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          Title: Christ and His Salvation: In Sermons Variously Related Thereto.
     Creator(s): Bushnell, Horace (1802-1876)
  CCEL Subjects: All; Christology
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CHRIST

AND HIS

SALVATION:

IN SERMONS VARIOUSLY RELATED THERETO.

    BY

HORACE BUSHNELL.

  NEW YORK:
  CHARLES SCRIBNER, 124 GRAND ST.
  1864.

   Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by
   CHARLES SCRIBNER,
   In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States
   for the Southern District of New York.

   STEREOTYPED BY R. H. HOBBS,

   Hartford, Conn.
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Prefatory Material
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    TO

JOSEPH SAMPSON, Esq.,

    OF NEW YORK.

   MY DEAR FRIEND:

   WHEN resigning my pastorship, five years ago, you will remember that
   you put it before me to consider myself engaged now in a "Ministry at
   Large;" serving in it, by the pen, or by whatever method, according to
   the ability left me, the cause we both have made our own. In this
   modified ministry, I have had the sense of a worthy and sacred charge
   upon me still as before, and in it, as I have occupied, I seem also to
   have prolonged, my life. This, with another volume, on The Vicarious
   Sacrifice, which is ready in due time to follow, are the principal
   fruit of my broken industry. Without consent obtained, I venture to
   connect them with your name, as the spontaneous tribute of my true
   respect and strong personal friendship.

   HORACE BUSHNELL.

   Hartford, June 10, 1864.
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                                       I.

CHRIST WAITING TO FIND ROOM.

   "And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling
   clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them
   in the inn."--Luke ii. 7.

   In the birth and birthplace of Jesus, there is something beautifully
   correspondent with his personal fortunes afterward, and also of the
   fortunes of his gospel, even down to our own age and time. He comes
   into the world, as it were to the taxing, and there is scant room for
   him even at that.

   A Roman decree having been issued, requiring the people to repair to
   their native place to be registered for taxation, Joseph and Mary set
   off for Bethlehem. The khan or inn of the village is full, when they
   arrive, and, being humble persons, they are obliged to find a place in
   the stall or stable, where the holy child is born. It so happens, not
   by any slight of the guests, in which they mock the advent of the
   child, for he makes his advent only as the child of two very common
   people. But there is a great concourse and crowd--senators, it may be,
   landowners, merchants, money-changers, tradesmen, publicans, peddlers,
   men of all sorts--and the most forward, showiest, best attended,
   boldest in airs of consequence, take up all the places, till in fact no
   place is left. What they have secured too it is their conceded right to
   keep. If the carpenter and his wife are in a plight, people as humble
   as they can well enough take the stable, when there is nothing better
   to be had.

   So it was, and perhaps it was more fitting to be so; for the great
   Messiah's errand allows no expectation of patronage, even for his
   infancy. He comes into the world and finds it preoccupied. A marvelous
   great world it is, and there is room in it for many things; room for
   wealth, ambition, pride, show, pleasure; room for trade, society,
   dissipation; room for powers, kingdoms, armies and their wars; but for
   him there is the smallest room possible; room in the stable but not in
   the inn. There he begins to breathe, and at that point introduces
   himself into his human life as a resident of our world-the greatest and
   most blessed event, humble as the guise of it may be, that has ever
   transpired among mortals. If it be a wonder to men's eyes and ears, a
   wonder even to science itself, when the flaming air-stone pitches into
   our world, as a stranger newly arrived out of parts unknown in the sky,
   what shall we think of the more transcendent fact, that the Eternal Son
   of God is born into the world; that proceeding forth from the Father,
   not being of our system or sphere, not of the world, he has come as a
   Holy Thing into it--God manifest in the flesh, the Word made flesh, a
   new divine man, closeted in humanity, there to abide and work until he
   has restored the race itself to God! Nor is this wonderful annunciation
   any the less welcome, or any the less worthy to be celebrated by the
   hallelujahs of angels and men, that the glorious visitant begins to
   breathe in a stall. Was there not a certain propriety in such a
   beginning, considered as the first chapter and symbol of his whole
   history, as the Saviour and Redeemer of mankind?

   But I am anticipating my subject, viz., the very impressive fact that
   Jesus could not find room in the world, and has never yet been able to
   find it.

   I do not understand, you will observe, that this particular subject is
   formally stated or asserted in my text. I only conceive that the birth
   of Jesus most aptly introduces the whole subsequent history of his
   life, and that both his birth and life as aptly represent the spiritual
   fortunes of his gospel as a great salvation for the world. And the
   reason why Jesus can not find room for his gospel is closely analogous
   to that which he encountered in his birth; viz., that men's hearts are
   preoccupied. They do not care, in general, to put any indignity on
   Christ; they would prefer not to do it; but they are filled to the full
   with their own objects already. It is now as then and then as now; the
   selfishness and self-accommodation, the coarseness, the want of right
   sensibility, the crowding, eager state of men, in a world too small for
   their ambition--all these preoccupy the inn of their affections,
   leaving only the stable, or some by-place, in their hearts, as little
   worthy of his occupancy and the glorious errand on which he comes.

   See how it was with him in. his life. Herod heard the rumor that the
   Messiah, that is, the king, was born, and it being specially clear that
   there was no room for two kings in Galilee, raised a slaughter general
   among the children, that he might be sure of getting this particular
   one out of the way. Twelve years later when Joseph and his mother
   turned back to seek the child at Jerusalem, where they had left him,
   and found him sitting with the doctors of the temple, asking them
   questions and astonishing their comprehension by his answers; when also
   his mother, remonstrating with him for remaining behind, hears him say
   that he "must be about his Father's business," and goes home pondering
   his strange answer in her heart; how clear is it that they, none of
   them, have room, even if they would, to take in the conception of his
   divine childhood, or the history preparing in it. John the Baptist,
   again, even after he has testified in the Spirit on seeing him
   approach--"Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the
   world!" and has all but refused to baptize him because of his superior
   dignity, grows doubtful afterward, yields to misgivings, gets
   perplexed, like any poor half-seeing sinner, with his mystery, and
   finally sends to inquire whether he is really the Christ, or whether
   some other is still to be looked for! is great ministry, wonderful in
   its dignity and power, wins but the scantiest hospitality; he journeys
   on foot through many populous towns and by the gates of many palaces,
   sleeping in desert places of the mountains, as he slept his first night
   in a manger, not having where to lay his head. Nicodemus, and many
   others probably in the higher conditions of life, felt the sense of
   some mysterious dignity in him, and went, even by night, to receive
   lessons of spiritual instruction from him, yet never took him to his
   house, and too little conceived him to so much as break silence at his
   trial by a word of vindication. The learned rabbis could have bid him
   welcome, if he had come teaching "corban," or the precise mode or merit
   of baptizing cups, or tithing anise, but when he spoke to them of
   judgment and mercy and the right of doing good on Sundays, they had no
   room, in their little theologies, for such a kind of doctrine. His own
   disciples got but the slenderest conception of his person and mission
   from his very explicit teachings. They still wanted even the
   explanations of his parables explained. It was as if the sun had broken
   out upon a field of moles--there was a wonderful incapacity and
   weakness in all their apprehensions; he shone too brightly and they
   could see only the less. The priests, and rabbis, and magistrates, saw
   enough in him to be afraid of him, or rather of his power over the
   people. They charged him, before Pilate, with a design to make himself
   king instead of Cæsar, and when he answered, in effect, that he came
   only to be king of the truth, Pilate, greatly mystified by his answer,
   and the more that he had the sense of some strange power in his person,
   wanted still, like a child, to know what he could mean by the truth? On
   the whole it can not be said that Christ ever once found room, and a
   clear receptivity for his person, any where, during his mortal life.
   Mary and Martha did their best to entertain him and give him a complete
   hospitality, and yet their hospitality so little conceived him as to
   assume that being nicely lodged, and complimented with a delicate
   housewifery, was a matter of much more consequence than it was; even
   more, a great deal, than to fitly receive the heaven-full of honor and
   beauty brought into their house in his person. And so it may be truly
   said of him that he came unto his own, and his own received him not.
   lie was never accepted as a guest of the world any more than on that
   first night in the inn. There was not room enough in the world's
   thought and feeling to hold him, or even to suffer so great a presence,
   and he was finally expelled by an ecclesiastical murder.

   At the descent of the Spirit there was certainly a great opening in the
   minds of his disciples concerning him, and there has been a slow,
   irregular, and difficult progress in the faith and perception of
   mankind since that day, but we shall greatly mistake, if we suppose
   that Christ has ever found room to spread himself at all in the world,
   as he had it in his heart to do, when he came into it, and will not
   fail to do, before his work is done.

   Were a man to enter some great cathedral of the old continent, of which
   there are many hundreds, survey the vaulted arches and the golden
   tracery above, wander among the forests of pillars on which they rest,
   listen to the music of choirs and catch the softened light that streams
   through sainted forms and histories on the windows, observe the company
   of priests, gorgeously arrayed, chanting, kneeling, crossing
   themselves, and wheeling in long processions before the great altar
   loaded with gold and gems; were he to look into the long tiers of side
   chapels, each a gorgeous temple, with an altar of its own for its
   princely family, adorned with costliest mosaics, and surrounded, in the
   niches of the walls, with statues and monumental groups of dead
   ancestors in the highest forms of art, noting also the living princes
   at their worship there among their patriarchs and brothers in
   stone--spectator of a scene so imposing, what but this will his thought
   be: "surely the infant of the manger has at last found room, and come
   to be entertained among men with a magnificence worthy of his dignity."
   But if he looks again, and looks a little farther in--far enough in to
   see the miserable pride of self and power that lurks under this
   gorgeous show, the mean ideas of Christ, the superstitions held instead
   of him, the bigotry, the hatred of the poor, the dismal corruption of
   life--with how deep a sigh of disappointment will he confess: "alas,
   the manger was better and a more royal honor!"

   So if we speak of what is called Christendom, comprising, as it does,
   all the most civilized and powerful nations of mankind, those most
   forward in learning, and science, and art, and commerce, it may well
   enough seem to us, when we fix. the. name
   Christendom--Christ-dominion--on these great powers of the earth, that
   Christ has certainly gotten room, so far, to enter and be glorified in
   human society. And it is a very great thing, doubtless, for Christ to
   be so far admitted to his kingly honors--more, however, as a token of
   what will sometime appear, than as a measure of power already exerted.
   Still what multitudes of out-lying populations are there that have
   never heard of him. And the states and populations that acknowledge
   him,--how unjust are their laws, how intriguing and dishonest their
   diplomacies, how cruel their wars, what oppressions do they put upon
   the weak, what persecutions raise against the good, what abuses and
   distortions of God's truth do they perpetrate, what idolatries and
   mummeries of superstition do they practice, and, to include all in one
   general summation, how little of Christ, take them all together,
   appears to be really in them. Now and then a saint appears, a real
   Christly man, but the general mass are sharp for money and dull to
   Christ, and whether sharp or dull, are for the most part extremely
   ignorant as regards all spiritual knowledge, even if they happen, as
   men, to be specially intelligent, or practiced much in philosophy. The
   savor of Christ, in short, is so weak that we can scarcely get the
   sense of it once in a day. A wind blowing off from his cross might
   almost be expected to carry as much grace with it--so slight,
   evanescent, scarcely perceptible, doubtfully real is the evidence shown
   of a genuine Christly power, even in just those upper tiers of
   humanity, which are called the Christendom, or Christ-dominion itself.

   But we must take a closer inspection, if we are to see how very little
   room Christ has yet been able to obtain, and how many things conspire
   to cramp the efficacy and narrow down the sway of his gospel. Great
   multitudes, it is well understood, utterly reject him, and stay fast in
   their sins. They have no time to be religious, or the sacrifices are
   too great. Some are too poor to have any heart left, and some are too
   rich--so rich, so filled up with goods, that a camel can as well get
   through a needle's eye, as Christ get into their love. Some are too
   much honored to receive him, and some too much want to be. Some are in
   their passions, some in their pleasures, some in their expectations.
   Some are too young and wait to give him only the dry remains of life,
   after the natural freshness is gone. Some are too old and are too much
   occupied with old recollections and stories of the past forever
   telling, to have any room longer for his reception. Some are too
   ignorant, and think they must learn a great deal before they can
   receive him. Others know too much, having stifled their capacity
   already in the dry-rot of books and opinions. The great world thus,
   under sin, even that part of it which is called Christian, is very much
   like the inn at Bethlehem, preoccupied, crowded full in every part, so
   that, as the mother of Jesus looked up wistfully to the guest-chambers
   that cold night, drawing her Holy Thing to her bosom, in like manner
   Jesus himself stands at the door of these multitudes, knocking vainly,
   till his head is filled with dew, and his locks are wet with the drops
   of the night.

   So it should be, as you will easily perceive beforehand; for
   Christianity comes into the world by supposition, just because the
   world is not ready to receive it. The very problem it proposes is to
   get room where there is none, to open a heart where there is no heart,
   to regenerate opposing dispositions, to sweeten soured affections, to
   beget love where there is selfishness, to institute peace in the
   elemental war of the soul's disorders. This being true, we can see
   beforehand that the grand main difficulty of the gospel in restoring,
   the world, is to get room enough opened for its mighty renovations to
   work. It will come to be received where there is no receptivity.
   Mankind will even seem to be shutting it away by a conspiracy of
   littleness and preoccupied feeling, when formally preparing to receive
   it.

   What shall Constantine, the first convert king do, for example, when he
   enters the fold, but bring in with him all his regal powers and
   prerogatives, and wield them for the furtherance of the new religion;
   never once imagining the fact that, in doing it, he was bringing church
   and gospel and every thing belonging to Christ, directly into the human
   keeping and the very nearly insulting patronage of the state. And so
   the gospel is to be kept in state pupilage, in all the old-world
   kingdoms, down to the present day--officered, endowed, regulated, by
   the state supremacy. Spiritual gifts have no place under the political
   regimen of course. Lay ministries are a disorder. No man comes to
   minister because he is called of God, or goes because he is sent of
   God, but he buys a living, or he has it given him, as he might in the
   army or the post-office. And so the grand, heaven-wide, gospel goes
   into quarantine, from age to age, getting no room to speak, or smite,
   or win, or save, beyond what worldly state-craft gives it. Call we this
   making room for the gospel?

   Church-craft meantime has been quite as narrow, quite as sore a
   limitation as state-craft. Thus instead of that grand, massive,
   practically educated, character, that Christ proposes to create in the
   open fields of duty, by sturdy encounter with wrong, by sacrifices of
   beneficence and the bloodier sacrifices of heroic testimony for the
   truth, it contrives a finer, saintlier, more superlative, virtue, to be
   trained in cells and nightly vigils!--poor, unchristly, mean imposture,
   it turns out to be of course. To give the church the prestige of a
   monarchy, under one universal head, a primacy is finally created in the
   bishop of Rome, and now, behold the august father, occupied, as in
   Christ's name, in blessing rosaries, preparing holy water, receiving
   the sacred puffs of censers, and submitting his feet to the devout
   kisses of his people! O how wretched and barren a thing, how very like
   to a poor mummery of imposture, have these ecclesiastics, contriving
   thus to add new ornaments and powers, reduced the gospel of heaven's
   love to men!

   And the attempted work of science, calling itself theology, is scarcely
   more equal to its theme. The subject matter outreaches, how visibly,
   and dwarfs all the. little pomps of the supposed scientific endeavor.
   What can it do, when trying, in fact, to measure the sea with a spoon!
   A great question it soon becomes, whether Christian forgiveness covers
   any but sins committed before baptism; as if the flow of God's great
   mercies in his Son could be stopped by the date of a baptism, and the
   sins of his children, afterward, left to be atoned by purgatorial
   fires! The death of Christ is conceived and taught, for whole
   centuries, as being a ransom paid to the devil; then, after so many
   centuries have worn the superstition fairly out, as an offering, or
   suffering, to appease the wrath of God.. Meantime it is carefully held,
   to save God's dignity in him, that he does not suffer at all as divine,
   but is even impassible; so that what he certainly suffers in his moral
   sensibilities, even because they are perfect--all to make the cross an
   expression of divine feeling powerful on the heart of sin--subsides
   into a stifled, unmoved, immovable mercy that, in fact, belongs to the
   stones. It becomes a great article of opinion also, that God only wants
   to save a particular number, and that exactly is the number He
   predestinates. Next, to coincide with this, Christ is shown to have
   died only for this particular part of mankind. Next to coincide with
   this, a limited or special grace is affirmed under the same
   restrictions. Regeneration, again, is wrought by baptism. Repentance
   subsides into doing penance. And the forgiveness of sins becomes a
   priestly dispensation.

   But the most remarkable thing of all is that, when the old, niggard
   dogmas of a bigot age and habit give way, and emancipated souls begin
   to look for a new Christianity and a broader, worthier faith, just
   there every thing great in the gospel vanishes even more strangely than
   before. Faith becomes mere opinion, love a natural sentiment, piety
   itself a blossom on the wild stock of nature. Jesus, the Everlasting
   Word, dwindles to a mere man. The Holy Spirit is made to be very nearly
   identical with the laws of the soul. God himself too is, in fact, put
   under nature, shut in back of nature and required to stay there; the
   incarnation, the miracles, the Gethsemane, the Calvary, all the flaming
   glories of the gospel are stifled as extravagances, and the new
   Christianity, the more liberal, more advanced, belief, turns out to be
   a discovery that we are living in nature, just as nature makes us live.
   Salvation there is none, nothing is left for a gospel but development,
   with a little human help from the very excellent person, Jesus.

   Now the blessed Lord wants room, we all agree; we even profess that we
   ourselves want mightily to be enlarged. Why then is it always turning
   out, hitherto, that when we try to go deepest, we drag every thing down
   with us? What, in fact, do we prove but that, when we undertake to
   shape theologically the glorious mystery of salvation by Christ, we
   just as much reduce it, or whittle it down, as human thought is
   narrower and tinier than the grand subject matter attempted.

   But saddest of all is the practical depreciation of Christ, or of what
   he will do as a Saviour, experimentally, from sin. The possibilities of
   liberty, assurance, a good conscience, a mind entered into rest, are,
   by one means or another, let down, obscured, or quite taken away. To
   believe much is enthusiasm, to attempt much, fanaticism. The assumption
   is, that Christ will, in fact, do only a little for us, just as there
   is only a little done; when the very sufficient reason is, that there
   is only a little allowed to be done. As to any common footing with the
   ancient saints in their inspirations, guidances, and gifts--it is even
   a kind of presumption to think of it. They had their religion at first
   hand, we are now a degree farther off. They had the inbirth of God, and
   knew him by the immediate knowledge of the heart. We only read of him
   and know about him and operate our minds, alas! how feebly, toward him,
   under the notions, or notional truths, gotten hold of by our
   understanding. O it is a very sad picture! Dear Lord Jesus can it never
   be that better room shall be given thee?

   True there is no grace of Christ that will suddenly make us perfect;
   but there is a grace that will take away all conscious sinning, as long
   as we sufficiently believe, raising us above the dominating power of
   sin into a state of divine consciousness, where we are new-charactered,
   as it were, continually, by the righteousness of God, spreading itself
   into and over and through the faith, by which we are trusted to his
   mercy. All this Christ will do. In this state of power and holy
   endowment, superior to sin, he can, he will establish every soul that
   makes room wide enough for him to enter and bestow his fullness. He
   will be a Saviour, in short, just as mighty and complete as we want him
   to be, just as meager and partial and doubtfully real as we require him
   to be. O what meaning is there, in this view, in the apostle's
   invocation--"That he would grant you, according to the riches of his
   glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man;
   that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted
   and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend, with all saints, what
   is the length, and breadth, and depth, and height; and to know the love
   of Christ that passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the
   fullness of God." This heavy, long-drawn sigh, whose wording carries
   such a weight of promise still--what does it invoke but that Christ may
   somehow, any how, get fit room, as he never yet has done, in these
   stunted human hearts.

   And this same sigh has been how fit a prayer for all ages. Probably
   nothing comparatively of the power of Christ, as a gift to the world,
   has ever yet been seen or realized in it. And a main part of the
   difficulty is, that Christ is a grace too big for men's thoughts, and
   of course too big for their faith,--the Eternal Word of God robed in
   flesh, the humanly manifested love and feeling of God, a free
   justification for the greatest of sinners and for all sin, a power of
   victory in the soul that raises it above temptation, supports it in
   peace, and makes obedience itself its liberty. Such a Christ of
   salvation fully received, embraced in the plenitude of his gifts--what
   fires would he kindle, what tongues -of eloquence loosen, what heroic
   witnessings inspire! But, as yeti the disciples are commonly men of
   only a little faith, and it is with them according to their faith. They
   too often almost make a merit of having no merit, and think it even a
   part of Christian modesty to believe that Christ will do for them, only
   according to what they miss, or really do not undertake for themselves.

   And so it comes to pass, my brethren, that our gospel fails, hitherto,
   of all its due honors, because we so poorly represent the worth and
   largeness of it. What multitudes are there, under the name of
   disciples, who maintain a Christian figure scarcely up to the line of
   common respect--penurious, little, mean, sordid, foul in their
   imaginations, low-minded, coarse-minded every way. Until Christ gets
   room in the higher spaces of their feeling, and their consciousness
   gets ennobled by a worthier and fuller reception, it must be so. Others
   are inconstant, falling away so feebly as to put a weak look on the
   gospel itself; as if it were only able to kindle a flare in the
   passions, not to establish a durable character. This too must be so,
   till Christ is fully enough received to be the head of their new
   capacity and growth. Multitudes, again, are not made happy as they
   should be, wear a long-faced, weary, dissatisfied, legally constrained
   look, any thing but a look of courage and joy and blessed contentation.
   Yes, and for the simple reason that there is nothing so wretched, so
   very close to starvation, as a little, doubtfully received grace. True
   joy comes by hearts'-full and when there is room enough given for
   Christ to flood the feeling, the peace becomes a river--never till
   then.

   Discordant opinions and strifes of doctrines endlessly propagated are
   another scandal. And since heads are little and many, full of fractious
   and gaunt notions, all horning or hoofing each other, as hungry beasts
   in their stall, what wonder is it if they raise a clatter of much
   discord? No, the true hospitality is that of the heart, and if only the
   grand heart-world of the race were set open to the full entertainment
   of Jesus, there would be what a chiming of peace and unity in the
   common love.

   Why, again, since Christianity undertakes to convert the world, does it
   seem to almost or quite fail in the slow progress it makes? Because, I
   answer, Christ gets no room; as yet, to work, and be the fire in men's
   hearts he is able to be. We undertake for him as by statecraft and
   churchcraft and priestcraft. We raise monasteries for him in one age,
   military crusades in another. Raymond Lull, representing a large class
   of teachers, undertook to make the gospel so logical that he could
   bring down all men of all nations, without a peradventure, before it.
   Some in our day are going to carry every thing by steam-ships and
   commerce; some by science and the schooling of heathen children; some
   by preaching agents adequately backed by missionary boards; some by
   tracts and books. But the work, however fitly ordered as respects the
   machinery, lingers, and will and must linger, till Christ gets room to
   be a more complete inspiration in his followers. They give him the
   stable when they ought to be giving him the inn, put him in the lot of
   weakness, keep him back from his victories, shut him down under the
   world, making his gospel, thus, such a secondary, doubtfully real,
   affair, that it has to be always debating in the evidences, instead of
   being its own evidence, and marching forward in its own mighty power.

   But what most of all grieves me, in such a review, is, that Christ
   himself has so great wrong to endure, in the slowness and low faith of
   so many ages. Why, if I had a friend, who was always making me to
   appear weaker and meaner than I am, putting the flattest construction
   possible on my words and sayings, professing still, in his own low
   conduct, to represent my ideas and principles, protesting the great
   advantage he gets, from being much with me, in just those things where
   he is most utterly unlike me--I could not bear him even for one week, I
   should denounce him utterly, blowing all terms of connection with him.
   And yet Christ has a patience large enough to bear us still; for he
   came to bear even our sin, and he will not start from his burden, even
   if he should not be soon through with it.

   All the sooner, brethren, ought we to come to the heart so long and
   patiently grieving for us. Is it not time, dear friends, that Christ
   our Master should begin to be fitly represented by his people--received
   in his true grandeur and fullness as the Lord of Life and Saviour of
   all mankind; able to save to, the uttermost; a grace all victorious;
   light, peace, liberty, and power; wisdom, righteousness,
   sanctification, and redemption. Be it yours then so to make room for
   him, even according to the greatness of his power-length, breadth,
   depth, height. Be no more straitened in your own bowels, stretch
   yourselves to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.
   Expect to be all that he will make you, and that you may be, open your
   whole heart to him broad as the sea. Give him all the widest spaces of
   your feeling--guest-chambers opened by your loving hospitality.
   Challenge for him his right to be now received by his disciples, as he
   never yet has been. Tell what changes and wondrous new creations will
   appear, when he finally breaks full-orbed on human experience--his true
   second coming in power and great glory. For this great consummation it
   is that every thing is preparing, and if there be voices and calls
   chiming through the spaces round us, which, for deafness, we have all
   these ages failed to hear, what is their burden but this--Lift up your
   heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the
   King of Glory shall come in.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                      II.

THE GENTLENESS OF GOD.

   "Thy gentleness hath made me great."--Ps. xviii. 35.

   Gentleness in a deity--what other religion ever took up such a thought?
   When the coarse mind of sin makes up gods and a religion by its own
   natural light, the gods, it will be seen, reveal both the coarseness
   and the sin together, as they properly should. They are made great as
   being great in force, and terrible in their resentments. They are
   mounted on tigers, hung about with snakes, cleave the sea with
   tridents, pound the sky with thunders, blow tempests out of their
   cheeks, send murrain upon the cattle, and pestilence on the cities and
   kingdoms of other gods--always raging in some lust or jealousy, or
   scaring the world by some vengeful portent.

   Just opposite to all these, the great God and creator of the world, the
   God of revelation, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
   contrives to be a gentle being; even hiding his power, and withholding
   the stress of his will, that he may put confidence and courage in the
   feeling of his children. Let us not shrink then from this epithet of
   scripture, as if it must imply some derogation from God's real
   greatness and majesty; for we are much more likely to reach the
   impression, before we have done, that precisely here do his greatness
   and majesty culminate.

   What then, first of all, do we mean by gentleness? To call it sweetness
   of temper, kindness, patience, flexibility, indecisiveness, does not
   really distinguish it. We shall best come at the true idea, if we ask
   what it means when applied to a course of treatment? When you speak,
   for example, of dealing gently with an enemy, you mean that, instead of
   trying to force a point straight through with him, you will give him
   time, and ply him indirectly with such measures and modes of
   forbearance as will put him on different thoughts, and finally turn him
   to a better mind. Here then is the true conception of God's gentleness.
   It lies in his consenting to the use of indirection, as a way of
   gaining his adversaries. It means that he does not set himself, as a
   ruler, to drive his purpose straight through, but that, consciously
   wise and right, abiding in his purposes with majestic confidence, and
   expecting to reign with a finally established supremacy, he is only too
   great to fly at his adversary, and force him to the wall, if he does
   not instantly surrender; that, instead of coming down upon him thus, in
   a manner of direct onset, to carry his immediate submission by storm,
   he lays gentle seige to him, waiting for his willing assent and choice.
   He allows dissent for the present, defers to prejudice, watches for the
   cooling of passion, gives room and space for the weaknesses of our
   unreasonable and perverse habit to play themselves out, and so by
   leading us round, through long courses of kind but faithful exercise,
   he counts on bringing us out into the ways of obedience and duty freely
   chosen. Force and crude absolutism are thus put by; the irritations of
   a jealous littleness have no place; and the great God and Father,
   intent on making his children great, follows them and plies them with
   the gracious indirections of a faithful and patient love.

   It is scarcely necessary to add that there are many kinds of
   indirection, which are wide, as possible, of any character of
   gentleness. All policy, in the bad sense of the term, is indirection. A
   simply wise expedient has often this character. But the indirections of
   God are those of a ruler, perfectly secure and sovereign, and their
   object is, not to turn a point of interest for himself, but simply to
   advance and make great the unworthy and disobedient subjects of his
   goodness.

   This character of gentleness in God's treatment, you will thus
   perceive, is one of the greatest spiritual beauty and majesty, and one
   that ought to affect us most tenderly in all our sentiments and
   choices. And that we may have it in its true estimation, observe, first
   of all, how far off it is from the practice and even capacity generally
   of mankind. We can do almost any thing more easily than consent to use
   any sort of indirection, when we are resisted in the exercise of
   authority, or encounter another at some point of violated right.

   There is a more frequent approach to gentleness, in the parental
   relation, than any where else among men. And yet even here, how common
   is the weak display of a violent, autocratic, manner, in the name of
   authority and government. Seeing the child daring to resist his will,
   the parent is, how often, foolishly exasperated. With a flush of anger
   and a stern, hard voice, he raises the issue of peremptory obedience;
   and when, either by force or without, he has carried his way, he
   probably congratulates himself that he has been faithful enough to
   break his child's will. Whereas, raising an issue between his own
   passions and his child's mere fears, he is quite as likely to have
   broken down his conscience as his will, unnerving all the forces of
   character and capacities of great manhood in him for life. Alas how
   many parents, misnamed fathers and mothers, fancy, in this manner, that
   when self-respect is completely demolished in their poor defenseless
   child, the family government is established. They fall into this
   barbarity, just because they have too little firmness to hold their
   ground in any way of indirection or gentleness. They are violent
   because they are weak, and then the conscious wrong of their violence
   weakens them still farther, turning them, after the occasion is past,
   to such a misgiving, half apologizing manner, as just completes their
   weakness.

   It will also be observed, almost universally, among men, that where one
   conies to an issue of any kind with another, matters are pressed to a
   direct pointblank Yes or No. If it is a case of personal wrong, or a
   quarrel of any kind, the parties face each other, pride against pride,
   passion against passion, and the hot endeavor is to storm a way through
   to victory. There is no indirection used to soften the adversary, no
   waiting for time, nothing meets the feeling of the moment but to bring
   him down upon the issue, and floor him by a direct assault. To redress
   the injury by gentleness, to humble an adversary by his own
   reflections, and tame his will by the circuitous approach of
   forbearance and a siege of true suggestion--that is not the manner of
   men, but only of God.

   True gentleness, we thus perceive, is, a character too great for any
   but the greatest and most divinely tempered souls. And yet how ready
   are many to infer that, since God is omnipotent, he must needs have it
   as a way of majesty, to carry all his points through to their issue by
   force, just as they would do themselves. What, in their view, is it for
   God to be omnipotent, but to drive his chariot where he will. Even
   Christian theologians, knowing that he has force enough to carry his
   points at will, make out pictures of his sovereignty, not seldom, that
   stamp it as a remorseless absolutism. They do not remember that it is
   man, he that has no force, who wants to carry every thing by force, and
   that God is a being too great for this kind of infirmity; that, having
   all power, he glories in the hiding of his power; that holding the
   worlds in the hollow of his hand, and causing heaven's pillars to shake
   at his reproof, He still counts it the only true gentleness for Him to
   bend, and wait, and reason with his adversary, and turn him round by
   His strong Providence, till. he is gained to repentance and a volunteer
   obedience.

   But God maintains a government of law, it will be remembered, and
   enforces his law by just penalties, and what room is there for
   gentleness in a government of law? All room, I answer; for how shall he
   gain us to his law as good and right, if he does not give us time to
   make the discovery of what it is? To receive law because we are crammed
   with it, is not to receive it as law, but only to receive it as force,
   and God would spurn that kind of obedience, even from the meanest of
   his subjects. He wants our intelligent, free choice, of duty--that we
   should have it in love, nay have it even in liberty. Doubtless it is
   true that he will finally punish the incorrigible; but He need not
   therefore, like some weak, mortal despot, hurry up his force, and drive
   straight in upon his mark. If he were consciously a little
   faint-hearted he would, but he is great enough in his firmness to be
   gentle and wait.

   But some evidence will be demanded that God pursues any such method of
   indirection, or of rectoral gentleness with us. See then, first of all,
   how openly he takes this altitude in the scriptures.

   When our first father breaks through law, by his act of sin, he does
   not strike him down by his thunders, but he holds them back, comes to
   him even with a word of promise, and sends him forth into the rough
   trials of a world unparadised by guilt, to work, and suffer, and learn,
   and, when he will, to turn and live. The ten brothers of Joseph are
   managed in the same way. When they could not speak peaceably to him, or
   even endure his presence in the family, God lets them sell him to the
   Egyptians, then sends them down to Egypt, by the instigations of
   famine, and passes them back and forth with supplies to their father,
   allowing them to feed even the life of their bodies out of Joseph's
   bounty, till finally, when he is revealed as their brother and their
   father's son, they are seen doing exactly what they had sworn in their
   wrath should never be done--bowing their sheaf to the sheaf of Joseph.
   Here too is the solution of that very strange chapter of history, the
   forty years' march in the wilderness. The people were a slave-born
   people, having all the vices, superstitions, and unmanly weaknesses,
   that belong to slavery. God will not settle his land with such, and no
   thunders or earthquakes of discipline can drive the inbred weakness
   suddenly out of them. So he takes the indirect method, puts them on a
   milling of time and trial, marches them round and round to ventilate
   their low passions, lets some die and others be born, till finally they
   become quite another people, and are fitted to inaugurate a new
   history.

   But I need not multiply these minor examples, when it is the very
   genius of Christianity itself to prevail with man, or bring him back to
   obedience and life by a course of loving indirection. What we call the
   gospel is only a translation, so to speak, of the gentleness of God--a
   matter in the world of fact, answering to a higher matter, antecedent,
   in the magnanimity of God. I do not say that this gospel is a mere
   effusion of divine sentiment apart from all counsel and government. It
   comes by counsel older than the world's foundations. The salvation it
   brings is a governmental salvation. It is, at once, the crown of God's
   purposes and of his governmental order. And the gentleness of God must
   institute this second chapter of gracious indirection, because no
   scheme of rule could issue more directly in good without it. For it was
   impossible in the nature of things that mere law--precept driven home
   by the forces of penalty--should ever establish a really principled
   obedience in us. How shall we gladly obey and serve in love, which is
   the only obedience having any true character, till we have had time to
   make some experiments, try some deviations, sting ourselves in some
   bitter pains of trials, and so come round into the law freely chosen,
   because we have found how good it is; and, what is more than all, have
   seen how good God thinks it himself to be, from what is revealed in
   that wondrous indirection of grace, the incarnate life and cross of
   Jesus. Here the very plan is to carry the precept of law by motives
   higher than force; by feeling, and character, and sacrifice. We could
   not be driven out of sin by the direct thrust of omnipotence; for to be
   thus driven out is to be in it still. But we could be overcome by the
   argument of the cross, and by voices that derive a quality from
   suffering and sorrow. And thus it is that we forsake our sins, at the
   call of Jesus and his cross, freely, embracing thus in trust, what in
   willfulness and ignorance we rejected.

   Nor does it vary at all our account of this gospel, that the Holy
   Spirit works concurrently in it, with Christ and his cross. For it is
   not true, as some Christian teachers imagine, that the Holy Spirit
   works conversion by a direct, soul-renewing fiat or silent
   thunder-stroke of omnipotence. He too works by indirection, not by any
   short method of absolute will. Working efficiently and, in a certain
   sense, immediately in the man, or subject, he still circles round the
   will, doing it respect by laying no force upon it, and only raising
   appeals to it from what he puts in the mind, the conscience, the
   memory, the sense of want, the fears excited, the aspirations kindled.
   lie moves upon it thus by a siege, and not by a fiat, carries it
   finally by a process of circumvallation, commonly much longer even than
   the ministry of Jesus. He begins with the child, opening his little
   nature to gleams of religious truth and feeling--at the family prayers,
   in his solitary hours and dreams, in the songs of praise that warble on
   the strings of his soul, and among the heavenly affinities of his
   religious nature. And thenceforward he goes with him, in all the future
   changes and unfoldings of his life, turning his thoughts, raising
   tender questions in him, working private bosom scenes in his feeling,
   forcing nothing, but pleading and insinuating every thing good; a
   better presence keeping him company, and preparing, by all modes of
   skill and holy inducement, to make him great, So that, if we could
   follow a soul onward in its life-history, we should see a
   Spirit-history running parallel with it. And when it is really born of
   God, it will be the result of what the Spirit has wrought, by a long,
   and various, and subtle, and beautiful process, too delicate for human
   thought to trace.

   Holding this view of God's gentleness in the treatment of souls, and
   finding even the Christian gospel in it, we ought also to find that his
   whole management of us and the world corresponds. Is it so--is there
   such a correspondence?

   See, some will say, what terrible forces we have ravening and pouring
   inevitably on about us day and night--roaring seas, wild hurricanes,
   thunder-shocks that split the heavens, earthquakes splitting the very
   world's body itself, heat and cold, drought and deluge, pestilences and
   deaths in all forms. What is there to be seen but a terrible,
   inexorable going on, still on, everywhere. The fixed laws everywhere
   refuse to bend, hearing no prayers, the great worlds fly through heaven
   as if slung by the Almighty like the smooth stone of David, and the
   atoms rush together in their indivertible affinities, like the simples
   of gunpowder touched by fire, refusing to consider any body. Where then
   is the gentleness of such a God as we have signaled to us, in these
   unpitying, inexorable, fated, powers of the world? Is it such a God
   that moves by indirection? Yes, and that all the more properly, just
   because these signs of earth and heaven, these undiverted,
   undivertible, all-demolishing and terrible forces permit him to do it.
   He now can hide his omnipotence, for a time, just at the point where it
   touches us; he can set his will behind his love, for to-day and
   possibly to-morrow; simply because he has these majestic
   inexorabilities for the rear-guard of his mercies. For we can not
   despise him now, when he bends to us in favor, because it is the
   bending, we may see, of firmness. Able to use force, he can now use
   character, and time, and kindness. Real gentleness in Him, as in every
   other being, supposes counsel, order, end, and a determinate will. A
   weak man can be weak and that is all. Not even a weak woman can be
   properly called gentle. No woman will so much impress others by her
   gentleness, when she is gentle, as one that has great firmness and
   decision. And so it is the firm, great God, he that goes on so
   inflexibly in the laws, and the inexorable forces and causes of the
   creation--He it is that can, with so much better dignity, gentle
   himself to a child or a sinner.

   See then how it goes with us in God's management of our experience.
   Doing every thing to work on our feeling, temperament, thought, will,
   and so on our eternal character, He still does nothing by direct
   impulsion. It is with us here, in every thing, as it was with Jonah
   when the Lord sent him to Nineveh. It was a good long journey inland,
   but Jonah steers for Joppa, straight the other way, and there puts to
   sea, sailing off upon it, and then under it, and through the belly of
   hell, and comes to land nobody knows where. After much perambulation,
   he gets to Nineveh and gives his message doggedly, finally to be tamed
   by a turn of hot weather and the wilting of a gourd. Just so goes the
   course of a soul whom God is training for obedience and life. It may be
   the case of a young man, setting off willfully, with his face turned
   away from God. Whereupon God lets him please himself a little in his
   folly, and finally pitch himself into vice, there to ]earn, by the
   bitter woes of his thraldom, how much better God is to him than he is
   to himself, how much worthier of trust than he ever can be to himself.
   Or he takes, it may be, a longer course with him--gives him a turn of
   sickness, then of bankruptcy, then of desertion by friends, then of
   slander by enemies, taming thus his pride, sobering his feeling, making
   the world change color, but not yet gaining him to the better life.
   Then he fetches him out of his disasters by unexpected. vindications
   and gifts of mercy, such as soften unwontedly the pitch of his
   sensibilities. A faithful Christian wife, gilding his lot of adversity
   before, by her gentle cares, and quite as much, his recovery now, by
   the beautiful spirit she has formed in his and her children, by her
   faithful training--making them an honor to him as to herself--wins upon
   his willful habit, melts into his feeling, and operates a change in his
   temperament itself. Meantime his years will have been setting him on,
   by a silent drift, where his will would never carry him, and changing,
   in fact, the current of his inclination itself. Till at length,
   dissatisfied with himself, as he is more softened to God, and more
   softened to God, as he is more diverted from the satisfaction he once
   had in himself, he turns, with deliberate consent, to the call of
   Jesus, and finds what seemed to be a yoke, to be easy as liberty
   itself.

   The change is great, nay almost total in his life, and yet it has been
   carried by a process of indirection so delicate, that he is scarcely
   sensible by what steps and curiously turned methods of skill it has
   been brought to pass. And so God is managing every man, by a process
   and history of his own; for he handles him as he does no other,
   adapting every turn to his want and to the points already gained, till
   finally he is caught by the gentle guile of God's mercies and drawn to
   the rock of salvation; even as some heavy and strong fish, that has
   been played by the skillful angler, is drawn, at last, to land, by a
   delicate line, that would not even hold his weight.

   In a similar way God manages, not seldom, to gain back infidels and
   doubters. First he commonly makes them doubt their doubts. Their
   conceit he moderates, meantime, by the sobering effect of years and
   sorrow. By and by he sharpens their spiritual hunger, by the
   consciously felt emptiness of their life, and the large blank spaces of
   their creed. Then he opens some new vista into the bright field of
   truth, down which they never looked before, and the mole eyes of their
   skepticism are even dazed by the new discovered glory of God's light.

   Disciples who are lapsed into sin, and even into looseness of life, are
   recovered in the same way of indirection. God does not pelt them with
   storms, nor jerk them back into their place by any violent seizure. He
   only leads them round by his strong-handed yet gentle tractions, till
   he has got them by, or out of, their fascinations, and winnowed the
   nonsense out of their fancy or feeling, by which they have been
   captivated. And so at length he gets their feet upon the rock again
   never to be moved.

   Indeed I may go farther. Even if you desire it, God will not thrust you
   on to higher attainments in religion, by any forcible and direct
   method. He will only bring you out into the rest you seek, just as soon
   as you are sufficiently untwisted, and cleared, and rectified, under
   his indirect methods, to be there. Commonly your light will spring up
   in quarters where you look not for it, and even the very hidings and
   obscurations you suffer, will give you out some spark of light, as they
   leave you. The obstacles you conquer will turn out to be, in some
   sense, aids, the discouragements that tried you will open, when they
   part, as windows of hope.

   Having traced the manner and fact of God's condescension to these
   gentle methods, let us now pass on to another point where the subject
   properly culminates; viz., to the end he has in view; which is, to make
   us great. He may have a different opinion of greatness from that which
   is commonly held by men--he certainly has. And what is more, he has it
   because he has a much higher respect for the capabilities of our human
   nature, and much higher designs concerning it, than we have ourselves.
   We fall into a mistake here also, under what we suppose to be the
   Christian gospel itself; as if it were a plan to bring down, not the
   loftiness of our pride, and the willfulness of our rebellion, but the
   stature and majesty of our nature itself. Thus we speak of submitting,
   or losing our will, being made weak and poor, becoming little children,
   ceasing to have any mind of our own, falling into nothingness and
   self-contempt before God. All which are well enough: as Christian modes
   of expression; but we take them too literally. They are good as
   relating to our wrong will and wrong feeling, not as relating to our
   capacity of will and feeling itself. On the contrary, while God is ever
   engaged to bring down our loftiness in evil and perversity, he is just
   as constantly engaged to make us loftier and stronger in every thing
   desirable--in capacity, and power, and all personal majesty. We do not
   understand him, in fact, till we conceive it as a truth profoundly real
   and glorious, that he wants to make us great--great in will, great in
   the breadth and honest freedom of our intellect, great in courage,
   enthusiasm, self-respect, firmness, superiority to things and matters
   of condition; great in sacrifice and beneficence; great in sonship with
   Himself; great in being raised to such common counsel, and such
   intimate unity with him in his ends, that we do, in fact, reign with
   him.

   Take, for example, the first point named, the will; for this, it will
   be agreed, is the spinal column even of our personality. Here it is
   that we assert ourselves with such frightful audacity in our sin. Here
   is the tap-root of our obstinacy. Hence come all the woes and disorders
   of our fallen state. Is it then His point to crush our will, or reduce
   it in quantity? If that were all, he could do it by a thought. No, that
   is not his way. His object is, on the contrary, to gain our will--gain
   it, that is, in such a manner as to save it, and make it finally a
   thousand fold stouter in good and sacrifice, than it has been, or could
   be, in wrong and evil. He will make it the chariot, as it were, of a
   great and mighty personality, inflexible, unsubduable, tremendous in
   good forever.

   So of the intellect. Blinded by sin, wedded to all misbelief and false
   seeing, he never requires us to put violence upon it, never to force an
   opinion or a faith, lest we break its integrity; he only bids us set it
   for seeing, by a wholly right intent and a willingness even to die for
   the truth; assured that, in this manner, Time, and Providence, and
   Cross, and Spirit, will bring it into the light, clearing, as in a
   glorious sun-rising, all the clouds that obscure it, and opening a
   full, broad heaven of day on its vision. Recovered thus without being
   forced or violated, it feels itself to be a complete integer in power,
   as never before; and having conquered such obstacles under God, by the
   simple honesty of its search, it has a mighty appetite sharpened for
   the truth, and a glorious confidence raised, that time and a patient
   beholding will pierce all other clouds, and open a way for the light.

   And so it is that God manages to save all the attributes of force and
   magnanimity in us, while reducing us to love and obedience. Take such
   an example as Paul. Do we speak of will? why he has the will-force of
   an empire in him. Of intelligence? let it be enough that he goes down
   into Arabia, and that in three years' time his mind has gone over all
   the course of Christian truth and doctrine, helped by no mortal, but
   only by God's converse with him, and his own free thought. Of courage,
   firmness, self-respect? what perils has he met, what stripes endured,
   and what offscouring of the world has he been taken for, unhumbled
   still, and erect in the consciousness of his glorious manhood in
   Christ--sorrowful yet always rejoicing, poor yet making many rich,
   having nothing yet possessing all things; confounding Athens and
   Ephesus and the mob at Jerusalem, out-pleading Tertullus the lawyer,
   convincing Felix and Agrippa, commanding in the shipwreck, winning
   disciples to the faith in the household of Cæsar, and planting, in
   fact, all over Cæsar's world-wide empire, the seeds of a loftier and
   stronger empire by which it is finally to be mastered.

   Such now are God's mighty ones--humble it may be and poor, or if not
   such by social position, most effectually humbled, some will think, by
   their faith, yet how gloriously exalted. God renounces all the
   point-blank methods of dealing, that he may give scope and verge to our
   liberty, and win us to some good and great feeling, in glorious
   affinity with his own. He wants us to be great enough in the stature of
   our opinions, principles, courage and character, that he may enjoy us
   and be Himself enjoyable by us. Hence also it is that, when we are born
   of God, and the divine affinities of our great nature come into play
   unbroken, unimpaired, and even wondrously raised in volume, we, for the
   first time, make discovery of ourselves. Our heads touch heaven, as it
   were, in the sense of our regenerated dignity, and joys like the ocean
   roll through our nature, that before could only catch some rill or
   trickling drop of good. And with it comes what strength, a mighty will,
   a sense of equilibrium recovered, an all appropriating faith,
   superiority to things, immovable repose.

   And now at the crowning of this great subject, what shall more impress
   us than the sublime and captivating figure God maintains for Himself
   and his government in it. Easy enough were it for him to lay his force
   upon us, and dash our obstinacy to the ground. He might not thrust us
   into love, he could not into courage and confidence, but he might
   instantly crush out all willfulness in us forever. But he could not
   willingly reduce us, in this manner, to a weak and cringing submission.
   He wants no slaves about his throne. If he could not raise us into
   liberty and make us great in duty, he would less respect both duty and
   Himself. He refuses therefore to subdue us unless by some such method
   that we may seem, in a certain other sense, to subdue ourselves. Most
   true it is that he carries a strong hand with us. He covers up no
   principle, tempers the exactness of no law. There is no connivance in
   his methods, no concealment of truths disagreeble and piercing, no
   proposition of compromise or halving, in a way of settlement. His
   Providence moves strong. His terrors flame out on the background of a
   wrathful sky. He thunders marvelously with his voice. And so his very
   gentleness stands glorious and strong and sovereignly majestic round
   us. Were he only soft or kind, bending like a willow to our wicked
   state, there were little to move and affect us even in his goodness
   itself. But when we look on Him as the Almighty Rock, the immovable
   Governor and Keeper of the worlds, girding himself in all terrible
   majesty, when he must, to lei us know that impunity in wrong is
   impossible, then it is that we behold Him in the true meaning of his
   gentleness--how good! how firm! how adorably great! Come nigh O thou
   sinning, weary prodigal, and acknowledge and receive, in blissful
   welcome, the true greatness of thy God! Be not jealous any more that
   religion is going to depress your manly parts, or weaken the strength
   of your high aspirations. In your lowest humiliations and deepest
   repentances, you will be consciously raised and exalted. Every throb of
   heaven's life in your bosom will be only a throb of greatness. Every
   good affection, every holy action, into which your God may lead you,
   all your bosom struggles, your hungers and tears and prostrations, will
   be the travailing only of a princely birth, and a glorious sonship with
   God.

   Holding such a view too of God's ends and the careful indirections by
   which he pursues them, we can not fail to note the softened aspect
   given to what are often called the unaccountable severities of human
   experience. The woes of broken health and grim depression; the pains,
   the unspeakable agonies by which human bodies are wrenched for whole
   years; the wrongs of orphanage; pestilence, fire, flood, tempest and
   famine--how can a good God launch his bolts on men, we ask, in
   severities like these? And the sufferers themselves sometimes wonder,
   even in their faith, how it is that if God is a Father, he can let fall
   on his children such hail-storms of inevitable, unmitigated disaster.
   No, suffering mortal! a truce to all such complainings. These are only
   God's merciful indirections, fomentations of trouble and sorrow that he
   is applying, to soften the rugged and hard will in you. These pains are
   only switches to turn you off from the track of his coming
   retributions. If your great, proud nature could be won to the real
   greatness of character, by a tenderer treatment, do you not see, from
   all God's gentle methods of dealing with mankind, that he would gladly
   soften your troubles? And if diamonds are not polished by soap, or oil,
   or even by any other stone, but only by their own fine dust, why should
   you complain that God is tempering you to your good, only by such
   throes and lacerations and wastings of life, as are necessary?

   Again, to vary the strain of our thought, how strangely weak and low,
   is the perversity of many, when they require it of God to convert them
   by force, or drive them heavenward by storm. You demand, it may be,
   that God shall raise the dead before you, or that He shall speak to you
   in an audible voice from the sky, or that he shall regenerate your life
   by some stroke of omnipotence in your sleep--something you demand that
   shall astound your senses, or supersede your freedom. You require it of
   God, in fact, that He shall manage you as he did Sennacherib, that He
   shall put his hook into your nose, and his bridle into your lips, and
   lead you back, in that manner, out of sins you will not consentingly
   forsake. How preposterous and base to ask it thus of your Father, that
   He will storm you with his power and thrust you into goodness by his
   thunder-bolts! Instead of being jealous, with a much finer class of
   souls, that God and religion are going to reduce your level, you even
   require to be made little by Him, nay, to be unmade, and even thrust
   out of your personal manhood. How much better to give a ready welcome
   to what God is doing for you and in you, without force, doing in a way
   to save and even to complete your personal manhood.

   Last of all let us not omit, in such a subject as this, the due
   adjustment of our conceptions to that which is the true pitch and scale
   of our magnanimity and worth as Christian men. It is easy, at this
   point, to flaunt our notions of dignity, and go off, as it were, in a
   gas of naturalism, prating of manliness, or manly character. And yet
   there is such a thing to be thought of, revelation being judge, as
   being even great--great in some true scale of Christian greatness. A
   little, mean-minded, shuffling, cringing, timorous, selfish soul--would
   that many of our time could see how base the figure it makes under any
   Christian name. I will not undertake to say how little a man may be and
   be a Christian; for there are some natures that are constitutionally
   mean, and it may be too much to expect that grace will ennoble them all
   through in a day. Judging them in. all charity, it must none the less
   be our conception for ourselves, that God is calling us even to be
   great, great in courage and candor, steadfast in honor and truth,
   immovable in our promises, heroic in our sacrifices, right, and bold,
   and holy--men whom He is training, by His own great spirit, for a world
   of great sentiment, and will, and might, and majesty. For when we
   conceive the meeting in that world, and being there compeers with such
   majestic souls as Moses, and Paul, and Luther, and Cromwell, nay with
   thrones and dominions otherwise nameless, we do not seem, I confess, to
   be so much raised in the sense of our possible stature in good, as when
   we simply meditate God's gentle methods with us here, to raise our
   fallen manhood to its place; his careful respect for our liberty, the
   hidings of His power, the detentions of his violated feeling, the
   sending of his Son, and his Son's great cross, the silent intercessions
   of his Spirit--all the changes through which he is leading us, all the
   careful trainings of care and culture by which he is bringing us back
   at last, stage by stage, to the final erectness and glory of a perfect
   life. Even as when the mother eagle lifts her young upon the edge of
   her nest, holding them back that they may not topple of, and puts them
   fluttering there and waving their pinions that they may get strength to
   lift their bodies, and finally to scale the empyreal heights. And when
   we shall be able, ascending thus our state of glory, to look back and
   trace all this, in a clear and orderly review, what a wonderful and
   thrilling retrospect will it be.

   Conscious there of powers not broken down or crushed into servility,
   but of wills invigorated rather by submission, with what sense of
   inborn dignity and strength shall we sing--Thy gentleness hath made us
   great. All the littleness of our sin is now quite gone. We are now
   complete men, such as God meant us to be;--great in the stature of our
   opinions, great in our feelings, principles, energies of will and joy;
   greatest of all in our conscious affinity with God and the Lamb. Be it
   ours to live, then; with a sense of our high calling upon us, abiding
   in all the holy magnanimities of love, honor, sacrifice and truth;
   sincere, exact, faithful, bountiful and free; showing thus to others
   and knowing always in ourselves, that we do steadily aspire to just
   that height of good, into which our God himself has undertaken to exalt
   us.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                      III.

THE INSIGHT OF LOVE.

   "She hath done what she could; she is come aforehand to anoint my body
   to the burying."--Mark, xiv. 8.

   It takes a woman disciple after all to do any most beautiful thing; in
   certain respects too, or as far as love is wisdom, any wisest thing.
   Thus we have before us, here, a simple-hearted loving woman, who has
   had no subtle questions of criticism about matters of duty and right,
   but only loves her Lord's person with a love that is probably a kind of
   mystery to herself, which love she wants somehow to express.; She comes
   therefore with her box of ointment, having sold we know not what
   article, or portion of her property, to buy it, for it was very costly,
   and pours it on the Saviour's head--just here to encounter, for the
   first time, scruples, questions, and rebuffs of argument. For though
   she is no casuist herself, no debater of cases of conscience, there are
   abundance of such among the Lord's male disciples present, Judas among
   them, and they have more reasons, a great many, to offer than she, poor
   child of love, has ever thought of. "Hold woman," they say, and
   particularly Judas in the representation of John, "Why this
   extravagance and foolish waste? Is not the Lord always teaching us to
   consider the poor, and do good in every thing, and what immense good
   might you have done, had you sold this ointment and put it to the uses
   of beneficence; why, the trains of benefit you might have set agoing by
   the money are even endless, and now it is thrown away for just
   nothing." She makes no answer, has nothing at all to say, and does not
   see, most likely, why she has not been as foolish as they think.

   But Christ answers for her. "No, children, no," he says, "do not
   trouble the woman, she has an oracle in her love wiser than yours that
   you have in your heads; she has done a good work on me, fitting,
   altogether, to be done by her, if not by you. [Nay, she has even
   prophesied here, taken hold practically of my future--just that which I
   have never been able to make you conceive, or guess. The poor you have
   always with you, be it yours to bless them, but me ye have not always.
   She is come aforehand--dear prophetic tribute!--to anoint my body for
   the burying. Is it nothing that I die in the fragrant odors of this
   dear woman's love? Verily I say unto you, wheresoever this gospel shall
   be preached throughout the whole world, this also that this woman hath
   done, shall be told for a memorial of her."

   No such commendation was ever before or after conferred by the Saviour
   on any mortal of the race. He testified for the Gentile centurion, that
   he had found no such faith as his even in Israel. He tacitly commended
   his three favorite disciples, Peter, James and John, by the peculiar
   confidence into which he took them. But the little gospel, so to speak,
   of this loving woman's devotion, he declares shall go forth with his,
   to be spoken of, and felt in its beauty, and breathed in its fragrance,
   in all remotest regions of the world, and latest ages of time.

   And what is the lesson or true import of this so much commended
   example? What but this?--do for Christ just what is closest at hand,
   and be sure that you will so meet all his remotest, or most unknown
   times and occasions. Or, better still, follow without question the
   impulse of love to Christ's own person; for this when really full and
   sovereign, will put you along easily in a kind of infallible way, and
   make your conduct chime, as it were, naturally with all God's future,
   even when that future is unknown; untying the most difficult questions
   of casuistry without so much as a question raised.

   And precisely here, not elsewhere, is the great contribution Christ has
   made to morality, or the department of duty. He inaugurates, in fact, a
   new Christian morality, quite superior to the natural ethics of the
   world. Not a new morality as respects the body of rules, or code of
   preceptive obligations, though even here he instituted laws of conduct
   so important as to create a new era of advancement, but new in the
   sense that. he raised his followers to a new point of insight, where
   the solutions of duty are easy, and the otherwise perplexed questions
   of casuistry are forever suspended; even as this woman friend of Jesus
   saw more through her love, and struck into a finer coincidence with his
   sublime future, than all the male disciples around her had been able to
   do by the computations of reflective reason. Nay, if Judas who,
   according to John, was the more forward critic, had been writing just
   then a treatise on the economies of duty, her little treatise of
   unction was better.

   But we shall not understand either her, or the subject we are proposing
   to illustrate, if we do not--

   I. Bring into view the inherent difficulty that besets all questions of
   casuistry that rise under the laws, or precepts of natural morality. By
   casuistry we mean, as the word is commonly used by ethical writers, the
   settlement of cases, sometimes called cases of conscience. The rules or
   precepts of morality are easy for the most part, it is only their
   applications to particular cases that are difficult. And they are often
   so difficult as to cause the greatest perplexity in the most
   conscientious and thoroughly Christian minds; as many of you will know
   perhaps from the struggles of your own moral experience. Ready to do
   any thing which duty requires, ready to fulfill any precept, or law,
   which is obligatory, you have yet been tormented often with doubts, it
   may be, regarding what this or that rule of duty required of you, in
   the particular case which had then arrived. For the rules, or precepts
   of obligation, are all general or generic in their nature, while the
   cases are particular, and appear to even run into each other, by subtle
   gradations of color, so as to be separable by no distinct lines. Every
   case is peculiar, it is more, it is less, it is different--does the
   rule of duty apply?

   Take for example, the statute "thou shalt not kill," either as a
   statute of the decalogue, or of natural morality. Under this, as an
   accepted law, there will come up, in the application, questions like
   these--Whether one can rightly be a soldier for the defense of his
   country? Whether he can rightly execute a criminal under the sentence
   of death? Whether it is murder to shoot a robber at one's bed-side in
   the night? Whether one can rightly defend a poor fugitive, hunted by
   his master, by assailing the master's life? Whether as a christian he
   may rightly pursue the murderer of his child, and bring him to trial,
   under a charge that subjects him to capital punishment? Whether he may
   order a surgical operation done upon a child, which there is much
   reason to fear will only shorten life? Whether he can run this or that
   considerable risk of his own life for purposes of gain, without
   incurring the guilt of suicide?

   The same is true of any other main precept of morality or statute of
   the decalogue. Accepting the law general, endless questions arise
   regarding its particular applications, which it seems impossible to
   solve.

   Or we may take the great principle which requires doing good, the
   utmost good possible. And then the question will arise continually, in
   new forms endlessly varied, what is best to be done? And here we find
   ourselves thrown at every turn, upon a search that requires an immense
   fore-reaching, or impossible, knowledge of the future. What are God's
   plans in regard to the future? shall we meet them and chime with them,
   by this course or by that? Or, if we only try to find what will be most
   useful, we can see but an inch forward, and how can we decide. Thus if
   the woman had been asking how she could use her box of ointment so as
   to do most good with it, she would either have fallen into utter doubt
   and perplexity, or else she would have taken up the same conclusion
   with Judas, and given it to the benefit of the poor. And so if you have
   on hand the question, whether, in the way of being useful in the
   highest possible degree, you will educate your son as a Christian
   minister? there come up immediately questions like these--Whether he
   will live to be of any service to the world? Whether he has talents to
   be useful? Whether he will maintain a character to be useful? Whether
   even God will make him eloquent, or keep him grounded thoroughly in the
   truth? A thousand unknown matters regarding his future, baffle you in
   coming to any intelligent solution of your duty, Any sort of business
   you propose to undertake as a way of usefulness, depends in the same
   way on a thousand unknown contingencies--the probable characters of
   partners and customers, the winds, wars, fires, seasons, markets of the
   years to come. In this measure you are brought up shortly, under the
   questions of duty, by the discovery that you can see but a little way,
   what ever you propose, and that all your computations of usefulness or
   means of usefulness to be obtained, are too short in the run to allow
   the satisfactory settlement of any thing.

   These difficulties, it is true may be exaggerated. Some men never have
   a trouble about duty in their lives, just because they have practically
   no conscience about it. Really conscientious persons, too, settle most
   of their questions as they rise, without debate. It is here exactly as
   it is in the law; for what is called the common law is a product of
   pure moral casuistry from beginning to end--ten thousand obligations
   are discharged without litigation to one that is settled by it, and yet
   the few to be thus settled are how many and troublesome. The reported
   volumes multiply till no one can read them, and yet the new cases come;
   the work is never done--never in fact to be done. Just so it is with
   our troubles of casuistry. The really conscientious man will be
   continually graveled by some question he can not solve by his reason,
   and one such question is enough to break his peace. However perfect and
   simple the code of preceptive duty, the applications of it will often
   be difficult, and sometimes well nigh impossible, without some better
   help than casuistry, which better help I now proceed,

   II. To show is contributed by Christ and his gospel. By him is added to
   the code of duty, what could, by no possibility be located in it, a
   power to settle right applications to all particular cases, without
   casuistry, or any such debate of reasons, as allows even a chance of
   perplexity.

   Thus, begetting in the soul a new personal love to himself, practically
   supreme, Christ establishes in it all law, and makes it gravitate, by
   its own sacred motion, toward all that is right and good in all
   particular cases. This love will find all good by its own pure
   affinity, apart from any mere debate of reasons; even as a magnet finds
   all specks of iron hidden in the common dust. Thus if the race were
   standing fast in love, perfect love, that love would be the fulfilling
   of the law without the law, determining itself rightly by its own
   blessed motions, without any statutory control whatever. It is only
   under sin, where the love is gone out as a principle, that we get up
   rules, work out adjudications, creep along toilsomely into moral
   customs and codes, contriving in that manner to fence about life and
   make society endurable. These are laws that God enacts for the lawless
   and disobedient; or which they, under God, elaborate for their own
   protection. But who will go to love and say, thou shalt not steal, or
   kill, or lie--does not love know that beforehand? These decalogue
   statutes--love wants none of them, she fulfills them before they are
   given. She can shape a life more beautifully by her own divine impulse,
   than it could be done by any and all ethical statutes, or refinements
   under them. And accordingly when Christ restores this love in a soul,
   it will be a new inspiration of duty, just according to its degree of
   power. In so far as the love is weak, or incomplete, the fences of
   precept and rule will be wanted. But the new affinity it creates, ought
   to be so clear as to make all questions of duty more and more easy,
   till finally the sense of all such rules is nearly or quite gone by,
   leaving only the love to be its own interpreter and light of guidance.

   Again it is a further consideration, drawing toward the same
   conclusion, that Christ incarnates a perfect and complete morality in
   his own person, so that when the soul in its new love embraces his
   person, it embraces, or takes into its own affinities, a complete
   morality. Consider who Christ is; the eternal Word of God for whom, and
   by whom, all the worlds were made; in whom as being in the form of God,
   all God's ends, creations, principles, counsels, providences, and
   future ongoings, are in a sense contained and totalized. Whoever loves
   him, therefore, loves in fact, all that he is in his perfection, and
   all that he means in the world, all that he is doing and going to do in
   it; and so loving him, all the currents of his soul run out with his,
   to meet as by a true inspiration, all his deepest purposes and most
   future and remotest appointments. He is in a state of mind that cleaves
   instinctively, and by hidden sympathies, to all that is in the Lord's
   person. Where the reasons of the understanding are short of reach, and
   ethical solutions of all kinds doubtful, he is drawn by the
   indivertible affinities of his heart, into easy coincidence with all
   that Christ means for him, and so into a certain divine morality. He is
   not a philosopher, not wise, as we commonly speak, and yet Christ, who
   is being formed in him, is made unto him wisdom. As the worlds are
   fashioned to serve His plans, and work out, in the sublime progression
   of ages, all His counsels of good, he falls into that same progression
   to roll on with it, not knowing whither, and how, and why, by any
   wisdom of the head, yet chiming faithfully with all that Christ is
   doing, or wants to be done.

   At the risk now of a little repetition, let us recur a moment to the
   singularly beautiful example of the woman, whose conduct gives us our
   subject, and see how completely these suggestions are verified. The
   wise male brethren who stood critics round her, had till the casuistic,
   humanly assignable, reasons plainly enough with them. And yet the
   wisdom is hers without ally reasons. She reaches further, touches the
   proprieties more fitly, chimes with God's future more exactly, than
   they do, reasoning the question as they best can. It is as if she were
   somehow polarized in her love by a new divine force, and she settles
   into coincidence with Christ and his future, just as the needle settles
   to its point without knowing why. She does not love him on debate, or
   serve him by contrived reasons, but she is so drunk up in his person,
   so totally captivated by the wondrous something felt in him, that she
   has and can have no thought other than to love him, and do every thing
   out of her love. To bathe his blessed head with what most precious
   ointment she can get, and bending low to put her fragrant homage on his
   feet, and wind them about in the honors of her hair, is all that she
   thinks of, and be it wise or unwise, it is done. Whereupon it turns out
   that she has met her Lord's future, as no other one of his disciples
   had been able; anointed his brow for the thorns, his feet for the
   nails, that both thorns and nails may draw blood in the perfume of at
   least one human creature's love. And this she has done, you perceive,
   because her life is wholly in Christ's element; tempered to him more
   fitly and totally than it could be by her understanding. By a, certain
   delicate affinity of feeling that was equal to insight, and almost to
   prophecy, she touches exactly her Lord's strange, unknown future, and
   anoints him for the kingdom and the death she does not even think of,
   or know. Plainly enough no debate of consequences could ever have
   prepared her for these deep and beautifully wise proprieties.

   Now in just this manner it is, that Christianity comes to our help, in
   all the most difficult, most insoluble questions of duty, those I mean
   which turn upon a computation of consequences. To compute such
   consequences, we need to know, in fact, a thousand things that belong
   to the future, and we know scarcely one of them--on what particular
   ends God is moving, by what means he will reach them, what effects will
   follow, or not follow, a supposed act of usefulness, what trains of
   causes will be put agoing, what trains checked and baffled. Here it is
   that our casuistry breaks down continually. At this point, all merely
   preceptive codes are inherently weak and well nigh impracticable. They
   command us to good, or beneficence, and leave us to utter perplexity in
   all computations of consequences that reach far enough to settle the
   real import or effect of any thing. Nothing plainly but some
   inspiration, or some new impulsion of love, such as puts the soul at
   one with all God's character and future, as when it embraces Christ and
   a completely incarnated morality in his person, can possibly settle our
   applications of duty and give us confidence in them. Just what helped
   the woman to come aforehand in the anointing of the Lord's body, is
   wanted by us all, at every turn of life.

   And this I will now add, as a last consideration, is what every
   Christian has found many times, if not always, in his own experience.
   Thus, in some trying condition, where he has not been able, by the
   understanding, to settle any wise course of proceeding, how very clear
   has everything been made to. him, step by step, by the simple and
   consciously single-eyed impulse of love to his Master. And when all is
   over, when his crisis is past, his course fought out, his adversaries
   confounded, his cause completely justified, his sacrifice crowned, how
   plain is it to him that he has been guided by a wisdom in his loving
   affinities, which he had not in the reasons of his understanding; all
   in a way so easy as even to be an astonishment to himself. Not to say
   this, my brethren, out of my own experience would be to withhold a good
   confession that is due. And I can not persuade myself that any
   thoroughly Christian person is ignorant of the experience I describe.
   All our best determinations of duty are those which come upon us in the
   immediate light of our immediate union to Christ.

   I ought, perhaps, to add that the doctrine I am wishing to unfold, does
   not exclude the use of the understanding. It is one thing to use the
   understanding under love, as being liquified and molded by it, and
   quite another to make it the oracle or sole arbiter of duty. Christ
   himself gives precepts to the understanding, just because we are not
   perfected in love, and require, meantime, to have the school-master's
   keeping, under a preceptive and statutory control. Nothing was further
   off from God's design than to add so many preceptive regulations by
   Christ and the apostles, to help out the natural code of morality, and
   be applied as that code is, and with it, by natural reason. He gives
   them only because we are not ripe enough in the good impulse of love to
   be kept right by that alone. We might take our passions for love, and
   become fanatics and fire-brands of duty. The false heats of our
   indignations against wrong, too little qualified by love, might fill us
   with personal animosities. Our lusts might steal the name of love and
   fool us by the counterfeit. Therefore he puts dry precepts in the
   understanding for a time, where, if they are legal and precisional in
   their way, the fogs of distemper and passion will be just as much less
   able to reach them.

