By the REV. R. S. STORRS, D. D.
There are two schemes of religious thought generically in the world, as
there has been—and are now to some extent—two systems of astronomical
speculation, one obtaining in uncivilized countries, and the other
in civilized. One system of astronomical speculation takes the earth
as the center around which the heavens revolve. That seems according
to our senses; that is the architecture of the heavens according
to the natural man. When the Rev. Mr. Jasper, at Richmond, insists
that “the sun do move,” he seems to have the judgment and the sense
of every seeing man with him. [Laughter.] And we know what comes of
it,—uninterpreted and unintelligible and contradictory motions in all
the sky; a baffled heaven scribbled o’er with cycle and epicycle.
The other system of astronomical speculation takes its start from
the sun as the center and the governor of the planetary system, and
finds that sun himself, with all his dependent orbs, marching onward
through the heavens. And we know what comes of that. (There came a book
from Dr. Hill, years ago, which I read with the intensest interest,
concerning the relation of the stars.) [Applause.] There comes order
and harmony in all the system of the heavens. We measure and weigh
the planet in its course. The astronomer catches the comet in its far
flight, measures its motion and predicts its course and its return. The
butterfly floating in the air is balanced against the sun. Every shell
on the beach, every bud on the tree, is brought into relation with the
farthest nebula whose lace-work stains the distant azure. It is the
astronomy of science; it is the astronomy of advanced and cultivated
thought.
There are two systems of religious speculation. The one takes man
as its center and starting-point, regarding him as a finished fact,
practically. In its grosser forms it does not profess to know, as we
have been told by the brother who preceded me, whence he came; but it
suspects that his nature is evolved out of the brutal. It does not
know whither he is going; but it treats the future as the scoffing
French sceptic treated it, as at best “a grand Perhaps.” It does
not know about God, or whether there be any God other than the sum
of universal forces. It has no moral law except a general average
of probable experiences. And so it comes to men and tells them to
go on and live as they list. It tells them that there is no fear of
retribution, no need of atonement, and it has no place in all its
compass for any doctrine of regeneration and of the Holy Spirit of God.
I do not mean, of course, that everybody who holds this system will
accept fully my statement of it. In fact it is sometimes hard to find
out exactly how they state it, or what they mean by their statements
themselves. I am reminded occasionally of the man who had a clock
which somebody criticised, saying, “Your clock, Mr. Jones, does not
keep good time.” “Why,” said he, “it does keep perfectly good time,
only you do not understand it. The fact is that when the hands on that
clock point to twelve, then it strikes three, and what that means is
that it wants twenty minutes to seven. [Laughter and applause.] Now
if you will keep that in mind, you will hit the right time in every
instance.” [Laughter.] Well, I intend to speak very seriously, and yet
I cannot help being reminded by some of the language which is made use
of in some of these what-we-call agnostic publications, into which the
richest Christian words are sometimes brought as if to give a kind of
artificial and fictitious consecration to the doctrine which I think a
detestable doctrine underneath,—I can not help being reminded of a very
careful paraphrase which was made by a very bright and faithful Indian
girl at the school at Hampton. Her teacher told her—she did all of
this innocently, of course—to take a certain passage of Roman history
and write a paraphrase of it in her own words. So she went at it; and
when the teacher read the paraphrase she was astounded at finding
this statement in it: That “on a certain time the city was made sick
by cooking the entrails of animals.” Well, what on earth that meant
she could not imagine, nor how it got into this paraphrase, until she
turned to the original passage and then she found the statement that
“at a certain time the city was disturbed by intestine broils.” [Great
laughter and applause.]
Now, over against that system stands the theology which starts with
God as the center, as the Lord and Sovereign and Judge, as well as
the Creator of the earth and men upon it; and it takes what God
declares, in that which the history of the world declares to be his
Word, and what the devout spirit reverently accepts as the Word of
God, concerning himself and man, and man’s need, and the hereafter.
Here inspiration and redemption, regeneration by the Holy Spirit,
retribution in the future, time as the proof of eternity, come vividly
before us as the thoughts of God. He shows them to us in characters as
broad as if he had written them in a great theodicy of star-fires and
enduring orbs in the heavens. This system of theology does not cast any
discredit on human nature; it exalts it by showing it the object of
divine solicitude. It casts the splendor and the solemnity of eternity
upon the present experience and life of man; and it gives to the Bible
an immeasurable and an almost inconceivable importance and value.
