Sermons Preached in English Churches

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Contents

WMiW

I. The Pattern in the Mount . • . i

" See that thou make all things according; to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount." — Hebrews

II. The Mind's Love For God.*

^ Jesus said unto him. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God • • • with all thy mind." — Matthew xxii. 37.

This is only part of a verse. It is a fragment of the injunction in which Christ laid down to His disciples the whole range and compass of the Christian life. In words which must have seemed to each of them, according to his character and mood, either the imposition of a duty or the offer of a privilege which was large enough to cover and fill all their lives, their Lord had said to them, ** Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." The two great commandments make one duty. Completely carried out in all their parts, they would make life a

^ Preached at St. Mark's Church, Upper Hamilton Tarrace, London, Sunday morning, 13th May 1883.

n. THE mind's LOVE FOR GOD. 23

strong and perfect unit. But, as we study them, it is possible to take their unity apart and fix our thoughts upon a single one of the elements of which it is composed. This is what I want to do this morning ; for there is one part of the great comprehensive statement of duty which, often as we repeat it, I think that many of us seldom pause to consider and have seldom consciously and conscientiously tried to work out into life. It is that in which Jesus says, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind." Far more familiar is the thought which is included in the other words, " Thou shalt love God with all thy heart and soul." The affections of the emotional nature we think of very often. That the soul, which is the very seat of admiring wonder and of spiritual sympathy, should glow and burn at the sight ol the excellence and love of God, we all see and feel how natural that is. But that the mind must love, that the intellectual nature also has its affections which it must give to God ; this, perhaps, seems to us more strange ; certainly it is less familiar.

But yet if it is true, we surely want to understand it. If there is one part of our nature which we have been in the habit of thinking either had nothing to do with our religion or else could only deal with our religion in the coldest and hardest

24 THE mind's love FOR GOD. U.

way, but which, indeed, is capable of burning with its own peculiar fire, surely it will be worth our while to study it as carefully as we can. This is why I ask you to think with me this morning, about the Christian loving God with all his mind. In the first place, then, we want to assure ourselves in general that there is such a power as . intellectual affection, and that no man completely and worthily loves any noble thing or person unless he loves it with his mind as well as with his heart and soul. That will not, I think, be very hard to see. Take, for instance, your love for some beautiful scene of nature. There is somewhere upon the earth a lordly landscape which you love. When you are absent from it, you remember it with delight and longing. When you step into the sight of it after long absence, your heart thrills and leaps. While you sit quietly gazing day after day upon it, your whole nature rests in peace and satisfaction. Now, what is it in you that loves that loveliness ? Love I take to be the delighted perception of the excellence of things. With what do you delightedly perceive how excellent is all that makes up that landscape's beauty, the bending sky, the rolling hill, the sparkling lake, the waving harvest, and the brooding mist ? First of all, no doubt, with your senses. It is the seeing eye, the hearing ear, n. THE mind's love FOR COD. S5

the sense of feeling which in the glowing cheek is soothed or made to tingle, the sense of smell which catches sweet odours from the garden or the hayfield, — it is these that love the landscape first ; you love it first with all your senses. But next to that what comes? Suppose that the bright scene is radiant with associations, suppose that by that river you have walked with your most helpful friend ; upon that lake you have floated and frolicked when you were a boy ; across that field you have guided the staggering plough ; over that hill you have climbed in days when life was all sunshine and breeze. That part of you which is capable of delightedly perceiving these associations as they shine up to you from the glowing scenery, perceives them with delight and takes the landscape into its affection. You love the scene with all your heart But yet again, suppose a deeper faculty in you perceives the hand of God in all this wondrous beauty; suppose a glad and earnest gratitude springs up in you and goes to meet the meadow and the sky ; suppose that all seems to tell to some deep listening instinct in you that it was all made for you, and made by one who loved you ; suppose that it all stands as a rich symbol of yet richer spiritual benefits of which you are aware ; what then ? Does not another part of you spring up

26 THE mind's love FOR GOD. VL

and pour out its affection, your power of reverence and gratefulness ; and so you love the landscape then with all your soul. Or yet again, if the whole scene appears to tempt you with invitations to work : the field calling on you to till it, and the river to bridge it, and the hill to set free the preciousness of gold or silver with which its heart is full and heavy; to that too you respond with your power of working ; and then you love the scene with all your will, or all your strength.