   Let me add now, a few distinct suggestions that crowd upon us,
   naturally in the closing of such a subject. And--

   1. The great debate which has been going on for some time past, with
   our modern infidelity, is seen to be joined upon a superficial and
   false issue. The superior preceptive morality of the Gospel of Christ,
   which used to be conceded, is now denied, and the learned champions of
   denial undertake to refute our claim, by citing from the explored
   literature of the ancient Pagan writers, every particular maxim, or
   precept that we most value, or suppose to be most original, in the
   teachings of Christ. Which if they can do, as they certainly can not,
   their argument is only a very transparent sophistry. For, when they
   have hunted all treasures of learning through, picking up here one
   thing and here another, to match the teachings of Christ, and claim as
   the result, that they have matched every thing, their conclusions
   amounts to simply this, not that Christ is the equal of some man, but
   that he is just as competently wise as all men taken together. Besides
   they make him none the less original; for no one can pretend that
   Christ obtained, or raked together so many precepts, by any such hunt
   of learned exploration as is here resorted to; he must have given them
   out of his own creative intelligence. And then again, what signifies a
   great deal more, it is not here after all, that he made his grand
   contribution to the life of duty. The issue tried is wholly one side of
   his chief merit; viz., that he brings relief and clearness where all
   the natural codes of duty break down. These codes are grounded in
   natural reason, by that also to be applied. The chief maxims may be
   right, but the applications are still to be settled as no mortal man
   can settle them--by analogies, by subtle distinctions, drawn where
   there are no definite lines of distinction; by computations of
   usefulness depending on a knowledge of the future that is impossible.
   Every maxim wants a volume of casuistry to settle its application to
   this or that case in practice; and then new cases, equally difficult,
   will be rising still--even as they do at common law, which covers only
   a very small corner of the general field of duty. Baxter wrote an
   immense folio on cases of conscience, thinking, I suppose, that he had
   made every thing clear to the end of the world; when in fact he had
   started more questions in doing it than twenty folios could settle.
   Handled in this way, the law of duty runs to endless refinements; and
   as men are corrupt, to endless sophistries and abortions; yielding
   codes in fact, that are codes of immorality, framing mischief by a law;
   codes of Jesuitry, codes of hideous and disgusting practice, such as
   heathen peoples propagate with endless perversity. How much then does
   it mean that Christ has a perfect morality incarnated in his
   person--all beauty, truth, mercy, greatness, wise counsel of life; so
   that when he is embraced, all casuistries are well nigh superseded, and
   the humblest, most unreasoning disciple, is able by a course of
   applications, wiser than he knows himself, to fill up a beautiful life,
   meet, with a glorious consent of practice, all the grandest meanings,
   and remotest future workings of God. The life of duty passes in a clear
   element, tossed by no perplexities, happy and sweet and strong, because
   the soul in Christ's love has a light of immediate guidance. In
   presence of this manifestly divine fact, how weak and sorry is the
   attempt to break down Christ's sublime superhuman evidences, by showing
   that his contributions to the mere preceptive code of duty, have been
   more or less nearly anticipated.

   2. All conscientious Christian persons who get confused and fall into
   painful debates of duty in particular cases, may here discover the
   secret of their trouble and the way to have it relieved. Their
   difficulty is that they fall back on the modes of casuistry, and
   attempt to settle their question of duty, as Jesuits or heathens do, by
   computations of reason. Shall I do this? shall I do that? shall I give
   myself, or my son, or my husband to the army of my country? keeping one
   day in seven, how shall I keep it? training up my child for God, what
   indulgences shall I give, what pleasures shall I allow? having
   adversaries, shall I be silent? willing to make every thing a sacrifice
   for God, shall I give or not give all my time and talent to the
   immediate duties of religion?--ten thousand such questions are rising
   every hour, this with one person, this with another. The debate is
   begun and kept up day and night, till the soul is weary. The darkness
   increases, the confusion grows painful, the longer and more critical
   the debate is, till finally the soul, thrown back upon itself, sinks
   into a kind of nervous dread, close akin to horror. How many such cases
   have I met, in past years, and they are among the saddest to which I
   have been called to minister. The question of duty was turned round and
   round, till the multitude of reasons made distraction. It was even as
   if duty were the only thing impossible to be found. Have I any such
   afflicted soul before me now? O, my friend, that I could show you the
   root of your difficulty. You carry your case to the wrong tribunal, to
   the casuistries of ethics and not to Christ. You get tangled in
   questions, when you should be clear in love. Go where Mary went, or
   rather where Mary's heart went. Cease from your refinements, refuse to
   be caught any more in the mouse-trap questions and scruples of duty,
   and let it be enough to lay your soul on Christ's bosom. Resting
   quietly thus, in the sacred bliss of love to Christ's person, wanting
   nothing but to be with him and for him, your torment will soon be over.
   The question of duty will be ended even beforehand, just because the
   soul of all duty is in you. The current of your feeling will run to it
   and settle it, even before you ask where it is.

   3. It is no good sign for a Christian person, that he is always trying
   to settle his duty by calculations, and wise presagings of the future;
   and it is all the worse, if he pleases himself in the confidence that
   he succeeds. Doing nothing by faith, making no room for impulse or the
   inspiration of christian love, he takes the easy method of
   sagacity--easy to the fool as to the wise. man--determining his
   questions of course mostly in the negative; for, if there is any doubt,
   it is always a brave thing, and always looks sagacious to say, No; and
   then, since he undertakes no duty which he can not see to the end of,
   even by his eyes, which is about the same as to undertake no duty at
   all, he conceives that he has a more solid way of judging than others.
   He will do nothing out of a great sentiment of course, he will break no
   box of ointment on the head of anybody; he will educate no son for the
   ministry, for example, lest possibly he should be only a martyr for the
   truth, and all that has been spent upon him, should only be anointing
   him for his burial. Meantime, what is the love of Christ doing in him?
   what great impulse of love does he trust enough to follow it? He makes
   a winter in the name of piety, and because nothing is melted in the
   heat of it, blesses himself in the solidity of his practice! Possibly
   there may be a little of the christian love in such a person, but the
   signs are bad. To be politic is no certain way of being good, and the
   man who tries it, perils every thing.

   4. We have a striking, and at the same time, most inviting conception
   here given us, of the perfect state of society and character in the
   future life. Calculation, criticism, moral codes and precepts, none of
   these are wanted longer to regulate the conduct, all the legalities are
   gone by. There is no debate of reasons, no casuistry. The reign of
   simple love has come. The impulse that moves has its law in itself, and
   every man does what is good, just because only good is in him. There is
   no scruple, no friction, no subtlety of evil to be restrained. The
   conduct of all is pure water flowing from a pure spring. And as springs
   are unconscious of their sweetness, thunders of their sublimity,
   flowers of their beauty, so the perfection of character and conduct is
   consummated in a spontaneous movement that excludes all
   self-regulation, and requires no dressing of the life by rules and
   statutes. All best and noblest things are done, as it were naturally;
   for Christ, who is formed within, must needs appear without in acts
   that represent himself. All acts of beauty and good are like that of
   the woman, coming to anoint her Lord--inspirations of the beauty she
   loved, wise without study or contrivance, unconscious, spontaneous, and
   free. This now is society, this is character, to this heighth of
   perfection, this blessedness in good, our God is raising all that love
   him.

   After having sunned ourselves, my friends; in this bright picture
   above, some of you, it may be, will now return to the earth with a
   feeling more wearied and worn by duty than ever. This everlasting and
   compunctious study of duty, duty to children, husband or wife, duty to
   poor neighbors, and bad neighbors, and impenitent neighbors, duty to
   Sunday Schools, duty to home missions and missionaries, duty to
   heathens and savages, duty to contrabands and wounded soldiers, and
   wooden legs in the streets, and limping beggers at the door, duty to
   every body, everywhere, every day; it keeps you questioning all the
   while, rasping in a torment of debates and compunctions, till you
   almost groan aloud for weariness. It is as if your life itself were
   slavery. And then you say, with a sigh, "O, if I had nothing to do but
   just to be with Christ personally, and have my duty solely as with him,
   how sweet and blessed and secret and free would it be." Well, you may
   have it so; exactly this you may do and nothing more! Sad mistake that
   you should ever have thought otherwise! what a loss of privilege has it
   been! come back then to Christ, retire into the secret place of his
   love, and have your whole duty personally as with him. Only then you
   will make this very welcome discovery, that as you are personally given
   up to Christ's person, you are going where he goes, helping what he
   does, keeping ever dear, bright company with him, in all his motions of
   good and sympathy, refusing even to let him suffer without suffering
   with him. And so you will do a great many more duties than you even
   think of now; only they will all be sweet and easy and free, even as
   your love is. You will stoop low, and bear the load of many, and be the
   servant of all, but it will be a secret joy that you have with your
   Master personally. You will not be digging out points of conscience,
   and debating what your duty is to this or that, or him or her, or here
   or yonder; indeed you will not think that you are doing much for Christ
   any way--not half enough--and yet he will be saying to you every hour
   in sweetest approbation--"Ye did it unto me."
     __________________________________________________________________

                                      IV.

SALVATION FOR THE LOST CONDITION.

   "For the Son of Man is come to save that which was lost."--Math. xviii.
   11.

   Every kind of work supposes something to be done, some ground or
   condition of fact to be affected by it; education the fact of
   ignorance, punishment the fact of crime, charity the fact of want. The
   work of Christ, commonly called a work of salvation, supposes in like
   manner the fact of a lost condition, such as makes salvation necessary.
   So it is that Christ himself conceives it, "For the Son of Man is come
   to save that which was lost." He does not say, you observe, "that which
   is about to be, or in danger of being, lost," but he uses the past
   tense, "was lost," as if it were a fact already consummated, or, at
   least, practically determined. This work, therefore, is to be a
   salvation, not as being a preventive, but as being a remedy after the
   fact; a supernatural provision by which seeds of life are to be
   ingenerated in a lapsed condition where there are none. At this point
   then Christianity begins, this is the grand substructural truth on
   which it rests, that man who is to be saved by it, is a lost
   being--already lost.

   And yet there will be many who recoil from this assumption of Christ,
   and, without any willing disrespect to his person, take up a suspicion
   that he somehow over-states the fact of our condition. They could
   admit, without difficulty, that they are imperfect, that they sometimes
   do wrong, and that there is often great perversity in men, or it may be
   in themselves. It would not shock them, if it were declared that every
   human being wants forgiveness; but to say that we are lost beings,
   appears to be an extravagance. They do not see it in the tolerably
   comfortable state of the world, and they are not conscious of it in
   themselves; they think they have even a kind of instinctive conviction
   against it, and feel obliged to repel it as injurious and without
   evidence.

   Probably some of you before me are in just this position of mind
   regarding the great point stated. You feel obliged to make issue with
   the Lord Jesus in respect to it--doing it, as you believe, not from any
   disposition to have a conflict with him, but simply because you can not
   assent to his words, and seem even to know that the fact he assumes can
   not be true. The disagreement you will admit is very unequal, but how
   can you assent to a position that so far violates your honest
   convictions.

   What I propose then at the present time, not in the way of controversy,
   but for your sake and Christ's sake, is to go over this matter in a
   careful revision, offering, if I can, such a statement of it that,
   going out as it were from your own center and sentiment, you will meet
   the mind of Christ approvingly. Perhaps you will so take his meaning as
   to meet him with a felt tenderness in it, such as he most certainly
   reveals to you; concluding this friendly negotiation, so to speak, in a
   reverent, believing acceptance of him as your own great, necessary
   Saviour. To this end let us,

   I. Clear away some obstructions, or points of misconception, that may
   put your feeling at unnecessary variance with Christ's doctrine, or
   give you a sense of revulsion from it that is not really occasioned by
   any thing in it.

   Thus, when he says "was lost," using the past tense, as if the lost
   condition were a fact accomplished, you do not see that either you, or
   the world is in a state of undoing so completely reprobate. But he does
   not mean, when he says "was lost," that the lost condition is literally
   accomplished in the full significance of it, but only that it is begun,
   with a fixed certainty of being fully accomplished; that, as being
   begun, the causes that are loosed in it contain the certainty of the
   fact, as truly as if the fact were fully executed. Thus if you see a
   man topple off the brink of a precipice a thousand feet high, you say
   inwardly, the moment he passes his center of gravity, "he is gone;" you
   know it as well as when you see him dashed in pieces on the rocks
   below; for the causes that have gotten hold of him, contain the fact of
   his destruction, and he is just as truly lost before the fact
   accomplished as after. So if a man has taken some deadly poison and the
   stupor has begun to settle upon him already, you say that he is a lost
   man; for the death-power is in him, and you know as well that he is
   gone, as if he lay dead at your feet. So a soul under evil once begun,
   has taken the poison, and the bad causation at work is fatal; it
   contains the fact of a ruined immortality, in such a sense that we
   never adequately conceive it, save as we give it past tense, and say,
   "was lost."

   Again, you have heard of such a thing as "total depravity," and the
   declaration of Christ may be somehow associated with such a conception;
   a conception which you instinctively repel as unjust and extravagant,
   and contrary plainly to what you know of the many graces and virtues
   that adorn our human life. But this notion of total depravity is no
   declaration of Christ, and he is not responsible for it. It is only a
   speculated dogma of man, which can be so stated as to be true, and very
   often is so stated as to be false. You have nothing to do with it here.

   It has much to do, again with your impressions on this subject, that
   you are so completely wide of all sensibility to, or consciousness of,
   the lost condition Christ assumes. Have you considered the possibility
   that you may be rather proving the truth of it in that manner? "If our
   gospel be hid," says an apostle, "it is hid to them that are lost." If
   you have no sense of being in the lost condition Christ speaks of, if
   the salvation he proposes seems, in that view, to be an exaggeration, a
   fiction, it may be true and is very likely to be, that the want of
   proportion is in you and not in it. I say not that it is, I only
   suggest that it may be. If it is, then it will appear by the positive
   evidence hereafter to be given.

   Again, your mind is an active principle, and it keeps suggesting, or
   putting in your way, thoughts that run, as it were, to a contrary
   conviction; as that God is good, and will not put a race in being, to
   be lost regarding all good ends of being, or that he is a great being,
   competent every way to keep his foster children safe. The argument is
   short and easy, it seems even to invent itself. But there is another
   counter suggestion that is quite as likely to be true, and has weight
   enough certainly to balance it; viz., that God wanted possibly, in the
   creation of men, free beings like himself, and capable of common
   virtues with himself--not stones, or trees, or animals--and that, being
   free and therefore not to be controlled by force, they must of
   necessity be free to evil; consequently never to be set fast in common
   virtues with himself, except as he goes down after them into evil and a
   lost condition, to restore them by a salvation. This being true,
   creatures may be made, that perish, or fall into lost conditions.,
   Besides the world is full of analogies. The blossoms of the spring
   cover the trees and the fields, all alike beautiful and fragrant; but
   they shortly strew the ground as dead failures, even the greater part
   of them, having set no beginning of fruit. And then of the fruits that
   are set how many die as abortive growths, strewing the ground again.
   How many harvests also are blasted, yielding only straw. In the immense
   propagations of the sea, what myriads die in the first week of life.
   Thus we find nature everywhere struggling in abortive growths,
   fainting, as it were, in the perfecting of what her prolific intentions
   initiate. And all these abortions are so many tokens in the lower forms
   of life, of the possibility that there also may be blasted growths in
   the higher.

   Once more the amiable virtues, high aspirations, and other shining
   qualities, you see in mankind, make the assumed fact of our lost
   condition seem harsh and extravagant--you could not believe it if you
   would. But considering how high and beautiful a nature the soul is, it
   should not surprise you that it shows many traces of dignity even after
   it has fallen prostrate, and lies a broken statue on the ground.
   Besides, Christ himself had even a more appreciative feeling, in
   respect to what may be called our natural character than you. When a
   certain young man, rich, but conscientiously upright and nobly
   ingenuous, came to him asking what he should do "to inherit eternal
   life?" though he was obliged in faithfulness to answer, "one thing thou
   lackest,"--requiring him to suffer a total change of life, in the
   sacrifice of all he had, and the assumption of his cross--his manner
   and look were so visibly and affectingly tender, nevertheless, as to
   attract the special attention of his disciples, and from them it passed
   into the narrative, as a distinctly noted element of description--"Then
   Jesus beholding him, loved him." You might not yourself have put any
   such terms of requirement upon him; I fear that you would not, but
   would you, with all you sensibilities to natural excellence, have loved
   him as much, or shown it by signs as beautifully impressive?

   Having noted, in this manner, so many points of unnecessary revulsion
   from the fact of a lost condition, assumed by Christ in his work of
   salvation, I think I may take it for granted that you are ready--

   II. To look at the evidence of the fact and accept the conclusion it
   brings you.

   And the first thing here to be considered is, that our blessed Master,
   in assuming your lost condition, is not doing it harshly, or in any
   manner of severity. He is no dogmatist, making out his article of
   depravity. He is not a teacher of that light quality that permits him
   to be pleased with appalling severities of rhetoric, and over-drawn
   allegations of fact, without any due sense of their meaning. His
   feeling is tender, never censorious. Sometimes, by a kind of divine
   politeness so to speak, he puts a face on human character and relations
   that avoids a look of impeachment where impeachment would be true; as
   when he speaks of "laying down his life for his friends." He could have
   said "enemies" quite as truly, or even more so, but did not like to put
   that now upon his disciples. In the same kind way of consideration, but
   with a deeper feeling, he apologizes to God for his murderers, even in
   the article of death, and apparently comforts himself in the
   allowance--"Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." Is it
   such a being that will thresh you in random charges, the severity of
   which is apparent to you and not to him? You can not say it, or even be
   willing to think it.

   Furthermore, it must be evident to you, as it has been to all most
   unrestrained critics and deniers, that his moral sentiments and
   standards are high and sharp beyond comparison--higher and sharper
   certainly than yours. He has also a most piercing insight of all that
   is deepest in character and its wants; as, by force of his most
   singular purity alone, he must of necessity have; what then will you
   sooner think of, when he calls you a lost man, than that, possibly, he
   knows you more adequately than you know yourself? Having then some
   better right than you to know, what does he in fact say?

   I might go to the other scriptures, citing declarations from them; and
   especially from the writings of Paul, who discusses this very point
   many times over, showing by the most cogently close and formal
   arguments, the fallen state of disability and subjection to evil, out
   of which Christ has undertaken to raise you; but I prefer to keep the
   question still and altogether between you and him, and therefore I
   shall not cite any words but his. Notice then his parables of the lost
   sheep, and the lost piece of money, not omitting to observe that he is
   here sharpening no point of allegation against men, but only setting
   forth the joy that will accrue to the angels of God, and all good
   beings, when they are restored. Is it in this attitude of feeling that
   he is launching hard or unjust judgments upon them? He also speaks of a
   state of "condemnation," declaring in a manifestly gentle feeling, that
   he has not come to condemn but to save the world, yet still obliged to
   add--"he that believeth not is condemned already." What is this state
   condemned of God but a lost condition under another figure? He uses
   also the figure of death, spiritual death, in the same manner,
   saying--"I am the life." "My Son was dead and is alive again, was lost
   and is found." "Is passed from death unto life." "For God so loved the
   world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on
   him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Death is the
   condition of disorder and spiritual dissolution, which is a lost
   condition. Life is salvation, because it is the condition of harmony
   restored; where part answers again to part, function to function, in a
   complete living order. The lost condition he also calls a state of
   "darkness" and "blindness," and to it he comes as "the light" and "the
   way." Who is more profoundly lost than he that walks groping for the
   wall? He conceives the lost condition as a state of moral disability,
   in which men "have eyes" which "can not see," and "ears which can not
   hear," and are able no longer to convert, or heal themselves. It even
   requires a divine power in us, he conceives, if we are to make any real
   approach to good--"No man can come to me, except the Father which hath
   sent me draw him." Not to multiply citations further, take the one
   practical exhibition of his discourse on regeneration. The doctrine is
   that man, as he conceives him, is in such a condition that nothing
   short of a divine movement upon him, can bring him back, into that
   character and felicity for which he was made. "Verily, verily I say
   unto you, except a man be born again"--"born of the Spirit,"--"he can
   not see the kingdom of God."

   These now are Christ's convictions, most tenderly, faithfully, and
   variously expressed, concerning man, or the lost condition of man--your
   lost condition. He does not come to some very bad men, saying these
   things, but he speaks comprehensively to the race, and grounds his work
   of salvation fixedly upon the lost condition affirmed.

   You will not hear them disrespectfully. Still it will not be strange if
   your feeling is unsatisfied. "If it be so with me," you will ask, "why
   may it not somehow be made to appear?" Let me take you then a step
   further, into another field, where I think it will appear.

   As the matter lies between you and Christ, and he has spoken already, I
   will take you now to yourself. Think it not strange, if your heart
   answers, after all, to the heart of Jesus, and re-affirms exactly what
   he has testified.

   You live in a world where there is certainly some wrong--you have seen
   it, suffered from it, and consciously done it. But all wrong, it will
   be agreed, is something done against the perfect and right will of God,
   and a shock must of necessity follow it. Suppose a machinist to produce
   a machine, some one wheel of which will somehow run directly the other
   way from what was intended--does run the other way for some space,
   longer or shorter, every few hours. It will go into confusion of course
   and become a total wreck. So a soul going against the will of God, in
   acts of wrong, breaks God's order in it. Taken as a functional
   structure, all the parts of which are to play harmoniously into each
   other, disorder and ruin begins just when wrong begins, and all its
   goings on afterward accelerate and aggravate the disorder. As the
   junctures and functions are no more in heaven's order, it is
   practically undone. Then, as the body is the soul's organ, the damage
   is propagated as disease in that. And then, as society is made up of
   souls and bodies, that also becomes an element of discord, infested
   with lies, grudges, enmities, jealousies, breaches of trust and of
   contract, deeds of injustice and robbery; history itself a volume, the
   main chapters of which report the conflicts of war, the oppressions of
   slavery, the wrongs of woman, the hard fortunes of industry, the
   corruptions of courts and governments, the intrigues of diplomacy, the
   persecutions of the good.

   But I refer you to society thus only in a way of transition, and return
   immediately to the main question as it stands in the revelations of
   your own personal consciousness. It has always seemed to me that
   whoever will accurately note his own inward working, for but one half
   hour, must even be appalled by the discoveries he will make. You
   distinguish first of all a certain shyness, or feeling of recoil from
   God--why should you withdraw instinctively thus from a being wholly
   good and pure? It was just this feeling that Adam had, after the sin,
   when he withdrew and hid himself in the garden. Guilt is at the bottom
   of this shyness. And what is a more certainly lost feeling than the
   feeling of guilt? Who can stop it, or smooth it away, by any thing done
   upon himself? It testifies to a fact--can you ever annihilate that
   fact? No more can you stop the guilt which is only a fit remembrance of
   it.

   You discover also a certain look of disproportion, that is painfully
   significant. Your ambition is too high for your possibilities and your
   place. Your passions are too strong for your prudence. Your prudence
   too close for your affections. Your irritabilities too fiery at times
   for both. Your resentments are too impetuous for your occasions. Your
   appetites too large for your possibilities of safe indulgence. Your
   will over-rules your conscience. Your inclinations master the dictates
   of your reason. And what is more sadly humiliating than any thing else,
   your great aspirations have some weight upon them which they can not
   lift, falling back baffled and spent, with no power left but to notify
   you of their constant failure. Your great ideals too, revealing, as it
   were, the summits of a magnificent nature, and lifting their flags of
   inspiration there, are yet draggled somehow and drugged by low
   impulses, that make you a mockery to yourself in your attainments. A
   kind of inversion appears in every thing--sure indication of disorder.

   There is disagreement also, as well as disproportion. Your practical
   judgments of things disagree with your real wants, magnifying toys of
   sense, to leave you aching for God and the unseen good of the mind.
   Your eyes discover good in shows and outward preferments, your
   convictions place it in truth and character. Your generous and high
   sentiments look down with scorn upon the sordid and cowardly impulses
   of your selfishness, to be, in turn, alas! how often, mastered in the
   conflict with them. Your feeling of independence knuckles to
   conventionalities, and what begun as a war, is ended as a truce, in
   which you agree, as a kind of independent abject, to hold every thing
   in scorn that is not under the fashion. Your eternal convictions
   quarrel with your passions, and your will quarrels feebly with both,
   misgiving under one, succumbing to the other. The whole internal man is
   a troubled element. You hardly know, many times, what to think, on the
   plainest subjects of duty and religion, and are most facile to what you
   least approve. You ask where you are? and think you do not know; what
   to believe? and say you can not find; what to do? and do what you would
   not; what to avoid? and do it. Your mind is full of distraction--in
   endless mazes lost.

   Take another and simpler view of your disorder, do just what so few men
   ever did, sit down for an hour, and watch the run of your thoughts.
   Nothing flows in regular causation, no law of suggestion can be more
   than faintly traced. As a man who is lost in a deep forest, turns
   confusedly one way and the other, unable to set his mind in a train of
   deliberative order, so it is with you. Your thoughts huddle on,
   crossing all lines, breaking through all trains, refusing all terms of
   order, uncontrolled, uncontrollable; even as droves in the jostle of
   panic before a prairie fire. The law of right proceeding appears to be
   somehow broken, the suggestions are, how often, base, impure, and low,
   and withal defy any look of system. What jumps of transition! how
   incongruous, unaccountable, and wild! Could the internal picture be
   mapped to the eye, what eye could trace it! It is as if the soul were
   an instrument played by demons. How unlike to the sweet flow of order
   and health in the mind of an angel. The metaphysicians do indeed make
   up their solutions, showing how every thing goes on by a law of
   suggestion or association in a strictly normal process. Their farthing
   candle gives a very little faint light, wholly insufficient, however,
   as regards the main question. The single word disease tells more than
   all their speculations. Watching these wild ways of thought, we
   distinguish a ferment of death, and not the flow of life. The look is
   abnormal; as if the soul were in a kind of dissolution. No man, duly
   observing thus himself will easily doubt that he is somehow lost. The
   appalling doubt, whether he can ever be saved will be more natural.
   What a work indeed to save him, restore him, that is, to the state of
   inward health, raise him up into the orderly movement of angelic life,
   and make the currents flow melodious and clear.

   Glance now a moment, at the disabilities that have somehow come upon
   you, in what the Saviour calls your lost condition. You never
   encountered any trouble, it may be, on this point, never thought of
   being under any such disability as he speaks of. Have you not your
   will, your strong will left? Yes, but the difficulty is to execute, or
   carry through what you will to be done. When you resolve to govern
   yourself, thus or thus, or to be this or that, according to some ideal
   conceived, does your soul mind you? do you become forthwith such as you
   undertook to be? Are there no currents of habit encountered, no floods
   of contrary impulse, no volcanic fires of irritation, that prove quite
   too strong for you? Suppose you determine with all seriousness, now, or
   at some future time, to begin a religious life. Is it begun? You find
   base motives creeping into your mind, which you disrespect and
   determine to shut them away. Do you succeed? You grow sick of the world
   in one form or another, and rise up to cast it out. Does it go? You
   conceive a true notion of spiritual dignity and beauty of character,
   and set yourself to the attainment. Do you reach it? Try a thing more
   brave and certainly not less necessary; take stiff hold of your
   thoughts, set your will down upon them and still their tumult, and tame
   their wild way, into the sweet order of health and rational proceeding.
   Can you do it? Could any thing be more preposterous even than to try?
   And yet there is no true perfection of soul that does not include even
   this; including also, in the same way, all that belongs to internal
   order, proportion, agreement, and a full consent of all functions and
   powers. Have you courage to undertake such perfection? This now is the
   very profound disability in which Christ finds you yourself. Perhaps
   you never saw it before, but be looks upon you tenderly in it, and
   counts you to be lost--is any thing more certainly, manifestly true?
   This brings me to speak--

   III. Of the salvation--what it is, and by what means or methods it is
   wrought. Too short a space is left me, you will see, to allow any thing
   but a very condensed statement. Excluding then all that may be held, or
   contended for, as regards the matter of expiation for sin, or the final
   satisfaction of God's justice, in the death of Christ--which can, at
   the most, be no proper salvation from the inward disorder and
   disability we have discovered--we come directly to the question, how
   the death is quickened, bow the lost condition of the old man is, or is
   to be, renewed by Christ, in his work considered as a salvation?

   Manifestly this can be done only by some means, or operation, that
   respects the soul's free nature, working in, upon, or through consent
   in us, and so new ordering the soul.

   Not then, by some divine act in the force principle of omnipotence,
   some new creating stroke from behind, that restores our disorder; the
   change thus accomplished is a mending by repair, and not a recovery;
   omnipotence, not Christ, is the Saviour.

   As little is it by some help given to your development, or
   self-culture, or even self-reformation. When Lord Chesterfield gives
   disquisitions on the elegant properties of good manners and polite
   conduct, he speaks to men as having a power to fashion themselves by
   his rules. Christ is no professor of goodness in that way. He calls you
   never to go about being better. He does not so much as call upon you to
   stifle your deep hunger, by satisfying your own wants. He does not even
   put you climbing after the glorious ideals you have, and the still more
   glorious he gives you from his own life and person; as if you could get
   inspiration from these to raise yourself. The Chesterfieldian method,
   and the merely moral of Socrates, are not his. These were instructors,
   not Saviours, speaking both to men, not to lost men--what you want, and
   what Christ undertakes to be, is a Saviour for lost men. No scheme of
   Christianity, so called, includes a gospel, which does not include
   this. Any Christ, who does not come to save lost men, is antichrist, or
   at best no Christ at all; for who can be the Lord's true Christ, not
   coming, as life to death, peace within to discord within, order to
   disorder, liberty to bondage.

   We must look, in fact, for some such being as can be a World's
   Regenerator; making good the fact that God has not created us for a
   lost condition, but for salvation. Doubtless it may be true that God
   could not bring us on as free, by any straight line progress of
   development, into the character he meant for us, and the relation to
   Himself, that was to be our joy and his. As the ancient poets tell us
   of this or that hero of their's, who went down to hell, fought away the
   three-headed dog at the gate, and passed the Stygian river, and when
   the grim reconnoisance was over, forced his way back, even by the
   judgment bar of Radamanthus, out into the light; so there was to be, we
   may believe, an epic descent of souls into the hell-state of disorder
   and judicial condemnation, and a bursting up again, out of their penal
   imprisonment, into life and free dominion. But if the soul-history
   could not be a simply quiet educing of good, if it must be inherently
   terrible, plunging down through gulfs of disaster and loss, in the mad
   experiment of wrong, even as it is itself inherently free; then a
   Saviour is required who can sound the bottom of such gulfs, and bring
   up the lost ones, into that good and glory eternal for which they were
   made. This is Christ the Lord, coming, as in everlasting counsel, to
   execute a salvation prepared before the foundation of the world.

   He works by no fiat of absolute will, as when God said "let there be
   light." He respects your moral nature, doing it no violence. He moves
   on your consent, by moving on your convictions, wants, sensibilities,
   and sympathies. He is the love of God, the beauty of God, the mercy of
   God--God's whole character, brought nigh through a proper and true Son
   of Man, a nature fellow to your own, thus to renovate and raise your
   own. Meeting you at the point of your fall and disorder, as being
   himself incarnated into the corporate evil of your state, he brings you
   God's great feeling to work on yours. He is deeply enough entered into
   your case, to let the retributive causes loosened by your sin roll over
   him in his innocence, doing honor thus to God's judicial order, that
   you may see it sufficiently hallowed without your punishment. And that
   he may get the greater and more constraining power over you, he reveals
   to you by his suffering death, the suffering state of God's
   perfection--stung by the wrongs, and moved in holy grief for the sad
   and shameful lot of his fallen children. His suffering is in fact the
   tragic hour of divine goodness; for what to our slow feeling, is even
   eternal goodness, till we see it tragically moved? Nay, it was even
   necessary, if transgressors were to have their dull heart opened to
   this goodness, that they should see it persecuted and gibbeted by
   themselves. Thus, and therefore, he dies, raising by his death at our
   hands, those terrible convictions that will rend our bosom open to his
   love--dies for love's sake into love in us. So he will become the power
   of God unto salvation, gathering you in, as it were, with all your
   disorders, into the infolding, new-creating sympathy of his own
   character in good; so that being thus infolded in him, all your
   disproportion, discord, disability, and all wild tumult of the mind
   will be new crystalized in his divine order. Thus ends the ferment of
   death, succeeded by the harmony and health of new born life. In this
   view it was that Christ said, "I am the life." And the same thing was
   differently put, when he said "and I, if I be lifted up, will draw all
   men unto me." He would draw by his death, moving on consent and choice,
   so to gather in all our disorder, into the molds of his own perfect
   life.

   And this is salvation, the entering of the soul into God's divine
   order; for nothing is in order that is not in God, having God flow
   through it by his perfect will, even as he sways to unsinning obedience
   the tides of the sea, and the rounds of the stars. As we are lost men
   when lost to God, so we find ourselves when we find God. And then, how
   consciously do the soul's broken members coalesce and meet in Christ's
   order, when Christ liveth in them. In this new relationship, the spirit
   of love and of a sound mind, all strength, free beauty, solid vigor,
   get their spring--we are no more lost. All that is in God or Christ his
   Son, flows in upon us--wisdom, righteousness, sanctification,
   redemption. We are new men created in righteousness after God. Even so,
   "in righteousness;" for we are new-charactered in God, closeted so to
   speak in God's perfections--in that mariner justified, as if we had
   never sinned, justified by faith. We have put on righteousness, and in
   it we are clothed; even the righteousness of God, which is by faith of
   Jesus Christ, unto all and upon all them that believe.

   This is the salvation that our God is working in his Son, but as the
   great apostle here intimates, it is, and is to be, by faith; for the
   result can never be issued save as we, on our part believe. The very
   plan, or mode of his working supposes a necessity of faith in us. For
   as God comes nigh us in his son, he can be a salvation, only as we come
   nigh responsively to Him, yielding our feeling to the cogent working of
   his. And this we do in faith. Faith is the act by which one being
   confides in another, trusting up himself to that other, in what he is
   and undertakes. And there is nothing that puts a man so close to
   another's feeling, principle, and character, as this act of trust. When
   you put such faith in a man, his opinions, ways, and even accents of
   voice have a wonderfully assimilative power in you. It is as if your
   life were overspread by his, included in his. To be nigh a great good
   mind, accepted in trust and friendship, is, in this manner, one of the
   greatest possible advantages, and especially so for a young person. In
   this fact you have the reason of that faith in Christ which is made the
   condition of salvation. For it is even your chance of salvation, as a
   lost man, that a being has come into the world, so great in character
   and feeling, that turning to be with him, he shall be in you. And
   therefore, it is that his apostle says--"Christ the power of God to
   every one that believeth;" and he himself--"he that believeth shall be
   saved." He can be no sufficient power, work no principle of life, save
   as he is welcomed to the heart by faith. In the same way, he calls you
   to "come," for coming is faith. And when he says, "come unto me all ye
   that are weary and heavy laden, learn of me and ye shall find rest to
   your souls," he does not speak, as many think, to such as are only
   afflicted, world-sick, tired, pining in weak self-sympathy, but to them
   who are weary of their own evils, tossed and rent by their own
   disorders, thrown out of rest by the tumult of their thoughts and bosom
   troubles, starving in their own deep wants, crushed by their felt
   disabilities to good--in a word, lost men. Thus he speaks to you. And
   you come when you truly believe in him. Then you rest, rest in God's
   harmony, rest in peace--knowing in the blissful revelation of fact, how
   much it means that the Son of Man is come to save that which was lost.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                       V.

THE FASTING AND TEMPTATION OF JESUS.

   "Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted
   of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he
   was afterward an hungered."--Math. iv. 1-2.

   I think I do not mistake, when I assume that this particular chapter of
   the gospel history, commonly called the temptation, is just the one
   that a good many theologians, and a much larger number of Christian
   disciples, do really, if not consciously, wish had not been written;
   that which most stumbles their speculation, and least fructifies their
   spiritual impressions; that which wears the most suspiciously mythic
   look, that which they skip most frequently in the reading, or, if they
   read, only gather up their minds to go on with due attention, after
   they are through with it.

   Jesus Immanuel, the eternal Word incarnate, innocence itself and
   purity, the only perfect being that ever trod the earth, fasting!
   opening his great ministry of life in a fast of forty days, and a
   conflict with the devil for so long a time! Coming down, as he himself
   declares from heaven, to set up the kingdom of God among men, he goes
   to his work as if it were a deed of repentance--out of a desert, out of
   a fast--inaugurating his sublime kingship by austerities and fierce
   mental conflicts, such as guilty souls might undergo for their
   chastening. The picture is incongruous, many think, and revolting to
   faith. Besides they have a settled disrespect to fasting itself.

   What I propose then at the present time, is a careful inquiry into the
   matter.--The fasting of Jesus in the wilderness. My hope is, that I
   shall be able to clear this remarkable scene of what many regard as its
   forbidding, or unwelcome aspect. I even hope to open up a conception of
   it that will place it along side of the agony and the cross, and will
   make it correspondently dear to all most thoughtful, practically
   earnest souls.

   In the descent of the Spirit upon him at his baptism, he passes his
   great inward crisis of call and endowment, the effect of which the
   gospels report, in terms that require to be distinctly noted; saying,
   one that he is "led up," [transported,] another, that he is "led,"
   [taken away,] another, that he is "driven" by the Spirit into the
   wilderness. Under all these rather violent forms of expression, the
   fact is signified, that the Spirit, coming here upon him in the full
   revelation of his call, raises such a ferment, in his bosom, of great
   thoughts and strangely contesting emotions, that he is hurried away to
   the wilderness, and the state of privacy before God, for relief and
   settlement. He was not wholly unapprised of his Messiahship before, but
   had come to no adequate impression of what, as Messiah, he was to do
   and to be. He began at twelve years of age, to talk, in words
   profoundly enigmatical to his friends, of being "about his Father's
   business." He was reading also, from that time onward, the prophets, so
   often quoted by him afterward, and his soul was making answer more and
   more consciously to their words, even as a bell that chimes
   responsively to some quivering harmony of sound that is felt upon the
   air. Still he was so far from expecting a public inaugural in John's
   baptism, that when John objects, saying "comest thou to me?" he only
   pleads the common reason of the multitude, a desire "to fulfill all
   righteousness," in the accepting of John's righteous ministry.

   As he was human, so there was to be a humanly progressive opening of
   his mind, and a growing presentiment of his great future. All which
   makes the revelation, when it comes, only the greater and more
   astounding, because he is just so much more capable of taking the fit
   impression of it. Nor does it make any difference what particular
   account we frame of his person. If there is a divine-nature soul, and a
   human-nature soul, existing together in him as one person, that one
   person must be in the human type, unfolding by a human process, toward
   the consciously great Messiahship he is going to fulfill. If he is pure
   divinity incarnate, he is not simply housed or templed in the flesh,
   but inhumanized, categorized in humanity, there to grow, to learn, to
   be unfolded under human conditions of progress.

   And then it is only a part of the same general view, that when his
   endowment settles upon him, as it does in the scene of his baptism, it
   raises in his feeling just the same kind of commotion that is raised in
   any very great and really upright human soul; as for example, in that
   of a prophet when his call arrives. There has been a mighty
   apprehension waking gradually in him before, and now there is a mighty
   breaking in, as it were at once, of the tremendous call; all the great
   movings attendant--sentiments, misgivings, joys of hope, agonies of
   concern--coming in with it, like the coming in of the sea. The surges
   break all round him, and the little skiff of humanity that he has taken
   for his voyage quivers painfully--quivers even the worse that it feels
   the heavy armament aboard of so great purpose and power.

   An amazing transformation is suddenly wrought in his consciousness. As
   heaven opens above to let forth the voice, and let down the power, and
   the gate is set open before him to let him forward into his great
   future as a world's Redeemer; as every thing opens every way to prepare
   his mighty kingship, and he feels the Messianic forces heaving in his
   breast, he reels so to speak, under the new sense he has of himself and
   his charge, moved all through in a movement so tremendous that every
   faculty groans in the pressure, like a forest swaying in a storm. And
   the result is that he does what he must--tears himself utterly away
   from the incontinent folly of human voices, and the sorry conceit of
   human faces, and plunges into the deep silence and solitude of the
   wilderness; there to settle his great inward commotions and compose
   himself to his call. He is "driven of the Spirit," only in the sense
   that the crisis brought upon him by his call and felt endowment drives
   him. And he goes "to be tempted of the devil," only in the sense that,
   being so mightily heaved by his inward commotion, he both is and will
   be tempted thus, till he finds his point of rest, and settles into his
   plan of sacrifice.

   As to the fast itself, it is not likely that he had any thought of
   fasting, when he betook himself to the retirement of the wilderness; he
   only found, when there, that a fast was upon him, and since it might
   help him to subdue his partly intractable humanity more completely to
   his uses, he took it for his opportunity, refusing to come out into the
   sight of the world's works and faces, to obtain his customary food. The
   great inward tumult he was in held him thus to his fasting for a whole
   forty days, and so deep was the stress of his feeling, that he does not
   appear to have been particularly conscious of hunger, till the very
   last of it; when as we are told "he began to be an hungered"--all
   which, as many are forward to say, is a myth, or, if not, a perfectly
   incredible story; no mortal organization being able to subsist for so
   long a time without food. And yet we hear every few months, of cases
   well attested that correspond. There appears in fact, to be a possible
   state of mental and nervous tension, that allows the subject to
   maintain life without food, for a much longer time than he could in the
   quiet equilibrium of a more natural state.

   But what is Christ doing in this long solitude and silence of the
   wilderness? To say that he is fasting does not satisfy our inquiry. The
   fast we can see, is total; not a fasting from food only, but from the
   comforts of human habitations, from conversation, from society, and
   even from public worship in the synagogue, where "his custom" was, even
   from his childhood, to be always present. Isolated thus from the great
   world, and closeted with God in that grim wilderness, there is of
   course, no one to report him and he has not chosen to report himself;
   save that, in the very closing scene of his exhaustion, which is often
   called "the temptation," he allows the veil to be lifted.

   Who has not wished many times, that he could have the record of these
   forty days? And yet they may be worth even the more to us, that the
   record is not given--left with a veil hung over it, left to the
   imagination; by that only, as the purveyor to faith and sympathy, to be
   explored and pictured as it may be in its scenes, for there is nothing
   so fructifying as the supplying fondly of what is not given us in our
   Master's history, but is left, in this manner, to our creative liberty.
   In this view, certain blank spaces were even necessary, it may be to
   our complete benefit in the record of his life. Had he kept a complete
   diary for us of the forty days experience, it might have been a far
   less fruitful chapter, than the almost total blank he has left us to
   range in, loosing our love in tender explorations and reconnoisances,
   and constructing a history for our faith, out of the scantiest helps
   given to our understanding.

   Among the few things given, or which we sufficiently know, are such as
   these; that he is not bewailing his sins; that he is not afflicting
   himself purposely in penances of hunger and starvation; that he is not
   wrestling with the question whether he will undertake the work to which
   he is called. The first he can not be doing, because he has no sins to
   bewail; nor the second, because he is no believer in the doctrine of
   penance; nor the third, because his choices are concluded always, by
   the simple fact that any thing right or good is given him to do. If by
   reason of his human weakness he suffers, for a time, great revulsions
   of body and mind, that do not pertain to his voluntary nature, that is
   quite another matter. We shall find reason to think it may be true.

   But these, are negations only, and I think we shall be able to fix on
   several very important points, where we know sufficient in the
   positive, to justify a large deduction, concerning the probable nature
   of the struggle through which Jesus is here passing.

   1. He has a nature, that in part, is humanly derived, so far an
   infected, broken nature. He has never sinned, he has lived in purity,
   under this humanly impure investment; growing more and more distinctly
   conscious of those higher affinities by which he thus dominates over
   the human, unable to be soiled by its contact. But now it is opened to
   him in his call, that he is here not as here belonging, that he is
   sent, let down into the world, incarnated into human evil, into the
   curse. There must have been some time at which the sense of this fact
   became fully developed in him; doubtless it was partly developed
   before, but it could not be completely till now, because his
   Messiahship, or mission of salvation to sinners, requiring him to be
   incarnated into the very fall and broken state of sin, was not before
   opened to him. Now it is opened, and the whole relation he is in
   flashes upon him. Before he had the contact of evil in a simply quiet
   mastery, now he has it in the grim discovery, that he is membered into
   it! Feeling himself incorporated thus into the corporate evil of the
   world, to bear its woe and shame, and hate and wrong, as being of the
   common humanity, he shudders in horrid recoil and revulsion--takes
   himself away into the desert, there to wrestle with his feeling, till
   he gets ready to bear the sin of the world with a mind leveled to the
   burden of its ignominy. For a time, he is just as much more disturbed
   and revolted, probably, as he is more consciously divine. In those
   forty days of trial, instinctively withdrawn from men, how often
   looking out upon them, did his divine chastity recoil from the fearful
   and even shocking relationship into which he was come. This in great
   part is the cross--not the wood, nor the nails, nor the vinegar, but
   the men, and the breath of hell, their malignity is breathing upon him.

   2. It is not to be doubted that he had internal struggles of a
   different nature, growing out of his hereditary connection with our
   humanly disordered and retributively broken state. I refer, more
   especially, to what must have come upon him under the law of bad
   suggestion. How it was with him in the closing scene, after he began to
   be an hungered--the bad thoughts that came to him, as by satanic
   suggestion--we are expressly told. And it is not to be doubted that his
   very call and spiritual endowment, raising, as they did, the sense of
   his kingly dignity and power, would also call out from his infected
   humanity, whole troops of bad thoughts or treacherous suggestions, even
   as the history declares. Raised in order and power, it is only human to
   be tempted by suggestions of the figure he can make, and the prodigious
   things he may do. It is not probably true that Jesus was contending,
   for the whole forty days, with such kind of temptations as came upon
   him at the close. But as certainly as his mind had a man-wise way of
   thinking, he must have had many thoughts coming upon him that required
   him to repeat his "get thee behind me," and turn his great nature home
   upon God and his work closely enough to pre-occupy it, and take away
   the annoyance. Neither let us shrink from such a mode of conceiving
   him, as if it were a derogation from his perfect character. Mental
   suggestion is not voluntary, but takes place under mental laws, going
   where it will, and running more or less wildly, where there is any
   contact of the nature with disorder. No crime is incurred by evil
   suggestion, when there is no encouragement of it, or yielding of the
   soul to it. As then Jesus was to be tempted in all points like as we
   are only without sin, it is even a fact included, that, when his
   tremendous call took him, an immense irruption of evil suggestions,
   bursting up from his low born humanity, must have taken him also. And
   this, I conceive, is what is meant, when he is declared to have been
   driven of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.
   The very call of the Spirit brought this contest upon him. I do not
   exclude the possibility of some access of bad spirits concurrently
   working with the bad thoughts; for he was tempted just as men are, and
   as being a man. And he gained his victory, doubtless by a struggle
   often renewed and variously protracted.

   3. It is not to be doubted that his human weakness made a fearful
   recoil from the lot of suffering, and the horrible death now before
   him. Human nature is keenly sensitive to suffering; but we manage often
   to bear a great deal of it, because we do not know of it beforehand,
   but have it coming upon us by surprises, or turns of Providence not
   expected. Hence there is nothing so common as the remark, from one or
   another, that he could not have borne such trials as have come
   successively upon him, if he had been advised, of them and had them in
   full view beforehand.

   But the call of Christ, as it now opened, was a call to suffering; a
   call to be fulfilled by sorrow and pain, and consummated by the
   ignominy of a cross. The great Messiahship in which he was inaugurated,
   was to be a power of salvation for the world, as being a sublime
   tragedy of goodness. In this respect, his career of suffering was
   different, widely, from that of any mortal of the race, in the fact
   that he came into it with a full knowledge flashed upon him, of all
   that he was to bear from the sin he was to conquer. As we hear him
   speak in one of his earliest discourses of being "lifted up," recurring
   more than once to the same thing afterward, and using the same
   expression, calling his disciples also, many times over, to "take up
   the cross" and follow him, we can see for ourselves how the sorrow, and
   buffeting, and shame, and cross, all met him and stood in their
   appalling certainty always before him, from the first hour of his call
   onward. The recoil of his human nature from such a prospect must have
   been dreadful--mortally regarded, insupportable.

   Let us not be misled, at this point, by the fact that be is a superior
   nature incarnate, imagining that he must also be superior, in that
   manner, to suffering. He has taken the human nature, and taken it as it
   is, by inheritance, and though it is good for symbol, as being the
   express image of God--better than all nature up to the stars
   beside--still it is weak for the matter of suffering, and is, in fact,
   only the more perfect for his uses on that account. Good, therefore, as
   symbol, it has to be conquered as organ. It wants staunching, for so
   dreadful a service, by some strong mastery, be it that of a fast, or of
   any other kind of discipline. Otherwise, being all weakness, it would
   even be treason if. it could. Nothing could be farther off from the
   heroic in sacrifice, more susceptible to fear, more instinctively
   averse to the hatred of men, more unwilling to die, and die hard, and
   die low. And what shall he do more naturally, in the confused struggles
   of his feeling, than withdraw till the terrible revulsion is quelled
   or, what is the same, till he gets the poor, unsteady, low bred organ
   of his life brought up, into the scale of his sacrifice.

   4. There comes upon him also, at the point of his call or endowment,
   still another and vaster kind of commotion, that belongs even to his
   divine nature, holding fit proportion with the greatness and perfection
   of it. The love he had before to mankind, was probably more like that
   of a simply perfect man. Having now the fallen world itself put upon
   his love, and the endowment of a Saviour entered consciously into his
   heart, his whole divinity is heaved into such commotion as is fitly
   called an agony; answering, in all respects, to the agony of the
   garden. How differently do we feel for any subject of benevolence the
   moment we have undertaken for him. He lies upon our heart-strings night
   and day, as a burden. We watch for him with a painful concern, we
   agonize for him. So when Jesus takes the world upon his love, it
   plunges him at once, into what may be called the suffering state of
   God; for it belongs to the goodness of God, just because it is good, to
   suffer, as being burdened in feeling for all wrong-doers and enemies.
   Every sort of love, the maternal, the patriotic, the christian, has for
   its inseparable incident, a moral suffering in behalf of its subjects.
   God has the same, in a degree of intensity equal to the intensity and
   compass of his love. And it is this moral suffering that now comes upon
   Christ, and is to be revealed by his incarnate ministry. The stress
   upon his feeling is too heavy to be supported by the frail and tender
   vehicle of his humanity. It rolls in like a sea, and his human nature
   can not breast the heavy surge of it. He goes apart in the terrible
   recoil, both of his divine feeling and his human nature, sinks away
   into the recesses of the wilderness, crushed by the burden that has
   come upon his agonizing heart. As was just now intimated, his
   experience corresponds with that of his agony; for it was the same
   burden returning upon him, at that crisis, that threw him on the
   ground, and wrenched his feeling, in such throes of concern for his
   enemies, that his too feeble body gave way, and the gates of the skin
   flew open before the terrible pressure on his heart. I do not say that
   any such scene is transacted here in these forty days. I only know that
   Christ has the same weak body, and the same great feeling, burdened now
   for men, and, what is much to be considered, it has come upon him just
   as suddenly as the investiture and official endowment of his call. I do
   not see his prostrations. I do not catch the wail of his prayer, "let
   this cup pass from me," I only see that a great and dreadful commotion
   must be upon him--leaving him to cope with it as he best may, in that
   mysterious silence and solitude into which he has retreated from our
   human inspection.

   Once more, the mind of Jesus, in his forty days retirement and fasting,
   must have been profoundly engaged and powerfully tasked in the
   unfolding of the necessary plan. He can not bolt into such a work,
   embracing such an immense reach of territory, and time, and kingly
   rule, without considering, beforehand, and distinctly conceiving the
   what, and how, and when, and why, of his work. Doubtless there is a
   divine plan ready for him, and has been even from before the world's
   creation, but he, as being man, must think it consecutively out, step
   by step, in a certain human way of reception, or development, else he
   is not in it. No matter if the plan lay perfect in him as the Ancient
   of Days before he came into the world, still the counsel of it lay, not
   in words, or specific judgments, but in the infinite abyss of his
   boundless intuition. Now, in consenting to be man, he consents to be
   unfolded gradually in body and mind, to grow as he feeds, and know as
   he thinks. Nor does it make any difference if his thinking draws on the
   infinite; for to think the infinite into the finite, deific light into
   form and particularity, is a very considerable work that will not soon
   be done. His plan, therefore, must be thought, in order to be humanly
   had. Yesterday he had it not, to day the call has come that requires
   it, and a great soul-labor begins. Doubtless he has thought much,
   coasting round the subject before; he has read the Messianic prophets,
   and had their visions opened to his understanding, probably, as no
   other ever had before; his every faculty is clear, and broad, and deep,
   and rapid, in a degree surpassing all genius. Still, making all such
   allowance, how far off is he, at the coming of his call, from having
   any complete fact-form plan ready for it. The matter of it includes
   even the reasons of the creation, also the last ends of the creation,
   what between has been already done and what remains to be, in the great
   new future; all that affects God's relations to men, and men's to God,
   and the eternal kingdom as connecting both. In this great
   salvation-problem, therefore, touching always the infinite and finite
   together, what he shall do and teach; what, and when, and how, he shall
   suffer; by whom he shall organize, and for a time how long--in this
   problem, to be wrought out in a train of finite human thinking, his
   forty days will have enough to do, pour in fast and free as the
   stupendous revelation will. Full of all heaviest commotion therefore,
   on the side of his feeling, the great deep of intelligence also in
   Jesus must be mightily heaved, that his counsel may be adequately
   settled. O thou grim solitude of wilderness, what work is going on,
   these days, in thy silence!

   How great and rapid the movement of his counsel has been, we may see,
   when coming out, after the forty days, into his ministry, he opens his
   mouth in his beatitudes and goes on with his wonderful first sermon,
   speaking, how decisively and calmly and with what evident repose; then
   beginning straightway his miracles, calling his apostles, and
   organizing his cause; evidently master of his plan even as a practiced
   general of his campaign-ready in all ripe counsel, to spread himself
   out on the great world-future of his kingdom.

   Beginning thus at the call of Jesus, and making this large induction
   from what we know concerning him, I think you will agree, my friends,
   that these forty days of his in the wilderness must have been the most
   eventful days of his Messiahship, including beyond question, a vast,
   unknown, scarcely imaginable, but necessary and sublime, preparation
   for his work. No other chapter, I may safely say, in the whole history
   of Jesus, has a more fascinating and mysterious interest to our
   feeling, covered though it be in dimness and silence.

   I have alluded once or twice to the agony of Jesus. I might also refer
   you to hours when the same deep conflict more than once, rolls back on
   him for a space, and his mighty "soul is troubled," venting itself in
   words. I can not resist the impression that the real agony of Jesus
   took him at the very first. How he bore himself in it for so many days
   in those desert wilds, his attitudes, his sleep or want of sleep, his
   prostrations and prayers, his groanings in spirit, his spaces of
   brightness and victorious courage and peace, his deep ponderings by day
   or night, sitting under the grim rocks--none of these are given us, but
   our heart will indulge itself in them and rightly may.

   Some few incidents are given us which, taken together, signify much.
   Thus, he is not hungry, he is too powerfully wrought in by his thoughts
   and emotions to have the sense of hunger.

   He is also alone. In the agony of the garden he has his friends with
   him, and looks to their sympathy for support. Here he has no friend
   with him, because he has not yet any friend enlisted, who can at all
   understand him, or yield him even a word of comfort. I said he was
   alone--no he is not alone, but as Mark very casually intimates, "he is
   with the wild beasts." And this word with indicates a strange
   concomitancy, by which they are somehow drawn to come about him and be
   with him, in a way of harmless attention. For the term "wild beasts"
   does not mean simply wild animals, but the savage beasts of prey, such
   as lions, panthers, wolves, and the like. These are with Jesus, coming
   about him. in his prostrations, drawing near in the moanings of his
   sleep, fawning about him tenderly when he sits in silence; going back,
   as it were, to the habit of paradise, and symbolizing, by their
   harmless companionship, that future paradise which he is to restore.
   Glad sign most surely, they, to his struggling heart.

   Still another and very different class of beings come to him--I mean
   the angels. These we are told ministered unto him. Great joy was that
   to the angels! and it must have been as great to him! In such a state
   of long, long conflict and trial, how blessed were these visitors from
   the great world of peace above, their communications how sweet, how
   rich in assurance! So between the beasts and the angels, men being
   wholly away, Jesus gets tokens of sympathy that minister comfort, and
   help him to compose himself to the opening tragedy of his life.

   We come, at last, to the final crisis of the trial, which many, by what
   appears to me a very great mistake, call the temptation; as if it
   covered the whole ground of the forty days. Exactly contrary to this
   the history says expressly--"And when he had fasted forty days and
   forty nights he was afterward an hungered." Or according to another
   gospel,--"when they were ended, he began to be an hungered." The three
   temptations follow. So powerfully had his mighty soul been wrought in,
   that he had not, till this time, been conscious of hunger. But now, at
   last, he is spent, and nature breaks under exhaustion. The
   representation appears to be that the fevered, half delirious state of
   hunger is upon him; and the phantoms of lying suggestion rush into his
   weakened brain, to bear down, if possible, his integrity. But it is not
   possible; even his broken, reeling, faculty is too strong in its purity
   for the utmost art of his enemy. And his triumph is thus finally
   completed, in the fact that any shred of his sinless majesty is seen to
   be enough to hold him fast, when the shattered vehicle of his humanity
   has quite given way.

   That this, or something like it, is the true account to be taken of the
   story, is hardly to be questioned. It must have been derived from his
   own report; for no one else was privy to the matter of it. And he
   simply meant, I have no doubt, in the three temptations recited, to
   report what appeared to him, visionally speaking; or how they stood
   before his fevered brain. To believe that he was actually taken up by
   the devil, and set on the pinnacle of the temple, when fifty miles
   away; or that he was taken up into a mountain so exceedingly high, that
   he could see all the kingdoms of the round world from the top, is
   fairly impossible. He only reported the seemings of his hunger-fevered
   state. All temptations are but seemings. The devils bait their hook,
   never with truths, always with illusions. Nor were the temptations any
   the less real, or satanic, as being phantoms of exhaustion. This, in
   fact, was to be his victory, that not even his unsettled, weakened,
   faculty could be seduced by such phantoms, whether of internal or
   external suggestion. In this victory the trial of Jesus was
   finished--"And when the devil had ended all the temptations, he
   departed from him for a season." Now therefore he is ready, and the
   great Messianic ministry begins.

   Scarcely necessary is it, my brethren, to say that it will be such a
   ministry as the great first chapter of the fast prepares--such and no
   other. I know not any point beside, in the history of his life, where
   you may take your stand and see the whole course of it open, with such
   intelligible unity and clearness. As the dawn prepares the day, so the
   forty days prepare the three wonderful years. Taking the fast for your
   initial point, and carefully distinguishing what goes on there, and is
   done or made ready, every thing appears to come out naturally, in a
   sense, from it. Here, in fact, as you may figure, Christ officially
   young, levels himself to his aim; and then, as age is not the count of
   years but of works, puts himself into his great ministry with such
   momentum and constancy, giving so much counsel, expending so much
   sympathy, suffering so great waste of sorrow, that he dies, at the end
   of three years, like one ripened by full age. The unsteadiness, the
   overdoing, the romance, of unpracticed energies, nowhere appears, but
   the regular gait of sagacity, patience, sound equilibrium, as of one
   who has his counsel ready, brings him on to his close. Whether this
   maturity is unfolded by the very rapid development of his crowded,
   heavy-pressing, all-doing ministry, or was really prepared, for the
   most part, in the fiery forty days of his trial, it may be difficult to
   say. Only this is abundantly clear, that he came out of that trial, to
   make his beginning, both strong and ready. If he did not seem to be as
   old when he gave the sermon on the mount as when he answered before,
   Pilate, he was as thoroughly assured, and as completely master of the
   situation. From that time onward his equipoise is perfect, and his
   movement restful and smooth--never hurrying after counsel not yet
   arrived, but visibly set on by counsel, such as leaves no room for
   surprise, or a moment's faltering. The sweetness, and repose, and
   readiness he is in, are such as indicate a mental graduation into
   counsel, and victory already accomplished--as he had, in fact,
   conquered, beforehand, the world, and the devil, and his own humanity,
   and had come to such kind of settlement as a victor only gets. Many
   martyrs have borne themselves heroically when the doom was on them, and
   the pressure of the hour riveted their firmness. But Christ was a
   martyr at large and beforehand, who had taken the sentence of death in
   the wilderness, and bowed himself in consecration upon it, coming out
   to live martyr-wise; but as strong, as steady, as free, as the felt
   mastery both of death and of himself could make him. Figuring himself
   to himself, deliberately, as a grain of wheat falling into the ground
   to die, and so to live again more fruitfully, he settles calmly into
   his appointment, without misgiving or regret. Having also a great
   baptism, as he knows, to be baptized with, he is no wise appalled by
   the prospect, but only oppressed by the delay; exclaiming, "how am I
   straitened till it be accomplished." In all which we may see, that the
   highest nerve of courage, endurance, and resolute equability, may be
   set, only in the silence and solitude of a complete self devotion,
   never in the noisy tumult of commotions and great throes of public
   excitement. What other being among men ever graduated into such glory
   of public life as Jesus, when he came out of the desert and his forty
   days of silence!

   I do not mean, of course, in hanging so much upon the temptation of the
   forty days, to say that Jesus was never tempted before, or after that
   time. All such temptations were casual, matters by the way, having a
   certain consequence, but no principal consequence in fixing the tenor
   of his life. But the forty days temptation had this distinction, that
   it took him at the point of crisis, so that every thing was turned by
   the settlement, and went with it. There could be only one such crisis,
   and the turning of it rightly was the grand inaugural of all that came
   after, in his wonderful and gloriously consecrated ministry.

   In just the same manner, there is, I conceive, in the life of almost
   every Christian disciple, a crisis, where every thing most eventful, as
   regards the Christian value of his life to himself, and of his
   consecration to God, especially hinges, and where, as we may figure,
   his grand temptation meets him. Other temptations have gone before,
   others will come after, here is the temptation of his personal call,
   and opportunity. What it will be, or in what form it will come, can not
   of course, be specified; enough that it will commonly bring the strong
   present conviction with it of a great Christian crisis arrived, on
   which all the heaviest results of character and service done for God
   are depending. At such a time, there is to be no haste or
   precipitation. The time for a grand, practical, settlement of the life
   has come, and if the man has any gravity of meaning or high aspiration,
   he will meet the crisis practically, and if possible, understandingly.
   To let go society, pleasure, profit, and the table, nay, to get away
   from them, will be a kind of relief. Any thing, any campaign of prayer,
   and thought, and self-devotement, will be accepted heartily, and be
   long enough protracted to settle the result finally and firmly. One
   great reason, brethren, why we make so poor a figure of fitfulness and
   inconstancy, is that we go by jets of emotion, or gusts of popular
   impulse, or sallies of extempore resolve; we do not settle our question
   upon a footing of counsel, and inward consecration, and, in fact, do
   not take time to settle any thing; least of all, any such great crisis
   of life. Moses drew off into the wilderness and was there forty years,
   getting ready for the call that was already half uttered in his heart.
   Paul retired into Arabia, and was there three years, gathering up his
   soul and soul's fuel, for the grand apostleship of word and sacrifice.
   So the Christian, every Christian, who has come to his crisis, will
   take time for the settlement of his plan, and the equipment of his
   undertaking--if not forty days, then as many as are wanted.

   Having this high work upon you, brethren, silence and solitude will be
   congenial, and the fasting of Jesus will be remembered by you with a
   strange sympathy--all in the endeavor to come out on your future,
   thoroughly consecrated to it, even as he was to his. Drawn to him in
   such profoundest sympathy with his temptation, O how tenderly and
   approvingly will he be drawn to you, pouring, as he best may, all the
   riches of his forty days struggle and consecration to sacrifice upon
   you. "For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to
   succor them that are tempted." Any life is great and blessed, into
   which you are entered, upon this high footing with Christ your Master.
   You can not be worse handled by men, or by what is called fortune, than
   he was; can not be more faithful to God's high purpose in you, or more
   consciously great, and happy, and true; and that, if I am right, is the
   only kind of life at all worthy of you. And then, at the end, it will
   be yours to say, in the sublime confidence also of your Master--"I have
   glorified thee on the earth, I have finished the work which thou gavest
   me to do."
     __________________________________________________________________

                                      VI.

CONVICTION OF SIN BY THE CROSS.

   "Of sin, because they believe not on me. Of righteousness, because I go
   to the Father, and ye see me no more. Of judgment, because the prince
   of this world is judged."--John, xvi. 9-11.

   In the convincement of sin, the Holy Spirit is to be the agent, and
   Christ rejected the argument--so Christ himself conceives the promise
   of the Spirit which he is here giving. The convincing work is to be
   wrought by no absolute method of force, but by truths and reasons drawn
   from Christ's person, and the treatment he received from the world. "Of
   sin," he says, "because they believe not on me." The two other points
   that he adds--"Of righteousness because I go to the Father and ye see
   me no more; Of judgment, because the prince of this world is
   judged;"--appear to be only amplifications of the first, or points in
   which the guilty convictions of his rejectors will be raised to a
   higher pitch. Thus when he is gone out of the world to be seen here no
   more, gone up to the Father in visible divine majesty, they will begin
   to conceive who he was--the Son of God, the righteousness itself of
   God. He will be no more the man or the prophet, poorly apprehended,
   doubtfully conceived; all their. opinions of him will undergo a
   revision, and their minds be quickened to a new sense even of what
   righteousness is; so, to a deeper more condemning, more appalling sense
   of their sin. Then again this conviction will be set home with a still
   heavier emphasis, by the fact made visible in his death and
   resurrection, that the "prince of this world is judged," and forever
   cast down. For if evil, when triumphant by conspiracy, still can not
   triumph, but falls inevitably doomed, how certainly doomed is every
   soul that meets the Just One it rejected, on its final day. When the
   bad empire called the world, is itself cloven down, visibly, by the
   rising and the over-mastering kingship of God's Messiah, the conviction
   of sin will be as much more appalling, as the general defeat and
   overthrow requires it to be.

   It is then a fixed expectation of Christ himself, and that is the truth
   to which I am now going to call your attention--that his mission to the
   world will have a considerable part of its value, in raising a higher
   moral sense in mankind, and producing a more appalling conviction of
   their guilt or guiltiness, before God.

   A widely different, or even contrary, impression appears to be
   generally derived from certain things said in the scripture, concerning
   the law; taken as they are, in a less qualified manner than they should
   be, or the facts of the gospel require them to be. Thus it is declared
   that, "by the law is the knowledge of sin." It is also described in its
   relation to the gospel, as the letter that killeth," "the ministration
   of death," "the ministration of condemnation;" that on the other hand,
   being "the Spirit that giveth life," "the ministration of
   righteousness." On the ground of such representations, an impression is
   received, that conviction of sin is distinctively "a law work." As such
   it is specially magnified, and it is even abundantly insisted on, that
   the effective preaching of the law is the prime condition of all
   genuine success in preaching. The conception is that what is called
   "the law" is a certain battery side of government, before which guilty
   minds are to be shot through with deadly pangs, and then that the
   ministration of life, in Jesus and his cross, coming on the gentle side
   opposite, does a work of pure healing and life. On that side, all is
   condemnation. On this side, all is forgiveness. There is guilt, here is
   peace. Bondage only is there, liberty only is here.

   Now this impression is so far true, that conviction of sin doubtless
   supposes the fact of some. rule or law, broken by sin; and that, when
   such law is broken, it can, as law, do nothing more than condemn--can
   not help, or save. God only can do that, and that he does in Christ.

   But, in a certain other view, there is more law in Christ, more, that
   is, in his character and life and doctrine, then there is in all
   statutes beside. The law of Eden is to the law of the sermon on the
   mount, as a jewsharp to an organ. The ten commandments, mostly
   negative, or laws of not doing, are not, all together, as weighty and
   broad upon the conscience, as Christ's one positive law, "Do ye unto
   others as ye would that others should do unto you." Not even the
   thunders of Sinai are any match for the silent thunders of Calvary.

   Besides, it is not so much the question, where most law is given, as by
   what means the sense of law may be most effectually quickened, where
   before it slept. And here it is that Christ's great expectation hinges,
   when he says, "of sin," "of righteousness," "of judgment." For in him,
   the law is more than a rule, or than all rules--a person, clothed in
   God's righteousness, bearing God's authority, filling and permeating
   all human relations with an exact well doing, and with all most loving
   ministries, such as never before had been even conceived in these
   relations. How much then will it signify, when guilty minds are so
   painfully dazed by the glories of right in his person, that they. can
   not endure the sight; conspiring even his death, and falling upon him
   in their implacable malice, to thrust him out of the world! Why, simply
   to have had such a being living in the world, doing his work, suffering
   his pains at the hands of his enemies and breathing out his pure
   untainted breath upon the poisoned air, changes it to a place of holy
   conviction, where sin must be ever knowing itself, and scorching itself
   in its own guilty fires!

   Thus much it was necessary to say, in a way of general statement, or
   adjustment, as respects the relative agency of Christ and the law in
   the convincement of guilty minds. That Christianity was to have, and
   has had, a considerable part of its value, in this convincing, as well
   as in a forgiving and restoring agency, I will now proceed to show, by
   arguments more special and positive. And--

   1. Make due account of the fact, that conviction of sin is a profoundly
   intelligent matter, and worthy, in that view, to engage the counsel of
   God in the gift of his Son. If we have any such thought as that what is
   called conviction of sin is only a blind torment, or crisis of excited
   fear, technically prescribed as a matter to be suffered in the way of
   conversion, we can not too soon rid ourselves of the mistake. It is
   neither more nor less than a due self-knowledge--not a knowledge of the
   mere understanding, or such as may be gotten by philosophic reflection,
   but a more certain, more immediate sensing of ourselves by
   consciousness; just the same which the criminal has, when he hies
   himself away from justice; fleeing, it may be, when no man pursueth. He
   has a most invincible, most real, knowledge of himself; not by any
   cognitive process of reflection, but by his immediate consciousness--he
   is consciously a guilty man. All men are consciously guilty before God,
   and the standards of God, in the same manner. They do not approve, but
   invariably condemn themselves; only they become so used to the fact
   that they make nothing of it, but take it even as the normal condition
   of their life. Their sin gets to be themselves, and they only think as
   thinking of themselves. Living always in the bad element, they think it
   is only their nature to be as they are. Their consciousness is frozen
   over, so to speak, and they see no river underneath, but only the ice
   that covers it. The motions of sins they do not observe, because the
   standards they have always violated are blunted and blurred by custom.
   They are only conscious, it may be, of a certain shyness of God, and
   they come to regard even that as being somehow natural. Hence it comes
   to be a very great point, in the recovery of men to God, to unmask them
   to themselves, to uncover the standards and reopen their consciousness
   to them; exactly what is done by Christ and his rejected Messiahship,
   inwardly applied by the Spirit of God. The result is conviction of sin;
   which is only a state of moral self-knowledge revived. Doubtless there
   is a pain in this kind of self-knowledge, but it is none the less
   intelligent on that account. The sense of guilt is itself a pain of the
   mind, just as light is pain to a diseased eye; but light is none the
   less truly light, and guilt is none the less truly intelligent, on that
   account. This returning of guilty conviction is, in fact, the dawning,
   or may be, of an everlasting and complete intelligence, in just that
   highest, moral, side of the nature, that was going down out of
   intelligence, into stupor and blindness. Is it then a severity in
   Christ that he is counting on a result of his ministry and death, so
   essentially great and beneficent?

