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_The World's Great Sermons_
VOLUME VII
HALE TO FARRAR
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 VII--HALE TO FARRAR
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
NEW YORK and LONDON
COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
_Printed in the United States of America_
CONTENTS
VOLUME VII.
HALE (Born in 1822). _Page_
The Colonization of the Desert 1
MAGEE (1821-1891).
The Miraculous Stilling of the Storm 19
SEISS (1823-1904).
The Wonderful Testimonies 39
MACLAREN (Born in 1826).
The Pattern of Service 63
CROSBY (1826-1891).
The Prepared Worm 87
DALE (1829-1895).
The Argument from Experience 103
LIDDON (1829-1890).
Influences of the Holy Spirit 121
W. M. TAYLOR (1829-1895).
Christ before Pilate--Pilate before
Christ 143
JOHN HALL (1829-1899).
Liberty Only in Truth 163
BACON (Born in 1830).
God Indwelling 179
JOSEPH PARKER (1830-1902).
A Word to the Weary 197
MCKENZIE (Born in 1830).
The Royal Bounty 209
FARRAR (1831-1903).
Work in the Groaning Creation 227
HALE
THE COLONIZATION OF THE DESERT
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Edward Everett Hale, Congregationalist divine and author, was born
in Boston in 1822. He was graduated at Harvard in 1839 and became
a Unitarian preacher in 1846 at Worcester. In 1850 he removed to
Boston, where his most important life's work was accomplished as a
preacher and writer. A collected edition of his writings, in ten
volumes, was published in 1901. His varied literary enterprises
and undertakings have been too many to be enumerated here. His
most famous work is "The Man Without a Country." He is at present
chaplain to the United States Senate.
HALE
BORN IN 1822
THE COLONIZATION OF THE DESERT
_God saw everything that he had made. And behold, it was very
good._--Gen. i., 31.
This simplest expression of the earliest religion comes back to us
with new force in the midst of all the wonderful revelations of our
modern life.
In ten weeks' time I have crossed from one ocean to the other; I
have crossed backward and forward over the Allegheny and the Rocky
Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, with the valleys between them, and
the slopes which rise from the ocean on either side. This means a
journey through twelve of the old thirteen States and fifteen of the
new States and Territories. It means intercourse with people of the
North and the South, the Gulf and the West, the Pacific coast and
the mountains. It means intercourse with the white race, the black
race, the red race, and the Chinaman. The variety of climate is such
that I have welcomed the shade of palm-trees, and that I have walked
over snow where it had drifted twenty feet beneath me. I have picked
oranges from the tree, and camellias from the twig in the open air,
and within three hours of good-by to the camellia I was in a driving
snow-storm, where the engine drivers were nervous because they had
no snow plow. In all this variety I have a thousand times recalled
the simplest expression of the oldest words of the Bible: "God saw
everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good."
The solid recognition of this truth--not, indeed, in any small
sense; but in that sense which is general and comprehensive--is at
the bottom of all true religious philosophy. It is not true in any
smaller sense. For I cannot say that it is good to be bitten by
a mosquito or worried by a fly, if I can escape fly or mosquito.
No, that is not true. And I do not suppose that the simple author
of this text meant any such extravagance. But this is true, that
the world is so made and ordered that man, who is himself a
creator--man, who shares the wishes, instincts, and plans of the
Power who directs the world--man can take the world in his hands and
compel it to serve his nobler purposes.
God saw the world, and he said: "Yes, this is what I want for My
home and the home of children who love Me. It is a world very good
to them, and they shall subdue it to My purposes." To recognize
this, to feel the fitness of the world for man and man's fitness for
the world, this is the basis of consistent optimism. Nobody says
that the top of the Rocky Mountains is a good place for whales,
or that the Ojai Valley is a good place for polar bears; but a
consistent optimism says that the world is a good place for man; and
it says that man is so closely allied to the God who is the life of
the world that he can take the world for his own, and make it his
home and his heaven. This consistent optimism is the basis of all
sound theology.
It is to be observed, however, that man gains no such control of
the world, and the world does not prove fit for man, unless he has
found out that he is akin to God and can enter into His work. There
is no such victory to the savage, who is afraid of God. So long as
he thinks the powers of nature are his enemies, he makes them his
enemies. I do not believe the old cave-dwellers, fighting hyenas
with clubs, and often finding that they were second-best in the
encounter, thought this world the best of worlds. I do not believe
that the Digger Indian, who spent his tedious day in rummaging for
ants and beetles to eat, and was very happy if he caught a lizard--I
do not believe that he said that the world was very good. True,
I think both of them had visions and hopes of a better time; but
while they were in the abject misery of cold and starvation, that
better time had not dawned. It did not dawn because they had not
taken on them the dignity and duty of children of God. They were not
about their Father's business. They did not see Him nor hear Him,
nor in any wise know Him. They did not conceive that they were on
His side nor He on theirs. And it is not till man comes up to some
comprehension that God has sent him here on an infinite business;
that he and the Author of this world are at one in this affair of
managing it; it is not till man knows God as his friend and not his
enemy, that man with any courage and success takes the business of
managing into his own hands. Then is it that he finds what pleasure,
nay what dignity, there is in taming the lightning and riding on the
storm. And then he knows enough of the divine Being, His purpose and
His power, to see that the world is good, and that God should call
it good in its creation.
