A little lower than the angels

Front matter

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PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY

Foreword

WE can contemplate the human soul either as it exists ideally in the divine mind or as it discloses itself in its present condition of infirmity. Neither aspect needs to exclude the other. The series of sermons printed in the following pages is more especially occupied with the former of the two.

It is doubtless the case that a disproportionate emphasis laid upon man's fallen condition tends to induce disrespect for his own nature and thus to discourage rather than to promote recovery to his proper and original estate. The author believes that it is quite as important to realize what it is in us to become as it is to realize what we just at present are.

C. H. Parkhurst.

l^ew York City.

Contents

I. Human Nature on Its Godward Side i i

" What is man ? " — Psalm 8 : 4.

II. Divine Irrigation .... 25

II

DIVINE IRRIGATION "Everything shall live whither the river cometh." — Ezekiel 4.^ : g.

THE fringe of green, that borders every flowing brook, pictures in a pleasant way the thought that the prophet here aims to tell. You remember how picturesquely the same thought is set forth in the scenery of the Twenty-third Psalm, where the " green pastures " are laid along the banks of the " still waters," and the verdancy of the fields felt to spring from the quiet saturation of the brook.

An example of this upon a wider scale is seen in the river-bank vegetation in Egypt, due to fertilizing sediment brought down by the Nile in its descent from the tropics. What are generally called the canals of the planet Mars are now supposed, by those competent to judge, to be belts of vegetation, vegetation that is induced by currents formed by the melting of the polar snows, too narrow to be themselves visible, but of sufficient volume to develop on either side stretches of vegetable life broad enough to come into telescopic view. " Everything shall live whither the river cometh."

This presents to us under a figure, pleasantly and easily to be understood, the intrusion into the world, and into human experience, of a certain current, a certain life-current, variously denominated by us, perhaps, but which everywhere creates along its margin results that are the same sort of thing in the personal world that the " green " which edged the " still waters " in David's Psalm was in the world of verdure.

The thoughts of earnest people are very intensely centred upon this matter of life. It is the problem of the scientist; it is still more the problem of the physician, the philosopher, the artist, the Christian : life and the increase of it. The word " life " is but the label by which we attempt to signalize to ourselves and to others that strange thing which underlies all the choicest phenomena of the natural world and all the richest manifestations that compose the scenery of the world personal and spiritual.

Life even in the plant, and still more in the animal, is a marvel so marvellous as to stand to our thought clothed with a certain garb of sanctity. The careless destruction of a flower seems to us to be almost a crime, and the wanton crushing out of the life of a brute appears to most of us, presumably, a kind of vulgarity, an offense against that in us which is noblest, a close approach to sin. There is that mystery attaching to life that beckons our thought so far away into the region of the unknown as to carry that thought, as always, into the domain of the religious. And so life is thought of by us as being not only mysterious but holy, and the river of the water of life to have its rise fast by the throne of God.

That then is the point from which we desire to date our devout meditation,— Hfe, the intrusion into the world of a divine current, that everywhere fringes its borders with all those varieties of floral spiritual beauty that make out the charm of the landscape of human being and experience. So that the supreme cry of the human heart needs to be, — More life ! so having fulfilled in us the mission with which our Lord was charged who came into the world " that we might have life and that we might have it more abundantly."

And this matter of our being divinely irrigated, of our being saturated with a more abundant infusion of the flow past us and through us of the God-current, must not be understood by us in any limited way, in any one exclusive sense. In the vegetable world the flowers that owe their vigour and beauty to the baptism of the brook are of all species and complexions, unlike one another in their allurements, but all precious because they are vital, and because they admit of that enlargement and enrichment that accrues from the access to them of the living current. And it is in a way similarly wide and comprehensive that we shall interpret the diversity of those flowers of the personal life to whose increased stature and enhanced beauty it is the province of the waters of the river of life to contribute.

To whatever the fact may be due, it is an undoubted fact that the minds of men are more and more gathering to the thought that however dissimilar the vitahty of the human body and the flowing current of the divine life may seem to be, there is nevertheless that congeniality between them, and some residuum of identity relating them, that makes God's life naturally capable of reinforcing the human physical life-current and of so strengthening the tidal flow of that current as to enable it to loosen and then to break up and to carry down-stream the barriers accumulated by the disorders developed in the bodily system.