And now, suppose that, beyond all these, another spirit comes out from the landscape to claim another yet unclaimed part of you ; suppose that unsolved problems start out from the earth and from the sky. Glimpses of relationships between things and of qualities in things flit before you, just letting you see enough of them to set your curiosity all astir. The scene which cried before, " Come, admire me," or " Come, work on me," now cries, " Come, study me." What hangs the stars in their places and swings them on their way ; how the earth builds the stately tree out of the petty seed ; how the river feeds the cornfield ; where lie the metals in the mountains — these, and a hundred other questions, leap out from the picture before you and, pressing in, past your senses and your emotions and your practical powers, will not rest till they have found out your n. THE mind's LOVE FOR GOD. 27

intelligence. They appeal to the mind, and the mind responds to them ; not coldly, as if it had nothing to do but just to find and register their answers, but enthusiastically, perceiving with delight the excellence of the truths at which they point, recognising its appropriate task in their solution, and so loving the nature out of which they spring in its distinctive way.

Is not this clear ? Is it not manifestly true that, besides the love of the senses, and the love of the heart, and the love of the soul, and the love of the strength, there is also a love of the mind, without whose entrance into the completeness of the. loving man's relation to the object of his love his love is not complete ? Think of the patriot's love for his land. Is it complete until the great ideas which lie at the basis of the country's life have appealed to the patriot's intellect, and his mind has enthusiastically recognised their truth and majesty ? Is your greatest friend contented with your love before you have come to love him with all your mind ? Will any fondness for his person, or association with his habits, or gratitude for his kindness, make up for the absence of intellectual sympathy, for a failure of your understanding to grasp the truths by which he lives ? Everywhere we find our assurances that the mind has its affections and en-

28 THE mind's love FOR GOD. ii.

thusiasms, that the intellect is no cold-hearted monster who only thinks and judges, but that it glows with love, not merely perceiving, but delighted to perceive, the beauty of the things with which it has to do

It would be strange indeed if it were not so ; strange indeed if the noblest part of us were incapable of the noblest action ; strange indeed if, while our senses could thrill and our hearts leap with affection, the mind must go its way in pure indifference, making its great discoveries with no emotion for the truths which it discovered, and for the men in whom those truths were uttered. But it is not so. The intellect can love. The being who has intellect does not love perfectly unless his intellect takes part in his loving. We know that God loves man. The first article of all our faith in Him, next to His existence, is that He is no cold passive observer or manager of what goes on upon the earth, but that He loves the world and man in whom the deepest interest of the world resides. But can we think about God's love and not feel ever present as an element in it the working of the infinite mind as well as of the perfect heart ? There is moral approbation, there is the father's tenderness, there is delight in the beauty of a good character. But the love on which we rest, and from which our most mighty

IL THE mind's love FOR COD. 29

inspirations come, is surely not complete until there also is in it the delight of the perfect intellect in the fitness of things, and joy in the adaptation of part to part, in the perfect sight of all the absolute harmony of laws and forces of which the little stray glimpses which we catch give the world a new sort of dearness in our eyes, and make us glow with enthusiasm as we, with our small judgments, speak God's words after Him and call it Good.

I know that I appear, as I speak thus, to separate into parts that which does really work as one unit A being who completely loves something which is completely worthy of his love does not analyse himself with any such analysis as this which we have made. His affection is the affection of the one whole man. But when we force ourselves to analyse, I am sure we come to this, that the mind has its true distinctive power of affection, and that there is not a perfectness of love until that giant of the nature is present glowing with delight in truth.

