were not a part of the universe as he had plotted it. The other
disciples did believe in a risen Christ because they were large
enough to be able to think farther than they could think clearly,
and because they were able to push the chariot of their convictions
over a road that had not been logically paved. And undoubtedly when
Thomas did finally accept Christ it was not because he had reasoned
Him out in his mind nor fingered Him out by pressing his hands into
the print of the nails, but because of having had divinely wrought
in him a capacity for larger persuasions than his mental and moral
contractedness had been hitherto able to accommodate.
And that is still the way in which we have to acquire the art of
great believing, the art of immense assurance of faith and the
triumphant joy that is bound to go along with it. A world that is
only large enough to contain our petty employments, or to contain
our small pleasures and paltry lusts, is not a world big enough
to have room in it for a human Son of God or for His immortal
escape from the tomb. We might convert our Church into an Easter
conservatory and crowd floor, galleries and chancel with a chorus of
as many angels as heralded the advent, and all of this be a splendid
tribute to the Lord of the resurrection and a splendid memorial
of the great Easter event, but the prime point of all is for us
each inwardly to grow to the proportions of so august an event, to
be inwardly equal to the cordial and settled entertainment of so
thrilling a thought, to have created in us such a sense of vast
spiritual territory margining this small world of commonplace, as
will give abundant space for transactions conducted on so large a
scale as that of the marvelous birth, the death in whose presence
the sun was darkened, and the great rising from the grave that broke
down the walls between this world and the other, converted the
coffin into a cradle of life eternal, and swung wide the doors of
paradise.
It is our prayer that the wide view opened before us by this
memorial season may stimulate us to higher levels of thought;
create for us a world too large to be filled with the small and
passing interests and commonplace incidents of life; destroy for
us in that way the obstinacy of antecedent objection; mental
reluctance and moral antagonism be dissolved in the warm light of
the larger prospect, till we become able to recognize Jesus in the
gracious face and scarred figure; and in the cordiality of complete
conviction to echo the words of the persuaded Thomas, "My Lord and
my God."
PATTON
GLORIFICATION THROUGH DEATH
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
FRANCIS LANDEY PATTON, Presbyterian minister and educator, was
born in Bermuda in 1843. He studied at Knox College, Toronto, and
Princeton Seminary, New Jersey. From 1865 to 1871 he held many
pastorates, but in the latter year his work as a controversialist
and educator began. He took a prominent part in the ecclesiastical
trials of Prof. David Swing and Dr. C. A. Briggs, and was elected
to succeed Dr. McCosh in the presidency of Princeton in 1888, but
resigned in 1902, after which he was elected president of the
Princeton Seminary. He is a deep thinker and dialectician, and
a vigorous speaker on the theological subjects in which he is
interested.
PATTON
Born in 1843
GLORIFICATION THROUGH DEATH[4]
[4] Copyright, 1905, by _The Homiletic Review, New York_.
_Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall
into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit._--John xii., 24.
We all know that it was necessary for Christ to die, and that his
path lay through the valley of the shadow of death. I do not take
this text to illustrate this idea, but to concern myself with a
line of illustration which has no reference to His death, and so
will avoid the suggestion. We have here, in the first place, the
enunciation of a principle which goes far toward unifying the moral
and spiritual history of our world. Glorification through death is
a principle that may be seen in various spheres of observation,
and in the relation of the individual to the race. For instance, a
man of ordinary education has a family of boys and girls. He has
reached that time of life, the sure sign of middle age, perhaps a
little beyond, when he ceased to raise the question that he has
been raising about himself, How shall I make the best of myself?
and he begins to raise the question-the only question he thinks of
after that--What shall I do for them? "Well," he says, "I had but
a limited education; they shall have the best the country can give
or they are willing to take. I had but few opportunities; there is
no lack of opportunity for them. I had many a rough encounter when
I first set out in the world; they shall have the advantage of my
accumulated earnings to set them up in life."
Sure enough, the boys grow up and fill positions that the father and
mother did not fill, and could not fill; and by and by they all come
home again, and as they look on the dead man's face they say, or
rather they seem to say, "Father did well by us," and they may very
well say it. His hand had wrought for them; his head had thought
for them; his heart had beat for them; this is the long result--the
father lies in his coffin, and the children go their several ways
in life, and repeat in their own experience the story; and so "the
individual withers, and the world is more and more."
