Sermons and songs of the Christian life

Front matter

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BEQUEATHED BY HIM TO

THE LIBRARY OF

Preface

The discourses comprised in this volume have been selected with special reference to those days observed by the Christian Church in commemoration of the fundamental facts of the Gospel history, and to the Christian life and experience which grow from a living apprehension of the system of truth which rests upon them. I do not regard it as the province of the Sermon to go behind the facts themselves, or try to prove them. That belongs to works of another kind. The Sermon assumes them as premises acknowledged by the congregation, and prophesies from them, but in such wise and with such applications to the wants of the human heart, as to complement the historical evidence with the clearest spiritual vision and the most assured experience of Christian believers. This in itself is evidence, and without it the historical facts are of little avail, and finally lose their hold, even upon the intellect, notwithstanding the completeness of the historic demonstration.

In our church service the Sermon consummates in the hymn, or sacred song, which makes the heart lyrical with the truth it sets forth. The idea that

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the sentiment which inspires the hymn is a hindrance to exact criticism, or the clearest and truest interpretation of the record, I resist as false in theory, and proved abundantly so in practice. A plodding criticism keeps close to the earth, and fails to see the significance of some of the most large and positive affirmations of the Gospel narrative, and so pares them away and reduces the whole Christian Revelation within the compass of our earthly vision. The best and most trustworthy historians are men who have enough of the imaginative faculty to reproduce the past as it really lived ; and the best commentators have been men whose intuitions were large and deep enough to bring them into some correspondency with the Mind that inspired the letter, so that they may not merely dig over the surface of the letter itself.

Without claiming these qualifications, I would only say that I had written at different times several lyrical pieces which were afloat in collections of hymns, or in periodicals, sometimes altered and mutilated. I have brought them together in this volume, some of them revised and amended, some of them simply restored, and I have added others not before published. As they are more or less adapted to the subjects of the discourses, and help to give the truths which they handle a fullness of utterance, I have interspersed them, like the hymns in the Sunday Service, though some of them are lyrics rather than hymns. The song, or hymn, should be a summing up

PREFACE. Vll

of the sermon, helping us to take home its truth, and so carry it with us as to fill our daily life with its melodies. I hesitated long in regard to some of these songs, because they are flavored so much with personal experience ; but this is true of most of the hymns that speak to the condition of others, and as best advised, I concluded to put them in, trusting to the large indulgence of my readers.

The Sermons were written, not for the press, but the pulpit, and are given mainly as they were delivered. I should revise them a good deal more if I sought to reduce them to the standard of classical taste, but I believe in that way they would lose in point and directness ; and so I dismiss them as they are, hoping they will find a response in the hearts of some readers worthy of the themes which they set forth.

I believe every Christian should have church relations, and be faithful to them, and I have always studied to render faithful service to the denomination where a good Providence placed me ; not by trying to conform to the average opinions which may be current among them to-day, but by trying to grasp and bring forth anew the vital truths essential alike to individual progress and denominational life. For when brought face to face with the central truths of Christianity, the idea of sect merges in the larger conception of the Church Universal, with Christ for its living Head and daily inspiration. I believe the

Vlll PREFACE.

best service which any man can render his denomination is to help on a consummation like this ; and this I would do in perfect loyalty to the branch of the Church to which it is my privilege to belong, and as some return for the large freedom of opinion and utterance which they have vouchsafed and defended. The time I believe is not far off when there is to be larger freedom in every branch of the Christian Zion for the treatment and readjustment of the great truths of Religion, and that this freedom is to consummate, not in new divisions, but in broader and warmer fellowship, and a more perfect and comprehending unity. For it will be a unity not imposed from without, but a growth within, from more intelligent convictions and the deeper inspirations of the Spirit which comes through these convictions themselves. E. H. S.

Contents

SERMONS.

I. The Cloud of Witnesses

II. One Mediator

I. The Cloud Of Witnesses

(preached all-saints day.)

Hebrews xii. i. Seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us.

r I ^HE writer of this book, called " the Epistle to ■*- the Hebrews," is not known with any certainty. There is no question, however, that it is a genuine production of the primitive Church, written by one of the contemporaries of the Apostles, and that it reflects the mind of the early believer before Christianity had been corrupted by pagan philosophy. The book has a unity and plan which are very striking, and it sets forth the apostolic doctrine with much fervor and perspicuity.