No doubt men's minds differ from one another exceedingly in their capacity of affection. As we enter into the society of the great masters of human thought, it is a difference which we feel at once. Some great thinkers seem to deal with the things of which they think in passionless calmness. It

30 THE mind's LOVE FOR COD. ii.

seems as if they flung the truths they find abroad and cared no more for them, as the machine flings out the nails it makes. They seem to be almost like machinery which you can set at work on any material. But always there is another class of students and thinkers whose whole intellectual action is alive and warm. They love the truth they deal with. About such men there always is a charm peculiar to themselves. They evidently have a joy in their own work, and they make other people share their joy. We know such men at once. We are certain that the minds of the great theologians, from Paul to Maurice, loved their truths. We are sure that Shakespeare's intellect had an affection for its wonderful creations. The highest glory of the great students of natural science to-day is in the glowing love of which their minds are full for Nature and her truths. It is the necessity of any really creative genius. It is the soul of any true artistic work. Without it the most massive structures of human thought are as dead and heavy as the pyramids. With it the slightest product of man's mind springs into life, and, however slight it be, compels and fascinates attention.

I am sure that there is no wise and thoughtful teacher of young people whose whole experience has not borne witness often to what I am saying, n. THE mind's love FOR GOD. 31 that the mind has a power of directly loving truth which must be awakened before the learner is really able to do his best work. You tell your scholar that he must study because his parents wish it, because he ought to be equal to his fellowscholars, because he will be poor and dishonoured if he is ignorant These motives are good, but they are only the kindling under the fire. Not until an enthusiasm of your scholar's own intellect begins and he loves the books you offer him with his mind, because of the way they lay hold of his power of knowing them ; not until then has the wood really caught and your fire truly begun to bum. To that end every true teacher must devote himself, and not count his work fairly begun till that is gained. When that is gained the scholar is richer by a new power of loving, the power of loving with his intellect, and he goes on through life, carrying in the midst of all the sufferings and disappointments which he meets a fountain of true joy in his own mind which can fill him with peace and happiness when men about him think that he has only dreariness and poverty and pain.

But now it is quite time to turn to Christ's commandment I hope that we shall find that what we have been saying will make it clearer and stronger to us. Christ bids His disciples to love God with all their minds. As we hear His words

32 THE mind's love FOR GOD. ii.

we know that He is speaking for God. Near to God as He is in sympathy, one with God as He is in nature, we are sure that He is able to tell us what God wants of His children. And the glory of this part of His commandment, which we have chosen for our study, seems to me to be in this assurance which it gives us that God, the Father of men, is not satisfied if His children give Him simply gratitude for His mercies or the most loyal obedience to His will ; but that He wants also, as the fulfilment of their love to Him, the enthusiastic use of their intellects, intent to know everything that it is possible for men to know about their Father and His ways. That is what, as I think we have seen, is meant by loving God with the mind. And is there not something sublimely beautiful and touching in this demand of God that the noblest part of His children's nature should come to Him? ** Understand me! understand me!" He seems to cry ; ** I am not wholly loved by you unless your understanding is reaching out after my truth, and with all your powers of thoughtfulness and study you are trying to find out all that you can about my nature and my ways."

If we rightly interpret God when we seem to hear Him saying such words as these, then there must fqllow a conviction which certainly ought to bring comfort and incitement at once to many

H. THE mind's love FOR GOD, 33

souls. It is that it is both man's privilege and duty to reason and think his best about God and the things of God, and that worse than any blunders or mistakes which any man may make in his religious thinking is the abandonment of religious thought altogether, and the consignment of the infinite interests of man to the mere region of feeling and emotion.

If you would know how needful that conviction is, you have only to listen to the strange way in which many people, both believers and unbelievers, talk about God and about religion. Hear what is the tone of man>' who call themselves believers, I go to a man who stands holding his Bible clasped with both hands upon his breast I say to him, " Tell me about that book ! What is it ? Where did it come from ? What is it made up of? How do its parts belong together? What is the ground of its authority? Why do you love it so?" And he turns round to me and says, " I will not ask, I will not hear questions like these ! I love this book with all my heart ! It ha? helped me. It has helped my fathers. When its promises speak to me I am calm. When its cry summons me I am brave. I will obey it and I will not question it I love it with all my heart and soul and strength.!'

I see another man prostrate at the feet of God.

p

34 THE mind's LOVE FOR GOD.

II

He knows that God is standing over him. He feels the shadow of the outstretched hand. He hears a voice which takes his will captive. I say to him, " Tell me about God. Try to explain to me what is His nature. Let me understand in some degree how He comes into communication with men's souls." And the grieved worshipper looks up almost in anger, and cries, " Away with such questions ! You must not understand. You must not try to understand ; you must only listen, and worship, and obey."