All this forces itself on one's thought as he sees how it is that
nature has been pursued and caught and tamed in these mountains
and these valleys. For nature is the nymph so wittily described by
Virgil. She
"Flies to her woods; but hopes her flight is seen."
Man, so long as he is savage, hates her and fears her. If he
worships, it is the abject worship of those who bring sacrifices
to buy her favor. And it may be said in passing that the last
visible form of pure barbarism or savagery is any theology which
supposes that God's favor must be bought by any price paid by man
in exchange. When man finds, by any revelation, the conditions of
absolute religion, which are simply faith, hope and love, all this
is changed. When he looks up to God gladly, looks forward to the
future cheerfully, and looks round on the world kindly, he finds,
possibly to his surprize, that he is working on the lines God works
on, and means to have him work on. Now he is on "his Father's
business." While he rows the boat, the tide sweeps the right way.
While he stretches the wire, the lightning is waiting and eager
to do his errand. And so soon as man the divine appears upon the
scene--man the child of God, who knows he shares God's nature--why,
easily and quickly the valleys are exalted and the mountains and
the hills made low; the deserts blossom as the rose, and even the
passing traveler sees that this world was made for man and man for
this world. And he understands as he has never understood before
what this is, that he himself is of the nature of the God at whose
present will this world comes into order. He understands better what
the old text means, which says that God is satisfied with the world
which He has made.
I crossed the continent westward and eastward on this journey,
fresh from recent reading of the history of the first Spanish
occupation. What did the Spaniards find there? They found in what
we call New Mexico the Zuni cities which, in a sad decline, exist
to-day. From those cities Casteneda led a party of Spanish horsemen
eastward in search of a certain mythical king who was supposed to
have much gold and many jewels. Those adventurous men rode for a
whole summer across the prairies and plains which are now Colorado,
and Kansas, and Missouri, and struck the Missouri, or perhaps the
Mississippi. You know that much of the country is now fertile
beyond praise. Mile after mile you can see corn, wheat; wheat,
corn; corn, wheat; wheat, corn; and the production to the acre
increases year by year. The States through which Casteneda's line
of travel passed now number four or five millions of people; and
they feed, from their agriculture, say twenty millions more. Now
when Casteneda and his people passed and repassed over this region
they did not meet a single man, woman or child. They were opprest by
the horrible loneliness of their journey. They felt, as Magellan's
people felt when they were crossing the Pacific Ocean, with that
horrible east wind, with a calm sea before and never a sight of an
island or a man. When Casteneda came at last to the Mississippi--or
Missouri--they had no heart to build a raft to cross it and incur
more such solitude; and they went back the way they came. And the
fame of its loneliness was such that no man attempted the adventure
for more than a hundred years.
When, in 1682--say a hundred and thirty years after--the great La
Salle discovered the Mississippi River, and sailed south upon it,
leaving Chicago, crossing Illinois, and so striking the Father of
Waters, his experience of this utter loneliness was the same. He
touched every night on one shore or the other. He is, therefore, the
discoverer of seven of the Western States--States which now feed
fifty million people and number seven or eight million of their
own. Only twice, I think, did he meet any great body of men. Not
five times did he find traces of the hand of man or the foot of
man. Through the same solitude he returned; and his report was of a
virgin world of elk, and deer, and buffalo; of shrubs and trees, of
fish and fowl; but a world without men.
The inference was drawn, hastily, but not unnaturally, that these
regions could not sustain men. On the Atlas given me as a boy, the
"Great American Desert" covered the greater part of the region west
of the Mississippi. It is now the home of the millions I have been
enumerating. And in the last map I have seen, the Great American
Desert appears as hardly a "speck on the surface of the earth."
The change which I have described has been wrought in the lifetime
of people of my age. It is wrought simply and wholly by the passion
for emigration which belongs to our own race. In Mr. Hoar's happy
phrase, people of our blood "thirst for the horizon."
In the year 1833 De Tocqueville, observing the steadiness of this
wave, calculated its average flow as seventeen miles westward every
year. That was the rate at which it had moved since the Federal
Constitution made it possible. Speaking roughly, there were then two
thousand miles of desert between the Missouri River and the Pacific.
At De Tocqueville's rate, the wave would have been one hundred and
twenty years in reaching that ocean. But it happened that in 1849
the Western coast was settled in the gold discovery. An Eastern wave
began which has now met the Western. The two together have founded
the great cities--for we must call them so--of the Rocky Mountains.
Now, in the face of that contrast between the last century and this
century, one asks why that half of our continent is any more fit for
men than it was then. The answer is, that it was not fit for the
kind of men on it then; and that the kind of men that have tamed it
are the kind of men who were fit for it, and whom it was fit for.