In the chapter from wThich I take the text, and indeed the whole chapter preceding, the writer sets forth the doctrine of angels. He goes back and enumerates a long train of martyrs who have passed up to the skies, some of them through the baptism of blood and fire. These, he reminds his readers, are a witness-train, and he refers to them as if they were still looking on ; a vast company that girds them round to help them gain the victory. His doctrine seems to be, Ye are acting in no obscure corner. All the ranks above are looking on. You stand at the centre of an immense amphitheatre. Row beyond row they are watching you. " Ye are come unto Mount Zion, to the city of the living God ; to the heavenly Jerusalem ; to an innumerable company of angels ; to the general assembly of the church of the first-born which are written in heaven ; to the spirits of good men made perfect ; and to God the judge of all." He does not refer to these merely as examples. Those who have put on immortality he calls elsewhere " ministering spirits sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation." Such, as we gather from no obscure intimations in the Acts and in Paul's writings, and from the words of the Master himself, was the primitive Christian doctrine of guardian angels. I need not say what courage and what earnest of victory it gave to the early converts to Christianity. It was as if countless tiers of faces were looking down, turning aside in grief if they faltered and failed ; and as if hands multitudinous as the waves clapped together and cheered them on at every victory they achieved.

This admirable Christian philosophy, or rather pneumatology, became corrupted. It degenerated into saint-worship and thence into image-worship. In this way, by about the seventh century, the old paganism under new names had been imported into the very heart of the Church and the worship of pictures and statues entered largely into the cultus of Christendom. The fiercest struggle of the eighth century arose from an attempt of the Greek Emperor to reform the paganism of the Church and break the images. It was in vain. The people rose up everywhere in rebellion against the edicts. " I am too poor," writes one of the bishops, " to possess books. I have no leisure for reading. I enter a church choked with the cares of the world ; the glowing colors attract my sight and delight my eyes like a flowery meadow, and the glory of God steals imperceptibly into my soul. I gaze on the fortitude of the martyr and the crown with which he is rewarded, and the fire of holy enthusiasm kindles within me, and I fall down and worship God, and through the martyr receive salvation."

It was the abuse of a doctrine educed from the deep wants of the human heart. Protestantism should have respected the doctrine itself and cleared it of idolatrous perversion. But the reformers of the sixteenth century swept away not only the corruptions but the doctrine along with them ; so that our denuded Protestantism looks up and finds the witness-train all vanished from sight and a blank space between us and the naked heavens.

The cloud of witnesses ! We will endeavor to bring out the primitive Christian doctrine and show its practical use, power, and influence. That this innumerable train of witnesses are spectators of all that we do, or even have cognizance of our external life, would be a construction altogether too literal, avouched neither by Scripture nor reason. Only the Omniscient eye sees all our actions and all states of mind and affection ere yet they have ripened into conduct. In quite other methods, however, the witness-train may beset us and engird us, and be a more mighty incentive to us than they could become as outside witnesses or lookers-on.

The general doctrine as I apprehend it is this, — that the spirit-world and this are continuous and interblending and from that run down into this the influence and energy on which we draw mightily' in our struggles and conquests ; that no man is alone or isolated ; that there are chords of sympathy that run from us along the higher ranks of being ; that the repentance of a single sinner is an event that sends a wavelet of joy into the breasts of those who have been an invisible guard around his virtue and helped determine his decision for the right.1 The universe is related part to part, visible and invisible. There are laws of attraction pertaining to mind

1 See Luke xv. 7, 10.

and spirit as well as matter, which no gulfs of space can suspend or abolish, so that no portion is broken off from any other portion ; but there are fine threads of nerve which run through the whole and make a calamity in one part a calamity to all. But let me illustrate and break the general doctrine into its specialties. The cloud of witnesses may be manifest and affect us in one or all of three ways : —

To sight, or external senses ;

To faith made rational and clear ;

To the heart made peaceful and strong.