   2. It is quite evident that such a being as Christ could not come into
   the world and pass through it, and out of it, in such a manner, without
   stirring the profoundest possible convictions of character. If the
   divine glory and spotless love of God are by him incarnated into the
   world, the revelation must be one that raises a great inward commotion.
   It should not surprise us that even the bad spirits were rallied, in
   that day, to a pitch of unwonted disturbance and malign activity, much
   more the bad mind of the race. The great standards of holiness, so
   fatally blurred as rules, will be all brought forth again, speaking in
   the doctrine, shining out in the perfect life. Every guilty mind will
   feel itself arraigned, and brought to know itself, that beholds, or
   looks into the perfect glass of history that describes this life. And
   above all when it is ended by such a death, inflicted by a world in
   wrong, who that knows himself to be a man, will not be visited by
   silent pangs, not easy to be stifled.

   3. Christ was a being who perfectly knew the pure standards of
   character and duty, knowing, as well, just what sin is in the breach of
   them, and what man is in the sin. He also knows of course, exactly what
   is necessary to stir up the guilty consciousness of men; sometimes
   doing it by instruction, sometimes by acts of unwonted patience and
   beneficence, sometimes by terrible rebukes and lifted rods of
   chastisement, and more than once by a divine skill of silence--as when
   stooping down, once and again, he drew mystic figures on the ground;
   sending out thus one by one, condemned and guilt-stricken, the
   pretentious accusers of the woman; or when, scarcely speaking and
   urging no defense, he so visibly shook with concern, the guilty mind of
   Pilate, by the dumb innocence only of his manner. He knew exactly what
   to do on all occasions, and with all different classes of men, to put
   the sense of guilt upon them, and we can see ourselves, that he has it
   for one of the great objects of his ministry; even as it was a great
   expectation, in the matter of his death, that all enemies and rejecters
   would discover, in bitter pangs of conviction, that, in what they have
   done upon him, they have only let their sin reveal its own madness. Let
   us turn now

   4. To the scriptures and gather up some few of the tokens that Christ,
   before his coming, was expected to come in this character; and also of
   the declarations, by himself and his followers afterward, that he had,
   especially in his death, accomplished such a result.

   "They shall look on me whom they have pierced," says the prophet, "and
   they shall mourn." Other expressions of the prophets correspond.
   Accordingly when the infant Jesus was brought to Simeon, by his mother,
   he said to her, "Behold this child is set for the fall and rising again
   of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be spoken against, that
   the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed." His rejection was to
   reveal the heart of his rejectors. John the Baptist conceives, in the
   same manner, that he is coining with "the axe" of conviction, to be
   laid to the root of all sin, and "the fan" of separation, to winnow out
   the chaffiness of all pretense, so to unmask the secrecy of guilt and
   place it in the open light of conviction.

   Christ himself also testifies that he has done it, saying to Nicodemus,
   "He that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not
   believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this the
   condemnation (how deeply shall the sting of it some time pierce the
   heart of my rejecters,)--this is the condemnation, "that light is come
   into the world and men have loved darkness rather then light, because
   their deeds were evil." On another occasion, he says, to the same
   effect,--"If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin,
   but now they have no cloak for their sin;"--they see now, by what they
   reject and hate, precisely what they are--"If I had not done among them
   the work which none other man did, they had not had sin, but now have
   they both seen and hated both me and my Father;" intimating clearly
   that their hatred of him, they will sometime see, is, at bottom, a
   hatred of goodness itself. On still another occasion, he brings out the
   same truth more argumentatively saying--"If God were your Father, ye
   would love me; for I proceeded forth and came from God. He that is of
   God heareth my words, ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of
   God." Your rejection of me is nothing but an exhibition, without, of
   that rejection of God in which you inwardly live. The bitterness of
   their reply you know.

   Take the trial scene of Jesus next, noting first, the bad spirit out of
   which it comes, and then the guilty conviction that follows it. What
   injury had Christ done to Caiphas and the managers of his party, that
   they should be so bitterly exasperated against him? There was never a
   more inoffensive being, save as goodness is itself an offense to sin.
   Hence the violence of their animosity; for no man is so violent and
   brutish in his animosities, as he that is storming against goodness, to
   drown the disturbance, and redress the guilty pangs it creates in an
   evil conscience. Hence the barbarous insults put upon the Saviour's
   person. If these great people of Jerusalem--high-priests, rabbis,
   scribes, and others--had been a tribe of Osages, or Dyaks, their
   treatment of Jesus would have been exactly in character. The slap in
   the face, the crown of thorns, the mock cries, the scourging, the
   spitting, the wagging of the heads, and the jeer "let him come down,"
   connected with a visibly conscious disrespect to evidence and justice,
   and with outcries raised to stifle even the sense of justice; the
   malignity and spite of the punishment itself, a slave's punishment, a
   crucifixion put upon a man whose dignity and the power of whose
   words,--"speaking as never man spake"--had been a principal part of his
   offense--what does it mean that gentlemen, Jewish leaders of the
   highest standing and culture, are found instigating these low
   barbarities of spite and cruelty? What has he done to transform
   civilized men, into savages in this manner? O it is the offense of his
   character! He has raised up demons of remorse in the conscience of
   these men, by the luster simply of his goodness. This it is that
   rankles in their hatred, and hate, as against goodness, is a feeling
   too weak to suffer the assumption even of dignity. Hence the simply
   diabolical frenzy of their conduct.

   Mark the result. The very moment after Jesus has commended his spirit
   to the Father and ceased to breathe, the conviction of crime begins to
   break through the enmity of his crucifiers. Their malignity is
   discovered, they could hate a living enemy, but the helpless body of a
   dead one over-masters their violence. Immediately the centurion himself
   glorified God, saying, "certainly this was a righteous man." "And all
   the people that came together to that sight, beholding the things which
   were done, smote their breasts and returned." This is the sign that was
   "to be-spoken against," and now "the thoughts of many hearts" begin to
   be "revealed." "They look on him whom they have pierced," and they are
   pierced themselves.

   Next we see the great principle of conviction--"of sin because they
   believe not on me,"--beginning to be wielded with overwhelming energy,
   by the apostles. This very truth charged home--you have rejected and
   crucified Christ--is the arrow of the day of Pentecost. "Therefore let
   all the house of Israel know assuredly," says Peter in his sermon on
   that occasion, "that God hath made that same Jesus whom ye crucified
   both Lord and Christ--he hath shed forth this which you now see and
   hear. Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and
   cried--Men and brethren, what shall we do?'"

   And the very next sermon of Peter hangs upon the same bitter truth of
   conviction. "Ye denied the Holy One and the Just, and desired a
   murderer to be granted unto you, and killed the Prince of Life, whom
   God hath raised from the dead, whereof we are witnesses."

   And again, in the third sermon of the same apostle, he hurls the same
   arrow. For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast
   anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and thy
   people Israel, were gathered together."--all orders and nations,
   because all alike are sinners--"and now behold their threatenings and
   grant unto thy servants that with all boldness they may speak thy
   word." Whereupon the place is shaken again a third time. Under the
   first sermon, three thousand souls have the thoughts of their hearts
   revealed, and turn to seek salvation in Jesus Christ. Under the second,
   the number is swelled to five thousand. Under the third, the count
   ceases and the number becomes a multitude--"the multitude of them that
   believed."

   So it was that Peter, in his preaching, charged home upon his hearers
   everywhere the rejecting and denying of Jesus the Saviour.

   Paul too was traveling over all seas, and through all lands, telling
   the story of his remarkable conversion--how at first he disbelieved and
   hated the very name of Jesus, how he was exceedingly mad against his
   followers, and went about dragging them to prison, till, at last, on
   his way to Damascus, he was met by that word of irresistible
   conviction, which had been so powerful many times before--"I am Jesus
   whom thou persecutest." O what depths were opened now in the
   persecutor's heart! All his bitter wrongs and fiery inflictions flame
   back in that word--"I am Jesus whom thou persecutest!" showing him the
   madness that reigns within. Thus begins the life in Christ of this
   great apostle--itself an illustration how sublime of the Saviour's
   thought! "Of sin because they believe not in me." But there is a
   reason--

   5. Back of this great fact, in the scheme of the gospel, in which it is
   grounded; viz., that a very bad act often brings out the show of a bad
   spirit within and becomes, in that manner, a most appalling argument of
   conviction. Hence the immense convincing power to be exerted on mankind
   through the crucifixion of Christ by his enemies. Even as a profligate,
   unfilial son, discovers himself as he is, and receives the true
   impression, for the first time, of his own dire wickedness and passion,
   when he looks upon the murdered form of his father, and washes the
   stains of parricide from his hands. In like manner Joseph's brethren,
   when he stood revealed before them, as the brother whom they cruelly
   sold, were struck dumb with guilt, and could not so much as speak to
   ask his forgiveness. So also Herod, haunted by the sense of his crime
   in the murder of John, imagined, in the wild tumult of his guilty
   brain, that Christ must be the prophet's ghost, returning to be avenged
   of his wrong.

   The death, or public execution of Socrates affords, in some respects, a
   more striking illustration. His pure morality of life, his sublime
   doctrine of virtue, the discredit reflected on the gods of his country,
   by his belief in a supreme, all-perfect God and governor of the world,
   worthy of a better worship, raised up enemies and accusers, who
   indicted him as a corrupter of the youth, and a denier of the gods of
   his country. The people, artfully wrought upon, voted his death.
   Shortly after, the dead teacher rose upon them mightier even than the
   living, and a wave of conviction rolling back upon their consciences,
   filled them with bitter distress. They voted his innocence; they
   acknowledged the public misfortunes just then coming upon the state to
   be judgments of heaven upon their crime; they put to death Miletus his
   principal accuser, drove his subordinates into exile, and erected a
   brazen statue to his memory. So the Saviour says, "of sin because they
   believe not on me;" only the reaction of his cross begins more
   immediately and extends through all the coming ages of time. No sooner
   is he dead, than all the multitude present, not his accusers only and
   his executioners, but the lookers on, were pricked with heavy
   compunctions of feeling, and went home smiting their breasts, for
   anguish they could not repress. And with better reason than they can
   distinctly know; for it is the Holy one and the Just, the Perfect Son
   of God, whom they have seen put to death; nay worse who has not been
   permitted even to die respectably, but has been publicly stripped,
   gibbeted, exposed to shame, compelled to die slowly, like a slave,
   nailed fast upon a cross. He had come into the world on a mission of
   love from the world above, a perfect character, clothed in the
   essential glory of a divine nature, a being whom all the righteous
   spirits--angels, archangels, and seraphim--had been wont to magnify and
   adore--such was the visitant who lighted, for once, on the earth and
   the race of mankind could not suffer him to live, tore him away in
   their spite, from his acts of healing, and his gentle mercies even to
   themselves, and thrust him out of the world, in mockeries that forgot
   even the appearance of dignity.

   I have spoken of this act, as the act of the human race, and such, in
   some true sense, it was; and as such has been ringing ever sense in the
   guilty conscience of the race; for it is, in fact, a proof by
   experiment, of what is in all human hearts. Thus, if there should come
   down from the upper sky some pure dove that has his home in that pure
   element, and the birds of the lower air should be heard screaming at
   all points, and seen pitching upon the unwelcome visitant and striking
   their beaks into his body, we should have no doubt of some radical
   unlikeness, or repugnance, between the creatures of the two elements.
   And this exactly is the feeling that has been forced upon the world's
   guilty mind, ever since, by the crucifixion of Jesus. It rolls back on
   our thought in a kind of silent horror, that will not always be
   repelled, that the manifested love of God, impartial and broad as the
   world, a grace for every human creature, is yet gnashed upon by the
   world and crucified. If we say that this act of crucifixion was not
   ours, it certainly was not in the particular sense intended, and yet in
   another and much deeper sense, it was; viz., in the sense that what it
   signifies was ours. It was done by mankind, as Christ was a Saviour for
   mankind, and we are men. It proves for one age all that it proves for
   another; proves for the lookers on all which it proves for the doers.
   In this manner it is yours, it is mine. I think it quite certain,
   sometimes, that I should have had no part it, and it may be that I
   should not. But again I sometimes shudder privately over the question,
   whether if such a being were to come upon the earth now, in my own day,
   one so peculiar, so little subject to the respectabilities and
   conventionalities of religion, doing such miracles, becoming an offense
   to so many religious schools and rabbis, charged so inevitably with
   being a wild impostor, I should not be quite turned away from him.
   Perhaps I should not join his crucifiers, but should I not as truly
   reject him as they? O shame to say it, but it fills me with pain, or
   even with a kind of horror, to conceive the possibility. Were not his
   enemies religious men in their habit, serious, thoughtful men, exact in
   the observances of their religion, many of them even sanctimonious in
   their lives? Had they not religious pretexts for all that they did? At
   any rate they had human hearts, and so have you and I. And will not
   what they show for their own heart, be as good a proof for us? So felt
   the multitude of spectators; and the feeling of the world has been the
   same.

   Lastly there is another and more direct kind of argument, that I mean
   which we get from our own consciousness. I think I may assert, with
   confidence, that there is no man living, who is not made conscious, at
   times, of sin, as in no other manner, by the simple fact of his own
   rejection of Christ. Nor does it make any great difference,. if his
   belief appears to be hindered by speculative difficulties. He may
   imagine, or distinctly maintain, that he rejects, or does not believe,
   on the ground of sufficient evidence. Still Christ is Christ, and the
   cross is the cross, and he can not so much as think of himself, before
   the merely conceived image of a goodness so divine--be it really
   historic or not--without a feeling of disturbance, in the not cleaving
   to the profound reality of the truth discovered in him. No matter what
   may be reasoned by infidels and Christian speculatists about, against,
   or for, the historic person of Christ; if he is a fiction only, or a
   myth, a romance of character gotten up by three or four of the most
   unromantic writers of the world, still he is the greatest, solidest,
   most real, truth ever known to man. The mere conception of such a life
   and character is inherently eternal--more indestructible, and so far
   more real than a mountain of rock. It affirms itself eternally as
   light, by its own self-evidence, and the soul of guilt trembles
   inwardly before it--trembles even the more certainly that it is a good
   approved, but not welcomed, or embraced. Enough that the Christ of the
   New Testament is the want, consciously or unconsciously, of every human
   heart, and that aching secretly for him, it aches the more that it has
   him not, and still the more that it will not have him. Who of you could
   ever think of him rejected without a pang?

   But the most of you are troubled by no such speculative doubts; you are
   only selfish and earthly, want your pleasures, want other objects more,
   that must be renounced to receive him--meaning still, at some time, to
   do it, and become his disciples. Living in this feeble and consciously
   false key, your courage wavers, and self-rebuking thoughts are, ever
   and anon, making their troublesome irruptions upon you. When the
   Saviour says--"Of sin because they believe not on me," the very words
   sharpen guilty pangs in your bosom. Sometimes the question rises,
   distinctly why is it, that beholding this love, I still do not embrace
   it? why do I so profoundly admire this wonderful excellence and still
   suppress the longings I so consciously feel? And then the goodness
   rejected becomes a fire of Hinnom in your uneasy convictions. It is not
   any particular sins that trouble you thus; consciously it is
   sin--nothing else explains you to yourself. The conviction of it runs
   quivering along your feeling in sharp pangs of remorse, and you half
   expect to hear--"I am Jesus of Nazareth whom thou rejectest." Even his
   tenderest call comes to you, more as an arrow, than as a balm, and your
   heart is inwardly stung, pricked through and through, with the rankle
   of thoughts that are being revealed. How many have passed, or now are
   passing through just this struggle of experience. To many too it will
   have been, I trust, the gate of heaven.

   But I must not close my argument on this great subject, without noting
   a common objection; viz., that all such phases of mental disturbance
   called conviction of sin, in the New Testament, are too weak for
   respect, and should not be indulged, even if they are felt. But if they
   are according to truth, if they are so far intelligent as to be modes
   of sensibility accurately squared by the fact of character within, then
   they are only a kind of weakness that is stronger to be allowed than
   stifled. They are however, in some sense, moods of weakness I must
   still admit; for they belong to sin and sin itself is weak. Nothing in
   fact is weaker. Courage, repose, equilibrium, strength of will,
   firmness of confidence--all these receive a shock under sin, and are
   more or less fatally broken. Were not all those Athenians weak who wept
   the death of Socrates, when they saw his place made vacant by
   themselves? But that weakness it was even honorable to suffer, because
   it was the very best thing left, after they had been weak enough to
   vote his death. So, when the Son of God is crucified and expelled to be
   seen no more, not the spectators only of the scene, but all we that
   pierced him by our sin were to be visited with guilty, soul-humbling
   pains in like manner--how much more that he is gone up visibly, as the
   wonderful Greek was not, to be stated in the eternal majesty of
   righteousness and judgment. All sin is weak, and the convincing cross
   must needs bring out the revelation of weakness, even as it did at the
   first. When the marshal's band, sent out to make the arrest, were
   shaken out of courage and strength enough even to stand, they fitly
   opened the scene that followed, by their backward fall and prostration.
   Was not. Peter weak when he wept bitterly? Was not Judas weak when he
   cast down the money for which he sold him? Were not the priests and
   elders weak when they said "he stirreth up the people?" Was not Pilate
   weak when he was "the more afraid?" Were not the multitude when they
   went home smiting their breasts? Nay, were not the rocks themselves
   weak when they shook, and the tomb when it opened, and the stone when
   it rolled back? O, it was a mighty judgment day, that day of the cross;
   token visible, to you and to me, of that other, higher, judgment which
   our righteous Lord has gone up to assume! Hence the distress which
   rises in so many hearts before the cross, and which some can think of
   only with disrespect. Could they learn to disrespect the sin that makes
   it necessary, they might even honor it rather, as the sign, or
   beginning, of a return to righteousness and reason.

   In what manner Christ was to convince of sin we have now seen, and no
   farther argument appears to be needed. But the subject can not be fitly
   concluded without noting a remarkable effect that has followed the
   cross as a convincing power on the world; viz., the fact that, in what
   is called Christendom, there has been a manifest uplifting of the moral
   standards, and a correspondent quickening of the moral sensibilities,
   both of individual men, and of whole races and people. In the people of
   the old dispensation and of the great Pagan empires long ago converted
   to the cross, moral ideas have now taken the place, to a great extent,
   of force; the coarse blank apathy of sin is broken up; the sense of
   duty is more piercing; and it is even as if a new conscience had been
   given respecting the soul in its relations to God. It is as if men had
   seen their state of sin glassed before them, and made visible in the
   rejection of Christ and his cross. Jews and Pagans had before been made
   conscious at times of particular sins; we are made conscious, in a
   deeper and more appalling way, of the state of sin itself, the damning
   evil that infects our humanity at the root--that which rejected and
   crucified the Son of God, and is in fact, the general madness and lost
   condition of the race. Thus, immediately after the departure of Christ
   from the world, that is on the day of Pentecost, there broke out a new
   demonstration of sensibility to sin, such as was never before seen. In
   the days of the law, men had their visitations of guilt and remorse,
   respecting this or that wrong act; but I do not recollect even under
   the prophets, those great preachers of the law, and sharpest and most
   terrible sifters of transgression, a single instance, where a soul is
   so broken, or distressed, by the conviction of its own bad state under
   sin, as to ask what it must do to be saved--the very thing which many
   thousands did, on the day of Pentecost, and in the weeks that followed,
   and have been doing even till now. So different a matter is it to have
   rules in a book, or rules in the conscience, from having them bodied
   into power, through a person, or personal character; that character,
   hated, persecuted, murdered, by the public will and voice; that
   murdered one rising again to be glorified in the triumphant
   righteousness, of his life; that righteousness, after having cast down
   principalities and powers, installed in the judgment bench of the
   world. Hence an amazing accession of strength, in the moral standards
   and convictions of all Christian peoples. It is all from the cross;
   which has raised the sense of guilt in human bosoms to such a pitch,
   that even strong men weep, and groan, and tremble for their sin. Every
   sensibility that lies about the standards of the soul, and its fallen
   possibilities in defection from them, is amazingly quickened. And it is
   just this to which the apostle refers, when speaking to the Hebrews of
   "the word of God"--he means the new word of Christianity, that which we
   have now, and not the old word of the law--"For the word of God, is
   quick and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to
   the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow,
   and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." Having
   this penetrating and convincing efficacy, the word of the cross is
   capable of a most faithful and deep work in the character; no gospel
   therefore of temporizing mercy, and slight healing, but a downright,
   thorough-going, radical, life-renewing energy--a power of God unto
   salvation. It bends to no false principle, deals in no mock sentiment,
   hides no point of exactness, spares no necessary pain. It applies to
   sin a surgery deep as the malady, it cuts the cancer clean out by
   conviction, that a genuine, true healing may follow. Just so much
   worthier is it of our confidence and respect. And what shall we do but
   open our heart to it, counting it even good to be condemned before a
   salvation so thorough, so deeply grounded in the unsparing severities
   of truth. But this condemnation, these unsparing severities, it
   behooves us to remember, will be not less piercing, when they cease to
   come in the hopeful guise of a salvation. Doubtless Christ rejected,
   will have a convincing power always, even in the future life. Moral
   ideas and standards will be raised, and moral sensibilities quickened
   still by the cross remembered. And the pangs of guilt will of course be
   sharpened still farther, by the barren regrets and the hopeless future
   of that undone state. O, that desert of guilt--to one that has
   journeyed long ages in its fiery and thirsty sands, how dreadful the
   words of the rejected Saviour still ringing and forever in his memory.
   "Of sin because they believe not on me."
     __________________________________________________________________

                                      VII.

CHRIST ASLEEP.

   "And behold there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the
   ship was covered with the waves: but he was asleep."--Matt., viii. 24.

   Christ asleep--the eternal Word of the Father, incarnate, lapped in the
   soft oblivion of unconsciousness--a very strange fact, when deeply
   enough pondered to reveal its significant and even singular
   implications.

   Where then do we go to look upon so great a sight, the sleep of God's
   Messiah? Is he royally bestowed in some retired hall, or chamber of his
   palace? Is he curtained about and canopied over on his bed of down, as
   one retiring into the deepest folds of luxury, there to woo the
   delicate approach of sleep? Must no doors be swinging, no feet of
   attendants stirring in the halls? Are the windows carefully shaded,
   lest some ray of moonlight streaming in may break the tender spell of
   the sleeper? No, it is not so that Jesus sleeps, or with any such
   delicate provisions of luxury to smooth his rest; but he is out upon
   the Gennessaret, in some little craft that his disciples have picked up
   for the crossing, and upon the short space of flooring, or deck, in the
   hinder part, he sinks, overcome with exhaustion, and is buried shortly
   in the deepest, soundest sleep. The open sky is over him, the boat
   swings drowsily among the waves, and the boatmen, talking over the
   miracles of the day, and all they have seen and heard, under the
   wonderful new ministry, continue on, as we may suppose, till by degrees
   the conversation lulls, the replies become slow and sepulchral, as if
   coming from afar, and finally cease. Meantime Jesus sleeps, fanned by
   the gentle breath of the night, rocked by the babbling waters, watched
   by the stars, that brighten seemingly to a finer purity, reflected from
   the sleeper's dreams.

   By and by a change appears. A dark and ominous cloud, sailing up, shuts
   in the sky. The lightnings begin to fall, crashing on the head of
   Gerizim and Tabor, and very soon the tempest that was booming heavily
   in the distance, strikes the little skiff, dashing the waves across,
   and filling instantly the forward part with water. The little company
   are thrown, as it would seem, into the greatest panic and confusion,
   unable to manage the sinking vessel, and only mixing their cries of
   distress with the general tumult of the storm. Still Jesus sleeps,
   folded in that deep self-oblivion which no rage of the elements can
   disturb. "And behold there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch
   that the ship was covered with the waves: but he was asleep." Even so,
   no wildest tumult without can reach the inward composure of his rest.
   The rain beating on his face, and the spray driving across it, and the
   sharp gleams of the lightning, and the crash of the thunder, and the
   roar of the storm, and the screams of the men--not all of these can
   shake him far enough inward, to reach the center where sleep lodges and
   waken him to consciousness. It is as if both consciousness and soul
   were gone--gone up in holy dream, to bask in the divine peace,
   breathing airs of music, and wandering along the rivers of paradise,
   where angels moor their boats and watch the currents of eternity.
   Finally some one touches him gently and says, "Master;" whereupon he is
   roused instantly; for it is a tender word, spoken, too, distressfully,
   in a manner of appeal, and there is no softest call of compassion that
   is not louder in his ear than either tempest or thunder. So his sleep
   is ended, and the storm, in turn, is laid in a deeper sleep than he.

   The sleeping of Jesus I believe is mentioned nowhere else in the
   gospels, and I do not recollect ever to have heard the subject
   presented as a topic of discourse, or even distinctly noticed--an
   omission the more remarkable that the theologic implications of the
   fact appear to be so important.

   Sleep is a shadow that falls on the soul, as well as on the body. It is
   such a kind of state, or affection, as makes even the mind, or
   intelligent principle, unconscious. What could be more in point, then,
   for the speculative humanitarian, than to call this fact to his aid, by
   raising the question, what can be made of the sleep of Jesus, on the
   supposition that he is divine? Does sleep attack divinity? How can it
   be conceived that deity, or a nature essentially deific, sleeps,
   falling into the condition of unconsciousness? And then what next
   should follow, in the common way, but that such as think to maintain
   the divinity of Christ, only as they are able to explain it, will make
   answer, that it is the human nature of Jesus that sleeps and not the
   divine--giving up thus, for the time, the fact of the incarnation
   itself; which, if it is any thing, is the absolute unity of the divine
   and the human in one person.

   It would carry me too far, to go into these questions here, taking me,
   in fact, quite away from my subject. I most readily admit that Jesus,
   being essentially a divine person, can not, in good logic, sleep; and
   just as certain it is that, if we proceed logically, he can not, as
   having a deific nature, be a man. And yet he both slept and was a man.
   As being God incarnate, the Word made flesh, the infinite in the
   finite, he is logically impossible. But God has a way of doing the
   impossible. In the communication of himself to men, he tears away the
   logical carpentry, refusing to put his glory into it. The truth is that
   our laws of thinking are totally at fault, in regard to subjects of
   this nature, speculatively handled. All that we can say of the
   personality of Jesus is that he is a being in our plane, and yet not in
   it--in it as a practical approach of God, not in it as being logically
   resolvable by our scientific, or speculative deductions. The very thing
   proposed in the person of Jesus is to make an approach transcending any
   possible explication by us; viz., to humanize divinity; that by means
   of a nature, fellow to our own, he may bring himself within our range,
   and meet our feeling by a feeling formally humanized in himself. And in
   order to this, there must be no doubt of his humanity; he must not be
   simply templed in a human body, but he must make his humanity complete
   by that last, most convincing evidence, the fact of sleep. If he were
   exhaustible only, or weak, or frail, as other men are known to be, but
   were never to sleep, we could scarcely feel that he is one of us; but
   beholding his intelligence close up, his consciousness fall away, and
   his prostrate body palpitating in deep slumber, we no longer question
   his humanity. Call Him the Word incarnate, the Son of God, God
   manifest: still he is none the less truly man to us, now that we find
   him asleep. No matter if we can not explain the mystery, or seeming
   contradiction, as we certainly can not. To say that only the human soul
   sleeps, explains nothing, and it signifies nothing more to us, if it
   does, than the sleep of any other human soul. To say that he is only
   human,: is against the plainest declarations of scripture, and against
   all that we know of his more than mortal bearing, or character. All
   that we can do here is to confess that the incarnate Word is somehow
   man, even one of ourselves, receiving and embracing in him the eternal
   love, and fellowship, and fullness of God.

   There is then a very great spiritual importance, in the fact that Jesus
   sleeps. In it we behold the divine humanity sealed or set in complete
   evidence. Divine he must be, for his character is deifically spotless
   and perfect; human he must be for he sleeps like a man. O this Great
   Benefactor and World's Redeemer in his sleep! just to look upon him
   here, in this strange hour--the rain and the spray drenching his body,
   his hair and pillow of plank washed by the driving storm, his calm
   benignant face lighted by the glittering flashes that set the night
   ablaze--thus to gaze upon him, king of angels and men, descended to
   this mortal plight--how very nigh does it draw us to his humbled state,
   how closely, and by what easy ties of sympathy, knit us to his person!

   And yet more nigh, by a sympathy more tender, when we go over the count
   of what he had been doing yesterday, and see how it was that he fell
   into a sleep so profound. The warrior sleeps returning spattered and
   spent from the bloody horrors of the field; the devotee of pleasure
   sleeps, because he has drunk the cup dry and would fain forget himself;
   one hasting to be rich, exhausted and spent by his overmastering cares,
   and the strain of his mighty passion, sleeps a hurried sleep, fevered
   by his price-current dreams; the hireling sleeps on his wages,
   gathering strength for the wages of tomorrow; Jesus sleeps, because he
   has emptied the fund of his compassions and poured himself completely
   out in works of mercy to the sick and the poor. His giving way to sleep
   is well accounted for, when we find him engaged the whole day previous,
   in works of teaching, advice, counsel, sympathy, consolation, healing,
   and rebuke, such as kept him in a constant expenditure of feeling and
   strain of attention, that no mortal strength could support. According
   to Matthew he heals the centurion's servant, and Peter's wife's mother,
   and continues at his work of healing, thronged by multitudes pouring in
   upon him, even till night. On the same day, according to Mark, he
   appears to have given the parable of the sower, and that of a candle
   hid under a bushel, and that of the earth as a harvest field sown by
   the owner, and that of the grain of mustard seed, with a discourse on
   hearing, and a private exposition of his parables to his own immediate
   disciples. It is also understood by some, combining what is given in
   the sixth chapter of Luke, and the third of Mark, that he was awake the
   whole night previous to this day, engaged in prayer; that he chose the
   twelve at day-break, and that coming down from the mountain, he was so
   thronged, at that early hour, that he could not so much as eat bread,
   and came near being trampled by the crowd; whereupon his friends laid
   hold of him to bring him off, declaring that he was beside himself; his
   mother and brethren also came to expostulate with him. However this may
   have been, it is at least clear that every moment of his day is a draft
   upon his physical resources, and the multitude are growing more
   clamorous for attention as their number increases, till finally, unable
   to bear the strain longer, he flies what he can not support. It even
   appears to be intimated by Matthew, that he was obliged to effect his
   escape, by hastening on board a vessel that lay near the place--"Now
   when Jesus saw great multitudes about him, he gave commandment to
   depart to the other side." The greatness of the multitude, and their
   pressing applications were rather a reason why he should stay, than why
   he should try to escape. They were only not a reason, when he was just
   ready to sink for exhaustion. Accordingly we see that, no sooner is he
   entered into the boat and cleared from the shore, than he drops on the
   deck of the skiff, apparently not minding the hunger of a whole day's
   toil unrespited, perhaps, by food, and is buried immediately in a
   slumber so profound that not even the hurricane wakes him.

   In this sleep of Jesus therefore, as related to the works of the day, a
   very great mistake, into which we are apt to fall, is corrected or
   prevented; the mistake, I mean, of silently assuming that Christ, being
   divine, takes nothing as we do, and is really not under our human
   conditions far enough to suffer exhaustions of nature by work or by
   feeling, by hunger, the want of sleep, dejections, or recoils of
   wounded sensibility. Able to do even miracles--to heal the sick, or
   cure the blind, or raise the dead, or still the sea--we fall into the
   impression that his works really cost him nothing, and that while his
   lot appears to be outwardly dejected, he has, in fact, an easy time of
   it. Exactly contrary to this, he feels it, even when virtue goes out
   only from the hem of his garment. And when he gives the word of
   healing, it is a draft, we know not how great, upon his powers. In the
   same way every sympathy requires an expenditure of strength
   proportioned to the measure of that sympathy. Every sort of tension, or
   attention, every argument, teaching, restraint of patience, concern of
   charity, is a putting forth with cost to him, as it is to us. And yet
   we somehow do not quite believe it. We read that he goes long journeys
   on foot, but we do not conceive that he is weary and foot-sore as we
   might be. We read that he is actually "wearied with his journey," and
   sits him down by a well, while his disciples go into the town to obtain
   food, but we do not seem to think that he is really way-worn, or faint
   with hunger, in the proper human sense of these terms. We read that he
   actually "hungered," and that having no table, or supply, he went aside
   to explore a fig tree, and break his. morning fast on the fruit, but we
   do not think that such a being as he could really care much for a
   breakfast any way. He declares his poverty and his outcast lot on
   earth, by protesting that he has not so much as a place for comfortable
   and protected sleep--"the Son of Man hath not where to lay his
   head"--but we think of him probably as meaning only to say, that he has
   no property; never as testifying his privation of comfort in this first
   article of civilized bestowment, a sheltered, in-door sleep--obliged,
   like the dumb animals, to sleep where he may; in the mountains, on the
   rocks, sometimes under the night rains, shivering often with cold.

   Now all such miscolorings of his human experience take him, so far, out
   of our tier of life, and slacken proportionally our sympathy with him.
   And they are beautifully corrected in the night of the boat. Jesus had
   become so exhausted that he could not, in fact, support himself an hour
   longer, and dropped immediately down, mind and body together, into the
   profoundest sleep. Is it really no true sleep, but only a divine
   seeming? Is he conscious in it? Does he hear the storm? does he feel
   the rain? does the plunging of the boat startle him? Ah! there is
   reality enough here to make a sight how affecting.

   Blessed be thy rough sleep, O thou great benefactor! thou that art
   wearied and spent by thy particular works and the virtues that have
   gone out of thee! What is it now to thee, that the waters drench thee,
   and the fierce tempest howls in tumult round thee! Sleep on exhausted
   goodness, take thy rest in the bosom of the storm! for it is thy
   Father's bosom, where they that are weary for works of love, may safely
   trust, and sink so deeply down into the abysses of sleep, that no
   thunder even may rouse them.

   Notice more particularly also the conditions, or bestowments of the
   sleep of Jesus, and especially their correspondence with his redemptive
   undertaking. Saying nothing of infants, which in a certain proper sense
   are called innocent, there have been two examples of full grown
   innocent sleep in our world; that of Adam in the garden, and that of
   Christ the second Adam, whose nights overtook him, with no place where
   to bestow himself. And the sleep of both, different as possible in the
   manner, is yet most exactly appropriate, in each, to his particular
   work and office. One is laid to sleep in a paradise of beauty, breathed
   upon by the flowers, lulled by the music of birds and running brooks,
   shaded and sheltered by the overhanging trees, shortly to wake and look
   upon a kindred nature standing by, offered him to be the partner and
   second life of his life. The other, as pure and spotless as he, and
   ripe, as he is not, in the unassailable righteousness of character,
   tears himself away from clamorous multitudes that crowd upon him suing
   piteously for his care, and drops, even out of miracle itself, on the
   hard plank deck, or bottom, of a fisherman's boat, and there, in
   lightning and thunder and tempest, sheeted, as it were, in the general
   wrath of the waters and the air, he sleeps--only to wake at the
   supplicating touch of fear and distress. One is the sleep of the
   world's father, the other that of the world's Redeemer. One has never
   known as yet the way of sin, the other has come into the tainted blood
   and ruin of it, to bear and suffer under it, and drink the cup it
   mixes; so to still the storm and be a reconciling peace. Both sleep in
   character. Were the question raised which of the two will be crucified
   we should have no doubt. Visibly the toil-worn Jesus, he that takes the
   storm, curtained in by it as by the curse--he is the Redeemer. His
   sleep agrees with his manger birth, his poverty, his agony, his cross,
   and what is more, as the curse that is maddening in his enemies is the
   retributive disorder of God's just penalty following their sin, so the
   fury of that night shadows it all the more fitly, that what he
   encounters in it is the wrathful cast of Providence.

   How fitting was it also, both that sleep should be one of the
   appointments of our nature, and that Christ should be joined to us in
   it. These rounds of sleep are rounds, in fact, of bodily regeneration,
   and there is no better possible type of the regeneration of a soul,
   than the recreating of a body, in the article of sleep. It was spent by
   labor. All the functions were subsiding unto weakness. The pulse ran
   low and slow, the gait was loose, life itself was ebbing consciously,
   and a general ferment of disability was, in every faculty, from the
   brain downward. The man said he was tired, and alas! he could do
   nothing in himself to mend his condition. No surgeon's or physician's
   art could put him up again equipped for action. But the silent
   new-creator, sleep, could do it. Taking down the spent subject of
   consciousness into his awful abyss of nihility and dark un-reason, he
   will decompose him, so to speak, and put him together again, all
   lubricated for new play, and send him forth to his old works, as it
   were with a new nature. We are made familiar thus with great internal
   changes and mighty new-creations, wrought by mystic powers, whose
   methods we can not trace. And Christ the great moral Regenerator goes
   the same rounds with us here; suffers the same exhaustion, sinks into
   the same unconsciousness, rising to the same newness of life--himself
   regenerated bodily with us, as he fitly should be.

   But as I have spoken of the sleep, I must also speak of the waking; or
   at least I must so far note the manner of it, as to draw from it some
   deeper and more fit conception of the internal state of the sleep. It
   is a matter of common remark that one who goes to his night's rest
   charged with a purpose to rise at some given signal, or at some fixed
   hour, will catch the faintest notification, and will almost notify
   himself, by a kind of instinctive judgment, or sense of time kept ready
   for the spring, even in his unconscious state. So Christ, whose love is
   ready, and full-charged to catch the faintest note of human distress,
   sleeps on through all the commotion of the elements, undisturbed; but
   the first cry of panic, "Lord save us, or we perish"--louder to him
   than all the tumult of the sky and the waters--strikes his inward ear
   and brings him straightway to his feet. "Then he arose and rebuked the
   sea, and there was a great calm." The tempest met his sovereign look
   and fell abashed before him; type sublime of the diviner and more
   difficult calm that he will bring to the storms of the mind. "What
   manner of man," said they, "is this, that even the winds and the sea
   obey him?" A far more wonderful and greater, that he can speak to man's
   guilty feeling, and the turbulent storms of his remorse, and calm even
   these into peace.

   But observe specially his manner when he wakes. It is as if the great
   commotion round him had been only a hymn lulling his slumber. He is not
   flurried or startled by the tumult, shows no sign of confusion, or
   alarm. If he sleeps, a man, he wakes, a God. You can almost see by his
   waking, that his dreams have been thoughts pure and mighty, coasting
   round the horrors of a guilty wrath-stricken world on errands of love
   and peace. Indeed if it has ever occurred to you to wish that you could
   once look in upon the sleep of Jesus, and distinguish accurately the
   dream-state of his thought, even this you may sufficiently guess from
   the manner of his waking. How majestic the tranquillity of it. The
   tempest roaring, the men screaming, the vessel just ready to go
   under--and yet, if his waking were the sunrise, it would not be less
   disturbed, or less flurried by excitement. Could any thing make it more
   certain that his sleeping mind has been flowing serenely, steadied and
   evened by a mighty peace. Internal purity, order, and harmony have been
   the paradise plainly of his rest. In all the wild confusion of the
   night and the sea without, his self-approving mind has been sleeping,
   as it were, in a chiming of sweet melodies. Thoughts vast, mysterious,
   merciful and holy, have been coursing through his unconscious humanity,
   as recollections, or recurrences of habit, from his august and
   supremely good eternity; so that when he wakes, at the cry of his
   disciples, it is only to say, "peace," to the raging elements, from
   that transcendent peace that was bathing his spirit within. It was no
   such waking as the bad and guilty mind, haunted all night by spectres,
   pursued by murderers, dropping into pitfalls, throttled by serpents
   round the neck, crushed by weights on the breast, scared by night-mare
   shapes in the air--it was out of no such element of guilt, or dyspeptic
   torment that Jesus waked. A sleep thus exercised prepares to fear and
   the wildness of panic--if the house be on fire, to leap into the fire,
   if the ship be sinking, to leap into the waters. A good pure mind
   sleeps goodness and purity, and wakes in peace; a bad sleeps painfully,
   conversing with internal horrors, ready, when it wakes, to meet the
   images it has seen. Probably the sleep of a holy mind is even more
   distinct from that of a bad, than its waking state is, because, in
   sleep, the thoughts run just as the internal habit makes them; the
   superintending will-power that musters, and drills, and artificially
   shapes them, when awake, being now suspended. Hence the profound
   philosophy as well as the beauty of the poet's prayer--


   "Be thine the sleep that throws

   Elysium o'er the soul's repose,

   Without a dream, save such as wind,

   Like midnight angels, through the mind."

   I am fully conscious, my friends, that I have been discoursing on this
   matter of the sleep of Christ, in a somewhat random way; for it is a
   specially intangible, unexplorable subject. Not an unimportant subject
   either in its theological implications, or its practical relations to
   our Christian life, but one whose value does not so much depend on our
   definite interior knowledge of it, as in the external and evident fact.
   It does not definitely, or conclusively teach, but it suggests many
   things, and things only suggested are often of as great consequence to
   us as things proved. Let us note a few of the points suggested. And

   1. The possible, or rather actual redemption of sleep. Sleep is just as
   truly fallen as humanity itself. And who that knows the sleeping
   thoughts of man, as they are, can have any doubt of it? Nay, who that
   knows the waking thoughts of man, as they are, can be at all ignorant
   how they will run when he sleeps? Gnawed by care, racked by ambition,
   bittered by the gall of envy, sensual, selfish, fearful, hateful, a
   prey to bad resentments, loaded and clogged by excesses, filled with
   hypocondriac terrors from nerves that are shattered by abuse, what can
   he be, in his sleep, but a faithful representative of what he is awake?
   And hence it is even one of the saddest known facts of the world, that
   it sleeps badly--one of the most grateful and most touching facts of
   the world, that Christ will even be the Redeemer of sleep. He does not
   of course offer himself to the state of sleep, for it would only be
   absurd; but he does undertake the regeneration of the soul in
   character, and that includes every thing; for when the soul's fearful
   stricture is taken off by love, when it is rested in faith, fortified
   by self-government, cleared by temperance and spiritual chastity,
   cheered by hope, it falls into chime, inevitably, with the divine
   order; so that, when the will is suspended, as in sleep, its internal
   movement flows on still in the divine order, meeting only grateful
   images and thoughts of peace. Hence partly it was that so much was made
   of their dreams, by holy men of old. It was no superstition of
   theirs--they had only come, so consciously, into the divine order of
   health and sanctity, that when they went to their sleep, they seemed
   even to be yielding themselves up to a sanctified flow of the mind, and
   to the unobstructed sway of a really harmonic movement with God. Nor is
   any thing more certain than that souls, advancing in holiness, will
   advance proportionally in the quality of their sleep. As they are being
   redeemed themselves, so it is a part of their divine privilege that
   their sleep is also. Accordingly it is often reported by such as have
   cleared the bondage of nature, and risen to a specially high pitch of
   intimacy with God, that they find a remarkable change in their sleeping
   thoughts. None but Christ can sleep the sleep of Christ, and they that
   are nearest to him ill spirit will as certainly be most like him, in
   the peace of their unconscious hours. Their very redemption is,
   according to its measure, the redemption of their sleep.

   2. It is another point suggested here, that there is a right and wrong
   sleep, as well as a right and wrong waking state. Sleep is the
   subsiding of soul and body into nature's lap, or the lap of Providence,
   to recruit exhaustion, and to be refitted for life's works. But what
   right has any one to be refitted for wrong; and above all refitted, by
   the help of Providence? Such sleep is a fraud, and the fund of new
   exertion obtained by it is actually stolen. Sleep was never appointed
   by God, to refit wrong-doers and disobedient children, and enable them
   to be more efficient against Him. Their very sleep they go to,
   therefore, as a crime, and the dark shadow of guilt curtains in their
   rest. O ye days-men, that a few hours hence, when your fund is spent,
   will go to your sleep to be refitted for to-morrow, is it to be a lying
   down upon wrong, upon sin, or will it be upon right--there is a very
   serious meaning in the question. Will you suffer it to rise and be
   distinctly met, when your head meets your pillow? How very hard a
   pillow would it be to many, if they took it understandingly!

   Observe, meantime, how free a guarantee Christ gives to sleep, when it
   is right sleep. There have been multitudes of devotees under the
   Christian name, that made a great merit of withholding sleep, in the
   rigid observance of long vigils; as if the reduction of the soul's
   quantity, and the obfuscation of its functions, were the same thing to
   God as advancing in holiness. These vigils are about the most
   irrational, most barren kind of fast, that was ever invented; for the
   reason that, instead of clearing, or girding up the mind, they even
   propose to make a penance of stupor and lethargy. It is a great mistake
   also of some that they are jealous of sleep, and have it as a point of
   merit to shorten the hours, by a regularly enforced anticipation of the
   dawn. Any such rule for the reduction of quantity is doubtful. A much
   better rule respects the quality. Make it your duty to prepare a
   Christian sleep; that kind which the exhaustion of a righteous, or
   right minded industry requires, and then you may know that Christ your
   master is with you. It is remarkable that he actually tore himself away
   from even his healings, and from vast multitudes of people crying
   piteously for help. He did not reason as some very good men often do,
   that he must go on, pressed by such calls of mercy, till he could stand
   no longer. He was famished with hunger, his strength was gone, and
   enough, to him, was enough. What merit could it be, if he should
   continue into the night, and falling at last on the ground for
   faintness, be carried off in that weak plight, to be himself
   commiserated in turn? He plucked himself away, therefore, fled to the
   boat, and casting himself down, fell, at once, into the soundest sleep.
   So when a man's capacity, full spent in good, comes to its limit, and
   conscience audits the reckoning of its hours, to fall back into God's
   sole keeping, and be recruited by unconscious rest in his bosom, is the
   true Christly sleep, at once a natural bestowment, and a supernatural
   gift. Be it in a palace or a hovel, be it on the land or on the sea, be
   it in outward calm or storm, be it with man's approbation or without,
   the resting place is glorious, the rest itself a baptism of peace--"God
   giveth his beloved sleep."

   3. The associations connected with the sleep of Jesus induce a very
   peculiar sense of his nearness to us in it. Only to have slept in some
   fisherman's hut, or about some hunter's fire, in company with a noted
   or publicly known person, gives a certain familiar kind of pleasure to
   our remembrance of him. In the same way, when the Son of God is joined
   to us here in a common sleep, subsiding nightly into unconsciousness
   with us, under the same heaven, a most strange association of nearness
   is awakened by the conjunction. In our very proper endeavor to exalt
   God, and give him the due honors of majesty, we commonly push him away,
   just so far, into distance; we seat him on the circle of the firmament,
   we lift him, not above the clouds only, but even above the stars;
   scarcely content, till we have found some altitude for Him, higher than
   all points visible, and even outside of the creation itself. When,
   therefore he comes down, as the incarnate One, to be a man with us,
   tired and spent as we by life's toils, when he lies so humbly down that
   even the waters of a lake some hundreds of feet below sea level, dash
   over him, and there sleeps, even as a soldier, or a sailor might, our
   feeling is in a strange maze of tenderness. Our God is so nigh, our
   glorious tent-mate in a guise so gentle, that we come to look upon him
   in his divine sleep, more tenderly than we could even in the waking
   mercies and charities of his life. The very heaven of sky and star,
   that ceils the august chamber of his sleep, is more sanctified from
   underneath, than before, it was from above. The world is another
   world--We are other ourselves. O this nearness, this daring
   familiarity, shall I say, of God! When he says so evidently in this
   dear, tender, mystery, "come," canst thou, guilty, fearing spirit,
   reject an approach so lowly and so lovely! And thou disciple too, whose
   faith is clouded, and upon whom the storms of the mind, as well as the
   less terrible storms of Providence, are loosed, think it not strange or
   disheartening, that thy Master sleeps--tender and great sign is it for
   you that he does--only go to him and say "Master I perish," and have it
   also to say, as the storm settles forthwith into peace, "What manner of
   man is this?"

   Once more the analogies of the sleep of Jesus suggest the Christian
   right, and even duty, of those relaxations, which are necessary, at
   times, to loosen the strain of life and restore the freshness of its
   powers. Christ, as we have seen, actually tore himself away from
   multitudes waiting to be healed, that he might refit himself by sleep.
   He had a way too of retiring often to mountain solitudes and by-places
   on the sea, partly for the resting of his exhausted energies. Sometimes
   also he called his disciples off in this manner, saying--"come ye
   yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest awhile." Not that every
   disciple is, of course, to retire into solitudes and desert places,
   when he wants recreation. Jesus was obliged to seek such places, to
   escape the continual press of the crowd. In our day, a waking rest of
   travel, change of scene, new society, is permitted, and when it is a
   privilege assumed by faithful men, to recruit them for their works of
   duty, they have it by God's sanction, and even as a part. of the sound
   economy of life. Going after a turn of gaiety or dissipation, not after
   Christian rest, or going after rest only because you are wearied and
   worried by selfish overdoings, troubled and spent by toils that serve
   an idol, is a very different matter. The true blessing of rest is on
   you, only when you carry a good mind with you, able to look back on
   works of industry and faithfulness, suspended for a time, that you may
   do them more effectively. Going in such a frame, you shall rest awhile,
   as none but such can rest. Nature will dress herself in beauty to your
   eye, calm thoughts will fan you with their cooling breath, and the joy
   of the Lord will be strength to your wasted brain and body. Ah, there
   is no luxury of indulgence to be compared with this true Christian
   rest! Money will not buy it, shows and pleasures can not woo its
   approach, no conjuration of art, or contrived gaiety, will compass it
   even for an hour: but it settles, like dew, unsought, upon the faithful
   servant of duty, bathing his weariness and recruiting his powers for a
   new engagement in his calling. Go ye thus apart and rest awhile if God
   permits.

   But if you go to kill time, or to cheat the ennui of an idle life, or
   to drown your self-remembrance in giddy excesses, or to coax into
   composure nervous energies eaten out by the passion or flustered by the
   ventures of gain, there goes an enemy with you that will bitterly mock
   you, giving you the type, in what you seek but nowhere find, of that
   more awful disappointment that awaits the rest of eternity. What, in
   fact, are you dying of now, but of rest that is no rest--the inanity of
   ease and idleness, the insipid bliss of cloyed, overworn pleasures,
   nights that add weariness to the weariness of the days, sabbaths of God
   that are bores and not restings under the fourth commandment. O I would
   rather sleep in a fisherman's boat, in thunder and tempest and rain,
   exhausted by a day of useful, Christly work, only dreaming there of the
   good rest to come, than to never know the exhaustions of true industry,
   and spend life, lolling in equipages, and courting pleasures that will
   not come! For what too are such ready, dying in their pampered bodies
   and worn out splendors, but to turn away heart-sick, as here, from the
   golden sands of the river, and chill with nervous ague for the shades
   of the trees of life. Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord; for
   they rest from their labors. Blessed only they; for where there is no
   labor, spending life's capacity for God, there is, of course, no rest.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                     VIII.

CHRISTIAN ABILITY.

   "Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are driven
   of fierce winds, yet are they turned about with a very small helm,
   whithersoever the governor listeth." James iii. 4.

   The ships that were "so great" in former days, were, in fact, scarcely
   more than cock-boats, or small coasters, scraping round the shores of
   the inland seas; whereas, now, what we call the great ships are big
   enough to store in their hold, a whole armed fleet of the ancient time,
   vessels and men together; and these huge bulks strike out on the broad
   oceans defying their storms, yet still turned about, as before, with a
   very small helm, whithersoever the helmsman will. There he stands at
   his post, a single man, scarcely more than a fly that has lighted on
   the immense bulk of the vessel, having a small city of people and their
   goods in the world of timber under him, and perhaps with only one hand,
   turning gently his lever of wood, or nicely guaging the motion of his
   wheel, steers along its steady track the mountain mass of the ship,
   turning it always to its course, even as he would an arrow to its mark.

   Dropping now the particular reference had by our apostle, in his
   illustration, to the tongue, or the power of the tongue, I shall take
   it simply as an instance or exhibition of what is more general, viz.,
   the fact--That man turns about every thing, handles all heaviest bulks,
   masters all hardest difficulties in the same way; that is, by using a
   small power so as to get the operation of a power greater than his own.
   He gets an immense ability thus, where his sufficiency is most
   restricted, and his Christian ability is of just this kind. We have no
   power to handle ships at sea by their bulk; as little have we to do or
   become, in the grand whole of character, what God requires of us. The
   soul is a magnitude more massive than any ship, and the storms it
   encounters are wilder than those of the sea. And yet there are small
   helms given us, by which we are able always to steer it triumphantly
   on, to just the good we seek and the highest we can even conceive.

   In this mode of statement the very supposition is, you perceive, that
   we have no ability in ourselves, more than simply to turn ourselves
   into the track of another, more sufficient power, and so to have it
   upon us. Helms do not impel ships, and if there were no other kind of
   power moving on the sea, they would only swing dead-logged upon the
   waters, making never a voyage. So the power we have as persons, in
   religion, is not a power of self-impulsion, but only a steering power;
   though it is a very great power at that. For when we so use it as to
   hold ourselves fairly to God's operation, as we hold a ship to the
   winds, that is sufficient, that will do every thing, turning even our
   impossibles themselves into victory. Our inability to regenerate, or
   new-create ourselves can not be too strongly stated. As little can our
   ability, when regarding the fair adjustment and perpetual offering of
   ourselves to God's operation.

   Glance a moment here at the analogies of our physical experience.
   Great, overwhelmingly great, as the forces and weights of nature are,
   what do we accomplish more easily than to turn about their whole body
   and bring them into manageable service?--doing it always by some
   adjustment, or mode of address, which acknowledges their superior
   force. We do not manage a horse by the collar, but by the bit. We do
   not raise the winds that serve us by blowing on the mill ourselves, but
   we let them blow as they list, only setting the fans of the wheel to
   get advantage of them. The cliffs of rocks we do not tear open with our
   hands, but we drill them and, by merely touching a little gunpowder
   with a spark of fire, as we know how, let that blow them into the air
   by a force of its own, repeating the operation till we have literally
   removed mountains. Our many thousand wheels of manufacture we do not
   turn by our arms, but we take the rivers, flowing as they will, and let
   them flow, only cutting sluices for them and setting wheels before
   them, or under them; whereupon they turn producers for us and even
   builders of cities. We have a way too of taking that most fierce and
   dreadful power called steam into service and management--doing it never
   by gathering it up into our arms and holding it in compression, but by
   raising it in heated folds of iron, and turning it through cocks and
   conduit pipes, into points of lifting or expansion, where it does the
   work of many winds and waters, conquering in fact both oceans and their
   storms. The lightnings we do not catch by the chase and whip into
   service, to be our couriers, but we just give them a wire and they run,
   of their own accord, upon our errands, true and swift as we could wish.
   We bring in thus all the great powers of nature and set them to doing
   almost miracles for us, by only just offering ourselves to them, in a
   way that steers them into our service. The great art now of all arts,
   that which is changing and new-creating the modern world, is, at bottom
   and in some real sense, a steering art. All our machineries--and where
   is the end of them?--are only so many adjustments, by which the great
   bulks and masses of force in nature are steered into methods of use.
   Even our rail roads, which are revolutionizing, in a sense, all the
   values and powers of the world, are in fact scarcely more than
   adjustments for the steering of motions and forces. The very skill we
   study most, and most continually practice is that of address to nature;
   finding how, or by what means and arrangements, we may get the forces
   of the creation to exert themselves in our behalf. Our ability thus
   amplified stops at almost nothing. Neither have we any difficulty in
   regard to this kind of ability, as if it were no ability at all. It is
   precisely that in one view, and in another it is all ability. Having
   got some force of nature, be it this or that, into use, we have it even
   as a property, we make real estate of it, buy it and sell it and, when
   we have it not, set our wheels of motion, raise our cylinders and
   fires, to obtain it. And it never once occurs to us that the weakness
   we thereby confess in ourselves is any real inability, or creates any
   shade of discouragement to effort. On the contrary we call it our great
   power over nature, and we have courage given us in it to attempt almost
   any thing.

   Prepared by such analogies, our dependence, in the matter of religion,
   ought to create no speculative difficulty, and I really do not believe
   that it does, unless it be in some few exceptional cases. There used to
   be much debate over the question of ability and dependence, but as far
   as my knowledge extends, such difficulties are not felt any longer as
   they once were. And yet we seem to have as much difficulty as ever in
   making that practical adjustment of ourselves to God, which is
   necessary in any and every true act of dependence.

   Thus a great many, admitting quietly the fact of some such ability as
   makes them responsible, take it really upon themselves to do, out and
   out and by their own force, all which they are responsible for. It is
   as if they were setting themselves to steady and move on the general
   bulk of the ship, seizing it by its body. What tremendous weights and
   fearfully complex forces the soul contains, and how many and fierce the
   storms may be that have broken loose in it, under the retributive
   damage of sin, they do not sufficiently consider, daring even to hope
   that they can gather it back into the sweet unity of order and health,
   by their own self-governing power. It turns out of course, since they
   can govern but one thing at a time, that while they are governing that
   one, a hundred others are breaking loose--and all these lusting,
   rasping, raging, tumultuous, wild, forces of evil, driving like fierce
   winds and tossing like mountain seas, are too much, of course, for any
   human power of self-government.

   Besides we have no capacity, under the natural laws of the soul, as a
   self-governing creature, to govern successfully any thing, except
   indirectly, that is by a process of steering. We can not govern a bad
   passion or grudge by choking it down, or master a wild ambition by
   willing it away, or stop the trains of bad thoughts by a direct fight
   with them--which fight would only keep them still in mind as
   before--all that we can do in such matters, in a way of
   self-regulation, is to simply steer the mind off from its grudges,
   ambitions, bad thoughts, by getting it occupied with good and pure
   objects that work a diversion; and then the danger is--only working
   thus upon ourselves--that we shortly forget ourselves; when the sky is
   filled, again, of course, with the old tumult. We ourselves, acting on
   ourselves, institute harmony in the soul and establish heaven's order
   in its working?--why if all its many thousand parts and forces were put
   in a perfect military subjection to the will, we could not even then
   conceive the state of internal order and harmony accurately enough to
   command them into their fit places and functions.

   Furthermore, if we could, our self-government would not be the state of
   religion, or bring us any one of its blessed incidents. The soul, as a
   religious creature, is put in affiance, by a fixed necessity of its
   nature, with God. Having broken this bond in its sin it comes back in
   religion to become what it inwardly longs for--restored to God, filled
   with God's inspirations, made conscious of God. And this is its
   regeneration; a grand, all-dominating, change that supposes a new
   revelation of God in it, and is called, in that view, its being born of
   God. Can it then reveal God in itself by its own self-regulative force?
   Can it, in fact, accomplish any one thing that is distinctively
   religious-the state of peace, the state of liberty, the state of light,
   the state of assurance? "Impossible" is the word written over against
   every character and condition of good it can, as a religious nature,
   attempt. And yet these impossibles we can easily and surely master, by
   only bringing ourselves into the range of God's operations. The
   helm-power only is ours, the executive is God's. He can govern the
   soul, its grudges, lusts, ambitions, bad thoughts, all at once. He
   knows the state of harmony internally and can settle us in it as a
   state of rest. He has inspirations, when he gets into our love, that
   make all duty free. He can settle assurance and confidence in us. He
   can be peace in the sealing of his forgiveness upon us. Revealing
   himself in the soul, he can fill its horizon with light. He can be
   angelic perfection in us, he can be purity, heaven, in his own fit time
   and order.

   What is wanted therefore in us, and nothing more is possible for us, is
   the using of our small helms so as to make our appeal to God's
   operation. Self-impelling, self-renovating power we have none; but the
   helm power we have, and if we use it rightly, it will put us in the
   range of all power, even the mighty power of God. Hence the great call
   of the scripture salvation is, "come unto me," "come unto God;" because
   the coming unto God is the coming unto God's operation, and the
   receiving of what his divine power will work in the soul, when he is
   templed in it. Hence also the call to renounce our own will, to
   renounce the world, to renounce eternally sin; because whoever lives in
   his own will--lives for the world as his end, lives apart from all
   homage to God--can not be in God's will, or come at all into God's
   operation. In the same way there must be a clearing of a thousand
   particular and even smallest things that will steer off the soul from
   God. When the helm of a ship gets foul, or so tangled in ropes, or
   weeds, that it can not traverse freely, it will even steer the ship
   into wreck instead of holding it to its course. So exactly it is with
   the soul. An old grudge adhered to steers it forever away from God. Any
   mode of profit, whose fairness or beneficence to men we distrust, but
   will not give up, will do the same. Adhering only to a party that we
   begin to doubt the merit of, takes away the possibility even of
   confidence toward God. In the same way, the dread only of being
   singular, the going after popularity, the fear of men's opinions, the
   cringing of the soul to men's fashions--all these give over the helm of
   one's life to others, that they may turn it where they will--always
   away, of course, and still away from God. Every such thing must of
   necessity be renounced or even denounced, as we hope to come into God's
   operation, or come unto God. No soul is born of God till it comes into
   his very mind and offers itself, as a really transparent medium, to his
   light. When the helm is practically set, honestly guaged for God, God
   will be a perfectly open harbor to it, but how can it think of entering
   either this or any other harbor, when it is really steering itself
   away?

   Hence also that very positive matter called faith, or the fixed demand
   of it as a condition of salvation. The conception of it is, not that we
   are to do or attempt doing something great upon ourselves--regenerating
   ourselves, sanctifying ourselves. All that we can do is to simply trust
   ourselves over to God, and so to bring ourselves into the range of His
   divine operation. In one view, or considered as including what God does
   for it and by it, faith it is very true is every thing--the whole
   substance and bulk and body of holiness; but considered in a manner
   most analytical and closest to us, it is our act alone and a very small
   one at that, to be the determining helm of a new life. Doubtless faith,
   again, is some how wrought by God, but it is none the less acted by us,
   being the sublimest and completest mortal act of dependence possible;
   in which the soul, ceasing from itself, turns away to God--comes unto
   God. Whereupon as God meets it, accepts it, and pours himself into its
   open gates, it is filled with God's inspirations and the working of his
   mighty power. Now the life proceeds again from God as it ought, being
   instigated inwardly, by his divine movement. Peace, liberty, light are
   its element; it is even conscious of God.

   All human doings therefore, as regards the souls' regeneration, or the
   beginning of a new-life, amount to nothing more than the right use of a
   power that steers it into the sphere of God's operation. And the reason
   why so many fail here is, that they undertake to do the work
   themselves, heaving away spasmodically to lift themselves over the
   unknown crisis by main strength--as if seizing the ship by its mast, or
   the main bulk of its body, they were going to push it on through the
   voyage themselves! Whereas it is the work of God, and not in any other
   sense their own, than that coming in, to God, by a total trust in Him,
   they are to have it in God's working. Let the wind blow where it
   listeth--God will take care of that--they have only to put themselves
   to it, and the impossible is done.

   In just this way also it is that so many miscarriages occur, after
   conversion. Nothing was necessary to prevent them, but simply to carry
   a steady helm in life's duties. Thus there will be some who get tired
   of the helm; to be always at their post, praying always, guaging their
   motions carefully to meet their new conditions, keeping their courses
   set exactly by their conscience, and allowing no slack times of
   indulgence, becomes wearisome as certainly as they lose out the Spirit
   that makes exactness liberty, and then they take away their hand, as it
   were to rest themselves. Some too will have a way of persuading
   themselves that the soul will get on well enough, at least for a time,
   by the impulse it is under already, and so far will consent to do what
   no sailor ever dares, let the ship steer itself; whereupon, when it
   begins to wheel, and plunge, and go just nowhere, as regards the
   voyage, they begin also to cry, "impossible!" "how can we stop it!"
   "how can we turn it back!" They imagine some great fatality, impossible
   to be controlled, when in fact the only fatality suffered is that of a
   ship that can not keep, or get back into, its course without being
   steered.

   At the same time it must not be forgotten, that multitudes of disciples
   fall out of course, for no less positive reason than that they actually
   steer themselves out of God's operation. One goes into an employment
   the right of which he is not sufficiently sure of to have a good
   conscience in it. Another galls himself in a right employment, by the
   consciously wrong manner in which he carries it on. A third goes into
   company that consciously does him injury, yet still continues to go. A
   male disciple turns himself to the pursuit of honor, a female disciple
   to the worship of fashion; one to the shows of condition, the other to
   the more personal vanities of dress. Thousands again will let their
   lusts and appetites get above their affections, their bodies above
   their minds. Some are nursing their pride and some their envy, driven
   of fierce winds by the gustiness of one, eaten out and barnacled by the
   water vermin of the other. These now and such like are the small helms,
   which all you keep turning, who turn yourselves away. You ask why it
   is, half grievingly, that you fall away from God so often, and loose
   the savor of his friendship so easily? But the very simple fact, if you
   could see it, is that you really steer yourselves away; allowing
   yourselves in modes of life that even turn you off from God, as by your
   own act. You not only forget, or neglect, the small helms of guidance,
   but you actually turn them the wrong way--only making now and then some
   clumsy effort, as you wake up in pauses of concern, to do some mighty
   thing by your will; in which you virtually attempt to handle the slip
   by its body--sighing piously in mock resignation, as you fail, over the
   inevitable fact of your dependence! O, if you could but use your
   dependence rightly, finding how to really and truly depend, what power
   and victory would it bring! The very steering power you have, which is
   the highest power God has given you to wield, is nothing but a way of
   depending; that is of right self-adjustment to the gales of the Spirit
   and the operating forces of God. How certainly too and tenderly would
   your God be drawn to you, putting all his power upon you, if he only
   saw you carefully guaging your small duties so as to guide yourselves
   into his help. Remember his promise, "he that is faithful in that which
   is least,"--nothing draws the heart of God like that.

   Now it is very true that a man who is tending the small helm of duty
   with great exactness may become painfully legal in it--a precisionist,
   a Pharisee. But it should not be so, and never will be, save when the
   precision is itself made a religion of. That precision which is only a
   way of steering the soul, precisely and faithfully, into God's
   inspirations, is but the necessary condition of liberty. No man ever
   keeps the way of liberty in a heedless, hap-hazard life. Mere
   strictness is only a mode of pain, but the strictness of a delicately
   faithful and punctual address to God, has God's witness and free
   blessing always upon it. Such a disciple consciously means to be
   faithful and, as certainly as God is God, he will somehow have God's
   power upon him. A very nice way of application, a steady, sleepless
   watch of the helm, turning it moment by moment, by gentle
   deflections--this navigates the ship and keeps it bounding on, as in
   the liberty of the sea No Christian is ever driven loose from his
   course, when he holds himself up to God, in the adjustment of a careful
   trust.

   Now in all that I have said, thus far, in the unfolding of this very
   practical subject, I have been preparing a more distinctly Christian
   view of it, that could not otherwise be given--this I will now present,
   and with this I close.

   I have been showing what power accrues, or will accrue, as we keep
   ourselves in, or bring ourselves into, the range of God's operation;
   and this word operation has been taken probably as referring only to
   the omnipotent working of his will, or spiritual force. But there is a
   power of God which is not his omnipotence, and has a wholly different
   mode of working; I mean his moral power--that of his beauty, goodness,
   gentleness, truth, purity, suffering compassion, in one word, his
   character. In this kind of power, he works, not by what he wills, but
   by what he is. What is wanted, therefore, above all things, in the
   regeneration of souls, and their advancement toward perfection
   afterward, is to be somehow put in the range of this higher power and
   kept there. And here exactly is the sublime art and glory of the new
   divine economy in Christ. For he is such, and so related to our want,
   that our mind gets a way open through him to God's divine beauty and
   greatness, so that we may bring our heart up into the transforming,
   molding, efficacy of these, which we most especially need--need even
   the more imperatively, that our -very conceptions of God, under the
   lowness and blind apathy of our sin, are so dull, and dim, and coarse,
   as to have little value and power.

   The infinite perfection, or unseen beauty of God--how could we so much
   as frame a notion of it, when even the being of God, as an unseen
   spirit, has so little reality to our coarse and fearfully demoralized
   apprehensions? Therefore understanding well our utter inability to so
   much as conceive the perfect good in which we require to be fashioned,
   or the moral excellence of God whose image is to stamp itself upon us,
   He has undertaken to put even this before our eyes. To this end he
   becomes incarnate in the person of His Son. As the incarnate Son, He is
   God in the small, God in humanity, the Son of Man, bringing all God's
   beauty and perfection to us in a personal being and life akin to our
   own--powerful on our own, by the tragic tenderness of his cross; so
   that if we simply love and cleave unto his human person, unto his
   cross, we embrace in him all that is included in God's infinite feeling
   and character. In this view it is, that he says, "I am the door;" for
   he is just that opening into the infinite beauty that brings us to the
   sense of it, and puts us in the power of it. Just this too was his
   meaning when he said, "he that hath seen me hath seen the Father"--he
   has seen a man simply, in one view; yet, in another, he has seen even
   God, in all those distant, impossible glories, and perfections, he
   otherwise could not conceive. This too was what he had in thought when
   he said--"He that believeth on me believeth not on me, but on him that
   sent me. And he that seeth me seeth him that sent me." The omnipotence
   of God works absolutely, the moral power of God by being seen, and
   Christ makes it seen. By which means, as an apostle conceives, he
   becomes the power of God--"Christ the power of God and the wisdom of
   God." In short this exactly is Christianity--this thought labors all
   through--that Christ in humanity is God humanized, divine feeling and
   perfection let down into the modes of finite sentiment and
   apprehension. In his human person, and the revelation of his cross, he
   is the door, the interpreter to our hearts, of God himself--so the
   moral power of- God upon our hearts. It is not necessary that we should
   so much as frame the intellectual idea of God's perfection from him,
   which multitudes could never do--we have simply to love him and cleave
   to him as to a human person, and we have the very excellence of God
   framing itself into us, by a most naturally relational, humanly real,
   sympathy; the power, that is the moral power, of God is upon us, and
   revealing itself in. us with all needed efficacy.

   Christ then as the Son of Man, is that small helm put in the hand, so
   to speak, of our affections, to bring us in, to God's most interior
   beauty and perfection, and puts us in the power of His infinite, unseen
   character; thus to be molded by it and fashioned to conformity with it.
   And so we have nothing to do but to keep his company, and watch for him
   in faithful adhesion to his person, in order to be kept in the very
   element of God's character, and have the consciousness of God, as a
   state of continually progressive and immovably steadfast experience.
   The moral power of God and God's glory is mirrored directly into us, to
   become a divine glory in us. Beholding, as in a glass, the glory of the
   Lord, we are changed into the same image from glory to glory. This it
   is, working in our sin, that clears it all away--the power of God unto
   salvation.