The study of history and of physical geography becomes a study of
what we mean by man and man's capacities. California, for instance,
was the same country in 1650 that it was in 1850. The south wind
blew from the sea, and that, in the north temperate zone, is the
great physical requisite. There was as much gold, and quicksilver,
and copper, and tin in the mountains as there is now. There was the
same soil and the same water on the hillsides. But the men, and
women, and children were afraid of their gods; they were afraid
of nature; they had neither faith, nor hope, nor love. They had
none of the elements of eternal power except as an acorn has the
possibilities of an oak.
To these people there came, sooner or later--with the best motives,
but still without the essentials of life--fifty families of
Franciscan monks. They came, observe, without wives or children.
They defied thus the first law of human life, or the life God
intends His children to live in. The primitive trinity, from which
all false trinities have grown, is the father, the mother and the
child. The Franciscan communities were false to all Divine law, if
it were only in their failure here.
They gathered around them, by the higher civilization which they
brought, great communities of starving Indians. They taught them
to feed themselves as they had never been fed before. So far they
improved the race, and lifted its civilization above that ant-eating
and lizard-chasing of the Digger Indian. But then the Catholic
Church, by the necessary subordination of man to the organized
Church, takes man's life out of him.
"The day
That makes a man a slave, takes all his life away."
The words are as true to-day as they were in Homer's time. Nor is
there any sadder instance of it than is the powerlessness of the
tribes of amiable slaves who were collected under the protection
of the Franciscan missions in California, or Jesuit missions in
Paraguay.
The native races between the Pacific and the Atlantic were dying
faster than their children were born. They were dying of the
diseases named laziness, ignorance, and war. They were not subduing
the continent. They were not fit for it, nor it for them. What is
the distinction of the race to which we belong, that it succeeds
where these have failed? The history of the country accentuates that
distinction.
It would be absurd to pretend that the average frontiersman was a
man of what are called saintly habits. Often he was not conscious
that he had any divine errand. But the frontiersman, to whose
courage and perseverance is due that forward wave we study, was a
man. He did not take his opinion or instruction from any priest.
There was no one between him and the good God. Often he sought Him.
So far so good. And often he did not seek Him. That one admits.
But he never sought any one else's advice or direction. He was no
slave, as the Indian of California was. He was not commissioned by
a superior, as the Franciscan priest of the mission was. He was a
man. He was independent and he was brave. If he did the right thing,
therefore, he succeeded; if he did the wrong thing, why, he failed.
And no one else tried just the same experiment. In this first trait
of absolute independence he showed the infinite characteristic of a
child of God.
Second, and perhaps more important, he took with him his wife and
his children. Here is the great distinction of American emigration,
which contrasts against the plans of Spaniards or Frenchmen, and of
the earlier Englishmen. Historically it begins with the Pilgrims,
of whom there were as many Pilgrim mothers as there were Pilgrim
fathers. It is of them that Emerson says that "they builded better
than they knew."
The frontiersman is independent. He lives with and for his family.
And, once more, he is an enthusiast in determining that to-morrow
shall be better than to-day. The Indian had no such notion. The
Franciscan had not. But this profane, ignorant pioneer had. He
believed implicitly in the country behind him and in the future
before him. "I tell you, sir, that in ten years you will see in this
valley such a city as the world never saw." Profane he may be,
ignorant he may be, cruel he may be; but he believes in the idea; he
is quickened and goaded forward by an infinite and majestic hope.
Given such conditions, the historical steps are easy. All this is
impossible till you have a nation, to give peace and compel peace,
so that the separate settler shall know that the whole majesty of
the world is behind him. There shall be no abiding quarrel between
man and man as to the line of a claim or the title of a mine.
The nation shall decide, and its whole majesty shall enforce the
decision. Or, if there is any massacre by an Apache or a Blackfoot,
the country behind, tho a thousand miles behind, shall stretch forth
her arm to avenge that lonely family. This means peace instead of
war. All this had to wait, therefore, until the formation of the
nation called the United States--the greatest peace society the sun
ever shone upon, and the model for societies yet larger. With the
birth of that nation, the real Western wave begins.
I do not claim for every pioneer that he thought he went as an
apostle of God. But in the emigrant wave from the very beginning,
the best blood, the best faith, the best training of the parent
stocks have gone. Science has sent her best. The determination
for thorough education has planted better school houses in the
wilderness than the emigrant left at home. And on Sunday, in a
church, one is proud to say that the organized Church of Christ,
in the liberty of a thousand communions, has covered with her egis
the settler most in advance. He could not keep in advance of the
missionary and of his Bible; and, to his credit be it said, he did
not want to.
So much for the personnel. Now, speaking roughly, what has been the
motive for the great Western wave, which is making this garden out
of that desert?
