The witness of Jesus and other sermons

Preface

The noblest and most enduring record which any man can leave behind him, when he has finished his earthly labors, is the influence which his life has made on other lives, which, transmitted from one generation to another, becomes a perpetual force for good while the world stands. While such a record is not traceable for human eyes in all its wide and subtle ramifications, it is none the less real and potent. A consecrated personality is the mightiest force for the uplifting of humanity which this world has ever known or can know. A good man is God's best gift to the world. Such a man cannot live and labor and suffer and die without putting into active operation good influences which, embodied in other lives, become permanent factors working for the world's redemption.

It has often, however, been a matter of regret among his brethren and friends that Alexander Procter did not, during his active life, put into more enduring form those ideas and truths which, as preached by him, so profoundly affected those who heard them. That he did not write more is, no doubt, a matter to

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be deeply regretted. But let no one suppose that because of this fact the good influence of his life will end with the generation which knew and heard him. Hundreds and thousands of minds have been deeply impressed and largely molded by his thought and his character, and through these he will continue to influence the thought and lives of men far beyond the limits, in time or space, of his name and fame.

It was the feeling referred to above, however, that led some of his friends to secure his consent to preach a series of discourses which should be taken down by a stenographer, and afterwards revised and printed in a book. The sermons were preached and taken down, as had been planned, in the latter part of 1892 and the first part of 1893, but unfortunately they were never revised by their author. He was in feeble health, and he had a strong disinclination to the use of a pen. It is not a matter of wonder that the stenographer often failed to catch the great preacher's exact thought, in writing out the sermons from the word-symbols in his reports. It is known, too, by Bro. Procter's best friends that, while he was capable of expressing himself in a very vigorous and striking way, he was careless of

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literary form, and never spoke with the thought of a reporter before his eyes. These two facts have placed a very heavy and often embarrassing responsibility upon the redactor, into whose hands these manuscripts were placed to be put in condition for publication. Sometimes the preacher was made to say exactly the opposite of what he did say or intended to say, a fact made obvious by the context. Occasionally the editor or redactor was not able to make out from the stenographer's report what the speaker meant, and when a sentence or paragraph was unintelligible to him, he struck it out. Where the meaning was plain but the statement was marred by infelicity of expression, owing to the rush of extemporaneous utterance or fault of the reporter, we have not hesitated to change the form of expression; but the aim throughout has been to preserve the exact language of the author, when this was possible.

It will be sufficiently obvious, from these statements, that these sermons should not be judged by a strict literary standard. It should be remembered constantly that they are not written but spoken sermons, and we have thought it best to retain the free, unconstrained form which marked the author's extemporan-

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eous style of preaching. They are, at best, only an approximate report of the sermons as they were actually preached. But our familiarity with the author's thought and style enables us to say, with confidence, that we have set forth in these sermons the characteristic ideas of the great preacher whom his friends were wont to speak of as "the Sage of Independence. " In this fact lies the sole claim of the book on the brotherhood which he loved so well and which he served so long and so faithfully and which can never cease to bear the impress of his thoughts. To the question which the younger people of this generation, and the thoughtful people of coming generations, may ask, What were the leading ideas and mental characteristics of Alexander Procter which gave him the reputation and high rank he holds among preachers? this volume of sermons must forever remain the best answer that can be given.

Standing in relations of closest personal friendship with the author of these sermons, as the editor of this volume did, their preparation for the press, at the request of his family, difficult and delicate as the task has been, was a labor of love. We are profoundly grateful that he has left us so much of his thou eh t to be

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placed in this permanent form as a legacy to his brethren and to those who shall come after him, and as an enduring contribution to the cause of religious reformation with which he was so long and so prominently identified. That these sermons may help, in some degree, to hasten the realization of those splendid ideals of Christian faith and life, herein presented, is alike the aim of the author and the earnest prayer of the editor.

J. H. Garrison.

St. Louis, Sept. 6, 1901.

Contents

Page

I. The Witness of Jesus . . n

II. The Creation — Old and New 29

II

"For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them." — Eph. 2:10.

There are very many conceptions and theories of religion which in the last twenty years have undergone great transition in consequence of the increase of the world's knowledge of the universe. The advance of our knowledge of the world in which we live, of ourselves, has made obsolete a great many of our old ideas of religion, and modified a great many others. In no one subject that I know of has the change been greater than in regard to that which I have announced — our conception of creation.

Twenty years ago, or a little more than that — most of you can remember the time — it was believed that God created everything that exists, not only this world, but all the worlds; not only this planet, but all the planets, and the suns and stars, that are six thousand years old, in six days. I do not think that when I began to preach there was a suspicion anywhere, except, perhaps, one or two men in Europe — I scarcely knew of one in this country — that this was not so. I heard many sermons in regard to these matters at that time, and the be- 29 lief everywhere expressed and fully received was that it was simply a vast fiat of God that threw these worlds out, and they have been shining since that time. When I was a youth attending college a great many were looking at these conceptions, and our attention was directed to this thought about the Creator. But modern thought has pushed out these conceptions of creation, pushed them backward indefinitely. It has expanded the whole space upon which we look, and theories like that have dropped away from us. It was treated to some extent in that lecture on "Moses and Geology" you had not long ago. Men created in the book of Genesis an historical and scientific account of the beginning of the world, but when we began to think we found that we have no conception of the time that creation has been going on.

The next thought was, "Well, what about Moses? What about the statements of the Bible?" And if your position seems to be against the thoughts and the theories that we have in the Bible, then we have a great conflict. This is one of those things that have come up in our time, and disturbed the hearts and minds of good men and good women, just as it has been going on for the last three hundred years, over and over again. Now, the truth is, religious thought is always conservative. Religious thought is never progressive. Professor Winchell says faith in the heart of a man receives what has been handed down to him; sprinkles holy water on it, lays it down and keeps it, and is never willing for it to change. But intellect is looking out for the reasons, and the conflict that goes on in the world's history is precisely that conflict that goes on between your own heart and your own faith. He describes it about in this way: The intellect in a given time brings a truth to the heart; the heart accepts, loves and trusts it. In a little while the intellect goes on another excursion, and finds out more, and brings that back to the heart, and says, "What I gave you before is not quite true; some of it not true at all; all of it incomplete; we will have to change that." And the heart rebels. Thus the heart and the intellect are in eternal conflict. If you take human history you will find that the ages fought one another, and that there was one long, continual conflict of faith against reason. We have just passed through a tremendous struggle of that kind.

The word creation conveys to us now another thought occasioned by this tremendously enriched knowledge from what we had when we began the study of religion. We think of creation now as a method of divine working, not a fiat, while the great and good men who made our creeds say that God made all things out of nothing. I think that thoughtful men everywhere now know that to make something out of nothing is an unthinkable thing; you cannot think it. We may affirm that something is made out of nothing; that is, we can say the words, but the intellect has no thought of its meaning. There are a great many men who will tell you that they can think it. If they can, they can think much better thinking than I can. Bven so great and so accurate and largely equipped a man as James Freeman Clarke, in the appendix to one of his books, says he can, and he gives an illustration. He moves his hand, and says, "There was nothing there, was there?" And then he moves it again, thus, and says: "There is something — something made out of nothing." Well, when you come to analyze that, it means simply that there is something where there was nothing before, but something was not made out of nothing. A motion was not made out of nothing. There was a volition, and it was made by the most wonderful, the greatest something we are acquainted with. I can readily conceive that there may be something where there was nothing, but that something was made out of nothing, I confess I cannot think it. I do not try to get back and find out the infinite purpose of the great God, and the way in which he has made the world; it is a matter of faith; I believe it.

I simply believe that he is the infinite and adequate Cause of everything that exists, but just how it began to exist I do not know. That is all I can say, and I do not know anybody else who can say more. When I study the things that he has made, as the world is studying them now, I find precise laws and causes at work which I do know something about. I cannot know all about them, but I can know something about them. And these have come up in our time under the offensive name of "evolution," as the method of the divine working. Now, I will tell you frankly — I do not know whether I ever did so before — but I have been an evolutionist from the beginning, and have not been at all afraid to avow it. But by that I do not mean that evolution originated anything, no more than I can think of anything being originated at all out of nothing. I mean by that, the method by which God works. God has a method, an intelligent, regular, ordinary method of working in this universe, and he produces these things by this method. When he makes a tree, he does not make roots, trunk, branches, leaves, and set it in the ground. He starts with a germ, a cell, and evolves the whole tree from beginning to end. And when we go from the natural to the animal kingdom, we see just the same process. And if we go back from that to the inorganic world, and study the rocks, we study the same process there in what is called nebula.

If that be true, then the inorganic world — the rocks, the earth, all there is in it, and the arrangement of it — has come just like a tree evolved from a seed. It has started, and is gradually being built up and evolved by similar processes.

Now, therefore, when we use the word creation, we have in our minds something very different from its old meaning. And I am talking about these things simply that I may contrast them with the old idea that some of you may still have in your minds — that the universe, the world in which we live, with its structure, its strata and their contents, bones of animals, tracks, were all made when God simply said, "LET it be!" There are those who have come to me within the last year or two, and have told me they still believed that; that the tracks of these great animals in these strata, these creatures of immense size, that have passed away from the earth, but whose traces we have discovered, were made in this manner. But we do not think so now. These were here on the earth before man came. We can go just as far down as when he was here, and a long way farther thau man used to think of ; and this conception now is in contrast with the one which we used to have. Now, then, the word ' 'creation"

was a keyword that we applied when we came to the New Testament. The idea that was in it should go with us to the New Testament. That is the thought that I have to present to you to-day. The process by which a man is changed from the state in which the Gospel finds him to a Christian man is called a "creation." With no idea of creation in the mind but that of a special fiat, men thought this creation was made in the same way; that the power by which the change is brought about in the soul of a Christian man was one like that when God made the rocks, the stars, the sun, simply by a special fiat, "LET it be!" and this theory you will find embedded in nearly all the creeds made in those times. It was the best men who thought thus, and the ideas are still there in the creeds, unchanged, although the minds of men have changed, and men do not believe them. If you read your history you will find that it is so; that men could not think otherwise. How could a man, when he saw the word creation in the New Testament, in a verse like that which I have read to you this morning, where the apostle says, "We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them," and when he had but the one idea about creation, as the word "creation" was understood then — how could he think of any different process than the one he believed to have been followed in the old creation? You can thus see the foundation of that old theology, the great theological process of conversion, or the new birth, or the change, whatever you call it. The foundation of that old theology rested upon an inadequate conception of what the word "creation" meant.

And now, when we have a different idea of creation; when it brings to our minds the conception of a vast, infinite, intelligent Being, working according to the law of cause in the universe, by regular and ordinary processes, and then read the word "creation" in the work of the Christian, we transfer the same meaning there. This has made the great change that has gone on in our time in the pulpit and in the world's thought.

I call your attention to a few passages, and the manner in which they can be interpreted by both of these lines of thought and meaning. The apostle, in a little paragraph in this letter, with which you are very familiar, referring to his visit to the people of Kphesus, and to what occurred by reason of his being present among them, said: "This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind." They were walking with false conceptions and feelings about themselves and about God and the universe, which he designated by the word " vanity." And he states what this is — the process of having the understanding darkened. He knew very well the connection between the intellectual nature of man and what we call the sensibilities of the heart. He says that the understanding was darkened, and alienation from the true life of God was one of the results. They were alienated from the life of God through their ignorance , and because of this blindness of the heart, this deadness, so hard to get away from, they gave themselves over to vanity. Here we have the psychology of the Apostle Paul, which is true, so far as we have learned, of the understanding, the sensibilities of the heart, and the will. When you think and feel toward God with the understanding blinded and the heart alienated, you are given over to work all uncleanness and greediness.

Now, this fact of man's alienation from God, which the apostle accounts for by the ignorance of men, reaching back to the fall of man, could not be illustrated by the old theologians except by the theory of making the universe out of nothing. I heard two of the most distinguished men I have ever known in the pulpit affirm that this power of the new birth, the birth in the soul, which is called creation, is the same as that act by which the universe was brought into being by the infinite Jehovah. If I would call their names many of you would know them. And I can refer you to a dozen books in which the same theory is argued by men prominent in the world, some of whom are still living. Here the apostle simply goes into the minds of these cultivated people at Kphesus, and traces the process from where the mind does not know, the heart does not feel, and the will control, to that state when it does know and feel. The process of the new creation is brought out here just like that beautiful process in the old creation. We take human nature as we find it — the heart, the mind, the sensibilities, the will; the thing to do is to teach it.

Jesus said to these men, "Go and teach. " That is the means, the power, that is going to create the work of change in the human mind. You see that truth stated over and over again, that teaching is the means by which to change the mind that is ignorant, and guide the sensibilities of a heart that has gone wrong, placing images in the mind which that mind and that heart can be influenced by. How can you force the will of a man to act unless you adopt these methods? This is what the apostle means when he says, "Put off the old man that is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts." The "old man" was the ignorant man, the man of insensibility, the man who was going wrong, and "put on the new man;" and he is made new by knowledge — that is the first thing, the usual process. He is made new in righteousness. And there is a method in making a man new in righteousness. There is a process in making the sensibilities right and renewing the heart in holiness, which has reference to a man's acting, keeping away from the unclean vices he indulged in before. Now we have what it is changed from, and the thing changed, and the process by which he was changed; and the apostle calls this creatioji, a creating a man over again, making a new man of him. He tells us that when a vile man wakes up to these higher sensibilities, when he takes hold of the beautiful truth and the goodness of God as illustrated in Christ, these powers of the intellect and heart, that carry the will with them, change, and the man, instead of working all uncleanness and greediness, will labor in holiness now, and do good with enthusiasm. You have thus the process. At first he merely receives it, and the apostle says that is what is creating a man in Christ Jesus — learning the truth as it is in him.

We have now the true conception of the whole matter. We think we have an idea of what a man ought to be when we see him in Christ. He has revealed God to us, and we see the Father; he has revealed God as the infinite Father. But that is only a part of his revelation. He has given us a true conception of what a man ought to be, and will be if he is faithful. He has placed that before us, and when you place the knowledge of God as brought to us in Christ, and the knowledge of man as God means the man shall be, we can put together the true knowledge of that universe of which man forms a part. Then you have the motive and the reason, and the evidence by which man is elevated, step by step, in the ordinary order of progress in the spiritual world, the same as goes on in the organic world and the world below us. Wherefore, the word "creation" now means an entirely different thing. And hence the whole theory of conversion is changing from what it used to be. The idea is changing.

And this illustrates, as well as any point I can state, how it is that a true knowledge of nature, of the universe, and of man, which is a very modern thing spread out before the mind and the heart of man, has caused to drop away the old conceptions of religion. The modern thought has given us newer, higher and more beautiful conceptions in regard to it. This Bible idea, coming to us in our day as a new thought, the church has opposed. The church never fails to make war against every new truth that God brings to this world. It is a sad thing for me to say, but it is a true thing, and we may just as well say the truth. Copernicus, Gallileo, Kepler, Newton, Hugh Miller and L,yell — all these men belong to one class, and stand out there alone as the objects of obloquy and abuse, which the church has thrown upon them through the centuries. These men were prophets of nature that God sent to the world to enlighten it, and the church has been their great opponent. It was the same in regard to this new idea of creation, when Darwin and Spencer and these other men began to say to us, "You don't know enough about it; you had better look into the creation again."

Now we can see the better conception of man in having that idea of what creation is, by these vast divine processes going on in him now — teaching, exhorting, purifying — and we can have some better idea of what glorifying him means. This book is a set of voices that we begin to hear with knowledge. We write them down and then read them out. But how about the man after he is completed, and this process is over? We have that man in spirit anew, but that is not the end of it. L,et him be made new; let him have God's thought; let him love the same thing which God loves; let him have his will strengthened that he can walk the path of righteousness; let him be called in this world and be a righteous man, a Christian man, the highest type of man, and that does not satisfy him. Living still, he wants to get something better. The very body that belongs to him is a part of the process in this waste; in that sense it is old. Yes, these words are metaphorical, so if a man gets old, dissolves, goes away, he may have a new heart, new thought, new kinship with God, new aspirations of heaven. But man is fading away, even this kind of man, this truest and best life in the world, so dear unto the Father. And then what? The thought conies — there is no way to escape it — This is not the end of it. There must be another world. There must be a better world. There must be some place in the universe for that man who has been the image of God, where he can live on, a place of sensibility, of volition, for his faculties to go on in the activities to which they have been awakened, and to which they have been directed, in those new and divine motives. And then we have this Book talking to us about that new and eternal life, and a new light is received. When you look forward to the future, if there is any great fact seen there along the line of the aspirations, hopes and reasoning that belong to a man, it is, that we do not want to live here after we have been made anew, in the image of him who created us. If we think like God, feel like God, and look like God, and have God's image, if we have been made anew, we do not want to live on from age to age where there has been so much sorrow, so many tears, close by the forms of those who lived, in the presence of those deserted lives, sometimes characters blighted, with the childhood growing up around you. This is not a suitable world for man to live in forever — a man of this divine image. There is a new world, a creation, that is before us, a new heaven and a new earth, to which a man shall attain, where these things shall not be. One of the words that come to us, which fill the heart with song, when we are listening to the voice, is, "I will make all things new."

Yet we have reversed God's conception. He works from the old to the new. He is making something new all the time; but we want to go from the new to the old. He goes back over the traces of the old world, and makes them new all the time, and after awhile he says, "When you have dropped this old body, and these old lives — these things you have had long enough, the things which are applicable to this life — behold, all things will be made new — a new man, a new body, a new world, with new activities, new joys, new employments, new hopes, new happiness, new glories, a new future, making all things new." It seems to me that people ought to live with that sort of a fact before them, and in harmony with that whole conception. That is how I see it; that is what I read of the creation, and of man, and of the future. This brings before us something worthy of God, of man and his destiny. And I read this word "creation" anew, and I get the thought which I read there, too, and I carry it from the Bible and place it up there. And God has placed it in the blue heaven, the heaven of the human heart, and we see a new heaven, and a new earth, and a new life. And immediately after we read this about them: "There shall be no more dying, no death and no sorrow, no pain, no more tears." That which has made these will drop away, and "Behold, all things have become new."

REMARKS AT THE COMMUNION TABLE.

The greatest power of which we can have any knowledge in this world in the making of things new is love. It is the vast, infinite renewer, like the sunlight, which is a symbol of love, renewing the heavens and the earth, as the old psalmist, looking upon the earth, said, "All nature changes and becomes new." Now, all the new homes in the world, and the new lives, and the new joys that spring out of them, come from, love; and when God wants to give us a taste of the new home, the new heaven, the new Jerusalem, he shows us his love. When he wants to fill the human heart with some anticipation of that which overflows, that new inspiration, lie shows us his infinite love in Christ. And that is what this ordinance means. It comes to us once more, always in harmony with God's greatest thoughts toward us, renewing the soul from week to week, making it diviner, stronger; filling it with hope and light. And this is the effect of love, by which his' own great heart comes into ours, his thought into our thought, as it is shown to us in Christ. This renewing is going on always, and this is what this institution means, that, looking at this great, divine, infinite force in God's heart, this is to make you new in your hopes, joys, religious life, aspirations, energies, from week to week, through the pilgrimage here, with regard to a life to come.