I see the soul which Christ has helped, the man for whom all the green earth is different because of the Divine feet that trod it once. I say to Him, " Let us see if we can know anything about the Incarnation. What has this coming of God among men in the wonderful life of His Son to do with that sonship of all men to God, which is an everlasting fact ? How did He who came mean to deal with all the remote anticipations of ' His coming, and cravings after Him, of which the whole religious history of man is full? What were the wonderful works that fell from His hands, which we call miracles?" I ask such questions in the profoundest reverence ; and again the lover of Christ turns off from me and says rebukingly, " You must not ask ; Christ is above all questions. He bears His own witness to the soul n. THE mind's LO VE FOR GOD. 3$

He helps. The less," even so some will speak of Him, ** the less I understand of Him the more I love Him."

Yet once again I speak to the saint at His sacrament. I beg of him to let me know what that dear and lofty rite means to him ; what are the perpetual faculties and dispositions of our human nature to which it appeals ; how it is that he expects to receive his Saviour there. And he cries, " Hush ! you must not rationalise. It is a mystery. No man can tell. The reason has no function here."

You will not misunderstand me, I am sure. You will not think that I disparage in the least degree the noble power of unreasoning love. The Bible, God, Christ, the Sacraments, the Church ; these great realities cannot exist without finding out men's hearts, and winning them, and giving precious blessings through the adoration and emotion which they evoke. But what I want to say most earnestly is this, that each of the men I have described, with whatever other parts of himself he loves the object of his affection, does not love it with his mind ; that, therefore, his affection IS a crippled thing ; and that if it be possible for him to bring his intelligence to bear upon his faith, to see the reasonableness which is at the heart of every truth, .to discriminate between the

36 THE MINDS LO VE FOR GOD. n.

true and the false forms of belief, to recognise how Christian truth is bound up with all the truth of which the world is full, and so to understand in some degree what now already he adores ; he will, without losing in the least his adoration, gain a new delight in a perception of the beauty of his truth upon another side ; his relation to it will be more complete ; it will become more truly his ; and his whole life will more completely feel its power.

There are Christians all about us who fear to bring their minds to bear upon their religion lest their hearts should lose their hold upon it Surely there is something terrible in that Surely it implies a terrible misgiving and distrust about their faith. They fear to think lest they should cease to love. But really it ought to be out of the heart of their thinking power that their deepest love is born. There is a love with most imperfect knowledge. The highest love which man can ever have for God must still live in the company of a knowledge which is so partial that, looked at against the perfect light, it will appear like darkness. But yet it still is true that the deeper is the knowledge the greater becomes the possibility of love. They always have loved God best, they are loving God best to-day, who gaze upon Him with wide-open eyes ; who, conscious

II. THE mind's love FOR GOD. 37

of their ignorance and weakness, more conscious of it the more they try to know, yet do try with all the powers He has given them, to understand all that they possibly can of Him and of His ways. I said that the unbeliever as well as the believer needed to recognise, and often failed to recognise, the true place of the mind and thinking powers in religion. Let me tell you what I mean by that There is a curious way of talking which seems to me to have grown strangely common of late among the men who disbelieve in Christianity. It is patronising, and quietly insulting ; it takes for granted that the Christian's faith has no real reason at its heart, nor any trustworthy grounds for thinking itself true. At the same time it grants that there is a certain weak side of human nature, where the reason does not work, where everything depends on sentiment and feeling, where not what is true, but what is beautiful and comforting .and reassuring is the soul's demand ; and that side of the nature it gives over to religion. Because that side of the nature is the most prominent part, and indeed sometimes seems to be the whole, of weaker kinds of men and women, it accepts the necessity of religion for these weak people, and does not desire its immediate extinction ; only it must not pretend to be a reasonable thing. Theology must not call itself a science, and Faith must know it is