First, there is the passion for adventure, the thirst for the
horizon, which drives old Leatherstocking and the men like him away
from the haunts of men. This in itself produces nothing. Next and
chiefly, the desire to make homes--the noblest desire given to man,
and the desire in which he follows the will of God most distinctly
and completely. Miners want to strike metals; farmers want to find
good soils; fruit men try for climate and irrigation; all with the
direct wish to make homes more happy than they have been before.
Again, young men go that they may get forward faster than in old
communities--and who can wonder? Men of sense give up the unequal
contest with nature in a northern and eastern climate to find a
country where nature is on their side. People in delicate health go
where they find softer air, more spring and less winter. But no man
goes to get rich alone. No man wants to eat gold or to drink it.
The wish and hope is to make homes where father, mother and children
can live the life which God ordained. These are no Franciscan
friars, these are no Apache bandits, to whom has been given the
subjugation of a continent. Side by side with the pioneer is the
surveyor, marking the lines of future homesteads. Hard behind him
are father, mother, boys and girls, to whom the nation gives this
homestead thus designated. If the man is sick the woman nurses him.
The children grow up to know the world they live in. The boundary of
the nation is not a mere chain of garrisons nor the scattered posts
of missions; it is a line of homes, founded with all that the word
home involves.
All these lessons of three centuries point one way. They show
that the world is not very good for wandering Apaches or Digger
Indians, freezing and starving under hard winters when harvests
have failed. To their point of view it was a world hard and cruel.
To Franciscan friars, ruling a little empire which yielded none
but physical harvests, where the garden, and orchard, and vineyard
were only so many specks in the midst of an unbounded desert, the
world can not have seemed a better world--a world made for wild
horses, and further East for wild buffaloes, but not for men--"the
great American Desert." It is not till man asserts the courage and
freedom of a son of God, it is not till man appears with wife and
child and proposes to establish his heaven here; it is not till then
that he masters nature, and she gladly obeys him. Nay, then he has
no success unless he appears as the vicegerent of God Himself, and
establishes over this vast domain the empire of law, and speaks as
God might speak, with "Thou shalt do this," and "Thou shalt not do
that" in this empire.
The Old-World writers are fond of telling us that we owe the
prosperity of this nation to its physical resources. It is not so.
The physical resources have existed for centuries. It is only in
the moral force of sons and daughters of God; it is such working
power as takes the names of law, courage, independence, and family
affection; it is only in these that our victory is won. The drunken
swaggerer of the advance only checks the triumph. The miser, who
would carry off his silver to use elsewhere, only hinders the
advance. The victory comes from the hand of God to the children of
God, who establish His empire in the magic spell of three great
names. As always these names are: Faith, which gives courage; Hope,
which determines to succeed; and Love, which builds up homes.
It is impossible to see the steps of such a victory without owning
the infinite Power behind it all. You cannot use magnetic ore and
coal for its smelting and the silicates for its fusion, all flung
in together side by side, without asking if the Power who threw
these priceless gifts together where each was needed for each
did not know what He was doing. But the buffalo passes over it,
and the gopher mines under it, and it might be so much gravel of
the sea. Savages pass over it, with no future, no heaven, and one
would say no God. It is worthless desert still, but one day a man
comes who deserves his name. He is a child of God. He is determined
that to-morrow shall be better than to-day. He knows he is lord of
nature, and he bids her serve him. The coal burns, the iron melts,
the silicate fuses. It is impossible to see that miracle and not
feel that for this man the world was created, and for this world
this man was born. He is in his place. He did not have to seek it;
it was made for him. With him it is a garden. Without him it is
a desert. He can hew down these mountains. He can fill up these
valleys. And where he has filled, and where he has hewed, lo, the
present heaven of happy homes! It is thus that prophecy accomplishes
itself, and
"The car of the Lord rolls gloriously on."
MAGEE
THE MIRACULOUS STILLING OF THE STORM
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
William Connor Magee, Archbishop of York, was born at Cork in 1821.
Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, he was ordained in 1844. His
first important charge was the Octagon Chapel at Bath in 1850. In
1864 he was made dean of Cork, and in 1868, Bishop of Peterborough.
In 1891 he was appointed to succeed Dr. William Thomson, as
Archbishop of York.
Dr. Magee was pronounced by Canon Liddon the greatest preacher of
his day. His speech in the House of Lords in 1869 against Irish
Disestablishment was said by the highest authorities, as quoted
by Lord Salisbury, to be the finest speech ever delivered, in
either house of Parliament, by any man then living. His oratory was
characterized by clearness and terseness of expression, while his
full-toned voice was capable of sounding every gradation of feeling.
He died in 1891, three months after his enthronization in York
Minster.
MAGEE
1821-1891
THE MIRACULOUS STILLING OF THE STORM
_Lord, save us: we perish.... Then he arose, and rebuked the
winds and the sea; and there was a great calm_.--Matt. viii.,
25, 26.