Now I understand perfectly that the natural tendency of men is to
accept the preceding system, as the natural tendency of man is to
believe that the earth is the center, and the heavens go around it.
Man finds self-consciousness the first element of thought. The impulse
of self-assertion appears to be the primary impulse of human nature.
It is simply the egotistic man, of whom it might be said, as was said
by a friend of mine, speaking rather roughly and not very elegantly
about a man who was very egotistic, and who had offended him by his
egotism: “I believe that that man thinks that his house is placed
where the leg of the compasses was put down when the earth was made
round.” [Laughter.] There is a certain tendency in every human heart
to feel that it is central, and that it has rights and privileges
and possibilities belonging to itself inherently, and with which no
being can properly interfere. And civilization works with its multiple
forces and instruments and wealth in the same direction, taking a man
feeling his lordship of the earth and reminding him more and more,
and encouraging him to feel that he is lord of his destiny, and lord
of the hereafter as well. There are certain philanthropic sentiments
which work in the same direction, no doubt, tending to make men
believe that all will be right hereafter somehow or other, and that
after some possible brief unpleasantness in the future there will be a
universal deliverance and restoration into holiness and its peace. And
the secular spirit of the time, intense, widening, ever increasing,
moves in the same direction. It enters into literature; it enters into
life on every side; it finds no reality in religion; it believes it a
matter of poetic aspiration, or of cultivated literary leisure, or of
fine speculation, or of social observance, or possibly of ethics, or
more likely of æsthetic art; but the grand reality of religion, as a
bond uniting the human soul with the divine, it does not recognize or
feel. It is this which gives significance and importance to infidel
harangues; it is this spirit which spreads beneath and behind them. The
harangues are merely the surface pustules, while the disease is within.
They are the red and sulphurous flames, while the fires are underneath.
And yet they multiply! The business of this city of Portland could not
be carried on on the principles of these harangues. There is not a bank
or an insurance company here that would not have to shut its doors
if it posted within its walls, “This is an agnostic establishment.
[Applause.] It is carried on upon these principles: that there is no
God about whom we know anything; there is no hereafter probable; man
came out of the monkey; and there is no moral law.” Let such sentiments
prevail in this city, and it would have been better if the fire of a
few years ago had swept away every house within it, and left nothing
but the bay and the beach on which to plant a new town. And yet men
love to crowd halls and pay money in order to hear these infidel
speculations which are in substance as old as the ages.
And thus it comes to pass that religious thought loses its power
among those who are not directly touched by such harangues,—that the
influence widens continually to make the Bible a neglected book, and to
make the Sabbath a secular day, to make the Church a mere convocation
of people coming together at leisure to hear a lecture.
It is at such times that the spirit of liberalism, as it is called,
in religious speculations tending all the time to loosen the bonds
and unstring the strength of the Gospel of Christ, finds opportunity
and incitement and comes more widely to prevail. Liberalism! I
repudiate the term. [Applause.] I do not understand what function
liberality has either in the record or in the interpretation of facts.
I do not understand how he is a liberal mathematician who makes his
calculations bend to the preferences of himself and of his pupils. I
do not understand how he is a liberal chemist who feels at liberty to
play fast and loose with the principles of his science, and will not
quite affirm whether gunpowder will explode or not when fire touches
it. How is he a liberal chart-maker who rubs out all the reefs and
rocks and bars and warning headlands from his maps, and shows a smooth
coast-line with nothing but smiling shores and welcoming bays? How is
he a liberal interpreter of the globe who denies the granite above
and the fire beneath, and affirms that the whole is built, if we only
knew it, of excellently selected wood-pulp? What possible province has
liberality in the record of facts or in the interpretation of them?
I understand perfectly what liberality means as toward the opinions
of others who differ from us. I understand what liberality means as
toward the character of others who are entirely opposed in opinion and
in action to us. Coleridge’s canon has always seemed to me perfectly
to cover the ground. “Tolerate no belief,” he says, “which you deem
false and of injurious tendency, but arraign no belief. The man is more
and other than his belief, and God only knows how large or how small a
part of him the belief in man may be.” But liberality in the statement
of facts—there we want exactness, we want earnestness, we want precise
fidelity to the truth of things; and there is no opportunity for what
calls itself liberality there. How is it less liberal to tell a man
that strychnine will kill him than to tell him that it will certainly
give him a pain in his stomach? [Laughter.] How is it less liberal to
tell a man that if he goes over Niagara he goes to a sure death, than
it is to tell him that if he takes that awful plunge he will almost
certainly wet his feet. [Laughter.] No! When a man comes to me and
says, “These are the liberal doctrines; there is not probably any God;
we do not know where men come from; there is no law above him; there is
no retribution—or if there be any, it is a small one—waiting for him,”
I say, I perfectly understand your doctrines. There is no reason why
I should not. There is nothing immense or complex or mysterious about
them,—in fact, they are rather thin. [Laughter.] They remind one of
the pillows which one of the waiters stole at a White Mountain hotel
where they didn’t have very solid pillows. They knew he stole them,
because they found them on him, both of them, in his waistcoat pocket.
