that and in writing it ourselves. Wheresoever we have
the opportunity, that is our work; a work greater, more momentous,
wider in its relations, than any other done upon the earth.
Let us not forget then the meanness, the misery and evilness, of
human society, where the gospel does not enter and pervade it. Let
us not forget the recoverableness to God of every person and every
people, if the divine energies are rightly used. Let us not forget
that the gospel of Christ is the power at which men laugh and say,
"You are trying to quarry mountains with sunbeams; you are trying
to lift masses of masonry with aerial or, at best, with silken
threads." It is the gospel of Christ which is to be the power to
lift mankind, and glorify God, on all the continents, in all the
earth. The passion of love for Christ, stimulated by everything
that we read or hear, quickened by the Spirit in our hearts, is the
power that is to loosen amassed wealth and make it fluent, that
is to vitalize dead wealth and make it active, that is to enter
into every languid heart and inspire it for service. And then the
view of the divine Providence working in history toward one result,
steadily steering toward one haven and port,--the earth renewed in
righteousness and beautiful before God; and then this dispensation
of the Spirit, in which we have our time! After the resurrection, a
disciple said, "I go a-fishing." Likewise said they all. It seems
strange that even after that miracle, which has shot its radiance
everywhere upon the history of the world, any disciple should have
yielded to such an impulse. But now shall we, after the ascension
and when the skies are still glowing with it, after Pentecost has
opened heavenly principalities and powers to our view and our
experience, under the shadow of the great white throne that is
to be set in heaven--shall we go to building and bargaining, to
mining and merchandising, as our chief aim in life, and omit this
sublimest service which angels, it seems to me, must bend above the
battlements of heaven to see in its progress, and to make their
hearts and harps jubilant in its vitality and success?