The story of this miracle reveals to us Christ entering into peril
together with His Church. It records for us her faith and her
prayer. It reveals to us His presence and His power. That faith has
been her faith, that prayer has been her prayer, from that hour
until now. In all the long perilous voyage of the Church from that
hour, never has she unlearned yet her first prayer; never has she
become entirely unconscious of her Lord. Sometimes with a great and
a fearless faith that defied the most terrible tempests, sometimes
with a little and a timid faith, that shrank from the first ripple
upon the deep, but ever with her real faith have Christ's Church and
Christ's disciples turned in the hour of their tribulation to seek
their Lord. And never has that prayer been said in vain. Never from
the Church at large, or from the solitary disciple in his terror,
has that prayer gone up without an answer. Never has the eye of
faith sought, and sought in vain, the Savior. Ever has the praying
Church or the praying disciple found the still present Christ; and
we believe that it is so now. We believe that Christ our Lord is
here in the midst of us now, and that our eye of faith may see Him,
and our prayer of faith may reach Him. And if this be so now--if
Christ's presence be a real fact amongst us now, and our prayer have
really a might to reveal that presence--then, above all things, it
concerns us, that we understand the nature of that prayer, and the
manner of that presence, that we understand what it is we mean, and
what will come of it when we say: "Lord, save us, or we perish."
We ask you, then, to-night, brethren, to consider these two things:
the meaning of the Church's prayer; the manner of her Lord's
presence. Now, when we use these words: "Lord, save: we perish,"
we are really rehearsing two articles of our belief. We are
declaring, first of all, that we believe there is a Lord--that in
the visible world there is an invisible God with His overruling,
and controlling, and appointing will; and, in the next place, we
believe that this God is our Lord Jesus Christ. In the first of
these, we Christians agree with every religion that ever has been.
In the second, we differ from all other religions. When we say that
above nature there is a will and a personality, we say what every
religion says. Religion is nothing else than the belief in the
supernatural, in something above nature, in a person, in a will; and
prayer is nothing but the speech of our spirit to that will, and the
submission of our will to it. Prayer is the effort of the spirit
of man to rise above the visible up to the region of the invisible
and the personal, there to speak out his care or his need. There
can, therefore, be no prayer without this element of religion; and
there can be no religion without this fact of prayer. Without it,
you have philosophy, you may have sentiment; but you cannot have a
real, practical, every-day religion. And, therefore, all religions
have believed in a God or gods, a Lord or lords. Turk, Jew, heathen,
in like case, would have said to some lord or other: "Save, or we
perish." But the Christian believes something more. He believes that
his Lord has come down amongst men; that He has taken to Him human
flesh, and lived a human life, and died, and risen again, for his
salvation. He worships not only a lord, but the incarnate Lord; and
so the Church speaks her twofold faith in her great hymn from the
first to Christ as God: "We praise Thee, O God; we acknowledge Thee
to be the Lord"--Thee, and none other, to be the God, and Thee to
be the Lord, and Ruler, and Master of all things. You see, then,
that there is something different in Christian prayer from all other
prayer and worship, and that the difference consists in this: that
it is distinctively and avowedly the prayer to an incarnate Christ.
Now, if there be this difference between this prayer and all other
prayer, then there must be a corresponding difference in the
feelings and in the practical results of such a religion; and I am
about to ask you now to follow me while I endeavor to trace for you
this difference between Christian prayer and all other prayer. It
seems as if the story in the gospel of this miracle exactly sets
out this difference--exactly shows us the distinctive nature of
Christian prayer. The story, you observe, divides itself, naturally,
into three parts. There is, first of all, the voyage before the
storm; there is, then, the storm; and there is, then, the miraculous
stilling of the storm. Now, you observe that in each of these three
parts, we have one thing in common. We have man, in some way or
other, encountering, or encountered by, the outward and visible
world. The third of these--the stilling of the storm--differs from
the other two in this, that it is miraculous and supernatural. Now,
let us, for a moment, leave out this third part. There are some, you
know, who say, that we should always leave it out, and be better
without it. Let us leave out, then, this third or miraculous part of
the story; and let us contrast the first and the second parts. And
what have we got? We have got a most remarkable contrast between
the two scenes. What is it we see in the first scene? We see a man
subduing nature. It was by the knowledge of the elements and the
laws of nature, that man learned thus to sail upon the deep; and in
that one fact you have represented for you the whole of the material
progress of humanity--all the triumphs of science, all the glory and
the beauty of art, all that marvelous mastery that man obtains by
his inventive and creative will over the secret powers of nature, as
he unlocks them one by one, and compels her to tell him her deepest
mysteries--all that man has done as he has advanced from horizon to
horizon of discovery, finding still new worlds to conquer, until
we stand amazed at our own progress and the infinity of it, and we
say of man: "What manner of being is this, that even the winds and
the sea obey him?" Yes, there is the man the lord of nature. There
is nothing supernatural there. All is natural, all is orderly. Man
is lord and master. Nature is man's servant; and, therefore, there
seems no room, there seems no need for prayer. There is nothing,
seemingly, there to be had for the asking; there is everything,
seemingly, there to be had for working. Man is to be seen walking in
the garden of his own planting and his own fencing; and he reaches
out hands to unforbidden fruits of knowledge; and he believes that
at last he shall gather even of the tree of life. He is a god unto
himself, and he sees no need for prayer.