And this principle of glorification through death is illustrated
further in the fact that, when the lower forms of life or
civilization disappear to make room for the higher, the one
dominating phase of the doctrine of evolution is the seeming unity
with which it invests everything; because, imagine it true, and
there at once you see how moving are the poet's words:
I held it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
This is the story not of the potential, but of the actual. And
what is true of the material world is true of the spiritual world.
The history of the spiritual world is a history of displacement.
You may account for it by the love of glory or by the sentiment of
revenge, but we know that God's glory is the final cause, and it
is all explicable upon the great scale of divine providence. We
all understand that there is a definite relationship between our
present and the past, and that we to-day are the heirs of all that
civilization that has gone. Our acts are the result of all that has
gone before. They were the seed and we are the harvest: "Except a
corn of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth alone; but
if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." The mass of this early
civilization survives in the civilization of to-day. Where do you go
to find the origin of the great principle of civil liberty? Where
do you go, but to that crowd of sturdy peoples who lived along the
banks of the Rhine, and whom Tacitus describes, or to those sturdy
barons at Runnymede who extorted the Magna Charta from King John? It
is just as true in the sphere of science or philosophy. It is a far
cry back to Thales of Miletus, and yet our own boasted century, the
nineteenth, and this which may have boasts of its own, has a close
relation to the civilization of the very far past. Our astronomy
is different from their astrology, and our chemistry is different
from their alchemy, but they are closely associated. We see further
than they did sometimes, just because we are as pigmies borne on the
shoulders of a giant.
This principle of glorification through death is illustrated once
more in that a new and expanded form of life is the fruit of death.
Take the railroad at the proper season of the year, and see the
corn standing as a dazzling glory in the fertile fields of the
golden West. Mark how towers herald the approach to the towns and
cities, and ask what they stand there for? These are the nation's
treasure-houses. These are the storehouses of the world. This is the
annual coronation of nature, and simply so many illustrations of
the text: "Except a corn of wheat fall into the earth and die, it
abideth alone; but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit."
Change the illustration and borrow one from the humbler phases of
the animal world, like the caterpillar, which eats up the floor
of the leaf on which it creeps, until, by and by, as it begins to
realize that its life is nearly done, it sets its house in order,
turns undertaker, weaves itself a silken shroud, and awaits the
dawning of its resurrection day, and soars away a bright-winged
butterfly--a beautiful illustration of the text: "Except a corn of
wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth alone; but if it die,
it bringeth forth much fruit." That is the story of our life. We are
born, and we grow; we go on our way, renew our infancy with impaired
faculties, and then we pass away. Life is a battle, and we win our
greatest victory when we lie down on that battle-field and die. Life
is a race, and the goal is at the grave. Life is a journey, and the
path that we take lies straight for the valley of the shadow of
death. The valley is dark, but beyond the darkness and across the
river I see the lights of the celestial city; I get an echo of the
angels' song, and the glimpse that I get tells me that it is worth
all it costs to die.
The principle of glorification through death is illustrated in the
death of Judaism. Judaism was a divinely founded institution--a
theological seminary. The purpose of it was to disseminate the
knowledge of the one living and true God. With the approach of the
pagan world and Christianity it gathered up its energies to give
birth to Jesus of Nazareth. That is what it existed for; and in
the throes of the birth-struggle Judaism died. Let us not speak
reproachfully of Judaism, for the glory of Christianity is the glory
of Judaism with an added glory: "Except a corn of wheat fall into
the earth and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth
forth fruit."
Once more (for this is our Lord's own illustration concerning
Himself), the principle of glorification through death is
illustrated in the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ
Himself. We see Jesus made a little lower than the angels and
crowned with glory and honor. He suffered that we might conquer.
He drank the bitter cup in order that we might taste something of
the sweetness of the joys of His Father's house. He has settled the
question of His own place, and of our place too, in the scale of
being. The question whether the finite and the infinite can ever
come together has been solved in the doctrine of the incarnation. We
do not want any more to sing the old song, which never amounted to
very much in the way of music or poetry:
I want to be an angel,
And with the angels stand,
A crown upon my forehead,
A harp within my hand.
We do not want anything of the sort. Angels never rise so high nor
stand so low as man. They know nothing about sin or repentance or
salvation through Jesus Christ, and are not worthy to sit with Him
who judges the ten tribes of Israel.
This text not only fastens on us this principle of glorification
through death, but, in the second place, it gives us a twofold
vindication of death, the first being the perils of survivorship,
and the second being the promise of grace. Death is one of the most
philosophical things in the world; and if you put yourselves in
the right attitude toward it, it is one of the kindest agencies in
nature. There is such a thing as a time to die; for two reasons at
least.