   What now brethren and friends, is our conclusion? What have we seen but
   that all condolings with ourselves, all regrets of failure, turning
   upon the fact of our weakness, all protestations of inability, all
   sighs and suspirations ending in the word "impossible," are without a
   shadow of reason--utterly groundless. We can do and become just all
   that we ought, and without so much as one strain of self-endeavor. It
   is very true that God has not made us omnipotent--we can not manipulate
   ourselves into holy character by our will, we can neither regenerate,
   nor make free, nor purify, nor keep ourselves. And just so we can not
   do any thing in the world of natural experience, without making our
   address to the powers of nature. Do we mourn over this in listless
   impatience, and call it our dreadful inability? Does the man who can
   not navigate a ship by its body, or drag it through the sea by its
   beak, set himself down upon the word impossible, and desist from the
   voyage? No, but he takes the very small helm, heading bravely out into
   the storms, compelling the huge bulk, in that easy manner, to go where
   he sends it, dashing on still on, by night and by day, and week after
   week, and month after month, till he has taken it possibly clean round
   the planet he lives on, and brought it quietly in to the haven for
   which he was set. Here, just here, is the mighty power of man, that he
   can steer! Weak in himself, as regards most things, able to do almost
   nothing in the gross, he can yet do almost any thing by only steering
   it into the lines of forces that will do it for him. And the same holds
   true exactly in religion. No man here is called to do some great thing
   which he can not do. Nothing is necessary for you, in becoming a
   Christian, or maintaining a triumphant Christian life, but just to stay
   by the helm, and put yourselves in where the power is--then you have
   all power, and every mountain bulk goes away at your bidding! Come unto
   God, unite yourselves to God, and the doing power you have is
   infinite!--and is none the less yours because it is His. Trim your ship
   steadily to the course, and God's own gales will waft it. If you want
   success enough to set yourselves for it, and guage your courses
   accurately by a strict application, infallible success is yours. Or,
   better still, if your mind is dark, if you do not even know how to
   guage any movement rightly, or even what the words mean that speak of
   it--then come to the man Jesus, your blessed, all perfect brother, ask
   him to let you go with him and keep him company, cling fast to him, and
   all the transforming moral power of God shall be with you. To
   investigate much and know many things, is not necessary. Only to love
   Jesus and adhere to him faithfully, knowing simply him, is wisdom
   enough.

   He will be the door, so that your heart will pass in, where your
   understanding can not. reach. No matter how weak you may seem to be, or
   how many impassable mountains to be before you, or how many fierce
   storms to be raging round you, still you will go over mountains beaten
   small as chaff, on through tempests that have heard the word "be
   still." You will never fail or fall. Stay by your love to Jesus and the
   power of God's infinite will is with you, and the still mightier, more
   inconceivable, power of his greatness upon you. O this glorious fact of
   our dependence--if we speak of ability, we have all utmost ability in
   it. We come to no bar in it, brethren, as many are wont to speak. If
   only we can rightly depend, we come into all power rather, and are able
   to do all things! Here it is that so many of God's. mighty ones became
   mighty--Moses, Elijah, Paul, Luther, Cromwell--all those efficient and
   successful ones that we ourselves have met, wondering often how they
   got such emphasis of action, such resistless sway. They were men who
   kept company with God, and lived in the powerful element of his divine
   operation. Here is the only way of success, whether of single men, or
   of churches. How can a church get on in any great concern of religion,
   when it is out at sea, beating about as it is driven, and steering just
   no whither. Nor is it any better if we take the ship into our own
   hands, to do all for it ourselves. Let us come into God's operation,
   and God will know how to open a way for us. He will lead just where we
   most want to go, and send us every gift even as he gives us a gospel.
   So if we are baffled personally, in all our Christian aims and doings,
   losing ground, weak and growing weaker, unhappy, dissatisfied, hopeless
   of good--out upon this wild and dreadful sea, and driven by all fierce
   winds and storms of the mind, we have only to steer ourselves on, by
   the steady helm of dependence, and our way is clear to the harbor.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                      IX.

INTEGRITY AND GRACE.

   "Judge me O Lord according to my righteousness, and according to mine
   integrity that is in me."--Ps. vii, 8.

   A truly noble confidence!--and yet many of our time would call the
   language very dangerous, or scarcely Christian, language, if it were
   spoken by any but one of the scripture saints. What can be a slipperier
   footing, they would say, for any sinner of mankind, than to be
   appealing to God in the confidence of his own righteousness; or, what
   is even worse, in the confidence of his mere integrity? What does it
   show but a state of egregious, fearfully overgrown, spiritual conceit,
   coupled with a prodigious self-ignorance? And what could evince a lower
   sense of God and religion? We shall see whether it is so, or must needs
   be so in all cases or not.

   It may not be amiss to note that some Unitarian teachers, on the other
   hand, charge it as a fault in our doctrine of salvation by grace, or
   justification by faith, that it lets down even the standards of our
   morality itself; making grace a cover for all defections from honor,
   truth, honesty, and whatever belongs to the outward integrity of our
   practices; allowing us to be selfish, heartless, perfidious, crafty,
   cruel, mean, and all this in good keeping, because it is a part of our
   merit under grace, to have no merit.

   Let us pursue this subject, and see if we can find the true place for
   integrity under the Christian salvation. And we shall best open the
   inquiry, I think, by noting--

   1. How the scriptures speak of integrity; how manifold and bold the
   forms in which they commend it, and how freely the good men of the
   scripture times testify their consciousness of it, in their appeals to
   God. The text I have cited does not stand alone. In the twenty-sixth
   Psalm, David says again--"Judge me O Lord; for I have walked in mine
   integrity." And again--"But as for me, I will walk in mine integrity."
   The Proverbs testify in language still more unqualified,--"that the
   integrity of the upright shall preserve them," "The just man walketh in
   his integrity." In the same view it is, that good men are so often
   called "the upright" and "the just"--"Mark the perfect man and behold
   the upright," "The way of the just is uprightness, thou most upright
   dost weigh the path of the just." They are called "righteous" too and
   "right" in the same manner, and it is even declared that they "shall
   deliver their own souls by their righteousness." And lest we should
   imagine that the integrity, honored by so many commendations and
   examples, is only a crude and partial conception, belonging to the
   piety of the Old Testament, the Christian disciples of the New are
   testifying also in a hundred ways, to the integrity, before God and
   man, in which they consciously live. They dare to say that they have a
   conscience void of offense, that they serve God with a pure conscience,
   that they count it nothing to be judged of man's judgment, when they
   know that God approves them. They rejoice in the confidence that they
   are made manifest unto God, and tenderly hope that they may be made
   manifest also in the consciences of men. They are so assured in the
   sense of their own integrity, as followers of Christ, that they even
   dare to exhort others to walk as they have them for examples. And this
   holy consciousness of being right with God, of being wholly offered up
   to him, of wanting to know nothing but Christ, of losing all things for
   his sake, appears and reappears in as many forms as language can
   possibly take. They spend their life, as it were, in the testimony that
   they please God. Making the strongest confessions of ill desert, and
   resting their salvation everywhere on the justifying grace and
   righteousness of God, they still are able, somehow, to be free in
   professing their own conscious integrity in their discipleship, and the
   sense they have of being right and true--whole men, so to speak, in the
   service of their master. Whether we can explain the riddle, or not, so
   it is. But the explanation is not difficult, and, before we have done,
   will be made sufficiently clear. Consider then--

   2. What integrity means, or what is the state intended by it. As an
   integer is a whole, in distinction from a fraction, which is only a
   part, so a man of integrity is a man whose aim, in the right, is a
   whole aim, in distinction from one whose aim is divided, partial, or
   unstable. It is such a state of right intention as allows the man to be
   consciously right-minded, and to firmly rest in the singleness of his
   purpose. He is a man who stands in the full honors of rectitude before
   his own mind or conscience. It does not mean that he has never been a
   sinner, or that he is not now, as regards the disorders and moral
   weaknesses of his nature, but simply that whatever may have been his
   life, or the guilt of it, he is now turned, as regards the intent of
   his soul, to do and be wholly right; firmly set, of course, to receive
   all the possible helps in his reach, for maintaining a life wholly
   right with God and man.

   But we must not pass over the distinction between what is called
   commercial, or social integrity, and the higher integrity of religion.
   This commercial integrity which is greatly affected and much praised
   among men, relates, only to matters of truth and personal justice in
   the outward affairs of life, and becomes integrity only because it is
   measured by a partial and merely human standard, viz., the standard of
   the market, and of social opinion. Such a character is always held in
   high respect among men, and, what is more, it should be. It is really
   refreshing in this selfish, scheming, sharp-dealing world, to meet an
   honest man. Whether he be a Christian or not, we love to honor such a
   man. It will also be seen that he is a man who means, at least so far,
   to honor himself. But it does not follow that such a man's integrity is
   complete enough even to give him a good conscience. He is, after all,
   it may be, no such integer in his confidence, or the approbation of his
   own mind, as he consciously might be. His intent is not really right,
   that is to accept the principle of right doing in its breadth, as the
   arbiter of all action, and do and be all right and forever. All that
   can be said of him, all that he will say for himself, is that he has
   had it for his law to speak the truth, fulfill his promises, and deal
   fairly by his fellow men. Still it is not, and has never been his aim,
   or object, to do what is right to God; and that if I am not mistaken,
   is a matter of much higher consequence and more necessary to his real
   integrity. God is a person as truly as men are, more closely related to
   us than they, a better friend, one who has more feeling to be injured
   than they all, claims of right more sacred. What then does it signify
   that a man gives men their due, and will not give God his? Does it give
   one a title to be called humane, that he will not stick a fly with a
   pin because of his tenderness, and yet will stab, in bitter grudge, his
   fellow man? Does it fitly entitle one to the name of a just man, that
   he is honest and fair with men of one color, and not with those of
   another, honest and fair on three days, or even five days in the week,
   and not on the days that remain? What then shall we think of the mere
   commercial integrity just described, taken by itself? Calling it
   integrity, it is still integrity by halves, and, of course, without the
   principle; integrity by market standards only, and not by any standard
   that makes. a real integer in duty. Real integrity begins with the
   principle, meaning to give every one his due; to be right with God, as
   with men, right against popularity as with it, right everywhere, wholly
   and eternally right.

   You perceive, in this manner, how easy it is for a man to be in great
   repute for this virtue, and yet be wholly uncommitted to principle in
   it. Nay, he may even be a very bad man. Examples of the kind will occur
   to almost any one. I knew in college, and afterward in a remote part of
   the country, a man of such repute now in the law, that he was said to
   have made the greatest argument ever presented before the Supreme Court
   at Washington, whose reputation, as a kind of Cato in this matter of
   market integrity, was scarcely less remarkable. He had more than once
   kicked a man out of his office, who had come to engage him in a case
   plainly tainted with fraud, and would never allow himself to gain a
   point, by the least deviation from truth. And yet he was a man of many
   vices, and a man, withal, of such infernal temper, that his wife and
   children knew him only as a tyrant scarcely endurable. Getting
   exasperated almost to the pitch of insanity, by what he conceived to be
   a base attempt of his law partner to jew him, for he was a Jew, in a
   matter of business, he drew off in disgust and anger from his practice,
   determined to add nothing more to the profits of the concern, where
   before he had, in fact, brought all. As the contract still existed in
   law, the right of his proceeding might be questioned, but his almost
   overgrown sensibilities to points of honor would no longer suffer him
   even to look upon the face of such a man. Still he would not so far
   disrespect the contract as to open a separate and rival office, but
   hired himself out as a common laborer in unloading coal from one of the
   ships in the harbor. While at work there, smirched and grimed by
   coal-dust, there came to him, in a few days, a client who wanted to
   engage him in a great cause involving the title to a vast property.
   Inasmuch as he must live, apart from all profits, he finally consented
   to undertake it, on condition that he should receive only a small
   day-wages allowance. He won the cause. And then, five or six years
   after, when he had his family with him, and was known to be short in
   the means of living, his old client, whom he had made a rich man, sent
   him a present of twenty thousand dollars. He was rather offended than
   pleased--as if he would do so mean a thing as to cover up the fact of a
   fee, under the semblance of a stipulation for day-wages! Forthwith he
   returned the present, and when it was renewed as a present to his wife,
   he required her also to send it back. If his partner had seen fit to
   raise a legal claim for the money as a fee, he might easily have been
   quieted by half the sum, but rather than consent to enrich a knave by
   that amount, he preferred to rob his family of the same.

   Now this man, so keenly sensitive to the matter of honor in business,
   as to be well nigh demonized by it, was not even a virtuous man. He
   was, in fact, the most magnificently abominable man I ever knew. And he
   died as he lived. The steamer on which he was a passenger sprung aleak
   at sea, and when they called him to the pumps, protesting, with an
   oath, that he would do no so mean thing as to pump for his life, he
   locked himself up in his state-room, and there he stayed, like a tiger
   in his cage, till the ship went down.

   Was he then a man of integrity? In one view he certainly was, and that
   was his reputation. Still he was a man false to every right principle,
   both of God and man, but just one; an example in which any one may see
   how little the boasted integrity of commercial honor and truth may
   signify, when taken alone.

   I could easily have given you a thousand nobler and more beautiful
   examples of integrity, in the spheres of business, and before the human
   standards of commercial obligation. I give you this, just because it is
   so nearly repulsive; showing, in that manner, how little true merit of
   character belongs to this kind of virtue, when it stands by itself. How
   far off is it then from being any true equivalent for that Broad,
   universal, radically principled, integrity that includes religion.
   Whoever is in the principle of right-doing, as a principle, will be
   ready to do all right, always, and everywhere--to God as to men, to men
   as to God. This it is and this only that makes a genuinely whole-intent
   man, thus a man of integrity.

   There is, then, a kind of integrity which goes vastly beyond the mere
   integrity of trade, and which is the only real integrity. The other is
   merely a name in which men of the market compliment themselves, when
   they observe their own standards; though consciously neglecting the
   higher standards of right as before God. This higher, and only real,
   integrity, is the root of all true character, and must be the
   condition, somehow, of Christian character itself. Let us inquire--

   3. In what manner? Christ, we say, does not undertake to save men by
   their merit, or on terms of justice and reward, but to save them out of
   great ill desert rather, and by purely gratuitous favor. What place
   have we then under such a scheme of religion, for insisting on the need
   of integrity at all. Does it not even appear to be superseded, or
   dispensed with?

   I wish I could deny that some pretendedly orthodox Christians do not
   seem, in fact, to think so. It is the comfort of what they call their
   piety, that God is going to dispense with all merit in them, and this
   they take to mean about the same thing as dispensing with all the sound
   realities of character--all exactness of principle and conduct. They
   are sometimes quite sanctimonious in this kind of faith. Cunning,
   sharp, untruthful, extortious, they look up piously still, at the top
   of what they call their faith, and bless God that he is able to hide a
   multitude of sins--able to save great sinners of whom they are chief!
   Submitting themselves habitually to evil, they compliment themselves in
   abundant confessions of sin; counting it apparently a kind of merit
   that they live loosely enough to make salvation by merit impossible.
   Ten times a day they declare that they will know nothing but Christ and
   him crucified, and lest they should miss of such a faith, they do not
   spare to crucify him abundantly themselves!

   It can not be that such persons are not in a great mistake. Any scheme
   of salvation that undertakes to save without integrity, has, to say the
   least, a very poor title to respect. And it ought to be evident
   beforehand, that Christianity is no such scheme at all.

   Yes doubtless, it will be said, there must be such a thing as
   integrity--that is, commercial integrity--in Christian men, else they
   would bring very great scandal on the cause. Is it then permitted that,
   if they will be just and true in trade and in society, they may safely
   consent to be out of integrity with God? Looking at the principle of
   things, for there is nothing else to look at here, it would seem that
   the Great God and Father of us all is certainly as much entitled to
   consideration from us as we are from each other, and how can there be
   any genuine principle at all in a disciple, who is not in that higher
   integrity which includes doing justice to God--being right with God?

   There must then be some place for the claim of integrity in our gospel,
   even though it be a scheme of salvation by grace. Nor does the solution
   of the matter appear to be difficult. Integrity, we have seen, is
   wholeness of aim, or intent; but mere intent of soul does not make and
   never could complete a character. It is even conceivable that a soul
   steeped in the disorders of sin, might take up such a kind of intent,
   on its own part, and, acting by itself, be only baffled in continual
   defeats and failures to the end of life, There is no redeeming efficacy
   in right intent, taken by itself--it would never vanquish the inward
   state of evil at all. And yet it is just that by which all evil will be
   vanquished, under Christ and by grace, because it puts the soul in such
   a state as makes the grace-power of Christ, co-working with it,
   effectual. Conscious of wrong, for example, and groaning under the
   bitterness of it, I take it up as my intent to be and become wholly
   right. Then I find Christ near me--O how near!--yielding me his divine
   sympathy, and pouring his whole tenderness into my feeling. As regards
   the guilty past, he will justify me freely, and hold me to account no
   more. As regards the future, he will take me as a friend, raise my
   conceptions of what is good by his own beauty, ennoble my feeling by
   society with him, draw me up out of my lowness and my weak corruptions,
   by his character great in suffering, and so enable me to conquer all my
   evils, as he conquered his. As certainly then as I come into right
   intent, I shall come into faith, and trust myself to him, as a means of
   becoming what I have undertaken to become.

   Here then is the place of integrity. It is even presupposed in all true
   faith, and enters, in that manner, into all true gospel character. It
   does not exclude the grace of Christ, or supersede salvation by grace,
   but on the human side moves toward grace, and is inwardly conjoined
   with it, in all the characters it forms. The sinning man, who comes
   into integrity of aim, is put thereby at the very gate of faith, where
   all God's helps are waiting for him. Now that he is so tenderly and
   nobly honest, there is no grace of God, or help of his merciful spirit,
   that will not flow into him as naturally as light into a window. By
   this grace, in which he will now trust, his whole being, feeling,
   aspiration, hope are invested, and the light of God, the brightness of
   salvation, everlasting life, is in him--he is born of God.

   His integrity, therefore, his new and better aim, is not any ground of
   merit, or title of desert, which dispenses with faith, but his way of
   coming into faith--thus into the helps, inspirations, joys and triumphs
   that Christ will inwardly minister--in one word, into the righteousness
   of God. And accordingly the scriptures formally condition all such
   helps, on the integrity of the soul that wants them. "Ye shall seek me
   and find me, if ye search for me with all your heart--that is with a
   whole and single aim." "If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will
   not hear me." "If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of
   light." The scriptures, we may thus perceive, have no difficulty in
   finding how integrity is needed in a way of salvation by grace, and
   there is, in fact, no such difficulty, save as we make it ourselves.

   Having discovered, in this manner, what, and how great a thing
   integrity is, and the necessity of it on strictly Christian grounds,
   let us note in conclusion, some of the practical relations of the
   subject. And

   1. Consider what it is that gives such peace and loftiness of bearing
   to the life of a truly righteous man. What an atmosphere of serenity
   does it create for him, that he is living in a conscience void of
   offense. And when great storms of trouble drive their clouds about him,
   when he is assailed by enemies and detractors, persecuted for his
   opinions, broken down by adversities, thrown out of confidence and
   respect even, as will sometimes happen, by false constructions of his
   conduct and malignant conspiracies against his character, still his
   soul abides in peace, because he justifies himself and has the witness
   that he pleases God. These clouds that seem to be about him do still
   not shut him in. He sits above with his God, and they all sail under!
   Such a man is strong my brethren--how very strong! There is no power
   below the stars that can shake him! The steaming vapors of a diseased
   body can not rise high enough to cloud his sun. He is able still and
   always to make his great appeal and say--"Judge me O Lord, according to
   my righteousness, and according to the integrity that is in me." Who
   can understand like him, the meaning of that word--"And the work of
   righteousness shall be peace, and the effect of righteousness,
   quietness, and assurance forever." Here too--

   2. Is the ground of all failures, and all highest successes in
   religion, or the Christian life. Only to be an honest man, in this
   highest and genuinely Christian sense, signifies a great deal more than
   most of us ever conceive. We make room for laxity here that we may let
   in grace, and do not hold ourselves to that real integrity that is
   wanted, to receive, or obtain, or be in, that grace. O how loosely,
   irresponsibly, carnally, do many Christians live--covetous, sensual,
   without self-government, eager to be on high terms with the world,
   praying, as it were in the smoke of their vanities and passions, making
   their sacrifices in a way of compounding with their obligations. Little
   do they conceive, meantime, how honest a man must be to pray, how
   heartily, simply, totally, he must mean what he prays for. Perhaps he
   prays much, prays in private, prays in public, and has it for a
   continual wonder that he gets on so poorly, and that God, for some
   mysterious reason, does not answer his prayers! Sometimes he will even
   be a little heart-broken by his failures, and will moisten his face
   with tears of complaint. He has made great struggles, it may be, at
   times, to freshen the fire that was burning in him, and yet, for some
   reason, he is all the while losing ground. His faith becomes a hand, as
   it were, without fingers, laying hold of nothing. The more he pumps at
   the well of his joys, the drier he grows. It is as if there were some
   dread fatality against him, and he wonders where it is. Commonly it is
   here--that he wants rectitude. He is trying to be piously exercised in
   his feeling, when he is slack in his integrity. He has been so much
   afraid of being self-righteous, it may be, that he is not righteous, at
   all. When he is loose at the conscience, how can he be clear in his
   feeling?

   Perhaps he has conceived a higher standing in religion, a state of
   attainment where his soul shall be in liberty, and has tried for whole
   months, possibly for years, to reach it, and yet he finds it not. He
   begins to imagine, not unlikely, that no such thing is for him--God's
   sovereignty is against him, and he must be content to stay in that
   lower plane that God has appointed him. "God never means," he will say,
   "that I should be much of a Christian--that is given to others that
   have a higher calling." Now strange as it may seem, here again is the
   root of his difficulty--that his projected attainments are clear ahead
   of his integrity. Some traitor is hid in his soul's chambers that is
   kept there, and carefully fed. What is wanting is the integer of a
   clear, undivided intent. Honesty! honesty! O that Christian men, saying
   nothing of others, could understand how much it means, and the
   wonderful power it has! We connive at evil and do it so cunningly that
   we do not know it. Our eye is evil, we regard iniquity in our heart,
   therefore do we fail in our prayers, therefore do we lose ground,
   therefore are we baffled and floored in all our attempts to rise. But
   it is not so when we have the single eye. Such power is there in this
   integrity, when it is real, that, making faith real, it makes all gifts
   attainable. God loves the honest mind, hears the honest prayer, pours
   all his fulness into the honest bosom. No great flights of ecstatic
   feeling are wanted, frames carry nothing, but that silent, sound,
   integrity, which poises the soul on its pivot of truth and
   self-approbation, is so mighty that it wins its way to God through all
   obstacles. Here is the secret after all, of the true success in every
   case. Success is the fixed destiny of any soul that has once reached
   the point of whole intent. No one need be troubled about his frames, or
   fluctuations, or even what appear to be his losing moods, if only he
   can stay by his conscience firmly enough to say, "Judge me O Lord
   according to mine integrity." Here then, brethren, is the spot where
   you are to make your revision, find what your intent is, whether it is
   honest and whole and clean, warped by no ambiguities, divided and
   stolen away by no idols. Here the Achan will be hid, if any where. Make
   sure of his dislodgment, and your way is clear. Then your faith will be
   faith, your prayers will be prayers; every thing will have its genuine
   meaning, and God will be revealed in every thing you do. I proceed now

   3. To another very important deduction, viz., that every man who comes
   into a state of right intent, or is set to be a real integer in the
   right, will forthwith also be a Christian. There is apt to be much
   pride in men not religious, on the score of their commercial integrity.
   They will find, if they search more narrowly, that they still have no
   right conscience in it. They feel themselves to be inwardly wrong. They
   live in a state of conscious disturbance. They are often consciously
   disingenuous, as regards the truths and claims of religion. They have
   consciously a certain dread of God which harrows their peace. What I
   mean to say, at present, is that whoever gets a clear perception of the
   state of wrong in which he lives, and comes back into a genuinely right
   intent, to be carried just where it will carry him, sacrifice what it
   will cost him--any thing to be right--in that man the spirit of all sin
   is broken, and his mind is in a state to lay hold of Christ, and be
   laid hold of by him, almost ere he is aware of it. Nor, when I say
   this, do I throw discredit on the common modes of expression; for this
   exactly is the point to which every converted person comes, though he
   may not so conceive at the time. One may tell of his convictions,
   another of his fears, another of his unspeakable wants, one of the
   prayer that he made thus or thus, another of the restitution or
   acknowledgment he made to some one he had wronged, many of their deep
   sorrow that melted into joy, many others of the despair they came to in
   their struggles, under which they fell off helpless in the hands of
   God's mercy, and behold it was deliverance itself. But whatever may
   have been the form of exercise, this most assuredly is in it always,
   consciously, or unconsciously present, that there is a coming somehow
   into a state of pure intent, a mind to receive all truth and do all
   right forever. And no man ever came to this, who did not find himself,
   at once, all over in the faith of Christ, a consciously and strangely
   new man.

   Let me give you a case, in which this particular point, in the matter
   of conversion to God, will be clearly distinguished. There died, in the
   city of New York, about ten years ago, a distinguished merchant, and:
   much more distinguished saint of God, whose conversion was on this
   wise. He was born and brought up in the island of Santa Cruz, belonging
   to a wealthy and gay family, in which he received no religious
   instruction at all. He had a naturally gay, light, forceful character,
   and scarcely a religious idea. One Sunday, when the family and their
   guests went out for a ride, he remained at home. Going to the library
   for something to read, his eye fell on a book labeled "The Truth of
   Christianity Demonstrated." He took it down, saying as he looked on the
   back of it, "The truth of Christianity demonstrated--the truth of
   Christianity demonstrated--well if it is, I ought to believe it and
   live it, and--I will. Let me try the book and see." Sitting down, at
   that point, he opened the book and began to read, and though it was an
   argument only; giving no particular appeal to feeling, he was surprised
   to find a strange brightness of light on the words. Holy conviction
   flowed in upon him, a wondrous love waked up in his feeling, a still
   more wondrous bliss dawned upon his love, and in a very few minutes, it
   seemed that the helm of his nature was somehow taken by a mysterious
   power he could not resist. The joy of the change, which he did not
   understand, or conceive, was so great as to prove its reality; he could
   never, from that moment, shake off the conviction of his being quite
   another man. What it was to be a Christian he did not know, but he knew
   that he was something, which to lose, or cease to be, he could as
   little think of as losing his life. When the riding party came back, he
   began forthwith to let out his joy, tell his wonder, testify of Christ,
   just as he would of any good, gay time he had had before. They were
   astonished, some of them doubted whether he was not somehow beside
   himself. But there was no slack in his flame, he went on like the just,
   growing brighter and brighter. There was no appearance of sanctimony,
   no cant, he was the same outspoken, social, manly youth, that he had
   been. Hungering finally after some religious society, he managed to
   remove to Philadelphia, where he found teaching and sympathy; and great
   works of duty. He went once to the theater, once to a ball, having no
   scruples about the right of it, and scarce knowing that he could have.
   But he never went again, simply because it did not meet his feeling,
   and gave him no pleasure. He finally came to a settlement in New York,
   where he was known many years as a man of dignity and power, nobly free
   and joyous, fond of the young, and open to all humblest minds wanting
   counsel, the most distinguished mark, and brightest ornament ever known
   in the churches of that great city. From first to last his Christian
   life was but a hymn.

   At what point now did this remarkable servant of God pass his
   conversion? Not when he was reading the book, but when he was looking
   on the back of it; for there it was, in that little deliberation on the
   label, and the nobly honest conclusion he accepted concerning it, that
   his soul took hold of integrity, and sin was all reversed! The mere
   resolve to accept it, if true, decided all. And therefore it was that
   Christ met him in the book, with a revelation so blessed. Doubtless it
   was the Spirit of God, working unseen, that drew him out in the
   previous parley on the label; and every step of the change, nay, of his
   whole life, was in some sense, worked by a power superior to his own
   mere will. And yet he had a will, by that consented to believe what is
   true, and live it in his life.

   Now there is no man in this audience, however remote he may have been
   from the thought of being a Christian, when he came into this place of
   worship today, who has any thing more to do, in order to be one, than
   to just come into the same really honest mind. You call not will to
   believe what is true, and do all right, as fast as you can find it and
   forever, and go out hence in your sins. Are you not ready my friends
   for this new and nobler kind of life? Call you lie down tonight and
   sleep outside of this blessed integrity? How can you think of yourself
   with respect, as not being a Christian, when that which is demanded of
   you is only what you think you are demanding of everybody. True, this
   integrity we speak of is of a higher kind, and more real; is it
   therefore less to be honored, and less promptly chosen?

   And now in conclusion of my subject, I will only lay down God's
   indorsement upon it and upon all that I have said, in a single, but
   remarkable sentence of scripture. I wish it might be remembered, and
   stay by you always, even from this hour till your last--"For the eyes
   of the Lord run to and fro, through the whole earth, to show himself
   strong in behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward Him." This
   "perfect heart" means a right conscience, a clean, simple intent. And
   the substance of the declaration is, that God is on the lookout always
   for an honest man--him to help, and with him, and for him, to be
   strong. And if there be one, that God will not miss of him; for his
   desiring, all-searching eyes are running the world through always to
   find him. And when he finds him, he will show himself to him in the
   discovery even of his strength. I believe that he has sometimes found
   such a man, even in the depths of heathenism, and to him been
   discovered as the helping and strong friend he longed for. Many a
   skeptic has he flooded with light, because he saw him willing, at last,
   to be right, and hungering for something true. This perfect heart, this
   soul of integrity, my friends--O if we had but this, what else could we
   fail of? I repeat the word thus explained--put it down to be with you,
   in your struggles with sin, your sickness, your poverty, your Christian
   defects and drynesses, all the mind-clouds, all the guilt-clouds, of
   your mortal state--"For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro through the
   whole earth to show himself strong in behalf of them whose heart is
   perfect toward him."
     __________________________________________________________________

                                       X.

LIBERTY AND DISCIPLINE.

   "As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they can not fast. But
   the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them,
   and then shall they fast in those days."--Mark ii, 19.

   It is one of the honorable distinctions of Christ's doctrine that he is
   never one-sided; never taken, as men are, with a half-view of a
   subject, or a half-truth concerning it. If there is, for example, a
   free side, or free element, in Christian life and experience, and also
   a restrictive side; conditions and times of not fasting, and conditions
   and times of fasting; he does not fall to setting one against the
   other, but he comprehends both, and holds them in a true adjustment of
   their offices and relations. John's disciples come to him in the
   question, why he does not put his disciples to fasting, as their own
   great prophet and the Pharisees do theirs? But instead of making light
   of fasting, and calling it an old, ascetic practice, now gone by, as
   many human teachers would have done, seeing only half the truth, and
   rallying a party for the part they see, he simply replies--"every thing
   in its time; the attendants of the bridegroom will, of course be wholly
   in the festive mood, while the wedding is on foot, but when it is over,
   they will fall into such other key as their personal condition
   requires. My disciples can not fast while I am with them. But when I am
   taken up they will turn themselves to such ways of fasting as their
   deprivation, or bereaved feeling requires."

   His answer, taken more spiritually, amounts to this: that when the love
   is full, and the soul is consciously gladdened by the present witness
   and felt impulse of God, any kind of restrictive, or severely
   self-compelling discipline is inappropriate or uncalled for, and is
   really out of place; but that when there is a failure of such divine
   impulse, when the soul is losing ground, brought under by temptation,
   groping in dryness and obscurity of light, then some sharp revision of
   the life, some new girding up of the will in sacrifice and
   self-discipline, is urgently demanded, and must not be declined. In
   other words, let there be liberty in God while there may, girding up in
   ourselves, by forced exercise and discipline, when there must; let the
   soul go by inspiration when the gale of the Spirit is in it, and when
   it has any way stifled or lost the Spirit, let it put itself down upon
   duty by the will; when the divine movement is upon it, let it have its
   festal day with the bridegroom, and when the better presence fades or
   vanishes, let it set itself to ways of self-compulsion, moving from its
   own human center.

   Much the same general truth though differently conceived, is taught by
   Paul when he represents the Christian soul as a coin having two seals
   or mottoes, on the two sides; on the obverse, or face--"The Lord
   knoweth them that are his;" on the reverse, or back--"Let every one
   that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity." It is as if
   divine calling, endowment, and help were on one side; self-discipline,
   watching, mortified lusting, and steady resolve on the other.

   Liberty and discipline, movement from God's center and movement from
   our own, sanctified inclination and self-compelling will, are the two
   great factors thus of Christian life and experience. We may figure, in
   a certain coarse analogy, that we live in a city having two supplies of
   water for its aqueduct; one upon high ground back of it, whence the
   water runs down freely along the inclinations of the surfaces; and the
   other in some lake or river on its front; whence, in case that fails,
   or the ducts give way, a supply is to be received by forcing, or the
   dead lift of the pump. The water, however, is not created in this
   latter case, you will observe, by the enforcement, but is taken, as in
   the former, from the general supply of nature's store. So there are
   ways of Christian living, where every thing goes by impulse, and a
   gracious inspiration, flowing in, as it were, by its own free motion;
   and other ways and times, where a self-compelling discipline of
   sacrifice and painstaking are wanted to regain the irrigating grace
   that was practically lost or shut away, by moods of inconstancy and
   mixtures of subjection to evil.

   It is very obvious that both these conceptions may be abused, or pushed
   to excess, as in fact they always are when they are taken apart from
   each other, and made a religion of. Thus we shall have, on one side,
   just what has many times appeared in this or that variety, a school of
   enthusiasts, living only in frames and for them, flighty, rhapsodical,
   ecstatic, moving in the upper air on wings, till such time as they get
   weary of their thin element, and consent, for comforts' sake, to light
   upon the ground; when, of course, they do as the prophet's living
   creatures did--"when they stood they let down their wings." Perhaps
   they will spread them again, and perhaps not. They are all for
   inspiration, or the state of divine impulse, and nothing else is to be
   much accounted of. To be in this elysian state is piety, and if they
   chance to fall out of it, or sink away, flagging and spent, as regards
   their good excitabilities, they have no way of going on foot to think
   of, that will prove their fidelity, and put them in a sober way of
   blessing. They have no conception of a walking with God that is not
   flying with him, and their high movement commonly ends, where
   dissipation must, in a state of loose keeping, disability, and general
   collapse.

   On the other side, where every thing takes the shape of will-work and
   discipline, the result will commonly be quite as bad. Sometimes the
   word will be activity, and a general campaign of doing will set every
   thing in a way of tumult, and aggressive motion. Responsible only for
   action, action will come to be just the thing most irresponsibly done.
   Hard, graceless, censorious, denunciatory, sometimes wild, and always
   unchastened by the love it magnifies, it keeps the conflagration up
   till the combustible matter is burned away, and then the fire goes out
   of course. Sometimes the word is sacrifice, and then comes on the
   dreary train of penances, vigils, vows of celibacy, mendicancy, and the
   pallid funeral hosts marching out alive to be entombed in cells. All
   these, making up a religion by their will, and the drill of their
   passionless obedience, agree, in fact, to make as hard a time of it as
   possible, and they will most fatally succeed; for it can not be long,
   ere the discipline they covet as a religion, breaks down both will and
   principle together, and shows them, alas! too perfect in the training
   of uncharity, mendacity, sensuality, and lust.

   I ought also, perhaps, to name two counterfeits that cover the ground
   of both these particular excesses. Thus, on one side,: the argument
   will be, "why should I do, or attempt to do in religion, what I can not
   do in liberty, or from inclination? When I am not inclined to prayer
   why should I pray? Why cross myself in duties which I only dislike? Why
   put myself under service by rules that only annoy me, and do not bless
   me? How can I imagine that God is pleased with me, when: he finds me
   doing by compulsion, what he knows I distaste, and have really no heart
   to?"

   The assumption is, in this way of. speaking, that when there is real
   inclination to the thing done, there is even something a little
   remarkable in it; a kind of superlative, or superfine, merit, such as
   discharges all thought of obligation respecting duties where such
   inclination fails. And yet the supposed. inclination, having so great
   value as to excuse all responsibility for inclination where there is
   none, is even understood to be nothing but an occasional glow of
   sentiment or desire, in the plane of nature; not any really divine or
   supernaturally inbreathed impulse. It is not of the bridegroom, raises
   no thought of any festal flow, in which Christ bathes their feeling. It
   is even the end of the law, without Christ, in a much more summary and
   complete sense that Christ himself could be; for it not only discharges
   all obligation, but forbids any farther command--how can God command
   what one is not inclined to already? and what he is inclined to needs,
   of course, no command.

   The counterfeit upon the other side, is that self-reliant morality,
   which counts it a sufficient, or even a rather. superlative religion,
   to live in correct practice under rules, and makes nothing of receiving
   from God, or being in any consciously restored relationship with him.
   Christ is engaged as a Saviour, I conceive, to connect human nature
   with God, according to its normal idea, and have it regenerated, as by
   God's restored movement in it--born of God. He wants to raise again the
   very plane of our existence, lifting us up out of mere self-hood into a
   state of divine consciousness and beatitude. This to him and this only
   is religion. The beaver is not more certainly below humanity, than the
   footing it along by mere rules, is a kind of life below the grade of
   religion, or concourse with God. That high world of blessing too, for
   which Christ has undertaken to prepare us, is not a world of good
   morals, but of godly affinities and free inspirations, moved, and
   lifted, and wafted, and glorified, and always to reign in God.

   We have then two conceptions of Christian life and experience, which
   Christ holds comprehensively together, but which his disciples are
   often trying to hold separately, making a whole religion of either one
   or the other; and then we have a counterfeit of each, contriving how to
   make a religion of each, without the reality of either one or the
   other. Let us see now if we can bring ourselves back into the
   conception of Christ, and find how to hold with him both the two sides
   at once; setting both in that genuine mutual relationship that belongs
   to them. There is then

   I. A ruling conception of the Christian life, which is called having
   the bridegroom present; a state of right inclination established, in
   which the soul has an immediate knowledge, or consciousness of God, and
   is swayed in liberty, by His all-moving, supernatural, inspirations.
   This kind of state, if it were complete, as it never is in this world,
   would, of itself, be the all of perfection and of blessedness. The
   whole aim of Christianity is fulfilled in this alone. No other kind of
   service, taken by itself, at all meets the Christian idea.
   Self-compelling ways of discipline, resolve, self-regulation,
   body-government, soul-government, carried on by the will may be
   wanted--I shall presently show in what manner--but no possible amount
   of such doings can make up a Christian virtue, and, if such virtue were
   perfect, they would not even be included in it. Every thing in genuine
   Christianity goes for the free inclination. Here begins the true
   nobility or princely rank of God's sons and daughters, and they will be
   complete, when their inclination is wholly to good and to God. They
   strike the point of magnanimity, when they do the right, as God does,
   because they simply love the right--bearing burdens, because it is the
   nature of love to bear them, making sacrifices, never from fear,
   interest, self-consideration, always for God's great ends of mercy and
   blessing. The bridegroom joy is now upon them, because their duty is
   become their festivity with Christ. Perfected in this duty and joy,
   they are complete in God's everlasting beatitude; for there is no wear
   of friction in such duty, but eternal liberty and play rather. What
   then

   II. Is the place, or office, or value of that whole side of will and
   self-discipline; which Christ himself assumes the need of, when the
   bridegroom is to be taken away? Here is the main stress of our subject,
   and upon the right solution of this point, its uses will principally
   depend.

   There is then, I undertake to say, one general purpose, or office, in
   all doings of will, on the human side of Christian experience, viz.,
   the ordering of the soul in fit position for God, that he may occupy
   it, have it in his power, sway it by his inspirations. No matter what
   the kind of doing to which we are called, or commanded; whether it be
   self-government, or self-renunciation, or holy resolve, or fasting, or
   steadfast waiting, the end is one and the same, the getting in position
   for God's occupancy. As the navigator of a ship does nothing for the
   voyage, save what he does by setting the ship to her course, and her
   sails to the wind, so our human doings in religion, those I mean, which
   make up our self-compelling, self-adjusting, self-constraining
   discipline, are all to be concerned in setting us before God, in the
   way to receive the actuating impulse of his will and character. We are
   not called, of course, to work a religion thus, ourselves, Or by our
   own will. Setting sails to the wind does not propel the ship, or give
   it the least onward movement, as regards the voyage; and yet, without
   such holding of it in position, the voyage could never be made. So also
   a seed must have position, else it can not grow; if it is laid on a
   rock, or buried in sand, or sunk in water, or frozen up in ice, it will
   be inert as a stone; but in good warm soil, and sun, and rain; and dew,
   it will quicken easily enough, because it is in position. A tree will
   die out of position, a clock will stop out of position, a plough wants
   holding, a saw wants guiding, a compass wants setting; nothing in the
   world works rightly that has not position given it. And the reason is
   that every thing to be operated upon must be fitly presented to that
   which operates; telescopes to their objects, mills to water-falls, and
   souls to God.

   And here is our particular human part in religion--all that we can do
   is summed up in self-presentation to God, or the putting of ourselves
   in position for his operation. Hence the call to salvation is "come,"
   and the complaint is, "ye will not come to me that ye might have life."
   So also, when the casting down of pride and self-will is required, the
   forsaking of all things, the yielding up of life and whatever is most
   dear, these ways of self-renunciation are only the taking down of bars
   that fence away God's entrance and free movement from the soul. Faith
   again is made the condition of salvation, in just this view, and no
   other; because, when a sinning soul trusts itself up to Christ, to be
   cared for, regenerated in good, and saved by his mercy, it is put in
   exactly the position toward God that is most open, and admits him most
   freely; even as the brazen serpent, lifted up before Israel, was to be
   effective in their healing, when looked upon. Out of position, with
   their backs toward it, there was no virtue to be received from it,
   because there was none expected or admitted.

   So it is in the matter always of conversion, or the beginning of a new
   life--it is always begun, just as soon as the subject comes into
   position far enough to let it be. And then the same holds true of all
   proper Christian doings afterward--they are all summed up, either in
   keeping position toward God, or in regaining it after it is lost. Thus,
   if by reason of a still partially remaining subjection to evil, the
   soul should be stolen away from its fidelity and the nuptial day of its
   liberty should somehow be succeeded by a void, dry state, without any
   proper light or evidence left, then the disciple has it given him to
   recover himself, by getting himself in position again before God. He
   will take time by forcible resolve, and gird himself to a careful
   revision. He will set himself upon his idols to clear them away, take
   up his cross invoking sacrifice itself to be his helper, rectify his
   misjudgments, make good his injuries, slay his resentments and grudges,
   mortify his appetites, crucify his bosom sins, tear open all the
   subtleties of distemper and treason--watching all the while his new
   beginnings, saving carefully his little advances, doing first works
   humbly and tenderly, and by this drawing into position, will, if
   possible, make ready for the festal coming of his Lord, and the
   restored liberty of a son.

   In this kind of struggle the disciple will get on most effectively,
   when for the time, he is much by himself, and much apart from the
   world, and even its pleasurable scenes and gifts. In one view, there
   will be a certain violence, or desperation sometimes in the fight of
   his repentances. "For behold what carefulness it wrought in you; yea
   what clearing of yourselves; yea what indignation; yea what fear; yea
   what vehement desire; yea what zeal; yea what revenge." By these stern
   rigors of will, these mighty throes of battle, the disciple out of
   liberty will in fact be only putting himself in position to recover it.
   He takes himself in hand in fiery self-chastening, and rigidly enforced
   subjection, that he may prepare himself to God's help. He gets
   confidence in this manner, by his thoroughness, to believe that God
   accepts him, and has the testimony given him that he pleases God.
   Restored in this manner to his liberty, the enemy that came in at the
   postern goes out at the front, and God again will have his full
   dominion.

   Neither let any one object that all such stresses and strains of
   endeavor must be without merit) because they are forced and are, in one
   sense, without inclination. Such kind of endeavor God honors because it
   is practical, and not for the merit of it. What should he more
   certainly honor than the true endeavor of souls to present themselves
   to him, and get position for the complete admission of his will. If
   these struggles of enforcement do not belong to the perfect state of
   good, it must be enough that they are struggles after that state. God
   is practical; and without prudishness; if nothing is really good: to
   him that is not from the heart's inclination, he will yet be drawn to
   such struggles against inclination, as he is to the cries of the
   ravens, and will put his benediction upon them, under that same
   fatherly impulse, if no other.

   Holy scripture has no such dainty way of reasoning in this matter, as
   they give us, who, by affected reverence, excuse themselves from all
   rough discipline, because they have no inclination for it. It even
   commands us to serve, when we are not in a key to reign. "Mortify
   therefore, your members which are upon the earth"--do men mortify
   themselves by inclination? "Ye have crucified the flesh with its
   affections and lusts"--do we this self-crucifying by inclination? "Deny
   thyself, take up thy cross"--do we deny ourselves by inclination, or
   take up the cross for inclination's sake? When Christ again, to get a
   certain rich moralist or formalist into position for God, bids him sell
   all that he has and give to the poor and come and follow--whereupon he
   "goes away sorrowful"--does the sad questioner sorrow because he is
   required to have his inclination? The Saviour too has even a more
   cutting requirement than this--"And if thy right eye offend thee pluck
   it out; if thy right hand offend thee cut it off." Is there any thing
   in which we are farther off from inclination, than in plucking out
   right eyes and cutting off right hands? What in fact is the very point
   of the Saviour's meaning here but to say, put your will down upon
   whatever is hardest and most against your inclinations--any thing for
   position.

   How feeble, superficial, sophistical, and withal, how very like to a
   practical mockery of all deep movement in religion is that word so
   often ventured, and of which I have already spoken--"Why should I pray
   when I do not feel inclined to it? Why should I go to church, why
   should I read the scriptures, why should I give alms, why should I hold
   myself to observances, all which I am weary of, and in fact really
   dislike? If I can not offer God from the heart, what better is my
   offering given than withheld? Just contrary to all such feeble
   platitudes Christ, we have seen, appoints a grandly rugged, thoroughly
   real, massive, discipline, by which souls, at best only half inserted
   into good are to hold on their way: and press themselves down upon the
   constancy their fickle hearts would fly. Filling them to the full, if
   he possibly may with holy inspirations and loving impulses, he counts
   even this a gospel on one foot, if he may not also put them every man
   to a hard fight of discipline, and watch, and drill and resisting even
   unto blood. When the inspiration is upon them, he will let the festive
   movement flow in its liberty. And when the grace-power lulls or is
   gone, he will have them take their turn of discipline, to gather up by
   their will, and bring into position for God's occupancy, all their
   vagrant and unsteady functions; so to strengthen the things that remain
   and are ready to die. These two things, in fact, he will hold, if
   possible at all times, to a close and practically guarded
   comprehension, the festive and the restrictive, the movement of love
   and the self-girding watch.

   But I should not produce any just impression of the immense reach of
   this very practical matter--the so ordering of our life, on the side of
   self-discipline, as to be always squaring ourselves to God, and holding
   true position before Him--if I did not specify some of the humbler and
   more common matters in which it is to be, or may be, done.

   Order, for example--how great a thing is it for a Christian, or indeed,
   for any one, to keep his life and practice and business in the terms of
   order? Holding himself steady, and squaring his habit thus carefully by
   system in God's will, his very order is itself position--the orbit he
   traverses having God to traverse it with him; and the worlds of the sky
   will not be more surely and steadily moved in their rounds, than he by
   God's impelling liberty. Fallen out of this order into all disorder and
   confusion, how can he ever be in position for God, till he comes back
   into the exactness and true discipline of the same?

   A responsible way has the same kind of value. An irresponsible man has
   no place for God or God's liberty. But a soul that stays fast in
   concern for all good things--responsible for the church, for the
   brethren, for the welfare and salvation of perishing men, for the vices
   and woes of society, for the good of the country--is just so far in
   position with God, and ready for his best inspirations. God loves
   responsible men, and delights to keep them in the full endowment of
   strength and liberty.

   Openness and boldness for God, the readiness to be found on God's side
   in the full acknowledgment of his name and people, is an absolute
   requisite, as regards the effective revelation of God in the soul.
   Whoever will not thus acknowledge God, in a bold commitment of himself
   before the world to his cause, wants the firm courage and manly truth
   of feeling which puts him in position. Real and bold devotement is
   magnanimity, and where there is nothing of one, there is nothing of the
   other--as little receptivity therefore for God. God loves to be
   trusted, and loves the men that can boldly take their part with him.
   When they stand openly for his name, he stands by them, and puts his.
   might upon them.

   Descending to what is in a still humbler key, let me speak of
   honesty--how a large and faithfully complete honesty puts every soul in
   true position before God. A single eye--that is honesty; and "if thine
   eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light." But the honesty
   of which I thus speak, is more and higher, you will observe, than mere
   commercial honesty. That will do justice to customers and laws of
   trade, but not to enemies, and least of all, to God. There is no
   reality in it therefore, more than there would be in doing justice to
   customers of one country, or color, and not to those of another. Called
   honesty in the market, it still may, and, many times, certainly is,
   hypocrisy and a lie. Real honesty takes in principle, engaging to do
   justice every where, every way, every day, and specially to God's high
   truth and God. O, what a presentation that to invite the incoming of
   God! Who is in position for God but he that will clear himself, thus
   impartially, of every wrong and injury; and how certainly will God's
   spirit flow into such a bosom, in how full a. tide of liberty! How
   completely open here is the gate of possibility for all greatest and
   divinest things!

   I could speak of things yet humbler and more common; such, for example,
   as dress and society. These are matters which we commonly put even
   outside of the pale of religious concern, or responsibility. And yet
   there is how much in them to fix the soul's position toward God. How
   perfectly evident is it that one may dress for the Holy Spirit and the
   modest opening of the soul to God's manifestation; or so as to quite
   shut away any possible visitation from the divine. In the same way,
   society may be observed in such a way of sobriety and grandly true
   hospitality, that angels, much more Christ and God, will gather to it
   unawares; or in such a way of ambition, flashiness, and worldly
   assumption, that the Holy Spirit can not get room in it for any
   smallest dispensation of his gracious impulse. I speak not here for any
   sumptuary, or morbidly scrupulous, restriction. I only say that there
   may be enough, in the modes of dress and society, to quite settle the
   matter of the soul's position toward God.

   Not pursuing these illustrations further, it must be enough that we
   have found, and practically verified two elements in Christian life and
   experience, liberty and discipline, God's free movement and our own
   self-constraining will. That is the heavenly state of blessing and
   perfection; this our human concern to get, as in conversion, recover,
   as in dryness and decay; or keep, as in all most ordinary goings on of
   life, the position toward God that commands his bestowment of the
   other.

   But what, of fasting? the very thing about which my text is itself
   concerned, and about which I have said as nearly nothing as possible.
   In one view it is even so; in another I have been speaking of nothing
   else; for the whole course of argument pursued has been tracing its fit
   place and relationship, as an integral part, or factor, of the true
   Christian discipline.

   Are we then to allow, some will ask, that fasting belongs to
   Christianity? I certainly think so. Did not Christ himself declare that
   his disciples should fast after he was gone? Did he not also begin his
   great ministry, by a protracted fast, which duly considered, and
   rightly conceived, constitutes one of the grandest and most impressive
   chapters of his story? It is easy, doubtless, to assume, in
   self-compliment, that we have now come to an age of maturity that
   permits us to conceive the Christian grace more worthily, but no such
   assumption will be very impressive as against the example of Christ
   himself! Some will also maintain, more argumentatively, that fasting is
   a bodily penance, excluded by the genius of Christianity; but when
   Christ is heard, in his great, first, sermon, discoursing of it just as
   he does of prayer and of alms, and giving it exactly the same promise
   of reward, the conclusion appears to be not far off that, either they
   do not, or Christ did not, understand Christianity!

   It is a great mistake of many, in our time, that they are so easily
   carried by a certain half-illuminated declamation against asceticism.
   Let us have nerve enough to withstand the odium of a word, and be less
   superficial, and just as much stronger in our practical life. For there
   is--I put the issue boldly that it may not be missed--a good asceticism
   that belongs to Christianity, as a worthy and even rationally integral
   function; the same which an apostle describes when he says, "I exercise
   myself (asko) to have a conscience void of offense." By which he means
   that he puts himself to it by the direct training of his will, even as
   a rider trains a horse by the rein.

   In this good asceticism, we take ourselves away purposely, when it
   seems to be needed, from society, from gain, and from animal
   indulgence, that we may assert, with more emphasis, the principle of
   self-subjection to God, or gird ourselves anew to the divine keeping.
   Thrusting down a whole side of our nature that habitually assumes to be
   uppermost, we get in this manner a powerful shove of reaction; for the
   great law of action and reaction holds universally, both in the worlds
   of matter and mind. In this manner painstaking itself is a great
   element of success; not because it is the taking of so much pain, as if
   there were some merit in that, but because the mind gets a confidence
   of honest meaning in it, such as nerves the soul to sacrifice, and
   gives it assurance with God. Christianity, as I have Shown, takes in
   this element. Filling us with great inspirations, it puts us to a stout
   self-discipline also, that we may get position for still greater, and a
   still more victorious liberty.

   Over against this good asceticism, there is also a false and a bad, as
   already intimated. It makes a virtue of self-torment, contrives
   artificial distresses to move on God's pity, or pacify his resentments,
   or purchase his favor. It macerates the body to make the soul weak and
   tender. It dispenses, in fact, with faith itself, and even thinks to
   square its account with God, by a due contribution of bodily pains and
   privations.

   This bad asceticism we exclude, the good we accept. And in this, we
   shall train ourselves, sometimes even naturally, by a fast. If we are
   mortified by the discovery that the body is getting uppermost, if our
   Sundays are choked, our great sentiments stifled, by indulgences of the
   body we meant not to allow, we shall turn upon it in this good
   asceticism, and say to it, with a meaning--"I keep under the body." In
   the same way, if we can not find how to bear an enemy, if we recoil
   from sacrifices that are plainly laid upon us, if we have no great
   courage to meet a great call, we shall emulate the example of
   Cromwell's soldiers, who conquered first the impassive state, by their
   fastings and prayers, and then sailing into battle as men ironclad,
   conquered also their enemies; or better still, we shall emulate those
   martyrs, who could sing in the crisp of their bodies, because they had
   trained their bodies to serve. So again if we are losing ground,
   getting under the world, heated by prosperity, soured by
   disappointment, bittered by resentments and grudges, we shall do well
   to seek the wilderness, taking our temptation with us to be mastered.
   So again if we have some great crisis upon us, even as our Master had,
   some turn of life to settle that will settle every thing; or if we have
   great endowments coming upon us, or coming out in us, that we must be
   responsible for--property, place, eloquence, fame, beauty, genius--what
   a girding do we need to meet our occasions, or even to effectually
   stifle the nonsense of pride and foolish suggestion. O, if we could set
   ourselves in position thus for God's call and his Christly
   inspirations, how cheap the discipline would be.

   Observed on occasions like these, a fast will sometimes wonderfully
   clear the atmosphere of the mind. The sentiments will be quickened in
   their play. The imagination, which is a great organ for religion, will
   get a more reverberative ring. The conscience will become at once more
   rigid and more tender. All the powers will be girded up, and God will
   have the soul in position, waiting to be filled with his eternal life
   and vigor.

   No such good results of fasting will follow, or will be expected, where
   it is improperly observed. No one should ever go into a fast, when he
   has the bridegroom consciously with him. Such fasting is untimely.
   Turning sunshine into night, and making misery gratis, when we are not
   miserable, is any thing but Christian, though alas! some very good
   people do sometimes make a merit of it.

   Some persons, who are not practiced in the art, so to speak, of
   fasting, complain that they are only troubled and mentally confused by
   their hunger, and get no advantage from it. But when they have learned
   the way to set their mind facing Godward, instead of facing the body,
   and moving in the low range of the gastric energy, it will not be
   so--they will even forget to be hungry. It might be well for such to
   begin with a prolonged half-fast, or Lenten reduction, instead of
   abstinence. Feeding the body circumspectly thus, as between cage bars,
   they may still the growling of nature, and learn, at last how to get a
   spring of reaction for the mind. A prolonged bridle check upon the body
   is good both for it and for the rider; for what both most especially
   need is to get accustomed to the rein!

   At the same time, fasting should always be a reality, never a
   semblance. To pretend a fast, when all the routine of table, office,
   and shop, is still going on as usual, is to make a cheat of it; such as
   takes away the mind's honor, and leaves a most sorry conviction of
   hypocrisy in place of any benefit. But let no one make the fast
   excessive under pretense of making it real. It should never amount to a
   maceration of the body; though sometimes the benefit gained by a
   disciple will even tempt him to make a luxury of it. Let it be a rule
   that the fasting should never be more frequent or more stringent, than
   is necessary to maintain, for the long run of time, the very clearest,
   strongest, healthiest, condition both of mind and body. For the
   digestive function wants its Sabbaths, just as truly as any other, and
   will keep the soundest health when it has them.

   Instead of recoiling now, my brethren from this more rugged kind of
   discipline, there ought even to be a fascination in the severities of
   it. As it is profoundly real and earnest, it will also make us strong.
   How often are we oppressed with the feeling that our modern piety wants
   depth and spiritual richness. It is as if it were in the skin and not
   in the heart--thin, flashy, flavorless, destitute of the heroic and
   sturdy qualities. It never can be otherwise, till we consent to endure
   some hardness, or at least to find some way of painstaking. The
   gymnastic we are in must be strong enough to make muscle, else we shall
   not have it. Hence the profound necessity, as I conceive, that there
   should be an ascetic side or element in this free salvation, where the
   disciple "exercises himself," as the apostle has it, putting himself in
   training and self-chastening for success. For as the competitors in
   games of wrestling, and rowing, and racing, do not despise the toughest
   severities of training for the victory, no more should the Christian
   repel that nobler discipline that is to be the girding of his
   character. It would not do, for a way of grace, to only fondle or codle
   us, in tenderings of favor and soft mercy and overflowing bounty; we
   could not be floated into the heights of character by any such gentle
   tide-swing as many look for, and conceive to be the grace offered to
   their faith. Such a kind of treatment qualified by nothing more sturdy
   and severe, might even soften the brain of our piety. No, there must be
   an ascetic self-girding for us, as well as a gracious impulsion,
   something which is more than fasting, but of which that is a type.
   There needs to be a side of tough endeavor, in which we undertake a
   mighty becoming,. even punishing ourselves, so to speak, into right
   position for God. We must come into the vise of a rugged and fiery
   self-discipline, where, if we wince for the severities suffered, we
   still forbid our cowardly, soft, nature to yield. If there is to be any
   fibre in our character, there must be a Spartan discipline to make it.
   There was never a strong Christian, or a Christian hero, that did not
   put himself to being a Christian with cost. To be merely wooed by
   grace, and tenderly dewed by sentiment, makes a Christian mushroom, not
   a Christian man. It is even difficult to conceive, how those angels
   that excel in strength, and are called the chariots of God, ever got
   their vigor without some fit training; nay, it is most certain that
   they never did. So much meaning has our master, when charging it upon
   us, again and again, without our once conceiving possibly what depth of
   meaning he would have us find in his words--Deny thyself, take up thy
   cross and follow me.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                      XI.

CHRIST'S AGONY, OR MORAL SUFFERING.

   "And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was, as
   it were, great drops of blood falling down to the ground."--Luke xxii,
   44.

   What Christian has not many times wished that he could lay hold of the
   precise condition and feeling of Jesus, in this very remarkable scene
   or chapter, commonly called his agony? And yet a suspicion may well be
   indulged that we not seldom push it quite away from us, and make it
   unrealizable, by dogmatic solutions that rather confound than solve it.
   Mystery, in some sense, it certainly is, and must be; for the person
   itself of Christ is, internally viewed, a mystery, and the What and
   how, of his personal pains, in what part they affect him, under what
   laws of intensity, and by what internal force he is able to support
   them, we can never know, till we understand his psychology itself--as
   we certainly shall not here on earth.

   Still the agony is given us, because it can somehow be seen to be for
   us; yielding impressions of Christ and of God, manifested in him, which
   it is important for us to receive. And to receive these impressions
   from it is, at least so far, to understand it. All the more to be
   regretted is it, if we interpose theologic constructions that make it
   impossible to all receptive sympathy. Thus if we conceive, or
   dogmatically assume, that Christ is in this hour of distress, because
   the sin of the world is upon him, to be punitively treated in his
   person; that God withdraws judicially from him, to make him suffer, and
   that the "cup" over which he groans is the cup of God's eternal
   indignations; may it not be that we ourselves so far violate the
   subject matter, as to make it an offense to our most inborn convictions
   of right, and raise up mutinous questions that even forbid the
   discovery of its meaning to our hearts?

   A much less artificial, tenderer, and, I think I shall be able to show,
   truer and more affecting conception of the agony is, that it rises
   naturally out of the perfect feeling, and the personal relations and
   exigences of the sufferer. Such. a being, on such a mission, meeting
   such objects of feeling, at such a crisis, will have just this agony,
   without any infliction to produce it.

   The facts of the scene briefly and freely related are these. The
   Saviour, attended by his disciples, goes up into a dell on the slope of
   Olivet, and enters a certain garden or olive yard, where he had often
   before communed with them apart. He requires them to sit down. But
   there is something peculiar in his manner. A feeling of depression
   makes him droop in his action, and gives a drooping accent to his
   voice. He signifies to three of their number that he wants their
   company while he goes forward a little way, to pray. Heretofore he has
   commonly sought to be alone in prayer, going apart at dead of night,
   and ascending this or that high mountain top, there to be closeted with
   God in solitude. The depression that before appeared now becomes a
   crushing weight upon him. In the language of the narrative, he begins
   to be sorrowful and very heavy. He speaks too, unable to suppress his
   feeling--"My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death." And then he
   adds what indicates even greater anguish, such as almost takes away his
   self-possession--"do not leave me, do not sleep, stay here and watch
   with me!" He goes forward a few steps, falling upon his face, which is
   the eastern posture of extreme sorrow and despair, and there he cries
   aloud--"O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me." He
   rises and turns back to his friends, but the weight is still heavy on
   his heart, and he throws himself again upon his face. And he does it
   again, even a third time. There is also given us, in the narrative made
   out by Luke, the pathology of his feeling--"And being in an agony, he
   prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was, as it were, great drops of
   blood falling down to the ground." Which is the same as to say, that
   the agony of feeling he was in was so intense that, under the laws of
   bodily affection, there were forced out, through the pores of the skin,
   large drops resembled to blood. An ancient writer reports the fact of a
   bloody sweat, or a sweat exceeding like to blood, produced by the bite
   in India of a poisonous serpent, and the same thing is reported, I
   believe, as a result of certain bodily diseases that produce very
   intense suffering. But the symptom is none the less peculiar here,
   since it is not the effect of any poison, or physical pain, but of a
   purely mental anguish.

   Thus far, as relates to the agony, or crisis of pain itself, reported
   in the narrative. Other points relating to his conduct in the scene,
   will come into view as we inquire into the causes of the agony, and
   need not be recited. Whence and why, this very strange crisis of mental
   anguish? According to a very common impression, as already intimated,
   the suffering has a judicial character, and is to be taken as a
   theologic factor, in a scheme of retributive justice. The conception is
   that Christ has somehow come into the place of transgressors, to
   receive upon his person what is due to them, and that God, accepting
   him in that office, launches upon him the abhorrence or displeasure,
   that is clue to them; inflicting upon him, as it were, deserved pains
   by withdrawing from him and letting fall upon him the horror of
   darkness under which he groans. The facts of the narrative have been so
   frequently, or even habitually, submitted to this construction, that
   our first concern will be to make a revision of the facts, ascertaining
   how far they give it their support.

   Thus it is alleged, as a striking peculiarity of the scene, that the
   suffering appears, on a merely human footing, to be out of place.
   Before the arrest, in a quiet place out of the city, at a still hour of
   the night, when he has all his friends about him, and judging by
   outward tokens, has far less reason to apprehend violence from his
   enemies than he has had many times before--such is the time and place,
   where Jesus falls into his dreadful agony and great horror of distress.
   In which he certainly appears to be exercised in a way that is not
   human, invaded by a suffering that can not on mere human principles be
   accounted for. And this fact favors the conviction, it is imagined,
   that he suffers because some mysterious judicial infliction is
   descending upon him, from a source invisible. But such a conclusion is
   rather made up theologically for the scene, than drawn from the facts
   themselves. No single intimation of any such thing is, either contained
   in the facts, or given out by the narrative.

   Again his language, in the figure of the "cup"--"if this cup may not
   pass away from me except I drink it"--is taken as favoring the idea of
   some suffering, in the nature of infliction. But do we not use the same
   kind, of language ourselves, having still no such thought as that the
   cup of anguish we speak of, or pray to have taken away, is a judicial
   infliction? This figure too of the cup is used, in scripture, for all
   kinds of experience, whether joyful, or painful. Thus we have the "cup
   of salvation," "the cup of consolation," "the cup of trembling," "of
   fury," "of astonishment," "of desolation." Whatever God sends upon a
   man to be deeply felt, and by whatever kind of Providence, whether
   benignant, or disciplinary, or retributive, is called his cup. How then
   does it follow, when Christ speaks of his cup, that it is a cup of
   judicial chastening? Besides, does he not say to his followers--"ye
   shall indeed drink of my cup;" and is any thing more fixed in this
   penal view of Christ's agony, than that no human being can, at all,
   participate in such matter of atonement? And, that being true, his cup,
   as he himself speaks, can not, in this particular instance at least,
   have reference to any penal suffering, and probably has not in any
   other.

   Again the agony is accounted for as having been caused by the judicial
   withdrawment of the Father; leaving him to feel the weight, in his
   human person, of that displeasure which is due to the sins of the
   world, now upon him. There is no intimation whatever, to this effect in
   the narrative, but his exclamation afterward, in the scene of the
   cross--"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,"--is carried back to
   the agony to fix this construction upon it. But there is not the least
   reason to suppose that Christ means literally to say, in the
   exclamation referred to, that God has forsaken him. Did he not comfort
   himself but a short time previous, in the assurance--"therefore doth my
   Father love me, because I lay down my life for the sheep?" how then can
   he imagine that God is forsaking him, in just the sacrifice for which
   he loved him? Nay it was only an hour ago that he was saying, in the
   dearest confidence, and in tender appeal even to the Father--"I have
   glorified thee on the earth, and now I come to thee." Besides it is
   represented by Luke, in his account of the agony itself, that an angel
   is sent unto him to strengthen him; does God then send his angels to
   support whom he himself forsakes? And again, when he says in his
   prayer, three times repeated--"Not as I will but as thou wilt," what
   does he indicate, according to all human methods of judgment, but the
   dearest present confidence in God and repose in his favor? It must also
   be noted, again, that, between the agony and the crucifixion, and even
   before he leaves the garden, he formally declares just this confidence,
   saying--"Thinkest thou that I can not now pray to my Father, and he
   shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?" The whole
   account in short, is crowded full of the most decisive proofs that he
   does not himself imagine any such thing as that he is forsaken of God
   and judicially given up to suffering. Let it also be observed, that
   when he utters the cry, "why hast thou forsaken me," he is just reeling
   out of life; requiring his outcry therefore to be taken as a mere
   interjectional utterance of distress. Nothing could be further from him
   than to be protesting God's severity thus, in the article of death.

   But he does it nevertheless, some one will say; for if we take his
   words interjectionally, why should he vent his sufferings by the outcry
   of what is not true? Because, I answer, the not true is often the most
   vehemently, best uttered truth. Thus when Jonathan and his armor bearer
   broke into the camp of the Philistines, the wild commotion, or panic,
   they two raised in the army, and the garrison, and all the people, is
   described by saying, "and the earth quaked; so there was a very great
   trembling." Does any one suppose that the earth really quaked on that
   occasion, or is it said only to set off the trembling? So when Paul, in
   the shipwreck, says, "not one hair of your head shall perish," it is
   not impossible that a good many hairs of the multitude were lost in
   their drifting ashore. He only said there should not, as a way of
   promising the safe landing more emphatically. Outcries too, of this
   kind are always to be taken freely, as the utterance of tragic feeling,
   or suffering, not as the language of historic allegation. Exactly so
   Zion cries in her distress, "the Lord hath forsaken me;" when
   immediately God answers, "I have graven thee upon the palms of my
   hands." It will be a great day, I must add, for the scriptures, when
   the dull soul of dogmatism has done with its undiscerning inflictions;
   when poetry is taken for poetry, passion for passion, and the
   hyperbolic intensities of interjection, never again for propositional
   statements.

   I will further add what ought, by a short method, to finish the
   argument, apart from all criticism on the terms of the narrative, that
   the absolute morality of God makes any such withdrawment of the Father
   impossible. That eternal goodness should forsake goodness in suffering,
   and even to make it suffer, in a way of gaining ulterior ends or
   advantages however merciful, is to pawn the eternal chastities of
   character for ends of beneficence; which, as certainly as God is God,
   will never be done.

   Dismissing now this artificial, over-theological, way of conceiving the
   agony as a judicial infliction, let us endeavor

   Secondly to find the spring of it, in a way that looks to the simple
   character and conditions of the sufferer himself. I greatly mistake, if
   it does not so become, at once, more intelligible, and as much more
   effective on our feeling, as it is closer to the range of our human
   sympathies.

   That it is not resolvable into fear is, I think, sufficiently evident.
   It is quite incredible that a character of such transcendent worth and
   majesty should be thus appalled, thus miserably shaken, or dissolved,
   by fear of any kind. Besides, in fear the blood flies the skin, rushing
   back upon the heart, and leaving a deadly pallor over the whole
   exterior aspect; while here we have a kind of agony that racks the
   soul, in some way, at the very center of life, forcing the blood
   outward and driving it even through the skin. In which we may see as
   conclusively as possible, that fear, the common human weakness, had
   nothing to do with his suffering. It must also be noticed that the
   account given of his agony does not call it fear. It simply declares
   that he was sorrowful, "exceeding sorrowful," a state which has nothing
   to do with fear.

   And yet he is shaken, somehow, in a degree that would not be considered
   honorable in a man of ordinary spirit, when about to die. Not only does
   the very great and wise man Socrates surpass him in the noble composure
   of his last hours, but thousands of malefactors even have received the
   sentence of death for their crimes, with a better show of serenity and
   self-possession.