And now we turn to the second scene, and what have we there? We have
the direct contrast with this scene. We have there, not man subduing
nature, but nature subduing man. We have the storm in which the
elements are man's masters and not his servants; and he that one
minute before was the boasting lord of nature is its toy and its
sport. The very foam upon the crest of those billows is not more
helpless in the grasp of the elements than the lord and the king of
them; and they toss him to and fro, as the wind drives the stubble
in the autumn. This is the terrible aspect of nature. This is nature
in her might, and in her majesty, and in her pitilessness, and in
her capriciousness--when nature seems everything, and man, in her
awful presence, dwindles and dwarfs into very nothingness--when
man, in the presence of the vastness of her solitude, and the
might of her storms, and the terror of her earthquakes, seems no
more before her, with his little cares and his sorrows, than the
wee bubbles upon the head of the cataract. This is nature as she
masters man. Is it, then, any wonder that, in the early struggles of
mankind with this terrible visible power of the creature, men came
to worship the creature--that they ascribed to every one of these
powers a divinity, that in the voice of the wind, and in the roar
of the sea, and in the raging of the fire, they saw the signs of
a divine presence, and they said to these elements: "Spare us," or
"Save us, or else we perish"? And so all creation became peopled
with gods--cruel gods, capricious gods, vengeful gods, gods whom
men bribed with blood, gods whom, even while they bribed them, they
could not love, and did not believe that they loved them. This is
the first and most terrible form of creature worship; this was the
idolatry of the heathen. But mark this, that such a worship as this
could not continue forever, could not continue long, because it is
the worship of ignorance; it is the belief in the supernatural,
only because it confuses the unknown with the supernatural. Ever as
science advances must this faith melt away. Ever must the domain
of the known push itself forward into the domain of the unknown.
Ever does the man of science take one by one the gods of the man
of superstition and break them upon their pedestals, and tell him
this: "What you worship is no god. What you worship is no lord. It
is not your lord. It is a servant of yours; and I class it in this
or that rank of your servants." So, one by one, like ghosts and
fantoms in the dawning of the day--one by one, the fantoms of gods
that haunted the night of the old world vanish before the dawn of
knowledge. But then it is a terrible daylight that breaks on men--a
blank, dreary world in which men have no sight of the invisible, no
sense of the supernatural. It is that last and most terrible aspect
of nature, when she appears, not as many gods, or many wills, but as
the great soulless piece of mechanism, of which we are only part--a
terrible machinery in which we are, somehow or other, involved, and
in the presence of which the sense of our free-will leaves us. The
pith, and the manhood, and the vigor of men, and the beauty and the
freedom of their life die out of them as they stand appalled before
this passionless, this terrible, this awful face of a soulless
world. This is the last and the most terrible form of creature
worship. And mark this, that between these two aspects of nature,
if you have no assured faith, there is no logical resting-place.
Without the act of faith, you must take your choice between the
superstition of ignorance or the atheism of knowledge.
And now we have seen these, we turn to the third portion of our
story; and what is that we see there? We see, again, in this world
of men, the miraculous and the supernatural. We hear a prayer,
and we see a miracle. In the face of the might of nature and the
terrors of her elements there arises up a Man in answer to man's
cry--there is heard a Man's voice, which is yet the voice of God;
and it rebukes the winds and the sea, and the elements of nature own
their real Lord; and immediately there is a great calm. What is
it, then, that we see? We see a miracle, and a miracle that answers
to prayer; we see the living spirits of living men, in the hour of
their agony and their distress, appealing from nature to the God of
nature; and we have recorded the answer of God to man's prayer. The
answer is, that God is Lord both of man and of nature; and we say,
therefore, that the miracle, and the miracle alone, sufficiently
justifies the prayer. We say that the reason why men may pray is,
and can only be, that they know and believe, that there is a will
which rules the visible. If you have not this belief, then believe
us that all prayer, whatever men may say about it, is an unreality
and a miserable mockery. To what am I to pray if I see no living
God to pray to? Am I to pray to a law? Am I to pray to a system? Am
I to pray to the winds, or to the waves, as men prayed of old? Am
I to pray for physical blessings and deliverances? Men tell us we
are not to pray, or to give thanks, concerning the rain or fruitful
seasons, for that science has told us that the supernatural has no
place there. Am I to pray then (for men do tell me that I may pray)
only for spiritual and for moral gifts? Am I to pray only to be
made wise, and good, and pure, and true, and holy? Ah! science is
beginning to meet us there, too; for she is telling us, and telling
us loudly, and telling us shamelessly, that here, too, there is no
room, so far as she can tell, for prayer, as our mind is but a part
of our body, and that our spiritual condition is a necessary result
of our past history and of our present temperament--that we are what
we are by virtue of birth and education, and country, and clime,
and other things over which we have no control. And so the very
spirit of man, all that is left of the invisible, vanishes before
the approach of science. The knife of the anatomist lays bare, as
he tells you, the secrets of man's being; and he finds no soul--he
finds only the gray matter of the brain and the white threads of
the nerves; and this is all that is left. Then, if we are not to
pray, may we at least praise? Men say that if it is a folly to pray,
at least it is a wisdom to praise; and they tell us this is the
sentimental theory of the modern gospel. They tell you: "You may
not pray,--prayer has no place in our system,--but you may praise;