One is the solitude of old age--the peril of survivorship--"Except
a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone";
it abideth alone. You can imagine a person very old. His eyes have
grown dim. Generations have grown old and died, but he still lives
on. He is too old to take kindly to the new ideas, or to see much
reason for the changes taking place. He is too old to have an
interest in the present, too old to have any friends, and at last
he lives, and lives, and lives, until he seems like a monumental
intrusion into the present, an object that people stop to look at
when they are in a reflective mood and wish to mark the flight of
years. Who would not court a new-made grave rather than risk the
perils of survivorship?
Then there is the promise of grace. Our blest Lord hallowed the
grave by His presence, and left it upon the morning of the third
day. The promise of Christ gives us a connection with His own
glorious resurrection; and planted with Him in His death, we shall
be with Him in His glory. And so the message comes to you and to
me: Be not afraid. Do not hesitate to go down, even into the
grave. Our Lord has not made it unnecessary for us to die, but He
has robbed death of its terrors. He has made easy the approach; He
has festooned the entrance with flowers; and we ride through its
portals, singing as we go, "O grave, where is thy victory? O death,
where is thy sting?" and we turn to discover that the door of death
is the gate of heaven.
Again, this text teaches one other truth. As we read it, we can not
very well help being imprest with the idea that there is embodied
in it the thought that there are two contrasted modes of being: a
fruitless conservation and a prolific decay. The seed corn is very
tenacious of life, and there is a story that grains taken from an
Egyptian mummy have been planted and have germinated in English
gardens. I believe that this is not so, but the tenacity of wheat
in respect to life is true. It abideth; but it abideth alone.
Let it reproduce itself, and by and by there will be enough of
harvest to feed a nation. We must make a choice between a fruitless
conservation and prolific decay. And this choice comes to us in
so many ways. We see it in the sphere of prejudice. Prejudice is
often, but it is not always, right. It is very often misplaced or
perpetuated beyond a time when it does any good. (You never find
a man cherishing a prejudice, because he says he is "standing up
for a principle.") It was good enough when he started; it served
its purpose at first; but it has outlived its usefulness, and is
now just a prejudice. A good many years ago, at the foundation of
the London Missionary Society, a speaker said, "We stand to-day at
the funeral of bigotry." There is not a word of objection to that,
except that these obsequies have been so unduly protracted. God send
the day when men shall recognize the lineament of Jesus Christ in
one another's face, whether they be Presbyterians, Episcopalians,
or what! And this principle, this choice, whether there shall be a
conservation that is fruitless, or an expenditure that is generous,
meets us everywhere. It meets us in our relationship to the past.
There is a sort of medievalism cherished and fostered by some
people with an odor of sanctity--they love things which are old.
And there is a vandalism that destroys the old, and worships the
new, because it is new. My friends, they are both wrong. Let us look
at our inheritance of the past in proof of this. Hold fast to that
which is true, and do not hold anything that is not. Read the great
formularies of worship with the critical light of modern thought,
and hold on to that which is true. The Jerusalem Chamber is not holy
ground, the Westminster divines were not inspired. If they said what
was true, it is because of the truth of what they say that we hold
on to it, not because they said it. And what is true in regard
to these formulas holds true in reference to our own individual
life. But there are times, I suppose, when people who live in a
city as busy as this is, and where the engagements of the week run
over into two weeks, and where every hour has its own employment,
there are times, I suppose, even here that people have leisure to
sit still while the fire burns; and in these choice stolen hours,
I suppose, figures of long ago come out upon the canvas, and stand
there in bold relief; and we say that they were happy days. Imagine
that dear old room, and those pictures of long ago coming before
us, when our imagination was all aglow. I can imagine that the
door-bell might ring, and that one of those that we have not seen
for fifty years was announced. I can imagine the conversation that
would ensue. We would talk excitedly for twenty minutes, and then
the conversation would flag, and before the hour was up we would be
completely disillusioned, and would see that our paths had diverged.