   We have a great matter then to account for, viz., that Jesus Christi
   the incarnate Word of God, a being who has never had to acknowledge a
   sin, or had the feeling of it, a perfect character who has confronted
   every sort of peril in his works of mercy, one who shows the most
   perfect confidence in God and the final success of his cause, is yet
   somehow shaken by the most dreadful agony--rent as it were asunder, by
   his agitated sensibility--when he meets the prospect of death.

   The first thing that occurs to us is that this agony can not be simply
   human. It visibly exceeds, in its degree, all that we know of human
   sensibility. Calling it then divine, if only we could think it possible
   for the divine sensibility to be a suffering sensibility, the question
   would begin to open. That this suffering sensibility should not
   fearfully wrench, and burden even to crushing, the human vehicle it
   occupies, is scarcely credible. A suffering that exceeds the
   proportions of the vehicle must needs appear by violent symptoms--even
   as a powerful engine in a frail, light-timbered vessel, must needs make
   it groan heavily, or shake it even to wreck.

   What then is the fact? Is there any sensibility in God that can suffer?
   is He ever wrenched by suffering? Nothing is more certain. He could not
   be good, having evil in his dominions, without suffering even according
   to his goodness. For what is goodness but a perfect feeling? and what
   is a perfect feeling but that which feels toward every wrong and misery
   according to its nature? And thus it is that we freely impute to him,
   whether we observe it or not, every sort of painful sensibility that is
   related to bad and suffering subjects. We conceive of him as feeling
   displeasure, which is the opposite of pleasure. We ascribe it as one of
   his perfections that he compassionates, which means that he suffers
   with, the fallen. We conceive that he loathes what is disgusting, hates
   what is cruel, suffers long what is perverse, grieves, burns, bears,
   forbears, and is even afflicted for his people, as the scripture
   expressly declares. All which are varieties of suffering. We also
   ascribed it to God, as one of his perfections, that he is impassible;
   but here, if we understand ourselves, we mean that he is physically
   impassible, not that he is morally so. Moral impassibility is really to
   have no sensibilities of character, which is far as possible from being
   any perfection. Indeed there is a whole class of what are called
   passive virtues that can not, in this view, belong to God at all, and
   his perfection culminates without including more than half the
   excellencies demanded even of us, in the range of our humble, finite
   capacity.

   There is then, we conclude, some true sense, in which even God's
   perfection requires him to be a suffering God--not a God unhappy, or
   less than perfectly, infinitely, blessed; for, though there be many
   subtractions from his blessedness, there is never a diminution; because
   the consciousness of suffering well brings with it, in every case and
   everlastingly, a compensation which, by a great law of equilibrium in
   his and all spiritual natures, fully repays the loss; just as Christ,
   assailed by so many throes of suffering sensibility--in the temptation,
   in his ministry, in the garden--still speaks of his joy, and bequeathes
   it as a gift most real and sublime to his followers.

   Now it is this suffering sensibility of God that most of all needed to
   be revealed, and brought nigh to human feeling, in the incarnate
   mission of Jesus; not being revealed in any sufficient measure through
   nature and the providential history of men. It was necessary for us to
   feel God in his feeling, to know him in his passive virtues--his
   patience, forbearance of enemies, compassion, pity, sympathy, and above
   all, his deep throes of love, agonizing for the salvation of
   transgressors and wanderers from his fold. This, accordingly, is just
   what we are to look for in the agony so called, viz., a true discovery
   to our hearts of God's intensity and depth, in those suffering virtues
   by which his transcendently sovereign nature is exercised.

   Christ then, we shall expect to find, suffers in his agony, not because
   it is put upon him judicially from without, but only as his better
   nature should and must in the crisis that has overtaken him. Not to
   particularize further, two great sources, or causes of anguish open
   upon him at once; firstly the chastity of his pure feeling recoils,
   with horror, from the hell-gulf of wrong and wild judicial madness into
   which he is now descending; and secondly the love he has for his
   enemies brings a burden of concern upon his heart, that oppresses and,
   for the time, well nigh crushes him. Of these two modes or kinds of
   anguish I will speak in their order.

   Christ, is a being of unsullied innocence, or even of divine purity,
   though incarnated into the corporate evil and retributive disorder of
   the world, to bear its liabilities and be himself a part of it. This
   retributive disorder of the race is what is called in scripture "the
   curse;" and, being himself a man, he is just so far in it as he is
   human. In all his previous ministry--in his temptation, in his
   healings, in the arts of hypocrisy and the cruelties of wrong he has
   encountered, he has been struggling often with the sense of recoil, or
   even with pungent visitations of horror difficult to be suppressed. But
   now, as he nears the great crisis of his life, he beholds the corporate
   evil, or curse, gathering itself up to a deed upon his sacred person,
   that will display just all that is most horrible in it. He is not
   afraid, but his pure feeling shudders at the madness which is ready to
   burst upon him--shudders even the worse that it is to be judicial
   madness. For, though God is not going to deal judicially with him, he
   does perceive that the rage of sin, ordinarily restrained and
   graciously softened by God's Spirit, is now to be let forth in his
   betrayers and crucifiers, in just the madness that judicially belongs
   to it--so to glass itself before conviction, in a deed of murder upon
   the only perfect being that ever trod the world, nay a deed of murder
   upon divine love itself! This it is that, in sad note of warning, he
   testifies, when his enemies come shortly after, to arrest him--"For
   this is your hour, and the power of darkness." He refers to no power of
   darkness, as many contrive to understand, upon himself; it is darkness
   upon them, his enemies--judicial darkness, the full, unmitigated,
   natural curse of wrong. This is "the cup" over which he groans, and
   which he is now to drink; the wormwood and the vinegar of the world's
   wild malice. The suffering and death are penal upon him, only in the
   sense that all martyrs suffer penally, when the corporate judgments of
   God upon their wicked times and wicked fellow-men, infuriate and even
   dehumanize their natural feeling. But the martyrs are sinners,
   suffering as such at the point of their faith; he is the sinless,
   suffering at the point of his innocence. They suffer as men, still
   bronzed in their susceptibility, by the old demoralization of sin; he
   as the celestial one, and as a pure superhuman feeling must. The recoil
   of his horror is dreadful, quite unimaginable probably by us, and his
   poor human vehicle breaks under the shock, even as a stranded ship
   under the heavy blows of the sea. He groans aloud, falls upon his face,
   calls to his friends to stay by him, utters anguished cries to God,
   shows discolored drops resembled to blood exuding from his
   face--suffers in a word more incontinently, a great deal, than either
   soldier, philosopher, or man of spirit should, nay than many a
   malefactor would! And so, it truly seems to me, that he ought: for who
   of all mankind had ever a tithe of his sensibility to evil. Indeed one
   of the most difficult things for us mortals is to be duly shocked by
   wrong and feel a just horror of its baseness. Impassive to fear, even
   as God himself, he is yet wrenched all through, in every fiber of
   sensibility, by the appalling and practically monstrous scene before
   him--human creatures!--creatures in God's image!--going to crucify
   their Divine Friend from above!--God's messenger and their Saviour! By
   their bloody hands he is himself to die! Verily it is given unto men to
   die, but ah! it was not given unto him. Death has no rights against
   him. Nothing but the corporate liability of his incarnation puts him
   under it. He shudders in throes of recoil, even as God's pure angels
   would, meeting such a death; nay more and worse, as he has a vaster
   nature, and a deeper sensibility, with only a human apparatus to
   support the shock!

   Now this suffering of the agony is the suffering, in one sense, of
   justice, answering doubtless many of the uses conceived by those who
   contrive to make it a suffering divinely inflicted. It is a suffering
   that he undergoes in God's retributive order. In one view it is the
   curse that murders him, being that power of darkness and corporate evil
   that has come upon the world, as disordered and shaken out of God's
   harmony, by the recoil of transgression. His very incarnation had put
   him into or under it, and he would not even by the power of miracle
   push the liability away; for it was one of his purposes to offer such a
   tribute of respect to God's retributive order, as would sanctify it in
   the feeling, and fix it in the convictions of mankind. Thus, by his
   power of miracle, he could have made to himself a testudo, so to speak,
   of inviolable protection against the rage of his enemies, but he
   preferred instead to suffer just what men are suffering, in that penal
   disorder and social dislocation, which God, in judgment, has appointed
   for the fact of sin. It was in his heart to let God's justice have its
   due honors, breaking out, at no one point, from the fiery liability
   into which he had come, in becoming a man. He consented thus to let the
   hell which scorches wrong scorch him too, claiming no exception even
   for his innocence. Behold, he would say, O man, God's sacrament of
   wrath that is on thee, revealed by the wrath its poison stirs within
   thee; and because it is the ordinance of his justice, bear witness that
   I spurn it not, neither ask that my integrity excuse me from it! Sacred
   it shall be because it is right; and being for man as man, a power of
   darkness for all sin, I will take the bitter cup for thy sake! Only
   this be noted, since the malediction working in thee will not suffer
   even goodness to live, how certain it is that blindness, madness,
   murder, all that is called hell, goes with thy sin, whose eternally
   just and sufficient penalty it is that it shall live in its own fires,
   and be itself!

   After such a tribute paid to the instituted justice of God, who will
   imagine that the forgiveness of penitent souls will loosen the joints
   of governmental order? By this submission of Christ to man's curse or
   lot of penalty--penalty in no other sense to him--an impression will be
   made for God's justice, and a sting of conviction sharpened against
   sin, that will even start a new sense of his law, and the penal order
   of his rule in the hearts of all mankind. Even as Christ himself
   anticipated when he said--"Of sin because they believed not on me."
   Also as it was anticipated for him that under and by his suffering
   mission, "the thoughts of many hearts should be revealed." And again,
   still further back, in the ancient prophecy--"They shall look on me
   whom they have pierced." All which was to be signally proved by the
   result of his crucifixion--"And all the people that came together to
   that sight, beholding the things which were done, smote their breasts
   and returned." When had they ever felt the horrible nature and the
   justly damning power of their sin as now?

   It remains to speak of yet another and very distinct kind of suffering
   included in the agony, viz., the suffering Christ bore on account of
   his love. As he recoiled in horror from the spirit and deed of his
   enemies, so he was oppressed by his anguish of concern for the men. He
   had come into the world, in the fullness even of God's love, to unbosom
   that love to the sight and feeling of mankind. As respects all enemies
   and rejectors, it had been a suffering love even from eternity, and it
   will be none the less a suffering love that it has taken humanity for
   its vehicle. Every sort of love connects some kind of suffering greater
   or less--desire, concern, affliction, anguish. A bliss in itself, it is
   even a bliss intensified, by the burden it so willingly or even
   painfully bears. Thus it is that friendship, charity, motherhood,
   patriotism, carries each its burden, light or heavy, according to the
   nature and degree of its love and according to the want, or woe of its
   object. What then must the feeling of Christ be, when he looks upon his
   enemies in the near prospect of death at their hands--death horrible to
   him, and a sacrilegious murder in them. If the great liberator Moses,
   discouraged and crushed in feeling by the perversity of his people,
   cried--"I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too
   heavy for me, and if thou deal thus with me kill me;" if Paul, himself
   a man, was constrained, by the burden of a man's love, to say--"I have
   great heaviness and continued sorrow in my heart; for I could wish that
   myself were accursed from Christ, for my brethren, my kinsmen according
   to the faith;" who shall wonder at the anguish of Christ's burden, when
   he bows himself under it to the ground, when he calls it his "cup,"
   when he cries, "my soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death?" If the
   love of a human benefactor will sometimes beget anguish, what will the
   love of God do less than to create an agony?

   And yet how little will our dull-hearted world bronzed in evil,
   habitually unloving, unvisited or seldom visited, by a consciously
   tender compassion; how little, indeed, will the most unselfish, or even
   beneficently Christian of us, conceive this agony of the divine love
   for men! Our hearts make feeble answer to it at the best; so feeble
   that there even seems to be a kind of overdoing, or overfeeling in it.
   Indeed we are even wont ourselves, for dignity's sake, to halve our own
   little emotion and we do the same unconsciously for the emotion of God;
   halving it also again, by the consideration here let in, that his love
   is only love to transgressors and enemies. Ah! if we could think it,
   that is just the fact, in which God's love becomes an agony; leaving,
   as it were, the ninety and nine of his friends, to go after that one
   who has gone astray, and rejoicing more over that, as he has felt the
   loss with a more painful concern. God's love has no burden of pain for
   the good; it sharpens to a pain only when it looks upon the evil. And
   here precisely is the stress of Christ's agony.

   When I consider thus who Christ was, what the love he bore, what the
   crime his enemies were going to perpetrate, invoking, in horrible
   delusion, his blood upon themselves and their children; I seem to get
   some little, dim, conception of his anguish for them, in this dreadful
   hour. I can not go to the depth of it, I can not ascend to the height
   of it, but I can perceive why it should transcend my feeling and even
   the possible reach of my conceptions. It is even the more credible too
   that its tokens do so plainly exceed all human demonstrations. The most
   adequate and complete thing we can say of it is, that it reveals the
   Suffering Holiness of God.

   The reason of the agony then--this is our conclusion--lies in the facts
   themselves; in the sensibilities of the sufferer and the causes acting
   on those sensibilities. No theologic reason, such as makes him suffer
   by infliction, or by the judicial forsaking of God, has even a
   tolerable pretext, aside from the theory that makes up such a
   construction for its own sake. Even the justice of God is more
   adequately impressed and set before the world more convincingly,
   without any so revolting conception, than with it. Never was there made
   before such an expression of God's abhorrence to sin, as in this recoil
   of Christ's agony from it; never such honor put upon God's instituted
   justice, as in Christ's submission to the corporate woe and penal
   madness of it. Never was the horrible nature of sin so revealed to
   human conviction, as by this agony of compassion, on one side, met by
   such judicial blindness and even phrenzied malice, on the other.

   Can there now my friends, be any thing more strange than that
   multitudes of you, having had full time to ponder this scene, and take
   its meaning after the fact, should still adhere to your sin, nay should
   even be quite insensible to it and the feeling of God concerning it.
   Beholding this immense sensibility of God, you still have none! O it is
   even appalling! Rightly conceiving such a fact, you would even start
   from yourself! Were you called by some angel, in the brightness of the
   sun, or by voices of thunder in the clouds, it would signify much less;
   but that you should not feel the silent call of God's feeling ought to
   make you think even with dread of yourself. When the Christ of
   Gethsemane meets you bathed in the sad drops of his divine sorrow,
   there certainly ought, if there be any feeling left, to be some
   answering sorrow in you. Is there still none? What a relation this
   between your sensibility and goodness--functional death, lying as a
   rock in Gethsemane, feeling as little that horror of sin, softened as
   little by that sorrowing love! O thou highly gifted creature, what kind
   of attainment hast thou made!

   The lessons derivable to us, my brethren, from this subject are many; I
   can only call attention specially to this one, that as Christ suffers
   in his agony, not by the forsaking of God, not by any kind of
   infliction making compensation to eternal justice; but naturally,
   because of his character, and the crisis into which he has come, so
   there will be times and conditions where we shall suffer in like
   manner, according to our measures, and the degree of our likeness to
   him. Purity in us will shudder, love in us will bear its burden of
   sorrow. It is no presumption or profanation for us to think of being
   with him in his passion, we shall even require it of ourselves, as a
   necessary Christian evidence. Even as he himself declares--"ye shall
   indeed drink of my cup." Not that we are to be as deep in the pains of
   holy sensibility as he--that is impossible. Not that we are to make a
   point of suffering much, and be always talking of some dreadful burden
   that is on us, and having it as a point of merit to be always in a
   groaning testimony. Christ did not make a three-years' funeral of his
   ministry. Once he had a heavy struggle of temptation, telling never a
   word about it but the close. Once, and again, he wept. Once he declared
   that his soul was troubled. Once he fell into an agony, and was very
   soon through with it. It was never his way to suffer more than he must,
   or to call for sympathy by a show of his sorrows. On the other hand, no
   disciple is to make a merit of being always floated in a luxury of
   bliss, as if the gospel had no purpose more rugged and practical than
   simply to beget an elysian frame. Much less may a disciple think it
   well that he suffers nothing, or is never overcast in his feeling, when
   the simple reason is that his soul is cased in the indifference of
   sloth and worldly living. No pangs of life are suffered by the dead! As
   certainly as your Master's love is in you, his work will be upon you.
   His objects will be yours, and also his divine burden. And sometimes
   that burden will be heavy. If your heart grows pure, it will just so
   far be shocked and revolted by the wrath and wrong of evil-doers. As
   certainly as you have feeling, you will have the pains of feeling.
   Expect to have your part then with Jesus in his Gethsemane. Come in
   freely hither, tarry ye here and watch. Out of his agony learn how to
   bear an enemy; what to do for your enemies and God's. If your
   intercessions sometimes turn to groans, if you sometimes wonder that
   being a Christian you are yet so heavily, painfully, burdened, almost
   crushed with concern for such as you are trying to save, let your
   comfort be that so you drink indeed your Master's cup. If your love is
   repelled with scorn, and your good work baffled, and your heart grows
   heavy under sorrow and discouragement--ready to sink under its
   load--come hither and pray with Jesus in his sweat of blood, "let this
   cup pass from me." If wickedness grows hot in malice round you, if
   conspiracy and violence array themselves against you, go apart into
   this Gethsemane of your Lord's troubles, and be sure that some good
   angel shall be sent to strengthen you; is not Christ's heart wringing
   for you more bitterly than yours for itself--tarry ye here and watch.
   If some demon of impatience whispers, here or there, "why not give it
   up?" behold the agonizing obedience of Christ, faithful unto death, and
   say, with him, "not as I will but as thou wilt." Look for no mere
   holiday of frames, but for such kind of joy as a heart may yield that
   is many times broken by sacrifice. Behold your Master prostrate on the
   ground, and by his agony and bloody sweat, be girded for a passion of
   your own. Consent with Christ to suffer; and when having gotten his
   victory, he says "rise, let us be going," go, not faltering, even
   though he lead you to the cross.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                      XII.

THE PHYSICAL SUFFERING, OR CROSS OF CHRIST.

   For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things,
   in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their
   salvation perfect through sufferings.--Heb. ii, 10.

   It is a fact worthy of distinct notice, that our apostle is here making
   answer to the very same question that Anselm propounded for settlement,
   a thousand years afterward, in his very famous treatise, the Cur Deus
   Homo? And despite of the very great admiration won by this treatise, I
   feel obliged to suffer an impression, that the apostle has greatly the
   advantage; writing out his answer with a freer hand, and a far more
   piercing insight, and presenting, in fact, the whole subject more
   adequately, in a single sentence, than the much venerated father was
   able to do in the high theological endeavor of his volume.

   In the verse previous to this sentence, which is my text, finding Jesus
   made a little lower than the angels, and, for the suffering of death,
   crowned with glory and honor, it is as if his mind began to ask, even
   as Anselm did, why should he suffer thus, or come, in the way of
   suffering, at all? why could not God, the Almighty, strike out the
   needed salvation by a shorter method, without suffering, viz., by his
   omnipotent force? Whereupon he makes answer, virtually, that force is
   out of the question; because the needed salvation is a purely moral
   result, which can be accomplished only by moral means and motives--"For
   it became Him"--it was even a fixed necessity upon Him, the
   Almighty--"for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in the
   bringing of many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their
   salvation perfect through sufferings."

   The words bringing and captain, here occurring, have a relationship in
   the original, which would not be suspected, and which disappears in the
   English; as if we should read--"in the bringing on of many sons unto
   glory, to make the bringer on" &c. There is no importance however in
   this reading, such as might be supposed, for a captain is a leader and
   bringer on of course; only we conceive the passage more fitly, if the
   family relationship of the two words is understood. The declaration is,
   and that is the matter of chief importance, that God, the Almighty,
   must needs work morally in such a case, and not by force: and that
   Christ, the leader, is made perfect, or perfectly competent, as regards
   the moral new creation, or bringing up unto glory, by his cross and the
   tragic eloquence of his death.

   That we may fully develop the apostle's meaning in this general
   announcement, and verify it in the orderly exposition of the points
   included under it, let us begin at the question where he appears to
   have begun himself; viz., why should Christ, in the redeeming of souls,
   and bringing then, unto glory, subject himself to physical
   suffering?--what, in other words, were the necessities and uses of that
   suffering?

   I confine the question here, it will be observed, to his physical
   suffering. He encountered two distinct kinds of suffering, as we
   commonly use the term, viz., mental suffering, and bodily suffering;
   that which belongs to burdened feeling and wounded sensibility, and
   that which is caused by outward privation, or violence done against the
   physical nature; that which appears more especially in the agony, and
   that which appears in the death of the cross. The former kind of
   suffering I believe is never called suffering in the New Testament, but
   a being grieved; a bearing, or a burden, as in sympathy and loving
   concern; a being troubled in spirit, or very heavy; sorrow; agony. The
   word suffering is applied, meantime, I think, only to physical
   suffering; and was doubtless used by the apostle, in the present
   instance, as relating to Christ's physical suffering only.

   It is obvious enough then, at the outset, and as the first thing to be
   noted, that physical suffering, taken by itself, or as being simply
   what it is in itself, is never a thing of value. On the contrary it is;
   so far, a thing on the losing side of existence, a subtraction from the
   general sum of good. It will not help a friend, or feed an enemy, or
   stop a fire, or cool a fever. To the sufferer himself, looking never to
   any thing beyond it, or consequent upon it, but simply at what it is,
   it has no inherent value, like wheat and wool, anal no market value,
   like gold. It is not, in fact, a commodity of any kind, exchangeable or
   not exchangeable, but a simple incommodity--a quantity purely negative
   and a worse than worthless fact.

   And the same exactly is true of Christ's suffering. Taken as physical
   pain simply, nothing is to be made of it. All the worse and more
   deplorable is the loss or negation of it, that it is a suffering which
   has no relation to personal desert; and still more deplorable in the
   fact that, regarding the divine order of the sufferer, it is even a
   shocking anomaly, which reason can not comprehend and faith only can
   accept. God certainly did not want it as wanting to get so much
   suffering out of somebody. He does not exact a retributive suffering,
   even in what is called his justice, because he wants so much in
   quantity to even the account of wrong, but only that he may vindicate
   the right and testify his honor to it by a fit expression. Nothing
   could be more horrible, or closer akin to blasphemy, than to say that
   God wants pain for his own feeling's sake; or because he is hungry for
   that particular kind of satisfaction. We have it as a proverb, that
   "revenge is sweet;" but I recollect no proverb which avers that justice
   is sweet; because the mind of justice is a right mind, as the mind of
   revenge is not; and, being right, no pain is sweet to it, not even that
   which chastises injustice and sin. Besides, there is, it is agreed, no
   justice in the pains of Christ, as being due on his own account; and it
   ought to be as well agreed that God could not take them as
   compensations on account of others. That would be taking them as actual
   somethings, or quantities having value in themselves, when, in fact,
   they have, as we have seen, no value at all. Nay worse, if God takes
   them, he gets only incommodities for his satisfaction, and makes a gain
   that is purely harm and loss.

   But some one will object in the question--are not the physical
   sufferings of Christ what are called, in the scripture, his sacrifice
   for sin? and what is the use of sacrifice but to atone God's justice? I
   do not understand the scripture to speak of suffering and sacrifice in
   that manner. Thus we hear an apostle say--"made perfect through
   sufferings"--for what made perfect? for the satisfying of God's
   justice? No, but "to bring many souls unto glory?" "Lamb of God that
   taketh away"--what? the pains of justice? No, but "the sins of the
   world." "Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the
   tree"--for what end? that God might be satisfied with his pains? No,
   but "that we being dead unto sin, should live unto righteousness;" "By
   whose stripes"--what of the stripes? do they pay off the release of
   ours?--"by whose stripes ye were healed." "For Christ also Lath once
   suffered for sins, the just for the unjust"--in what view? to satisfy
   the justice of God? no, but "to bring us unto God." All the lustral
   figures--those of washing, purging, sprinkling, purifying,
   cleansing--set forth the sacrifice in the same manner, not as a way of
   reconciling God to us, but of reconciling us to God. And so
   universally--I do not know the instance where Christ's cross and
   physical suffering are conceived as a making satisfaction to God's
   justice.

   Regarding Christ's sufferings then as having no value in themselves, on
   the ground of which they may be accepted as compensations to justice,
   we must not leap to the conclusion that Christ could do nothing in a
   way of bringing men to God, without such sufferings. He could even have
   been incarnated into the world, in such a way as to involve no physical
   liability at all. He might even have been incarnated, I suppose, into
   the family of Cæsar, and strid into his mission, as a prince iron-clad,
   in all the dignities and immunities of the Empire. He might have taught
   the same doctrine, omitting only his call to take up the cross, which
   he taught as the son of Mary. He might have healed as great multitudes,
   with as kind a sympathy. He might even have been followed, if he chose,
   by trains of great people, as he was by the humble and the poor, dining
   at their tables, lodging in their palaces, receiving all the while the
   highest honors of genius. Or if it should be imagined that, teaching
   faithfully the same principles, and rebuking the same sins, and
   offering himself to men as the incarnate Word and Lord, he must of
   necessity provoke the hatred of enemies, and stir up powerful
   conspiracies of violence and bigot zeal, what suffering could they
   bring upon him, armed as he was with miracle, strongly enough even to
   have routed the Roman army? As the posse that went out to arrest him
   could not strengthen their knees to stand, or their hands to seize, but
   fell backward on the ground even as moths fall off from flames they
   attack; as the moneychangers and trafficking priests fled away before
   him, taken by a strange panic that no single man ever raised before; so
   he could have withered Caiaphas by a look, and dashed his accusers
   away, as a rock tosses off the sea; making Pilate's wife dream a great
   deal worse dreams than she did, and causing the poor servile magistrate
   himself to be a good deal "more afraid" than he was; and as to being
   gibbeted on the cross, if the conspiracy could have gone so far, he
   probably enough could have changed the wood into water, as he did the
   water into wine. There was, in short, no necessary condition of
   physical suffering implied in his Messiahship. He probably could not
   have been as complete a Saviour without physical suffering, but he
   could have been a wonderfully great character and beneficent teacher,
   as clear of spot or stain, as true in his truth, as wise in his wisdom,
   as evidently, and some would say, a great deal more evidently, divine.

   If then Christ's physical sufferings, taken as such, had no value, and
   if he could have been incarnated in the human state without
   suffering--doing and teaching, to a great extent, the same things--why
   did he come under conditions of suffering, what uses did he expect to
   serve by it, such as would compensate the loss? It was done I answer,
   that he might be made perfect by such suffering--perfect, that is, not
   in his character, but in his official competency; perfect as having
   gotten power over men, through his sufferings, to be the sufficient
   bringer on, or captain, he undertakes to be, in bringing many sons unto
   glory.

   Does he then, it may be asked, undertake the suffering as having that
   for his object or as consenting to it for effect's sake? He of course
   knows that he will suffer, and how, and when, and by whom, arid with
   what result, but he does not fall into the weakness of those partly
   fanatical martyrs who undertook the particular merit of being somehow
   murdered. Coming down to do a work of love, he simply took the
   liabilities of a human person doing such a work. He was not ignorant of
   the immense value or power of a right and great suffering, as regards
   the possible effect of it, and as sin would certainly be exasperated by
   his goodness, and drag him down to suffering, he meant beforehand to
   make it a right and great suffering, and so to win dominion by it. He
   suffered understandingly, therefore, as the Lamb that was slain from
   the foundation of the world, though not as aiming to get himself
   afflicted, or to make an ostentation of being wronged.

   What, then, we have now to look after, is the manner and degree of that
   power over men's convictions and feelings, which Christ obtained by his
   physical suffering. And the points to which I call your attention are
   such as these.

   1. The manner in which, by his physical suffering, he magnifies and
   sanctifies the law in men's convictions. This in fact was a kind of
   first point to be carried in getting the necessary power over fallen
   minds. The speculation that requires him to suffer in a way of helping
   God to justify himself in the forgiveness of sins, before certain great
   judicial minds in other worlds and spheres, is a speculation that to
   say the least travels far, and the scripture gives it no help. The true
   Christian idea appears to be that Christ is magnifying the law, and
   making it honorable, not before the remote altitudes, but before the
   sinning souls of this world by whom it has been trampled. How else
   shall they ever be regained? God is an essentially practical and not a
   romantic being. He will not concern himself about the figure he makes
   in the forgiveness of sins, before the outlying populations of his
   realm, if only he can bring transgressors down to ask forgiveness here
   on earth, by making the pinnacles of order smoke before their guilty
   consciences.

   See then how he does it in the matter of Christ's physical suffering.
   He came into the world with a perfect right to be exempted from such
   suffering. There is nothing in his character to require this kind of
   discipline, or even to make it just. He also had power to put all
   suffering by, and sail over the world as the stars do, in a region of
   calm and comfort above it. He could have exorcised the wild hate of his
   enemies, as he did the poor lunatics of the Gergesenes. By his power of
   miracle, if not without, he could have driven Pilate and his accusers
   out of the judgment-hall into the street, passing intact through all
   the conspiracies of his enemies, even as Moses passed through the sea.
   But he would not so far infringe on the penal order of God's
   retributions., Looking on society, in its madness against him and
   against the truth, as grinding in God's mill of retribution, swayed,
   and rent and tortured by exasperating causes in the guilt of its own
   transgression, he refuses to take himself out of the general torment.
   Having taken humanity, he takes all the judicial liabilities of human
   society under sin, preferring, in this manner, to submit himself to the
   corporate order of God's judgments, and testify in that manner, his
   profound homage to law and justice. He will not so much as parry any
   one of the bad causations loosened by sin. He will let the world be to
   him just that river of vinegar and gall which its sins have made it to
   itself. So he bears the world's bitter curse, magnifying, even by his
   pains, the essential sanctity of law and justice.

   He suffers nothing as from justice to himself, and therefore makes no
   satisfaction to the justice of God. But he powerfully honors that
   justice in its dealings with the world, by refusing to let even his
   innocence take him out of the murderous and bloody element it mixes.
   Hence the marvelous, unheard of power his life and gospel, and
   especially his suffering death, have exerted in men's consciences. His
   suffering has this wonderful divine art in it, that it sanctifies both
   forgiveness and justice, and makes them common factors of good, in the
   conscience of all transgression.

   2. The physical suffering of Christ has an immediate values under that
   great law of human nature, that ordains the disarming of all wrong, and
   the prostration of all violence, by a right suffering of the evils they
   inflict. Nothing breaks the bad will of evil so completely, as to have
   had its way, and done its injury, and looked upon its victim. And if
   the victim, suffering even the worst it could do, still lives
   unvanquished, the defeat is only a more absolute and stunning
   paralysis. Thus in the bitting of horses, the animal champs the bit as
   if he would crush it, and throws himself on the rein as if he would
   snap it, till finding that he only worries and galls himself, he at
   last gives way to what has not given way to him, and so is tamed, or,
   as we say, broken to the rein. So when the wrath of transgression hurls
   itself upon the Lord's person, sparing not his life, nor even letting
   him die easily or in respect, the bad will is only the more fatally
   broken that, accomplishing so much in a way so dreadful, it has yet
   accomplished nothing. It has mocked him, tortured him, thrust him out
   of life, only to find him still alive and see him go up to reign! In
   one view it has succeeded against him, and he has been seemingly
   crushed under the heel of its malignity. It has pierced the noblest
   heart and seen it bleed. It has finished the worst, most shocking, deed
   of murder ever conceived, And yet that murdered one still lives and
   loves! How dreadfully crest-fallen now and weak is that bad will, how
   nearly slain itself by what it has done! Nay, to have only spent so
   great malignity, and come to the point of exhaustion, would produce a
   nearly mortal weakness. Suffering kills, how often, the wrong-doing
   that inflicts it. The man of blood who looks upon his murdered enemy is
   disarmed by the sight. Even if there seemed to have been some
   provocation, how tender, and soft, and low-spoken, how visibly gentled
   in feeling is he, standing in the room where his lifeless adversary
   lies! That dead face looks imploringly up to him, and his fire is
   extinguished by natural relentings. How much more when the murdered one
   is a friend inherently good, bearing a much honored name and great; how
   much more, if he is the incarnate Son of God; still more, if he is not
   only killed, but crucified, hung up thus to be looked upon depending
   from his cross--sad, broken flower, which the spite of so great beauty
   has plucked! O how weak, irresolute, guilt-broken, now, is all sin,
   when confronted by that suffering goodness which reveals at once, both
   its spite and its impotence! "I am Jesus of Nazareth whom thou
   persecutest"--How piercing is the word!

   3. The sublime morality, or moral worth of Jesus, could never have been
   sharply impressed, except for the sensibilities appealed to by his
   physical suffering. If he had come as one born of a good family, if he
   had been a considerable owner of real estate, if he had made his
   journeys in a chariot, lodging, at night, with distinguished senators
   and persons of consideration, if he had been a great scholar among the
   Rabbis, or had been familiar to the people in the livery of a judge, or
   a priest, winning great popularity by the profuseness of his charities,
   and exciting even applause by his attention to low people and his
   tender ministry to their diseases; dying finally by some of the modes
   that are common, to be followed to his burial by multitudes that come
   to weep their loss at his grave--if, I say, he had lived in condition,
   and died as one admired for his excellence, the real depth of his
   virtue could never even have been conceived. He would only have been
   looked upon as fulfilling the type of a graciously benevolent
   gentleman, and described as the John Joseph Gurney of his time. No, it
   was only as he waived the honors of condition in his birth, and the
   comforts of property in his life, became a footman, hungered often,
   slept under the sky shivering with cold, spent himself daily in
   exhausting sympathies and got almost no sympathy in return, met the
   looks of crafty messengers and spies on every side, and scarcely found
   a place, except in the lone recesses of the mountains, where his ear
   was not all day, perhaps all night, saluted by the carping sounds of
   bigot voices quarreling with his doctrine, ending finally his hunted,
   hated, weary life, by a slave's death on the cross--this too, even for
   enemies, as truly as for his friends--it is here that we begin to
   really look down into the deeps of his great bosom, deeps holy and
   divine, that no mortal plummet has sounded! And so he is made perfect
   through sufferings, able to wake a sense in our bosoms of what love is,
   quickening thoughts in us that are new, opening sensibilities never
   before consciously opened. All the most effective powers, in short, of
   moral impression, contained in his character, would have been wanting,
   if he had not borne the lot of wrong and bitter suffering.

   4. It is only by his suffering in the flesh that he reveals or fitly
   expresses the suffering sensibility of God. As certainly as God has any
   sensibility, such as belongs to a perfect mind and heart, that
   sensibility must be profoundly moved by all misery, impurity and wrong.
   Impassible, physically speaking, he is not impassive to evils that
   offend, or grieve, his moral perfections. Indeed his vast and glorious
   nature is, in this view, nothing but an immense sensibility, whose
   dislikes, disgusts, indignations, revulsions of pity, wounded
   compassions, afflicted sympathies, pains of violated tenderness, wrongs
   of ingratitude, are mingling and commingling, as cups of gall, for the
   pure good feeling of his breast. So far he suffers because he is a
   perfect being, and according to the measure of his perfection. Why if
   he could not hate what is hateful, pity what is pitiful, mourn for the
   hopeless, burn against the cruel, scent the disgusts of the impure--if
   all bad things and all good were just alike to him, what is he better
   than granite or ice? No, the glorious, all-moving fact is, that there
   is a great sensibility at the head of the worlds, and a mental
   suffering as great, when the worlds go wrong!

   This accordingly it is, that we, as sinners, need most of all to know
   and to feel, and this that Christ, for our salvation's sake, has taken
   the flesh and suffered even death, to impress. Nature, in her scenes
   and objects, had no power to express this moral pain of God's heart.
   The ancient providential history was trying always vainly to elaborate
   the same; testifying, in almost every chapter, of God's sorrows,
   griefs, repentings, loathings, displeasures, and his afflictions over
   the afflicted. Nothing could ever express it but the, physical
   suffering of Jesus. Here, for the first time, a vehicle is, found that
   will sufficiently bring home to our guilty feeling God's wounded
   feeling, and put us in real acquaintance with that suffering state of
   love, which his unseen goodness feels.

   And every thing turns here, you will perceive, on the matter of
   physical suffering; for, to our coarse human habit, nothing else
   appears, at first, to have much reality. In the agony, for example, the
   real suffering is mental, and the great struggle, a struggle purely of
   feeling. But if it were not for the physical symptoms attendant, the
   prostrations, the audible groans, and above all, the body dripping, in
   blood-like drops, forced through the skin by the pains of the
   mind--were it not for these physical tokens we should get no impression
   of a suffering sensibility, that would be of much account. We should
   only look on drowsily, doubting probably. how much, or what kind of,
   reality there may be in this rather dull scenic of the gospels!

   And here is the precise relation of the agony and the cross. One is the
   reality, the other is the outward sign or symbol. Having all the mental
   sensibility Christ has regarding our sin, and shame, and wrong, and
   fearfully lost state, he still needs to be made perfect through
   physical sufferings, or by these to have his higher sensibility brought
   forth into power. He is perfect before, in all the pains of his perfect
   sensibility, but to our coarse, sensuous, undiscerning habit, there is
   nothing of much meaning in him, till we watch him undergoing his
   murder! This physical suffering we can understand; the other is a great
   way off and very dim.

   In one view it is even a scandal that we make so much more of the cross
   than we do of the agony. And yet the cross was appointed for the
   culminating point of the gospel, partly in a way of condescension to
   our lowness and the want of our coarseness, and is really the greater
   for that reason. The grand thing to be revealed is that which stands in
   the agony; and the superior value of the cross, or physical suffering,
   lies in the fact that it comes to us, at our low point, speaking to us
   of the other, in a way that we can feel. When we look on Jesus
   suspended by nails through his hands and feet, and set up to die a slow
   death, in delirium and thirst and fever, we do have raised in our
   bosoms a little natural sensibility. And, taken hold of by that, our
   apprehensions will perhaps be sufficiently fixed, at last, to let us in
   where that deeper, and warmer, and more agonizing, sensibility heaves
   unseen in the mental compassions of God!

   Let us not be too much taken, my friends, by the typology in which our
   gospel is here and there so feebly and pretensively dressed--the low
   perceptions, and the short culture, always putting their cheap honors
   and ornaments upon it. I speak not here of the cross set up as a symbol
   on our peaks of architecture, worn upon the person, painted on the
   banners of the religion itself; but I speak of the crucifixes, and the
   carefully carved distresses of the dying Lord, the droppings of blood,
   the contortions of form, the pallors of death so elaborately painted,
   and the generally overdone studies of art, by which Christ's dying woe
   is magnified as being, not the sign, but the all of his suffering. The
   very shallow, feeble, look of such art, the want of all high insight in
   it, is abundantly mortifying. There is scarcely a doubt that Christ
   suffered more intensely in the agony, where the pain was wholly mental,
   than he did upon the cross. Even the external signs appear to indicate
   as much. In the same way too, his chief suffering, on the cross, was
   probably mental and not bodily. For. some reason, his suffering on the
   cross was so much more severe than that of the malefactors crucified
   with him, that he died whole hours before them; not because they did
   not suffer as great physical pain as he, but because he had a moral
   sensibility so vast, a horror of wrong so deep, a concern of love for
   his enemies so wrenched with agony, that his heart broke and his breath
   stopped, as it were before the time. This now--would that we could
   think it--was the real suffering to him! and the physical suffering of
   the cross was probably a matter of consequence to him principally in
   the fact that, considering our low, dull, habit, there might be force
   enough in it to initiate, or pricl in, as it were, some faint
   impression of the other. And this it is, this only, that makes it a
   salvation. It is a cross before the eyes, for beings that live in their
   eyes, and are too coarse to apprehend the spiritual things of God in a
   spiritual manner--in that way a type of the more wondrous and
   tremendous cross that is hid in God's perfections from eternity. O, it
   is for this, to make sin feel this unseen, tender, sensibility, this
   pain of goodness, this fatherhood of sorrow--this it is that Christ has
   undertaken to impress, and for this end he is made perfect through
   sufferings. Once more--

   5. It was necessary that Christ should suffer in the body, and get
   power over men by that kind of suffering, because the world itself is
   put in a tragic economy, requiring its salvation to be an essentially
   tragic salvation. God has made the world, we all agree, for the great
   sentiments it will organize and bring into play, and souls themselves
   to be lifted by that play, in those great sentiments. Hence the
   wonderful affinity of our human nature for the tragic exaltations.

   There may have been a prior necessity that a free moral kingdom should
   include peril, disorder, suffering, great struggles to escape great
   woes, sacrifices in the good, wrongs suffered by the good, to regain
   and restore the evil; in other words, there may have been a prior
   necessity that the plan of God's moral universe should be essentially
   tragic in the cast of it. But, whatever may be true in this respect, we
   can see, every man for himself, that so it is. No merely fine
   sentiment, or morally high, is quite sufficient for us. The festive,
   the gay, the triumphal, the melo-dramatic tenderness, the pastoral
   sweetness, the flutes of domestic arbors, the gongs of public
   liberty--none of these quite satisfy, not even the mighty love-passion
   strikes our highest cords of tension till it draws blood! Blood! blood!
   we must have blood! Human history therefore moves on trailing in blood,
   tragic in its characters, and scenes, and its material generally.

   The great crimes are tragic, and the great virtues scarcely less so.
   The tribunals sprinkle their gate-posts with blood. The stormy
   passions, honor, jealousy, and revenge, are letting blood in all ages;
   and the little ones of trust, and truth, and worth, do the bleeding.
   And then all the epics and romances, and a great part of the world's
   poetry go on to add imaginary pangs and troubles, and torture us still
   more with bloody felicities that are fictitious. Practically the world
   has a general fashion of suffering. Right is trampled everywhere,,
   goodness fights with wrong, nations fall, heroes bleed, and all great
   works are championed by suffering. Some Prometheus, torn by his eagle,
   bleeds painfully on every rock waiting to be loosed from his chain. So
   if Christ will pluck away eternal judgment for the world, he must bleed
   for it. So great a salvation must tear a passage into the world by some
   tragic woe--without shedding of blood there is no remission.

   This blood--O, it is this that has a purifying touch, working
   lustrally, as the divine word conceives, on all the stains of our sin,
   washing us, making us clean, sprinkling even our evil conscience. This
   tragic power of the cross takes hold, in other words, of all that is
   dullest, and hardest, and most intractable, in our sin, and moves our
   palsied nature, all through, in mighty throbs of life.

   And this is Christianity; meeting us just where we most require to be
   met. Christ is a great bringer on for us, because he suffers for us.
   Christianity is al mighty salvation, because it is a tragic salvation.
   Why my friends, if it were not for this generally tragic way in things
   about us, and especially in religion, I fear that we should have a more
   dull time of it than we think. Indeed I suspect that even the same is
   true of the general universe--it probably is and is forever to be an
   essentially tragic universe. With, a fall and an overspreading curse at
   the beginning, and a cross in the middle, and a glory and shame at the
   end, where souls struggle out, through perils, and pains, and broken
   chains, or bear their chains away unbroken still and still to be--how
   moving, and mighty, and high, must be the sentiment of it! O how
   grandly harrowing is that joy, how tremulous in tragic excitement is
   that song of ascription, roaring as a sea-surge round the throne--"unto
   him that loved us, and washed us, from our sins in his blood!"

   Concluding at this point, my brethren, the exposition I have
   undertaken, you will not fail to note how it gathers in its force upon
   this table and rite of communion before us. These symbols, bread and
   wine, body and blood, represent exactly what is most physical in
   Christ's suffering. But they do not stop in that, as if there were a
   value in the pains. They are even a language, as that was, bearing an
   impression of something higher. They say "made perfect through
   sufferings;" calling up to be thought, and received, just all that I
   have here been trying to unfold, of the power which our Master was
   obtaining, by his dreadful cross and passion.

   Back of the wood and the nails, back of the suffering body, there was
   another cross, another suffering, even that of God's deep love,
   struggling out through the blood and the pain, to make its revelation
   felt in us. And this for what? To bring many sons, that is to bring us
   all, unto glory.

   Suffering and glory! even so; in that tragic copula, the gospel stands,
   and it is remarkable how many times it recurs. "Ought not Christ to
   suffer these things, and to enter into his glory?" "For the suffering
   of death, crowned with glory and honor"--"The sufferings of Christ and
   the glory that should follow"--"A witness of the suffering of Christ,
   and a partaker of the glory that should be revealed"--"Who hath called
   us unto eternal glory, by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered
   awhile"--responses all, as it were, to the word "made perfect through
   sufferings in bringing many sons unto glory."

   Here, too, as you have noted, Christ's sufferings for us, and ours for
   him, and his glory, and our glory, are blended all together, heaving in
   a common passion, shining in a common glory. And thus it is, my
   brethren, that our ascended Master, by these communion tokens, pledges
   us to-day our right to suffer with him, and to be strengthened with him
   according to his glorious power. And what we call his glory, is, if we
   rightly understand, but this same glorious power, or powerfulness of
   glory--no phantom of display, or dazzling crown, conferred by servile
   worshipers wanting a hero, but that most solid kind of merit which is
   an element and power of day, on all who are blessed in the sight. When
   Christ was transfigured in the mount, the shining as the sun, the
   glistering whiteness, which are called--"the excellent glory," were yet
   but a surface glory in themselves, and were only good as types of that
   inherent, practical glory, that belonged to his nature, and was just
   now dawning on discovery in his suffering sacrifice. The immense power
   he gets in being made perfect through sufferings, is itself his glory.
   And so the state of glory in us is the solid power that we are to
   obtain, by following in our Master's steps, by suffering patience and
   sacrifice. When Christ says, "the glory which thou gavest me I have
   given them," that glory is the sense we have in them, as God's martyrs
   and servants, of a somehow divine brightness and transforming luster.
   There is something felt which yet we do not see, and we call that
   invisible something, glory. It is splendor of soul, or the halo that is
   on it, when the blur and disorder and opaque mixture of wrong are all
   gone bye; or it is the state of perfect strength, concord, liberty in
   good, freeness of knowledge, purposes eternally set, great sentiment
   hallowed by great principle, and uttered by and through great action,
   when Christ, who is himself the glory of the Father, has put himself
   fully upon us, and when so the divine splendor and power, and truth,
   and righteousness, are become our eternal investiture. And therefore it
   is, that the very state of glory for which we hope is set forth as a
   daylight element, bathing holy minds forever, whose sun is the
   Revelation of God by suffering--"For the Glory of God doth lighten it
   and the Lamb--is the light thereof. O, thou divine Lamb; suffering
   symbol in the flesh, of God's suffering love in the spirit, what shall
   be the light of our seeing forever, but that which may shine out from
   thee!
     __________________________________________________________________

                                     XIII.

SALVATION BY MAN.

   For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection from the
   dead.--1. Cor. xv. 21.

   It can not, of course, be the apostle's meaning, that mankind are going
   literally to raise themselves from the dead. When he says "by man," he
   mentally refers to Christ; only taking advantage of the fact that,
   since Christ the Son of God incarnate, is become a proper man, a member
   of the race, it is therefore permitted us to regard the whole remedy of
   sin, or power of salvation, as being included in humanity itself.
   Redemption, life, resurrection--all are, in a sense, being and to be,
   by man. When we say humanity, there is inclosed and, as it were,
   closeted in it, all the inspiration, all the light, all the
   life-impulse of the divine man, and so all the supernatural, resurgent
   powers of a complete salvation, even up to the resurrection force
   itself. It is not as if God had called us here from a distance, or had
   sent his Son to sit upon the circle of the heavens and lecture us from
   those supernal heights, but he has gotten him into the race by a birth,
   and has entered, in that manner, a corporate grace of life into the
   race itself.

   What I propose then at the present time, is the practically important
   fact that Christ is not so much to be thought of as a being external,
   or as dispensing salvation from above, as a second Adam in the race
   itself; a regenerative and redemptive power, so inserted into humanity
   as to be in a sense of it. Just as the apostle's language
   intimates--"For since by man came death, by man came also the
   resurrection from the dead." For this word "since" is a word of
   rational connection, supposing an impression felt of some inherent
   fitness, requiring the corporate disadvantage of the fall, to be made
   good by a corporate remedy. Consider then--

   1. The antecedent probability of such a remedy, indicated by familiar
   analogies. It is not God's manner to work all remedies in things from
   without, but to make them largely self-remedial, when attacked by
   damage, or disorder. Thus all creatures of life, all substances above
   the range of mineral substance, are endowed by him with recuperative
   functions for the repair of their own injuries. The bush that is bent
   to the ground does not require some other bush or even tree, to come
   and lift it up, but, no sooner is it let go, than it springs up
   suddenly by an elastic force within. Cut it down, as it begins to be a
   tree, and it will set new growths to pricking through the hard bark
   even of its stump, and so, by a newly begun architecture it will go on
   to build the tree it was beginning to build at the first. Every animal
   body has a distinct self-medicating force in its own vital nature,
   called by physicians and physiologists the vis medicatrix. When,
   therefore, it is attacked by disease, or hacked by violence, the
   qualified physician, knowing how it will rally its own hidden force,
   and put its own mysterious self-medications at work, will simply
   endeavor, on his part, to clear the way, and supply the needed stimulus
   of action, till the subtle, inborn physician, wiser and more sovereign
   than he, has mended the break, or completed the cure. The same is true
   as regards all defections of honor or character. If the man himself
   does not return to himself, and repair his losses by a process of
   recovery undertaken by himself, there is no recovery for him. The whole
   world toiling at his vices and dishonors, could not repair one of them.
   He alone has power to win the first inch of recovery. On a larger scale
   the same is true of society. Broken down by oppression, desolated by
   conquest, rent by faction, weakened by every sort of incapacity, it
   finally gets clear and rises, by reactions from within itself--just as
   Italy is rising now. The rational resurrection comes by man--man, that
   is, grown manlier, as God prepared him to be, by his own great
   struggles of devotion.

   We see, in this manner, on how large a scale God contrives to
   incorporate powers of self-recovery in things. What then shall we
   expect, when humanity is broken by the irruption, or precipitation of
   sin, but that if he organizes redemption, he will do it in a way to
   have it appear as a redemption from within, executed in a sense by man.

   I do not mean, of course, when I speak in this manner of
   "self-recovery," and "salvation my man," that the recovery and
   salvation are not by God. There is exactly the same propriety in this
   kind of language that there is in speaking of a harvest, or a voyage,
   as being by man--it is never such in the sense of excluding God and his
   natural agencies. Indeed the recovery and salvation of souls are more
   properly by man, because the agency of God is here incarnated and works
   in the race by a man thus inserted into it.

   2. It is another point to be observed, that we not only want a
   supernatural salvation (for nothing less than that can possibly
   regenerate the fall of nature,) but in order to any steady faith in it,
   we must have it wrought into nature and made to be as it were, one of
   its own stock powers. It does not meet our intellectual conditions,
   till it satisfies, in a degree, the scientific instinct in us, and
   becomes rational and solid, by appearing to work inherently, or from
   within, as by a certain force of law. Moving on the soul and society,
   as from a point above and without, it would be here, and there, and
   nowhere, flitting as it were apparitionally, breaking out now as from
   behind the moon, and vanishing next, as our faith reels away, in we
   know not what spaces of the air, or abysses of the sea. What we want
   can be seen, at a glance, from the eagerness that hurries such
   multitudes of our time after the doctrine of progress. We love to look
   on education, political liberty, personal culture, and the sway of
   moral ideas, all as advancing under fixed laws of progress. This
   doctrine of progress is even a better kind of gospel to many, and more
   rational. And yet if we speak of a strictly natural progress, under
   natural laws, there is no fiction more utterly baseless: for after the
   fact of sin, or moral evil broken loose in the race, the progress of
   society must be inevitably downward from bad to worse. Just that too
   which ought to be true is true, many of the proudest, most historic
   races drop into extinction; and many others exist that we call savage
   races, just because they make no such progress, more than the animals,
   from age to age.

   And yet we want a salvation that is to us all which this doctrine of
   progress pretends to be, and God defers to our want, by contriving a
   gospel for man that is to be, in form, by man; giving us to see the
   general humanity so penetrated and charged with the supernatural, by
   Christ living in it, as to be, in a sense, working out redemption
   naturally from within itself. We call it the progress of society, and
   such it really is, and yet, solid and scientific as we think it, all
   the reality it has comes of the incorporated, incarnated grace, in
   Jesus Christ, which is countervailing always the penal disorders of
   nature, and setting continually on, as by a destiny itself, the rising
   fortunes of the race. Our gospel is a cause, in this manner, among
   causes; a real calculable force, the Confidence of which can be held
   with a steady assurance. Is any thing more rational than to believe
   that goodness and truth are bound to master all things by their own
   everlasting necessary laws? No matter from what sphere they come,
   natural or supernatural, getting into man, into the race, they will as
   certainly master man at last, master the race, as gravity will master a
   stone. Exactly this confidence God therefore means to give us--no
   visionary confidence but a rational, that of a banker whose fund is in;
   for God has put the stock functions of his own everlasting kingdom into
   humanity itself, and by man He must reign. Meantime--

   3. We shall see that, if it were possible to restore the fall of our
   race, by any kind of agency, or operation, wholly external, supposing
   no recuperative forces and concurrent struggles operating from within,
   it would reduce our character and grade of significance to a virtual
   nullity. Dismiss the grand world-honoring fact of the incarnation,
   conceive that the Jehovah angel, or some angelic messenger comes to us,
   not humanized in sympathy or in order, but having a plastic power to
   work on us from without and sway us to good, by his own methods of
   divine magic, apart from our consent; this would settle us, at once,
   into a state of cliency both dangerous and humiliating. We should
   probably begin, at once, to pay him the honors of idolatry; for the
   manly consciousness in us will be taken away, and we shall be to
   ourselves a kind of second rate interest in God's kingdom; just that
   which the incarnation, begetting a new divine power in the race itself
   contrives to avoid with a skill so beautiful.

   Or we may suppose that God was able to put the physical world into such
   a state of divine glow, showing forth, in its objects, such radiances
   and miraculous revolvings, such glorious apparitions of truth, such
   faces of. goodness, that men should have their bad will quite taken
   away by the magical sceneries they live in. But the transformation they
   undergo in this manner would have little dignity in it, because their
   manhood is unexercised in the change. It would be a kind of vegetable
   conversion, not a kindling of God's fires in the soul's aspirations and
   choices.

   So, if the race were to be recovered in any way that includes no
   struggle of self-recovery, no power within striving toward recovery, it
   would almost take away the sense of our personality. We should be
   ciphers to ourselves, not men. Exactly contrary to this, it is the very
   great merit of the incarnation, that it brings help in a way to make it
   valuable. God could easily help us in a way to crush us, just as many
   human helpers will really make nothing of their beneficiaries, by
   allowing them to make nothing of themselves, and be nothing for
   themselves. The very thing wanted here is to get power into the fallen
   race, and put it striving upward; to raise a ferment of recuperative
   energy, feeling, aspiration, choice, and whole right working in
   humanity; exactly what the nearness and high sympathy of God in the
   incarnation must inevitably do. The Saviour being, or becoming man, the
   salvation dignifies and raises man even before he receives it; giving
   him the right to feel, that, coming verily as an approach of God, it is
   none the less a power in the race itself, a salvation by man.

   4. Since it is continually assumed by the scripture that we fall by
   race, or as a corporate whole, we naturally look for some recuperative
   grace to be entered into the race, by which so great disadvantage may
   be repaid or overcome. Thus, if we say "as in Adam all die," we want
   also to say, "so in Christ shall all be made alive." Or if we say that
   "through the offense of one many be dead," we want also to say, "much
   more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man,
   Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many." In this manner it is that
   Christ is conceived to be a "second Adam," a kind of new progenitor,
   such that we get in him, as it were, a new descent from good.

   But we are born of Adam physiologically, it will be remembered, and so
   we go down with him as a race by physiological consequence, while we
   are not thus born of Christ the second Adam. He only comes into the
   race at a given point, just as we do, and communicates nothing by
   descent to persons collateral, any more than we do to persons
   collateral to us. How then, being no progenitor, does he become any
   proper Adam at all? how get himself into the race, in any such general
   way, as to become a new headship of life?

   To this I answer, that we must not press the correspondence too
   closely; it is not understood to be literal, or to hold in any but a
   general and qualified way. Let it be enough that as the sin abounded,
   so the grace much more abounds, only not in exactly the same manner.
   Adam is our head physiologically, Christ is our head by the head
   influences he inaugurates, by the authority, sympathy, beauty, of his
   suffering goodness--a power that propagates across all the lines of
   generation, as efficiently as if it traveled by descent--a new
   regenerative power incarnated into the race as such, there to work,
   running down through all descent, as a redemption of man executed in
   the large view by man.

   Observe too this very striking distinction, that good souls have a
   power to get into the race by collateral propagations of their
   goodness, when bad souls have almost no such power at all. The bad
   impregnate human feeling through falsities, and lies, and oppressions,
   and combinations of interest, or at best through the dazzling exploits
   of ambition. But there is a short run to such kind of power. Deep in
   evil, the world is yet naturally shy of evil, and begins very soon to
   get away from it. No bad character propagates long, as by character.
   Even bad writings drop out soon and die, as it were, of their own
   poison. On the other hand it will be seen that good and great souls
   have a destiny of headship, propagating side-ways, and every way, till
   they become Adams in the sublime fatherhood of their power, and that so
   completely as to finally reach, and take headship of the race. Thus we
   think of Socrates, for example, as a kind of progenitor in good for his
   people; a man whose ideas, principles, sacrifices, entered him into the
   whole Greek race, and more and more widely into the general life of the
   world. So of Washington. Dying childless, he had yet many children, and
   his large posterity still multiplies more and more rapidly, in every
   part of the world. Aaron Burr was a man of greater splendor, but he
   never got into the world's life and feeling at all, and never became
   progenitor of any thing. He was dropped instinctively even out of the
   world's thought. But Washington goes on to be, not father of his
   country only, but world's father also; inserting his grand fatherhood
   into kings, emperors, peoples, and laws, accepted more and more
   reverently, by the compulsion of good in his life, and reigning, in
   fact, as a kind of civil-state Messiah, that has come to propagate his
   sway in human laws and liberties. The civil capacity even of the world,
   is increased by the august propagations of his example and sentiment.

   And so it is, illustrating the great by the small, the divine by the
   human, that Jesus, the incarnate word of God's eternity, coming into
   birth and living and dying as a man, fills the whole race with new
   possibilities and powers, starts resurgent activities, overtops the sin
   abounding with a grace that much more abounds, and becomes the Adam, so
   to speak, of a new humanity. Consider now--

   5. Some of the scripture evidences of the subject. And here we meet,
   first of all, as it were at the head of all scripture, the remarkable
   and rather strangely worded promise, which declares that the seed of
   the woman shall bruise the serpent's head. The representation is not
   that Christ, sometime hereafter to be born of the woman, shall bring
   under and finally destroy the bad power, though that is true, but that
   the woman's whole posterity, having Christ included, shall do it. God
   will of course be always present in the struggle, pushing it on, and
   turning all the crises of it, by his invisible agency; while outwardly,
   to human apprehension, it is but a struggle, in one view, of society
   and man. In this manner, he contrives, by the hiding of himself, in our
   otherwise poor, dejected humanity, to put us in confidence and keep us
   at a pitch of courage, quite above our own broken powers.

   Here and there, it is true, this interior hidden method is departed
   from, and he appears to be operating from without, doing something for,
   or upon, our humanity, and not through it; working some astounding
   miracle, sending some angel, or appearing by some angelic theophany. In
   one case he even ordains a supernatural sign that is to be a kind of
   institution, recurring, like the sun itself, with astronomic
   regularity; the cloud, I mean, by day and the pillar of fire by night.
   And yet none of these extraordinary, external things, appear to get
   much hold of the race, just because they do not get into it. Nothing
   works like a power that does not work by man. The sacrifice of Abraham
   and the wrestling of Jacob bring more victory and might into the race,
   as far as we can see, than the brazen serpent, or the waters drawn out
   of the rock. When, too, Christ comes, what is he but a man? and though,
   as such, he has a divine power and plenitude, how careful is he to get
   his attitude in the race and not above it. He undertakes no outward
   championship. Seed of the woman, a proper man, he only gets into the
   common family register as such, and puts the struggle on, as being a
   struggle of the race itself. Perfect in all divinity even, he is still
   the Son of Man, claiming the appellation for himself. He dies low. And
   when he is gone, all that we know is that a gospel is born! In one view
   there seems to be nothing here but the same humanity there was before,
   and the same hard fight still going on that before was struggling to
   bring the serpent under and to bruise his head. But it is a very
   different fight, as respects the power of it; for there is a Christ now
   in the race, and the whole seed of man is quickened by the sense of his
   divine brotherhood.

   We shall find, accordingly, that the scriptures are full of images,
   that conceive the great contest with evil to be a struggle in the bosom
   of the race itself, and give us the expectation that it will go on, as
   such, till it has won a complete triumph for the truth. Thus it is that
   Isaiah uses the word "increase," which does not mean to enlarge by
   additions, but by internal growth;--"And of the increase of his
   government and peace there shall be no end." Thus it is that Daniel
   represents the kingdom of the Messiah as "a stone cut out without
   hands," but a most remarkable kind of stone in the fact that it grows
   from within itself, and becomes a great mountain filling the whole
   earth. In the same way it is compared, by Christ himself, to a grain of
   mustard seed, which does not grow by something added on the outside,
   but by an internal operation, becoming in that manner a tree. He
   compares it also to leaven hid in a large quantity of meal, there to
   work till all is leavened; where the working, it will be observed, is
   not the working only of the original leaven, or that of the atmosphere
   outside, but such a kind as puts the meal next the leaven working too,
   and that also on doing the same to what is next to it; and so the
   propagated working goes on, till the whole body of the bread is
   leavened.

   Here Christ is giving, you will see, his deliberate opinion of the
   manner in which his kingdom will be extended. The process will be
   forwarded, he conceives, within the race itself, and will so far be
   human, that we may rightly say of it--for since by man came the fall of
   the world, by man came also its restored glory and peace.

   Observe, again, how even holy scripture is the scripture also of man,
   written by man, given to the world by man, bearing, in every book, the
   particular stamp and style of the particular mind, in whose personal
   conceptions it was shaped. The subject matter too of the historic and
   biographic parts is human, showing how men have acted, thought, felt,
   suffered for the truth, fallen before temptation, triumphed over it.
   Indeed the value itself of these records consists, to a great extent,
   in the fact that they give us divine lessons under human incidents, in
   the molds of human character and life. They show us too, on a larger
   scale, what is the meaning and way of God's Providence, by the
   disasters of wrong and the struggles of merit, and also by the
   overturnings and uprisings of nations.

   When we come to the writings of devotion, the Psalms, for example, and
   other chorals of scripture, these are human sentiments, lifted indeed
   by holy inspirations, but none the less properly human for that
   reason--rolling in as such upon us, from the word, even as the tides
   roll in from the sea.

   The proverbs are specially human, being maxims of human wisdom, such as
   have even gained a proverbial currency, in the judgments of philosophy,
   and statesmanship, and common life.

   The prophets, again--these are all men speaking by men s words and
   voices. True their voices are voices also of God, but they are none the
   less human, that God wants to use them as such, or that he sometimes
   puts them to speaking in the first person for him, saying "I the Lord;"
   for when he crowds himself thus into men, or men's voices, he only
   proves how much he may prefer to do as man.

   The same is true of the Epistles. They are written by men, to men, in
   the words of men, under the relationships of teacher and taught, and
   shepherd and flock. They deal with actual human conduct, in actual
   human conditions. They speak to human difficulties and human dangers.
   They show how good men suffer in times of persecution, how they bruise
   Satan under their feet, how fidelity triumphs; in a word how the great
   life-struggle of the church goes on.

   A corresponding reason doubtless required the gospel of Christ to be
   preached by human ministers. It is not commonly expected that thieves
   will be sent to reform thieves, or perjurers to remonstrate with
   perjury, but sinners are sent to gospel sinners. God certainly could
   have taken a different method. He could have sent cohorts of angels
   flying through the air, to publish the good news, even as they began to
   do, for an hour, when Christ was here. He could have set the stars
   chiming with the silver music of salvation. He could have made the
   stones cry it out of the mountain tops, and under the ground, and under
   the sea. But he wants the great work of the redemption to go on from
   within the race itself, unfolding by internal growth, intending that
   his kingdom shall be great and finally universal, only because the
   powers or principles he has inserted are sufficient of themselves to
   make it so.

   He also constructs a corporate state, called the church, in which, as
   being corporate, and not subject to death, he deposits the gospel and
   the sacraments, and all the institutional appointments of religion,
   thus to be conserved and perpetuated by man.

   In the same way too, he makes the church even to be the pillar and
   ground of the truth itself; for the disciples in it are to be Christ's
   living epistles, gospels of the life, new incarnations of the word,
   showing always what is in the text, by what is expressed in their life
   and walk and character. Were it not for this light continually supplied
   to the written gospel, from the lives of those who live it, the word of
   the skies would shortly become an utterly dead language, a kind of
   Sanscrit jargon, without either salvation or intelligence in it. Living
   men are its interpretation, living men are its arguments and evidences.
   It lives by man.

   As the disciples are to be new incarnations, in this manner, of Christ,
   so, in a sense, they are to be vehicles also of the Spirit,
   demonstrations, revelations, of his otherwise unseen or unobserved
   agency; and so, many of his most effective operations will be through
   their gifts, works, prayers, sufferings, personal testimonies, and the
   pentecostal glow of their assemblies.

   Again, last of all, and as it were to include all, it is given to men
   even to convert the world. Not that they, as being simply men, are able
   to do any such thing, but that Christ, the Son of Man, being entered
   into the race, and working as a leaven in the mass of it, will make
   them a leaven also to one another, and set the ferment on till all is
   leavened. And so the great world itself, all the empires, known or
   unknown, all the continents, and islands undiscovered, all most distant
   ages and times are given as a trust to men, originally to a very few,
   very humble men. "Ye," said Christ, "are the light of the world." "Go
   ye into all the world and disciple every creature."

   I will not detain you with farther illustrations of the subject in
   hand, but will simply suggest in conclusion, a few points variously
   related, in the practical drift of its applications.

   We have then a very significant presumption raised, that when any
   breakage, or damage, occurs in any legitimate institution, or society
   of the world, God has prepared, or put in somewhere, some kind of
   self-remedial force to mend it. Thus if any church, or Christian
   brotherhood, is rent by disagreements, embittered by recriminations,
   and broken, for the time, as regards a due confidence of the future,
   the remedy must still be in it, else it is nowhere. Even if God himself
   undertakes for it, he will accomplish his restoring purpose, in some
   very important sense, only by man, even by themselves; that is by their
   strivings after one another, their sorrowings over themselves, their
   prayers and their longings after the lost love. If there be any remedy
   for them, it must so far come out of themselves. Not even God will try
   to bring it from any other quarter.

   So if there be a great nation rent by faction, a good government broken
   down and trampled by rebellion, God has no miraculous fire to flash
   upon the conspirators and scorch them down. It must be enough that he
   has given a sword for the punishment of evil doers, that the remedy may
   come by man, making due use of it. If the people too will know that God
   is with them, let a spirit be kindled in their manly breast that shall
   take them to the field, forbidding any word of peace to be spoken, till
   the laws are vindicated and the foes of order crushed. If God will make
   a broken world restore itself by man, much more a broken people, and it
   will as certainly be done as there is quantity enough of manhood in
   them--enough great sentiment and patriotic fire--to do it.

   Again, the immense responsibility thrown upon Christ's followers, in
   the fact that the salvation of the world is to be in so many ways, by
   man, ought to be distinctly admitted and practically assumed. If they
   are to preach the gospel, and light up the gospel by their lives, so to
   be the gospel, and finally to regain the world to God; if Christ
   himself lays it on them to be gospelers with him, putting the world in
   their hands to be lived for, died for, won and saved, then how clear it
   is that their faith will be no relaxation of responsibility, but the
   begun fulfillment and seal of it rather. How nearly appalling too is
   the fact that if God has any good thing to be done, it is to be done
   somehow by man, and that he has the man, or men, or women, somewhere on
   whom so great a charge is laid. As he has undertaken to make man good,
   he will let the good that wants to be done, wait till their goodness
   gets purpose, and fire, and sacrifice, in a word, reality, enough to do
   it. And if they make slow progress, if the conversion of the world
   drags heavily, then so it must; for God will not so far dishonor the
   great salvation as to push on the propagation of it faster than it has
   reality enough to propagate itself. If it takes a million of years to
   recover the world to God, then a million it must have; for it never can
   be accomplished, either in one, or in a hundred millions, unless it is
   accomplished by man. O, how preposterous, in this view, is the soft
   opinion many hold of faith; as if it were the faith of a soldier to
   expect that his captain will do all the fighting himself, and that he
   is never to fight under him, or win with him; or as if it were the true
   believing unto life, to come in, as clinical patients, and lie down
   upon the gospel to be saved by it! No! the salvation of God is no such
   washy and thin affair--it has meaning, it has dignity; else it has no
   mark of God upon it. To really believe is to come into the great
   life-struggle of Jesus and be with him in it; to be engineering for
   him, watching for occasions to commend him, watching for souls to
   receive him, fighting for him in sacrifice, even as heroes fight for
   their country. The salvation of the world by man--that is the
   tremendous fact which all true faith takes hold of, and for which it is
   girded even by the sign of the cross.

   There is, furthermore, a great mine of comfort opened here, for such as
   have settled into heart-sickness over human affairs, and the want of
   all high movement in them. Some are sick because they hear no thunders,
   and see no mighty stir in the heavens. If they could see God converting
   the world by signs, and wonders, and mighty portents, there would seem
   to be something going on! Nothing could be weaker than such a kind of
   gospeling. Laying no hold of us by rational evidence, it would only
   drum us to sleep in the tumults of the senses. And yet they are almost
   pining to have the world's dull tedium broken, by some such outward
   stir; never once recollecting that, while commotion is a profitless
   noise, real motion is silent. Another class are pining, in the same
   manner, for some new dispensation to break, that shall displace the
   rotten hopelessness of the old; some second coming of Christ, some
   purgation by fire, some literal new heavens. They want a Saviour
   farther off and not one hid in the world's bosom, a Saviour in the
   clouds of heaven, or in some miraculous new city,--just the Saviour
   that would take us out of our faith and put us into our senses, and set
   us running to see, instead of resting in love to know. Still another
   class, who look for no such mock reliefs, are only the more sick,
   because seeing no good, they have, beside, no hope of any. There seems
   to be no good reason why the world should continue, for it comes to
   nothing, losing always in one year, age, or place, what it gained in
   another--constitutions, laws, liberties, learning, commerce, religion,
   all swinging tidally, and as certain to go back in the ebb, as to come
   in at the flow. Why should such a hopeless, always baffling, laboring
   vanity be kept on foot? Why, my friends, because it is not hopeless!
   because the grand, all-regenerating, force is already entered into the
   world, and is working steadily on through all retrocessions and
   advances alike. Lift up your heads O ye drooping ones! Christ is in the
   world.! Jesus, Son of God, and word of God's eternity--he is about us,
   within us, going through all things, moving onward in all. Leaven does
   not make a noise when it works, and yet it works! And so the gospel
   works, the progress goes on, a grand, mighty progress, and there is
   really no retrocession. No river runs to the sea more certainly or
   steadily, than the great salvation by man runs to conquest and a
   kingdom. No reason why the world should continue? That is unbelief. Do
   the men who are lifted up to such grand heights by the progress of.
   society think so? No, there is reason enough to them, why the world
   should continue; they only steal our gospel and millenium, which, if we
   reclaim, we shall be as jubilant as they, with only so much better
   right.

