established. Let us carefully turn to it, for it is a revelation of
the apostle's own heart. The old man himself is bidding us draw
near and taste of his own experiences. He unlocks his soul to us
that he may help us to mount up into his assured peace, so calm, so
sure, so strong. He sits there murmuring always his: "Come, Lord
Jesus, even come"; and round about him, enthroned in the majesty
of age, is that mysterious silence in which the voices of the
Spirit and the Bride say: "Come." And yet he can turn from that
upward vision and bend his eyes back on us--on us, so perplexed,
and troubled, and hesitating, and fearful, and bewildered. He can
yearn to make us fellowship in his joy. "Little children, it is the
last hour. Even now are there many antichrists. And now, my little
children, abide in him. My little children, let no man lead you
astray, for this is the true God and eternal life; and therefore, O
my children, keep yourselves from idols." So tender, so beseeching,
the fatherly love! And in the name of that love he sets himself
to tell the story of his own conversion, how he had begun. He can
recall every tiny detail of that first critical hour. It began
on the day when John the Baptist cast off the hopes that were so
eagerly bent upon him; for he it was, the Baptist, and not the Lord
Jesus, who first woke in their hearts that spiritual movement which
became Christianity. He roused first the cry of the new faith, and
passionately they had given him their souls--they and all who,
seeing John, mused in their hearts what would be the Christ. Even
the Pharisees of Jerusalem felt the excitement and shared the hope;
and it was to their deputation that the Baptist made his great
repudiation: "No; I am not it, not the Christ; no, nor Elias, nor a
prophet. I am nought but a flying cry in the wilderness, a cry that
floats by on the wind and perishes. Not I, but another--another who
comes after me; yea, who is now standing among you, even tho you
know it not." So he confest. He denied not, but confest; so brave
a heart he had! All those hearts were at his service, a world of
devotion all lying there at his feet; but he would not be tempted.
He knew his own limits; he would have none of it. He confest, and
denied not: "I am not the Christ."
And then came the great moment. It was the very next day after
the great confession--so exact is the apostle's memory. The very
day after, John saw Jesus coming toward him, and a wonderful word
broke from him: "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the
sins of the world." Taketh away the sin! Oh, the peace of such a
promise to those who had been washed in Jordan, and had repented,
and had confest, and yet found their burden of sin as miserable,
as intolerable as ever! The words haunted them; and when, the day
following, John uttered them again, two of them at least could
not rest. Their hearts burned to know more. Who is this strange
visitant--so quiet, so silent, so unobserved? He makes no sign. He
says no word. He invites no attention. He does not even stop to
look. He just passes by; and, lo! He is already passed--in another
moment He will have gone. They must act for themselves then. They
will force Him to stop and tell them the secret. So two of them that
heard John speak followed Him--two of them, and John the beloved,
who now tells us the story, was one of the two. And now that they
followed, He, the Stranger, must turn and speak. For the first time,
then, He looked upon them with that look which again and again had
power to draw a soul, by one glance, out of the night of sin into
the life of eternal light. He turned and saw them following, and
it was then they heard His voice first speak--that voice which by
its cry could raise the dead. "Whom seek ye?" That was all. And
they--they hardly knew what to say--only they must see Him, must go
with Him; and they stammered out: "Rabbi, where dwellest thou?" And
He said: "Come and see."
Come and see! It was all as quiet and natural and easy as any
ordinary interview. No one could have seen anything unusual. Just a
few words of salutation--just three short sentences that could be
said in half a minute. And yet that sealed their lot for eternity.
That was the moment of decision. "Come and see." They went and saw.
So intense is the apostle's memory of that blest hour that he can
never forget the very hour of the day. It was just ten o'clock when
he got to the house. They stopt there with Him that night; and in
the morning they were sure of what they had found--so sure that
neither of them could rest until he had hurried off with the good
news to find and bring his brother. Andrew found his brother before
John could find James; or else it was that both went at once to
seek for Peter, and Andrew found him first. Anyhow, when Peter was
found, both were prepared to assert, "We have found the Christ."
And so they brought the great chief to his Master; and in a moment
the Master knew what He had won in that loyal, loving soul, and He
turned those deep eyes upon him, and named him by his new name.
"Thou art Simon, the son of Jonas; thou shalt be called Cephas."
So it all began. The very next day after that the Master Himself
added one other to the number--Philip a friend of Peter's and
Andrew's--and Philip brought Nathaniel; and these were the little
band whom the Master took with Him from Jordan to Cana--the seed of
that great Church which now reigns from Babylon to Rome.
"And what next"--so the listeners ask--"what was the next step
made?" Three days later, at Cana, for the first time, came that
strange secret of which the apostle had spoken. The glory shone out
with a sudden flash from the deeps within Him; a word of power leapt
out--very quietly. Very few saw or knew it. But as the few saw there
the white water redden into wine, they knew, and felt the wonder
of that change which had passed over their own being. That word of
power was at its work within them, transforming them from out of
sickly impotence into splendid energy. They saw now what it was that
had happened when the Lord spoke, that it would have the same power
whether He spoke to matter or spirit, to body or soul; whether He
said: "Thy sins be forgiven thee," or "Rise up and walk." As water
into wine, so the old into the new.
So the light flashed; so the secret made its first disclosure. It
had vanished again, for His hour had not yet come; but they had seen
it, and this is John's enduring record, remembered by us this day,
that there first at Cana Jesus manifested His glory, and there His
disciples first believed in Him.
And what next did they learn? It was at Jerusalem, the Passover
feast. The Master made His first entry and startled them, for He who
was so quiet and reserved burned with a sudden fury as He looked
upon the temple of Jehovah. Very, very rarely did He show Himself
excited or disturbed; but then He was terrible. He bound together
a scourge of small cords. He drove the cattle in front of Him; He
dashed over the money-changers' tables. And John can recall still
the look of the coins as they poured down upon the pavement. And
they, the disciples, wondered at the violence of the emotion, until
a word from an old Psalm came into their minds, and they remembered
how it was written that the zeal of the Lord's house should be in a
prophet's heart like a devouring fire.
At that time, too, the Lord Himself gave a sign and spoke a word,
which at the time the disciples could make nothing of, and forgot.
It was about the temple being destroyed and raised again in three
days. They forgot it; but long after, when He had risen from the
dead, the old words came back to them: "After three days I shall
raise it again"; and they remembered then how He had spoken them two
years before His death, and as they remembered, they believed....
And how can we stop to follow the apostle through all the wonderful
story? Yet just one thing we can not pass over--the awful hours of
crisis in Galilee. It came just when all looked brightest, when
the people were rushing round Him, and would have made Him a king.
They would have gone with Him to the death. But He--He threw it all
away to the winds. He hurried off the twelve in a body across the
lake, for they had caught the crowd's enthusiasm, and could not be
calmed. He scattered the crowd; He fled back Himself alone into the
dark hills, and on the morrow at Capernaum, He broke it all down by
a word which staggered the rising belief. It was a saying about His
body and His blood--a very hard saying. Not only were the Pharisees
furious, but His own followers were dumfounded. They could not bear
it, could not believe. They fell away, and walked no more with Jesus.
"And you, O disciple dearly loved, what of you and your brethren?"
"Most terrible, most bitter that hour, my children," the old man
answers. "We walked trembling, quaking, behind him. We were cowed
and disheartened, until he the Master felt himself the chill of our
dismay, and He turned to us and challenged our failing faith. 'Will
ye also go away?' Oh, the shame of being open to a charge of such
meanness! The very tenderness of the question and of the reproach
recalled and recovered us. We knew nothing. We could explain
nothing. Every clue was lost. The darkness was thickening over our
heads, our hearts were failing for fear, our souls were sinking in
the great water-floods, earth was falling from us; struggle, and
anguish, and doubt shook us with wild alarm; and yet, even so as
he turned his eyes upon us, the old unconquerable faith woke, and
stirred, and quickened; and with a rush, as of a mighty wind, it
lifted us; and out from Peter's lips broke the words which saved
us--the words which sealed us to Him forever: 'Will we go away? Nay,
Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life!' So
we spoke with burning hearts, and yet through and through us still
those strange eyes of His pierced. Deep below all our emotion He
penetrated. Quite calmly He weighed its worth; and in one of us even
then He detected a flaw which would widen and worsen. One of us,
He knew, hung back from echoing St. Peter's confession. One spirit
there was there that could not throw off its dismay, one dark spirit
in whom the hard saying was the seed of bitter and poisonous fruit.
'Have I not chosen you twelve, and yet one of you is a devil?' He
spoke of Judas Iscariot, who should betray him."
So they followed and clung, the trembling band; clung through all
the narrowing days in which the Jewish enmity hardened itself into
the hate of hates; clung even tho their souls fell away from the
rapture of St. Peter to the desperate wail of Thomas: "Let us go
with him that at least we may die with him"; clung even through
the terrors of that last evening, when they sat shaking with the
very shudder of death, and the soul of the Master Himself was
trouble-tossed, and there was the scent of treachery in the air, and
the end was very near, and He spake dim, dark words that they could
not follow--only they knew one thing, that He was to be taken from
them, and they sat shrouded in a mighty sorrow such as no assurances
even of His could lessen or lift. One moment there was indeed even
then in which they seemed suddenly to lay hold of His meaning. "Now
we believe," they cried. "Now we are sure that thou camest forth
from God." So they cried, and yet He met their professions with a
sorrowful hesitation. "Do ye now believe? Yea; the hour is all but
come when ye will all flee and leave me alone." How sad and cowed
they felt at the rebuff! Were they then never to rise into the joy
of clear and entire belief? Yes; it came at last. Blest assurance!
Let John tell how it was reached by him.
Two points he singles out for himself as marking epochs of his
own conviction, and in them both we are let inside the workings
of his innermost mind. And how curious, yet how natural is the
working! For in every hour of agony the mind becomes strangely and
fearfully alert to very little things. It is sensitive to sudden
and ineffaceable impressions. It is touched into the swiftest and
subtlest activity by the tiniest touches of detail. Often in the
supreme moment of a dark tragedy, the fibers of the imagination seem
to close round some minute incident, like the ticking of a clock in
the hush of a death-chamber; and never throughout the long years
that follow can it detach that tiny incident from its memory of the
black hour. And so with St. John. He stood below the bitter cross,
and he saw the nails beaten through the hands and feet, and he heard
the last loud cry, and yet still his despair hung heavy as death
upon his soul, until, just at the touch of the soldier's spear,
there broke from the dead side a little jet of blood and water.
What was it that he saw and felt? What was it that so startled him?
Why could that little jet of blood and water never pass out of his
sight? Why should it haunt him sixty years after, as still his heart
wonders over the mysterious witness of the water and the blood? We
can not tell. Perhaps he could never tell. Only his spirit woke with
a start. Only a strange tremor shook him, and somehow just then,
just at that little pivot moment, he must break off all his story,
to declare with abrupt and quivering emphasis: "This is the disciple
that wrote these things. He it is who saw the water and the blood,
and he knows that his record is true."
And once again, in the haste of the resurrection morning, what was
the moment and what was the scene which turned his despair into
belief? It was the moment at which he stooped down and saw within
the empty tomb the folded napkin and the linen clothes. What did he
notice? Why, that the napkin that had been round the Master's head
was not lying with the linen clothes, but was rolled up in a place
by itself. A tiny, tiny thing! Yet somehow it was that which he saw
and never forgot. It was that which he could never omit from his
story of the resurrection--the rolled-up napkin lying apart from the
linen clothes. Was it the sudden sense that struck him of order and
seemliness as of a thing premeditated, intended? Was it the reaction
of detecting the quiet tokens of deliberate purpose there, where
all had seemed to him a very chaos of confusion? Who can say? Only
just then a key was somewhat turned and a bolt shot back somewhere
within his breast, and a secret flashed in upon him, and a thrill of
insight rushed over him, and his blindness fell off as it had been
scales, and a quiver of hope shot up like a flame, and a new light
broke over him, and he passed at one bound out of death into life.
"Then entered in, therefore, that other disciple which came first to
the tomb, and he saw and believed."
My brethren, where do you stand? How far have you come in this
pathway of faith? Are you yet at the beginning, looking wistfully,
with hungry eyes, after a hundred gallant human heroes who point you
this way and that? Are you musing in your heart which of them may
be your guide and master, which is the Christ? Good, and fair, and
high they may be; but they must all confess it, they can not deny
it--they are not the Christ. And all of them who are honest will
earnestly assure you, "It is not I, but another." Oh, and that other
even now standeth among you, tho you know Him not yet; and there is
a voice gone out upon Him which has gone out upon none other ever
born of woman, with this witness, "Behold the Lamb of God, which
taketh away the sin of the world!"
Consider it. What an assurance! Who is there that has ever been
brave enough to accept such a salutation without a whisper of
protest, without a shadow of a scruple? Who is this that dares to
stand up before the entire mass of His fellows and say, "Come, all
who are weary and heavy-laden--come, all who are burdened sorely
with sin--come all to me--I will give you rest?" Who is He? Look
at Him. He is passing even now before you. Follow Him. He is very
quiet, and still, and silent; but follow Him. He will turn at last
and speak, and invite you--invite you a little further. "Master,
where dwellest thou?" "Come and see."
O Jesus, Lord and lover of souls, there are many of us laden with
sickness and sin, so many that are sad with doubt and fear, that
are asking: "Master, where dwellest thou?" Oh, let them even come
home with Thee and see. Go and see. Abide with Him, talk with Him.
Wait upon Him. Learn His words. Take up His gospels. Read them with
care, with silence to yourself, with thought and prayer. Abide with
Him one night at least, that you may in the morning be able to tell
your fellows: "I have found the Christ." And then suddenly, now and
again, a light flashes, and a glory is made manifest to you. Some
touch of Divine benediction will break out of the secret silence,
some sudden joy, some gift of power. It is as at Cana with you when
the water ran into wine.
Yet this when it comes, remember, is not the end. It is but a
pledge. You may not cling to the blessings and the gifts of faith.
They flash and disappear, and you will not be surprized to find that
you have yet a long road to travel--a road of disappointment, of
increasing failure, of gathering pain, of enlarging doubt--doubt!
why not? Doubt of the ways and the methods of God. Doubt of the
path as the darkness encompasses, doubt of Christ's meaning, of
His wisdom, of His readiness, of His care, of His guidance. The
obscurity may even deepen as you advance along the road of faith.
The storm may grow blacker and fiercer, for the higher your faith
in God, the darker will be your despair at His failure to make His
name good. And you will find Him fail. He will seem to come so
little way in the world; He will seem to miss opportunities. It is
very hard to believe in One in whom others believe less and less
every day. And then it is, when all are falling away and the hard
sayings of theology begin to harass and repel, then it is that you
must call with all your might upon the St. Peter within you that you
may have the heart of fire that will feel but one thing, will feel
that if the world fell into ruins, and if the power of God Himself
be hidden, yet there stands the Christ still facing you with the
question: "Will you go away? Will you fail as others failed me?"
Will you feel then but this, just that you must send out your faith
in the one passionate cry: "Lord, thou art there, and that is all.
Thou hast the words of eternal life. To whom can I go? Tho all men
forsake thee yet will not I; and in spite of all, I believe, and am
sure that thou art the Christ, the holy one of God?" That is the
faith which is felt indeed as a rock under the feet, and to such
faith the love of God will make itself more and more manifest. You
will so trust Him in the black night, you who can walk on knowing
nothing but that Christ goes before you, you who mutually cling
with the violence of an ineradicable love to Him Who has enthralled
you, you will find yourselves carried on day after day, you know
not how, until at last you find yourselves enclosed in some upper
chamber with the Master. Yes, and there the secrets of His love
are disclosed, and the mysteries of His counsels, and the hidden
wonder of His victory, and the strange glory of His consolation. You
will not know or understand all; you will feel yourselves held in
the grasp of a wisdom that reaches far and away beyond your little
day. You will inquire with stammering lips as Philip and Judas, not
Iscariot, and Thomas stammered in the upper chamber before you, and
the answer that He gives will be but dim; and yet you will know
enough to make you absolutely sure that the truth as you hold it in
Jesus is the truth that holds the world in one in God, and you will
be able to cry in glimpses of peculiar manifestation: "Lord, now
speakest thou plainly, and speakest no parable. Now I believe, and
have known, and am sure that thou camest forth from God." And yet
even that faith, the faith of roused feelings, may lapse again; even
that moment of blessing may lose its power over you. Yes, for only
when you become convinced not only of your possession of a Teacher
who once came on earth from God, but more, of a Lord living on the
far side of death, living in the might of a resurrection life, able
to stand by you in that life-giving might as you keep there with
the faithful in the upper chamber--able to feed you with His life
now from that home of His beyond the grave--only then, when you so
receive Him, and take of Him, and taste Him, and know yourselves
quickened in Him--only so will your last doubt pass away from you,
only so will the close of the crown of your faith be obtained,
and you will end--as the story of St. John ends--with the cry of
doubting Thomas, with his last doubt scattered--the cry in which the
perfected apostolic faith at last saluted its rising Master--"Jesus
Christ, my Lord and my God."
STALKER
TEMPTATION
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
JAMES STALKER, professor of Church History in the United Free Church
College, Aberdeen, was born at Crieff in 1848, and was educated at
the universities of Edinburgh, Halle, and Berlin. He has been an
incumbent of many pastorates in Scotland, and has published "Life of
Jesus Christ"; "Life of St. Paul"; "The Preacher and His Models,"
etc. In 1891 he delivered the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching,
at Yale, and is examiner for the degree of B.D. in Aberdeen
University.
STALKER
Born in 1848
TEMPTATION
_There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to men;
but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above
that ye are able; but will with temptation also make a way to
escape, that ye may be able to bear it._--1 Cor. x., 13.
Once, when I was going to address a gathering of young men, I asked
a friend what I should speak to them about. His answer was: There
is only one subject worth speaking to young men about, and that is
temptation.
Of course, he did not mean this literally: he only meant to
emphasize the importance of this subject. Was he not right? You
remember, in the story of the Garden of Eden, where the tree
which represented temptation stood? It stood in the midst of the
garden--just at the point where all the walks converged, where Adam
and Eve had to pass it every day. This is a parable of human life.
We are out of paradise now; but the tree of temptation still stands
in our life where it stood then--in the midst; where all the roads
meet; where we must pass it every day--and every man's weal of wo
depends on the attitude to it which he takes up.
There are six attitudes in any of which we may stand to
temptation--first, we may be tempted; second, we may have fallen
before temptation; third, we may be tempting others; or, fourth,
we may be successfully resisting temptation; fifth, we may have
outlived temptation; sixth, we may be assisting others to overcome
their temptations.
As I should like these six attitudes to be remembered, let me
give them names; and these I will borrow from the politics of
the continent of Europe. Any of you who may glance at times into
the politics of France or Germany will be aware that in their
legislative assemblies there prevails a more minute division into
parties, or groups as they are called, than we are accustomed
to. In your politics you are content with two great historical
parties--Republicans and Democrats. But, as I have said, in
Continental parliaments the members are divided into groups. You
read of the group of the left center, the group of the left, and the
group of the extreme left; the group of the right center, the group
of the right, and the group of the extreme right. I do not pretend
that even these are all; but I will take these as the six names I
need for characterizing the six attitudes in which men may stand to
temptation.
On the left there are three--first, the group of the left center, by
which I mean those who are being tempted; second, the group of the
left, by which are meant those who have fallen before temptation;
third, the group of the extreme left, or those who are tempters of
others. And on the right there are three groups--the fourth group,
that of the right center, containing those who are successfully
resisting temptation; the fifth, the group of the right, or those
who have outlived their temptations; and the sixth and last, the
group of the extreme right, that is to say, those who are helping
others to resist their temptations.
Let me run rapidly over these six groups.
I. The group of the left center or those who are being tempted.
With this one I begin; because we have all been in it. Whether we
have been in the other groups or not, we have all been in this one:
we have all been tempted. One of the first things we were told when
we were quite young was that we should be tempted--that we should
have to beware of evil companions; and there is not one of us in
whose case this prediction has not come true.
There is, indeed, no greater mystery of providence than to
understand the unequal proportions in which temptation is
distributed. Some are comparatively little tempted; others are
thrown into a fiery furnace of it seven times heated. There are in
the world sheltered situations in which a man may be compared to a
ship in the harbor, where the waves may sometimes heave a little,
but a real storm never comes; there are other men like the vessel
which has to sail the high seas and face the full force of the
tempest. Many here must know well what this means. Perhaps you know
it so well that you feel inclined to say to me, Preacher, you know
nothing about it; if you had to live where we live--if you had to
associate with the companions whom we have to work with, and hear
the kind of language which we have to listen to every hour of the
day--you would know better the truth of what you are saying. Do not
be too sure of that. Perhaps I know as well about it as you do.
Perhaps my library is as dangerous a place for me as your workshop
is for you. Solitude has its temptations as well as society. St.
Anthony, before his conversion, was a gay and fast young man of
Alexandria; and, when he was converted, he found the temptations of
the city so intolerable that he fled into the Egyptian desert and
became a hermit; but he afterward confest that the temptations of a
cell in the wilderness were worse than those of the city. It would
not be safe to exchange our temptations for those of another man;
every one has his own.