you may lift up your heart in hymns of joy and gratitude to the
great Father of your being; you may have festival and flower-crowned
processions in honor of the Supreme Being; yes, you may in fine
weather, when you are sailing over summer seas, and the pleasant
summer wind is filling the sails of your bark, and is wafting sweet
odors from the flower-crowned shores along which youth, and hope,
and joy are passing--then you may lift up your hearts in thanks to
the Father that gave all these, if you do not forget it. But how is
it in foul weather? How is it when the sky above us darkens, and the
white crests of the waves beneath us are swelling sharp and fierce,
and the jagged edges of the rocks are projecting for our shipwreck,
and the wild waste of the waters is yawning below us, and we tremble
and shudder at their depths, and the wild wind blows our prayer
back into our bosoms--is that the time to sing sentimental hymns to
our great supreme Father and Giver of all good? It is a time (thank
God, thank Christ, for this) when the Christian, when the disciple
of Christ, may hold fast his faith and say, "Tho he slay me, yet
will I trust in him"; but it is not a time when the deist has
breath to sing his hymns to the supreme Author of his being. No, we
believe that there is a miracle that justifies, and alone justifies
prayer. We know that there are those (and they are good and wise
men, many of them) who contrive nice adjustments and philosophical
explanations how prayer may be reconciled with universal law. We do
not greatly care for these. They may be right; they may be wrong.
In some future state and higher condition of our being we may know
how far they are true, how far they are false; but, meanwhile, we
need not be too nervously anxious to make room for almighty God to
work His own will in His own world. We believe in the miracle of
creation; we believe that there was once a voice that said, "Let
there be light, and there was light"; we believe that at the sound
of that voice the universe leapt into life; and we believe in the
miracle of the Incarnation, when God took human flesh and dwelt
amongst men; we believe in the miracle of the descent of the Spirit
of God, when, with the miraculous sound of the rushing wind and
the miraculous gleam of the fire, God once more came down to dwell
amongst men; we believe in the miracles that are written for us in
this Book, were they ten times as many as they are; we believe that
the sea has stood on one side like a wall, and that the waters have
gushed forth from the rock; we believe that bread has been rained
from heaven; we believe that a touch has awakened the dead--we
believe all this; and, because we believe it, we believe the voice
when it says to us, "Pray"; and because we hear that voice still
amongst us, and because we know it to be the same voice, we say, as
we hear it, "Lord, save, or we perish."
But still, in the last place, it may be said to us: If you do
believe that there is this power of miracle amongst you still, and
that it will answer to your prayer, why is it that we do not see
more miracles than we do? Why is not the world filled with strange
miracles every day, considering the infinite number of men's needs,
and the infinite number of human prayers? My brethren, it does seem
to me that if we were merely deists, and did not believe in Christ,
it would be difficult for us to answer this objection. The spirit
of man has, however (thanks be to God for it), in all ages been
deeper and truer in its instincts than his mere logical power. Even
the deist (and we thankfully acknowledge it), tho inconsistently
and illogically, yet really and truly prays. For us Christians
there is not any difficulty. There is that difference in our prayer
of which I spoke. To whom is it that we pray? Not merely to the
invisible Lord or Creator of the past, but to the incarnate Lord of
the present. We believe that Christ our Lord, to whom we pray, took
flesh and dwelt amongst us, and we believe that He did so that He
might work the greatest of all miracles--the salvation of the souls
of men; and we believe that He wrought it by dying and by living
again. We believe that He established in the world this great and
miraculous law, that it is possible out of death to bring life--nay,
that death is the way to life. If this be so, that by His death
life was purchased for us, then He teaches us that there is another
life than this, and that there is another death and a deeper death
than that we fear; and He tells us, it may be, that even by dying
we shall be saved, that He will not always save us from death--nay,
that He may save us by death. And so it comes to pass that we
understand how, by losing life, we may miraculously save it; and
yet, on the other hand, by trying to save life, we may naturally
lose it. So we come to understand this fact, how the beginning of
His kingdom was full of miracles, and how, in the history of His
kingdom, miracles have since ceased. The kingdom began with miracles
that He might teach us that He was able to save; the miracles ceased
in order that He might work a greater miracle. The lesser miracle
of ruling nature ceased in order that the greatest of all miracles
might perpetually be wrought--the regeneration, the redemption, and
the glorification of the nature of man. And so we understand that
Christ our Lord, because He is our Lord, may save us, even while
we seem to perish, and to perish in His presence. He saved us of
old by His agony and bloody sweat, by His cross and passion; and
He will save us now, and He does save every child of His. Through
agony and sweating, through cross and passion--through the agony of
our long nights of spiritual darkness, through the sweat of long
days of sore trouble and labor, beneath the weight of sharp and
heavy crosses and sorrow, and through the bitterness of spiritual
or bodily passion, does Christ our Lord still save those who cry
to Him, even while He seems to sleep and not to hear them, as, in
the bitterness of their souls, thinking themselves Christ-forsaken,
they cry, "Our Christ, our Christ, why hast Thou forsaken us? Dost
Thou sleep, Lord? Save us, or we perish." And so you understand
the peculiarity, the blest and the glorious peculiarity, of our
Christian prayer. You understand the meaning of those deep words
of Scripture--patience and the faith of the saints. You understand
how the Christian man may pray and wait, and wait and pray still.