There is no believing Bible-reader that denies that that is exactly what divine power showed itself interested to do and capable of doing in the day of our Lord. The purpose of Christ's wonder-works of that kind was at least twofold, perhaps threefold. It aimed to demonstrate the fact that bodily disease was abnormal, not that it did not exist but that it was abnormal. It aimed to demonstrate the fact that God did not want people to be sick. It aimed to demonstrate the fact that when disease came in the way of God's power it had to go, and that a sick body was a kind of sewage system that could be made pure by being divinely flushed.

Christ's works of healing were evidently too numerous to warrant our supposing that they were done merely to demonstrate to the public the extent of His curative power: and also too numerous to allow of the supposition that He healed human bodies merely as a means of leading men's thoughts up to the idea of His being the physician of the soul, — a kind of ladder by means of which they could climb to the higher conception.

So far from that kind of service being a mere contingency of His mission to men, He Himself emphasizes it as being no inconsiderable part of His mission, and when He would have John the Baptist convinced that He was the Christ, five out of the six proofs that He would have His disciples make use of in persuading John of His Messiahship had to do with the curing of bodily ailments.

And when we take into account the additional fact that Christ's apostolic successors were competent to continue the same line of operation and did continue it, and taught it as a part of Christian doctrine and life, we hardly seem at liberty to ignore all that is herein involved, if indeed we be prepared to stand up to the full import of what is Scripturally set down for us. We are terribly afraid to assent to anything that surpasses the frontier of our easy comprehension. If men had not been more heroic in their adventures along material lines than they have been along moral and spiritual ones, we should still be clad and millinered in the simplicity of our earliest ancestry and be creeping alongshore in the same sort of naval curiosities that helped mankind through the crisis of the Noachian deluge.

We ought to be willing whole-heartedly to accept it as an essential part of our religion that there are no limits that can be set to the power of the divine life, and as said before, if we are New Testament Christians we ought to accept the New Testament Scriptures as prescriptive of the directions in which the divine life is everywhere and at all times ready to operate. When we are told by the apostle that " He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by His Spirit that dwelleth in you," we may be constrained to feel that the complete fulfillment of that promise requires to be relegated to the future, but if the indwelling Spirit of God is so related to bodily life that it can work a complete resurrection by and by, it is so related to the bodily life that it can work a young resurrection now, and that was what God's Spirit was doing all the way through Christ's ministry historically set down in the written Gospels.

For we are very infirm in our grasp upon the intention of the Gospel if we think of the three years of the God-man ministry as anything other than the prelude to a divine oratorio permanently continued. Those years and what occurred in them, are no relics, no curious anomalies to be relegated to the museum of religious antiquities. They are the momentary flash of everlasting realities ; the rift in the cloud that gives us a glimpse of the heavens in all the unvarying beauteousness of blue with which the whole circumference of years and centuries is canopied.

That is the way we are to interpret the Gospel. It is a Gospel true to even date. It is the uncovering, valid for all time, of the processes of God's mind, of the movings of God's heart, of the activities of His power. So that what He did in those three Christyears is only a way of showing to us what He is all the time doing, or ready to do, and a way of exhibiting the current of divine hfe that, to those who will be laved by its touch, flows ever quickeningly along, meeting us at all grades of our being from the corporeal up. " Everything liveth whither the river floweth." Bodily renewal, physical emancipation from the thraldom of disease that is abnormal, — that then is one of the flowers appointed to leaf and bloom on the margin of the " still waters," and to be freshened by the side of the waters of the river of Ufe.

That, however, is but one out of many illustrations of the principle stated in our text. Physical renewal is only one, and that perhaps the least alluring, of the flowers that stand up in beauteous and fragrant blossom where God's living waters are flowing by. There is not a single energy contained in the manifold personality of each of us that is not constituted in such a way as to be able to absorb into itself an irrigating baptism, a quickening impulse, entering directly from the waters of the river of life.

This fact in its relation to mental power and activity is expressed in the old maxim, not heard spoken now as often as once, — " To have prayed well is to have studied well." For the service of prayer is first of all the act of coming into divine contact, lying up close against God's influence, as the roots of the flowers, along the edge of the watercourse, yield themselves to the gentle saturation. " To have prayed well is to have studied well," — is to have made great entrance into that realm of reality in which the mind of man aspires to be at home.