All that sort of thing was good in its way and time, but it is not
the time for it now. Of course, we must have a foundation for the
house. Still we do not live in the cellar. We live upstairs in the
sunlight, and experience says we do well. These past incidents of
life are just the foundation, and it is the superstructure after
all that you build upon; and unless a man is willing to part with
the past, he is going to make a mistake. Unless we learn to do
better to-day the things that we did yesterday, and paint a better
picture to-day, and write a better poem than the last, and are
more proficient in our arts, we are just as good as dead. We are
eternally improving and moving on. There is a conservation, stedfast
and still; and there is a forgetfulness and a generous prodigality
of past attainments that is prolific of vast results. There is
your health. What are you going to do with it? You had better wear
out than rust out any day. You can see people who make themselves
obnoxious to you by their everlasting attitude of complaint. There
is something better for a man to do than to take care of his health,
and he will probably live longer if he does not. Is a man who has
an intellect expected to have nothing better to do than to play
nurse to his body that he has to summer in the North, and winter
in the South, and to clothe with purple and fine linen, and fare
sumptuously every day, and give it now and then a trip to Europe--a
body that is bound to die? There is your life. What are you going
to do with it? There is your money. What are you going to do with
it? Why, invest it, and be careful about your security, and don't be
careful about the interest, and keep on investing and reinvesting,
until it will take the figures of astronomy to count it. As fortunes
go now, astronomy is not in it. Invest it, and then what do you
do? There are so many things that some people might do and do do,
that so many more people might do. They might perpetuate their
names by doing something for the Church, for education, and for the
world, and its moral, spiritual, and intellectual advance. God be
praised for this! You, who have cast your bread of benevolence upon
the waters of Christian philanthropy hope that you will receive it
after many days. This world's history shows that our forests have
not been cleared by the brawn of men who lived in comfortable homes.
How have our liberties been secured? By the blood of men who counted
no service too great. Can we do that? William of Orange might have
lived a long life, but he stript himself of land and fortune, and
planted himself in deadly opposition to Alva, and died a monument
to the fall of Spanish tyranny. Yes, my friends, in humbler spheres
it is your privilege, and mine, in the house of this tabernacle, to
choose between the alternative of a conservation which is fruitless
and an expenditure that is substantial, generous, and prodigal. It
is a choice for us to make. Wrap yourselves in your mummy folds, and
live for yourself or, in generous forgetfulness, live for God and
country, and for fellow men while you live, and when the hour comes,
without fear, if need be, drop into the ground and die.
Help us, O Lord, to endure as good soldiers of Jesus Christ. Help
us to do our duty so completely that every day we do better and
become better and be with Christ. Help us that we may be ready for
death, and in that last encounter may be as brave as in all the
other encounters of our lives. Give us this faith to the end. For
Christ's sake. Amen.
SCOTT HOLLAND
THE STORY OF A DISCIPLE'S FAITH
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND, English clergyman and author, was born at
Wimbledon in 1847. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, at which
university he was distinguished for learning and character. In
1844 he was appointed Canon of St. Paul's Cathedral, London. He
has published "Logic and Life"; "Creed and Character," and other
volumes.
SCOTT HOLLAND
Born in 1847
THE STORY OF A DISCIPLE'S FAITH
_Then went in also that other disciple which came first to the
sepulchre, and he saw and believed._--John xx., 8.
John, the beloved disciple, has given his witness, has made his
confession. What he once touched, and tasted, and handled, that he
has declared unto us. It was the shining, the epiphany of God the
Father which he and the twelve had discovered, tabernacled close
at their side in the body of Christ. "We saw his glory, the glory
as of God himself." So he pronounces. Yet still his listeners sit
on about his feet. They hear great words, but these words are the
end of a long and anxious meditation. The apostle is giving us, is
giving them his completed conclusions--yes, and they have accepted
the conclusions; they hold them fast. But it is not enough to know
what they ought to believe, tho that is much--they must also know
the process by which the conclusion is to be reached. They must
reproduce in themselves the living story of its formation. They
must be conscious of its stages, its degrees, and its growth. They
can not surely be as reapers entering into the labors of others
who went forth weeping with good seed. They must feel their own
faith grow, first the blade, then the ear, and so at last, in ample
richness, the full corn in the ear; and therefore they went on
wondering. "Let us hear it all," they say; "tell us of that day when
first it came to you that something wonderful was there. Tell us
how you slowly learned the great mystery; and then tell us when and
how it was that the full truth broke from your heart and from your
lips. Tell us this, that so we, too, may say with you and with ten
thousand times ten thousand: 'Worthy is the Lamb that was slain.'"
This is the question that St. John sets himself to answer; and you
can see that it is so by this, that he begins his gospel, not with
our Lord's own beginning, the baptism by John, but with the day
on which the disciples began to believe on Him; and he ends it,
not with our Lord's own ending, His ascension, but with the first
completed confession of Jesus by an apostle--the confession of
Thomas. This achieved, his gospel is done; he has nothing to add but
one scene that to him was full of tender personal interest.