38 THE mind's LOVE FOR GOD. Ii.

a dream« " Yes, be religious if you will," this spirit cries, " only do not imagine that your intellect has anything to do with it ! Be religious ; dwell on the beauty of the sacred past ; let your lives walk in the twilight of imaginary cloisters ; picture to yourselves what the world would be if there were a God ; weep over the legendary woes of Jesus ; dream of immortal life ; give yourself up to rapturous emotions, whose source is largely physical ; nay, if you will, be stirred by your dreams to noble and self-sacrificing work — do all this and be made happier. Yes, perhaps be made better — if there are such things as good and bad — by doing it ; only, do not for a moment think that the mind, the reason, has anything to do with it at all. It is pure sentimentality. Religion is a thing of feelings and of fancies altogether." So pityingly, patronisingly, and insultingly talks many an unbeliever. Nay, strange as it may seem, there are some men whose minds are wholly sceptical of Christian truth, who yet allow themselves a sort of religion on the weaker side. They let their emotions be religious, while they keep their minds in the hard clear air of disbelief ; the heart may worship, while the brain denies. I will not stop to ask the meaning of this last strange condition, interesting as the study might be made. I only want you all to feel how thoroughly Christianity w. THt mind's love FOR GOD, 39

is bound to reject indignantly this whole treatment of itself. Just think how the great masters of religion would receive it I Think of David and his cry — " Thy testimonies are wonderful. I have more understanding than my teachers, for thy testimonies are my study.'* Think of Paul — ** O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God." Think of Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Milton, Edwards, and a hundred more, the men whose minds have found their loftiest inspiration in religion, how would they have received this quiet and contemptuous relegation of the most stupendous subjects of human thought to the region of silly sentiment ? They were men who loved the Lord their God with all their minds. The noble relation of their intellects to Him was the supreme satisfaction of their lives. We cannot imagine them for a moment as yielding up that great region of their lives in which their minds delighted in the study and attainment of His truth.

There are ignorant saints who come very near to God, and live in the rich sunlight of His love ; but none the less foe that is their ignorance a detraction from their sainthood. There are mystics who, seeing hpw God outgoes human knowledge, choose to assume that God is not a subject of human knowledge at all ; that His works are dis-

40 THE mind's LOVE FOR GOD. IL

tinct in kind from any of which we know, prompted by other motives, and proceeding upon principles entirely unintelligible to our reason. Such mystics may mount to sublime heights of unreasoning contemplation, but there is an incompleteness in their love ; because they rob one part of their nature of all share in their approach to God. Their first assumption is not true ; their starting-point is wrong. God's ways are not as our ways. More vast, infinitely more vast in size than ours, they stretch beyond us, as the ocean stretches beyond the little pool of water which it has left, separated from and yet united to itself, behind the extended arm of the outreaching shore. But yet, because we are made in the image of God, His ways are of the same kind as ours, and we may know very much about them as you may know much about the ocean from the study of the waters of the bay, and from the sight of how the tides sweep into it and out again. There is no principle involved in the Atonement of Christ that is not included in its essence in the most sacred relations between man and man. The ^ Bible opens new beauties and depths to any man who studies its history, its geography, its language, with the same intelligence with which men study other books. The Church is an institution built of men, and a knowledge of human nature throws perpetual light upon its

II. THE mind's love FOR GOD. 41

character and its hopes. Everywhere, to think that divine truth lies beyond or away from the intelligence of man, is at once to make divine truth unreal and unpractical, and to condemn the human intelligence to dealing not with the highest, but only with the lower themes.

I have pled with you to-day for the use of your intellects in matters of religion. By them you must discriminate between the false and the true. You have no other faculty with which to do that necessary work. You cannot know that one idea is necessarily true because it seems to help you, nor that another idea is false because it wounds and seems to hinder you. Your mind is your faculty for judging what is true ; and only by the use of your thoughtful intellect, too, can you preserve your faith in the attacks which come against it on every side. However it may have been in other days, however it may seem to be to-day, in the days which are to come — the days in which the younger people who hear me now will livethere will be ever-increasing demand for thoughtful saints ; for men and women, earnest, lofty, spiritual, but also full of intelligence, knowing the meaning and the reasons of the things which they believe, and not content to worship the God to whom they owe everything with less than their whole nature.