For in such hour of holy access the pulses of thought are quickened, the current of thought is somehow deepened and accelerated. We need have no theory as to the detailed manner of the quickening. In our season of intellectual research the pressure upon us of even a warm and urgent human intelligence works within us a small miracle of stimulation and entrancement, and how much more must this be the case when we are being mentally told upon by the pressure of the infinite mind, and are being refreshed at the fountain of infinite supply.

In such moment of high uplift we are not only able in a way to think with an energy of insight divinely made over to us, but the very significance of truth becomes itself enhanced. It is seen lying out in the light with something more of its intrinsic beauty and import. Truth does not denote quite all that it might till it is experienced in its relations to the divine mind. It is only in that way that the entire domain of truth can be regarded by us in its coherency.

Up to that moment particular items of truth evince themselves to us in their disinterested separateness. Each such item stands before us unguaranteed, and able to be thought of by us as being merely a shadow cast by our own mind instead of being something that is substantial and that is suffused with the essence of the eternal. But with God in the mind. His breath warm upon us, the current of His infinite thought flowing past us, truth instantly assumes to us the character of something tremendously real, indestructible, and the conquest of a truth, the acquisition of a possession that will continue to make us wealthy till the death of the God in whom all truth inheres.

And it is to just that kind of holy enthusiasm that is to be accorded the name inspiration. The very word " enthusiasm " as the Greek understood it (Ev Oeos) " God in us," means inspiration. It means the tide of the divine mind projecting itself along the narrow channel of human thought, till the channel overflows and overspreads surrounding country with the abundance of fruitful inundation. The utterances of prophets are the brimmings of full souls that God has filled to the point of overflow.

And inspiration is the prerogative of every man that stands on the windward side of the Omniscient. You know very well how, in the old days, and in some later days, the baptismal touch has made ordinary men great; how it has scattered mists out of the eye and clouds out of the air ; how it has uncovered to small hearts the secrets of God and let minds, as little as yours and mine, into God's confidences.

And I would like to add that therein Hes the supreme need of our educational institutions to-day, all the way up from the primary school to the university. We have no end of educational apparatus for storing empty minds with facts, and for limbering up the mental muscle by educational gymnastic. But that does not make men nor women either. There is nothing so barren or so empty as a stuffed mind. All the way up and down our schools are substantially godless. Things, facts, truths are viewed through the smoky atmosphere of common material Hving, There is some mental nervousness and intellectual hustling, but the truths that are dealt out are not so held in the pure and sweet open as to become iridescent with the light dropping upon them from the firmament. The enthusiasm is a man-made enthusiasm and not a divine inspiration. Truths are not felt in the breadth of their range and in the eternity of their reach.

And because the quality of the schools determines the quality of the times, the times are bad. The commercialism of our educational institutions, the bread-and-butter aspect of the whole business, the pettifogging devotion paid to microscopic details, the contemplation of things in their unrelated attitude to the grand whole, the emphasis upon matter to the exclusion of spirit, the consciousness of the atom to the neglect of the universe and to the neglect of the Almighty who has taken the universe for His throne of power and His chamber of love, scrutinizing a starbeam without tracing back its glittering track to the celestial orb it was shot from; — all of that is contributing cause to the materiality of our civilization, a civilization in which man is all and God nowhere ; time everything and eternity still unborn ; body the whole of our humanness and soul a myth : and bread, trinkets and money the sum total of available assets. The supreme beauty of earth is its heavenliness and it takes a great deal of God to make a man.

It will be a third illustration of the principle expressed in our text to say that it is only as they are irrigated by the waters of the river of Hfe fast by the throne of God, that our purposes of life can be strengthened into vigour and vitahzed into forms of perfect beauty. It is not difficult to understand that the large intentions of our lives are invariably sustained upon the basis of a religious impulse. There are none of the more important movements, either of our minds or of our affections, that do not involve the tacit recognition of a certain indestructible value and a certain reliable steadfastness in things, so arguing the existence and the supremacy of some sort of eternal groundwork and support.