I. There may be disclosures of immortality to our grosser perceptions ; I will not say to the bodily senses, but to the senses that lie close within them and are sheathed by them, and which before death as well as after may have open converse with higher things. This is only saying that we are already immortal beings and belong to a higher sphere than this earthly one. This, however, is not the sort of disclosure which the Scriptures refer to when they speak of the company of the witness-train. This writer to the Hebrews does not mean that we are connected by sense with them nor they with us, for he puts into the same enumeration Jesus the Mediator of the New Covenant and God the Judge of all. The reasons against any such connection as this, as a normal condition of our present being, are obvious enough. A sentient connection with spheres of being where our duties do not lie would not enlarge and strengthen but repress our higher and nobler manhood. Even now and here the continual problem is how to keep the sense faculties from becoming so luxuriant as to overtop and repress the reason. They are the most seductive, the most bewildering, the most lying of all our faculties, unless educated and subordinated and their impressions constantly corrected and verified by the rational powers. The infant, when his senses first open upon this world, sees all its objects projected confusedly upon one ground, and he must learn by experience the laws of perspective. It took five thousand years of unfolding reason to reverse the verdict of the senses which reported the universe inside out and upside down. Men of science tell us at this day that descriptions of phenomena by unscientific observers are unreliable and nearly worthless for all the purposes of science. For yet stronger reasons, if in this childhood of our being the spirit-world were given to our senses, it wrould give us phenomena rather than the higher realities ; appearances rather than the laws that underlie them — those eternal and universal laws which in the book of Divine Revelation are addressed to a higher and worthier part of our nature. Even when our spiritual senses are first unsheathed and the eternal substances are about us, it seems probable from all analogy that appearances will lie upon us adaptive and tender, and melt away or disclose the laws that govern them, as our higher nature unfolds and is prepared for the eternal verities in their unclouded glory.

For yet higher reasons the witness-train are not manifest to our senses. Hero-worship in this world is a very dangerous kind of homage, tending to draw out of the worshipper the prime principles of manhood and waft incense to the pride and vanity of the hero. Saint-worship is more dangerous still, and would become sheer idolatry if we had visible connection and intercourse with the witness-train — for among that train are your own kinsfolk, to whom your hearts went out in their warmest love, and to whom in their glorified being the affections yearn with a fervor which time does not cool, but fans, rather, into more burning flame. If they appeared above you they would fill the void till the Father's face were shut out from view, and you would need constantly the voice of the rebuking angel — " See thou do it not ! " Hence the guards, the warnings, the denunciations interposed throughout the old Bible, and repeated in the new, against the necromancy that would substitute " familiar spirits " for the Spirit of the Lord, or take reports from them as a revelation from heaven.

II. There was a man, nevertheless, who appeared in this world with all the wants and susceptibilities of our human nature, and so endowed at the same time with the presence and indwelling of the Godhead, that none of these dangers beset Him. He dwelt "in heaven" and on the earth at the same time. Not alone the words of Jesus but his life is a revelation to us on this as on kindred themes. The full import of the words, that He " brought immortality to light," will appear to you as you follow Him from Bethlehem to Ascension Mount. This life divides itself into four of its grander epochs, representing the periods corresponding to it in every human probation on the earth — his birth, his temptation, his death, and his return to his place on high. At each of these events the clouds disappear from the heights and show the heavens touching the earth, and the cloud of witnesses transfusing celestial energy through its affairs. The song over Bethlehem was the quiring of " the young-eyed cherubim," whose melodies have never died away since the morning stars sang together, but whose chant then and there was so strong and triumphant that it broke audibly through the discords of earth. The angels that " came and ministered " unto Jesus after his great victory over temptation, disclose one of the sources of that ineffable peace, falling as it were from hovering and protecting wings, vouchsafed to every follower of Christ when he triumphs over evil and sin. The valley of the shadow of death through which Jesus passed, lay between the Mount of Transfiguration and the open sepulchre of resurrection morning. The witness-train were visible on the mount, in Gethsemane, and at the sepulchre ; they were close on the other side as the divinely appointed guard shining through the rents in this veil of mortality. And on Ascension Mount they appear again. Do you say that all this was miracle ? Undoubtedly it was ; but you may forget that miracle is not the breaking of law, but the revelation thereof giving us fragmentary gleams of the vast system of agencies and workings whose unveiled operation would bewilder and amaze us. The weak, tempted, suffering nature of Jesus was like all other human natures. He came not to save Himself but to save humanity ; to lift up our faith into serener light ; to take up our experience into his own, and show openly at the same time the helps and the guards that are always nigh. His experience would not be ours, unless the helps and the guards were ours as well as the trials and the sufferings. Not as the Eternal Creative Word, not as the God-with-us ,did He need the angelic ministries, but as a sharer in our common humanity ; and as such He opens vistas to us of the cloud of witnesses that surround us, when to break down the separating wall would make sure an invasion we could never bear.

If not to the senses, then yet to faith made rational and clear the witness train is disclosed. This is what the writer specially means. He has just given an admirable description of this faculty of faith. He calls it the substance (v7roora<ris) of things

IO SERMONS AND SONGS.

hoped for, the demonstration of things not seen. That is to say, faith made open and clear apprehends its objects as the real substances beyond the shifting panorama of sight. Faith has the demonstration or higher beholding of things invisible to mortal eyes. He appeals here to a power within us which, being divinely touched and illumined, lays hold of its objects and possesses them with an assurance beyond that of sight. Jesus not only had disclosures of immortality, but He gives interpretations thereof, and reveals the laws and the substance that underlie them. Without these interpretations the disclosures of the spirit-world would only come to us as " apparitions," and so the world generally has agreed to call them. Sight only gives us phenomena ; faith made clear and rational gives us what lies within the phenomena, and is the ground and substance of all its exflorations.

Jllustrate. Look at the mazy round of night and day, and even and morn, and suns and stars in their courses ! How different to the child who only sees appearances and the man of reason who sees what is within them, and judges not from phenomena but from eternal and shining laws. So of faith made rational and clear. To our higher reason God may so reveal to us the things of the higher life, may make the laws of spiritual existence so radiant and all harmonizing, so rounded and complete, both to the intellect and the heart, that the eternal world

THE CLOUD OF WITNESSES. II

shall be mirrored down to us here in time as it never could be by any fragmentary disclosures to our timid and wildering senses. And when this is so, faith has the substance of things hoped for, the demonstration and beholding of things to come, just as they will be found when we pass into them down into the depths of the endless years ! Hence it was that these first Christians acted as in presence of the great realities. Those realities broke upon their faith with a power and certitude which sense even could not give, so that on the cross and in the fire this world of shows faded out altogether, and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jersalem, the myriads of angels in full assembly, the spirits of good men perfected, Jesus the mediator and God over all, — these rose in brightening ranks and filled all the firmanent of vision as the substance of things hoped for, and of which all things else are but the earnest and the shadow.

III. But higher yet, and still farther inward, are manifestations to us of the cloud of witnesses — namely, to the heart made peaceful and strong.

It is, I believe, a law of spiritual being, that there are bonds which are subtile and pervasive, and which join the body of true disciples as a living and organic whole, so that

" The church on earth and all the dead But one communion make."

This, in fact, is the doctrine of the New Testament,

12 SERMOXS AXD SONGS.

and this is the true Catholic Church, standing complete in its beauty before the eye of the Lord, every part joined vitally to every other part, each receiving the currents of life from all the rest, and being thus swept mightily along. There are two kinds of energy by which the Lord draws us up into his peaceful heavens. One is communion with Himself, or prayer, the other is that energy called in the Apostle's Creed " the communion of saints." These last words have come to mean little or nothing in our rationalizing Protestantism that crumbles everything into individualism. In the primitive Church they meant that every true believer was included vitally in one great Catholicity, in which he was pervaded by the common consciousness, and by which the life of all the saints above and below flowed into him. And this is none other than the fulfillment of the prayer of Christ : " Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one as we are. As thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they also may be one in us, that the world may believe that thou hast sent me." And death has no power to make any rents or breaks in this communion and this unity. It is the sphere of mind flowing into mind, and heart into heart ; and inasmuch as death cleaves away our clumsy clogs and hindrances, these interactions are more perfect than before. The Saviour said, " If I go away I will come again ; " that is, come nearer than ever. This is that Church catholic in which human popedoms have no power of excommunication, for it is drawn into unity, not by outward distinctions and priestly rules, but by inward fitness and regeneration. Hence, with every evil overcome, and every new likeness of Christ inwardly put on, you are brought more completely within the circle of the great cloud of witnesses, the myriads of angels in full assembly, and the spirits of good men made perfect ; their strength passes mightily into your soul and their peace is laid brightly within the heart. This is one of the essential elements of our strength when we are supported and buoyed up in doing the Divine will. You are not marching alone. You feel it ; you know it. Visible or invisible, a mighty host is with you ; you are marching with them in countless and serried numbers ; one spirit moves the whole and lifts their feet, and they keep step to the same music. If we are with the right and for it, though all the world have gone over to the other side, the long line of ancestral and glorified men are behind us and breathing upon us,

" Troops of beautiful tall angels to enshield us from all wrong."

If they came to us from without, if they came to our timid senses, they would repress our manhood and overlay it ; taking the place of our reason and leading us servilely after them. But now they build us up within, their celestial energy we make our

14 S£RM(JArS AND SONGS.

own ; we appropriate it by our rational and voluntary life, and so put it on as our robe and diadem.

How impressively this subject appeals to us now! We have just closed four years of trial during which thousands of martyrs, the flower of the country, have given up their lives to save it.1 In the light of my subject, death has not taken them from us, but given them to us, and their spirit is to inspire our Future and help to unfold it For the more of good men that rise up to the place of ancestors, the more mighty is the influence that comes invisibly from the witness-train. Yea, the more consciously and swiftly will the earth and the heavens become one. What a privilege, in this view of the matter, to live in such times as these ! And how animating the thought that as the heavens fill up and bend over us more nearly, the more virtue comes down to the earth and the swifter its redemption draweth nigh !

The subject abounds with incitements to the Christian life which are full of encouragement. It takes us out of the little cliques and parties of the day, and places us among the blest societies of all ages. It "raises us out of sect and puts us peacefully within the church universal, embracing the first-born which are written in heaven and the last good man that went up into its pale. Your home may be humble, apart, alone ; but if a good life is lived there,

1 This sermon was preached in 1865.

it stands in the centre of an amphitheatre thronged with heavenly multitudes, all bending towards you and breathing their spirit into yours. Nearest about you are those of like character, like trials, and like victories, who have conquered through just such a path as yours, and whose life beats through you with every step that is gained. Farther up are the lengthening ranges, the clouds of witnesses, and looking down through all and breathing through all, is Christ the Mediator of the new covenant and God the Judge of all. Only remember the condition by which you put on the strength and are swept by the spirit of this goodly multitude, — " laying aside every weight, and the sin that doth so easily beset us, and running with patience the race that is set before us, ever looking to Jesus the author and finisher of our faith."

CHRISTMAS CAROLS.

It came upon the midnight clear,

That glorious song of old, From angels bending near the earth

To touch their harps of gold ; Peace on the earth, good will to men

From heaven's all-gracious King " — The world in solemn stillness lay

To hear the angels sing.

Still through the cloven skies they come

With peaceful wings unfurled, And still their heavenly music floats

O'er all the weary world ; Above its sad and lowly plains

They bend on hovering wing, And ever o'er its Babel-sounds

The blessed angels sing.

But with the woes of sin and strife

The world has suffered long ; Beneath the angel-strain have rolled

Two thousand years of wrong ; And man, at war with man, hears not The love-song which they bring ; — Oh hush the noise, ye men of strife, And hear the angels sing ! 2

1 8 CHRISTMAS CAROLS.

And ye, beneath life's crushing load, Whose forms are bending low,

Who toil along the climbing way With painful steps and slow,

Look now ! for glad and golden hours Come swiftly on the wing ; —

Oh, rest beside the weary road And hear the angels sing !

For lo ! the days are hastening on

By prophet bards foretold, When with the ever circling years

Comes round the age of gold ; When Peace shall over all the earth

Its ancient splendors fling, And the whole world give back the song

Which now the angels sing.

II. One Mediator

(CHRISTMAS EVE.)

I Timothy ii. 6. There is one God and one Mediator between God a?id men, the man Christ Jesns.

r I ^HE word here rendered "Mediator" means -■■ one who comes between two parties, and, in the more specific Christian sense of the word, between two parties to reconcile them and make peace between them. It presupposes a state of emnity and warfare, so that an old commentator does no more than justice to the original when he renders — There is one God, and one peace-maker between God and man.

We do not yet, however, come to the full thought of the original word. These analogies from human affairs only help us a little to climb up to the great doctrine involved. A man who goes between two hostile armies and negotiates a peace, represents very dimly and remotely the Divine Mediation in Jesus Christ. On the Divine side this does not represent the fact at all. For God has no hostility towards his creatures ; the enmity is all on one side, and the fearful chasm and antagonism between the Divine nature and human nature do not require any treaty-making or going between, that God may understand us, and be made placable towards us. The thing needed is not an arbitrator to settle disputed points, but a channel rather through which the Divine life and energy can flow. Suppose this Mediator, then, not merely to come between the two parties, but to embody the whole spirit and moral power of the rightful one, — that these possess Him, and clothe Him with their majesty and grace, — that thus He comes to the hostile party on their own ground and among their own camp-fires, and dissolves their hatred beneath the touches of his own spirit, and that then they throw down their arms and strike their banners and say we are reconciled and we will rebel no more. This will give more completely the burden of the text, "there is one God and one Peace-maker between God and man." He is peace-maker in that he opens between both the streams and courses through which the Divine Peace flows to man and reconciles him, so to say, under the Omnipotence of the Divine Love.