[Laughter.] We carry these doctrines very easily in our thought and
hand. There is nothing massive or majestic about them; there is nothing
liberal in them. If a man is true to his convictions, he is true to
them; and he has no right to be liberal in the way of giving away a
part of what he believes, or hiding it under any mystery of words and
imposing upon men with a thought which is not really his. And when I
look at the drift and working of such doctrines, I find at once that
they tend to build no grand characters; they give no motive to men for
repentance and faith; they do not seek, they do not tend, to lift man
nearer to the level of the holiness and happiness of God on high; they
work only in degradation of character; they authorize and encourage men
to imitate their grandfathers, which, on that system of doctrine, is to
make beasts of themselves. [Laughter.]
So I turn to the system of truth, which takes God for its center, his
law as our rule, his gospel as our light, his Son as our Redeemer, and
his immortality as the possible and glorious home of every created
being redeemed by the Son of God and renewed by his Spirit; and I say
here is the gospel of the ancient time and of the present time. You
need not call it antiquated. Everything which is best in the world
is old. Sunshine is as old as the earth itself and the sun when the
fire-mist was rounded into an orb,—the same to-day, playing on the
streets of Portland, as when it played on the bowers of Paradise. The
air is old, pouring its refreshing currents into our lungs and renewing
our life to-day as in all time past. The great arch of the heavens is
old; it has not been taken down and built up again on modern brick-work
since the creation. These doctrines are old but full of motion, full of
energy as the river is full of movements,—full of life-giving power,
as the sunlight and the vital air. They are the doctrines out of which
the missionary work sprang,—doctrines in which is all its life and the
spring of its power. They are the doctrines of Paul, that first great
missionary, of whom we heard in the sermon the other evening. He had
strong convictions. He did not doubt. He knew whom he had believed,
and was persuaded that he was able to keep him and to save the world.
And who is the successor of Paul? Who holds the same faith with him
and teaches it with the same earnest fidelity? I do not care to know
especially what he believed unless I believe it myself. I do not want
any uncertain or broken ice-bridge of outward ordinations between me
and the Apostle; I want to have his faith in my heart and to preach it
with the emphasis with which he preached it, and then I feel myself a
successor of the great missionary to the Roman Empire. [Applause.]
Our fathers had these convictions and because of them they gave of
their wealth; they prayed, they sacrificed, they gave themselves to
the work. I remember as a lad in a distant school seeing that man to
whom our president refers—Champion—who went out from a great fortune
to lay his bones in Western Africa in the service of his Master; and
though I was a careless boy, unmindful of these things, I remember that
his face shone almost as the face of Stephen when he looked up and
saw the Lord on high, and the vision of it has never failed to come
back to me whenever I have heard his name. They gave themselves. The
motive of their missionary work was found in this Gospel of Christ.
This was the instrument by which they accomplished their work in other
lands. This was the instrument by which Paul wrought his mighty work
in his day, and those who followed him in the Empire and in barbarous
tribes, wherever they could get access to men. It is this gospel which
has built New England. It is this gospel which, under the power of the
Spirit of God, is to change the earth—this gospel and nothing else.
Do not let us mask its doctrines in any mystery of words. Do not let
us evaporate its doctrines into any thin mist of speculation. Do not
let us emasculate it of its energy by taking away any of its vital
forces. It seems to me that to state this gospel in novel forms and
doubtful forms, in order to conciliate unbelief, is very much like the
woman’s wisdom who kept the burglars out of the house by leaving all
the valuables on the doorstep. [Laughter.] It seems to me that we shall
have no inspiration in us, no great powerful impulse to the work, and
no instrument to work with in that work, except as the old gospel of
man, not a cultivated monkey but a fallen prince, of God’s law binding
on him, of the light of the near eternity flashing on his spirit, of
the cross of Christ and its redemptive efficacy, of the Spirit of God
with his renewing power—except as this old gospel is not merely in our
hands or on our lips, but is in our brains and in our hearts; and then
we shall conquer. [Applause.]