   Let us also observe the beautiful delicacy of God in his plan of
   salvation. He is not willing to make it a salvation for man only, as I
   have said already, but contrives to make it also, as far as possible, a
   salvation by man. As the seed of the woman goes down, so he contrives
   to get a force into it that will finally bruise and trample its
   adversary. If he should do every thing simply as acting upon us, it
   would make us only underlings to eternity, waste timber of creation,
   that he has only gathered and stored for the dry-rot of a state of
   impotence, miscalled felicity. No, he wants to raise a character in us,
   and, to do this, requires a great hiding of power. He must contrive to
   put us a doing, in all that is to be done, striving to enter the
   straight gate, working out our salvation with fear and trembling, as
   only knowing by faith that he is working at all. And then his word of
   promise at the end will be--"to him that overcometh." The beauty, the
   delicacy, of his work is that he gets the force of it into our own
   bosom, and lets it work as if it were a part of ourselves. True it is
   all by Christ, and yet it is by the Christ within--the law of the
   Spirit of life in Christ Jesus. And so, instead of making his mercy a
   mere pity that kills respect, he makes it a power that lifts into
   character and everlasting manhood. He becomes a second Adam, a kind of
   better parentage in the race itself, and we rise by a new derivation
   that nowise shames our feeling, or shatters our confidence. How
   beautiful and tender the method! and when we conceive, in addition,
   that we ourselves are to preach, and live, and illustrate, and
   perpetuate, and spread, this gospel, having it as a gospel to prevail
   by man, what shall we feel eternally, but that our very sorrow and
   shame are ennobled by the grace we partake. And when we shall go home
   to be with Christ, Christ the faithful witness, and prince of the kings
   of the earth, what shall we do but confess, in loveliest homage--Unto
   him that loved us and washed us from our sins in his own blood; raising
   our finale also to sing, in the glorified majesty of our feeling--And
   hath made us kings and priests unto God.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                      XIV.

THE BAD CONSCIOUSNESS TAKEN AWAY.

   "Because that the worshipers, once purged, should have had no more
   conscience of sins."--Heb. x, 2.

   The reading is not, you observe, "conscience of no more sins,"--as if
   the sins were stopped, but "no more conscience of sins,"--as if the
   conscience of sins already past were somehow extirpated, or else the
   sins taken quite away from it and forever extirpated themselves, as
   facts, or factors of the life. And the allegation is, that while the
   old sacrifices of the law had power to accomplish no such thing, it is
   accomplished by the wonderful, seemingly impossible, efficacy of the
   gospel sacrifice. Those older sacrifices could not make the comers
   thereunto perfect--perfect, that is, as pertaining Ito the
   conscience--and therefore they must needs be renewed as remembrances of
   sin every year; but the offering of the body of Jesus, once for all,
   was sufficient; allowing us forever after to have no more conscience of
   sins. Now it is this practical wonder, this: seeming impossibility
   accomplished by the cross, to which I invite your attention on the
   present occasion. It is what our apostle elsewhere calls--The mystery
   of faith in a pure conscience.

   I fell in company, some years ago, with a college acquaintance--not a
   minister of religion, but a remarkably subtle, closely scientific
   thinker, and withal a devout Christian--who said to me, in a manner and
   tone of sensibility I can never forget--My great trial in religion is,
   to find how a clean bosom, in regard to sin, is ever possible. I can,
   not see how my sin can ever be really gotten away; indeed I fall into
   such darkness on this point, when I undertake to solve it, that I quite
   lose my faith in the possibility of a real deliverance, and feel
   obliged to say with David--"my Sin is ever before me." He went on to
   state his difficulty more fully, but as I have it on hand to make an
   exposition of the whole subject, the ground of his difficulty will be
   covered with much other ground beside. How then is it, or how is it to
   be imagined, that Christ, by his sacrifice, takes away the condemning
   conscience, or the felt dishonor of transgression? This is the question
   we are to consider, and, if possible, answer; in doing which I will--

   I. Go over, as briefly as may be, certain supposed answers, that do not
   appear to reach the real point of the question; and--

   II. Will endeavor to exhibit and support by sufficient illustrations
   what appears to be the true scriptural answer.

   I. The supposed answers that are not sufficient. They are various and
   very unlike among themselves; they still fall short, all of them, at
   the same point; viz., in the fact that they do not touch, or take away
   at all from the mind, or memory, or conscience, the fact and shame of
   wrong-doing. Be the remedy this or that, still the man, as a man, is
   none the less consciously guilty, none the less really dishonored,
   shamed, damned, before himself. There stands the fact, unmoved and
   immovable forever, that he is a malefactor soul, none the better for
   being safe, or forgiven, or justified.

   Thus, when it is conceived that Christ has borne our punishment, that,
   if it were true, might take away our fear of punishment, but fear is
   one thing, and mortified honor, self-condemning guilt, self-chastising
   remorse, another and Very different thing; and that will be only the
   more exasperated, that divine innocence itself has been put to
   suffering on its account.

   Neither will it bring any relief to show that the justice of God is
   satisfied. Be it so; the transgressor is none the better satisfied with
   himself--his own self-damning justice is as far from being satisfied as
   before.

   Is it then conceived that what has satisfied the justice of God, has
   also atoned the guilty conscience? Will it then make the guilty
   conscience less guilty, or say sweeter things of itself, that it sees
   innocence, purity, goodness divine, put to suffering for it? If any
   thing could exasperate, even insupportably, the sense of guilt, it
   should be that.

   Is it then brought forward to quell the guilt of the conscience that
   Christ has evened our account legally by his sacrifice, and that we are
   even justified of God, for Christ's sake? But if God, in this manner,
   and by a kind of benevolent fiction, calls us just, do we any the less
   certainly disapprove and damn ourselves even to eternity? Nothing it
   would seem can save us from it, but to lose the integrity of our
   judgments!

   Forgiveness taken as a mere release of claim, or a negative letting go
   of right against transgression, brings, if possible, even less help to
   the conscience. Christ had forgiven his crucifiers in his dying prayer,
   but it was the very crime of the cross, nevertheless, that pricked so
   many hundreds of hearts on the day of pentecost. Christ bad forgiven
   them, but their consciences had not!

   But Christ renews the soul itself, it will be said, and makes it just
   within; when, of course, it will be justified. That does not follow. If
   Judas at the very point where he confessed--"I have betrayed the
   innocent blood," could have been instantly transformed into an angel of
   beauty, his purified sensibility would have been shaken, I think, with
   a greater horror even of his crime than before.

   But the fatherhood of God--the disciple of another and different school
   will take refuge under that, and say, that here, at least, there is
   truly no more conscience of sins. Would it not be strange, if a
   tolerably good father can forgive and forget, and God can not? But who
   is God, and what most fitly represents him? a mortal father who is
   able, just because of his weakness, to forgive and forget, or to
   forgive without forgetting, or to forget without forgiving, or the
   transgressor's own everlasting immutable conscience, which can neither
   forgive nor forget? What is this conscience, in fact, but God's throne
   of judgment in the man? Why, if God, in his fatherhood, were such a
   kind of being, dealing in laxities and fond accommodations, having no
   care for his rectoral honor, as the defender of right and order, we
   certainly are not such to ourselves. A conscience that can say, "no
   matter, God is rather loose and very easy with his children, therefore
   I will be to myself as good as good in my sin, and let the matter
   go,?"--I certainly, for one, whatever may be said by others, have no
   conscience that can go in that loose gait. I love my conscience because
   it is the one thing in me that goes true and will unalterably,
   inevitably damn my wrongs, even if God should let them go. Nay, if God
   be such a God, it would even set me in a shudder, to find how easily I
   might sigh for a being whom I can more sufficiently respect.

   You perceive in this recital, my friends, how great a matter we have
   undertaken, and how very obstinate, or intractable, our difficulty is.
   Doubtless a foul vessel may be washed, a fracture mended, a personal
   injury redressed, a sick body restored to health and soundness, and
   dressed in a new covering of flesh; nay, there is a clear possibility
   of raising the dead to life, but to conceive a sinner so wrought in as
   to obliterate the fact of his sin, leaving no more conscience of it, is
   a very different matter, and if the possibility were not really: shown
   by the gospel itself, we must certainly give up the question, as one
   that we can not solve, by any faculty that God has given us. We come
   then--

   II. To the question as it is, and the answer given it by the scriptures
   of God.

   The great question meeting us at this point is, whether it is possible,
   or how far possible; to change the consciousness of a soul, without any
   breach of its identity? In this manner, we shall find, the gospel
   undertakes to remove, and assumes the fact of a removal of, the
   dishonor and self-condemnation of sin. But we shall conceive the matter
   more easily and naturally, if we notice, before going into the
   scripture inquiry, certain analogies discoverable in our human state,
   which may serve as approaches to the proper truth of the question.

   Thus a thoroughly venal, low-principled man, elected President of the
   United States, will undergo, not unlikely, an inward lifting of
   sentiment and impulse, corresponding with the immense lift of his
   position. The great honor put upon him makes him willing to honor
   himself. He wants to deserve his place and begins to act in character
   in it. He is the same man, regarding his personal identity, but he is
   raised, even to himself, in the grade he occupies. His old natural
   consciousness has a kind of Presidential consciousness superinduced,
   which holds a higher range of quality. He lives, in fact,
   Presidentially, and is dignified inwardly by the dignities of his
   position.

   How many thousand soldiers, who before were living in the low, mean
   vices, lost to character and self-respect, have been raised, in like
   manner, in our armies, to quite another grade of being. It has given
   them a wholly different sense of themselves, that their dear, great
   country has come upon them in so great power. They are consciously
   ennobled, in the fact that they have borne themselves heroically in the
   field; and are so become another kind of man even to themselves. They
   are the same, yet by a vast reach of distance not the same. A certain
   great something has come into their feeling. They stand more firmly,
   and bear themselves more erectly; and it gives them an-exultant feeling
   even, that their discouraged and miserably forlorn consciousness is
   gone--supplanted by the sense of self-respect, and manly honor.

   The same, again, is true in a different way, of all the gifted ones in
   art and speech and poetry, when they are taken by the inspirations of
   genius. When such a soul, that was down upon the level of uses,
   torturing itself into production for applause, or even for bread,
   begins to behold God's signatures upon his works, and worlds, and the
   magnificent discipline he gives us; discovering in objects ideas, in
   facts the faces of truth; catching also the fires of a Promethean heat
   from all subtlest moods and hardest flints of experience;--then it is
   become, to itself, quite another creature. It is as if the grub-state
   were gone by, and the winged life had broken loose, to try the freedom
   of the air. In that finer element he ranges at will, lifted by his
   etherial seership, to move in altitudes hitherto invisited; consciously
   another and different being--another, yet still the same.

   In these and other like examples, afforded us in the field of our
   natural life, we are made familiar with the possibility of remarkable
   liftings in the consciousness of men, such as make them really other to
   themselves, and set them in a higher range of being; and, by these
   examples, we are prepared, as it were beforehand, to that more
   wonderful ascent above ourselves which is accomplished in Christ, when
   he takes us away from the conscience of sins. He does it--this is the
   general, or inclusive truth that covers the whole ground of the
   subject--by so communicating God, or himself as the express image of
   God, that he changes, in fact, the plane of our existence. Without due
   note of this, we do not understand Christianity; the very thing it
   proposes is to bring us up into another level, where the consciousness
   shall take in other matter, and have a higher range. Thus, when the
   apostle says--"And hath raised us up together and made us sit together
   in heavenly places in Christ Jesus," he is speaking of a change purely
   internal, a conscious lifting to another grade of life, and a higher
   range of joy. The word places, here occurring, belongs to the English
   only, and it is put in to fill out the plural of the neuter adjective
   heavenlies, used here as a noun. But sitting in the heavenlies, does
   not mean, of necessity, sitting in other localities. It means sitting
   in heavenly things, as well; above the world, that is, and the flesh
   and sin, in the serene, pure element of God's eternal love and glory,
   there to be folded in harmony, raised in- consciousness, filled to the
   full with all God's heavenlies, even as his angels are; no more to be
   shamed forever by the little, defiled consciousness that is henceforth
   overspread, submerged, and drowned by the sea-full of God's infinite
   worthiness and righteousness wafted in upon it.

   Now it must not be imagined that this one passage of scripture stands
   by itself in asserting such a sentiment. The whole New Testament is
   full of it. "If ye then be risen with Christ seek those things which
   are above where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God,"--"Hath made
   us kings and priests unto God,"--"A chosen generation--a royal
   priesthood,"--"Partakers of the divine nature,"--"Sons of God,"--In all
   such modes of expression, and a hundred others that might be cited, we
   have the same thought breaking out on our discovery; that Christ is
   lifting us out of shame and condemnation, into a higher plane and a
   footing of conscious affiliation with God.

   But you will not conceive how very essential this idea of a raising of
   the consciousness may be, if you do not bring up distinctly the immense
   fall of our mortal consciousness, in the precipitation of our sin. In
   their true normal condition, as originally created, human souls are
   inherently related to God, made permeable and inspirable by him,
   intended to move in his divine impulse forever. A sponge in the sea is
   not more truly made to be filled and permeated by the water in which it
   grows, than a soul to be permeated and possessed by the Infinite Life.
   It is so made that, over and above the little, tiny consciousness it
   has of itself, it may have a grand, all-inclusive consciousness of God.
   In that consciousness it was to be, and be lifted and blessed evermore.
   The senses it should have of God, always present, were to be its
   dignity, its base of equilibrium, its everlasting strength, and growth,
   and majesty, and reigning power in good.

   But this higher consciousness, the consciousness of God, is exactly
   what was lost in transgression, and nothing was left of course but the
   little, defiled consciousness of ourselves, in which we are all
   contriving how to get some particles of good, or pleasure, or pride, or
   passion, that will comfort us. The great, inspirable, and divinely
   permeable faculty, is closed up. We do not know God any more, we only
   know ourselves. We have the eyes, and the ears, that were given us, but
   we are too blind to see, too deaf to hear--"Having the understanding
   darkened, being alienated from the life of God, through the ignorance
   that is in us because of the blindness of our heart." The true normal
   footing or plane of our humanity was thus let down, and it is exactly
   this which Christ undertakes to restore. And until that restoration is
   accomplished, the soul occupies a plane of mere self-knowing, and
   self-loving, and is, in fact, a lower order of being. It lives in the
   conscience of sins, a guilty, self-denouncing, and miserably shamed
   life. But as soon as it is opened to God, by the faith of Jesus Christ,
   and is truly born of God, it begins to be the higher creature God meant
   it to be--the same yet another. It is no more like the sponge stuck
   fast on some dry rock, but like the same, filled and vitalized by its
   own proper element, and spreading itself in its possessorship, so to
   speak, of the sea!

   It is of course to be admitted that the disciple, raised thus in his
   plane, has the same conscience, and remembers the same sins, and is the
   very same person that he was before; but the consciousness of God, now
   restored, makes him so nearly another being to himself, that the old
   torment of his sin will scarcely so much as ripple the flow of his
   peace. It takes, in fact, a considerable rock, a little way out from
   the shore, to do more than dimple or curl the tide-swell coming in; and
   the sea, at the full, will simply bury it. and hide it from the sight,
   in the depths of its own stillness. Or we may imagine, without much
   danger of extravagance, that when a soul is really filled with the
   higher consciousness, moving wholly in the divine movement, so great a
   lifting of character, and quality, and action, will carry it above the
   old range so completely, as to let the wrong and shame quite drop away;
   even as the insect creatures hovering on wings about us, flitting in
   swift motion, and playing with the air and the light, remember probably
   no more the cold, slow worms they were, when crawling, but a week ago,
   in the ground.

   You will understand, of course, that if Christ is purging thus men's
   consciences, by lifting them above themselves, into a higher range of
   life, the conception will appear and reappear, in many distinct forms,
   and weave itself, in so many varieties, into the whole texture of
   Christianity. Notice then three distinct forms, not to speak of others,
   in which this change of grade or personal consciousness comes into view
   as a mighty gospel fact.

   As the first of these, I name justification, or justification by faith.
   The grand last point or final. effect of Christian justification is,
   "no more conscience of sins;" for, having that accomplished, it is
   inconceivable that God should condemn us. when we do not condemn
   ourselves, and having it not accomplished, but condemning still
   ourselves, no justification by God will do us any good. But in this
   matter of justification, the less we make of the old standing
   alternative the better; what if it should happen that, while we are
   debating which of two conceptions is the true one, they are neither of
   them true? And so I think it will sometime be found. According to the
   scripture, which is very plain, gospel justification turns on no such
   mere objective matter as the squaring of an account; nor on any such
   subjective matter as our being made inherently righteous; but it turns
   on the fact of our being so invested with God, and closeted in his
   righteous impulse, that he becomes a felt righteousness upon us. Our
   consciousness is so far changed, in this manner, by the river-flood of
   God's character upon us, that, as long as our faith keeps the
   connection good, and permits the river to flow, we are raised above all
   condemnation and have no more conscience of sins. Inherently speaking
   we are not righteous; our store is in God not in ourselves; but we have
   the supply traductively from him, just as we do the supply of light
   from the sun. But the new divine consciousness in which we live is
   continually conforming us, more and more deeply, and will settle us, at
   last, in its own pure habit. In this manner, faith is counted to us for
   righteousness, because it holds us to God, in whom we have our springs
   of supply.

   See how beautifully and simply Paul sets forth this true Christian idea
   of justification--"But now the righteousness of God, without the law,
   is manifested, even the righteousness of God, which is by faith of
   Jesus Christ, unto all and upon all them that believe." It is not
   righteousness for us in a book, nor in us by inherent character, but
   righteousness unto us and upon us, in its own living flow, as long as
   we believe. It is a higher consciousness which God generates and feeds,
   and as long as he does it there is no more conscience of sins.

   This same truth of a raising of our plane appears in another form, in
   what is called the witness of the Spirit. "The Spirit itself beareth
   witness with our spirit that we are the children of God; and if
   children then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ." Here
   the conception is that, as being spirit, we are permeable by the divine
   Spirit, and that he has a way of working in our working, so as to be
   consciously known as a better presence in our hearts. And so we have
   the confidence of children or sons, raised in our before low-bred
   nature, and dare to count ourselves God's heirs--fellow heirs with
   Christ our brother. Nothing is said of sins in this connection, but we
   can see for ourselves that, being thus ennobled by the inflowing
   Spirit, we shall be too much raised in the confidence of our dignity,
   to be troubled, or shamed by the past. And this same lifting, or
   ennobling-of our spirit, is put in other forms of assertion; as when
   Christ, promising the Comforter, says--"At that day ye shall know that
   I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you." To be thus interlocked
   with the Father and the Son in a firm knowledge of the fact, revealed
   by the witnessing Spirit, is to have a consciousness opened that is
   dignity itself and glory begun. The same thing is put more practically,
   by the apostle, when he says--"Walk in the Spirit and ye shall not
   fulfill the lusts of the flesh." Keep fast in the higher element, where
   the senses of God and his joy are lifting the mind into liberty, and
   the lower and more carnal impulses will be left behind and forgot.

   Once more this grand fact of the gospel, the raising of our plane of
   being, is presented in a still different manner in what is said of the
   conscious inhabitation of Christ. "Christ in you the hope of
   glory,"--"But ye see me,"--"bide in me,"--"Until Christ be formed in
   you." But the great apostle to the Gentiles, himself a Christian man,
   all through, having that for his sublime distinction, declares himself,
   on this point, out of his very consciousness--"I am crucified with
   Christ, nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." It
   is, you perceive, as if his being itself were taken well nigh out of
   its identity by Christ revealed in it. The old sin--he does not think
   of it. The old I--why it is gone--"yet not I." He was going to say that
   he Paul was alive, but he did not like to say so much as that, and so
   he puts down his negative on it, and says he does not live. But O, the
   living, all-quickening Christ--that is boasting enough--"Christ liveth
   in me; for the life I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the
   Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." How great a fact was
   the lifting of this man's plane, which took him, demonized by bigotry
   and hate, and made him the hero and strangely Christed propagator of
   the cross. Then he was Saul, now he is Paul; but the change touches
   more than a letter--he is raised even in his own feeling to quite
   another order of being. The conscience of sins--it may be that he has
   it in a sense; for, being an eternal fact, he must eternally know it;
   but the Christ-consciousness in him ranges so high above the
   self-consciousness, that he lives in a summit of exaltation, which the
   infinitesimal disturbances of his human wrong and shame can not reach.

   Here then, my friends, you have opened to view one of the greatest
   triumphs of Christianity, perhaps the very greatest of all. To bring a
   clean thing out of: an unclean is a much easier matter than to make a
   good conscience out of an evil or accusing conscience. Here the
   difficulty appears to be a. kind of metaphysical impossibility. Indeed
   there is no philosopher, who would not say, beforehand, that such a
   thing is even demonstrably impossible. For if the accusing conscience
   accuses rightly, then it must either be extirpated, which decomposes
   the man, or else it must be suborned to give a lying testimony, when of
   course it will even condemn itself. But our gospel is able to look so
   great a difficulty in the face, and, what is more, turns it by a method
   so very simple as to be even sublime. When once you have conceived the
   possibility of raising a soul into a higher grade and order, where the
   consciousness shall take in more than the mere self, the body of God's
   own righteousness, and love, and peace, the problem is solved and that
   in a way so plain, yet so easily ennobling to our state of shame, that
   it proves itself by its own self-supporting evidence. This we say
   instinctively ought to be and must be true.

   Only the more strange is it that, when this way of remedy is, and no
   other can be, sufficient, we so easily fall out of our faith, and begin
   to put ourselves on methods of purgation that only mock our endeavor.
   Having the grand possibilities of a good conscience opened to us in
   Christ, and nothing given us to do but just to receive by faith the
   manifested righteousness of God, we begin to work, in the lower level
   of our shame, upon the shameful unclean matter, as if going to purge it
   ourselves. One will mend himself up in a way of self-correction; which,
   if he could do, would, alas, not even touch the conscience of his old
   sins. Another goes to the work of self-cultivation, where he may
   possibly start some plausible amenities on the top of his bad
   conscience, even as flowers will sometimes be induced to grow upon a
   glacier. Another will pacify his bad conscience by his alms and
   philanthropic sacrifices, when an avalanche on its way could as well be
   pacified by the same. Others will make up a purgation by their
   repressive penances and voluntary humiliations, when the very thing
   their consciences complain of is, that they are too miserably shamed
   and humiliated already. Multitudes also will expect much from
   purgatorial fires hereafter, as if being duly chastised could make a
   good conscience! or as if these supposed fires would not rather burn in
   the brand of sin than burn it out! Now these poor scanty methods of
   delusion, unlike as they are to each other, are just as good one as
   another, because they are all equally worthless. Who could believe that
   rational beings, having so grand a way open to the new footing of sons
   of God, and having once conceived that way, could yet subside into
   these wretched futilities?

   Worthier of sympathy but scarcely more worthy of the gospel name, are
   those hapless souls, who have fallen under their bad conscience to be
   forever harrowed and tormented by it. They have no faith to believe in
   a concrete, personal grace, and are only haunted by the nightmare of
   their moral convictions. They mope along their pathway therefore,
   looking always shamefully down; as if the sky above were paved with
   condemnations. If they bear the Christian name, they have yet no real
   peace, no sweet element of rest and confidence. They seem ever to be
   saying, "mine iniquities have taken hold upon me so that I am not able
   to look up." Or sometimes there is a trouble more specific--some one
   sin, the shame, the inward mortification, or damnation of which,
   follows them, day and night, and even year by year; a crime unknown to
   the world, but for which they inwardly blush, or choke with guilty
   pain, whenever it meets them alone. They seem to be even everlastingly
   dishonored before themselves. Perhaps they are, and fitly should be;
   but, my friends, there is a medicine for all such torments. Looking
   down upon your sins, or your particular sin, you can be, must be,
   everlastingly shamed; but if you can look away to Christ, take hold of
   Christ and rise with him, you shall go above your trouble, you shall be
   strong, and free, and full, and even righteous; established in all
   glorious confidence, because your very consciousness is lifted and
   glorified, by, what comes into it from God's eternal concourse and
   friendship.

   And here, just here, in fact, we strike the culminating point of wonder
   and glory in what Christ, by his more perfect offering, has been able
   and was even required to accomplish, to put us on a footing of complete
   salvation; viz., a restoration, forever, of the soul's lost honor. We
   could not take our place among the pure angels of God, and be really
   united to their blessedness, when we are inwardly self-disgusted,
   shamed, and even to be eternally stigmatized, by our condemning
   consciences. Nothing sufficiently restores us, which does not restore
   the mind's honor. And this, exactly, is our confidence; "that we are to
   be found unto praise, and honor, and glory, at the appearing of our
   Lord Jesus Christ." We are even called to "seek for honor, and glory,
   and immortality." What dishonor, what possible shame, can be our
   torment, when our very consciousness is robed in the righteousness of
   God? There is to be no more condemnation, no more conscience of sins;
   simply because we are so raised in the plane of our sentiment, and
   life, that we may think of ourselves, without any sense of dishonor
   upon us. We go in--heirs, sons, princes of God--joining ourselves
   boldly to all the royalties and sublime honors of the kingdom.

   Are there none of us, my friends, that have many times sighed after
   just this hope, nay, that are sighing for it now? You have lost
   forever, you say, the chastity of your nature, you are and must forever
   be a guilty man; how then can you ever think of yourself without
   mortification? Getting into heaven itself, what can you ever do with so
   many bad facts upon you, and a bad conscience in you testifying
   eternally against them? No! no! There is even to be given back the
   sense of honor that was lost. You shall go in, not to hang your head,
   but to hold it up in praise and confidence. Now that mighty word is
   fulfilled according to its utmost meaning--"raised up together to sit
   in the heavenlies." We are there "together" in the common fold, we
   "sit" there in a titled security, the "heavenlies" are all ours--the
   honor, the confidence, the peace, the praise. O my God, what reverence
   shall every creature have for every other, when thou puttest honor upon
   all! gathering in before thee, nothing which defileth, or abideth in
   shame, but only such as Christ hath raised to eternal honor, before
   both thee and--themselves!
     __________________________________________________________________

                                      XV.

THE BAD MIND MAKES A BAD ELEMENT.

   "Then answered the Jews and said unto him--say we not well, that thou
   art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?"--John viii, 48.

   It is often remarked as a curious, half ludicrous distinction of insane
   persons, that they look on others round them as being out of their
   head. And yet this kind of phenomenon is more or less observable, in
   all cases of diseased action, whether mental or spiritual; the subject
   sees his disorder, not in himself, but in the objects and conditions
   round him.

   Under the disease or disaffection called sin, the same is true; as we
   may see by the answer of these carping hypocrites, when Christ reproves
   their high pretenses, and sanctimonious lies. "You call yourselves
   children of Abraham," he says, "when you do none of his works, when
   your fatherhood is more truly discovered in the father of lies. And as
   he abode not in the truth, and has no truth in him, so because I tell
   you the truth ye believe me not." They feel the sharpness of the words,
   but do not perceive the solemn justice of the argument--throwing it
   captiously back upon him as in the text; "say we not well, that thou
   art a Samaritan and hast a devil?" Just as they should if his argument
   was true; for the men who have a devilish spirit are sure to see their
   devil objectively in others. There must be a devil on hand somewhere,
   they are sure, and who will expect them to find it where it is, in
   themselves? The truth accordingly which I now propose for your
   consideration is this:

   That a bad mind sees bad things, and makes to itself a bad element. In
   other words, a bad mind projects its own evils into persons and
   conditions round it; charging the pains of its own inward disorder to
   the objects that refuse to bless it, and counting, it may be, Christ
   himself a sting only of annoyance.

   It would be far more agreeable to me to assert this truth universally,
   or so as to include the good; showing how they convert all things to
   good by their bright and loving spirit, and how the stones even of the
   field are in league with them to bless them; but this would take me
   over too large a ground, and therefore I must be content to occupy you,
   for the time, with a subject not grateful in itself, hoping that you
   may even find the greater benefit in it. If the errand we are after is
   not pleasant, if it compels us to go burrowing into the dark,
   underground, abysses and pains of evil in the soul, let us not recoil
   from the task, because we find a great deal of our conceit inverted and
   a great many of our complaints of God and the world turned back upon
   ourselves.

   I do not mean, of course, to say, that we can have nothing to complain
   of, or that other men can not do us bitter wrongs. Neither do I
   undertake to say, that we shall not feel them. But he that suffers a
   wrong rightly, finds a law of compensation going with him, as with God,
   so that his injury, or injured feeling, is repaid many times over, like
   that of God, by the consciously sublime repose of his own
   self-approving spirit. And, this being true, it is only the bad mind in
   us, after all, that allows us to be really troubled and harassed by
   wrong. I will only add that what I am going to say may seem to be an
   over-statement, or exaggeration of the truth, without this
   qualification, and must therefore ask to have it remembered.

   We shall best open the gate of our argument on this subject, if we
   notice two great facts, or laws of our nature, which are the ground of
   this tendency in us to refer our own evils to things about us, and in
   the same way to keep us from a discovery of them as being in ourselves.

   First, by a fixed necessity of language, we are obliged, apart from all
   the blinding effects of our sin, to represent. a great part of what
   transpires in our experience, in a way of objective description. For
   example, it is the natural way of language to call things "hot,"
   "sweet," "bitter," and the like, when in fact the words really describe
   nothing but our own inward sensations. So we say that a "subject is
   dark," not because there is any thing dark in the subject, but that we
   are dark to it. So again we say. that a thing bears a "suspicious
   look," when we are suspicious of it; or of some spectacle that it "is
   fearful," when we are fearfully moved by it. We speak in the same way
   of "taking our chances" and "meeting our dangers," when in fact there
   is neither chance nor danger in things at all, but only an absolute
   certainty that this or that will take place. The uncertainty, or
   ignorance of what is to come is in us, and we call it chance or danger
   in things. Now the great part of mankind go through life, using every
   hour these objective terms of language, without ever once suspecting
   that what they describe as without, is nothing but an experience within
   themselves. Almost all staple words of language, as related to our
   inward experience, are of just this kind; it could not, as might easily
   be shown, have been otherwise. In this manner, we put almost all that
   we suffer, enjoy, feel, and think, into the objects and doings and
   characters round us, not understanding that what we figure, as in them,
   is really transpiring in ourselves--just as we say, how often, that we
   have "taken a cold," and verily believe that a cold something, we know
   not what, has seized us; whereas we have simply gotten up a
   fever--probably by over-indulgence--and then the shiverings and
   atmospheric chills that follow we take for the causes of the mischief.

   But there is another great condition, or law of experience in bad
   minds, that is operating always and more powerfully in the same
   direction. A bad mind lives in things and for things, or we might
   rather say, under things. Condition, pleasure, show, are its god. And
   then it follows that the worship is only another name for distemper,
   unreason, hallucination. It is not positively insane, but what is very
   nearly the same thing, unsane--a nature out of joint, poisoned, racked
   with pains, a cloudy, wild, ungoverned, misconceiving power. It knows
   nothing but things, and if things do not bless it, what can it do but
   fall to cursing them? Being a distempered organ, it sees its distempers
   only in things and conditions round it. Thus when a diseased ear keeps
   up a nervous drumming in the brain, all sweetest music will have that
   drumming in it. So if the taste is bittered by some dyspectic woe, it
   will find that bitter savor in all most delicate things, and even in
   the pure waters of the spring. So also, I suppose, if the humors of the
   eye were jaundiced, the pure light of heaven would be yellowed also.
   Even the sun is smoky, seen through a smoked glass. Just so we are
   meeting all sorts of bitter, painful, and bad things, in our life, just
   because we are bitter, painful, bad, ourselves, and can not see that
   this is the root of our misery.

   Besides it is a fact, under this great law of retributive disorder,
   that even good things are really bad to our feeling, because there is a
   bad mind in us. They are not given to be our torment, but the
   subjective badness of the soul makes them so; just as the weakness of
   the diseased eye makes the light a cause of injury and pain. The light
   is not bad in itself, but the receiving organ is bad, and so the pure
   light, image itself of God, shoots in arrows of pain that sting the
   body. In the same way selfishness and sin make the whole soul a
   diseased receiving organ; when, of course, every thing received or
   looked upon is bad, and imparts some kind of pain. The good law is made
   death unto it, Christ himself a savor of death. Truth is bad to us,
   holy men are a disturbance, life a burden, death a terror, heaven
   itself a world of constrained service and unreal or impossible joy.

   We come now to the matter of fact itself. Is it only theory of which we
   have been speaking, or is it fact?

   Here we make our appeal first of all to the scripture, where the
   illustrations are manifold and striking. There was never among men a
   more inoffensive, winning, and beautiful character than Joseph. But his
   brethren hated him and could not speak peaceably to him--hated him so
   intensely that they were willing to put him out of the way, by almost
   any method, however cruel. They talked with one another about him,
   painted him as a selfish, proud brother, and set him off in the most
   odious colors. Having a bad mind towards him, they saw only bad and
   hateful things in him. But the bad things were all in themselves, not
   in him. His only crime was his worth, and the beauty of his spirit, and
   that God, on this account, had advanced him, giving him the precedence
   his character deserved. So with Saul; the devil of jealousy creeps into
   his morbid, selfish heart, and he sees in David, the faith-.ful servant
   of his throne, a scheming usurper only and traitor, waiting to vault
   into his place. He is wrought up thus to such a pitch of fear and
   malice, that, in one of his paroxysms, he hurls a javelin at his head.
   The evil he sees in David is really in his own wild, ugly passion, but
   instead of strangling that, he tries to murder him!

   Equally mad, exceedingly mad, almost conscientiously mad; as he himself
   relates, was Saul, the young rabbi of Tarsus, though in a different
   vein. The fiery young zealot was hot against Jesus, hot against
   Stephen, hot also against all the disciples of the new religion; but
   the heat of his passion he afterwards discovered was in the bad fire of
   his own bad mind, and the miserable bigotry that possessed him.

   It is also a fact most remarkable, evincing the same thing, that Jesus
   Christ, the only spotless and perfect character that ever breathed the
   air of our planet, was more accused and hated, and charged with worse
   crimes, than it ever fell to the lot of any mortal to perpetrate. He
   was not only a Samaritan and had a devil, but he cast out devils by a
   devil, he broke the Sabbath, he was a mover of sedition, he made
   himself equal with God, he spoke blasphemy, he was a conspirator
   against Cæsar, his silence was called obstinacy, his eating and
   drinking gluttony and drunkenness, his cross the proof of his weakness
   and a fit mark for jeering, his death his defeat as an impostor and his
   final expulsion from the world. And yet there was nothing in him to
   irritate, or anger good men. His life was beauty itself, his spirit
   breathed the pure benignity even of God. Yes, and for just this reason,
   he disturbed the bad mind of men only the more bitterly. Troubled,
   heated, moved with jealousy, convinced of evil, they all rushed upon
   him as the troubler; becoming, at last, so exasperated against him, as
   to break out--priests, rabbis, senators, soldiers, populace--crying,
   all with one voice, crucify him, crucify him. See them gathering round
   his cross, hear their coarse mockeries and jeers! the poor fools have
   no thought or suspicion, that they are raging, in this diabolical
   malice, against exasperating causes that are after all in themselves!

   The same truth is continually thrust upon our observation, in the
   intercourse of life. The passionate, ill-natured man is an example,
   living always in stormy weather, even though it be the quiet of
   dew-fall round him--always wronged, always hurt, always complaining of
   some enemy. He has no conception that this enemy is in his own
   bosom--in the sourness, the ungoverned irritability, the habitual
   ill-nature of his own bad spirit and character. I speak not here of
   some single burst of passion, into which a man of amiable temper may,
   for once, be betrayed; but I speak, more especially, of the angry
   characters--always brewing in some tempest of violated feeling. They
   have a great many enemies, they are unaccountably ill-treated, and can
   not understand why it is. They have no suspicion that they see and
   suffer bad things because they are bad, that being ill-natured is about
   the same thing as having ill-treatment, and that all the enemies they
   suffer from are snugly closeted in their own devilish temper.

   The same is true of fretful persons--men and women that wear away fast
   and die, because they have worried life completely out. Nothing goes
   right; husband, or wife, or child, or customer, or sermon. They are
   pricked and stung at every motion they make, and wonder why it is that
   others are permitted to float along so peacefully, and they never
   suffered to have a moment of peace in their lives! And the very simple
   reason is that life is a field of nettles to them, because their
   fretful, worrying tempers, are always pricking out, through the tender
   skin of their uneasiness. Why, if they were set down in Paradise,
   carrying their bad mind with them, they would fret at the good angels,
   and the climate, and the colors even of the roses.

   The animosities of the world are commonly to be solved in the same
   way--"Hateful and hating one another." A purely good mind would not
   hate even the worst of enemies and wrong-doers, but would. have a
   sublime joy in loving him still. Thus we have one kind of enmity that
   hates differences of thought and sentiment, and is continually rasped
   by the fact that other men are so generally wrong-headed. Commonly the
   difficulty is prejudice, or bigotry in ourselves, reigning as a narrow,
   self-willed principle in the heart. Another misery we suffer, in the
   pride, and the high airs, and the ambition, and the undeserved
   successes of others. We wish there was some justice in the world, and
   that such people had their due! This now is envy in the soul,
   green-eyed, sick, self-tormenting envy. Then, again, we have it as
   another form of misery, that, having injured some one, we for that
   reason hate him; and there is no hatred so implacable, so bitter, and
   so like the pain of hell, as that which a man has to one whom he has
   injured--not to one who has injured him, but to one whom he has injured
   himself. And yet he will charge it not to himself, but only to the
   unaccountable fact, that the object of his malice must be so bad, so
   unmitigably hateful.

   So again in regard to things of condition. The poor hypochondriac is
   just ready to be stranded in utter poverty and distress, though he
   holds, it may be, millions of property. We laugh at the strange fatuity
   he suffers. But every selfish mind is in it, only in some different
   way, or in some less exaggerated and palpably absurd form. Thus, what
   care, fear, anxiety, hunger, eagerness, is there in the world; and the
   secret of it is, that we are all imagining some fault in our condition.
   We want condition. Our thirsty, weary, discontented soul finds all it
   wants of blessedness denied, and wonders why it is that God has given
   us such a miserable desert to live in; as if the desert were in the
   world and not in ourselves--an immense Sahara wider than Africa knows!
   Why, if we were in the midst of God's own paradise, carrying our bad
   mind with us, we should see the desert there. The inward dearth and
   desolation of a mind separated from God and the all-sufficing rest and
   fullness of his peace, would raise mutinous questions and harsh
   accusations of dryness, against the finest, most superlative felicity
   God has ever been able to invent for his angels themselves.

   Let us not omit to notice that the immoralities and crimes of the world
   are commonly conceived, by those who are in them, to be not of
   themselves, but to be chargeable on the bad causes round them. What is
   more continually asserted by thieves and gamblers, than the maxim that
   the world owes them a living; till, finally, they half teach themselves
   to feel that the world wrongs them, because it does not pay what it
   owes, but requires them to take the pay as they may find it. Whereas
   the bottom fact of all is, that they hate the bad necessity of work.
   The blasphemer, raging in a storm of imprecations and swearing by all
   sacred names--he is saying inwardly, even if no one remonstrates with
   him, how can I help it? an angel would speak some bad words, if he had
   such a horse as this to manage, or such a neighbor to deal with. The
   poor victim of drink--was he not disinherited by his father? or broken
   down by the slanders of enemies? or troubled by loads of debt from
   misfortunes that overtook him? Or married to a wife who was a perpetual
   thorn to his peace? Was he not driven by the bad world somehow, as he
   manages to think himself, into this mode of drowning his misery? And so
   of the traitor hatching his treason--whole states of traitors hatching
   public treasons. Listen to their grievances--all in others, none in
   themselves. They have been injured, or insulted, or at any rate they
   were going to be. They are hot with the sense of injury not yet
   arrived, and must have their redress! Farewell order! welcome anarchy
   and blood! What an example of human passion, seeing worlds of wrong and
   enmity through the smoke of its own guilty jealousies, and the rampant
   fury of its own domineering habit.

   Such is human nature in its bad estate everywhere. No sin sees its own
   evil; but the world is evil, everything is evil to it. Even truth is
   evil. Why should the preacher come to us with so many unwelcome
   messages? as if it were not enough to be dragged through such a world
   as this, without being disturbed all the way by hard accusations! It
   may be that we all sin; but the circumstances we live in are all bad,
   and what do we do, but what the circumstances make us. Let the preacher
   charge upon the circumstances! When they are not really angry at the
   truth, how many hearers dislike it. Little conception have they that
   the badness of the sermon is in themselves--"Say we not well, thou art
   a Samaritan and hast a devil?"

   The subject I have now endeavored to illustrate is itself a purely
   practical subject, and yet a great many practical things beside are
   opened by it, that do not seem, at first, to be included. And--

   1. It puts in a sad light of evidence what may well enough be called
   the weak point of Christianity; viz., the fact that the souls to be
   saved will be always seeing themselves in it, and not seeing it as it
   is--turning it thus into an element as dry as their dryness, as bitter
   as their bitterness, as distasteful and oppressive as their own weak
   thraldom under sin. And so it turns out that Christ is dry, bitter, a
   hard yoke, any thing but what he is. O, what power would there be in
   his love, and beauty, and divine greatness, if it were not for this.
   The grand difficulty in the way of a general conversion is, that the
   bad minds of the world so immediately convert the gospel into their own
   figure. Christ is to them a root out of a dry ground, having no form or
   comeliness, and no beauty to be desired--they turn away their faces, he
   is despised and not esteemed. And what does he propose, in their view,
   but to make them like himself, laying it upon them also to be roots out
   of a. dry ground, even as they are to follow him in self-denial,
   self-sacrifice, and bearing the cross. "These you propose to us," they
   say, "for our allotment; and what shall we have after we have
   sacrificed ourselves in this manner, and given up even our souls to the
   perdition of righteousness?" Every good and great thing offered is
   discolored from the bad color of their own bad state. And so the
   perpetual danger is, that what is given for their life, will be only a
   savor of death. Even the liberty of Christ appears to be only a way of
   thraldom--how can they imagine that the only real liberty of mind is
   the liberty of being in the truth, and the only possession of self the
   loss of self in God? And so it comes to pass that our gospel--mighty,
   gracious, captivating enough, we might think, to make an easy conquest
   of the world--dwindles sadly and gets fatally stifled, because it can
   not be to men's eyes, what it really is in itself. It can not be the
   salvation it would, just because a salvation is wanted.

   It used to be frequently taught that men have no susceptibility that
   can be acted on by the gospel, save in a way of revulsion; that they
   must be only more exasperated by it, the more powerfully they are made
   to feel it. No, the difficulty commonly is that they project their own
   bad state into it, so as to almost shut away the feeling of it. As far
   as they do feel it they are drawn by the beauty of it--sometimes
   powerfully drawn--but alas! how soon is it discolored by their own
   turbid state, and the power it was going to have subsides into
   weakness.

   2. We here perceive what is the true value of condition. I do not
   blame, of course, a proper attention to condition--it is even a duty.
   But the notion that we are really to make our state as bad or good by
   the surroundings of life, and not by what is within us, not only
   violates the scripture counsel, but; quite as palpably, the dictates of
   good sense--it is in fact the great folly of man. For a bad mind is of
   necessity its own bad state, and that state will be just as bad as the
   man is to himself, neither more nor less, come what may. A bad temper,
   a wrong love, an ungoverned pride, a restive ambition, a fretful,
   irritable, discontented habit within--why if a man had a den of vipers
   within, they would not make a state for him more absolutely than these.
   The surroundings of condition are to the man what the cloak is to the
   body, and the man who hid the fox under his cloak and hugged him close,
   till he gnawed into his vitals, might as well have been thinking to be
   happy because of his cloak, as any bad soul to be happy in sin because
   of condition. O, that men could be so far disenchanted of this devil
   that possesses their understanding, as to see how certain it is that
   their condition, after all, is what they are themselves; that it can be
   only bad as long as they are bad, even if all the riches and power and
   splendor of the world were laid at their feet; and can be only good, if
   good is the spirit and the inward element of their life. Toil on, O ye
   slaves, contrive, and strive, and thrust yourselves on to riches and
   power; and then, at the end, discover that you have only gilded your
   misery, and built you a condition of more splendid sorrow; embittering
   bitterness by the mockery you offer to its comfort. Still you will see
   without, just what you are within, and the curse that is in you will
   curse every thing round you. The down you sleep on will be hard as your
   heart is, the silk that robes you will be a vesture of nettles to your
   ugly tempers, the coach in which you ride will answer to the jolting,
   night and day, of your bad conscience and your unsteady, gusty
   passions. If the bad state is in you, then every thing is bad, the
   internal disorder makes all things an element of disorder--even the sun
   in the sky will be your enemy.

   3. We discover in this subject, what opinion to hold of the meaning and
   dignity of the state sometimes called misanthropy. Misanthropy is the
   state of mind that distastes men, the world, and life, and withdraws
   itself, more or less completely, into a feeling of self-justifying and
   self-isolating enmity. It is the sentimental state of wickedness, or
   wicked feeling, and is more common to youth than to persons of a later
   age. For some reason they are not happy; they begin to sympathize with
   themselves; they imagine how bad men are, and dislike them because they
   are selfish, or proud, or unjust to merit; they disapprove the scheme
   of life, it is such a miserable affair, an experience so dull and so
   generally contemptible; they read Lord Byron, steeping their souls in
   his poetic hate, and specially sympathizing with the truculent
   sentiment of his Cain, retiring Cain-like, as it were, into the
   felicity of a self-justifying malice, to look out upon the world and
   curse it. Now the bottom of their woe, if they could dispossess
   themselves of a little vanity, is that they are bad themselves. If they
   have such a hatred of men, are they not men themselves? and is it not
   probable enough that they have some as good title to distaste
   themselves? Is there not another, in the next house, or chamber, who is
   hating men, disgusted with men, just as they are? This very foolish
   state of mind has one legitimate cure, and one that is true reason
   itself, viz., conviction of sin. As soon as they can pass on just one
   step farther, and see that what they so much distaste is themselves,
   and that all the badness of the bad world is in their own bad spirit,
   they are in a way to come at the true remedy. Accordingly it is in just
   this manner that the Holy Spirit often leads to Christ. The man begins
   to be sick and weary, sick in mind and so in body, for a full half of
   the sicknesses of the body are only distempers of the mind; the world
   palls and grows distasteful; he sympathizes with himself, in a manner
   of inward complaint, draws off from that which does not satisfy, and
   loosens a kind of sentimental animosity towards men and things. But the
   load grows heavier, chafing through the skin of his conceit into the
   nerves of conviction; misanthropy changes to self-disgust; the secrets
   of the heart are opened; the conscience breaks restraint; and finally
   it stands revealed that sin is in the soul--a bondage, a disease, a
   shame, a curse. And now the question is who can heal the inward
   bitterness? Misanthropy, then, and world sickness are the bad state
   felt, conviction of sin is the bad state understood. That is a
   conceited misery, this the shame of a self-discovering weakness, guilt,
   and spiritual disorder.

   4. It is clear, in this subject, that we have little reason for
   troubling ourselves in questions that relate to a place of future
   misery. Enough to know that the mind is its own place, and will make a
   place of woe to itself, whithersoever it goes, in a life of sin and
   separation from God. If the sceptic bolts upon us with the question,
   where is hell? or the question, whether we suppose that a God of
   infinite goodness has occupied himself in excavating and fashioning a
   local state for the torment of bad men? it is enough to answer that a
   bad mind carries a hell with it, excavates its own place of torment,
   makes it deep and hot as with fire, and will assuredly be in that
   place, whatever else may be true. A good mind sits in heavenly places,
   because it is good. Go where it will it is with God, and God is templed
   eternally in it; God in his own everlasting beatitude and peace.
   Exactly what is true of place beyond this, or of place as related to
   the condition of happy spirits, we do not know, but shall know
   hereafter. Enough that the bad mind will at least be its own bad state
   and element. It has the fire and brimstone in itself, and the
   suffocating smoke, and the darkness, and the thirst, and the worm that
   never dies--testifying always, "I myself am Hell." It would turn the
   golden pavement into burning marl, and the hymns and hallelujahs of the
   blessed into shrieks of discord.

   Finally, it is evident in these illustrations, that the salvation of
   man is possible, only on the ground of a great and radical change in
   his inmost temper and spirit. What is wanted for the felicity of man is
   clearly not a change of place, or condition, but a change in that which
   makes both place and condition what they are. The bad spirit--this is
   the woe; and nothing cures the woe, but that which changes the spirit
   of the mind. Marvel not at this; you have only to take one glance at
   the world, turn one thought upon yourselves, to see it. Hence it is
   that Christ has come into the world as the physician of souls--it is
   that he may impart to them a new life and spirit from himself, and heal
   the disorders of their bad state, by uniting them to his own person.
   Think it not strange that he proposes thoughts to you so different from
   your own. O, ye weary ones, all ye desolate, all ye tossed with tempest
   and not comforted, all ye world-sick and heavy hearted, hear ye his
   call--"come unto me and I will give you rest." Why, my friends, what
   does it mean that we are such a malcontent, miserable race of beings?
   Did not a good God make us and the world we live in? Why then are we so
   continually plagued and tormented in it? Why so hungry, so dry, so
   empty, so bitter, so like the troubled sea and the mire and dirt it
   casts up in its storms? Has God made some mistake in mixing the
   ingredients of our state? No, it is we that make all this discord, we
   that mix in the acid ingredients of misery. The moment you can enter
   back, out of sin, into this pure element of love in Christ, this world
   becomes a realm of peace, a paradise of beauty, a feast of satisfying
   good, an instrument of joyous harmony. Change the inward state and all
   is changed. Ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace, the
   mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and
   all the trees of the hills shall clap their hands.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                      XVI.

PRESENT RELATIONS OF CHRIST WITH HIS FOLLOWERS.

   "Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away and come again unto
   you."--John xiv, 28.

   To go away and come again, or to go away in order to come again, would
   seem, taking the words -at their face, to be a rather idle or unmeaning
   operation; but if we can get far enough into the mind of Christ to
   apprehend his real meaning, we shall find that he is proposing, in
   these words, a change of the greatest consequence--a change that is
   necessary to the working plan of his gospel and even to the complete
   value of his incarnation itself. In what sense then he is going, and in
   what sense he will come again, what change of relationship he will
   inaugurate between himself and his followers, and so what kind of
   personal relation he undertakes to hold with them now, is the subject
   to which I call your attention this morning, as one of intense
   practical interest, and even of the tenderest personal concern.

   Whoever has reflected much upon the subject of the incarnation has
   discovered that its value depends on brevity of time, and that no such
   condition could be permanent, without becoming a limitation upon itself
   and a real hindrance to its own objects. Remaining permanently on earth
   in the body, Christ, plainly enough, could never have extended his rule
   into parts remote, or to persons debarred by distance from the external
   modes of access and acquaintance. The incarnation, therefore, requires
   shortly to be inverted. After the immense new revelation, or new
   salvation, of God has been accomplished, by such a manifested presence
   and divine life in the flesh, there needs, just as truly, to be a
   withdrawment from the eyes; otherwise Christ, remaining in the world
   and permanently fixed in it, could only gather a small circle about
   him, and become the center of an outward Lama worship, as restricted as
   the mere sight, or appearing, of the divine man-idol requires it to be.

   Therefore he says--"it is expedient for you that I go away," adding the
   promise--"I will come to you." He means, by this, that the time has now
   arrived, when there must be a change of administration; when he must
   needs be taken away from the eyes, and begin to be set in a new
   spiritual relation, which permits a universal access of men to him, and
   a universal presence of him with them--so a grand, world-wide kingdom.
   Saying nothing of the particular objects to be gained by his death, he
   could not stay here and carry on his work; he had as many friends now
   as 6he could speak with, or allow to speak with him; and if he should
   remain, holding fixed locality, as of a body in space, he could be the
   head only of a coterie, never of a kingdom. What is wanted now is an
   unlocalized, invisible, spiritually present, everywhere present,
   Saviour; such as all may know and receive, being consciously known and
   received by him.

   And this will be his coming again, or his second coming--such a kind of
   coming as shows him bearing rule in Providence, and riding in the
   clouds of heaven--rolling on the changes, unfolding the destinies of
   time, and preparing his universal kingdom. The world, he says, seeth me
   no more, but ye see me; and having your spiritual eye open for this, it
   will be as if you saw me coming triumphantly in the clouds. This image
   is a well-known Eastern figure of princely pomp and majesty; they say
   of every great monarch, taking ascendancy, that he rides on the clouds
   of heaven. So, as Christ comes on, bearing sway and ruling invisible,
   it will be as if he were seen coming on overhead, in the clouds. And
   especially will this be felt when Jerusalem the Holy City is blotted
   out, as it were by God's hand of judgment upon it, in the conquest by
   Titus. By that sign goes out the old, exclusive, Jew-state; and there
   comes in after it, now to have its place, the Christian, catholic, free
   state, that is to be gathered under the universal, spiritual headship
   of Christ. That gathering in, as in power, is to be his coming, or
   coming again--no bodily appearing, no visible pomp, no manifestation
   locally as in space; for the very thing that made it expedient for him
   to go away from the senses, forbids any such outward manifestation. And
   therefore be adds a caution, telling his disciples expressly, that his
   coming thus again is not to be a coming with observation. There shall
   be no calling "Lo, here is Christ, or lo, there," "behold he is in the
   desert," "behold he is in the secret chambers." The power in which he
   comes will be morally diffusive and secretly piercing--"as the
   lightning cometh out of the east and shineth even unto the west, so
   also shall the coming of the Son of Man be."

   In all which Christ, you will perceive, is proposing to do exactly
   nothing which many of his disciples, specially taken by the faith of
   his second coming, so fervently preach and so earnestly magnify. They
   believe that he is to come in a body, and be visible as in body. He
   will of course be here or there in space, a locally present being, at
   some particular geographic point--Jerusalem, or London, or Rome, or
   going about in all places by turns. Hearing now that he is here, or
   there, we shall think no more of seeing him by faith, and begin to
   think of seeing him with our eyes. Every ship that sails will be
   crowded with eager multitudes pressing on to see the visible Christ.
   Thronging in thus, month by month, a vast seething crowd of pilgrims,
   curious and devout, poor and rich, houseless all and hungry, trampling
   each other, many of them sick, not one of them in the enjoyment truly
   of God's peace, not one of a thousand getting near enough to see him,
   still fewer to hear him speak--how long will it take under such kind of
   experience to learn what Christ intended and the solid truth of it,
   when he said--"it is expedient for you that I go away." Nothing could
   be more inexpedient, or a profounder affliction, than a locally
   descended, permanently visible, Saviour. How much better a Saviour
   present everywhere, and at all times; a Saviour who can say, "Lo, I am
   with you always," and make the promise good; one whom the heart can
   know, as being at rest in him, and behold, as. by faith; wheeling his
   chariot on through all the tumults and overturnings of time, till his
   universal kingdom is complete.

   I am well aware that our brethren, who look for Christ's visible
   coming, will not allow the inconveniences, or almost absurdities, I
   have here sketched, to be any proper results of their doctrine. "We
   believe," they will say, "that he will come in a spiritual body, such
   as he had after his resurrection, not in a coarse, material body. It
   will be such a body that he can be here, or there, at any given moment,
   hampered by no conditions of space; even as he came into the room where
   his disciples were gathered, when the doors were shut." But they only
   impose upon themselves by such a conception. If their spiritual body is
   to be visible, it must be as in space and outward appearing; for that
   is the condition of all visibility. And then we have a flitting
   Saviour, breaking out here or there, at what time, or on what occasion,
   no mortal can guess. And the result will be that they are in a worse
   torment than they would be, if he were established in some known
   locality. Going after their eyes, they are taken off from all faith,
   and where their eyes shall find him they know not.

   Pardon me then if I suggest the suspicion that they are more carnal in
   their expectation than they know. If it is so much better to have a
   visible Saviour, are they not more weary of faith than they should be,
   and secretly longing, catching at straws of prophecy, to get away from
   it? There is nothing, I must frankly say, that would be so nearly a
   dead loss of Christ to any disciple who knows him in the dear
   companionship of faith, as to have him come in visible show; either
   setting up his reign at some geographic point, or reigning aerially, in
   some flitting and cursitating manner which can not be traced. How
   beautifully accessible is he now everywhere, present to every heart
   that loves him; consciously dear, as friend, consoler, guide, and stay,
   in all conditions; close at hand in every sinking ship. in the
   uttermost parts of the sea; the sweet joy of dungeons under ground,
   where there is no light to see him in a body; immediately and
   all-diffusively present, to comfort every sorrow, support every
   persecution, and even to turn away the tempting thought before it
   comes. A Saviour in the body and before the eyes can serve no such
   offices. None can find him, but them that come in his way, or chance to
   spy him with their eyes.

   We have no want then of a locally related, that is of a bodily resident
   Saviour; we perceive, without difficulty, the expediency of which
   Christ speaks, that he should go away and not continue the incarnate,
   or visible state, longer than to serve the particular objects for which
   he assumed that state. But he gives us to understand, that he is not
   going to be taken utterly away in the proposed removal, but rather to
   be as much closer to his disciples as he can be, when all conditions of
   time and space are cast off. And accordingly the question rises at this
   point, how is Christ related now to the knowledge and friendship of his
   people? "Ye have heard how I said unto you I go away and come again
   unto you." And again--"I will not leave you comfortless, I will come to
   you." And again--"but ye see me." And again--"Lo, I am with you
   always." He evidently means to put himself thus in a practically close
   and dear relation with his people--what is that relation? how set open?
   how maintained?

   Obviously what we want ourselves, is to be somehow with him, and to
   know that he is with us. We want a social, consciously open state with
   him, as real as if he were with us bodily, and as diffusive as if he
   were everywhere; thus to have a personal enjoyment of him, and rest in
   the felt sympathies of his personal companionship. This, too, exactly
   is what he means to allow us; not in the external way, but in a way
   more immediate, and blessed, and evident, and as much more beneficial.
   If we had him with us in the external way, as his own disciples had,
   when they journeyed, and talked, and eat, and slept, in his company, we
   should be living altogether in our eyes, and not in any way of mental
   realization. And, as a result, we should not be raised and exalted in
   spiritual force, or character, as we specially need to be. What we
   want, therefore, is to have a knowledge of him, and presence and
   society with him, that we can carry with us, and have as the secret
   joy, and strength, and conscious blessing of our inmost life itself;
   that we may see him, when we are blind and can see nothing with our
   eyes; that we may hear him speak, when we are deaf and can hear nothing
   with our ears; that we may walk with him, when we can not walk at all;
   sit in heavenly places with him, when we can not sit at all; rise with
   him when he rises, reign with him when he reigns; never away from him,
   even when beyond the sea, or passing through the valley of the shadow
   of death.

   Now it is just this relation that he undertakes to fill, when he goes
   away. Being himself a Comforter, [Paraclete,] for this is the word
   translated Advocate, he promises "another Comforter;" that is, in some
   proper sense, another self. Indeed, he really calls the Comforter
   promised, another self; for he says expressly, in this very
   connection--"Even the Spirit of truth, whom the world can not receive
   because it seeth him not; neither knoweth him, but ye know him; for he
   dwelleth with you and shall be in you;" striking directly into the
   first person, to say the same thing over again, as relating to
   himself--"Yet a little while and the world seeth me no more, but ye see
   me; because I live, ye shall live also. At that day ye shall know that
   I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you." And then, to be still
   more explicit, he gives the promise, that whosoever of his followers
   follows faithfully, keeping his commandments, shall have the immediate
   manifestation always of his presence--"I will manifest myself unto
   him,"--"If a man love me he will keep my words, and my Father will love
   him, and we will come unto him and make our abode with him."

   The great change of administration thus to be introduced, by the going
   away and coming again, includes several points that require to be
   distinctly noted.

   1. That Christ now institutes such a relationship between him and his
   followers, that they can know him when the world can not. Before this,
   the world had known him just as his disciples had, seeing him with
   their eyes, hearing his doctrine, observing his miracles, but now he is
   to be withdrawn, so that only they shall see him--"the world seeth him
   not." As being rational persons, they may recollect him, they may read
   other men's recollections of him, but his presence they will not
   discern, he is not manifest unto them, but only to his followers. He
   that loveth knoweth God, and he only.

   2. It is a point included that the new presence, or social
   relationship, is to be effected and maintained by the Holy Spirit, the
   Comforter. And he it is that Christ, in the promise, calls so freely
   himself. The. New Testament writings are not delicate in maintaining
   any particular formula, or scheme of personality, as regards the
   distributions of Trinity. They call the Spirit "the Spirit of Christ."
   They say, "God hath sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts." They
   speak of "the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ." They speak also of
   "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus." They say, "the Lord
   [Christ] is that Spirit." Christ also is shown, more than once,
   fulfilling the official functions of the Spirit; as in Paul's
   conversion, where the invisible Christ, that is the Spirit, says "I am
   Jesus of Nazareth whom thou persecutest;" or again, when Paul himself
   describes his conversion by saying, "when it pleased God to reveal his
   Son in me." No theologic scruples are felt in such free modes of
   expression, and indeed there never should be; for to every one but the
   strict tritheist, Christ must, in some sense, be the Spirit, and the
   Spirit, Christ. And when Christ calls the Comforter he promises,
   himself, he gives precisely the best and truest representation of the
   Spirit, in his new office, possible to be given. It is to be as if the
   disincarnated soul, or person of Christ, were now to go away and return
   as a universal Spirit invisible; in that form "to abide forever." And
   the beauty of the conception is, that the Spirit is to be no mere
   impersonal effluence, or influence, but to be with us in the very
   feeling and charity of Jesus. All the fullness of Christ is in him; the
   gentleness, the patience, the tenderness, the self-sacrifice; all that
   makes Jesus himself such a power of personal mastery in us. He is to be
   with us in Christ's name as a being with a heart, nay, to be the heart
   itself that was beating in the Son of Mary. All the charities, and even
   the blessed humanities of Jesus are to be in him, and, in fact, to be
   ministered socially, and socially manifested by him; even as Christ
   expressly declared--"He shall glorify me; for he shall receive of man
   and show it unto you." This inward showing is, in fact, the virtuality
   of Christ. He will be to the soul all that Christ himself would wish to
   be; for he loves the world with Christ's own love. He will be as
   forgiving as Christ in his passion, as tenderly burdened as Christ in
   his agony, as really present to physical suffering, as truly a
   Comforter to all the shapes of human sorrow. All which Christ outwardly
   expressed, he will inwardly show.

   3. In this coming again of Christ by the Spirit, there is included also
   the fact that he will be known by the disciple, not only socially, but
   as the Christ, in such a way as to put us in a personal relationship
   with him, even as his own disciples were in their outward society with
   him. "Ye shall know that I am in the Father, and ye in me, and I in
   you." "But ye know him." "But ye see me." Many persons appear to
   suppose that the Holy Spirit works in a manner back of all
   consciousness, and that there is even a kind of extravagance in the
   disciple who presumes to know him. And so it really is, if the
   conception is that he knows him by sensation, or by inward phantasy.
   But what means the apostle when he says--"the Spirit itself beareth
   witness with our Spirit that we are the children of God"? That bearing
   witness with imports some kind of inward society, or interchange, in
   which a divine testimony flows into human impression, or conviction,
   else it imports nothing. The real Christian fact in regard to this very
   important subject appears to be, that the Holy Spirit, or Spirit of
   Christ, though not felt by sensation, or beheld by mental vision, is
   yet revealed, back of all perception, in the consciousness. We are made
   originally to be conscious of God, just as we are of ourselves, and
   know him by that immediate light. This is our normal state and it is
   now so far restored. Our finite being was to be complete in the
   infinite, and apart from that, could only be a poor dead limb, or
   broken fragment, worthless to itself. And this accordingly is the
   wonder of a true religious experience begun, that the soul, awakened to
   the consciousness of God, not knowing how, has a certain mysterious
   feeling of otherness imparted, which is somehow a new element to it--a
   pure, inwardly glorious, free element. By and by it gets acquainted
   with the new and glorious incoming, and dares to say, it is Christ, it
   is God. A whole side of the nature turning Godward thus, and before
   closed, is now open, and the man is even more impressively conscious at
   times of the divine movement in his feeling, than of his own. And this
   fulfills the promise--"I will manifest myself unto him." A promise
   which Paul bravely answers, when he says, out of his own conscious
   experience--"Christ liveth in me,"--"who loved me and gave himself for
   me."

   Here then is the relationship we seek--Christ is so related now, to the
   soul of them that receive him, that he is present with them in all
   places, at all times, bearing witness with their spirit, in guidance
   and holy society; a friend, a consoler, a glorious illuminator, all
   that he would or could be, if we had him each to himself in outward
   company. Yes, and he is more than this; for if we simply had him in
   such outward company, the contrast perceived would be even mortifying
   and oppressive; but now, as he comes up from within, through our
   personal consciousness itself, we are raised in dignity, and have him
   as the sense of a new and nobler self unfolded in us. O, what a footing
   is this for a mortal creature to occupy, an open relationship with
   Christ and God, in which it shall receive just all which it wants,
   being consciously girded with strength for whatever it has to do,
   patience for suffering, wisdom for guidance. His very nature is
   penetrated by a higher nature, and, being spirit to Spirit, he moves in
   the liberty of that superior impulse and advisement. His relationship
   to Christ is that of the branch to the vine, and the presence that he
   has with Christ is immediate, vital, and if he will suffer it,
   perpetual. Its whole gospel in one view it has in the promise--"Lo, I
   am with you always, even to the end of the world."

   But there is a different conception of this whole matter, which I must
   briefly notice. Many persons appear to assume, that we have, and can
   have, no relations to Christ, more immediate than those which we have
   through language and the understanding, The Spirit, they say, works by
   truth, and only as the truth gets power in our thoughts and choices.
   Their conception is that we have nothing to do with God, except as we
   get hold of notions, or notional truths, concerning him--reported
   facts, for example, and teachings, and doctrinal deductions.
   Undoubtedly we are to have this notional furniture in the
   understanding, but it is never to be a fence between us and God,
   requiring us to know him only at second hand, as we know China by the
   report of the geographers. We are still to know God, or Christ, by our
   immediate experience; nay, to know him as we know ourselves, by
   consciousness. It is useful for us to know ourselves scientifically,
   intellectually, reflectively; but this kind of artificial
   self-knowledge is not enough. Some of us, in that way, would scarcely
   know ourselves at all, and none of us more than partially,
   intermittently, and in spots. We want to know ourselves all the while,
   and without study, so as to be all the while possessing and going along
   with ourselves, and therefore we are gifted with an immediate
   consciousness of ourselves. But we want, just as much, to know God by
   this immediate and perpetual knowledge; for apart from. God we are
   nothing, we do not even half exist. Our finite existence becomes
   complete existence, only as we are complete in Him, and this we can not
   be, save as he is manifested, or participated, by our consciousness.
   Thus we might have our advantage in a notional, or scientific
   conception of the atmosphere, but if we could breathe only by such
   scientific self-regulation, many of us would stop breathing entirely,
   and all of us would be gasping for air a great part of the time; what
   we want is a continual fanning of the breath that shall keep the air at
   work, feeding our life all the time, without intermission, and without
   any kind of notional self-regulation. So, too, we want a perpetual
   inbreathing of God, a witnessing of the divine Spirit with our spirit,
   else our very nature is abortive and worthless. It is not enough that
   we have notions, or doctrines, of God, which we may use, or apply, to
   obtain flavors of good effect through such media--we want the immediate
   manifestation of God himself. And then, lest we should sink away into
   the abysses and trances of contemplation, with Plotinus and others who
   struggle out vaguely into and after the infinite, we have the infinite
   humanly personated in Christ; so that, instead of wandering off into
   any abysses at all, we simply let the Son of Man be God in our feeling,
   and fashion us in the molds of his own humanly divine excellence.
   Christ we say liveth in us; and therefore by the faith of the Son of
   God, we live.

   But is not this a kind of mysticism, some will ask, better therefore to
   be avoided than received? I hardly know what is definitely meant by the
   question; unless perhaps it be that a word is wanted that will serve
   the uses of a stigma. A great many will begin to suspect some kind of
   mysticism, just because they are mystified, or misted, and see things
   only in a fog of obscurity. But if this be mysticism, nothing is
   plainer than that Christ is the original teacher of it, and his two
   disciples, John and Paul, specially abundant teachers of it after him.
   Every man is a mystic in the same way, who believes that Christ is the
   Life--in such a sense the life that he truly liveth in his followers,
   and giveth them to live by him. God as the Life, the all-quickener, the
   all-mover and sustainer, the inward glory and bliss of souls--this may
   be set down as a thing too high to be any but a mystical notion. And
   yet all highest things are apt to be most rational, and, at bottom,
   most credible. What can be more rational, in fact, than to think that
   God will give us most certainly what is most wanted--water, and light,
   and air, and yet more freely, Himself? He will not put us off to know
   only things about him, truths, notions, items of fact, but will give us
   to know Himself. And since all souls are dark, living only to grope,
   without Him--poor, blind pilgrims, straying on the shores of
   eternity--what will he do, what, in all true reason, must he do, but
   make himself the true sunrising to them, and the conscious revelation
   of their inward day.

   Our answer then to the question what are Christ's present relations to
   his followers? is that he is present to them as he is not, and can not
   be to the world; present as an all-permeating Spirit; present as the
   all-quickening Life; consciously, socially present; so that no
   explorations of science, or debates of reason are wanted to find him,
   no going over the sea to bring him back, or up into heaven to bring him
   down; because he is already present, always present, in the mouth and
   in the heart. In this manner he will be revealed in all men, waits to
   be revealed in all, if only they will suffer it. The word for every
   loving, trusting heart is, I will come unto it, I will be manifest in
   it. Lo, I will be with it always.

   But the answer at which we thus arrive is a purely spiritual answer,
   you perceive, one that is real and true only as it is opened to faith,
   and experimentally proved. But all such spiritualities waver and
   flicker; we are too much in the senses to hold them constantly and
   evenly enough to rest in them. Therefore to keep us in the range of
   this relationship, God has contrived to fasten us in the sense of it,
   and make it good, by two fixed, partly outward, institutes, that are to
   stand as forts, or fortresses, in the foreground of it; viz., by the
   church and by the sacraments.

   "Behold the kingdom of God is within you," says the Saviour, meaning
   that he will be there, and there will have his reign. But he also lays
   the foundations of a great, perpetual, visible institute, that he names
   the church, calling it to be the light of the world, even as he, in the
   body, was the light of the world himself, and because he is now, in the
   Spirit, to be entered into and fill the body of the church with light.
   His apostle calls it too "the pillar and ground of the truth," because
   it is to be that corporate body that never dies, receiving the written
   word as a deposit and trust for all ages to come, and becoming itself a
   living epistle, answering faithfully to it, and shedding, from its own
   luminous property, a perpetual light of interpretation upon it. Of this
   body, called the church, he is to be the Head himself, and all the
   members joined together in him, are to be so related to Him as to make
   a virtually real, and perpetually diffusive, incarnation of him in the
   world. While, therefore, it was expedient for him to go away as the Son
   of Man, or of Mary, it was yet to be found, as he comes again by
   revelation to the consciousness of his disciples, that he is again
   taking body, in fact, for all time, in them; so to be manifested
   organically, and, as it were, instituted in their undying and corporate
   membership--"Head over all things to the church which is his body, the
   fullness of him that filleth all in all." The members are to know him
   personally, each in his own immediate life, and then they are to know
   him again even the more firmly, that they are consciously instituted
   and framed into body by his life. It is to be as if their divine
   consciousness itself were certified, and sealed, and made visible, by
   its own organizing power--that power which ages and times can not
   weaken, which outlives the kingdoms and their persecutions, and defies
   the gates of hell. "From whence the whole body, fitly joined together
   and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the
   effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the
   body unto the edifying of itself in love." What solidity is there now
   in such a relation to Christ! Spiritual as the relation is, it is yet
   even more intellectually fixed, and carries better evidence, than
   Christ in the body was ever able to give his followers.

   But the spiritualities of the relation Christ maintains with his
   disciples were to be settled and fortified by still another institute;
   I mean the sacraments, and especially the sacrament of the Holy Supper.
   The very object of the supper appears to be the settlement, and
   practical, or experimental, certification of that revelation to
   consciousness, of which we have been speaking. "This is my body, take
   and eat." "This is my blood, drink ye all of it." And this, to
   establish, as by institute, the fact that Christ here present, is to be
   communicated and received, as by nutrition, or as life. And this is
   what is meant by discerning his body, and the showing forth of his
   death; for there is to be an accepting, in the partaker, of his here
   represented embodiment, and a confession of trust in his death, to
   which he will, by these instituted symbols and pledges, be inwardly
   discovered, as certainly and as often as the rite is duly observed.
   When, therefore, he says, "this do in remembrance of me," we are not to
   take his words in the lightest, shallowest, possible meaning, as if he
   were only giving us a mnemonic to refresh our memories, but in the
   deepest and most sacredly inward sense; viz., that he is giving it to
   us here, to receive the dearest hospitality, the communion of his own
   divine Life. All that famous discourse. of his about the bread and the
   blood, in the 6th chapter of John, is but the fit opening of his
   meaning. "I am the bread of life--the living bread that came down from
   heaven--if any man eat of this bread he shall live forever. My flesh is
   meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. Except ye eat the flesh of
   the Son of Man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you."

   And this exactly is the great institute of the supper. Christ engages
   to be present in it, by a most real presence, without a miracle of
   transubstantiation; so that when we come to offer him up ourselves, and
   open our inmost receptivities to the appropriation of his presence, it
   is no vague, volunteer, possibly presumptuous, thing that we do, as if
   venturing on some almost aerial flight, in the way of coming unto God,
   but we have the grace by institution, firmly pledged, and given, as it
   were, by routine. Here is Christ to be communicated. Here are we to
   commune. There is no miracle, but what is a great deal better, viz.,
   life; community of life with Christ and God. What we get in the
   conscious revelation of his Spirit, we here receive by an outward and
   perpetually instituted dispensation. And we have this communion also
   with each other as with Christ; because he is the common life, which is
   endeavoring always a common growth in the members.

   O, that we might receive this supper to-day, my brethren, according to
   its true meaning, and eat and drink worthily. Take it as no mere
   commemorative ceremony over Christ dead, but as the appointed vehicle
   of Christ living, and in you to live. Come not here to be sad and sit
   mourning for your Master's body, like the women weeping for Tammuz.
   Consider, above all, this, that Christ, once dead, is here alive, that
   he may here dispense himself to you. Blessed is the heart that shall be
   fully opened to him. Be that true, as it may be, of you all; that you
   may go forth loving one another as you love your Master, and shining
   without, by the light he gives you within. Neither forget how that
   open, dear, relation of spirit with him, of which we have been
   speaking, is here sanctioned publicly for you, and sanctified before
   you, even as by an institute of God. As he has gone away, so believe,
   henceforth and always, that he has come again. Count this coming in the
   Spirit to be with you, dearer than even outward society with him would
   be, such as his disciples had at the first; and expect to be always
   with him in this manner, in the closest, most immediate, knowledge;
   even as he said himself--BUT YE SEE ME.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                     XVII.

THE WRATH OF THE LAMB.

   "And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us and hide us from the
   face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb.
   For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to
   stand?"--Rev. vi, 16-17.

   The lamb is the most simply innocent of all animals. Historically also
   it had become a name for sacrifice. For this twofold reason, Christ is
   set forth as the Lamb. Under this name, as fulfilling the conception of
   gentleness and sacrifice in God, we give him ready welcome. We magnify
   him as the Lamb, and expect to magnify him even eternally, in
   ascriptions offered to that dear name. Even such as are most remote
   from the life of religion are commonly satisfied with conceptions of
   God under this gentle, patient figure; making up, not seldom, schemes
   of divine character and order, that have only the innocuous way of the
   lamb--just as thousands of the devotees of liberty will magnify
   liberty, as being the whole substance of government; counting it really
   the same thing as a release from being governed. Yet liberty is but
   justice secured; and, in just the same manner, the Lamb is but the
   complemental gentleness of God's judicial vigor.

   All which appears to be represented by a most paradoxical, jarring,
   combination of words, that predicates wrath of the very lambhood of
   Christ. To speak simply of the wrath of God is bad enough to some; it
   is even a real offense. They recoil from such expressions as unworthy,
   and as indicating, either a degree of irreverence in those who use
   them, or else low ideas of God, such as may not be revolted by the
   ascription of a temper so unregulated and so essentially coarse. It is
   commonly no sufficient answer to such, that the scriptures of God speak
   of his wrath in this way without compunction; for the scriptures, they
   will suspect, are not as far refined themselves, in the moral tastes
   and proprieties, as they might be. But here we have "the wrath of the
   Lamb;"--which not only violates a first principle of rhetoric,
   forbidding the conjunction of symbols that have no agreement of kind or
   quality, but also shocks our cherished conceptions of Christ, as the
   suffering victim, or the all-merciful and beneficent friend, in either
   way, tile Saviour of sinners. Who will ever speak of a lamb's wrath?
   Who, much more, of the wrath of the Lamb of God? And yet the scripture
   does it without any sense of impropriety, or moral incongruity--what
   shall we make of such a fact?

   Simply this, I answer, that while our particular age is at the point of
   apogee from all the more robust and vigorous conceptions of God in his
   relation to evil; while it makes nothing of God as a person or
   governing will; less, if possible, of sin as a wrong-doing by subject
   wills; we are still to believe in christianity, and not in the new
   religion of nature; in Christ, and not in the literary gentlemen. It
   does not, in my view, require a very great degree of nerve to do this.
   Only we must have the right to believe in the real Christ, and not that
   theologic Christ which has so long been praised, as it were into
   weakness, by the showing that separates him from all God's decisive
   energies and fires of combustion, and puts him over against them, to be
   only a pacifier of them by his suffering goodness. Our Christ must be
   the real king--Messiah--and no mere victim; he must govern, have his
   indignations, take the regal way in his salvation. His goodness must
   have fire and fibre enough to make it divine.

   We take the principle, in brief, without scruple, that if we can settle
   what is to be understood by the wrath of God, we shall not only find
   the wrath in God, but as much more intensely revealed, in the incarnate
   life and ministry of Christ, as the love is, or the patience, or any
   other character of God. Since he is the Lamb, in other words, the most
   emphatic and appalling of all epithets will have its place, viz.,--the
   wrath of the Lamb.

   We want very much, in English, a word that we have not, to express more
   definitely the true force of the original scripture word [orge]
   occurring in this relation. We have a considerable family of words that
   we can employ for this purpose; such as wrath, anger, indignation,
   fury, vengeance, judgment, justice, and the like, but they are all more
   or less defective. Indignation is the most unexceptionable, but it is
   too prosy and weak to carry such a meaning with due effect. Wrath is
   the term most commonly used in our translation, and it is really the
   best, if only we can hold it closely enough to the idea of a moral, in
   distinction from a merely animal passion; else, failing in this, it
   will connect associations of unregulated temper that are painful, and
   as far as possible from being sacred. It requires in this view, like
   the safety-lamps of the miners, a gauze of definition round it, to save
   it from blazing into an explosion too fierce to serve the purposes of
   light.

   We understand then by wrath, as applied to God and to Christ, a certain
   principled heat of resentment towards evil doing and evil doers, such
   as arms the good to inflictions of pain, or just retribution, upon
   them. It is not the heat of revenge, girding up itself in fiery
   passion, to repay the personal injuries it has suffered; but it is that
   holy heat which kindles about order, and law, and truth, and right;
   going in, as it were, spontaneously, to redress their wrongs and
   chastise the injuries they have suffered. It is that, in every moral
   nature, which prepares it to be an essentially beneficent avenger, a
   holy knight-errant champion for the right, and true, and good. It can
   be let in to nerve a resentment, or to bitter a grudge, and commonly
   is, in souls given up to resentments and grudges; but it was ordained
   specially to be such an equipment of moral natures, that goodness would
   be an armed state, capable not only of beneficence, but of inflicting
   pain where pain is wanted, in the fit vindication of order and right.

   How it works, we may see, almost every hour, in some example greater,
   or less, in its magnitude. Only to see a large boy in the street
   harassing and persecuting a small one, stirs the natural
   wrath-principle in us, in such a manner that, if we do not actually lay
   hands upon him ourselves, we could easily be much satisfied if a
   considerable chastisement should overtake him. So, if an officer of the
   law arrests a woman in the street, haling her away to justice, you will
   see a multitude, excited by her outcries, rushing quickly together,
   wanting to know what a strong man can be doing in that fashion with a
   woman, and about half ready to interfere, before they have learned
   whether it is a case of oppression or not. We had an illustration, a
   few days ago, of this wrath-principle in human bosoms, on a much
   grander scale--the whole New England people, or rather the whole nation
   itself, waiting, as it were, by the gallows of a Webster, and giving
   their spontaneous sanction to his death, by their emphatic and hearty
   Amen. Under the solemn wrath-principle of which I am here speaking,
   every healthy and robust soul took the penalty with appetite, and with
   a certain good revenge, stood stiff and firm by the impartial and
   righteous sentence of the law. So if this great and awful rebellion
   against which we are now in arms, should finally collapse and go down,
   and the friends of Union, so long and bitterly oppressed by their
   tyrants, should rise upon them and drag them to summary justice,
   compelling them to expiate, by their death, the most terrible and
   bloodiest, and really most impious, crime ever committed on earth, save
   the crucifixion of Jesus itself, who of us would blame, or in the least
   regret, the judicial severity of the retribution? Why, the unspeakable
   desolations, the latitudes and longitudes of the woe, would even take
   on a smile, in our thought, and we should find ourselves thanking God,
   even before we knew it, that he has put a wrath-principle in human
   bosoms for the avenging of so great a crime. Nay, we should be quite
   willing to imagine this wrath-principle residing also in the very
   ground itself, and crying unto God, from every blood-sodden field and
   region, even as the blood of Abel did, in Cain's one, solitary, merely
   initial, comparatively insignificant, murder.

   In all these and similar examples that could be cited without number,
   there is, you perceive, a function of wrath, or an instinctively
   vindicatory function, that pertains to all moral natures, and arms them
   to be the supporters of justice and the avengers of wrong. They have
   this high moral instinct, or function, not as a vice to be extirpated
   or stifled, but as an integral part of their inmost original nature. It
   is constituent, consubstantial, and is to be eternal.

   Having distinguished, in this manner, what is to be understood by
   wrath, as predicated, whether of God or of the Lamb, we are ready to
   proceed with the main subject of inquiry. Is it then a fact that
   Christ, as the incarnate Word of God, embodies and reveals the
   wrath-principle of God, even as he does the patience or love-principle,
   and as much more intensely? On this point we have many distinct
   evidences. And--

   1. It is very obvious, at the outset, that Christ can not be a true
   manifestation of God, when he comes in half the character of God, to
   act upon, or qualify, or pacify, the other half. He must be God
   manifest in the flesh, and not one side of God. If only God's
   affectional nature is represented in him, then he is but a half
   manifestation. And if we assign him, in that character, a special
   value, then we say, by implication, what amounts to the worst
   irreverence, that God is a being to be most desired when he is only
   half presented, and when his other half is either kept back, or somehow
   smoothed to a condition of silence. I take issue with all such
   conceptions of Christ. He is God manifested truly, God as he is, God in
   all his attributes combined, else he is nothing, or at least no fair
   exhibition. If the purposes of God, the justice of God, the
   indignations of God, are not in Him; if any thing is shut away, or let
   down, or covered over, then he is not in God's proportions, and does
   not incarnate his character.

   2. It will be noted that Christ can be the manifested wrath of God,
   without being any the less tender in his feeling, or gentle in his
   patience. If God may fitly comprehend these opposite poles of
   character, so also may Christ; and if the fires of God's retributive
   indignations are no contradiction to the fact that he is love, no more
   is there any such contradiction to be apprehended, when these
   indignations are displayed in Christ. Indeed we have occasions in the
   history of Jesus, when he actually displays the judicial and the
   tender, most affectingly, together and in the very same scene. "And
   when he had looked about on them with anger," says Mark, "being grieved
   for the hardness of their hearts." Here we have the wrath, [orge] in a
   connection of feeling so tender and loving, that he is even grieved.
   His indignations have quickened his more tender sensibilities, and
   these, in turn, have fired his indignations. And we have exactly the
   same conjunction over again, when we find him even weeping over
   Jerusalem, and, at the same moment, denouncing against it, in stern
   retribution, the day of its final visitation. "If thou hadst known the
   things that belong to thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes!"
   How tenderly, and yet how firmly spoken is the wrath. And then, while
   the tears of his compassion are scarcely dried away upon his face, he
   goes directly into the temple and drives out, in a terrible outburst of
   indignant zeal, the whole crowd of hucksters and traders that have made
   even that sacred place, to his pure feeling, no better than a den of
   thieves. His tears did not extinguish his wrath, and his wrath did not
   stifle the tenderness that issued in tears.

   Indeed these two poles of sensibility, wrath and tender love, are not
   only compatible; I must go farther and say, that the tenderest, purest
   souls will, for just that reason, be hottest in the wrath-principle,
   where any bitter wrong, or shameful crime, is committed. They take fire
   and burn, because they feel. Furthermore you will observe that the man
   whose dull-hearted phlegm keeps prudent silence, utters no
   condemnation, burns with no indignant fire, when some wicked cruelty or
   oppression is perpetrated, is, in almost every case, deficient in the
   finer, nobler, and more tender sympathies. His cold, apathetic,
   politic, sour nature is just about as defective in the gentle
   sensibilities, as it is in the fiery and strong impulses.

   3. It is another and distinct consideration that God, without the
   wrath-principle; never was, and Christ never can be, a complete
   character. This element belongs inherently to every moral nature. God
   is no God without it, man is no man without it. Take it away from God
   and he is simply Brama, a mere Fate, or Infinite Thing--no Governor of
   the world, but an ideal, in the neuter gender, of the True and the
   Good; a Beauty that lies in sweet lassitude on the world, for literary
   souls to make a religion of, for themselves. Take it away from man, and
   he is only paste, or, at best, an animal; for though animals have the
   capacity of brute passion, or infuriated excitement, yet that moral
   passion or vindicatory instinct, of which we are now speaking, they as
   little share as they do the instinct of language, or that of scientific
   inquiry. They have no moral ideas, and of course have no moral armature
   of wrath to set them on the side of moral ideas, and steel them, as in
   principled resentment, to be avengers of the same. Now it is this
   principled wrath, in one view, that gives staminal force and majesty to
   character. It is in this principle of the moral nature that it becomes
   a regal nature. In these indignations against wrong, it champions the
   right and judges the world. Without this, or apart from this,
   submission to wrong is pusillanimity, forgiveness to enemies a flimsy
   and feeble habit, love a merely clinging devotement. All such tender
   passivities become great, only as they consciously consent to bathe,
   what fiery judgment has a right to burn. There is no dignity in them,
   till the grand vindicatory instinct, the governmental wrath-principle,
   is found united with them. This also it is, in our humanity, that is
   always volunteering government, and is, in that manner, the capacity of
   society--all movements of redress, all institutes of penalty, all
   executed pains of justice, being issued, as it were naturally, from
   this. It is, in fact, a kind of electric battery moral that God has put
   in the body of society, to shock, or stun, or kill, the violators of
   order and right. No wrong-doer can so much as touch it, without being
   struck and paralyzed by it. And it is in virtue of this same regal or
   judicial instinct, that God's moral nature, including his lovely and
   gentle sympathies, becomes everlastingly electric, in its wrath against
   misdoing and wrong. He governs with a will, he towers in personal
   majesty, he is great in his authority, because the regal attribute is
   in him. Which if we suppose to be true in no sense of Christ, if we
   take him to be a gentle way of goodness only, separated wholly from
   this flaming kind of vigor--soft only, and submissive, and patient--we
   put him in a grade almost unmoral, and show him making feeble suit to
   the world, in the merely plaintive airs of suffering. The character is
   weak, unkingly, unchristly, and it can not be more, till the wrath, is
   added to the patience, of the Lamb.

   4. It is a conceded principle of justice, that wrongdoers are to suffer
   just according to what they deserve. It was unavoidable, therefore,
   that if Christ brought in new mercies and gifts of grace, the
   liabilities of justice must be correspondently increased--not
   diminished, as many try to imagine. As the score of justice, too, is
   augmented, the judicial wrath must be, and be also as much more
   forcibly manifested--just as we shall find it to be, in fact, in the
   new assertion made of God, by Christ's personal life and doctrine.
   First he asserts the principle--"For unto whomsoever much is given, of
   him shall much be required." Next he asserts the new liability that has
   actually accrued under it--"If I had not done among them the works that
   none other man did, they had not had sin, but now they have both seen
   and hated both me and my Father." Then again he makes specific
   denouncement both of the principle and the liability, declaring to the
   cities that reject his ministry, that they are bringing a doom of
   judgment on them, worse than God ever put upon the worst and wickedest
   of the past ages--"Woe unto thee, Chorazin, woe unto thee, Bethsaida;
   it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment
   than for you." "And thou, Capernaum, it shall be more tolerable for the
   land of Sodom, in the day of judgment, than for thee." His apostles,
   too, only represent him fitly, when they say--"treasurest up unto
   thyself wrath, against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous
   judgment of God;" or again--"Of how much sorer punishment suppose ye
   shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God,
   and hath counted the blood of the covenant wherewith he was sanctified
   an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace." The
   wrath-principle and justice, you will thus perceive, have the same
   place under christianity that they had before. The divine government is
   not made new, but is only new revealed. God is not less just, nor more
   merciful, but more fitly and proportionately expressed.

   5. One of the things most needed in the recovery of men to God, is this
   very thing; a more decisive manifestation of the wrath-principle and
   justice of God. Intimidation is the first means of grace. No bad mind
   is arrested by love and beauty, till such time as it is balked in evil
   and put on ways of thoughtfulness. And nothing will be so effectual for
   this, as a distinct apprehension of the wrath to come. Then, when it is
   brought to a condition of thoughtfulness by the apprehension of damage
   and loss, the vehemence of God and his judgments starts a correspondent
   moral vehemence in its own self-condemnations; when of course it is
   ready to be melted by the compassions and won by the beauty of the
   cross--that is born of God. Now it is no longer swayed by interest and
   fear, but having come into God's occupancy and become spirit, as being
   permeated by God's impulse, it ranges in liberty with God himself. The
   precise thing not wanted, in this view, is to get justice out of the
   way. To know that the avenging wrath-principle of God's moral nature is
   forever hushed, would be fatal. The weak point of sin is that it can
   tremble--does inwardly tremble even in its boldest moods. Too low in
   its moral conceptions to be taken by goodness and love it for its own
   sake, it can be seized and shaken by the rough hand of wrath. Hence the
   wrath is wanted, and at this point the attack of salvation begins. It
   could not be a salvation by rose-water, or by any means less stringent
   than God's roughest enforcements.

   6. We can see for ourselves that the more impressive revelation of
   wrath, which appears to be wanted, is actually made in the person of
   Christ. I will not stop here to speak of the driving out of the
   money-changers from the temple, which has been the scandal of so many,
   just because of the imagined over vehemence of the wrath, and which his
   disciples took as being the zeal that was to eat him up; I will not
   stay upon the fiery denunciations and imprecations of woe by which he
   scorched the oppressions and the sanctimonious hypocrisies of the
   priests and the Pharisees; I will not recur again to the terrible
   judgments he denounced upon so many guilty cities, and among them even
   upon Jerusalem itself; but pass directly to the fact that no other
   preacher ever had appealed as strenuously as he to the sense of fear,
   or employed with as little restraint the artillery of God's penalties.
   The terrible and abundantly unwelcome, or unpopular, doctrine of future
   punishment is specially his. Previously, the sanctions of religion had
   been temporal, and the future state itself had been only dimly
   revealed; save that in two or three single passages of the prophets it
   had finally obtained a more distinct recognition and pronounced its
   more fearful awards. But Christ, when he came, opened up formally and
   distinctly the great world of the future, and pressed home the claims
   of duty and repentance by the tremendous sanctions of eternity. He
   uses, without scruple, in his language, the most appalling terms,
   which, though they are certainly figures of speech, are yet such
   figures as show that he is in no mood of delicacy, but is keyed up in
   the wrath-principle, as intensely and heartily as he is in the
   love-principle--speaking to men as offended majesty should, when it
   goes to rebels in arms. He denounces what he calls "everlasting
   punishment," "destruction," "death," "fire," "the worm that never
   dies," "the gnashing of teeth," "thirst," "outer darkness," "torment."
   I can not stop to settle the precise meaning of these figures. I only
   ask you to note, first, that they are new, almost every one of them,
   never heard of before, even under what is called the hard and pitiless
   rigors of the Old Testament; and, secondly, that they are from Christ,
   the all-merciful Saviour, and tenderly suffering friend of the world.
   We call him the Lamb, for God's mercy was never before revealed, by a
   sacrifice of simple, unoffending innocence. And just. so these are the
   wrath of the Lamb; which never before shook human bosoms by such words
   of doom and sanctions of eternal majesty.

   Once more Christ is appointed, and publicly undertakes, to maintain the
   wrath-principle officially, as the judge of the world--even as he
   maintains the love-principle officially, as the Saviour of the world.
   He consents, that is, when every attempt to do better by men, than they
   have deserved, has failed to win them, to fall back on the merely
   retributive regimen of his kingdom, and do by them as they deserve. He
   even declares that authority is given him to execute judgment, because
   he is the Son of Man; for as he has come into the flesh to unfold God's
   human sympathy and tenderness, so, to maintain what is only fit
   proportion, he must needs be clothed in the rigors of judicial majesty.
   He, then, is to be the judge, as he himself openly declares, and before
   his judgment-seat all mankind, including all his rejectors, shall be
   gathered. He will separate them to their fit award. He will say, "ye
   did it not to me." He will speak the "depart." Whoever has joined
   himself wholly to evil, put himself to the uses of evil, that is, of
   the devil and his angels, he will consign to the devil and his angels,
   according to their real affinities and according to what they deserve.
   And this is the wrath, and this the day of wrath; "for the great day of
   his wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand?"

   But it will be objected, I suppose, by some, that in the view now
   presented, the hope of a possible salvation is quite taken away. You
   can not, any more, deserve God's favor, how then can you be saved,
   unless God's justice be somehow satisfied in your behalf? You could
   not, I answer, if God were obliged to execute justice, having no option
   concerning it. But exactly contrary to this, the wrath-principle in him
   is only that judicial impulse that backs him in the infliction of
   justice, whenever justice requires to be inflicted. And it does not
   require to be inflicted always; it never ought to be, when there is any
   thing better that is possible. The law of right, or righteousness, is
   absolute and eternal. Not so the vindicatory principle of justice.
   Since penal justice is only a matter of means to ends in government,
   backed by the wrath-impulse, the means and occasions are to be
   regulated by counsel, and the wrath moderated by counsel. It is with
   God, in these matters, as it is with us. We are never bound to do by
   men as they deserve, simply because the wrath-impulse moves us to this,
   if only we are able to do what is better for them, and involves no
   injury to others. We do not want our justice satisfied before we can
   forgive. No more does God. As certainly as we may, at any time, do by
   our enemy and for him, better than he deserves, however pungently we
   may feel the wrong he has done us, so also may God. Something may be
   necessary on his part to save an appearance of laxity, when he
   forgives--some kind of honor paid to the instituted order of justice,
   that will keep it in as high respect as the exact execution of it.
   Christ will see to that. I can not here describe the provision he has
   made; enough that when he remits the penalties of justice, in his moral
   distributions, he shows most convincingly still, that he adheres to
   justice in his feeling as firmly as ever. It does not follow, when I
   forgive my enemy, that I condemn any the less heartily, or hotly, the
   wrongs he has done me. The very heat, too, of my rebukes, and of my
   decisive measures of redress, may be the means, in part, by which he is
   subdued, and the redress of justice made unnecessary.

   Put it down, then, first of all, at the close of this great subject,
   that the New Testament gives us no new God, or better God, or less just
   God, than we had before. He is the I Am of all ages; the I Am that was,
   and is, and is to come; the same that was declared from the
   beginning--"The Lord God, gracious and merciful, forgiving iniquity,
   transgressions, and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty."

   At the same time, let. no one be concerned to find how God's justice
   has been satisfied, or please himself in the discovery how Christ has
   made up the needed satisfaction, by the pains and penalties of his
   cross. For if Christ has satisfied God's justice, then who is going to
   satisfy the justice of Christ? If the offered Lamb has propitiated, or
   appeased, the wrath of God against transgressors, then a question of
   some point remains, viz., who is going to propitiate the wrath of the
   Lamb? Furthermore, if the lighter penalty of justice has been taken
   off, on the original score of retribution, who is going to lift the
   more tremendous liabilities of justice incurred by those who have
   trodden under foot the blood of the Son of God, and cast away forever
   all the glorious mercies and helps of the cross? O, it grieves me to
   think of the poor, speculated inventions we have wearied ourselves to
   set up. on this summit, and most central point, of gospel truth! Wood,
   hay, stubble--God grant that when it is burned we may not perish in the
   fire ourselves.

   How plain is it, also, in such a view of God and the inevitable
   wrath-principle of his nature, that the charity, so called, of our
   modern philanthropism, is an effeminate and false charity. It
   reprobates all condemning judgments and all inflictions of penalty. It
   does not really believe in government, or sin as an act of responsible
   liberty. Sin is only misdirection, and the misdirecting power is
   circumstance. Are we not all what our conditions make us to be? Why,
   then; do we lay severe judgments; or even torments of penalty, on the
   head of transgression? Just contrary to this, we have seen that no man
   even is a proper man, whose moral nature is not put in armor by the
   wrath-principle. Much less is God true God, when no such central fire
   burns in his bosom, to make him the moral avenger of the world. Neither
   let any one argue. that God, as he is good, must desire the happiness
   of all, and that, being omnipotent also, what he desires he will
   certainly bring to pass. What if it should also be true, that there is
   a wrath-impulse in his nature, burning to have every wrong chastised by
   the pain it deserves; is not the argument as good to show that the
   chastisement will certainly be inflicted? The argument, in fact, holds
   neither way, least of all in showing that God will make every creature
   happy; for we know, as a plain matter of fact, that he does not. There
   may seem to be a considerable show of reason in the vaunted liberality
   of this new philanthropism; still it is only that weak light of
   moonshine which the higher light of day dispels. The eternal King is
   King indeed, and no such dispenser only of the confections and other
   sweet delectations of favor, as this feeble gospel of philanthropy
   requires him to be. O, the wrath of the Lamb!--there is the rugged
   majesty of meaning that transgression wants to meet! Smooth and soft
   things only will not do. As certainly as God is God, and Christ his
   prophet, he will not come bringing pardons only, suing and suing to the
   guilty, but over against all obstinacy he will kindle his fires of
   justice, and by these he will reign--even where by love he can not.

   We are brought out thus, at the close, just where John began, when he
   came to make prophetic announcement of the new dispensation. He looks,
   you may see, for no merely soft salvation, but for a great and
   appalling salvation rather. "Now the axe will be laid," he says, "unto
   the root of the trees. He that cometh after me is mightier than I, his
   fan is in his hand, he will thoroughly purge his floor, the chaff he
   will burn with unquenchable fire." The doctrines of religion will now
   be more spiritual and the tests more severe. God will not be changed,
   but will only be more perfectly shown. Responsibilities will not be
   diminished, but increased with the increase of light. If Christ bends
   low at his cross, no such fearful words of warning and severity as his
   were ever before spoken. The Old Testament is a dew-fall in comparison
   with the simply judicial, spiritual, unbending, and impartial wrath of
   the New. And this exactly is the impression, we can see, of Christ
   himself--putting forth his most ominous warning in the tender shape
   even of a blessing--"Blessed is he whosoever is not offended in me." He
   speaks also of a taking away, and a still farther taking away, in his
   parable of the. talents, where he seems to be looking distinctly on the
   fact that, as life progresses, every soul is descending more and more
   closely down to justice; losing out the conditions and prospects, one
   after another, of being treated better than it deserves; to be finally
   suited in the only alternative left--treated in strict justice as it
   deserves. In his tenderest accents of mercy, there is always blended,
   as it were, some reverberative note of judgment; as if there was a
   voice behind saying, behold, therefore, the goodness--and severity of
   God! It does not signify as much when he unmasks his judgment throne,
   and shows the gathering in, and tells the issues to be made, as it does
   that his very love is so visibly tempered with dread, in the sense of
   what his rejectors are doing. O, how far away the conceit of, that
   clumsy speculation which shows him smoothing down the rugged front of
   justice. No such conception of his gospel mission has he, as we can
   easily see for ourselves. Christianity to him, my friends, is not the
   same thing that it has been to many of you. Doubtless it is a great
   salvation to him; and you may also think it such yourselves; but if you
   take it simply as a penal satisfaction for your sins, placing its value
   wholly in that, so great an abuse will scarcely suffer it to have been,
   or in fact ever to be, any real salvation to you at all. You presume
   upon the cross. You take it for granted that Christ is going to do by
   you better than you deserve, whereas that depends in part on you. If
   you can not be turned away from your sin, then he is preparing to do by
   you exactly as you deserve. Christ understands christianity--hear him
   therefore say, with a manner of dread how deep, in words that toll in a
   warning as deep for you--Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be
   broken, but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                     XVIII.

CHRISTIAN FORGIVENESS.

   "Forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven
   you."--Eph. iv, 32.

   Under these words, "even as," and the relation or comparison they
   introduce, a very serious and high truth is presented; viz., that our
   human or Christian forgivenesses are to correspond with the forgiveness
   of sins by Christ himself; to be cast in the same molds of quality and
   bestowed under similar conditions. And that we may not fail of
   receiving such an impression, the principle or idea is made to recur
   many times over, and in such ways that we can not miss of it, or throw
   a doubt upon it. Thus we read again--"forgiving one another, if any man
   have a quarrel against any; even as Christ forgave you so also do ye."
   Again, in the gospels, it is given us in Christ's own words--"forgive,
   and ye shall be forgiven"--"for if ye forgive men their trespasses,
   your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if ye forgive not men
   their trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive your
   trespasses." He will not even allow us to pray for forgiveness, save as
   we ourselves forgive--"Forgive us our trespasses, even as we forgive
   those who trespass against us." All this on the ground that there is
   such an analogy between the forgiveness of Christ to us, and ours to
   our brethren and our fellow-men, as makes them virtually alike in
   spirit and kind, though not equal of course in degree. The quality of
   the virtue, the greatness of feeling, and height of meaning, will be so
   far correspondent, at least, that the smaller will represent the
   larger, and, according to its measure, reveal the same properties.

   I state the point thus distinctly, because, in the matter of
   forgiveness among men, a kind of lapse, or sinking of grade, appears to
   have somehow occurred; so that, holding still the duty of forgiveness,
   we have it in a form so cheap and low, as to signify little when it is
   practiced. "O, yes," says the brother, finally worn out by much
   expostulation, on account of the grudge he is holding against another
   who has greatly injured him, "I will forgive him, but I hope never to
   see him again." Christ does not say that to the man whom he forgives,
   and I suppose it would commonly be regarded among brethren, as a rather
   scant mode of forgiveness--such a mode of it as scarcely fulfills the
   idea. Another degree of it, which would probably pass, says--"Yes, let
   him come to me and ask to be forgiven, and it will be time for me to
   answer him." Probably a quotation is made, in this connection, of the
   scripture text which says--"If thy brother repent forgive him." And
   most certainly he should be thus forgiven, when the repentance appears
   to be an actual and present fact; but suppose that no such repentance
   has yet appeared. Is it then enough to say, "let him come and ask to be
   forgiven?" Many think so, and the argument appears to be conclusive,
   when they demand--"How can I be expected to forgive, where there is no
   repentance, and the wrong is just as stubbornly adhered to as ever?
   What but a mockery is it for me to forgive, when there is no
   forgiveness wanted, and my adversary has not even come into the right?"

   Well then, suppose that Christ had stopped just there. Nobody is asking
   to be forgiven, all are in their sins and mean to be there. They love
   their sins. They have asked no release or forgiveness. They are not
   repentant in the least degree? What then is there for him to do? Is he
   not absolved from any such matter as the preparing and publishing of
   forgiveness, by the simple fact that nobody wants it, or asks for it?"
   "If they were penitent," he might say, "it would lay a heavy charge
   upon me. But they are not, and what is forgiveness thrust upon souls
   that do not even so much as care for it?"

   Why, my friends, it is just here that Christ and his gospel begin--just
   here, in fact, that his forgiveness begins; viz., in for-giving, giving
   himself for, and to, the blinded and dead heart of unrepentant men, to
   make them penitent, and regain them to God. The real gist of his
   forgiveness antedates their. penitence; it is what he does, shows,
   suffers, in a way of gaining his enemy--bringing him off and away, that
   is, from his wrongs, to seek, and, in a true sorrow, find, the
   forgiveness that has been searching beforehand so tenderly after him.

   If we are to understand this matter accurately, as it stands in the New
   Testament, we need to observe that two very distinct and, in some
   respects, dissimilar Greek words are employed here, to denote the
   virtue under consideration; both of which are translated by the single,
   very beautiful, but strangely dishonored English word, forgiveness. One
   signifies merely a letting go, a release of charges, an exemption from
   punishment, the merely negative good of not being held in condemnation;
   a word accurately translated here and there by the word "remission."
   The other signifies the very positive and operative matter of sacrifice
   and suffering to gain the heart of an adversary; that which not merely
   lets go, but prepares men to be let go. Literally this word means "to
   bestow grace." Thus in the text, where it is translated forgive, we may
   read--"dealing grace, one towards another, even as God for Christ's
   sake, hath dealt grace towards you." There is also this remarkable
   contrast between the two words, translating both by forgiveness, that
   one fixes on the very last point, or final effect of forgiveness, viz.,
   the release, the letting go of charges, the absolution which says, "go
   in peace;" and the other finds its main idea in the first things of
   forgiveness, the love, the going after, the giving-for, by which the
   soul is taken hold of sooner than it asks to be; that which did not
   wait for penitence to come, that it might let penitence go, but which
   undertook to bring on penitence, prepare it, melt the heart into it,
   and so to execute the letting go of the soul, by making the sins let go
   of it.

   Now both of these words are names, we have said, of the same grace;
   viz., the grace of forgiveness; only one names it from a last incident
   or effect, and the other from the initiative movement of love and
   operative goodness, in which it took its spring--just as one might name
   the dawn, as a mere effect, or call it the sunrising, as denoting the
   cause or spring of the returning light; where of course the names are
   coincident, though inherently different from each other. In the present
   case, there is an immense difference between the two words employed, as
   regards the dignity and the real amount of their meaning--all the moral
   greatness, or high beneficence, appears to lie in the grace-dealing of
   love and sacrifice that prepares the remission; and yet when the lower,
   feebler word is used, as it is in a majority of cases, all that is in
   the other word is supposed to pass into its meaning, and keep along
   with it. Nothing is further off from Christ and his apostles, than to
   suppose, in any case, that the forgiveness they speak of is nothing but
   the simple letting. go of charges against the penitent. They have it
   understood always that the grand reality of the forgiveness preached is
   that which went before, in the putting by of so much injured feeling,
   the going after them that want no forgiveness, the giving for, and
   suffering for, by which they may be drawn to God;--just that which is
   described historically and transactionally, when the apostle says, "Who
   gave himself a ransom for all," "who gave himself for me." For it is
   precisely this which goes into the higher word "grace-dealing" and
   composes the reality of its meaning. This is the grace, that Christ
   gives himself for us, and so works in us, by his sacrifice, that we are
   transformed, reconciled, covered in with God's feeling, in one word,
   forgiven.

   Do not understand me to say that the higher Greek word is made up of
   the verb to give, with the preposition for, like our English word. It
   is not; it signifies literally and simply "dealing grace," or "doing
   grace upon;" which is represented by the genius of our tongue, in the
   word "for-giving;" and, what is remarkable, the Latin and all the
   principal modern tongues, [as in con-dono, par-don, ver-geben,] make up
   their word signifying remission in the same way, by compounding their
   verb to give with a preposition answering to for; giving it, as it were
   by vote, and declaring it as their inward sense or conviction, that the
   true forgiving of wrong and evil is that which has its beauty and
   greatness and the spring of its operative power, in a giving-for the
   sinners and the sins to be forgiven.

   And lest this might seem to be scarcely better than a suggestion of the
   fancy, or a curiosity of speech, let us glance a moment at the
   practical, or practically Christian, import of forgiveness when it is
   received. What is it practically to us, or in us? What does it do for
   us? What internal changes of position, or experience, does it bring?
   Answering these questions, we shall find that forgiveness, when
   ascribed to Christ, has suffered a lapse or fall in our understanding,
   much like that which it has suffered when applied to men. For the word
   is taken by multitudes, including even teachers of theology, as if it
   had no reach of meaning above the lower and more negative of the two
   words just referred to. Thus we say that Christ first prepares a ground
   of forgiveness, by suffering before God (penally or not penally) in a
   manner to even the account of our sin; and then, having magnified the
   justice of God, he is able to let go, remit, release the charge of, in
   that sense, forgive, our sin. Well, suppose the absolution is passed
   and we are let go, declared to be let go, as I let go verbally my enemy
   when I forgive him. What does this signify, that God has let go, taken
   off all charges against, his enemy? Just nothing but a most barren
   mockery, unless he has somehow got into the man's bosom and executed
   his pardon, by making the sins let go of him. And precisely here is the
   stress, the struggle, the wonder and glory of the forgiveness; that
   Christ, going before, has gotten him away from his sin; and, in all
   this previous grace-dealing, the reality of the letting go, otherwise
   nothing but empty words, is accomplished. Why, the man to be redeemed
   had a hell of retributive causes tearing in his disordered nature, and
   the mere letting him go only lets him have that hell to himself! No,
   the grand effort of forgiveness begins farther back, in what is
   undertaken for the sinner to win upon him, change him, get him loose
   from sin, loose from retribution, and then the letting go is only the
   ending off, or completion declared. And so the real forgiveness is that
   Jesus came, to be for his adversary and execute the great release in
   him. Long ages ago, before the foundation of the world, his mind of
   love began to grapple with the wrong and bitter woe of his adversary.
   He was not saying, "let him come to me, in his day, and ask it if he
   will, and then I will forgive him;" as little was it in him to say,
   "let him be a better man and by-gones shall be by-gones." But he was
   the Lamb slain already. He was contriving how to get beforehand in his
   forgiveness, postponing his just indignations, laying himself into the
   case of his adversaries to gain them back, planning a descent into the
   flesh and a suffering life--giving himself for, in a word forgiving, in
   all profoundest reality of feeling, ages before they arrive, and of
   course before they come to ask forgiveness. And when they come along in
   their day, and say for their scanty testimony in receiving such a
   grace, "Christ has let us go, Christ has remitted our sins," he will
   himself have a deeper solution, in the consciousness of having long ago
   given himself for them, and had the enjoyment of their forgiven state.
   Neither will he ever think of it as any fit summation of his work in
   the world, to say that he has first prepared a ground of forgiveness,
   and then that having made forgiveness safe in that manner, he is able
   to release or let go, or in that sense forgive sins. No, but he will
   understand that he was lifted up to draw men away from their sins, and
   be the release in them; that, by showing how God suffers in feeling for
   sinners, he has gotten a power in their feeling; in a word, that, by
   giving himself for his adversaries, in such burdens of sympathy, and
   fear, and care, and against such tempests of murderous and bloody
   wrong, he has slid himself into the secret place of their sins and made
   them all let go--in that manner executed the release; so that now he
   can say, with real truth in the words, "thy sins are forgiven thee."

   We go back now from this excursion, to the subject-matter at which we
   began; viz., the duty of forgiveness between brethren, or. fellow-men.
   And we carry back this very important principle or discovery; that the
   reality of forgiveness, or the grace of a forgiving spirit in us, lies
   not so much in our ability to let go, or to be persuaded to let go, the
   remembrance of injuries, as in what we are able to do, what volunteer
   sacrifices to make, what painstaking to undergo, that we may get our
   adversary softened, to want, or gently accept, our forgiveness. If it
   is in us to forgive, in any real and properly Christian sense of the
   term, it will not be that we can somehow be gotten down to it, by the
   expostulations of brethren, nor that we only do not expressly claim a
   right to stay in our grudge, or the hurt feeling raised by the wrongs
   of our adversary, till he comes to us in a better mind. Perhaps he
   ought to come, or to have come long ago, but that is nothing as regards
   our justification. If we know how to forgive, we shall be like Christ
   our Master, we shall be giving ourselves for our adversary,
   circumventing him by our prayers, contriving ways to reach his
   tenderness and turn the bad will he is in, taking pains, even to the
   extent of great loss and suffering, that we may get him into the right
   again; thus to accept our remission, and be joined to us openly for
   Christ our Master's sake.

   But this, it may be objected, carries the obligation too high--Christ
   was a peculiar being, in a very peculiar office, and it can not be
   expected of us to follow him and be like him, in what belonged rather
   to his official work, than to the merely inherent principle of personal
   excellence in his character. Now it may be very true that we are not
   called to work out the same problems of divine government, but we are
   required to have, in our degree, exactly the same modes of character,
   and all that he did was the simple coming out of his character. He had
   no good ways, or qualities, that were more than good, no merits of
   character that were superlative and above all the known standards of
   merit. On the contrary one of the great and blessed objects of his
   mission was to consist, in the true unfolding of God's feelings,
   graces, perfections, so as to draw us into the same, or impregnate our
   fallen life with the same. No matter what relations he may have filled,
   or solved, in the great mystery of government, still every thing he
   undertook and bore was for forgiveness' sake, and: he had precisely the
   same reasons of feeling for withholding himself that we have, when we
   withhold from our adversaries. He had his personal indignations against
   the wrong of transgressors, he had his disgusts towards their
   character, he had feelings wounded by the sense of their wrongs, and if
   he could have let a little pride play among his passions, he would have
   had his bitter, invincible grudges against them; so that when he
   thought of them he would have said, "I want no more to do with them.
   Perhaps I will consider them, if they come to me in a better mind, but
   until they. do, I shall let them take the wages of their sin, giving
   myself no farther trouble." The only reason why he did not do this was
   that he was too perfect in excellence to do it. He must dispense
   forgiveness. He must go before, and give himself for, and watch, and
   wait, and suffer, and sue, at the gate of his adversaries. And w1ly not
   we? Because, says the objection, Christ was peculiar, and could do
   things out of his peculiarity that are too high for us. No! no! his
   great peculiarity was that he could be right. "Faithful and just," says
   an apostle, "to forgive us our sins." He could not be faithful to his
   trust as Creator and Lord, could not be consciously just or righteous,
   (for that is what the term here means,) if he did not prepare and offer
   the forgiveness of sins. If there be some kind of rectoral, or public,
   justice that required to be maintained by some fit compensation, or
   compensative expression, that is another matter, but there wanted
   nothing in him better than that most solid justice, which is
   everlasting, immutable, righteousness, to make him a forgiver of sin.
   And in all that you distinguish of a nobler and diviner life, in his
   bearing of his enemies and their sins, he is simply showing what
   belongs, in righteousness, to every moral nature from the Uncreated
   Lord down to the humblest created intelligence. Forgiveness, this same
   Christly forgiveness, belongs to all; to you, to me, to every lowest
   mortal that bears God's image.

   Do we, then, undertake to say, that there is no salvation, out of this
   same Christly forgiveness--has no man a right to expect salvation,
   whose soul hangs fire at the point of such forgiveness? must he
   forgive, in this Christly manner, going before and giving himself for,
   his adversary, if he is to be forgiven? What then does the Saviour
   himself say to this? When he has taught you to pray--"forgive us our
   debts as we forgive our debtors," and has added, "but if ye forgive not
   men. their trespasses, neither will your Heavenly Father forgive your
   trespasses," what does it mean, or to what does it bring you? Can you
   turn off the bad conclusion, by contriving a sort of forgiveness that
   is lower, such barely as can manage to choke down a grudge, or not
   choke down an adversary, when he comes to ask a reconciliation? And was
   that Christ's meaning? was he saying "forgive in your own sense, or
   else I will not forgive in mine?" O, these niggard forgivenesses! He
   would even make you repent of them! He wants you to be with him in his
   own! He wants such a feeling struggling in your bosom, that you can not
   bear to have an adversary, can not rest from your prayers and
   sacrifices and the life-long suit of your concern, till you have gained
   him away from his wrong, and brought him into peace. This in fact is
   salvation; to be with Christ, in all the travail of his forgivenesses.

   Besides, there is another answer to this question of salvation. As w6
   just now said that Christ was simply fulfilling the right in his
   blessed ways of forgiveness, so we may conceive that he is simply
   fulfilling the eternal love. For what is right coincides with love, and
   love with what is right. Now Christ is in this kind of
   forgiveness--unable to stand for the relenting of his adversaries,
   going before them, and giving himself for them--just because it is in
   the nature of love to do so. For it is a vicarious principle and must
   insert itself into whatever sorrow,, sin, suffering, danger, it looks
   upon; and, for this most affecting reason, can not rest till it has
   either gotten its adversary to its bosom, or discovered the
   impossibility that he ever should be. Are we then to look for
   salvation, when we are out of this- love? What do we most readily
   believe and most commonly hold, but that our salvation lies in loving
   God and having his love upon us. The being in heaven's love is, we all
   agree, the bond of heaven's perfectness, the very life and constituent
   beatitude of heaven itself. And what will this love do in us but just
   what it does in Christ? If it keeps down all grudges and hard judgments
   in him, if it makes forgiveness his dearest opportunity, if it puts him
   into the case of his adversary, bearing his wrongs, and contriving only
   how to prepare him to forgiveness--if, I say, the love so works in him,
   what will it do and how will it work in you? Let it not be disguised
   from you, that there are many kinds of mock love, and but one that is
   true, even that which works so sublimely in the self-sacrificing ways
   of Jesus our Master. Thus there is a theologic love, a state that is
   tested by merely defined contrasts of feeling, apart from any effects
   in the practical sacrifices of the life. There is also a sentimental
   love, taken with God's beauty. And again there is a philanthropic love,
   which is caught with great expectations for man, coming out of its own
   prodigious, better than Christian, reforms. Now the test of all these
   mock species of love is that there is no forgiveness in them. You may
   be in this, or that, or all of them, and they will not help you to bear
   one enemy, or put you into any tender ways of seeking after an
   adversary. Could there be any more damning evidence against your love,
   whether it be the defined evangelical, or the sentimental, or the
   philanthropic, than that there is no Christly forgiveness in it? That
   being true, how is any salvation to come out of it? No, my friends,
   this is the love--the only true--"Hereby perceive we the love of God,
   because he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our
   lives for the brethren."

   Taking now this high view of the Christian spirit as related to Christ,
   it would not surprise me, if there should be a feeling of special
   revulsion, or repulsion, rising up in some of your hearts, to thrust
   away even farther than ever the claims of religion. "I could not be a
   Christian after this kind," you will say, "and I never can be. If I
   must forgive all the wrongs I meet, after this manner, I must give up
   any right to be a proper man. Such a volunteering of forgiveness before
   it is sought, and even when smarting under the bitter wrongs of an
   enemy, is too spiritless and weak in the look of it--I could not endure
   being held down to any such forgiving way." All this, my friends, may
   be very true, regarding only the present key of your feeling and
   life--I presume it is. But it may be equally true, at the same time,
   that your judgment is a false one, and that this very impossible
   looking forgiveness, when you are once really in it, by the grace of
   God, will be such an element of dignity, and rest, and strength, and
   conscious superiority to all wrong-doers and wrongs, that you will even
   seem to be raised by it in the relative grade of your nature itself.
   Why, my friends, instead of being humbled, and tamed, and put in
   mortification, by this entering into forgiveness with Christ, you will
   ascend rather into greatness and conscious sovereignty with him, and
   will then, for the first time, begin to conceive what it is to be. free
   and a king! No, the forgiveness you so much distaste is probably not
   the forgiveness I describe, but the low, false kind of your old
   associations; that niggard, misnamed forgiveness that cheapens the
   grace by putting all sacrifice out of question, and makes it
   distasteful by reducing it to so low a figure, that pride can be just
   goaded into it. Sticking fast in its bitternesses, resentments, and
   grudges, and contriving how little and late to forgive, it is only
   dogged into some verbal letting go, which is the more certainly cross
   to self-respect, that there is no genuine meaning in it, and nothing
   genuine but the fit mortification. Not so is it, but far otherwise,
   with the really Christly forgiveness. Here the soul has a really great
   feeling to begin with, and the moment it undertakes for its adversary,
   it goes above him. No matter what his power and the dignity of his
   station, the humblest peasant puts him under, when he begins to pray
   for him, and contrive and labor for his sake. No matter what, or how
   great, the wrong you have suffered, the way to make it greater is to
   hug it fast in grudges and blistering resentments. Pride, passion,
   hate, will make a great wrong out of a very small one; but in the true
   forgiveness, you ascend to a range of feeling so high, so immovably
   serene, that the greatest wrong looks small under you, and quite as
   truly the greatest wrong-doer. O, there is no greatness possible to
   man, none that lifts him so nearly out of the world, and above it, as
   the true Christly forgiveness. This was the greatness of Christ
   himself. Did any being ever tread the world in such majesty as he? And
   his wrongs were bitter enough, and his adversaries high enough, and,
   what is quite as conspicuous, he keeps the true sense always of their
   wrongs, and hates the hateful in their sins, and feels a fit disgust
   for what is disgusting in their character, holding all his judgments
   level and true, as if he were going to proceed entirely by them; yet
   giving himself, as it were out of majesty, for the wrongs he condemns
   and the enemies he is obliged to pity. Do you call this an humble,
   mortifying key to live in? Must you shrink from this? Why, my friends,
   the moment you are born into this high consciousness you will feel that
   your heads strike heaven rather.

   Brethren in Christ, let me also turn the lessons of this subject
   specially towards you; for it was specially Christian brethren, even
   those of Ephesus, that the apostle was addressing when he
   exhorted--"forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath
   forgiven you."

   You have seen what this forgiveness means, what a volunteering there is
   in it, how the true Christian works in it, long before.the forgiveness
   is wanted, works in sacrifice and patience, even as all love must. What
   I want therefore to know, my brethren, is whether you find this
   forgiveness in you? Can you give yourself for your brother, or do you
   hold off in the stiff pretense, that he must come to you first and
   right himself? Can you be the Christian towards hirn, or can you more
   easily hug your injury, as a wound bleeding internally, and hold
   yourself aloof? Let me tell you then how very bad the sign is, when a
   Christian is slow to forgive. It does not show, it is true, that he is
   a vicious, or viciously depraved, man, as other kinds of fault, or
   deviation would, but it shows a great amount of unsanctified nature in
   him--none can tell or guess how much. For it is our proud, wild nature,
   just that in kind, though not in degree, that is observed to burn so
   inextinguishably, in the bloody resentments of savages, which makes it
   so hard for us to forgive. Therefore, if any one finds it more easy to
   stay in the savage feeling, than to go after his adversary in the
   Christian, the indication is fearfully bad. Nay, it is even a very
   unpleasant and doubtful sign, when one has an adversary long to
   forgive; for when a true Christian goes after his adversary, in such
   temper as he ought, tender, assiduous, proving himself in his love, by
   the most faithful sacrifices, he is not like to stay by his enmity
   long. As the heat of a warm day will make even a willful man take off
   his overcoat, so the silent melting of forgiveness at the heart will
   compel it, even before it is aware, to let the grudges go. Still a
   really good man may have enemies, all his life-long, even as Christ
   had, and the real blame may be chargeable not against him, but against
   them, and it would be too much to make their obstinacy a certain proof
   against his fidelity. Enough that he follows his Master, and allows
   them no reason for their obstinacy, by the stint of his own
   affectionate and self-sacrificing endeavors. Commonly the wrong-doer of
   two parties will be the most unforgiving, and, for just that reason,
   the wrong sufferer will be readiest and most forward in forgiveness.

   Sometimes the alienated, or aggrieved parties, will both of them be
   Christian brethren; and how very sad a sight is it, and how much to be
   pitied when two brethren fall into an enmity! How frightfully fallen is
   their look when you look at them! How much worse their internal look.
   to themselves! When they go to pray in secret, how are they choked in
   their prayers! How very likely are they also, to be even choked off
   soon from prayer itself. How certain are they in this manner, even
   against much endeavor, to go down in their piety. The warm heart they
   once had, or seemed to have--where is it? If they beamed in rich
   feeling once on every body, and it was a, blessing to meet them and be
   warmed in the glow of their faces, the blessing and the glow are soon
   gone, and we may almost say the faces too; for there is scarcely any
   but a negative meaning left in them. O, ye pitiable and sad pair of
   disciples, that are paired in your enmity! How easily and beautifully
   paired might you be in your forgiveness! Go apart and think of this! go
   apart and pray over it! Nay, come together and pray over it! Pray
   especially, as you most need, that God will forgive you, even as you
   forgive each other--thus or--never.

   Sometimes it will happen that a whole brotherhood of disciples will be
   scored and scorched by disaffections, jealousies, wounded feelings that
   are akin to enmity, in the same manner. There is much talk and a
   general talking down of course, and as a family quarrel brings down
   family respect, so it is when brethren are set to the work of
   diminishing each other's worth and character. Believe them and they are
   all no better than they should be, If they once loved each other, and
   were firmly locked together in their common cause, so much the worse
   now, for the dishonor falls on their tendernesses and prayers, and all
   the good things that seemed to be in their love. The Holy Dove flies
   their assemblies, or only hovers doubtfully over them, unable to light
   where there is no peace. When they come to pray together, it is only
   locally together, and not in spirit that they pray. There is a dreary
   chill in their assemblies. Neither the prayers appear to go up, nor the
   preaching to come down. There is no savoring element for the word, and
   of course there is as little due sense of savor from it. It is neither
   fire, nor hammer, but a chill made audible rather, like the ripping,
   rifting noises of some ice-clad lake or river in a silent, freezing
   night. The power is all gone, fatally benumbed. The power of the word,
   the power of the living epistle, that of the prayers--every sort is
   gone, and there is no fire of heaven left.

   What then shall they do? Some of them perhaps will finally begin to
   say, let us take the counsel of Lot and Abraham--go to the right, and
   go to the left. Yes, but there is a difference; these friends, Abraham
   and Lot, parted because they were agreed, not because they were at
   variance; parted to save their agreement and not to comfort their
   repugnances. Have then Christian brethren, under Christ's own gospel,
   nothing better left, than to take themselves out of sight of each
   other?--going apart just to get rid of forgiveness; going to carry the
   rankling with them, live in the bitterness, die in the grudges of their
   untamable passion? What is our gospel but a reconciling power even for
   sin itself, and what is it good for--cross, and love, and patience, and
   all--if it can not reconcile? No, there is a better way; Christ lays it
   on them, by his own dear passion where he gave himself for them, by his
   bloody sweat, by his pierced hands, and by his open side, to go about
   the matter of forgiving one another even as he went about forgiving
   them. O, it is a short method, and how beautiful, and one that never
   failed. When they are ready to go before all relentings, and above all
   grudges, and be weary, and sick, and sad, and sorrowful, and so to give
   themselves for their adversaries, weeping on their necks in tender and
   true confession, they will not be adversaries long, but they will be
   turning all together to the cross, and joining in the prayer--forgive
   us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. They
   had much to say before of forgiveness, they were all ready to forgive,
   but they could not find how much, or when, or how, because they took
   forgiveness in too light a key. Now they take it in Christ's meaning,
   and how shortly are their troubles ended. They can not forgive enough,
   or soon enough, or with half as much love as they would. The
   bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil speaking, are
   put away, with all malice. They are kind one to another, tenderhearted,
   forgiving one another, even as God, for Christ's sake, has forgiven
   them.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                      XIX.

CHRIST BEARING THE SINS OF TRANSGRESSORS.

   "So Christ. was once offered to bear the sins of many."--Heb. ix, 28.

   Christ bearing our sins ought to be the tenderest and most
   soul-subduing of all facts conceivable. And yet it may even be made
   quite revolting, by the over literal, and legally hard, face put upon
   it. Perhaps I ought to say that it too often is, and that what is given
   to be the new creating power of God in our lives, is made, in this
   manner, to be an offense that even balks our repentances. What I
   propose then, at the present time, is to answer, in a very practical
   way, the very practical question--

   In what sense, or manner, it is, that Christ bears the sins of the
   world?

   To make the answer clear, I begin by specifying some things which are
   not to be understood by it.

   Thus we are not to understand that the sins of the world are put upon
   him, or transferred to him, so as to be his. That is impossible. Guilt
   is a matter so strictly and eternally personal, that nobody can be in
   it, but the transgressor himself to whom it belongs. Apart from him it
   is nothing. Strike him out of existence and it no longer exists. The
   bad conscience, the blame, the damning self-conviction, is as
   incommunicably his, even as his brain, or his will. Indeed, the
   creatorship of the world can as well be transferred, as the doership of
   a sin. The meum and tuum of property can be transferred, but the meum
   and tuum of sin is even absolute. If I owe a debt, another man can make
   himself a debtor in my place, but if I am a felon, no other man can be
   the felon for me.

   It follows, in the same view, that Christ does not bear our sins in the
   sense that he bears our punishment. Everlasting justice forbids any
   such commutation of places in punishment. What is this justice? An
   indignation against wrong that wants pain out of somebody, caring only
   that the quantum be made up? Or is it, rather, an indignation against
   the wrong-doer himself, and no other? No matter if another consents to
   bear that indignation, and suffer all the deserved pains of the
   wrong-doer, when that second person comes to offer himself, God's
   justice will forthwith object in the question--"Are you guilty of this
   man's sin? Doubtless you may be his friend, but the only thing you can
   do for him is to be innocence in him, and you can as well do that as to
   be guilty instead of him. But as long as you are innocence yourself,
   what kind of transaction is it that you undertake, when you come to be
   punished in innocence? What opinion have you of my justice, when you
   expect me to release the pains deserved, if only I can get enough that
   are not deserved? Did I ever threaten to punish the guilty man, or
   somebody else, when my law should be broken? You ask more than is
   possible, when you ask me to smooth over even the everlasting
   distinctions of principle, and be satisfied with the punishment of
   innocence. I can only be revolted by the thought, and should be
   everlastingly by the deed."

   Again, it is not conceivable that Christ bears our sin, in the sense
   that the abhorrence of God to our sin is laid upon him, and expressed
   through, and by means of, his sufferings. How can God lay abhorrence
   upon what is not abhorrent? Is he going to abhor goodness, truth,
   beauty itself? And if Jesus, being all this, comes in as a volunteer
   into the place of transgressors, challenging upon himself the
   abhorrence due to them, will God falsify and mock all his own approving
   judgments and moral affinities, by acting an abhorrence which he must
   renounce every one of his perfections to feel? Perhaps it will be
   imagined that he only puts great pains on Christ, which we ourselves
   are to look upon as tokens of abhorrence to us. That would be very
   ingenious in us, but how are we going to take up such a thought? In the
   first place, God did not inflict those pains, but we ourselves. Are we
   then going to put Christ to death and take it up as a religious
   discovery, having a gospel in it, that God's abhorrence to us is so far
   expressed by our very abominable deed of murder, that it need not be
   any more, by our punishment? We can easily enough imagine God's
   abhorrence, in such a case, to the sin perpetrated, and the murderers
   by whom it is perpetrated, but the difficulty is to get either Christ
   or his suffering into the same line; for the last thing any human soul
   can think of will be, that God's abhorrence touches him any how, or
   looks out any where from his pains.

   We come now, having dismissed these rather common misconceptions, to
   the positive matter of the question, or the positive answer to be
   given. And here let me indicate, beforehand, a certain point of fact
   that will probably distinguish any true answer; viz., that Christ, in
   bearing the sins of transgressors, simply fulfills principles of duty,
   or holiness, that are common to all moral beings, and does it as being
   obliged by those principles. If there is any fundamental truth in
   morals, it is that there is no superlative kind of merit or excellence;
   that as far as kind is concerned, the same kind is for all, and there
   is no other. Thus, if Christ has it incumbent on him, as a point of
   beneficence, or love, to bear the sins of transgressors, it will be
   incumbent on every moral being in the universe, ourselves included, to
   bear sins; only not perhaps in the same degree, or with the same
   effect. If he is to be a sacrifice for sin, it will be laid upon us to
   be, every man, a sacrifice and an offering in like manner, only not to
   accomplish all the same results. We are not then to look for some
   artificial, theologically contrived, never before heard of, kind of
   good, in the bearing of sins, but simply to look after what lies in the
   first principles of religious love and devotion, as related to the
   conduct of all. Having this intent in view I shall make out--

   I. A general or inclusive answer to the question, and then, secondly, a
   threefold, particular answer, the points of which. are included under
   it. The general is this--that Christ bears the sins of the world in a
   certain representative sense, analogous to that in which the priests
   and the sacrifices of the former altar-service, bore the sins of the
   people worshiping. The phrase, "he shall bear his sin," or "bear his
   iniquity," means, it is true, when applied to the guilty person, that
   he shall be punished for his sin. But when it is applied, as it is many
   times, to the priests and sacrifices at the altar, we are not to
   conceive that the priests, or the altar victims, have the guilt
   actually put upon them--nothing could be more absurd--but we are to
   take the words in an accommodated, ritually formal sense, where the
   same thing is true representatively; the design being to let the people
   feel or believe, that their sins are being taken away, as if put over
   upon the priests, or upon the head of the victims. Not to multiply
   instances, we have the phrase "to bear sins" used in both senses in a
   single passage, (Numb. xviii, 22, 23)--"Neither must the children of
   Israel henceforth come near the tabernacle of the congregation, lest
   they bear sin [that is, their own sin] and die. But the Levites shall
   do the service of the tabernacle of the congregation, and they shall
   bear their iniquity." No one will be so absurd as to imagine, that the
   iniquity of the people is here declared to be literally put on the
   priesthood. They are only to bear it representatively, coming so far in
   place of the people before God, as to conduct their sacrifice for them,
   and, as God accepts the sacrifice, put them in the state, formally at
   least, of reconciliation. In a similarly representative sense, the
   prophet Ezekiel lies upon his left side three hundred and ninety days,
   "bearing," as he says, "the iniquity of the house of Israel," and upon
   his right side forty days "bearing the iniquity of the house of Judah;"
   where it is simply meant that the iniquity was made visible
   representatively in that sign. So when "all the iniquities of the
   children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins,"
   were put, as we read, upon the head of their scape-goat, and he was
   driven out into the desert, they knew not where, there was neither any
   sin upon the goat, nor any punishment. The reality of the whole matter
   stood in what was representatively signified; viz., the removal and
   clearance of their sin.

   And here is the ready solution of all those expressions in the New
   Testament, which are brought over from the priesthood and sacrifices of
   the Old Testament, and used, with so great power, to represent the
   relation of Christ to the sins of the world. Thus he is declared to be
   "made sin for us," just as the Levites were, in bearing the iniquities
   of the congregation. Thus also it is declared that he "was once offered
   to bear the sins of many." The meaning is that he comes
   representatively in our place, undertaking, or taking on himself, the
   case of our sin, even as the priests at the altar did. Such forms of
   speech come to be natural, as it were, to the Jewish mind, under the
   uses of their ritual, and pass into new applications of a different
   shade. Thus Paul speaks of Christ "being made a curse for us."
   Regarding Christ as having come into our state of corporate evil, under
   the curse, and borne the bitterness of it, and at so great expense
   delivered us from it, he takes up the representative figure of the
   altar-service, and shows him, in that manner, bearing the curse for us.
   He does not mean that Christ was literally and legally substituted, in
   the matter of our punishment, but that he was substituted, as the
   priests were, in bearing the sins of the people, and with a like
   result. Thus also Peter says, in the fervor of his obligation to
   Christ--"Who his own self bare our sins, in his own body on the tree;"
   as if our very sins were personally chastised, or punished, in the
   pains of his cross; and yet he does not say it, but turns the sentence,
   in what follows, in a way to show that he means no such thing--"that we
   being dead to sin, might live unto righteousness; by whose stripes ye
   were healed." After all he is only showing, at what expense, Christ
   takes us away from our sin, and makes us "live unto righteousness." And
   though he speaks of "stripes," a penal word, he does not say "by whose
   stripes God's justice was satisfied," but, "by whose stripes ye were
   healed."

   Christ then bears our sin, we answer inclusively and generally, in the
   sense that he has come representatively into our place and got such
   power in us by his sacrifice, as to take it wholly away.

   Pause here now a moment at the threshhold, and raise the question,
   whether we, as human beings, can have any thing in common with him, in
   such a sacrifice? Of course we can not do the same things; for we have
   not the same grade of character and power over human sentiment, nor the
   same undertaking for the world upon us. We are sinners ourselves,
   wanting, for outfit in duty, just that taking away of sin and renewing
   in good, which are to be the fruit of his sacrifice. It is not to be
   expected, therefore, that we shall come into any such answering for
   sin, as to have the representative figures of the altar applied to us;
   unless it be in ways more restricted and partial. We shall only follow
   him, as our very much abused faculty, and humbler key of being, allow
   us to follow.

   Still it is remarkable how many of the scripture terms of sacrifice and
   priestly intervention are applied to Christian disciples, and how
   constantly they are called to maintain precisely the way of the cross.
   Nothing, in fact, is farther off from the New Testament, than to
   conceive that Christ is in a superlative kind of virtue, inappropriate,
   or impossible, to mortals.

   Thus we are called to be sacrifices and priests of sacrifice. "I
   beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, [that is, in
   Jesus Christ,] that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, [in the
   same manner,] holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable
   service," [the dictate of your moral nature as it was of his.] The
   phrase "acceptable to God," you will also observe, is a sacrificial
   phrase, bearing an allusion to God's acceptance of the sin offerings.
   And, in this sense, it occurs again--"Ye also, as lively stones, are
   built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual
   sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ." The disciples are taken
   often as being thus a priesthood, all, with their Master--"Kings and
   priests unto God," "entering into the holiest with boldness;" entering
   in thither also to act the part of intercessors--to anoint and raise up
   the sick, as James represents; to obtain forgiveness of sins for the
   brethren that have committed sin; to convert sinning brethren from the
   error of their ways, in such a sense as to be in fact their human
   saviours--"saving their souls from death and hiding the multitude of
   their sins." And this word hiding it should also be observed is a word
   of sacrificial atonement; for to atone is literally to cover, that is,
   to hide; put away, forever, make as naught. Not that we are to do these
   things in our own right, and by our own power, as Christ did, but, as
   in the language just now cited, "by Jesus Christ." The conception is
   that our life is to be so far in the analogy of his, and moved by his
   inspirations, that the same words, priest, sacrifice, intercession,
   saving of souls, converting sinners, hiding, or covering sins; will be
   fitly applied to us-that is, in senses modified by our human capacities
   and conditions.

   Having sketched this general outline of what is to be understood by the
   bearing of sins, we now proceed--

   II. To fill up the outline by a more particular statement of the
   subject matter included under it. Christ, we have seen, bears the sins
   of the world representatively, in a figure, much as the priesthood, or
   the scapegoat, bore them, only procuring an absolution for them as much
   more real and spiritual, as the heavenly things themselves are more
   quickening and substantial in him, than their shadows in the forms of
   the altar. This for the general statement; which includes, we shall
   find, when we look into the subject matter of his life more closely,
   three particular modes, or distinctly and rationally conceived methods,
   of bearing sin by him, in his mission as a Redeemer.

   1. He bears the sin of the world, by that assumption which his love
   must needs make of it. Love puts every being, from the eternal God
   downward, into the case of all sufferers, wrong-doers, and enemies, to
   assume their evils, and be concerned for them. Being love, it assumes
   their loss, danger, present suffering, suffering to be; all their want,
   sorrow, shame, and disorder; and goes into their case to restore and
   save. As a father, who has a dear son straying from honor and virtue,
   assumes that son to be an inevitable burden on his love, and bears him,
   sin and all, as a heavy load upon his feeling, striving after him in
   many tears, and prayers, and weary contrivings, and it may be under
   great personal abuse, that he may regain him to a better life, just so
   God assumes in Christ all transgressors and enemies, and all their sin,
   and all their coming woes, and bears them on his paternal feeling,
   through great waves of living conflict and dying passion--"For God so
   loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever
   believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life." The
   assumption is such that we may even look upon it and speak of it, as a
   kind of substitution. Hence the strongly substitutional language
   employed concerning it. But there is no room for mistaking the meaning
   of such language. The precise nature of the assumption, or
   substitution, is given when the evangelist says of Christ's healing
   works--"That it might be fulfilled that was spoken by. Esaias the
   prophet, himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses." It
   does not mean that Christ literally took into his body, and bore,
   himself, all the fevers, pains, lamenesses, blindnesses, leprosies he
   healed, but simply that he took them upon his sympathy, bore them as a
   burden upon his compassionate love. In that sense, exactly, he assumed
   and bore the sins of the world; not that he became the sinner and
   suffered the due punishment himself, but that he took them on his love,
   and put himself by mighty throes of feeling, and sacrifice, and mortal
   passion, to the working out of their deliverance. And these were the
   throes in which we find him often struggling; declaring now that his
   soul is troubled, heaving now, in prostrate weakness, and bloody sweat,
   on the ground. In these throes he died, saying, "It is finished
   "--viz., the bearing of sins that he had undertaken to bear. The sins
   were never his, the deserved pains never touched him as being deserved,
   but they were upon his feeling in so heavy a burden as to make him
   sigh, "my soul is exceeding sorrowful." And just because the world in
   sin took hold of his feeling in this manner, was he able, in turn, to
   get hold of the feeling of the world, and become its true deliverer and
   Saviour. In this fact lay bosomed the everlasting gospel.

   Let me not be understood now, in transferring this analogy, to say, or
   suggest, that Christ came into such a life of sympathy and death of
   passion, just to give us an example which we are to copy. Nothing could
   be more impotent, or farther from the truth. Giving and copying
   examples is too tame a matter to be conceived as making out a gospel.
   No, Christ took our sin upon him in this manner and bore it as the
   burden of his mission, just because it was in his love to do it; and
   that same love, in any being, of any world, in us just struggling up
   out of our lowness and bondage, will put us, in our human grade, and
   according to the measure of our love, on making the same kind of
   assumption. We shall take the child of sin, or sorrow, our friend, our
   enemy, any. one, every one we see to be in evil, on our feeling, and
   make him a charge upon our sacrifices and prayers. Paul knew exactly
   what this meant when he said--"Bear ye one another's burdens and so
   fulfill the law of Christ;"--that is, the eternal love-law, or standard
   of obligation, that he himself fulfilled. Paul had the meaning too, the
   very Gethsemane of it, in his own heart, when he cried, under his
   burden--"I have great heaviness, and continual sorrow in my heart. For
   I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my
   kinsmen, according to the flesh." And the same we find recurring, in
   one form or another, in all the apostles, all the brethren. When they
   hear the Master lay it on them to minister--"Even as the Son of Man
   came, not to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give his life a
   ransom for many"--they take the sense of it; for, having his love in
   them, they are not afraid to find a cross of sacrifice in the love,
   just the cross that he called them to bear as followers. Thus also it
   is that he institutes a communion for them, and calls them to show
   forth his death; by which he means, not that they are to simply
   remember his death, or make mention of it, but that they are to show
   the love that can bear sins with him, and be a sacrifice even up to
   that stern limit.

   O, what a calling is this, my brethren, the bearing of sins, with
   Christ. Of course you have not the same things to do that he had, or
   the same. capacity to do them; you have not even the same things to do,
   one as another; but if his love has really been. quickened in you, the
   fact will be known by the burdens that have come upon your heart;
   covetousness, world-greediness, self-indulgence, prejudices,
   resentments, feelings wounded by injury--none of these will hold you:
   but there will be a most dear love going forth in you, not to your
   friends only, but even more consciously to your enemies, and God's
   enemies. There will be times when you seem to be well nigh crushed, by
   the concern you feel and the burdens you bear. Is it so with you? Is it
   here that you sometimes find even your joy--the same which Christ
   himself had and bequeathed to you? Have you found, as every mother, for
   example, has, and every Christian may, that love-pains are the deepest
   attainable joys; tragic exaltations of a consciously great feeling
   that, in bearing enemies and sins, challenges eternal affinity with
   Christ and with God?

   2. It is another and equally true conception of the bearing of sins by
   Christ, that he is incarnated into the state of sin, including all the
   corporate woes of penalty, or natural retribution, under it--woes that
   infest the world, the body, and the social and political departments of
   human affairs. These disorders and mischiefs comprehend what is called,
   in scripture, "the curse;" for the curse is just that state of
   retributive disorder, and disjunction, that follows, under natural
   laws, the outbreak of sin The virus of disease, possibly of all
   disease, is generated under and by these laws. Natural causes are
   beneficent henceforth, only in the qualified sense, that they are
   attacking sin with due mixtures of pain, as well as with favors
   undeserved. Dreadful superstitions cloud the general understanding.
   Truth is obscured. Passion is made coarse and violent. Envies,
   ambitions, grudges, hatreds, are loosened, and bloody wrongs are
   instigated everywhere by them. Oppressions, persecutions, rebellions,
   wars, roll across the nations, and turn the world's history into a kind
   of Alcedama. This now is the curse, the corporate woe of the world, and
   when Christ comes down into the world to be incarnate in it, and do his
   work of love, he enters himself into its corporate evils, and takes
   them just as they are; even as a man, plunging into the sea, would take
   the waves and the monsters coursing in it as they are. All which is
   described by an apostle, when he says, that Christ "was made a curse
   for us." Nor, when he adds, "for it is written, cursed is every one
   that hangeth on a tree," does he mean to say that Christ is made a
   curse for us only in the sense that he is crucified, or at the
   particular point of his crucifixion; he merely drops in this allusion,
   touching that particular point, taken as a good type of all that he
   does and suffers in the world; for he meets the corporate woe and
   retribution of the world at every step. His body, as being born of the
   flesh, has the mortal maladies and temptations of the curse working
   subtly in it. When there is no room at the inn but only in the manger,
   that is the corporate mischief and curse of society, where the great
   rule down the humble, and respect goes only by appearances. The
   jealousy of Herod is the curse, before which he flies into Egypt. The
   bigotry of the priests was the curse. The slowness of his friends, the
   denial by one, the betrayal by another, the flight of all, was the
   curse. The chief priests and the rabbis, and the council, and Pilate,
   and Herod, all combined against him, only represent the corporate
   wrath, and wrong, and curse, of the world. Incarnated thus into the
   curse, he had the living contact of it at every breath. The waves of
   God's retribution dashed against him all the way, as he waded through
   on his course. Innocent he was, but had none of the rights, or proper
   fortunes of innocence. Not that any thing befell him as punishment, and
   yet he was scorching, every hour, under the great world's corporate
   evils; those which God's retributions had kindled for the chastisement
   of its sin. And why is he here, for what is he bearing thus the sin of
   the world? Not that he may suffer, not that he may idly brave so much
   of suffering--of what possible use were this?--no, but he is here
   because he has an errand that brought him, or required him to come. His
   object is to gain the human heart; and, to do it, he must open the
   heart of God; and to do that, he must not come flying over the world,
   but must be incarnated into it, put upon the same human footing in his
   human life, that we are--all this to make God's feeling intelligible,
   or what is the same, to open God's sympathies to us, and open our
   sympathies to God; thus to beget us anew in God's likeness. If he had
   come to be an exceptional man, whom the waves of the world's corporate
   evils could not touch, or if he had come as a man of brass, not to feel
   their touch, he were in fact nothing to us. But now that we have him
   struggling in the waves with us, touched with all our infirmities, and
   bearing, in deep sympathy, all our human evils, O, how tenderly do we
   cling to him and what strength do we get from his power and patience in
   our hearts!

   Now, my friends, it would seem, at first view, to be very wide of all
   possibility, that we should be called to any such bearing of sin as
   this. Are we going to be incarnated like our divine Master? Even so!
   Dropping only the form of the word, the coming into flesh, it is no
   inconsiderable part of our dignity and God-likeness in sacrifice, that
   we are able to go directly down into the corporate evils of men, for
   their good!--into some house, for example, or village, or city, where a
   dreadful pestilence rages, to minister to their sick ones and comfort
   their dying; into the disgusts of low and filthy society, where vice
   rages, rescuing the victims and their children; into works of
   reformation, or maintenances of truth, that are unpopular, just because
   society has lost the truth. Christ bids you make a feast and call the
   lame, the halt, and the blind, passing, for the time, into their range
   of sympathy--what is that but a kind of incarnation, like that which
   brought him down out of heaven's orders of glory, into the lame and
   halting sorrows of our human apostasy. When, too, you go out, in God's
   love, into scenes of dissipation, or of splendid profligacy, it is an
   almost literal incarnation--going into the flesh to be tempted as
   Christ was. Perhaps you are just now in the question, whether you shall
   forsake the refinements and comforts of a Christian home, and go down
   as a missionary, for all your future life, into the level of a
   barbarous and idolatrous people, where your. motives will not, for many
   long years, be even so much as conceived, where your sympathies will be
   repelled, your operations looked on with jealousy, your beginnings
   crushed by violence, and many a sad long night of, tears and groanings,
   witness your Gethsemane? Will you go, or will you not? What is it, in
   fact, but the question, whether you can be incarnated with your Master,
   under a little different version of the word? Almost half our duties
   come to us in this shape, raising the question, whether we can take the
   corporate evils of some condition that is unpopular, distasteful,
   unappreciative, hostile, or without dignity? In these things it is one
   of our greatest privileges to follow, and know that we follow, our
   Master--are we ready?

   3. Christ bears the sin of the world, in the sense that he bears,
   consentingly, the direct attacks of wrong, or sin, upon his person;
   doing it, of course, in but a few instances, such as may have been
   included in his comparatively short life, but showing, in those few
   instances, how all the human wrongs are related to his feeling, or
   would be if he suffered them all. And here again it is that he gets an
   amazing power, as a redeemer, over the sins of the world. He did not
   come into the world to suffer these wrongs as an end, or to brave them
   by an ostentation of patience, as possibly some may understand, when
   they hear him commanding one who is smitten on one cheek to turn the
   other. He is not counseling, in such words, a defiant, but only a total
   non-resistance. Coming into the world thus as the incarnate Word of
   God, God manifest in the flesh, he bears the wrong-doing of sin, not
   defiantly, but as feeling after the sin; letting it see what wrong it
   has in its own nature to do, when the Son of God comes to it
   ministering love and forgiveness. And what a spectacle is this to look
   upon! the Eternal King coming in love to win transgression back--mocked
   in his doctrine, hated for his miracles, insulted, struck, spit upon,
   crucified! And the more strangely impressive is the spectacle, that the
   sufferer is dumb, makes no protestation of his rights, parries no
   accusation, answers none. Pilate himself is "afraid" before such
   dignity. All that he will answer is, that he is come into the world "to
   bear witness to the truth." He does not say that he is here to bear the
   worst they can do upon him, nor that he is here to suffer at all as an
   end, but that his end is everlasting truth. That accordingly which so
   visibly shook the courage of Pilate, at the trial, fell with as heavy a
   shock, on all sin, everywhere, afterwards. When the sin found such a
   being, even the incarnate Word of the Father, taking its blows, in such
   patience, and dying under the blows, how dreadful the recoil of feeling
   it suffered! How wild, and weak, and low, was it made to appear in its
   own sight. Thus it was that, in his bearing of sin upon his cross,
   Christ broke it down forever. Or, if it better please, thus it was that
   sin broke itself across the silence of Jesus, and the wood, and the
   nails, of his cross. And thus it was that the just now angry
   multitudes, "all the people that came together to see that sight,
   beholding the things that were done, smote their breasts and returned."
   All sin was broken, as it were, in that sight; it was the sight of
   Lucifer falling from heaven, even as he had testified in vision before.

   And this kind also is for us, my brethren. Here we also are to take the
   cross and follow, as our Master bade us. Many persons appear to
   suppose, that we are required to submit ourselves to wrong as a kind of
   tax, or tariff, levied upon us, without any particular end. They take
   it as a mere blind appointment, and think it must be so accepted. Far
   from that as possible! On the contrary it is to be evil or wrong
   encountered in a work of sacrifice, encountered by one who is after the
   ends of love, even as Christ was. That death of his was great in power,
   not because he bore it, but because he was in the work of God's love,
   and bore it on his way, unable to be diverted from his end by that or
   any other death. In just that manner and degree, it was in his heart to
   bear sin. So if wrongs are done to you, and the same love is in you,
   the sin will have a great discovery to make in your patience, of its
   own cruelty and weakness. If you do but suffer well, nobody can long
   triumph over you, or live before you unforgiven. Do you then remember,
   that, a great part of your Christian power and privilege is here, in
   the bearing of sin with your Master. Perhaps you talk down your
   enemies, perhaps you mix hot resentments with your words, perhaps you
   break the silence of Christ first, and then break every thing else in
   his example. Come back then if it be so, and read, and settle into your
   memory, and transcribe on your heart, that one sentence of the apostle
   concerning charity--"Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth
   all things, endureth all things." There you have the power of Jesus
   himself, and it is for you!

   Having reached this point I see no reason why the subject should be
   farther protracted. There is nothing, in fact, to add, even for
   persuasion's sake. The gospel, as we have here seen it, is complete in
   itself, asking, and in fact, permitting, no help from its advocate.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                      XX.

THE PUTTING ON OF CHRIST.

   "But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ."--Rom. xiii, 14.

   The highest distinction of man, taken as an animal among animals, lies
   not in his two-handedness, or his erect figure, but in his necessity
   and right of dress. The inferior animals have no option concerning
   their outward figure and appearing. Their dress, or covering, is a part
   of their organization, growing on them, or out of them, as their bones
   are grown within. Be it feathers, or fur, or hair, or wool; be it in
   this color or that, brilliant as the rainbow, or shaggy, or grizzled,
   or rusty and dull, they have no liberty to change it, even if they
   could desire the change, for one that is glossier and more to their
   taste. But man, as a creature gifted with a larger option, begins, at
   the very outset, to show his superior dignity in the necessary option
   of dress. It is given him for his really high prerogative, to dress
   himself, and come into just what form of appearing will best satisfy
   the tastes into which he has grown; or, what is very nearly the same
   thing, will best represent the quality of his feeling and character.
   With this kind of liberty comes, of course, an immense peril; for there
   is a peril that belongs to every kind of liberty. As dress and equipage
   may create a difference of appearing, that very nearly amounts to a
   difference of order and kind, the race of ambition, as soon as ambition
   is born, will here begin. And now the tremendous option of dress, given
   as a point of dignity, becomes, under sin, a mighty instigator in the
   fearful race of money, society, and fashion.

   You already understand from this course of remark, that I am going to
   speak of dress as the outward analogon, or figure of character, and of
   character as the grand "putting on" of the soul. It would be
   instructive here to notice the immense reacting power of dress on
   character, showing how we not only choose our own figure in it, but our
   figure in turn chooses us; requiring us to feel and act, or helping us
   to feel and act, according to the appearing we are in. But I hasten to
   speak of the analogy referred to. Dress relates to the form or figure
   of the body, character to the form or figure of the soul--it is, in
   fact, the dress of the soul. The option we have, in one, typifies the
   grander option we have in the other. The right we have in one, above
   the mere animals, to choose the color, type and figure of the outward
   man, foreshadows the nobler right we also have to cast the mold,
   fashion or despoil the beauty, of the inward man. There is also an
   immense reaction in character; what we have become already, in the cast
   of life, going far to shape our doings and possible becomings
   hereafter.

   On the ground of this analogy it is that the scriptures so frequently
   make use of dress, to signify what lies in character, and represent
   character, in one way or another, as being the dress of the soul. Thus
   they speak of "the wedding-garment," "the garment of praise," that "of
   cursing," that "of pride;" "the robe of righteousness," and "of
   judgment," and "the white robe," and "the best robe" given to the
   returning prodigal, and "the robe that has been washed," and "judgment
   put on as a robe;" of "white raiment," and "white apparel," of
   "glorious apparel," of "filthiness," or "righteousness that are filthy
   rags," of "filthiness in the skirts;" and more inclusively and
   generally still, of being "clothed with salvation," "with strength and
   power," "with humility," "with majesty," "with shame," "with fine linen
   clean and white, which is the righteousness of saints;" "I put on
   righteousness," says Job, "and it clothed me." And, in the same way, it
   is that Paul, conceiving Christ to be the soul's new dress, or what is
   no wise different, its new character, says "Put ye on the Lord Jesus
   Christ."

   All the figures of dress or clothing are used up, in this manner, by
   the scriptures, to represent the forms of disgrace and filthiness, or
   of beauty and glory, into which the inner man of the soul may be
   fashioned--wearing heaven's livery or that of sin. As character is the
   soul's dress, and dress analogical to character, whatever has power to
   produce a character when received, is represented as a dress to be put
   on.

   Passing thus into the great problem of life as a moral and spiritual
   affair, we are surprised to find that inward character and outward
   covering are so closely related, as to be taken, by a kind of natural
   instinct, one for the other, and the loss of one for the loss of the
   other. What do the first human pair imagine when they fall into sin,
   and make the loss of character, but that they have lost their covering?
   It does not appear to be merely a stroke of art in the description
   given, but a most natural turn of fact, that the shamed consciousness
   within is taken, by their unpracticed simplicity, as a shock that has
   come upon their modesty.

   No sooner is the deed done, than the culprits, all covered in before by
   the sense of God's beauty on their feeling--for exactly that was their
   original righteousness and not any beauty of their own culture--begin
   to be troubled by the discovery of their nakedness! The real difficulty
   is that the pure investiture of God upon their consciousness has been
   stripped away, thrown off by their sin. Nothing is changed without, as
   they foolishly think--stitching their scant leaves, vain hope! to hide
   a loss that is within. And probably the same is true of the immense
   dressing art and trade of the world; it is put agoing and continued, as
   regards the fearfully deep zeal of it, by just that shame of the mind
   which keeps it company in evil, and makes it always emulous of some
   better figure. Were this inward shame taken away, and the soul
   inwrapped, as at the first, by the sense of God's beauty upon it, the
   secret phrenzy at least would soon be over. The maiden would forget her
   torment in the sense of a holier beauty within, the hidden man of the
   heart, the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit; and the man of the
   world would be striving no more after the outward shows and trappings
   that are needed to cover the lost honors of the mind.

   In the same way it is, just according to the manner of the fig-leaf
   history, that such an immense patching art, in the matter of character,
   is kept in practice in all ages of the world. It is the general
   admission of souls, that they are not in a true figure of respect
   before themselves; but instead of returning to God, and the complete
   investure in which he will cover them, they imagine, or get up, small
   shows of excellence, which they contrive to think are as good, for the
   matter of character, as they need. These small shows we have a name
   for, calling them pretexts, shows of covering that, after all, do not
   cover--patches, fig-leaves. In one view the absurd figures continually
   put forward as pretexts, in this way, are abundantly ludicrous; in
   another they carry a look most sad, as well as profoundly serious.
   Politeness--this is one of the fig-leaves; taken for a complete
   character by many, and carefully maintained, as the standard excellence
   of life. Honor is another and scantier, assuming still to be even a
   superlative kind of character; more imposing and airy than it could be
   under the restrictions of virtue. Bravery, again, is a fig-leaf
   pretext, put on to cover the loss of courage; for evil in the soul is
   of a coward nature, and can only keep itself up, without heart, by
   sallies and wild dashes of bravery from the will. These and many others
   of the same class are pretexts of character outside of religion, but
   immensely significant, as revelations of the shamed consciousness of
   sin. Passing into the more immediate field of religion, the pretexts
   there invented and put forward, as covers to the soul's nakedness, are
   scarcely to be numbered or named--such as sacrifices offered the world
   over to idols, self-tortures of the body to cover the sin of the soul,
   penances, austerities of solitude, vows of abstinence and poverty,
   exactness in rites and traditions, orthodoxy, alms-givings, honesty in
   trade, the doing others no harm, resignations and fatalizing
   submissions to God, works of reform and philanthropy, patience without
   feeling, liberality without character. This fig-leaf stitching is, in
   fact, the great business of the world; in which we may see, more
   convincingly than by any thing else, the certainty that men are goaded
   everywhere by the secret, inexpugnable feeling of nakedness or a want
   of character. It is a most sad picture to look upon. Then how piercing
   and fearful is the revelation, when the Holy Spirit strips away all the
   illusions they practice, and they are made to see that their
   righteousnesses are rags and not garments, and that they are wretched,
   and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked. O, this nakedness of the
   soul! how dismal a figure it is even to itself! Jesus pities it, and
   comes to it saying, in what gentleness of promise--"buy of me gold
   tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich, and white raiment that
   thou mayest be clothed, that the shame of thy nakedness may not
   appear."

   Nor let any one imagine that these deep wants of spiritual nakedness we
   speak of are to be satisfied, by any uprightness in the moral life. The
   shame is religious, not moral--it belongs entirely to the religious
   nature, divested as it is of what was to be everlastingly upon it, the
   conscious infolding of God. The law moral is a law of this world,
   sanctioned by this world's custom. It was not this out which the first
   man fell; for custom had not yet arrived. No, it was the original
   inspiration, that enveloped and, as it were, covered in his life; the
   holy investiture that he had inductively from God, by community of
   being with him--this it was that he had put off, and the loss of which
   was the dreadful shame of his uncovering. Impossible, therefore, it is
   for any one to reinvest himself with the covering he needs. He can not
   dew himself in the dews of his lost morning, can not cover in himself
   in the righteousness that was God's infolding of character upon him.
   What he had by community of being he can never reproduce by his
   personal will. lie must have it again, as he had it at the first; only
   by that same righteousness of God revealed to faith, in Christ his Son.
   Here again the robe is offered back, and he may have good use of his
   liberty in putting it on; he only can not make a thread of it himself;
   the warp and woof must be wholly divine--the incovering beauty of God's
   own feeling and Spirit, that enveloped our first father, and, in
   Christ, are offered to us all.

   We pass, then, here to another point in advance, viz., to the fact that
   Christ our Lord comes into the world to restore the investiture we have
   lost; or rather to be himself, for us and upon us, all that our sin has
   cast away. The original word of scripture, represented in our English
   version by the word atone, or make atonement, literally means to cover.
   In this manner, Jesus the Lord comes to cover our sin; covering, first,
   our liabilities in the sins that are past, by the forbearance of God,
   and the honor he confers on God's instituted justice, by community with
   us in the penal scathing and curse of our transgression; and, secondly
   and principally, in the sense that he undertook to be the divine
   character upon us--yea, the divine glory. For he does not merely teach
   us something, as many fancy, which we are to take up notionally and
   copy, item by item, in ourselves, but he undertakes to copy himself
   into us, and be the righteousness of God upon us. Had we been taught,
   in the best manner possible, what things in character to add, what
   things to change, or qualify, or put away, or put on, what could we
   have done, in the weaving of so many and such infinite subtleties and
   shadings of quality, but inevitably miss of all the really divine
   proportions; producing only a grotesque and half absurd caricature? But
   when Jesus comes to us bearing all these finest, holiest proportions of
   beauty in himself, we have nothing to do but to believe in him, or
   receive him in his person, and he copies himself into us, by the
   wondrous power of his feeling and sacrifice upon us. Then, as every
   shade is from him, nothing is overdone, distorted, missed, or omitted.
   The glory of the Father, all the Father's character, is upon him, and
   he is able to say--"the glory which thou gavest me I have given them."

   Furthermore, there is this wonderful art, so to speak, in the incarnate
   human appearing of Jesus, that he humanizes God to us, or brings out
   into the human molds of feeling, conduct and expression, the infinite
   perfection, otherwise inappropriable and very nearly inconceivable.
   Since we are finite, God must needs take the finite in all revelation.
   He can never draw himself close enough to get hold of our feeling, or
   sympathy, and be revealed to our heart, till he takes the finite of
   humanity. In the man-wise form only can we put him on. Otherwise his
   very perfections, elaborated by our human thought, would be only
   impassive, distant, autocratic, it may be, and even repulsive; as they
   often are, even in the teachings now of Christian theology. That he has
   any particular feeling for men, or this, or that man, that his great
   spirit can be overcast and burdened with concern for us under sin, that
   he is complete in all the passive virtues he puts it upon us to
   practice--how could we think it, or be at all sure of it? But here he
   is, in Jesus Christ, moving up out of a childhood, into a great
   manhood, filling all the human relations with offices and ministries in
   human shapes of good; helping the sick with kind words, and healing
   them by the touch, so to speak, of his sympathies, careful of the poor,
   patient with enemies, burdened for them in feeling even to the pitch of
   agony, simple, and true, and faithful unto death. And so we have God's
   infinite perfections in our own finite molds, and are ready to have
   them even upon ourselves. God is now no more some blank idol of reason,
   some fate, or infinite abyss, or some frigid, thin immensity of
   pantheistic unconsciousness; his vast superhuman proportions no longer
   baffle us, or spread themselves in phantoms of glory, which we can as
   little think as partake. But they are given us in the traits of Jesus,
   who being Son of God, has come to be the Son of Man among us, living
   out, in his human way, and so helping us to conceive, that excellence
   of God, in which we require to be invested. The ineffable character is
   made human, set forth in the human proportions, and we have it as a
   glorious, full suit, prepared in the exactest fit of our humanity, yet
   still divine. The virtues, graces, glories, sympathies infinite, are so
   brought forth and embodied in the incarnate whole of his life, that we
   can have them all upon us at once, when we could, not even sketch the
   pattern, by simply embracing, in trust, his human person.

   In this manner, for this, in brief, is the gospel, we are to be new
   charactered, by the putting on of Christ; not by some imitation or
   copying of Christ that we practice, item by item, in a way of
   self-culture--the Christian idea is not that--but that Christ is to be
   a complete wardrobe for us himself, and that by simply receiving his
   person, we are to have the holy texture of his life upon us, and live
   in the infolding of his character. And this is the meaning of that
   "righteousness of faith" which is variously spoken of in the
   scriptures. It is that Christ is everything for us and upon us, and
   that we are to see our whole supply--righteousness, beauty, peace,
   liberty in good, graces, and stores of character, putatively ours in
   him; reckoned to be ours by faith, always derivable by faith from him;
   for this exactly is the difference between a Christian and a merely
   humanly virtuous person, that one draws on Christ for everything, and
   the other on himself--on his will, his works, his self-criticism,
   shaping all his amendments himself. Or, reversing the order of
   comparison, one manufactures a suit for himself, in patches of
   character gotten together and laid upon the ground of his sin, and the
   other takes a whole robe of life, graciously fitted and freely
   tendered, in the humanly divine excellence of Christ his Saviour--who
   is thus made unto him wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and
   redemption.

   But we are to put him on--"put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ." And here
   is the difficulty--you can not see, it may be, how it is done. The very
   conception is unintelligible, or mystical, and you can not guess, it
   may be, what it means. What then does it mean to put on Christ?

   It does not mean, of course, that you are only to make an experiment of
   putting on the garb of a new life, and see how you will like it. No man
   puts on Christ for any thing short of eternity. The act must be a
   finality, even at the beginning. He must be accepted as the Alpha and
   Omega. Whoever contemplates even the possibility of being without him,
   or of ever being without him again, does not put him on.

   Neither do you put him on, when you undertake to copy some one or more
   of the virtues, or characters, in him--the gentleness, for example, the
   love, the dignity--without being willing to accept the sacrifice in
   him, to bear the world's contempt with him, to be singular, to be
   hated, to go through your Gethsemane, and groan with him under the
   burdens of love. There can be no choosing out here of shreds and
   patches from his divine beauty; you must take the whole suit, else you
   can not put him on. The garment is seamless, and can not be divided.

   Neither do you put him on, when you undertake only to realize some
   previous conceptions of character that are your own. The dress is to be
   not from you, but from him--the whole Christ, just as he is, taken upon
   you to shape you in the molds of his own divine life and spirit.

   But we must be more positive. First, then, there must be a full and
   hearty renunciation of your past life. As the apostle words it in
   another place, you must put off the old man in order to put on the new.
   You can not have the new character to put on over the old. The filthy
   garments, all the rags, must be thrown off, thrown completely away.
   Christ will be no mere overall to the old affections and lusts.

   How, then, for the next thing, do we put him on? By faith, I answer,
   only by faith. For in that the soul comes to him, shivering in the cold
   shame of its sin, and gives itself over to him, to be loved, protected,
   covered in, by his gracious life and passion. It sees such beauty upon
   him that it dares trust him, and says--"be thou my all, the washing
   away of my sin, the covering of my vileness, my character and life. O
   Lord, my hope is in thee!" And this is faith; it is coming to Jesus in
   all his manlike sympathies, characters, molds of life, and receiving
   him, by a total act of trust, to be-upon you, as the Lord your
   righteousness. Your iniquities are thus to be forgiven, your sin to be
   covered. Righteousness from him, and not from your own will and works,
   is to be upon you thus, by the infolding of a divine power; even the
   righteousness that is of God by faith, unto all and upon all them that
   believe.

   Take another conception, which may be more intelligible to some, viz.,
   that you will put on Christ by obedience to him; for whoever obeys
   Christ willingly trusts him, and whoever trusts him obeys him. Hence
   the promise--"If a man love me, he will keep my words, and my father
   will love him. and we will come unto him and make our abode with him."
   And then it follows that whoever has the abode with him, consciously,
   of the Father and the Son, will be all folded in by the thought of it,
   and will live as being in the sacred investiture of the divine
   character and power. If, then, you can not understand faith, you can
   understand obedience, and if you go into that, as the final, total,
   giving over of your life, I will answer for it, that there will be a
   faith in your obedience, and that Christ will be with you, manifested
   in you, truly put on, as the consciously divine attire of your life.

   I have only to add on this point, that you are to be always putting on
   Christ afterwards, as you begin to put him on at the first. All the
   success of your Christian life will consist in the closeness of your
   walk with Christ, and the completeness of your trust in him. You are
   not so much to fashion yourself by him, as to let him fashion you by
   himself--to be upon you, as he is with you, and cover you with all the
   graces of his inimitable love and beauty; and this you will do most
   perfectly, when you trust him most implicitly, and keep his words most
   faithfully.

   It only remains, now, to bring our subject to its fit conclusion, by
   speaking of the consequences of this putting on of Christ. And I name,
   first of all, that which the apostle suggests, in a kind of cadence
   that immediately follows and finishes out the text. "But put ye on," he
   says, "the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to
   fulfill the lusts thereof." Where he conceives, it will be seen, that
   one substitutes, or takes place of, the other--that when Christ is
   really put on, the world falls off, and the lusts of property, and
   fame, and power, and appetite, subside or fall away. The effect runs
   both ways, under the great law of action and reaction--as the old man
   is put off that the new may be put on, so the new put on still further
   displaces the old. This, too, we know by the attestations of
   experience. He that has the sense of Christ upon him, has himself
   ennobled. He is raised in the pitch of his feeling every way; having
   such a consciousness awakened of his inward relation to God, that
   money, and pleasure, and all the petty lustings of the lower life are
   sunk out of sight and forgot. Sometimes you will see that an appetite
   which has become a madness, like the appetite for drink, and has shaken
   down all the man's resolutions, and floored him at every point of
   struggle, utterly dies and is felt no more, from the moment when he has
   put on Christ. He wants no more a sensation, when the sentiment of his
   soul is full. It is as if he were in Christ's own appetites, instead of
   those which have so long domineered over his diseased nature. And so it
   will be universally. If there be any over-mastering temptation which
   baffles you, and keeps turning you off in your endeavors, and boasting
   itself against you, here is your deliverance--raise no fight with it in
   your own will, as you always have done when you have failed, but simply
   turn yourself to Christ alone: put on Christ, let your soul be so
   covered in by the power of his grace upon you, that you feel yourself
   raised and caparisoned for glory in him, and all the little and low
   lustings of this world will be silent-felt no more.

   There is also this most admirable effect in the putting on of Christ,
   that being thus enveloped in his life and feeling, a power will move
   inward from him, that will search out all most subtle, inbred evils in
   you, even those which are hidden from your consciousness, and will
   finally assimilate you in them, and in all beside, to what he himself
   was. This, in fact, is the wonderful power of dress, that, while no
   person who has spent his life in the rags of poverty, and the
   coarseness of lowbred manners, can possibly fashion himself to ways of
   elegance, by superintending his every particular look, motion, gesture,
   and tone, the simple insphering of his life in new associations and new
   proprieties of dress, may and often does suffice, in a very few years,
   to recompose and assimilate his whole manner as a man. And so it is
   that Christ will be able, when put on, to fashion us into a character
   of innumerable graces, all consolidated, in a harmonious whole of
   beauty like his own.

   Here, too, is the true idea of Christian sanctification. It is that we
   may so put on Christ, and be so infolded in him, as to be consciously
   raised above all bad impulse into good, above all guiltiness into a
   conscience void of offense, above all detentions of bondage into
   perfect liberty, above all fear into perfect assurance, and so continue
   as long as we falter not in the faith, by which Christ is thus brought
   in upon the soul, to be its impulse and the appetizing force of its
   life. But whether this can be fitly called a perfect sanctification is
   more doubtful. That it leaves the soul in a temptable state all must
   and do in fact agree, and if the faith, at any time, gives way, the
   subject will immediately lapse into some kind of sin. Nay, if he were
   sanctified far down, in all the deepest, most underground cells of
   feeling he was ever conscious of, there would yet be treasons hid still
   deeper in the soul, and he would fall at once, the moment he let go his
   faith. The truth appears to be that, in such a state of perfect liberty
   and good impulse as we have described, the character still is not
   wholly inherent, but only in part;--a kind of supervening, or
   superinduced character; a garment of grace put on, the grace of which
   has not yet struck through into the inmost nature of him who is covered
   by it. Christ is perfect on him, and he is in Christ, but he is not
   perfected in himself. The transformation of the man has not yet come up
   to the type of his Christly investiture. He is like a soldier in the
   fiery panoply and dress of war. When he has it on him, and hears the
   trumpet sounding bravely, he is bold enough to face all danger in the
   fight; but there still are vestiges of a naturally coward feeling, it
   may be, in the center and core of his personality, such that if you
   strip him of the warlike trappings, and send him out to fight a silent
   engagement in that common figure, he will not unlikely turn and flee
   for his life. It is one thing in this way to have on a pure garment,
   clean and white, and so to act purely, and quite another to be clean
   and white all through, in the inmost substance, and deepest impulse,
   and subtlest windings, of the soul's own habit. This requires time, and
   it may be a long time. Even if he were to be in Christ so perfectly as
   not to commit one conscious sin for many years, which is possible,
   there would still be in him, after all this long investiture by Christ,
   old vestiges of disease, and disorder, and bad passion, not yet
   sanctified away.

   But it is much, how very much, that all these can be thus kept under,
   so as never again to break out and reign, as long as Christ is
   faithfully put on by a believing, consecrated life. Potentially
   speaking, all sanctification is here; for the superinduced character
   may be kept up bright, and clean, full, and free to the last; when, of
   course, it will complete itself in the all-renovated, absolutely
   perfect, through and through character of the glorified.

   Observe again the consciousness of strength, and the exalted confidence
   of feeling, that must gird any soul that has truly put on Christ. It
   will be with him, in his faith, as it was with the prodigal, when the
   Father said, "bring forth the best robe and put it on him, and put a
   ring on his finger and shoes on his feet." From that moment he felt
   strong in the family. The shame fell off as the robe went on, and the
   confidence of a son come back upon him. So it is that every Christian
   is strong who has really put on Christ. He is clothed with strength and
   honor, as with salvation. He lives in the garment of praise. All
   misgivings flee, all mutinous passions fall under. Do you sometimes
   try, my brethren, to be strong by your will, strong by your works,
   strong by what you can raise of excitement, or high resolve, that is
   only weakness, and a great part of all weakness comes in that way.
   Nothing is more natural for a Christian losing ground, than to put
   forth all the force he has, in a strain of hard endeavor, lashing up
   and thrusting on himself; but in that, he is believing, probably, just
   as much less as he is goading himself more. Let him go back to faith,
   see that he lets go mere self-endeavor, to put on Christ, and he will
   have all strength and victory.

   Here, too, be it understood, is the source of that strange power of
   impression, which is felt in the life and society of all earnest
   Christians. Everybody feels that there is a something about them not
   human. And the reason is that they have put on Christ. The serious,
   loving, gentle, sacrificing and firm spirit of Jesus, is revealed
   within, or upon them, and they signify to men's feeling just what he
   signified. They fulfill that gracious name that was formerly in so
   great favor in the Church--they are all Christophers, Christ-bearers.
   They will even put so much meaning into their "good morning," or their
   bow of courtesy, as to carry a Christly impression in the heart of a
   stranger. This, my brethren, is the true power. Would that the
   multitude in our day, who can think to be powerful only as they strive
   and cry, and go dinning through the world in a perpetual ado of hard
   endeavor, could just learn how much it means, to put on Christ.

   It only remains to add, what has been coming into view in the whole
   progress of our subject, that the only true salvation-title is Christ
   put on, and found upon the soul as its heavenly investiture. A great
   many persons are at work, in these times, to fashion a character for
   themselves, and demanding it of them who preach the gospel, that they
   preach conduct, tell men how to be good and right, correct their
   faults, make them good husbands, wives, children, citizens--cease, in a
   word, from the mystic matter of faith and divine experience, and put
   the world on doing something more solid and satisfactory. This kind of
   cant has gone so far, too, that many professed preachers of the gospel
   itself are in it. The Master owns them not, so far, at least. He wants,
   not simply a better conduct, but a solid, new man--so, new husbands,
   wives, children, citizens; new kindness, truthfulness, honor, honesty,
   beauty. This new man to be put on, as having put off the old, is a very
   different matter from the old man in a better style of behavior. It is
   that which after God, is created in righteousness and true holiness--a
   man after God, even as Christ was, when he came in God's love to take
   us on his soul, thatwe may take him on our soul, and be covered in by
   the new investiture of his life; that sighing we may sigh with him,
   dying die with him, rising rise with him, carrying up all our once low
   affections to sit with him where he sitteth, at the right hand of God.
   All which he figures in the parable of the great king's wedding-feast;
   where the guests are called by sending round to each, for his card of
   invitation, a caftan, or splendid wedding-robe. Putting on this robe
   the guests are to come in, and, by this found upon them, are to be
   admitted and have their places assigned. But it happens, at the great
   eternal feast, as the Saviour represents, that the King comes in and
   finds one there that has no robe on him but-his own. It may be a very
   fine, wonderfully elaborate robe; he may even have thought to shine
   there in it more than if it were the king's providing. But the king
   says--"Friend, how camest thou in hither not having on the
   wedding-garment? And he was speechless. The king said--"bind him hand
   and foot, and take him away." Inasmuch as holy character in created
   beings is and must eternally be derivative, finite from infinite, who
   shall be able to stand by self-originative goodness, who that will not
   put on Christ! Putting on his robe of self-criticism, self-endeavor,
   self-righteousness, will not answer. All such fine attire is only rags
   at the best. The true wedding-garment is Jesus himself, and there is no
   other.

   Here then, brethren and friends, I speak now to you all without
   distinction, here is the fearfully precise point on which our eternity
   hinges--the putting on of Christ. Observe, we are to put on no great
   name or standard, no sectarian badge or livery, no lawn, or saintly
   drab, or veil, or stole, or girdle--none of these are the real new man
   to be put on. No! Christ! we must put on Christ himself, and none but
   him. We must be in-Christed, found in him, covered in the seamless,
   indivisible robe of his blessed life and passion. Far be it also from
   us, when we put on Christ, to think of turning ourselves about, in the
   search after some other, finer, pretext that we may put on over him, to
   make him attractive, pleasing, acceptable. No, we are to put him on
   just as he is, wear him outside, walk in him, bear his reproach, glory
   in his beauty, call it good to die with him, so to be found in him not
   having our own righteousness, but the righteousness that is of God by
   faith. Cover us in it, O thou Christ of God, and let our shame be hid
   eternally in thee.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                      XXI.

HEAVEN OPENED.

   "And he saith unto him--Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye
   shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending
   on the Son of Man."--John i, 31.

   With a singular felicity and power of statement, Mr. Coleridge gives it
   for his doctrine of scripture inspiration--"In the Bible there is more
   that finds me, than I have experienced in all other books put together;
   the words of the Bible find me at greater depths of my being; and
   whatever finds me brings with it an irresistible evidence of its having
   proceeded from the Holy Spirit." God only can be so far privy, that is,
   to the soul, as to make it answer thus, all through, in its deepest and
   most hidden parts, to his words. Whatever may be thought of his
   doctrine, as a complete and sufficient solution of the question, it is
   certainly good, and even powerfully good, as far as it goes. And it has
   a beautiful coincidence, which he probably had never observed, with the
   very simple and truly natural sentiment of Christ's interview with
   Nathanael.

   Fig-trees make a very dense covering of leaves and sometimes drop their
   boughs very low. Nathanael had lately retired into the cabin of thick
   foliage thus provided by some tree of his garden, and closeted there
   with God, was opening his heart, in regard to some particular
   difficulty, or enemy, or question of duty, or promise of a Messiah to
   come, in a manner only the more guileless, that he felt himself to be
   so entirely removed from human observation. Shortly after, probably on
   that same day, being notified by Philip, he comes to see Jesus, who is
   even thought to be the great Messiah himself. Jesus saw Nathanael
   coming to him and saith of him--"Behold an Israelite indeed in whom is
   no guile!" Nathanael saith unto him--"Whence knowest thou me?" Jesus
   answered and said unto him--"Before Philip called thee, when thou wast
   under the fig-tree, I saw thee." Nathanael saith unto him" Rabbi, thou
   art the Son of God, thou art the king of Israel." Jesus answered and
   said unto him--"Because I saw thee under the fig-tree believest thou?
   thou shalt see greater things than these." And he saith unto
   him--"Verily, verily I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven
   open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of
   Man."

   The two main points of the dialogue are, first, that Nathanael was so
   impressed by the finding of Christ, or the privity of Christ's
   knowledge of him, under the fig-tree, that he at once declared his
   belief in him as the Messiah; and secondly, that Christ immediately
   proclaims a deeper finding, and a more convincing privity of knowledge,
   that shall, in, due time, be shown or proved, by the opening, within
   his own bosom, of a supernatural, sense and the discovery to him thus
   of supernatural beings, the passing and repassing, the flow and reflow
   of their blessed society. According to the description given, it will
   be as if that isthmus barrier between the two great oceans of the world
   were cloven down, for the oscillating tides to begin their coming and
   returning flow; when also the ships of the nations, wafted convergently
   thither, shall be sailing freely through, burdened with the fruits and
   golden riches of all climes and shores.

   Now this opening of heaven, which is to be our subject, is presented by
   the Saviour in terms that may seem to be a little enigmatical. We shall
   conceive his meaning perhaps more sufficiently, if we note three
   principal views of the heavenly state that occur in the scripture.
   First, there is the local objective view, that conceives it as a place
   somewhere in the upper worlds of heaven or the sky. Secondly, there is
   the terrestrial objective view, where the New Jerusalem descending from
   God out of heaven and refitting our world itself to be the abode of God
   with men, makes it a province, in that manner, of the other. Thirdly,
   the subjective view, which has nothing to do with place or locality,
   but conceives the heavenly state simply as a state of spiritual
   beholding and social commerce opened in the soul itself. There is no
   necessary contradiction or disagreement between the three conceptions
   stated; they are all true, though probably in different senses, and may
   be taken as complementary, in fact, to each other. The first is more
   impressive and popular and more commonly used; the second, as being
   more geographical, is more closely connected with our mundane prospects
   and affairs; the third is more entirely moral and rational, being
   simply the condition of character. All are to be used with entire
   freedom, and without any attempt to maintain one against the others;
   the presumption being that a state. so transcendent will be only feebly
   conceived, when they are all brought in, to intensify and qualify, or
   complement, each other.

   In the conversation with Nathanael, the Saviour appears to be speaking
   in the subjective way, as of a heaven to be opened in the soul itself.
   In his terms of description, he refers, apparently, to Jacob's dream,
   where that patriarch beholds, not without, but in the chamber of his
   own brain, in a dream of the night when the senses are fast locked in
   sleep, a ladder set up and the angels of God coursing up and down upon
   it; only what transpired subjectively in his brain he naturally
   associated with the place, conceiving also that the sky above was
   somehow specially set open there, saying--"how dreadful is this place,"
   and calling it "the gate of heaven." So the Saviour says, "ascending
   and descending," putting the ascending first; as if the metropolis or
   point or departure, in the commerce begun, were to be from within the
   soul itself. There lives the Son of Man, reigning in his heavenly
   kingdom at the soul's own center, and from him go up couriers and
   ministers of glory, descending also back upon him there. The precise
   point made, in this manner, with Nathanael is, that as he was
   discovered under the fig-tree, so he shall be discovered, as regards
   the immense upper world of the soul, existing unsuspected in him
   hitherto, but now set open. These two propositions cover the ground of
   the subject stated, and these I shall endeavor to substantiate.

   I. That there is a supernatural sense, now slumbering or closed up in
   souls, by which they might perceive, or cognize, supernatural beings
   and things, even as they cognize material beings and things by the
   natural sense. And

   II. That Christ undertakes to open this supernatural sense, and make it
   the organ or inlet of universal society.

   I. There is a supernatural sense now closed up, or existing under a
   state of suppression.

   We encounter a difficulty here, in attempting to prove the existence of
   faculties and powers that are shut in, or suppressed in their action.
   And yet even our natural faculties are very nearly in that condition at
   the first--no man knowing, or conceiving, what is in him, till it is
   brought forth. We also know that all finest qualities and highest
   powers are stifled, for the time, or even permanently, by wrongs and
   vices. What we here suppose to be true is, that in the original and
   properly normal state, souls were open to God, and a full, free
   commerce with his upright society. Being made in God's image, they were
   to be children with God their Father, living in society with him,
   having him to know, enjoy, and love, and having all their desires
   freely met and satisfied by the open ministry of his friendship. He
   was, and, with all his glorious company, was eternally to be, revealed
   in them, as in a heaven of present bliss, and immediately conscious
   communion of life.

   But this original and properly normal state was necessarily broken up
   and brought to a full end, by their fall into sin. They now become
   afraid of him and hide themselves instinctively from him. No longer can
   he be revealed to their immediate knowledge, because the personal
   affinities through which he was to be revealed are closed up in them.
   They fall off thus into their senses, and become occupied with the
   objects of the senses; having the understanding darkened, being
   alienated from the life of God, through the ignorance that is in them.
   So they live as under heavy storm-clouds in the night; the. lightning
   flashes in sharp gleams across the clouds, or glares in red anger fits
   from within their body, but there is no opening through, to let in the
   light of the stars. Heaven is gone out to them in the same manner; God
   is hid, and they know not where they can find Him; spirit and spiritual
   being and spiritual society with his great family is so far a lost
   possibility, that, if they think it, they can not give it reality.
   There is something too in guilt, or the state of guiltiness, that
   amounts to a virtual shutting up, or suppression, of all affinities
   with supernatural being. It freezes in perception. It condenses all the
   Godward and pure aspirations and gathers them in, by the dreadful
   recoil it makes on the soul's own center. It pronounces a damnation too
   upon itself, and by its own remorseful severities makes the sentence
   good. Falling away thus from God, and closing itself up as regards all
   supernatural relations and perceptions, it becomes self-centered,
   isolated, a worm in the ground, having its belongings there and not in
   the element of day.

   Is there now any such supernatural sense existing under suppression in
   the soul, as the statement I have made supposes? The question is a very
   great, and is getting to be the almost only, question for our day.

   To go over the evidence briefly, there is obviously nothing impossible
   in the fact of such a sense. There may as well be a power to cognize
   immaterial, supernatural being, as material.

   Neither is it any thing, that our philosophers recognize no such higher
   ranges of faculty. No faculty is ever recognized, save as it comes into
   consciousness by use. That which is shut up, therefore, can be nothing
   to philosophy. When the lantern of a light-house has no light burning
   within, it will be an opaque body at the top, as it is in the base
   below--even the transparency will be opaque.

   But we can affirm, I think, with confidence, for one distinct argument,
   that there ought to be just this upper world of supernatural insight in
   souls. As they are related to God, there ought to be a power of
   immediate knowledge, in which he is revealed--they require, in fact, to
   be as truly conscious of God as of themselves; for God is the
   complement of their being, and without him they only half exist. Again,
   as they are related to eternal society with all good beings, they ought
   also to have powers of discerning that may apprehend them. In this
   manner, as they are not made to be mere plodders, however intelligent,
   or scientific in distinguishing the laws and causes of things, but to
   have their summits and supreme destinies of life, in their commerce
   with God, and the supernatural society of his realm, their fit
   equipment requires, obviously enough, a higher sense opening towards
   the supernatural. How can the understanding, operating on the subject
   matter of sense, discover, or attain, by mere inference, to what is not
   in the premises of sense, but in a totally different range? Whoever
   then adheres to immortality and religion, and denies the credibility of
   what is supernatural, confesses, at once, that he wants the commerce of
   God's universal society, and cuts off the possibility of finding it.

   Again, there not only ought to be aspirations in the soul, and powers
   of sensing for the supernatural, but we can see, by many signs, more or
   less definite, that there are. Sometimes a groping will signify as much
   as an open discovery, and what has the race been doing, in all the past
   ages and everywhere, but groping after gods, and demons, and populating
   even the earth and the sky with mythologic creations. It is as if some
   divine phrenzy were in them, goading them on after what they so
   mightily want. Little, indeed, do they discover of what is real and
   true; they only go a marveling, as the phrenologists would say, carried
   off from the mere plane of reason, by they know not what. They grope
   with their eyes shut, and their groping signifies more than their
   discoveries. I think also that we can find, every one of us, in
   ourselves, dim yearnings, imaginations coasting round unknown realms,
   guesses asking after the commerce of good and great beings, that put us
   in profound sympathy with them. Nothing will account for what we find
   thus in ourselves and the world, but the fact of supernatural longings
   and perceptions, existing in us under suppression. Indeed, I think we
   should very nearly suffocate, all of us, including even the infidel
   deniers, shut down close under nature and her causes. After all, we do
   think higher things, and there is more comfort in it than perhaps we
   know.

   We are able, again, to conceive certain things about this supernatural
   sense, taking in supernatural things and beings, which makes it seem
   less extravagant. To say that we can sense, or could, other ranges of
   being, and have them in the open heaven of the soul, appears to be
   violent, or extravagant. Just as violent is it still to say, that we do
   take in the world of matter by the natural senses, and have it in us,
   even from the sky downward. We do not go to things in our perception of
   them, neither do they come locally to us; the latitudes, and
   longitudes, and altitudes, are still there; we do not spread ourselves
   in presence upon them; and yet we somehow have them in us, and
   subjectively possess them. Besides, in the relation of spirits and
   beings supernatural, we know not by what presences and revelations they
   may come within the precincts of knowledge; as little by what fences
   they are kept asunder. Place in this matter may be nothing,
   congenialities every thing. It does not surprise us that the bad should
   somehow come upon the bad; as little should it that the good have a way
   of social presence with the good. Perhaps, too, it will relieve the
   aspect of extravagance here, if I say, that faith is nothing but the
   opening of the supernatural sense of the soul on the supernatural being
   to be apprehended. It opens, in other words, the heaven of the mind,
   and God, and Christ, and the good supernatural society press in to fill
   it. Faith is the evidence, ill this manner, even as the scriptures
   declare, of things not seen, and the substance, or substantiation, of
   things hoped for. There is even a kind of faith in the sensing of
   sight, turning mere images, in the eye, to things, and making them
   real. That there is a higher sense, realizing beings supernatural, is a
   fact every way correspondent.

   Furthermore it is a fact well attested, in all ages, and proved by
   manifold experience, that minds do consciously approximate God and the
   heavenly society, accordingly as they are turned away from evil and set
   open to good. They feel a certain nearness to beings and words
   supernatural, that amounts to society begun. And then how very often,
   as their affinities are more completely fined and set open, do they, in
   their last hours, hail the Saviour present, and good angels revealed,
   and departed friends whom they salute by name, waiting to receive them.
   Doubtless all such things will be set down as the illusions of their
   wandering faculty, but what if they should happen to be true--even the
   truest truths ever beheld by them, and most profoundly wanted by us
   all?

   I will only add that the scriptures constantly assume, and in many ways
   assert, the fact of a supernatural sense in souls, that is shut up and
   requires to be opened. Christ declares this truth again and again, as,
   for instance, when he says, "For this people's heart is waxed gross,
   and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed,
   lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their
   ears, and understand with their heart." He does not say this of the
   natural senses and judgments, but of the higher perceptions of the
   heart, or the religious and spiritual man. The same thing also is very
   deliberately and carefully put by the apostle, when he says--"But the
   natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, neither can
   he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is
   spiritual judgeth all things." There is, in other words, a natural man
   and a spiritual, a lower range of perception and a higher; and by this
   latter only, set open to the light, can the spiritual and supernatural.
   things of God be discerned and judged. And this is the supernatural
   sense of which I have been speaking, the upper range of faculty that
   belongs to religion, prepared for a seeing of the invisible. By this it
   was that Christ expected to be in the soul's inward beholding, as when
   he said--"but ye see me." By this it was that a whole heaven of being
   and society is conceived to reveal itself to souls, when they are
   converted and set open to God--"But ye are come unto mount Zion, the
   city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable
   company of angels, and to the general assembly and church of the
   first-born which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all,
   and to the spirits of just men made perfect." And so glorious and clear
   was their inward beholding, at times, that one disciple seemed to be
   caught up into some "third heaven" by it, though the heaven, as he well
   understood, was within. Another also declared, as in vision, "I see
   heaven opened," and though he "looked steadfastly up" at the time, it
   was only that altitude is the natural language, or line of direction,
   in such inward exaltations. So intensely perceptive, according to the
   scripture view, may a human soul become, when awakened inwardly, and
   drawn out in its higher apprehensions, after those invisible,
   supernatural, associations for which it is created.

   Assuming now the fact of a supernatural sense in souls, that it is shut
   up by sin, we are next to consider--

   II. How Christ, as he declares to Nathanael, will open this suppressed
   faculty, and make it the organ, or inlet, of universal society.

   And here it will be remembered, that angelic visitations had been
   coursing back and forth upon the world and through it, in all ages,
   both before Christ's coming, and at his coming, and after. Moses had
   gone up into the mount and brought down tables lettered, as it were, in
   heaven. Fires had been kindled, from above, in sacrifices offered on
   rocks, and altars of turf. Two holy men had been visibly translated.
   And yet heaven still appears to be somehow shut. The angels--not
   ascending and descending but descending and ascending--are thought of
   only as having gone away, to some invisible nowhere whence they came.
   The great public miracles only help the chosen people to believe in a
   kind of Jew-God reigning under limitations, and holding their little
   patch of territory for his field. Instead of catching the hint from so
   many wonders, and so many bright visitants, of a world above the world,
   waiting to receive them in eternal society, it even makes them angry to
   hear, that God will include, in one circle of being, all that come to
   him on earth. A holy few found real access to the king, led in, to his
   seat, by the teachings of their prophets and the more secret teachings
   of the Spirit. But it is a most singular fact that no one of these, no
   dying saint most enlightened by holy experience, speaks, in these
   former ages, of going to heaven, or even of there being a heavenly
   world where righteous souls are gathered; unless it be that one or two
   expressions of the prophets are to be taken in that sense. Many critics
   therefore have denied, that there is any revelation of immortality, or
   a second life, before Christ's coming. And we know that, when he came,
   it was even an open question, whether any such being as "angel or
   spirit" really exists?

   If now any one should ask what this means--how the world above seems to
   be already opened if it ever can be, and yet is shut?--the answer is,
   that all this apparitional machinery goes on without, before men's
   eyes, while the heaven of the soul is shut; and that so many angels
   therefore, coming and going, are looked upon only as ghosts of the
   fancy, or at least mere outsiders and strangers. They do not stay to be
   citizens, they are seen only as in transitu; they flit across the stage
   and are gone-gone, as many will think, to the same blind nowhere that
   receives all phantasms.

   Here then is the deeper work Christ undertakes to do; viz., to open the
   heaven of the soul itself, or, what is nowise different, to waken in it
   that higher sense, by which it may discern the supernatural being and
   society of God's realm. How he does it we shall hardly be at a loss to
   find.

   First, he comes into the. world himself, not apparitionally, like an
   irruption of angels, but he comes up, so to speak, out of humanity,
   emerging into his visibly divine glory, through a glorious and perfect
   manhood. And so it comes to pass that, while they accomplish nothing by
   their character, and have, in fact, no character beyond what is implied
   in their message, he is bringing on his wonderful, visibly divine
   manhood, and becoming, by force of his mere supernatural character
   alone, the greatest miracle of time--with the advantage that, being
   self-evident, even as the sun, all other miracle is upheld by it. At
   first he appears to be only a man among men, the Son of Mary, growing
   up in the mold and mortal weakness of a man; but his life unfolds
   silently and imperceptibly, till the magnificent proportions of his
   Godhood begin to appear in his manhood, and the tremendous fact is
   revealed, that a being from above the world is living in it!
   Supernatural event and character are built in solidly thus, into the
   world's history, to be an integral part of it. Mere nature is no longer
   all, and never can be again. The very world has another world
   interfused and working jointly with it.

   He comes too in no light figure, but in the heavy tread of one that
   bears eternal government upon his shoulder--comes to reconcile the
   world, to justify, and gather, and pacify, and save, the world; "For it
   pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell, and having
   made peace by the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all unto
   himself, whether they be things in earth or things in heaven."
   Everlasting order hangs tremulous in expectation round his cross, and
   eternity rings out from it, tolling in the world. As the veil of the
   temple is rent, so the way into the holiest opens. As the dead are
   shaken out their graves when he dies, so the souls shut up in death are
   loosened from the senses, to behold the new-sprung day. The middle wall
   is now broken down, the dividing isthmus cut through, and things in
   heaven, and things in earth, are set in a common headship in his
   person. Heaven is become an open door which no man shutteth, an
   abundant and free entrance is ministered, that we may enter with
   boldness into the holiest.

   It is a great point also, as regards the impression effected, that
   every thing taught by him, in his doctrine, holds the footing of
   immortality and eternity, looking towards a higher and relatively
   supernatural state. Nothing is allowed to stop short, within the
   boundaries of time, as in the old religion. The very law of God is
   carried forward into spiritual applications; the temporal and outward
   sanctions are taken away, and the inmost principle of duty under it is
   enforced by the tremendous allotments of a future, everlasting state.
   Outward sacrifices and remissions will not answer. There must be a
   sacrifice that purges even the conscience itself. There must be a
   righteousness found, that exceeds the righteousness of the Scribes and
   Pharisees--even the righteousness of God. Every thing in the doctrine
   out-reaches nature and time, piercing even to the dividing asunder, and
   stirring all the inmost senses, sentiments, and fears of the religious
   nature. Not that any mere standards, or sanctions, can force open the
   shut heaven of souls; but that, by these things, grinding hard upon the
   supernatural sense, it is made to feel a reverberative movement of the
   powers of the world to come, and look in, through the rifts that are
   opened in the stony casement that surrounds it.

   Let us not imagine now that, by any or all these things, the
   supernatural sense, or heaven of the soul, is really opened. These are
   preparations, all, including even the cross itself--powers that move on
   our consent, but without that consent accomplish no result. Nothing
   done will ever accomplish that result with many; they will go to their
   graves denying that any such upper world of faculty is in them. But
   with some it will be otherwise; they will respond, they will believe,
   and their faith will be the opening of heaven. In that faith the Son of
   Man will be revealed, and the angels of God ascending and descending
   upon him. But this faith, in still another view, is love, and here we
   have the grand finality. Christ and his cross are a movement on the
   world's love, and love itself is the higher sense, or apprehending
   power of the soul. Love is perceptive; whatever is loved is most really
   known, or discovered. He that loveth knoweth God, and, in that manner,
   he that loveth universal society knoweth universal society. Worlds
   above the world are present to the sense of love. All the immense
   longings of souls after universal society are consummated and crowned,
   when they are issued in love. And this is the opening of the soul, this
   the state and character which are its heaven--the kingdom of God
   within.

   And what a finding of the soul will it be! what a sublime privity of
   knowledge will it reveal! when Christ, as in the promise made to
   Nathanael, shall have made it conscious eternally, in this manner, of
   the paradise hid in its own higher faculty, so long shut up and
   suppressed.

   Some very important consequences follow, in the train of the subject
   thus presented, and with these I conclude.

   1. The real merit of the issue made up between Christ and the
   naturalizing critics of his gospels is here distinctly shown.
   Professing much respect to his character, they are offended by the
   supernatural matters reported in his life, and set themselves at work
   to produce a new Christianity, without either miracle or mystery, or
   more than natural fact in it--and, of course, without even Christ
   himself, who is the greatest miracle of all. Christ, on the other hand,
   undertakes to give them, over and above the supernatural facts they
   reject, supernatural evidences; viz., to set open a higher range of
   faculty in them related to himself and all supernatural beings, and so
   to find them at the point of deeper sentiments and apprehensions in
   their nature, than they are themselves aware of. They do not even
   imagine, that they have any thing included in their nature, above the
   mere basement story so much investigated and magnified by the
   philosophers; viz., reason, memory, imagination, affectional capacities
   and the like, including, perhaps, a merely moral, in distinction from a
   religious, conscience; practically ignoring, because they are shut, the
   sublime upper ranges of their spiritual nature--their transcendent
   affinities prepared for immense supernatural relations, their
   capacities to apprehend what is above the test of mere intellectual
   judgments, divine being, viz., arid concourse and the flow and reflow
   of God's universal society. The heaven of their nature being shut, and
   the supernatural sense practically undiscovered, they proceed to bring
   the great questions of the gospels down for trial before the basement
   court of their criticism; where it results, that having made their
   souls small enough for their doctrine, they have no great difficulty in
   making their doctrine small enough for their souls.

   They are men of high talent, if any talent is high in the lower ranges
   only of the nature, they are some of them scholars specially advanced
   in their culture, but talent and scholarship are, alas, how pitiably
   shriveled in their figure, when they undertake to handle the questions
   of religion, without so much as a conception of the inherently
   supernatural relations and discerning powers of the religious mind.
   Why, the humble, guileless Nathanaels, who never had a speculation in
   their lives, but have the heaven of their faith set open, and have
   found the Son of Man deep set in the heart's own center, have a better
   competence in the supernatural than Hennel, or Parker, or Strauss, or
   Renan, or than all these brilliant gospel extirpators together. No,
   gentlemen, Christ did not come to be approved before the tribunal of
   your mere logic, or lore, or critical acumen, but before a nobler and
   more competent, which, though it be in you, is yet hidden from you.
   Having a nature boundlessly related to the supernatural, flowering
   never, save in the knowledge and concourse of supernatural society, you
   put your critical extinguishers on it and stifle it, and then you can
   even triumph in the discovery that all you most sublimely want is
   incredible--scientifically impossible! Hardly could you make yourselves
   a more fit mark for Christian pity; for, with all your fine stores of
   learning, you are in fact the least knowing men of your day. Would that
   Christ might only find you, in that glorious opening of the nature of
   which he speaks; what a revelation would it be--and, first of all,
   because it would be a revelation so wonderful of yourselves!

   You assume that you can settle questions of being, or not
   being--supernatural being, or not being--by logic, and criticism, and
   the processes of the head, even as you do questions of thought, or
   idea. Can you then reason a rock, as being or not being, in that
   manner? No, you will answer; subjects of being can not, in the first
   instance, be thought or reasoned, they can only be cognized, or
   perceived, by the senses. And so it is of all supernatural being, God,
   angels, worlds above the world, universal society; they are known only
   as they are cognized, by the supernatural sensing of the spiritual man;
   or, what is nowise different, by faith. And when it is done, they are
   had in as complete evidence even as the solids of matter. I do not
   undertake to say what particular facts of the gospel will, or will not
   be proved in this manner, but only that nothing will be rejected,
   because it is supernatural. The soul will be going after things
   supernatural and the commerce of the supernatural society, because it
   is practically open to their concourse. Here then is Christ, on one
   side, contriving how to open this immense upper world of the soul, and
   you, on your side, protesting that there is not, and must not be, any
   such upper world in you. He would make the soul a sky-full of glorious
   and blessed concourse, and you set yourselves to it, as a problem
   worthy of your industry, to make it a cavern! His work may be a hard
   one, but yours will be much harder. The emptiness of your cavern will
   ring back answers, stronger to most men, after all, than your
   arguments. For heaven is as much a necessity to men as bread, and souls
   can no more live without the supernatural, than the senses without
   matters of sense. In the same way--

   2. We have given back to us, here, the most solid, only sufficient,
   proof of our immortality. How often do we stagger at this point, even
   the best of us. All mere rational arguments, here, fall quite short of
   the mark. They never established any body. And yet every man ought to
   know his immortality, even as he knows that he is alive. He is made, to
   have an immediate, self-asserting consciousness of immortality, and
   would never have a doubt of it, if he had not shut up and darkened the
   divine side of the soul. And for just the same reason, Christ, when he
   opens the soul, opens immortality also. What was so dimly revealed,
   under the old religion, stands out visible everywhere under the new.
   There is no room here for a Sadducee to live. The metropolis of the
   world is here in Christ's person, and the visitants of all unknown
   spheres crowd about him, ascending and descending upon him. And they
   are all certified to our faith, by his supernatural character. We grow
   familiar thus with spirit, realize it, and know it in ourselves.
   Immortality! why the dead Christ proves it. And again the resurrection
   proves it; for what could such a being do but rise? It would even be a
   greater wonder if he did not. Away to their native abyss fly all our
   doubts--life and immortality are brought to light through the gospel!
   It only remains--

   3. To note precisely, as we can at no other point of view, the meaning
   of salvation, or the saving of souls. Christ does not undertake to save
   them as they are only half existing in the plane of nature. Do we call
   it saving the hand, that we save it in all but the fingers? Is it
   saving an eye, that we save it in all but the sight? Do we save a tree,
   when we save the stump and the roots, and not the leafy crown of shade
   and flower? No more is it saving a soul to save the economic under-work
   only of opinion, judgment, memory, and the like. These are not the
   soul, and if we take them to be, we only come as near saying, as
   possible, that the soul is gone already. And it is in just this
   condition that Christ finds us--O, that he might also find us in the
   deeper sense of his promise! He comes to the soul as having a whole
   heaven hid in its possibilities, which heaven is shut up, which
   possibilities are even ignored and hid. He finds it made little, a fire
   almost gone out. Related constitutionally to a vast supernatural
   society, and to ranges of life and knowledge, as much broader than all
   causes and laws of the world, as eternity is broader than time, he
   undertakes to open it again upon its true field, relieve the pinch of
   its compression, give it enlargement, and make it truly live. Whatever
   man of opinion, taking on the airs of science, tells him that his
   gospel is incredible because it is supernatural, will get no answer,
   but that his soul is very nearly gone out already, and is wanting
   simply salvation. And just here it is that the soul gets such an
   immense lifting of pitch, and outspreading of dimensions, when it comes
   to Christ. The coming unto Christ is, in another view, Christ coming
   unto it and being revealed in it. Even as the apostle says--"When it
   pleased God to reveal his Son in me." And what a revelation was it to
   him!--as great proportionally to all who receive it. It is as if they
   had gotten a new soul, with a heaven-full of society gathered round the
   Son of Man there revealed. Therefore it is called "the new man;" not
   because it is new, for it is older even than the old man put away,
   being the original, normal, man of Paradise, hitherto stifled and
   suppressed; still it is new, all things are new. The change is so great
   as to be sometimes even bewildering. It is as if some wondrous, unknown
   light had broken in; the whole sky is luminous. The soul is in day; for
   the day has dawned and the day-star is risen. God, eternity,
   immortality, universal love and society--into these broad ranges it has
   come, and in these it is free, having them all for its element and its
   conversation in them, as in heaven. The unknowing state, the old, blank
   ignorance that was, because of the blindness of the heart, is gone; and
   a wondrous knowledge opens because the heart can see. Before it was a
   doubter possibly, mighty in opinion, wise in the wisdom of this world,
   pleased with its own questions and reasons, now it has come up where
   the light is, and the old questions and reasons do not mean any
   thing--the judgments of moles, in matters of astronomy, are as good. O,
   what strength, and majesty, and general height of being, are felt in
   the new life begun! And this is salvation! great because it saves, not
   some small part of the soul, but because it saves and glorifies the
   sublime whole; restoring its integrity and proportion, and setting it
   complete in God's own order, as in everlasting life. Who could wish it
   to do less? who could ask it do more?
     __________________________________________________________________

                                    Indexes
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Scripture References

   Numbers

   [1]18:22-23

   Psalms

   [2]7:8   [3]18:35

   Matthew

   [4]4:1-2   [5]8:24   [6]18:11

   Mark

   [7]2:19   [8]14:8

   Luke

   [9]2:7   [10]22:44

   John

   [11]1:31   [12]8:48   [13]14:28   [14]16:9-11

   Romans

   [15]13:14

   1 Corinthians

   [16]15:21

   Ephesians

   [17]4:32

   Hebrews

   [18]2:10   [19]9:28   [20]10:2

   James

   [21]3:4

   Revelation

   [22]6:16-17
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Latin Words and Phrases

     * in transitu: [23]1
     * meum: [24]1 [25]2
     * testudo: [26]1
     * tuum: [27]1 [28]2
     * vis medicatrix: [29]1
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Pages of the Print Edition

   [30]i  [31]ii  [32]iii  [33]iv  [34]v  [35]10  [36]11  [37]12  [38]13
   [39]14  [40]15  [41]16  [42]17  [43]18  [44]19  [45]20  [46]21  [47]22
   [48]23  [49]24  [50]25  [51]26  [52]27  [53]28  [54]29  [55]30  [56]31
   [57]32  [58]33  [59]34  [60]35  [61]36  [62]37  [63]38  [64]39  [65]40
   [66]41  [67]42  [68]43  [69]44  [70]45  [71]46  [72]47  [73]48  [74]49
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   [412]387  [413]388  [414]389  [415]390  [416]391  [417]392  [418]393
   [419]394  [420]395  [421]396  [422]397  [423]398  [424]399  [425]400
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     __________________________________________________________________

            This document is from the Christian Classics Ethereal
               Library at Calvin College, http://www.ccel.org,
                   generated on demand from ThML source.

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