Sermons

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I. Three Views of Life 1

II. Authorities and Scribes 21

II. Authokities And Sceibes

He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. Matt. vii. 29.

HHHERE are still, and always, these two kinds of teaching, — the teaching of authority and the teaching of scribes. We all have felt the difference without perhaps defining it to ourselves. Some men speak to us with authority by word of mouth or by books; others, with equal or even greater attainments, and so far as we can judge, with equal purity of purpose, want that authority as speakers or as writers. Whence this difference ?

What constitutes authority in a teacher ? The answer is, Competent testimony, original observation by a qualified witness.

In secular science the majority are dependent on the testimony of experts, not having the means of verifying the facts for themselves. The ship-master at sea ascertains his longitude by the aid of certain tables in his nautical almanac. These tables are based on astronomical calculations, and embody the results of those calculations for years to come. It is not necessary that the ship-master be an astronomer ; it needs only that he have the testimony of competent witnesses in that science. He receives their testimony as authority, and relying on that authority traverses the pathless ocean without other way-mark, and can tell at any moment how far the forces that impel his vessel have borne him east or west. Relying on that authority, I believe the sun to be ninety-five millions of miles from the earth, and I expect an eclipse of that body at the moment indicated in my almanac.

But what constitutes authority in religion ? Who is the qualified witness of moral and spiritual truth ? Here is a kind of knowledge accessible to all. " The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart." Yet here too, as well as in questions of science, we feel and acknowledge the weight of authority. We listen to one teacher, and, though what he says is undeniably true, and his manner of saying it unexceptionable, he makes no impression ; we do not dispute his statement, but we are not persuaded by it. It provokes no dissent, and it carries no conviction. He teaches as the scribes. We listen to another who says substantially the same thing, and immediately a new world is open to our perception, a new day shed abroad in our minds. It is nothing new that he propounds, but it comes to us with the force of a new revelation. Before it was a truism, now it is a truth.

What Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount — that which made his hearers astonished at his doctrine — was not new ; the scribes had said substantially the same ; but the spirit with which it was said was new, and that new spirit made the Christian evangel a new creation, so that history dates from that teacher's word.

In the multitude, which no man can number, of teachers who have spoken from age to age on the same eternal themes, — the being of God and the destination of man, — there has been but here and there one whose word was a power in the world, here and there an authority in a world of scribes. The recorded words of Jesus and of Paul take very little room, and may be read in a couple of hours ; but the writings to which they have given rise in the way of comment and controversy and discourse, if preserved from the beginning and collected together, no man could read in a lifetime. The greater part of these have perished, and the rest will follow. Not a hundred volumes, not fifty, of those so-called Bodies of Divinity which cumber the shelves of old libraries, will maintain a permanent place in the literature of religion ; while the little volume which has furnished the topic of so much discoursing is likely to endure, and be read and received as authority until some new convulsion of the globe shall sweep every vestige of existing civilization from the face of the earth. This is Humanity's verdict on the relative value of these two classes of teachers, — the authorities and the scribes.

Authority is adequate testimony, the word of a competent witness. We call it revelation. And what is revelation ? Let us free our minds from a certain confusion which seems to mystify this term. Revelation is not a voice from without, but a voice within ; not a prodigious communication out of the skies, a doctrine appended to the tail of some portent, but the intuition of a rapt soul that has met the Spirit of God in its meditation. The teacher with authority in religion is the qualified witness, he who has had direct intuition of the truth he affirms. The scribes but restate the testimony of others ; they add nothing to the truth, they rather weaken it by repetition and inadequate statement. He only speaks with authority who tells what he has seen with his own independent vision, the truth he has reproduced in his own mind, the truth which flesh and blood have not revealed, but the living God. The truth thus obtained is not necessarily new, in the sense that the like had never been said before ; but it is new in the sense of having been new-born in the thought of him who declares it. That makes it as fresh as the morning, the ever-new surprise of a new day.

Such teachers we call "seers," signifying thereby that they see what they teach. Of such seeing the first and most essential condition is unconditional surrender to the truth. With the scribe the first consideration is not what is true, but what is written, vouched, accredited, or else what is profitable, what is best fitted to build up our denomination, to strengthen our church; not what saith the Spirit speaking to me this day, but what says the conference, what says the platform, the covenant, the catechism ; what has credit with the churches, what is good ecclesiastical stock. But they whom God has destined to be his witnesses — authorities not for a day or a sect, but for all time — listen to no secondary teaching. They settle on no platform, they stop at no intermediate stage ; they go straight to the Fountain, and listen in their souls to what God shall declare to them concerning himself. They believe that God will speak to them also, if they really wish to hear ; that is, they believe in a present, living God, not merely in the God of long ago. They deliver themselves up without reserve to the truth ; they open mind and heart to God's teaching, asking not what is profitable, what say the scribes, but what saith the Spirit.- " Speak,

Lord, for thy servant heareth," is the constant frame of their waiting souls.

No teacher acquires authority by his thought alone. No mere philosopher, however accepted in his day, can be permanent authority for the mass of mankind. Those old Greek sages, who said so many wise and beautiful things about duty and God, and were so conspicuous in their generation, — Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and the rest, — what are they now ? What can they be to the multitude in every age but a vague impression of something far off and sublime, beyond the appreciation of ordinary minds, like those dim stars in the upper deep which astronomers tell us are luminous worlds, the centres of unknown systems, but which, so far as our senses can discern, are only faint specks requiring often artificial aid to make them perceptible.

What the world requires in its spiritual leaders is not intellectual acuteness, but truth incarnate in the life. Such a leader, a teacher with authority, the Christian world acknowledges in its Founder. It finds him pre-eminent in those respects in which philosophers and philosophy fail.

1. Universality. Jesus represents no school or epoch or race. He speaks a universal dialect, the dialect of the heart ; addressing himself not to a few select and disciplined natures, but to universal man. " Come unto me, all ye that labor, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" " Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him, shall never thirst ; but the water that I shall give him, shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." " He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live."

There is no philosophy here ; but what consciousness, what authority ! Who else ever uttered words like these ? Translatable into every idiom and losing little or nothing by translation, the words which were uttered so long ago in the solitudes of Galilee or the streets of Jerusalem are household words to-day in the remotest corners of the globe, endeared by daily use and consecrated by centuries of faith and worship, wholesome as daily bread, and still revered as bread from heaven.

2. Next, the Christian world cherishes in Christ the element of stability. Other teachers arise and vanish with the rolling years. The sure foot of advancing time overtakes them, supplants them. New systems are demanded by new generations. The oracles of one age are dumb to the next. The voyager soon misses the familiar coast-lights that light him along his native shore. A few hours' sail withdraws their friendly blaze. But Sirius and Orion accompany him through all the meridians. Such are the lights of philosophic speculation, and such the eternal truths of the Spirit to the journeying soul in its life-long voyage. The guides which seemed so infallible once have ceased to be infallible now, have ceased to edify. We have shifted our point of sight, and what was once a star has become the solitary candle of some plodding student no wiser than ourselves. We have ascended into new regions, and what seemed to be celestial radiance as we looked up to it from beneath, is meteor and mist as we look down upon it from above. We come to doubt at last whether any thought of philosopher or sage will continue to feed us, whether any light in literature will continue to light us to the end. It is sad to lose our faith in teachers, but that is the price we pay for our growth. One by one we outgrow our idols, we come up with them and pass on. They were wise in their generation ; but the soul is wiser than all generations, and the Word from everlasting is wiser than the soul.

3. Furthermore, the Christian world perceives in Jesus that Word made flesh. It is not the peculiarity of the doctrine, but the quality of soul and the quantum of life in the Teacher, that makes him authority, and explains the epithet, " Son of Man." There was no new doctrine taught by Jesus. The Gospel contains no precept so peculiar, no moral so sublime, that the learned will not find you chapter and verse of some Rabbi or ethnic philosopher where the same thing has been said before. The doctrine was not new, but the life was, — that wondrous life, so sharply relieved on the world's history, yet so intimately, ineradicably blended with it ; so near the ground, yet so lifted above the earth, in its humiliation drawing all men unto it; so exalted above human weakness, yet so profoundly sympathizing with it; so homely and so shining, so human and so divine !

Such was the authority of that one example that succeeding ages have been steeped in its baptism, and taken its name and confessed its law. Christendom with all its attainments, with its forces still growing, still unfolding, — the kingdom as wide as the circuit of the sun, — is the growth of that life. The history of Jesus is the history of one who surrendered himself entirely to the Truth. He gave himself without measure to the Spirit, and therefore without measure the Spirit was given to him. And because in him no care of self, and no infirmity of prejudice, and no bias of time or custom or institution, and no view to present effect, and no fear of consequences, and no mere curiosity of the intellect, no conceit or fancy such as in other men wise and good, as in Plato and Swedenborg, mars the receptivity of the soul, — because in him nothing of this sort, no slightest barrier of privacy, hindered the influx of the Spirit, — because the Godhead found in him a wholly permeable, translucent subject, — therefore he was absorbed in God, and God impersonated in him, so that he and the Father were one; and virtue and divinity went out of him when he acted and spoke, and his action was miracle and his word revelation, and act and word have sacramented succeeding ages, and the piety unfathomable of that one life still floats the world.

On a lower plane, in a lesser degree, other spirits in diverse times have impersonated some truth or doctrine, have identified themselves with it, so that it has come to be the meaning and idea of their life. So Paul inclined his ear to the Spirit, and heard God say to him that the ceremonial law of Judaism had been fulfilled and superseded in Christ. Accordingly the life of Paul means deliverance from ritual bondage. In a later age Luther, meditating the errors and corruptions and spiritual wants of his time, received in himself the assurance that penances and pilgrimages and fasts have no saving power ; and the life of Luther means salvation by faith. The life of George Fox means the gift of the Spirit to all who believe. The life of Swedenborg means the correspondence of natural objects with spiritual truths. The life of Channing represents the dignity and sacredness of human nature.

On the whole, we may say that truth is the only authority. He only speaks with authority who has that, and has it at first hand, who shows me the truth I had never seen before, or who makes me see it as I had never seen it before. And truth once seen may be safely left to its own operation. It needs no rhetoric to set it off ; it needs no enforcement to give it effect. When the geometrician has demonstrated his proposition that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, he does not proceed to enforce it by appeals to sentiment and passion, he uses no rhetoric to set it off. What should we think of the geometrician who should conclude his demonstration by addressing our sympathies, and earnestly adjuring us by every motive of interest, of self-respect, of good-will to mankind, to admit that things are as they are. His only argument is the fact which he proves. Why may not moral truth in like manner be left to itself ? What can be so powerful as just itself ? All that we can do for it is to make it appear. " Show us " the Truth, " and it sufficeth."

But let us understand that truth is progressive, — I mean, truth in religion. The truths of geometry, which express the immutable relations of space, are unchangeable. A proposition in mathematics which was true six thousand years ago is just as true now, and will be six thousand years hence. The relations of angles and curves are the same from age to age. But the relations of spirit change. The world of spirit advances, and as it advances brings new points of view ; and with new points of view come new views of the same objects, differing from the old, yet equally true, — I should say, more true than the old are now. The objects are the same, but are differently seen, as the same fixed star has a different relative position as the earth advances in its annual course. Propositions in theology need to be reconsidered from time to time ; the creed which was true for the ninth century is not true for the nineteenth, and many who spoke with authority then have ceased to be authority now. And yet the genuine teacher, speaking not from the plane of current beliefs, but out of the fulness of the Spirit, speaks with authority to all time. There are voices which never can become mute. There are forces over which time has no power ; for time did not make them, but they time. Existing forms, organizations, creeds may become obsolete. Once they were new ; now they are old. But the Spirit which gave them birth, though older than the oldest as measured by the scale of earthly years, is newer than the newest, and can never be outgrown. It was in the world before it took the Christian name, and will never be out of it whatever name it may take. Christian it will always be in the true and eternal import of that name. For the ever-living Spirit, and not an historic individual, is the true Christ, — the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. Systems pass, theologies slide, and authorities whose sphere and function were merely dogmatic, the authorities of the schools, are authorities no longer. But goodness is the same in all generations. The authority of a good life can never become obsolete, can never fail to teach with effect. Let us not think so poorly of the business of teaching as to fancy it confined to word of mouth or the written page, or deem that they only instruct and admonish and persuade who speak with words of wisdom and rhetorical art.

If we trace the influences which have acted most powerfully on our moral nature, we shall find that it is not the teachers by profession that have doue the most and the best to shape our life, but the characters we conversed with, the daily life and conversation of our fellow-men. And the best influences and instruction have come from those beneath us, quite as often as from those above us in culture and understanding and the social scale. The most diligent student of us all will confess, I think, that he has learned more from life than from books, — from public and private examples of usefulness and worth. The conscientious and laborious father of a family, the patient, self-sacrificing wife and mother, the devoted child, the faithful and painstaking servant in our employ, — these are our teachers, better than all homilies, more convincing than any treatise. Authorities they are, unquestionable and commanding. Not quotable in literature, inasmuch as teaching by word was not their function, but authority such as the soul that considers them cannot choose but accept. I confess the majesty of unconscious goodness in some obscure individual has more impressed me than any page of Jeremy Taylor or Saint Augustine. Compared with this silent authority, my favorite teachers were but scribes. And I sometimes think what a different standard of authority and dignity the angels may have from that received among men. You remember whom Jesus pronounced authorities on three separate occasions, — in the matter of practical well-doing, the unknown citizen of a country held in abhorrence and contempt ; in the matter of liberality, a poverty-stricken widow ; in the matter of spiritual greatness, a little child.

It is truth alone that teaches with authority, whether bodied in words or deeds. Be obedient to the truth which you see and know ; live that truth, be that truth, and you will be, so far as that truth is concerned, authority to all who come within your sphere. Without word-wisdom or excellency of speech, you will preach more impressively than sermon or book.

III. The Lesson Of Floweks

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow ; they toil not, neither do they spin : and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Matt. vi. 28.

TF the Bible were struck out of existence to-mor- "^ row and not a copy of it left to any library or any household, there are sayings of Jesus which would long survive in the memory of Christendom ; and this is one of them. No saying is more likely to survive than this which speaks to the heart with such a winsome grace ; it brings the great Teacher so near, so domesticates him in the natural world of our experience, — the out-door world which the spring is now transfiguring with a new dispensation of rejoicing life.

How touching this benediction of natural beauty from the Son of Man, — the Spirit's tribute to Nature, his great ally ! For who so in league with Nature as Jesus ? Who ever owed less to books and the past ? He used these only to prove to those who assailed him with their traditions how they missed the spirit of the Scripture in their worship of the letter. With simple and unprejudiced hearers he reasoned always from actual life as it passed before his eyes. His scriptures were birds and flowers, earth and sky, men, women, and children, objects and interests new as the dawn, and older than all the traditions of the world. He spoke as a living man to living men, with no school doctrine, but in lessons gleaned by a fresh, clear eye, which made the world seem fresh about him, as if he were the first that had appeared in its scenes. When the people looked for dogmas, he gave them things ; when they looked for forms, he gave them spirit; instead of the past, he drew from the present. The first object that met his eye, the fact of the moment, was his theme. All Nature was translated into parable for their instruction. Whatever he handled became, by the mark which he put upon it, a new creation. His hearers could not analyze the charm of his teaching ; they knew not the secret of his power. The only account they could give of it, comparing him with other teachers, was that " he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes." What scribe or doctor of the Law would have deigned to discourse of lilies, unless it were the carved ones of the Temple columns ? The scribes and doctors were too intent on their phylacteries to think of flowers, or to find any comfort in their immunities and splendors. They could talk of the glory of Solomon far away in the past, for that was in their books, — a part of the national tradition ; but the glory all around them, the glory of the flowers of the field, had no meaning or charm for them. One jot or tittle of the Law was more to them than all the beauty of earth and sky.

The Hebrew people have been charged with a want of appreciation of the beautiful in Nature, in which it is said they differ from the Greeks. The difference, I suspect, is not so great as has been represented. The fact is, none of the ancient nations had that feeling for Nature so characteristic of the modern mind, — the feeling which breathes from the canvas of Turner and the strains of such poets as Wordsworth and our own Bryant. This feeling is essentially modern, Christian ; due in great part to the Christian sense of the immediate presence of God in Nature. It is true, however, that the Hebrew mind had apparently less sympathy with the beautiful in Nature than with the awful and sublime. Rugged cliffs and craggy mountain-peaks seem to have best suited those stern spirits, with their abrupt monotheism. With the exception of some passages in the Psalms and the Canticles, there is no expression of delight in natural beauty in their scriptures. The more remarkable and all the more welcome is this expression from the lips of Jesus, the consummate flower of the Hebrew race, — proof of the more than Hebrew spirit that dwelt in him, of the mind transcending all nationality, comprehending the sympathies of universal man, and illustrating the fitness of the title " Son of Man."

Consider the lilies, how they grow ! The lilies had been there from the days of the conquest, but where the heart to feel and the mind to interpret their beauty ? Year after year they had come in their season and starred the fields with their bright array, but who had thought them worth considering? Kings and chiefs returning from slaughter had stalked remorseless through their ranks, war's unheeding foot had trod upon their cups, priest and Levite had passed them by, and none ever pondered how they grow, or paused to study their hidden moral. But when Jesus came he exalted the neglected wild-flower, and set it above the splendor of courts.

" And in the bosom of its purity, A voice he set as in a temple shrine, That life's quick travellers ne'er might pass it by Unwarned of that sweet influence divine."

The flowers which Jesus praised, — not lilies, as we understand that term, but a gorgeous wild-flower which still enamels the plains of Palestine, — the flowers which Jesus praised are not native to our clime , but the same Nature from which the great Teacher drew is present here and lovely here, if not so luxuriant as seen under Syrian skies ; the flowers which gladden our own fields, if not so gay, are as dainty and as full of significance as those of Palestine. And now that we are once more comforted and blessed with these yearly visitants, now that spring-blossoms glorify the landscape once more, I am moved in the spirit of this Scripture to draw from Nature for our instruction, and to follow the Master in a lesson of flowers.

Consider the lilies, how they grow! Consider first their essential beauty, the delicate texture of their silken petals, their varied forms of grace, the tender promise of the folded bud, the faultless rhythm of the full-blown flower, the splendor of their tints, and the grateful incense of their balmy breath. Beautiful they are; but why are they, and what is their use ? The answer is, Beauty. Beauty is for us all their being's end. Their only or chief function, so far as man is concerned, is to please the eye, and through the eye to refresh and make glad the heart. Here is a lesson for the Christian moralist ; here is a revelation of the mind of God. Beauty is use, and an end in itself.

Beauty is divine. This is a truth which theology has yet to learn and apply. Something of the Hebrew sternness and alleged indifference to natural beauty has passed into Christian theology. The saints of the Church have looked on beauty as idle vanity or carnal satisfaction. The early painters rejected it from their portraits. The Fathers of the desert ruled it out of their scheme of life. The less of beauty, they thought, the more of holiness, the more of spirit. The English hermit in his island fastness walled up the window of his hermitage, shutting out the magnificent prospect which disturbed, he said, his communion with God, — as if God were less present in his own creation than within the wails of a cell. The Jesuits of Granada boasted of their father Sanchez, that though the monastery in which he lived had a beautiful garden, he never looked at a single flower. Calvin in romantic Geneva cherished his doctrine of despair, and exhibits no trace in his writings of any influence on his heart of the Alpine glories which surrounded him, no sign that his spirit had ever been soothed by the contemplation of Lake Leman, or kindled at beholding the snow-peaks blush and glow in the rosy light of sunset. Christian theologians have written books to prove that Nature is blasted and corrupt, a deformity and ruin, accursed by God in consequence of man's transgression. I find nothing in the sayings of Christ that gives countenance to such a doctrine. Surely Jesus knows nothing of a blasted Nature. Nature to him is no ruin, but the realm of order and peace and blessing, the vestiture of spirit, the very presence of the infinite Father. Every flower that blows refutes the impious doctrine of a ruined Nature with its eye of grace. Every flower bears witness of law and order and loving obedience.

The first lesson taught by flowers is the sacred significance of beauty, — the place which beauty occupies in the scheme of things. They teach that " beauty is its own excuse for being," that the world is not a system of bare necessities and dryutilities, that man is not to live by bread alone. What would the world be if all the flowers were out of it, if all the graces and charms of life were expunged ? Civilization is based on the love of beauty more than on the grosser satisfactions of life. The savage has meat, clothes, fire, under normal conditions enough to eat and drink, a shelter from the cold, a place to lay his head, and all the grosser satisfactions of life. What has the cultured prosperous citizen that the child of the forest has not ? First and chiefly, beauty. Animal satisfaction is common to both ; the accompanying grace is peculiar to the former. Instead of the rude wigwam, the tapestried drawing-room; instead of food snatched from the hearth where it is cooked, the service of the table ; instead of the shaggy hide and unkempt locks, the decent robe and the comely, trim array. These principally distinguish the civilized man from the savage. To brute necessity civilization adds grace. The greater part of the callings and business of society relates to the maintenance and perfection of this grace. The sense of beauty is the mainspring of civilization. Take away this and you abolish the difference between the troglodyte and the gentleman. God implanted the sense of beauty in us to be our educator and civilizer. Through the sense of beauty he says to us perpetually, " Come up higher! " And he feeds that sentiment by his own benign action with all that is beautiful in his creations, and most of all with flowers. In them we have a subtle proof of divine beneficence. They express the riches of that Love which provides for the fancy as well as the flesh, and while nourishing the body with necessary food entertains the mind with ethereal bread. A love less tender would have given the needful fruits without the superfluous flowers. These are the finer expressions of the Infinite good-will, the dearer tokens of the Father's love.