Men may object to it, of course—men object to everything. I remember
a gentleman on the Hudson who took a querulous Englishman—not a
Canadian, [laughter]—who had been finding fault with everything from
the constitution of our government down to the shape of the toes of
our shoes, out to see from his place the magnificent autumnal forests
on the other side of the river, and the forests on the Hudson at this
season of the year are as if thousands of rainbows had fallen to the
earth and lodged. Said he, “Isn’t that magnificent?” “Well, yes, that
is—yes, that is very fine; but don’t you think now that it is just
a little tawdry, perhaps?” [Laughter.] There is nothing men may not
object to in the works or in the word of God, if their hearts set them
in that direction. No matter for the objection! The Gospel of Christ,
instinct with power, coming from the heart, coming on the earnest word
of him who believes it, goes through objections as the cannon ball goes
through mists. Do not let us doubt or fear concerning its success, if
we hold it as the fathers held it. Men object to the atonement; why,
it has been the life of so many millions of human hearts that the
multitudes on high are now uncounted and incomputable. They object to
the doctrine of regeneration; that is the doctrine which more than any
other exalts man’s nature, showing the royalty of it, the greatness of
it, its possibilities, and the glory of its future.
Of course men may object. Do not let us be disturbed; but always
remember that, with the word of God within us and the power and
providence of God behind us, and the spirit of God going before us to
open ways for our progress, victory is sure. Christ seemed insane in
his aim at the beginning. Speaking a few words orally to his disciples;
writing no line unless he wrote one on the sand; only uttering his
thought in syllables that seemed dissipated in the air, and aiming
by that to conquer the world to his truth,—it seemed like expecting
the whistle of a boy in these mountain valleys to go reverberating
as thunder over all the earth in all the centuries. But he did it.
It seemed insane to undertake to build a kingdom by gathering a few
scattered followers here and there, and especially a small nucleus of
obscure and uneducated men bound together by nothing but the simple
sacrament of eating bread and drinking wine in memory of him,—without
saint or standard or army or treasure or navy or counselors or
forum,—it seemed like building another Lebanon with shovelfuls of sand,
or building another Jerusalem with charred sticks and straws. But he
did it. His kingdom already is in all the earth. The proudest empire
which sets itself against it, shivers in the contact. Napoleon saw
this on the Island of St. Helena. Comparing himself as a man ruling in
the world with Christ as a Godlike person, said he, “He is God and not
man.” He has done the work thus far; he is to do it in the future, if
you and I adhere to the gospel, if from all our pulpits reverberate the
echoes of this great meeting, if the force which is here assembled goes
forth to testify of that system of religion of which God is the centre
and head, which has its grandest trophy and symbol in the cross of
Christ, and which opens the vast and near eternity to the apprehension
of every soul conscious of unconfessed sins, and to the desiring and
exulting hope of every soul that has found rest in Christ—the gospel
that is to fill the world at last.
I remember when a lad, forty years ago last spring, coming for the
first time into this beautiful Portland harbor from Boston by the
boat. The night was windy and rough. The cabin was confined, the boat
was small; and very early in the morning I went up on deck. There
was nothing but the blue waste around, dark and threatening, and the
clouded heavens above. At last suddenly on the horizon flashed a light,
and then after a little while another, and then a little later another
still, from the light-houses along the coast; and at last the light
at the entrance of this harbor became visible just as “the fingers of
the dawn” were rushing up into the sky. As we swept around into the
harbor the sunrise gun was fired from the cutter or corvette lying
in the harbor, the band struck up a martial and inspiring air, the
great splendor of the rising sun flooded the whole view, and every
window-pane on these hills, as seen from the boat, seemed to be a plate
of burnished gold let down from the celestial realms.
Ah! my friends, we are drawing nearer to the glory of the latter day.
I have thought of that vision often. I thought of it then in my early
carelessness, as representing what might be conceived of the entrance
into heaven. I have thought of it as I have stood by the bed of the
dying and seen their faces flush and flash in a radiance that I could
not apprehend. I have thought of it this week as I have been in these
meetings. The lights are brightening along the coast; the darkness is
disappearing; the harbor is not far off; the Sun of Righteousness is to
arise in all the earth, and the golden glory of the new Jerusalem is to
be established here. Let it be ours in that great day to remember that
we held the faith, we triumphed by the Cross, we stood with Paul and
with the Son of God, taking God’s revelation for our inspiration and
doing our work under that mighty impulse.