Not a great many people, perhaps, think carefully enough to realize as they might, that pretty much everything that we do, think or feel has its significance, guaranteed to us by a lurking suspicion that in that act, thought or passion is an element of meaning that means eternally ; that there is in things something that is infinite ; that fluctuation and change are simply a complexion worn by the unfluctuating and the changeless ; and that just as when we walk we put our feet down confidently because we feel the ground's stability and know that the whole gravitating intention of the globe is pledged to hold our foot fast once it is planted, so in the larger walk of life, in our dealing with the greater facts, and what we name the more important causes and concerns of our own and the general life, we have a sense more or less distinct that those are things that can be counted on, that what Ave call a good cause, or a commendable enterprise, is instinct with a kind of spirit that we might venture to call an immortal spirit; so that when we commit ourselves to such an enterprise there is a feeling of having gone aboard a train whose track runs on into the everlasting centuries.

We may not always think of these things as having God for their grand underlying guarantee, but whatever the dimness of our thought about it, this feeling of the permanent value of a splendid cause, and of its deathless import, is simply at bottom the religious sense, is simply at bottom that experience of an underlying God, which has not yet become wide awake enough to know itself as religion and as trust in the durability of the great Eternal.

Cite for instance the intellectual development of men, the aesthetic refinement of men, the moral uplift of men ; development, refinement, uplift are values, we bank on them : they are treasures in a bank that never will be broken. We feel it : we feel it tremendously and are inspired by the fact of it, for there is in the feeling the twilight appreciation of some immense underlying omnipotence of mind and heart that in our finer and higher moments we spell, " The Almighty Father."

So that the soul-surrender of ourselves to such an interest becomes an act of piety and a form of worship and the grand purposes so entertained by us become religious purposes, flowers that indeed stand along the brook-side waiting always to be watered from the fountain of divine irrigation. And just as the moisture of the " still waters " stimulates the life of the brook-side plant, and helps to build it up in stature and in the luxuriance of growing and blossoming, so it is by the influx into our fine and exalted purposes of the current of the divine life, that those purposes grow big and staunch, full of wealth and assurance, triumphant even in the moment of defeat because consciously broadened into sympathy and union with God's purpose which never can fail and which is forever moving on in slow grandeur of advance, checked by no steps of retreat.

And it is that feeling of moving upon ground that is unshakable, with a push behind that comes directly down from the throne of the Omnipotent, that makes out the success, the joy and the constant triumph of our service. For there is no good working that is not warmed by the realizing sense that every stroke upon the stone we are moulding contributes to the consummation of the final building as it lies modelled in the mind of the supreme architect. For as another has said, — " Give me the man who believes in the ultimate triumph of truth over error, of harmony over discord, of love over hate, of purity over vice, of light over darkness, of life over death. Such men are the true builders."

" Everything liveth whither the river cometh." Our cry then is to have the roots of our life held closely fast to the touch of the " still waters," that in all the ranges of our life and its services this weakness of ours may be divinely thrilled into strength, that our narrowness may be widened out into concord with God's great intentions, that, as with the prophet at Dothan, there may be such entrance into our eye of the divine hght as shall erase the mistiness of our vision and enable us to behold the presence and working of the celestial energies that are achieving the purposes of God; and first and last of all, that every drooping flower of grace that is planted in our hearts may be so moistened that it shall be straightened up into erectness of stature and take upon itself those features of form and colour that shall make it beautiful to the eye of man and dear to the heart of God.

Ill

" And behold there came a leper and worshipped Him, saying, Lord, if Thou -wilt, Thou canst make me clean. And Jesus put forth' His hand and touched him, saying, I will: be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was c\Q2.xiiQd:'—Ma(t/iew 8 : 2-3.

LEPROSY is contagious. At least so claimed by Hansen and Dragnat-Landre,— who are authorities. Jesus touched the leper and was not infected. The saltness of the sea cannot creep up into the river when the tidal flow of the river is pouring itself down into the sea. Cleanness has to be a little unclean before uncleanness can soil it. Power must needs be a little enfeebled before feebleness can debilitate it. Christ was in a way physically divine as well as spiritually divine. Divineness as applied to the spirit means perfect holiness. Divineness as applied to the body means perfect health. The two words, " health " and " holy," come from the same root and mean somewhat the same thing.

So that there was no danger that contact with the leper would communicate to Jesus the leper's disease. It means a great deal that Jesus could not have become a leper by touching a leper. It means that sickness is the shadow cast by sin ; perhaps not the sin of the invalid, but somebody's sin ; and that only by being whole, — that is, holy, — in our souls, can we become whole, — that is, healthy, — in our bodies. There was a vast reason why Jesus, on another occasion, said to the impotent man whom He had healed, — " Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee." There is many a dismal shadow that has overcast the earth only because of the corruption in the human heart. There is fact as well as fiction in the story of the thorns that grew in the furrows of Adam's sin. Perhaps this present world would be beautiful enough if we could erase from it the trail of the serpent, and we may reasonably expect that " Paradise Regained " will come in as fast as the sin goes out that was the occasion of " Paradise Lost."

It is another feature, incidental to the main intention of the story, that by putting His touch upon one infected with leprosy Christ practically declared Himself independent of ecclesiastical statute, for by the law of Moses he who touched a leper became himself unclean. Christ's attitude in the situation was a way He had of stating that He was His own statute, and that life, a live soul, is itself prescriptive of law. That is only to say that the same principle obtains in the personal world that everywhere operates in plant and animal existence. The plant shapes itself, puts on leaves, colours itself, blossoms and fructifies, not by the requirement of any outwardly imposed statute, but by the law of its own interior life. It legislates for itself as it goes along, and the finer and fuller its life the richer will be the terms of its legislation.

The immensity of the life that was in the soul of

Jesus did not admit of its being cramped within the limitations of a Judaistic prohibition. Soul is itself the measure of its authority and of its prerogatives. It is the expanding hfe of the unhatched bird that shatters its confining shell, and the principle holds everywhere from the swelling and bursting wheatgrain to the emancipation wrought out in the spirit of the Son of God. That is what " liberty " means as the word stands written on the pages of the Gospel. It does not mean at all exemption from the authority of law ; it means obedience, but obedience to the law of a renewed mind, obedience to the statutes that the soul has itself enacted for itself under the impulse of the God-soul that has lodged itself in the human soul, — law where the legislative process proceeds from within outward instead of from without inward. That is what we have to understand by the transition from Judaism to Christianity.

That was what the prophet Jeremiah saw was coming. Prophets always see ahead of their times ; they see ahead of their times because they have an eye that so grasps the nature and the tendency of things as to be able to know what that nature and tendency are sure to issue in. And so the prophet said " Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a 7iezu covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. I will put My law into the inward parts and write it in their hearts." It is as though Jehovah had said, " I will have the living impulse that is lodged within them work out their statutes for them instead of having them proceed under the restraints and constraints of statutes externally riveted upon them." I want to say that we make far too little of this principle, and continue to be slaves after we have had the proclamation of emancipation divinely edited and published for us.

We have no business to be plodding along in the treadmill of Mosaism, doing this thing and not doing that other thing because somebody back there in Arabia constructed a cast-iron Decalogue for us. The Psalmist writes about the beauty of holiness, but there is no beauty in cast-iron holiness. The poet pouring forth the irrepressible fullness of his soul in memory of his dear friend Arthur Hallem, says :

" I do but sing because I must And pipe as do the linnets sing."

Shell Shattered at the Pressure of the Life Swelling Inwardly

Outward activity, as in this instance of Jesus, breaking away from the confined channel of traditional obhgation, and running out and flowing over in a fertilizing inundation of generous act, because a spring freshet has dropped down from the uplands and filled the channel to the bursting of its banks, — what a picture of life that is, life that is so large and exuberant that it can afford to take counsel with itself, to disdain manufactured obstacles, to laugh in the face of proprieties that are merely fictitious proprieties, and to be like those gigantic roots in the forest that will steal into the crevices of the rocks, pry the boulders apart and operate with the irresistibleness of slow dynamite.

Christ Himself illustrates all this by the memorable figure of the new wine and the old wine-skins. Something is bound to give way when expansive life is kept boxed in an old casket. And what the incoming into the world of this fuller life in the person of Jesus has already accomplished in the way of rending the fetters in which human thought and ambition had been bound, that we must each of us have achieved in our separate and personal experience. It is not a matter of artificially knocking off fetters. That is dangerous. The poultry-man kills the bird by breaking the bird's shell. The bird must by the push of its swelling life burst its own shell. In human life there is quite too much artificial shell-breaking, — renouncing statutes simply because we have decided we do not like them : throwing away opinions and doctrines merely because it is easier not to have opinions and doctrines.