If prayer were always followed by a miraculous answer, then prayer
would be easy enough; or, on the other hand, if there were no
thought of an answer, then it might be possible, tho not easy, to
submit ourselves to the inevitable. But to pray and not to receive
an answer, and yet to believe that the very not receiving is an
answer; to cry, "Save, or we perish," and to seem about to perish;
to believe that in what seems perishing is really salvation; to look
for the living and watchful Christ, and to see what seems only the
living and regardless Christ, and yet to believe that the time will
come when, at His word, there shall be a great calm--this is the
patience, this is the faith of those who worship an incarnate Lord.
And so we trace the history of Christ's Church, and so we strive
to trace the history of our own lives. Comparatively easy it is to
trace the Church's history along her voyage. The Church gives time
for comparing events and testing faith; and so, believing still in
the presence of her living Lord, the litanies of His Church ring
out, as they have ever rung, clearly and loudly, and high above the
roar of the tempest and the rushing of the waters, still the prayer
is heard, "Good Lord, deliver us"; and still, again and again, as
the storm sweeps by, and the Church passes out into calmer waters,
still comes the voice of thanksgiving: "He hath delivered us."
Even in our shorter voyage, are there none of us who can remember
times when we have knelt in agony and wrestled in prayer with the
Savior, who seemed to have forgotten us, when the mighty storm of
temptation and the billows of calamity seemed about to destroy us,
and when we have cried (oh, how men do cry in those storms of the
soul, in those tempests and terrors of the heart), "Lord, save us,
or we perish!" to Him to save us, and He has seemed to sleep and to
refuse to save? But at the last we can remember how He did reveal
Himself, not stilling the raging storm when we would have had Him
still the terrible tempest, not sparing, it may be, the precious
bark that we had rigged, and manned, and launched ourselves with
trembling hopes and loving prayers, and watched with eyes tearless
with agony, as we saw it about to sink before us; and we have
been led to see and believe that the living and the loving Lord
was answering even then our prayer, for the bark has, at length,
entered that haven where we would be, and where the vexed waters of
our voyage never awake a ripple on the calm depths of its eternal
peace. This has been the experience of more than one of this great
multitude that I see. And there is another experience that each one
of you may have: it is when, in the troubles of your own spirit,
when in the agonies of your own grief-stricken heart, when in the
depths of your own repentance, when in the storms of your own fear
and your own doubt, you cry to Christ the Savior--when you bring
your sins as some men bring their sorrows, as anxious to have them
removed as the others--when you cry to Christ your Savior: "Lord,
save me! Save me, a sinner! Save me, an unprayerful man hitherto!
Save me, an unbelieving man hitherto! Save me, not merely from the
hell hereafter, but the present storm and depth of my own sins that
threaten to destroy me! Save me, or I perish!" For, brethren, be
sure of this, sooner or later this will be the experience of every
such vexed and terrified soul--that, after he shall have endured, so
long as his Lord sees good, the terrifying storm and the threatening
deep that drive him in closer and closer search and seeking after
his Lord, then, at last, there will appear the form of the Son of
man, the form of Him who hung upon the cross, that He might for
ever in the world's history work this great and, to Him, dearest
of all miracles; and, at last, He will rebuke the winds and the
waves in that troubled soul, and there will be a great calm--a calm
that may not last for ever, a calm that will not last for ever, for
we have not yet reached the haven of perfect rest, but a calm that
is a foretaste of the eternal rest. And so, praying with all our
hearts to Christ our Lord, setting our will in submission to His
will, pouring out our spirit in prayer to His Spirit, laying bare
our hearts before His pure and loving eyes, through calm and through
storm, praying still that we suffer not death in either, that we
neither rot in the calm nor founder in the storm, praying still for
His presence, praying still for grace to realize that presence,
crying still for that deeper and yet deeper faith which is the
result of more and more constant experience, crying still, "Lord,
save, or we perish," wait in patience and in faith until He shall
send His last messenger in this world, His angel of death, and bid
him for us and in His name rebuke for the last time the winds that
have vexed us, and the waves that have terrified us, and then with
Him for ever there shall be a great calm.
SEISS
THE WONDERFUL TESTIMONIES
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE