that salvation may become a known and felt reality? We have to do
something. We have _to do_, as we are told by Him who only can tell us
what it is we have to do: "Will to do the will," says the Christ, "and
ye shall know." And if we are really seeking a basis of assurance in
His saving power, we ought surely to take Him at His word, when He
tells us how to find it. It is not first through assured belief that
we become sure of Christ, it is by doing Christ's will that we become
sure of our belief. Have we to explain to a child the mechanism of its
limbs before it can attempt to walk? The impulse comes, and the child
walks, that is all. But the child has to walk to know that it can walk.
But what, you ask me, are we to say about sudden conversions, of which
we once heard so much, and which we are still taught to seek and
expect? What, I ask you, about those sudden flashes of insight which
at times seem to reveal in a moment a way out of difficulties which for
years we have sought in vain? A man told me lately about a period in
his life when through drink and betting he was reduced from a
prosperous man to a wreck in body and means. "I was down," he said,
"low as a human creature could get in this world." He was converted to
God, and from the very hour his change came, he declared that his
craving for drink, and mania for gambling, dropped out of his being, as
a piece of dead matter falls away from a living organism. And there
are such cases, thank God, but we must not make our teaching about them
misleading by making it despotic. As in the instances of sudden
insight, we do not because we dare not say they are general, deny that
they occur. The soul-development on its immortal side is, for the most
part, gradual and slow. The life-faculty is there, but it often means
hard work, patient waiting, and great faith, to realize its presence
and bring out its power.
[2] It has been said that modern psychology confirms scientifically
this method of seeking and finding the truth. It teaches that action
has often to precede thought and feeling. If this is the word of
psychology, it is really in accord with the method of Jesus.
Practically all His teaching is addressed, not so much to the intellect
or to the emotions, but to the will. He does not put doing and
believing in opposition; in actual life they are really
indistinguishable parts of a healthy spiritual growth. But our Lord
does put doing before knowing, as He puts religion before theology, and
life before the understanding of life. His unmistakable object is to
constrain men to take action, rather than to wait for emotion, or even
for intellectual confidence and conviction.
As a matter of experience, we find at every turn on the road of life we
have to do things we do not want to do, to secure the things we want to
have. Necessity does not humour us, and that is the reason the world
owes so much to necessity. We may be very "superior" about dogmatism
in theology, but well for us that dogmatism will have no such nonsense
in life. It is just doing the duty that tasks us most, whatever our
feeling about it, which makes the difference between the worthy and the
unworthy in character; between the numerals and the ciphers in the
human world. It is doing, not what we would, but as we ought which
changes reluctance into interest, and the sense of futility into the
joy of achievement. It is doing what we know to be true which
illumines its ever-lasting significance. "You could write stories
which people would read," said Lecky repeatedly to George Eliot. She
did not believe him, and, strange as it may seem, she had almost a
morbid shrinking from making the attempt. But she did make it, and we
know with what results. The attempt to write a story had not only to
precede the belief that she could write one, it had to reveal the gift.
And so Jesus, who came to manifest God, says to you and me: My brother,
My sister, there is that in you which, brought out and cultivated, can
achieve in you the highest order and quality of life in this world, and
fit you for whatever environment lies beyond. Believe me. Just take
me at my word when I say to you, will to do my will, and doing it you
shall come to love it--and that is to be saved; for it is to be at one
with the Father in me. Leave your past, however unworthy it may be.
What I have done and suffered for you has atoned for all. Do your
part, and you, too, shall testify: "I live, and yet not I, but Christ
that liveth in Me."
This, then, is my position; and whether or not it answer to fact and to
Scripture, I leave with your judgment. I ought to have accomplished
something if I have made myself understood. It probably overlooks much
that many of you hold to be integral to the nature and meaning of
salvation. I have only to repeat, that what has been advanced is a
setting of this great subject; and I venture to urge it upon your
consideration. It now remains for me to notice very briefly one or two
further questions as I draw to a close.
What, I may be asked, are we expected, as young people, to understand
about the doctrines and dogmas of Christianity as necessary to an
intelligent religious faith? And what about feeling or emotion, which
is usually represented as a vital part of the driving power of
Christian life and conduct? Well, speaking for myself, I make no
pretension to the lofty disregard of doctrine which in so many quarters
seems to be regarded as the hall-mark of enlightened thinking. We do
well to beware of a so-called "breadth," which is but a pet euphemism
for thinness.
But after all, we can hold a thing for true, and yet find no
explanation of it which quite satisfies us. Theories about the heavens
have come and gone, but the stars remain. Christ was, before creeds
gathered about Him; and it is because He is, that men must formulate
doctrine to explain Him. I have long had the conviction that in
religion nothing really matters but the Spirit of Christ. This is not
to say that if we have, or claim to have, the Spirit of Christ, it
makes no difference whether we do, or do not, believe in the
"historical Christ." To my thinking such a position is nonsense. We
may as well talk about an effect without a cause. Spirit must needs
clothe itself with body. The "external may come in at different points
of the process, but the internal without the external cannot exist." I
am simply saying, that everything we need to know in a general sense
about Christian doctrine becomes intelligible and reasonable, not when
we approach Christ through our doubts and difficulties about doctrines,
but our doubts and difficulties through Christ. In Him is life, and
the life is the light of men. I care not for the moment what dogmas
about Christ you accept or reject; I ask you to think, and then say,
what heaven worth entering, of state or place, could close against us,
were we in the Spirit of Christ walking in the footsteps of Christ?
Then about feeling: Is there one of us who can say, that he, or she,
has never had the impulse that should lead to Christian decision? Long
as we make it possible for God to appeal to us, He will find His own
way. From Him is the impulse, whichever way it comes, but it is ours
to put it in practice. But just as we do not wait for feeling to take
us out to earn our bread, and keep a roof over our head, so it is a far
nobler thing to turn to God from a sense of duty, and conscience, and
spiritual need, than it is to depend upon feeling to make us do, what
not to do, with or without feeling, is our loss and our shame.
Do not wait for feeling. Begin your part in the work of your own
salvation. If feeling carry you into decision, and it sometimes does,
well and good. But for one case where feeling leads to decision there
are probably a score where feeling must be made by what follows
decision. Take care of doing, and feeling will take care of itself;
and as we rejoice in its inspiration, we shall realize that, perhaps
for the most part, it can come no other way. To have the joy of doing
good, we must do good. We cannot have the tonic and bracing sense of
vigour by saying we will climb the mountain. It is when we have scaled
its heights that we have the experience of a new physical creation.
Why wait, then, for what is waiting for us? The Divine Spirit is
universal and infinite. It is the mother-soul of the universe, with
eternal power and sweetness and beauty, and glory, shining down upon
all men, stimulating them to be nobler, to go up higher. And when we
accept the influence of the Holy Spirit seeking the divine in us, and
co-operate with it, we have found the answer to the question: What must
I do to be saved?
Does any one say, I ask again, that he has never had this impulse? As
truly can he say that he has never felt the sun. Let him take heed.
The sun sets, and it is night. There can be a night of the soul--the
darkest, blackest, most hopeless night of all.
"He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God
hath not life." To be saved is to live; and only to the life above us
can the life within us respond. Out of Christ we do not live; we but
exist. And existence at its highest estate has no power inherent in it
to cast out the selfishness and death that build a hell's despair, in
what might be the kingdom of heaven in our human life and world. Do we
want to be saved? Do we desire life? Then pray, and begin at once to
do what our heart and conscience tell us the Christ would have us do.
Will to do the will, and doing it we shall enter, gradually at first,
and then with more royal progress and joy unspeakable, into the truth
of His word: "Because I live, ye shall live also."
[1] Rev. W. L. Walker.
[2] Dr. Lyman Abbot.
DOES GOD HAVE FAIR-PLAY?
"Know therefore that the Lord thy God, he is God, the faithful
God."--Deut. vii. 9.
X
DOES GOD HAVE FAIR-PLAY?
A professor in one of our colleges, who is an acknowledged authority on
the prophets of the Old Testament, gave a course of lectures lately on
his own subject to a summer school of theology. His aim in one of
these prelections was to show how the prophet Jeremiah developed
himself by debate and discussion with God. At its close an elderly
clergyman, shaking the lecturer by the hand, said to him: "I was
delighted to hear what you said about Jeremiah. I myself have for
forty years preached the right and duty of men to stand up to their
Maker."
It was, to say the least, a crude way of expressing himself; but the
man had a meaning, and I think I know what it was. We may, to a large
extent, have grown out of the old Calvinistic representation of God;
but its reflex influence abides in a greater degree than we perhaps
realize. This representation puts its emphasis, not so much upon the
Fatherhood as upon the Sovereignty of God. It holds man responsible
for the moral quality of his actions to God; but all reference to man's
claims upon God are met with the stern question: "Shall the thing
formed say to Him that formed it, Why hast Thou made me thus?"
Whatever the Apostle may have meant, this question has been used to
support an intolerable position, and the clergyman spoke out his revolt
against it. His divinely implanted instinct of justice assured him
that a God, who is to command our intellectual confidence and
heart-trust, must, while exercising the prerogatives of a Sovereign,
accept the responsibilities of a Father. Family life would break all
to pieces if we as fathers did not carry our recognition of the claims
and rights of children past a severe, however just, parental authority
and control into the larger realm of wise liberty and undoubted
affection. And it is out of the best and highest we know of our
relations to one another, that we are to understand what we ought to be
to God, and what God has promised to be to us.
For God not only affirms His responsibility to us, He challenges us to
say, whether, having done our part, we have weighed His part in the
balance and found it wanting. It is the declaration of the Scriptures
from beginning to end, that the Lord our God is a faithful God.
Through the mouth of one of His prophets He confronts us with a
question which, were it not His own question, would hurt us as almost
profane: "What iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they have
gone far from me?"
We need not shrink, therefore, from talking reverently about the
responsibility of God, for He asks us to build our trust, not only in
His promises, but upon our experience of the faithfulness with which He
has kept His promises. What, then, is our testimony? Has God been
faithful to us; and if so, are we justified in assuming that the same
faithfulness is the experience of others?
"Know therefore that the Lord thy God, He is God, the faithful God."
Take this affirmation on its lowest grounds--as touching material
things. It is not said that man does not live by bread, when it is
said that he lives not by bread alone. We may insist upon it, that
material concerns are not worthy to be compared with the things of the
spirit; but this does not affect the truth, that while we are on this
planet we must have material things. Jesus has told us that, "Our
Heavenly Father knoweth what things we have need of before we ask Him."
It does not follow that the things we desire are the things we need.
Christ does not pledge the divine faithfulness to our desires; it is
pledged to our needs.
And how is it redeemed, even in the case of the latter? Think for a
moment of the poverty there is amid all our plenty. Think of the evils
and misery that are the consequence as well as the cause of poverty.
There are thousands of men, and women, and children dying every year in
India from want and sheer starvation. We are told that, in each case,
a penny a day would mean comparative plenty. They are God's creatures,
willing, and indeed eager, to work themselves to skin and bone for a
penny a day, and they cannot earn it. Think again of the untold human
beings nearer home, locked in a warfare from which there is no
discharge but death; the grim struggle for a bare existence, with its
chances at every turn of sickness, accident, no work, and then the
abyss. When we have reckoned off the probable proportion of those who
have done much to make the conditions in which they find themselves, we
have a large percentage of people who are no more responsible for the
poverty and suffering they have to endure than they are responsible for
the fact that they are in the world which uses them so harshly.
For my part I can offer no explanation of these things, that can give a
sensitive heart and an honest mind more than a very moderate degree of
satisfaction. There are communities, and even races of people, whose
existence in this world appears to have no immediate relation to their
own personal happiness and well-being. They come and pass away as
phases of what we must believe is an evolution towards higher things.
But this is the question: Have they who compose this lonely and sombre
procession no claims upon their Maker in the meanwhile?
I do not believe that one human soul will fail of absolute, abundant,
and rich compensation, in those eternal years that are at God's right
hand. I have a word to say about this later, but for the present I may
say that I answer many questions by my conviction that what we call
death does not end all. Columbus is reported to have said: "I must
have another continent to keep the earth's balance true." And I must
have the personal conscious future, which is to right the wrongs of the
ages, if I am to believe and preach the faithfulness of God. But we
must guard against an impatience which is our littleness. In the
immense times of the Almighty, every dark mystery of human being can
move away, and leave the "sky of Providence at last, arching over the
soul with not a cloud to dim its stars." For my present faith I hold
it true with one who trusts--
"That nothing walks with aimless feet,
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete."
When any man confronts me with the inequalities of our human lot, with
the suffering many have to endure from causes they have not instituted,
and circumstances over which they have no control, I may be, and often
am, obliged to make him a present of much that he has to urge. But
there are two things to be said, on the other side, which I can only
briefly indicate, and ask you to work them out in your own mind.
I affirm as the first of the two, that the good in our life far
outweighs the evil. When all is said, happiness is the rule of our
normal experience, and not misery. We hear much, for example, about
the suffering which is part of the order of the animal creation; how a
stronger beast feeds upon a weaker, and is in turn the prey of another
stronger still. While again we are told that the joys of these myriads
of sentient creatures are immeasurably greater than their pains. They
have pleasure more than sufficient to justify their call into
existence, in spite of the drawbacks to their happiness incident to the
conditions of their existence.
I am satisfied that the latter representation is true of the animal
world, as I am convinced that it is true of the human. Let what may be
said to the contrary, life is a mighty boon. When men bring in a
verdict of unsound mind in a case of suicide, the instinct may have
more to do with it than the order of evidence on which the verdict is
based. We have to conclude that a man was insane before he could lay
violent hands on himself. Look back upon our life, we who have
travelled some distance into it, and let us say whether so far we do
not account it a blessing to have lived and to be living. We have had
our hard lines, and we have known the pleasant places; we have had our
sorrows, and we have had our joys; we have been under the clouds, and
we have lived in the sunshine. Nay, I dare go further and say, that
for a day we have had of the former, we have had a week of the latter.
It is a narrow and unworthy conception of happiness to invest all our
chances of it in the accident of circumstances. There is some force in
the saying, that heaven is here or nowhere. If we have any thought of
happiness worth turning into a fact, our life may be filled with it
though the hardest possible circumstances be surrounding us. Not where
we are, but what we are, makes our much or little whether of good or
ill. It is an ungrateful proceeding to go through life consuming as
much as possible of the fruits of a gracious present, and yet with only
plaints and complaints about the legislation which tempers the
blessings with the little severity needed to teach us what the
blessings are.
Some one has remarked that it is the whole tragedy, and ultimately the
whole power of the Christian religion, that it is attacked from every
side. It is accused of faults that are hopelessly inconsistent with
each other. One day it is charged with making man too responsible; the
next, with not making him responsible enough. The truth is, that we
need not try to make man too responsible in order to make him
responsible enough. It has often been pointed out, that the Christian
religion is by turns optimistic and pessimistic. St. Paul is pessimist
enough where he says: "For I know that in me--that is, in my
flesh--dwelleth no good thing." But who so optimistic as the same
Apostle when he declares: "I can do all things through Christ which
strengtheneth me."
Much of the secret of it, under God, is in a cultivated and consecrated
will. Every matter, says Epictetus, has two handles, and you can
choose which handle you will take. Every man has in him some promise
of the gradual supremacy of character over the accidents, happenings,
forces and factors of circumstances. These may be his tests; they need
not be his fate. "The real vital division of the religious part of our
Protestant communities," says Wendell Holmes, "is into Christian
optimists and Christian pessimists." I would rank myself among the
former and say again, that the good in the conditions of our life far
outweighs the ill. And while maintaining this position, I would also,
as the second of the two things to be urged, have us face the question,
Who is responsible for the ill there is?
George Meredith, in a reference to this subject, declares that no man
can _think_, and not think hopefully. Whether or not this be true in
the case of every man who thinks, this can be said--it ought to be
true. Instead of multiplying words to no profit over the old question,
Why all this misery and suffering? let us think for a moment in another
direction, and we shall perchance be encouraged to think hopefully.
It has been said that human wisdom has arrived at no juster and higher
view of the present state, than that it is intended to call forth power
by obstruction; the power of a life that is perfect and entire, by the
responsibility of choice between the things that make or mar it. If
God can rank in us nothing higher than character, and if character on
the man side can be achieved only out of right choice translated in its
kindred action--then it must follow that the power to choose the right
is the power to choose the wrong. Which means in the fewest words,
that sin, and all the ills and suffering that proceed out of its
selfishness, are the issue of this possibility of fatal choosing. If
it be asked: "Why the possibility at all?" I answer that without it men
would cease to be men and become something else; and what that
something else would be need not enter into our speculation. It is
because we can do wrong that we can do right; and if we think about
this, may we not think hopefully?
It is the fashion in our day to write and talk as though heredity, and
the effects of the accumulation of heredity, were somehow sinister
enough to drape the heavens in black, and silence all the songs of the
angels. This law, we are told, can have no moral interpretation
consistent with freedom and responsibility. The more than tendency of
much that is being written and said is to depress the mind with a sense
of the relentless force of general laws and influences, and to diminish
in the individual the conviction of his power to contend against them.
I would avoid dogmatism about this matter and simply say that this
seems plain to me: for one drawback we meet along the pathway of
inheritances, we have a very legion of resource and help through the
gains of time, and of the race. The penalties we have to pay for
transgression against law are not a just indictment of the law, they
are the penalty of its transgression; a by-product, which is always a
decaying product as the character of the race heightens.
The purpose of God in us is character, and once we have it, established
in divine grace and ensphered in the human will of a sufficient number
of us, we shall soon make our new and better world. Without this
character we may hope for nothing, with it we need despair of nothing.
Granted then for a moment that we had but a little more of this
God-fibre running through our individual and our collective life, such
an experience as physical want would become but a memory of a hideous
past. This good old mother-earth can yield us, not only enough to go
round, but enough to go round in generous abundance. Why is it that a
few have so much more than they can use, and so many have less than
they need? Do we think that God wills it? Can we conceive of it as
having any part in the economy of the Kingdom which Jesus came to
establish on the earth? It is not God, but our selfishness that wills
it; a selfishness that has its length of days and its malign power in
the widespread folly and culpable ignorance that play into its hands.
Think again for a moment about the effects on society as a whole of the
intemperate use of strong drink. They are incarnated in horrors, look
where we will. The injuries which simply swarm out of our licensed
temptations to drunkenness are not exceptional and irregular; they are,
as one of the most eminent of our publicists has said, "uniform as the
movements of the planets, and as deadly as the sirocco of the desert or
the malaria of the marshes." There is not a profession round which
drink has not thrown the spell of its sorcery; scarcely a household
that has not been despoiled by its leprous pollution. And who is
responsible for it? Does any one doubt that if the Christian Churches
looked at this accursed traffic through the eyes of God, and attacked
it with faith in His omnipotence, that we could not break its back
within the next ten years?